The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Yes,” Chris Welman said, nodding his head, “I found just that same thing. Every time I’ve got to hear about a new kind of farming that’s supposed to have brought good results in a country like Sweden, say, I have discovered inside of a week that it’s no good for South African conditions. I don’t say that it mightn’t work very well in, say, Sweden, of course.

  “But I’ve found every time that to carry out that new kind of method in South Africa I’ve got to get up a lot earlier, every morning. A lot of these new plans they recommend just aren’t suited to South African conditions, I mean. Not that I’ve got anything against a Belgian or that kind of foreigner, of course. But it’s only that here, in the Groot Marico, well, it’s different. It doesn’t work out that way, here. I mean, you just take the soil here in the Marico –”

  There was no need for Chris Welman to proceed any further, for even At Naudé himself, who had introduced the discussion, acknowledged that it was with several mental reservations of his own that he had passed on to us the latest sweet-potato-growing theories as expounded by the radio farming authority.

  “I mean, I listened carefully,” At Naudé said, “because, as you all know, I’ve got no prejudice against the At-Ease-on-the-Dung-Heap man. – I mean, he’s much more human than the broadcaster before him, that gave the “On Your Toes at 4.15 a. m.” talks. Every reasonable farmer boycotted him at the end, naturally, him with his liberal use of sulphur for reclaiming brak soil and painting every plant with a camel-hair brush for soft scale. He never said who was supposed to go round doing all that painting … But I don’t know how long this new man is going to last, either. Of course, we all know that what he says is kindly meant.

  “Still, when he mentions things like design and feature and good proportion, and he’s talking about sweet-potatoes, then you know it won’t be long before a few Bushveld farmers start writing in about it. Because you know that, when once he starts using words like that, there is going to be a lot of extra work sticking out for somebody. And that is where I say that the wireless is so much better than the Government experimental farm pamphlets.

  “The wireless encourages the farmer to write in what he thinks about the talks. The agricultural experimental farms don’t. They’ve learnt better. In any case by the look of it, I should say they’re too busy. Making the bottom soil gradually shelve up to the sides, like they say in their pamphlets. Well, there must be somebody on a Government experimental farm doing all that, I suppose. And so he’ll be too busy to answer farmers’ letters. Or to show the farmers’ letters to his boss, even.

  “And the experimental farm man doesn’t care how many complaints he gets from farmers about how unpractical his advice is, through the extra work. He just starts off again in his next pamphlet with the words: ‘Proceed as follows.’ I have noticed that the At-Ease-on-the-Dung-Heap man is a bit careful, there. He never says, ‘Proceed,’ straight out, like that. After he explains what he thinks is a good method he just tells a few jokes to make you laugh. It looks like he wants to keep his job.”

  There was another thing too, Gysbert van Tonder said, that the agricultural expert never seemed to pay enough attention to. All right, he didn’t say that if you followed the expert’s advice, whatever that advice was, that you wouldn’t then be able to grow more sweet-potatoes. But even without the expert’s advice you could grow all the sweet-potatoes you wanted, just sticking bits of it in the ground.

  But if every farmer in the country started growing sweet-potatoes on such a scale, what were you going to do with all those sweet-potatoes in the end, Gysbert van Tonder asked. And never mind about design and good proportion and all those other things that At Naudé mentioned, Gysbert van Tonder said. He was just talking about ordinary sweet-potatoes that came up anyhow.

  “Why, I can remember only a few years ago, that time of the big rains,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “that I had so many sweet-potatoes, they just rotted on the market. And I couldn’t sell them to the jam factory, anymore, even, either, afterwards. Even when I showed the owner of the jam factory that my sweet-potatoes didn’t have soot fungus on them, he still said he couldn’t use them. Not even for strawberry jam, the jam factory owner said to me. It wasn’t the soot fungus, he told me, but he just didn’t have any more tins. Bring him some tins, he said, and he would talk business.”

  That got Jurie Steyn talking about the anthrax epidemic of years ago. When a beast died, and it looked like it might be anthrax, Jurie Steyn said, they got instructions from Pretoria that the beast hadn’t to be moved but that he had to be buried right on the spot where he lay, and a barbed-wire fence had to be erected round him, and a blood smear of the dead animal had to be sent inside two pieces of glass to the research laboratory. And the grass had to be burnt for twenty yards around where the ox or the cow was buried, to prevent infection.

  “Well, that was in my father’s time, of course,” Jurie Steyn said. “And we carried out all the instructions, as best we could. I didn’t have much to do with it, myself, seeing that I was still just a boy, then. All that my work was, when a beast died and it looked like anthrax, was to go round to the oldest Bechuana I could see standing in front of one of the huts on the far end of our farm.

  “And I would tell him. And the old Bechuana would look thoughtful; and he would sigh and say how sorry he was to hear that my father had suffered again a loss. Au! It was bad, the anthrax, he would say, clicking his tongue. But about an hour or so later you would hardly recognise that Bechuana for the same man. The way, I mean, that he would be jumping around the dead ox that the women were cutting into pieces for roasting. He wouldn’t look old at all, then, or thoughtful, the way he was leading everybody there in a beer-dance.

  “And that party would go on into the morning – or, at least, until such time as there was still any ox left. And I used to eat some of it myself, too. And although I believed that I could taste the anthrax in it, on account of all that I had heard about anthrax, it nevertheless didn’t – because I was young, I suppose – taste to me very awful. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t mind having some of that right now: here, as I’m standing in my own post office – just so’s I could have the appetite, too, to eat it as it tasted, then, when I was young.

  “And another thing, too, that went with those instructions – that the remains had to be buried and that the grass had to be burnt for twenty yards around. Well, after the party was over there was just no remains left to be buried. And as for the grass, well, as likely as not a mile and more of it would have been burnt, and right into the next people’s farm, even. And that would be only on account of the beer-drinking – nobody noticing that the fire that the ox was being roasted on was starting to spread.”

  The view that he himself must take, young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, said, of all that Jurie Steyn had been telling us, could not be otherwise but dim. There was the department trying to help us, he said. Placing at our disposal free of charge, the schoolmaster said, the enlightenment come by through expensive scientific research, the schoolmaster said, and costly experiment, endangering lives, even, in some cases, and here were we, instead of co-operating, carrying on like a lot of bush baboons.

  The schoolmaster should never have spoken like that, of course. Because it took him a long while – not counting the time occupied in straight apologies – to convince Jurie Steyn that he hadn’t meant that Jurie Steyn’s father was a bush baboon. It took him an almost equally long time to persuade Chris Welman that nothing could have been further from his thoughts than to have implied that Chris Welman’s father was a krantz ape.

  Nor did the schoolmaster seek to suggest – Gysbert van Tonder having invited the schoolmaster to come outside, at one stage – that in Gysbert van Tonder’s ancestry as far back as Jan van Riebeeck there was anybody even remotely resembling a withaak gorilla.

  All that he had tried to make clear, the schoolmaster said, in those words of which we had misunderstood the meaning, was that we should try to co-operate with the Go
vernment’s agricultural department, when the department was only doing its best. He himself had heard a few stories of those old anthrax days, young Vermaak went on, and he honestly couldn’t see that those stories reflected much credit on the farmers concerned. Like some of those things that for instance went on with the glass slides in which the farmer was supposed to put a blood smear of the ox that had died of anthrax.

  “Through a misguided sense of what was funny,” the schoolmaster said, “the farmer in question would as likely as not put a blood smear of his own in, in between the two glass slides. And it is also known that quite a few farmers would not take a hint from the answers they got back. They really thought that the scientists in the Government laboratory were that ignorant and couldn’t distinguish between human and ox blood. They didn’t know that the research workers in the laboratory were having a quiet, scientific laugh.”

  That just showed how cut off the schoolmaster was from realities, Jurie Steyn said, then. For the laboratory scientists were as ignorant as all that. It was one of the things that made most of the Marico farmers this side of the Pilanesberg lose all respect for the agricultural pamphlets. When they saw how little those scientists really knew, Jurie Steyn said.

  “Take old Ockert Struwig, now,” Jurie Steyn said. “Why, I remember when one of Ockert’s trek-oxen died of what we all knew was the anthrax. And so, what does Ockert Struwig do, but just for a joke he sends in to the Pretoria laboratory a smear not of the trek-ox’s blood but his own blood, and what is the answer he gets? This: ‘A weak-minded beast like this is better dead.’

  “That gave Ockert Struwig a laugh, all right, to think how wrong the research institute people were. For the joke of it was that Ockert Struwig was as alive as anything, and the trek-ox of his that had died of anthrax wasn’t in any way weak-minded. I mean, you can well understand that none of us had much faith in the research science experts after that.”

  We were all gratified to note that the schoolmaster couldn’t answer that one, at all. All the schoolmaster could do was to stare in a bewildered fashion.

  “And this thing, before buying ground,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked, then. “Taking samples of the soil at different places and sending it for analysis. Well, what kind of farmer is that, I’d like to know? If you can’t just take it in your hand and crumble it, and know what kind of soil it is.”

  “Or looking how high the weeds get to, that are growing on it,” Jurie Steyn said. “Seeing how they’re liking it.”

  “Or going to where there’s a donga, and seeing how far the soil goes down,” Chris Welman said. “That tells you a few things. Where’s a research chemist then?”

  “Or, when nobody is watching, taking a little of it in your hand and tasting it,” Oupa Bekker said. “That gives you a better idea than any, of what the soil is like. And I’ve still got to see an agricultural department soil expert doing that, that’s all.”

  And he applied no more than just that simple test of tasting the ground, Oupa Bekker said, when, many years ago, he bought his present farm.

  “I tasted it for quite a bit,” Oupa Bekker said. “For I wanted to make really sure. I mean, I wasn’t too young, even then. And so I made up my mind that the ground had to be right. Not only for tilling, but for lying in many years after I had finished tilling. I couldn’t ask an Onderstepoort soil expert to do that for me.”

  VIII

  The barn in which Herman Charles Bosman and John Callaghan taught school. The Haasbroek farm, Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend. 1964

  No Spoon-feeding

  “It’s difficult,” young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, said. “Difficult for the teacher, that is. It seems that at a particular age it’s worse than at other times. The questions children ask me. The things they want to know. ‘Why is … ?’ they ask me. And ‘Can a … ?’ is another way they have of putting a question. There seems no end to the things a child wants to know at a certain age. ‘If a … ?’ is another very popular kind of enquiry. So is ‘What makes … ?’

  “And some of the things children pop out with unexpectedly. You’ve got no idea. Like ‘Where does a … ?’”

  Gysbert van Tonder gave a low snigger.

  “Not that,” the schoolmaster said, taking Gysbert van Tonder up sharply. “The schoolchild of today is quite different from what you were like, in your time. He’s much more natural about everything. More healthy-minded, too, I should imagine.”

  Gysbert van Tonder looked somewhat perturbed. From the way the schoolmaster spoke it would appear as though he regarded Gysbert van Tonder as somebody that was at his age harbouring unwholesome thoughts. As though in Gysbert’s lucubrations there lurked the mephitic, the noisome. From the way the schoolmaster’s lip curled you could sense all that.

  “All right,” Gysbert van Tonder said, after a while, coughing awkwardly, “if you think I’ve got an unhealthy sickness in my brain, sort of, I won’t argue about it. I only hope it’s catching, that’s all.”

  Having made that observation, Gysbert van Tonder seemed quite cheerful, again. It did not occur to him that in giving expression to so antisocial a sentiment he was merely supplying background and colour – and collateral evidence – in substantiation of the mental fault that the schoolmaster had hinted about him.

  “Questions starting with ‘Which … ?’ for instance,” young Vermaak continued. “Like ‘Which side of the cloud is the thunder on?’ Now, there’s something for you to have to answer.

  “I tell you, I’ve grown to dread it – when a child puts up his hand and he doesn’t ask, quite politely, can he leave the room, please, Meneer, but he puts me a question starting with the word ‘Which … ?’ Another kind of opening sentence I’m never too happy about is ‘Who was … ?’ Or ‘How far … ?’ Or, an old favourite, ‘Say now, Meneer …’ Because, when it’s ‘Say now, Meneer …’ then I don’t mind telling you that it’s as likely as not a question that I can’t answer.

  “The chances are, even, that it’s a question that nobody has ever heard of before. I can’t go and look up the answer in a book, even, and then come back next day and explain it all on the blackboard, as though I knew it all along, but I was just giving the class an opportunity to think it out for themselves first.

  “And it’s a funny thing, but the longer I keep teaching, the more I discover that the Theory of Education that I had to learn at the Teachers’ College really does amount to something. When I was a student I used to sneer at a lot of the things the lecturers said. But I find that in many things they were very sound. Like one thing they used to say was: ‘Don’t answer a child’s question immediately: give him an opportunity to try and think out the answer for himself first.’

  “It means that it also gives the teacher a chance to think out the answer, first. It also gives the teacher a proper chance to look up the answer after school, in a book. It’s not in the best traditions of the Theory of Education for the teacher to come out pat, just like that, with the answer, including all the exact dates, if it’s a history question, or right down to the decimals, if it’s a sum. The child must not be just spoon-fed. Next day the teacher can work it all out for the class, on the blackboard, in a free and easy manner, oh, airily, even if the teacher’s eyes are a bit red around the rims, through having sat up late.

  “More and more I am growing to realise that they knew a thing or two, the old lecturers and professors at the Teachers’ College. It wasn’t just pure Theory of Education they were palming off onto us and that we had to make notes about. A lot of it was what they had learnt from sound, solid practice.”

  Young Vermaak sat silent, then, for some moments. Before his inner vision there passed in procession the dry-as-dust lecturers at his alma mater – unimaginative exponents of a haphazard pedagogy that embraced impartially Johannes Duns Scotus, Montessori and Circular 88 (c) of the Transvaal Education Department. He realised now that one thing, at least, that they didn’t have on them, lecturers and professors alike, was flies.

  He was
, belatedly, acquiring a respect for them. He saw, now, that they had been through the mill, all right. In the very triteness of some of their aphorisms – what they called golden rules – there was an element of the sinister that they could have come by only in the course of the bear garden rough-and-tumble that teaching in a classroom consisted of.

  There was the first lecture he had listened to about the importance of maintaining discipline in the classroom. And he remembered how that lecturer had stressed the fact that discipline was the opposite of anarchy. It was the contrary state to turbulence, also, the lecturer had made clear. Discipline was also the inverse of rampaging and running amok, the lecturer had said.

  It was the antithesis to pandemonium, the lecturer had made clear. Discipline was most decidedly not uproar and violent rumpus. Only after he had himself been teaching for a short while did young Vermaak begin to understand something of the years of patient suffering that imparted a measure of shrillness to the lecturer’s statement, like a red ink line drawn underneath it with a ruler.

  Then there was that other lecturer – dull-eyed but, on occasion, red-faced – who had struck a note that young Vermaak was subsequently to recognise as having been happier. “The best way of correcting a pupil’s work,” was the counsel proffered by the lecturer whose face was always markedly red round about the end of the month – the Post Office vermilion of his visage being accompanied also by a certain unsteadiness of gait, “is to correct it right in his presence. Call him up to your desk and show him where he went wrong.”

  Young Vermaak had since learnt that that was sound pedagogy. It meant that that was an exercise book he didn’t have to take home to correct.