of the very schoolgirls who are now giggling at his antics – and together they will raise a string of children who will eventually end up in this very classroom crushing flies. Where would Leendert van Niekerk and his future family ever need English poetry? Certainly not in church or the bar or the farmer’s co-op, nor once a year when they go to Strandfontein for their seaside holiday.
‘You didn’t have to “make it dead”, Leendert,’ she says. ‘You could have simply killed it. But please warn me next time you want to kill anything.’
The rest of the class is now laughing out loud, whispering to each other, making comments and cracking jokes, a general commotion that threatens to get out of hand if it isn’t nipped in the bud. ‘Quiet!’ she shouts in her sternest voice, smacking a ruler against the side of a table, marching between the rows of desks like a drill sergeant major. ‘You have fifteen minutes to finish your essay.’ It is hard for her to be severe with the children. She doesn’t want to control them with fear the way so many teachers did during her own school days. She would, in fact, really like them to like her. In this, her first year as a high-school teacher, it however didn’t take long to discover that it is extremely difficult for a young teacher to command respect without a degree of fear being involved. Even if it amounts to no more than the perpetual threat of the principal’s office. The swish of his cane and the dull crack when it meets tender skin, now these are sounds that command respect. Just another disillusionment among several the teaching profession has afforded Miss Cronjé.
Not that she ever had high expectations, really. To be honest, she became an English teacher purely because she didn’t know what else to do. Other than being a housewife and mother – but she is far from ready for that. She first wants to see something of the great wide world, but the only more or less respectable work that will allow a young woman with a university education to travel the world is the exciting new occupation of being an air hostess – and that, sadly, is not yet respectable enough in the eyes of her parents. The only thing left for her was to teach and save up to explore the great wide world a year or three from now.
Saving is so much easier in the countryside, too, away from temptations such as shops selling the latest fashions and records by The Platters or Bill Haley & His Comets, far away from irresistible bioscopes such as the Alhambra or the Plaza, from music concerts with international performers, and unforgettable stage plays such as Yerma with Lydia Lindeque. Besides bus tickets to Cape Town every holiday, there is nothing here to spend your money on.
Though sometimes, just sometimes, when she can no longer stand the dust and the silence, and craves her mother’s food, she will escape home for a weekend too.
Her father’s family farm is somewhere in this region, but she has never been hungry enough to go there for a weekend. Even her father hardly ever visits the farm now that her grandfather and grandmother have both died. Oom Kleingert’s son, Gerhard, who apparently shares his father’s admiration for Hitler, has taken over the farming and has had a grand, ultramodern flat-roofed house built for him and his family. In the Spanish style, according to Auntie Holy Wilma, too beautiful, I tell you! And the modest family homestead, now almost one hundred years old, where her father and numerous other Cronjés were born, stands empty, with broken windows, gaping doorways and bat droppings on the floors. That was what Deddy reported after the last time he went to Somerverdriet.
Colette has decided she would rather not see it. Some of her most pleasant childhood memories are of that house with the flat pumpkins on the corrugated iron roof. The wide stoep with the little diamond-shaped stained-glass windows at either end, the sparkling patterns that slide across the polished floor when the sun blazes through the glass, green and yellow and blue and red …
She resumes her march between the desks, straight-backed and stern, and tries to herd her thoughts like sheep into a pen, while here and there she pauses to read something over her pupils’ shoulders. It is enough to make you cry. Not just the mutilation of Shakespeare’s language – she should be used to that by now – but how small and remote their world is, how little they are touched by any international or even national news. Earlier in the week she had brought a stack of old Time and Life magazines to class in the faint hope that a few of them might be moved to write about something more significant than a school outing to Zebrakop or a rugby match against a neighbouring town. Now even this faint hope has been dashed. As far as she can tell, just one event outside Piketberg in the past year has made an impression on anyone. Three girls and one of the boys will always remember 1955 as the year when teen idol James Dean died tragically in a car accident.
Not that Miss Cronjé is immune to the animal magnetism of the young movie star. Of course not. One of the reasons she has allowed herself to be courted by a young farmer in the district for the past several months is precisely because this Janneman Diederiks reminds her of James Dean. Bigger, coarser, more Afrikaans than American, but there are similarities nonetheless. Aside from their initials and a preference for fast cars, the two JDs also share a sort of presumptuous sexuality which makes the heat rise to Miss Cronjé’s cheeks. And descend to more hidden parts of her body too.
She senses that she is being watched, and catches Leendert’s eye. His gaze is a little too challenging for comfort, as if he has guessed the direction in which her thoughts have strayed. At eighteen Leendert has to shave every morning – and he is not the only regular shaver in the standard eight class. Even in the younger classes there are boys of fourteen, fifteen who most likely have more sexual experience than their supposedly sophisticated English teacher. Could it be the wide blue sky and the endless wheat fields that make these boys grow so immoderately, with such large feet, such muscular thighs, grey school shorts straining over the hard buttocks? Could it be the heat that makes them so sexually precocious? Or is it just the constant proximity of animals – sheep, cows, horses, goats, pigs, dogs, cats – with their endless mating, mating, mating, from shortly after birth until they die?
‘Anneke!’ She holds out a hand for the clandestine note Anneke Benade is trying to pass to Leendert. Anneke hands over the scrap of paper, pouting. Miss Cronjé stuffs it into the breast pocket of her dress without reading it. Having to read their feeble essays is bad enough. Heaven forbid that she should read their intimate declarations of love and other scribbles. ‘Come and see me after class if you want it back.’
The girls ripen just as early; Anneke and a few others seem almost overripe, like watermelons that have been left in the field, their trembling breasts almost bursting from their gymslips, the swaying hips and plump white thighs, but at least they’re more timid than the boys. Or maybe they’re just more sanctimonious. They’re raised that way, these future mothers of the nation. Prim and proper, that’s their motto, modesty, piety, propriety and all the other signifiers of decency, an entire landscape of ornate hypocrisy covering a multitude of sins. But down below the devils are dancing, and no one knows this better than Miss Cronjé, herself a future mother of the nation.
Take pretty Marietjie Pretorius in the front row, the image of sixteen-year-old maidenhood with her pale skin, blushing cheeks and long black braid. You would swear she was Snow White sitting there bent over her scribbling, deep in thought. However, what Marietjie will remember above all about the year 1955, if Miss Cronjé is to judge from her essay thus far, is a holiday romance in Dwarskersbos. Romantic walks with an attractive boy as the sun sets over the sea. A rapturous description of the sunset (Marietjie has literary pretensions, Miss Cronjé has already learnt), every noun supported by at least three adjectives like a bride with too many bridesmaids, and then …
Marietjie’s pale hand is in the way, Miss Cronjé cannot read the rest. But it is highly unlikely that Marietjie will describe any of the action after sunset. Don’t ask, don’t tell is a strategy Marietjie and her girl friends know all too well. No, Marietjie’s essay will be like the romance novels she is so crazy about, filled with hints of erotic yearning, but anything beyond a chaste kiss is simply left to the imagination via three tiny dots. Dot, dot, dot.
Good
