The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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no longer contain himself.
“This second-childhood drivel that Oupa Bekker is talking,” At Naudé announced, not looking at anybody in particular, but saying it to all of us, in the way Jurie Steyn’s wife had spoken when she came out of the kitchen. “Well, I would actually sooner listen to scandal about the Pilanesberg ouderling. There is at least some sort of meaning to it. I am not being unfriendly to Oupa Bekker, of course. I know it’s just that he’s old. But it’s also quite clear to me that he doesn’t know what news is, at all.”
Jurie Steyn said that it was at least as sensible as a man lying on the veld under fifty feet of concrete because of some rays. If a man were to lie under fifty feet of concrete he wouldn’t be able to breathe, leave alone anything else.
In the meantime, Johnny Coen had been asking Oupa Bekker to tell us some more.
“On another day, say,” Oupa Bekker went on, “you would not be in your lands at all, but you would be sitting on your front stoep, drinking coffee, say. And the Cape-cart with the two vos horses in front would be coming down the road again, but in the opposite direction, going towards the poort, this time. And you would not see much of Du Plessis’s face, because his hat would be pulled over his eyes. And the veldkornet would be sitting on the Cape-cart next to him, say.”
Oupa Bekker paused. He paused for quite a while, too, holding a lighted match cupped over his pipe as though he was out on the veld where there was wind, and puffing vigorously.
“And my wife and I would go on talking about it for years afterwards, say,” Oupa Bekker went on. “For years after Du Plessis was hanged, I mean.”
School Concert
The preparations for the annual school concert were in full swing.
In the Marico these school concerts were held in the second part of June, when the nights were pleasantly cool. It was too hot, in December, for recitations and singing and reading the Joernaal that carried playful references to the activities and idiosyncrasies of individual members of the Dwarsberg population. On a midsummer’s night, in a little school building crowded to the doors with children and adults and with more adults leaning in through the windows and keeping out the air, the songs and the recitations sounded limp, somehow. Moreover, the personal references in the Joernaal did not sound quite as playful, then, as they were intended to be.
The institution of the Joernaal dated back to the time of the first Hollander schoolmaster in the Groot Marico. The Joernaal was a very popular feature of school concerts in Limburg, where he came from, the Hollander schoolmaster explained. For weeks beforehand the schoolmaster, assisted by some of the pupils in the upper class, would write down, in the funniest way they knew, odds and ends of things about people living in the neighbourhood. Why, they just about killed themselves laughing, while they were writing those things down in a classroom in old Limburg, the Hollander schoolmaster said, and then, at the concert, one of the pupils would read it all out. Oh, it was a real scream. You wouldn’t mention people’s names, of course, the Hollander schoolmaster went on to say. They would just hint at who they were. It was all done in a subtle sort of way, naturally, but it was also clear enough so that you couldn’t possibly miss the allusion. And you knew straight away who was meant.
That was what the first Hollander schoolmaster in the Marico explained, oh, long ago, before the reading, at a school concert, of the first Joernaal.
Today, in the Dwarsberge, they still talk about that concert.
It would appear, somehow, that in drawing up the Joernaal, the Hollander schoolmaster had not been quite subtle enough. Or, maybe, what they would split their sides laughing at in Limburg would raise quite different sorts of emotions north of the railway line to Ottoshoop. That’s the way it is with humour, of course. Anyway, while the head pupil was reading out the Joernaal – stuttering a bit now and again because he could sense what that silence on the part of a Bushveld audience meant – the Hollander schoolmaster had tears streaming down his cheeks, the way his laughter was convulsing him. Seated on the platform next to the pupil who was reading, the schoolmaster would reach into his pocket every so often for his handkerchief to wipe his eyes with. That made the audience freeze into a yet greater stillness.
A farmer’s wife said afterwards that she felt she could just choke, then.
“If what was in that Joernaal were jokes, now,” Koos Kirstein – who had been a prominent cattle-smuggler in his day – said, “well, I can laugh at a joke with the best of them. I read the page of jokes at the back of the Kerkbode regularly every month. But can anybody see anything to titter at in asking where I got the money from to buy that harmonium that my daughter plays hymns on? That came in the Joernaal.”
Koos Kirstein asked that question of a church elder a few days after the school concert, and the elder said, no, there was nothing funny in it. Everybody in the Marico knew where Koos Kirstein got his money from, the elder said.
“And saying I am so well in with the police,” Koos Kirstein continued. “Saying in the Joernaal that a policeman on border patrol went and hid behind my harmonium when a special plain-clothes inspector from Pretoria walked into my voorkamer unexpectedly. Why, the schoolmaster just about doubled up laughing, when that bit was being read out.”
Anyway, the reading of that first Joernaal at a Marico school concert never reached a proper end. When the proceedings terminated the head pupil still had a considerable number of unread foolscap sheets in his hand. And he was stuttering more than ever. For he had just finished the part about the Indian store at Ramoutsa refusing to give Giel Oosthuizen any more credit until he paid off something on last year’s account.
Before that he had read out something about a crateful of muscovy ducks at the Zeerust market that Faans Lemmer had loaded onto his own wagon by mistake, and that he afterwards, still making the same error, unloaded into his own chicken pen – not noticing at the time the difference between the muscovy ducks and his own Australorps, as he afterwards explained to the market master.
The head pupil had also read out something about why Frikkie Snyman’s grandfather had to stay behind in the tent on the kerkplein when the rest of the family went to the Nagmaal. It wasn’t the rheumatics that kept Frikkie Snyman’s grandfather away from the Communion service, the Joernaal said, but he stayed behind in the tent because he didn’t have an extra pair of laced-up shop boots. It was when Frikkie Snyman’s wife, Hanna, knelt in church at the end of a pew and her long skirt that had all flowers on came up over one ankle – the Joernaal said that you realised how Frikkie Snyman’s grandfather was sitting barefooted in the tent on the kerkplein.
That was about as far as the head pupil got with the reading of the Joernaal … And to this day they can still show you, in an old Marico schoolroom, the burnt corner of a blackboard from where the lamp fell on it when the audience turned the platform upside down on the Hollander schoolmaster. Nothing happened to the head pupil, however. He sensed what was coming and got away, in time, into the rafters. Unlike most head pupils, he had a quick mind.
All that happened very long ago, of course, as we were saying to each other in Jurie Steyn’s post office. Today, the Marico was very different, we said to one another. Those old farmers didn’t have the advantages that we enjoyed today, we said. There was no Afrikander Cattle Breeders’ Society in those days, or even the Dwarsberge Hog Breeders’ Society, and you would never see a front garden with irises in it – or a front garden at all, for that matter. And you couldn’t order clothes from Johannesburg, just filling in your measurements, so that all your wife had to do was …
But it was when Jurie Steyn’s wife explained what she had to do to the last serge suit that Jurie Steyn ordered by post, just giving his size, that we saw that this example that we mentioned did not perhaps reflect progress in the Marico in its best light.
From the way Jurie Steyn’s wife spoke, it would seem that the easiest part of the alterations she had to make was cutting off the trouser turn-ups and inserting the material in the neck part of the jacket. “And then the suit still hung on Jurie like a sack,” she concluded.
But Gysbert van Tonder said that she must