They do not cover the Boer War at school, at least not in English-medium classes. There are rumours that the Boer War is taught in the Afrikaans classes, under the name of the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, the Second War of Liberation, but not for examination. Being a touchy subject, the Boer War is not officially on the syllabus. Even his parents will not say anything about the Boer War, about who was right and who was wrong. However, his mother does repeat a story about the Boer War that her own mother told her. When the Boers arrived on their farm, said her mother, they demanded food and money and expected to be waited on. When the British soldiers came, they slept in the stable, stole nothing, and before leaving courteously thanked their hosts.
The British, with their haughty, arrogant generals, are the villains of the Boer War. They are also stupid, for wearing red uniforms that make them easy targets for the Boer marksmen. In stories of the War one is supposed to side with the Boers, fighting for their freedom against the might of the British Empire. However, he prefers to dislike the Boers, not only for their long beards and ugly clothes, but for hiding behind rocks and shooting from ambush, and to like the British for marching to their death to the skirl of bagpipes.
In Worcester the English are a minority, in Reunion Park a tiny minority. Aside from himself and his brother, who are English only in a way, there are only two proper English boys: Rob Hart and a small, wiry boy named Billy Smith whose father works on the railways and who has a sickness that makes his skin flake off (his mother forbids him to touch any of the Smith children).
When he lets it slip that Rob Hart is being flogged by Miss Oosthuizen, his parents seem at once to know why. Miss Oosthuizen is one of the Oosthuizen clan, who are Nationalists; Rob Hart’s father, who owns a hardware store, was a United Party town councillor until the elections of 1948.
His parents shake their heads over Miss Oosthuizen. They regard her as excitable, unstable; they disapprove of her hennaed hair. Under Smuts, his father says, something would have been done about a teacher who brought politics into school. His father is also United Party. In fact his father lost his job in Cape Town, the job with the title his mother was so proud of — Controller of Letting — when Malan beat Smuts in 1948. It was because of Malan that they had to leave the house in Rosebank that he looks back on with such longing, the house with the big overgrown garden and the observatory with the domed roof and the two cellars, had to leave Rosebank Junior School and his Rosebank friends, and come here to Worcester. In Cape Town his father used to set off to work in the mornings wearing a dapper double-breasted suit, carrying a leather attaché case. When other children asked what his father did, he could reply, ‘He is Controller of Letting,’ and they would fall respectfully silent. In Worcester his father’s work has no name. ‘My father works for Standard Canners,’ he has to say. ‘But what does he do?’ ‘He is in the office, he keeps the books,’ he has to say, lamely. He has no idea what ‘keeping books’ means.
Standard Canners produces canned Alberta peaches, canned Bartlett pears and canned apricots. Standard Canners cans more peaches than any other canner in the country: that is all it is famous for.
Despite the defeat of 1948 and the death of General Smuts, his father remains loyal to the United Party: loyal but gloomy. Advocate Strauss, the new leader of the United Party, is only a pale shadow of Smuts; under Strauss the UP has no hope of winning the next election. Furthermore, the Nats are assuring themselves of victory by redrawing the boundaries of constituencies to favour their supporters in the platteland, the countryside.
‘Why don’t they do something about it?’ he asks his father.
‘Who?’ says his father. ‘Who can stop them? They can do what they like, now that they are in power.’
He does not see the point of having elections if the party that wins can change the rules. It is like the batsman deciding who may and who may not bowl.
His father switches on the radio at news-time but really only to listen to the scores, cricket scores in the summer, rugby scores in the winter.
The news bulletin used once to come from England, before the Nats took over. First there would be ‘God Save the King,’ then there would be the six pips from Greenwich, then the announcer would say, ‘This is London, here is the news,’ and would read news from all over the world. Now all that is finished. ‘This is the South African Broadcasting Corporation,’ says the announcer, and plunges into a long recital of what Dr Malan said in Parliament.
What he hates most about Worcester, what most makes him want to escape, is the rage and resentment that he senses crackling through the Afrikaans boys. He fears and loathes the hulking, barefoot Afrikaans boys in their tight short trousers, particularly the older boys, who, given half a chance, will take you off to some quiet place in the veld and violate you in ways he has heard leeringly alluded to — borsel you, for instance, which as far as he can work out means pulling down your pants and brushing shoe polish into your balls (but why your balls? why shoe polish?) and sending you home through the streets half-naked and blubbering.
There is a lore that all Afrikaans boys seem to share, spread by the student teachers who visit the school, to do with initiation and what happens to you during initiation. The Afrikaans boys whisper about it in the same excited way that they talk of being caned. What he overhears repels him: walking around in a baby’s nappy, for instance, or drinking urine. If that is what you have to go through before you can become a teacher, he refuses to become a teacher.
There are rumours that the Government is going to order all schoolchildren with Afrikaans surnames to be transferred to Afrikaans classes. His parents talk about it in low voices; they are clearly worried. As for him, he is filled with panic at the thought of having to move to an Afrikaans class. He tells his parents he will not obey. He will refuse to go to school. They try to calm him. ‘Nothing will happen,’ they say. ‘It is just talk. It will be years before they do anything.’ He is not reassured.
It will be up to the school inspectors, he learns, to remove false English boys from the English classes. He lives in dread of the day when the inspector will come, run his finger down the register, call out his name, and tell him to pack his books. He has a plan for that day, carefully worked out. He will pack his books and leave the room without protest. But he will not go to the Afrikaans class. Instead, calmly, so as not to attract attention, he will walk over to the bicycle shed, take his bicycle, and ride home so fast that no one can catch him. Then he will close and lock the front door and tell his mother that he is not going back to school, that if she betrays him he will kill himself.
An image of Dr Malan is engraved in his mind. Dr Malan’s round, bald face is without understanding or mercy. His gullet pulses like a frog’s. His lips are pursed.
He has not forgotten Dr Malan’s first act in 1948: to ban all Captain Marvel and Superman comics, allowing only comics with animal characters, comics intended to keep one a baby, to pass through the Customs.
He thinks of the Afrikaans songs they are made to sing at school. He has come to hate them so much that he wants to scream and shout and make farting noises during the singing, particularly during ‘Kom ons gaan blomme pluk,’ with its children gambolling in the fields among chirping birds and jolly insects.
One Saturday morning he and two friends cycle out of Worcester along the De Doorns road. Within half an hour they are out of sight of human habitation. They leave their bicycles at the roadside and strike off into the hills. They find a cave, make a fire, and eat the sandwiches they have brought. Suddenly a huge, truculent Afrikaans boy in khaki shorts appears. ‘Wie het julle toestemming gegee?’ — Who gave you permission?