War prisoner of war who “got sick at sea from watching the ship going up and down, up and down, all the time” (MR: 120 “Veld Maiden”).
“Coffee that Tasted like Tar, The” (IT: 98) The voorkamer crowd pull Jurie Steyn’s leg about his flu symptoms. One of the weaker Voorkamer stories that has no theme to keep it together and peters out at the end. “Gysbert van Tonder said that he wouldn’t like to go so far as to say that Jurie Steyn wasn’t himself. That was a matter on which he would rather not offer an opinion, Gysbert continued. Maybe Jurie Steyn was himself, and maybe he wasn’t. But what nobody could deny was that at that moment there was something very queer about Jurie Steyn.”
“Coffin in the Loft” (H: 133) Oupa Bekker tells of a ghost who occupied a coffin in the loft of a particular house in his district, and could not be laid to rest, while Gysbert van Tonder tells how a ghost helped him smuggle cattle. A disjointed tale with a somewhat predictable ending. “‘It’s a lonely sort of graveyard,’ Chris Welman explained, ‘and so just out of human nature I didn’t worry to pick my hat up when it fell off.’ Then At Naudé told us about the height of the barbed-wire fence that he had cleared at one leap near Nietverdiend, in the dark, on account of human nature and arising out of what he saw.”
Cohen, Marjorie Employee of Stephen Black who is severely berated by HCB (YB: 114 “Stephen Black”).
“Cold Night, A” (L&O: 52) Two travellers overnight in an abandoned Bushveld schoolhouse where one of them was schoolmaster 20 years earlier. Sweet and humorous autobiographical sketch that evokes nostalgic feelings and ends with a bittersweet twist. “‘I didn’t say all school-teachers are mad. Or all former school-teachers, either,’ Gawie Oosthuizen acknowledged, the warmth from the fire making him gracious. ‘But this one was different. He used to write a lot of things, too. All rubbish, I’ve heard –’.” See Butler, David.
Cold Stone Jug (1949) Described by the author in an epigraph as “A chronicle: being the unimpassioned record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison”, Cold Stone Jug is a semi-autobiographical account of HCB’s four years in prison, from the memorable opening, which recalls his misery straight after the murder and interrogation by fellow prisoners (“‘Murder,’ I answered” CSJ: 45), to his release: “‘Look after yourself, now,’ the gate warder said, ‘You know boob is a bastard. See that you don’t come back.’ I answered, ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ Forgetting that I no longer had any need to call him ‘sir.’” (197). (See on trial.)
The early parts of the chronicle are deceptively light-hearted, but the narrative later shifts vertiginously under the pressure of the narrator’s descent into insanity. In the condemned cells, which he shares with another prisoner waiting to be either reprieved or hanged, the two convicts engage in casual banter with the warders: “Of course, Stoffels and I affected unconcern, there in the condemned cell. We spent much of our waking hours in pulling the warders’ legs. We didn’t know, then, that we were in actual fact engaged in a time-honoured prison pastime” (53). The account of Stoffels’s execution (61–62), recorded in icy detail, is one of the most moving passages of the entire text, and could serve as a highly persuasive anti-death-penalty tract.
The dull, brutal reality of prison life is never far below the surface. The narrator recalls his ironic envy at a hard-labour convict’s beating by a warder: “For no warder would dream of hitting a condemned man with a baton. To a warder a condemned man was something already dead” (53). A similar sense of unreality pervades the closing passages of the text, when the narrator becomes a ‘non-person’ after his release is suspended owing to a bureaucratic oversight: “Here was I, in the prison, a human being, of flesh and air and bone; I existed here, in the prison, as a physical reality. At least, that was what I had always believed [… .] What was really me were a lot of papers, dog-eared and yellowed with the years, lying between two cardboard covers and tied up with green string, in a filing cabinet at head office” (196).
For those attuned to HCB’s distinctive brand of wry, ironic humour, typified by Schalk Lourens’s throw-away lines, Cold Stone Jug yields some special moments: “Every man in the first offenders’ section I spoke to was innocent. And he would explain his innocence to me in such detail, and his countenance, as he spoke, would be lit up with so pure a radiance, so noble a refulgence, that I believed him implicitly, and I felt very sorry for him, and I wondered how he could bring himself, from the noble elevation of his guiltlessness, to hold converse with so sorry a worm as myself” (102).
Also of interest are the prison stories, which constitute an entire subgenre in Cold Stone Jug. The circular pointlessness of the yarns inevitably shows up the circularity and pointlessness of the prisoners’ lives. They are invariably disrupted by the resumption of prison routine and leave a weird, disembodied impression in their wake. On one occasion the narrator reports a story told to him by one ‘bluecoat’ (habitual criminal) about a safe-blowing that goes horribly awry when the dynamite the gang members use explodes in their faces. Typically, this storytelling session is terminated when exercise period ends. The narrator remarks: “The whole story ended just like that, in mid-air [… .] But I knew I could go back to him any time, and he would continue with that story from the point where he had left off, if I had asked him to. Or else he would have told me a brand new story, starting just from anywhere and ending up nowhere – exactly like his own life was” (69).
In tone Cold Stone Jug shifts from the jocular and sardonic to the anguished, desperate cry of a young man already half over the edge of insanity and hanging perilously on the precipice. This gives the chronicle its unique, haunting power, and enables Cold Stone Jug to transcend its more awkward moments, where the flat prose style threatens to trivialise what was clearly a most brutal and degrading experience. A further significance of Cold Stone Jug is its role as a pioneering work in the corpus of ‘prison literature’ – sadly, a genre that became well established in SA.
Pretoria Central Prison, showing the door through which HCB would have stepped upon his release in 1930 (Craig MacKenzie)
Collected Works of Herman Charles Bosman, The (1981 & 1988) A gathering of all of the published volumes by HCB at the time, initially in two hardback volumes in a slipcase (1981), and then in one hardback volume (1988), with a preface by Lionel Abrahams. It contains Mafeking Road, Unto Dust, Jacaranda in the Night, Willemsdorp, The Earth is Waiting, poems from The Blue Princess, poems from Mara, Cold Stone Jug, A Bekkersdal Marathon, Jurie Steyn’s Post Office, Selected Stories, and A Cask of Jerepigo. The Anniversary Edition was to see this collection of HCB’s work added to by at least a quarter, with many texts restored after intentional and unintentional meddling.
Colley, Major-General Sir George Pomeroy See Majuba Hill.
coloured See Cape Coloured.
Combrinck (no first name) Nervous leader of a commando, parallel to OSL’s, sent to flush Sijefu’s warriors from the thick bush; died at Dalmanutha during the Second Anglo-Boer War (UD: 109 “Funeral Earth”).
Combrinck, Hans Farmer who objects to drinking too early in the day (OTS: 64 “New Elder”).
comet Possibly Halley’s Comet, which appeared in 1910; used as substitute for or allusion to the Star of Bethlehem (S&H: 113 “Cometh Comet”).
“Cometh Comet” (S&H: 111) A comet brings great relief to farmers driven to desperation by drought. HCB at the height of his powers; not a word out of place in this beautiful nativity story. “It seemed that the further a tribe of kaffirs lived away from civilisation, the more detailed and dependable was the information they had about the comet.”
commando(s) (Afr. ‘kommando’) Mounted military unit(s), member(s) of mounted
