Carefully explaining to the Chinese in Shanghai what it meant to grow up in the old South Africa (part two)

(Continued from previous post) “… This white child and nanny relationship added to the complexity of the racial situation I grew up in,” I said to my entirely Chinese audience at the University of Engineering and Science in Shanghai. These black nannies, or ousies, as we would also call them, were wonderful people and as a kid I had no idea what poverty most of them lived in. But as I grew up it gradually dawned on me that something was wrong with the system.

My first intimation that something was seriously wrong in the old South African way of doing things lies in the following story of a kindly man in his sixties, who I remember as Timothy. He did menial chores and was some sort of office assistant and cleaner for the private boarding school, Saint Andrew’s, Bloemfontein that I attended from the age of seven.’ Someone in the audience asked, ‘was he black?’ ‘Oh yes, of course,’ I replied, realising the fact that Timothy was black was not obvious to him. ‘He used to help us cover our books and gave us sugar off the staff tea tray, which he carried to the school staff room. I remember being bothered by the sadness on his face. I identified with quiet despondency because I was often lonely and homesick when at boarding school. Then he retired. I remember us cheering him on at a school assembly while he was given a radio and a mysterious packet by the headmaster.

“Some months passed and then, at another school assembly, it was announced that Timothy had died. I remembered trying to comprehend this as the school priest led us in prayers for him. But what was bizarre is that Timothy appeared, live and well, a few weeks later, angrily waiting outside the headmaster’s office.

“I remember that day very clearly: We were playing in the common room upstairs and two boys came running in shouting, ‘It’s Timothy, it’s Timothy! He’s alive!’ Of course we thought it was just a prank. But eventually we were persuaded to go downstairs to the headmaster’s office, and there Timothy was, waiting outside the office and looking very angry. It turned out, or so it was gossiped, that his family had tried to steal from him by having it announced that he was dead so that they could have his inheritance, or whatever pension money he was getting via the school. It was a naïve plot and sure to fail, and I have never been sure what the true story was, but there he was on that day, alive and well.

“It occurred to me at that early age that someone must have been extremely desperate to try and steal his money in this stupid way. Surely something in society was very wrong if a family did that to the head of the household. And a few years later we heard again that Timothy had died, this time for keeps. But we were much older then, high school students more calloused by apartheid perhaps, or he was now more of a distant memory. ‘But both his presence as a memory, and his absence, haunted me, including dreams I had about him. Decades later, leaving out his fake death, I wrote the following about Timothy in my poem-sequence The Faces:
— For Timothy

Your cheeks and forehead were a cracked, grooved leather
I only feel thirty years on. At school, aged 64,
You had the title of “tea boy”. Your face –
Brittle as a boot trudged through the sole,
Worn and weathered every day – always clung
To a sadness and a peace that even then
Reminded me of washing hung out to dry.
Your face
Quietened me, a Standard Two schoolboy watching you
Smiling while kids swiped sugar from the teachers’ tea-tray.

I’d also quieten when your fingers roamed slowly
Over our school books. You’d help the boys cover them
With paper and sticky tape. All our faces bowed
Over the job while your leathery cheeks
Smoothed out
From some remembrance –
Which also moistened your eyes,
Making thoughtful your working hands.

You died.
A stooped, shuffling presence abruptly gone.
For years after, you would enter my dreams.
You would crouch in the night on windowsills
And cupboards, teeth and fists clenched.
Your body
Would be bloodied and daubed with paint,
Face thrust forward, contorted, glaring.