The Accidental Teacher

My teaching career began in the filtered shade of a spreading jacaranda that stood over the rock garden to the left of the schoolyard. I was seven and in Standard I, my third year at the Rustenburg Junior School as the pre-primary school was called. For two years I had worked as an after-school apprentice to my first teacher, Juffrou Gnade. Some thought I was Juffrou’s pet but I knew I deserved the privileges I got.
Juffrou lived just a five-minute walk away from us. She often gave me a lift to school and soon made use of my cutting and colouring skills to help her prepare visual aids for the classroom; in 1950 She taught me how to make duplicates on a glycerine and gelatine pad, the only way to make colour copies in those days. She knew from my careful penmanship that I would take care to centre every sheet precisely and smooth it down methodically to avoid any air bubbles. Outside school she often called me what my father called me: Ounôi - old lady- the name fondly used for precocious little girls. Perhaps calling me by this name allowed her to treat me as a person in my own right, a rare thing in a society where children were firmly kept in their place by regular put downs and a general lack of respect for their opinions. She was a frequent visitor to our house, active in the church and my mother’s right hand in the organization of the MSA, a young (unmarried) women’s service group promoting mission work. To me Juffrou was more of an aunt than a teacher. She convinced me at that early age that teaching and learning were enjoyable and rewarding pursuits.
My pupil was the most unusual human I had ever set eyes on. Juffrou briefed me on the morning of her first appearance:
“Her name is Angelina, which means little angel in Italian, I am told. She arrived with her mother and sister from Italy only last week. She’s a year older than the rest of you but we’re putting her back because she doesn’t speak any Afrikaans and only a little English. Now, I know you speak enough English to fight with your neighbours, Rosie and Maureen, but I don’t want you to fight with Angelina. I want you to be her special friend and teach her Afrikaans so she can make friends of her own.”
Italy! The land of opera! It had a definite place in my eight year-old map of the world. When I was four my mother travelled a great distance to Johannesburg to see La Bohème. Famous singers had come all the way from Italy for the performance.
“What is opera?” I asked.
“It’s a story acted out on stage but instead of speaking, everybody sings.”
This answer triggered the famous week when I sang instead of spoke and drove everyone around me crazy. Accounts of it have surfaced throughout my life to point to either my early love of music or proof of innate eccentricity.
But that first morning in classroom number one, Angelina neither sang nor spoke. Juffrou almost had to drag her to the desk she was to share with me.
“You sit here with Therese. She is a friend.”
Juffrou’s flat English accent and un-nuanced vocabulary made the introduction sound austere. ‘Help me’ pleaded Angelina’s protruding blue-green eyes as she nervously took me in. Her long hair was not braided according to school rules but was held back a large tortoiseshell hair clip. She wore small gold rings in her pierced ears and from the fine chain around her neck dangled a small golden cross – we were expressly told to leave our jewellery at home and only ‘fast’ women had pierced ears. Her dress, though childish in style, reached below her knees – a length reserved for grown-ups. She was so different, she could have been a character from a book. It was a notion that appealed to me.
“Yes, I will be your friend,” I smiled with an equally flat accent but confidently using the future tense.
Juffrou lost no time in putting her plan in place. The girl was already causing much distraction.
“Therese, after opening and arithmetic I want to hear your Afrikaans and English reading and then you can take Angelina outside and teach her some words.”
I already had some experience in the teaching of words: Knife, big knife, small knife, fish knife, butter knife, carving knife. Fork, big fork, pudding fork, fish fork, cake fork. Spoon, teaspoon, soupspoon, pudding spoon, serving spoon, gravy spoon, pudding serving spoon. Salad servers. Small plates, serviettes, serviette rings. Salt and peppershakers. Ever since I was six I had taught this vocabulary to a succession of housemaids. It was a task I took seriously, knowing that my poor teaching would be partly to blame for the scolding, the failure and eventual sacking of my pupils. Most of them came straight from the village and had most likely never seen a dining table, let alone set one according to the complex configurations of Victorian customs. Their Afrikaans was rudimentary and my knowledge of Tswana virtually non-existent. It was an interesting challenge intent on improved service rather than socialization. At eight, I already understood and followed the social code based on discrimination; always kind but distant, in the missionary tradition, my black pupils would never be my friends.
But Angelina, though different, was white. My task was to teach her ‘our’ language so that she could fit in, make friends, be one of ‘us’. Juffrou gave me an alphabet book and pointed to the rock garden as a suitable place of instruction. She also thought a walk around the schoolyard might be a good idea.
With the book in one hand and Angelina’s hand in the other, we made a widdershins tour of the grounds. My basic instructions had a lot to do with dos and don’ts: Where girls did things – line up, play and pee – and where boys did the same but never the twain shall meet. I showed her the school kitchen where the cook made delicious soup and cocoa in the cold months and portioned out pieces of fried fish or sweet milk cheese to be distributed the rest of the year. I showed her the nurse’s office, best known by all for the annual ‘redwater’- biharzia - testing though I did not try to explain how we all had to drink gallons and pee in a bottle to see if our kidneys were under attack from parasites. That advanced lesson I would save for much later. Finally we reached the bicycle shed and made our way to the summit of the rock garden where two large red iron oxide rocks invited us to settle down for Angelina’s first formal lesson of A is for apple –appel, B is for book -boek.
We got as far as M is for mouse –muis when two nuns came walking from the convent on the corner on their way to town. To my amazement Angelina’s face lit up as she called ‘Suore!’ and waved. Instinctively I restrained her from going down to the fence to talk to them. Did she not know that those women collected children’s toes? Did she not know that they were followers of the Anti-Christ? The nuns looked up and waved but, to my relief, kept going. Angelina carefully extracted herself from my restraining arm and turned her wistful gaze away from the disappearing habits. She turned back to K is for kerk – church, a simple, recognizable Protestant structure complete with a rooster atop its spire. She fingered her little gold cross and looked puzzled.
That evening I turned to my mother for an explanation. The hair, the hoops in her ears, the dress length, the cross and, especially the fearless friendliness towards nuns came as a culture shock to someone like me whose knowledge of foreign lands and peoples was confined to three specific areas: faith, ancestry and oppression. Every Bible had a map of Canaan and Palestine to support the Old and New Testaments respectively. I knew how to match the Red Sea with the stories of Moses and could point to the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked on water. The exotic inhabitants of the Holy Land were fixed in my mind as they were depicted in period costume to match the stories in the Children’s Bible.
I had a vague idea that Holland and France, the purported lands of my forebears, lay somewhere near England, land of the oppressors whom my grandfather fought and whose concentrations camp killed my two little uncles. Most traces of the French heritage had disappeared in customs and language, though Huguenot names and faith were being newly harnessed to the Afrikaner Nationalist identity in the form of a monument in Franschhoek. The previous December’s pilgrimage to this brand new shrine to our Calvinist traditions had impressed me greatly and pumped up the pride I felt in the Huguenot branch of our family despite the fact that one of them, General Piet Cronjé, had surrendered to the British.
Around me grown-up conversation tended to dismiss Holland by characterizing the modern Dutch as rude and liberal, invariably referring to them as Kaaskoppe – Cheeseheads. I did not quite understand this; I knew that Queen Wilhelmina had sent the Gelderland to pick up Paul Kruger and carry him away from danger, which made the Dutch good guys in my book. I also knew that our language was Dutch not too long ago because my Grandmother only read her Bible in Dutch and induced waves of suppressed giggles whenever she came to visit by lustily singing along in Dutch in church and evening devotions. It was this same Grandmother who left us in no doubt about the evil of the British. The anger and grief of her Boer War tales made it clear that England and the English language were beyond the pale. She had eaten from a bitter fruit and she did her best to impose its bitterness on us. We knew well not to recite any English verse or show her our reading books; any hint of enthusiasm for the enemy or its language would be a betrayal of Ouma’s sorrow.
Now, here was Angelina, a foreigner without context. My mother took a surprisingly non-judgemental view, explaining that customs varied as to dress and piercing. She assured me that Angelina’s family would want her to fit in and that soon she would probably braid her hair, shorten her hems and remove the hoops from her ears. As for the cross and the nuns: there was a direct connection. My mother straightened her back and her tone became strident. She repeated what I knew already:
“ You know how many Protestants were burnt at the stake by Catholics?”
“Yes, that’s why the Huguenots had to flee France,” said I remembering the inscriptions at the monument.
“That’s why we don’t trust them. And also they worship graven the images of Mary and mere mortals they call saints, supposedly because they can perform miracles. That’s idolatry. The Bible forbids that but most Catholics don’t even know what’s in the Bible because they’re only allowed to read the Bible in Latin, not in their own language.”
As she spoke, my spiritual concern for my new friend grew.
“But they are Christians, aren’t they, Mamma?”
“Yes, but completely on the wrong track.”
“But are they sinners? Do all Catholics go to Hell?”
She looked around furtively and lowered her voice:
“Don’t let Pappa hear this because he doesn’t believe it. But I believe Catholics, if they’re good and do the Lord’s will, can go to Heaven.”
I decided to spare my father all talk of Angelina. It would be easy to keep my association with this idolater under wraps; she lived some distance out of town and came to school by bus. It was unlikely that she would ever come to the house to play, and, therefore, improbable my father would ever get to meet her. But he surprised me one afternoon:
“Would you like to go and play with your little Italian friend while I do my home visits one day? Juffrou tells me her father is Oom Giel Boshoff’s farm manager. I have to go and see a few old and sick people on farms nearby on Saturday.”
Before I started school I was my father’s constant companion on these calls to his flock. I got to know the district well while sucking mint imperials or humbugs. Before he graduated to Mercedes, my father drove imported American cars – Packards and Pontiacs. They were the cars of choice for their robust suspension on ill-maintained dirt roads and were well sealed to keep out the dust. The disadvantage was that the steering wheel was on the wrong side. The right side for America but the wrong side for us. Overtaking was a risky business for a driver caught in a cloud of dust, unable to see the oncoming traffic. This is where I earned my mints: it was my job to give the all clear to pass from my perch in the front passenger’s seat. These jaunts introduced me to the rules of the road and I missed them when I had to go to school.
It felt like old times when we set off on the Pretoria road. There was even a fresh supply of humbugs.
“I’m surprised Mamma lets me go and play with a farm manager’s child,” I confided, “she always said Ouma Annie wouldn’t let them play with the bywoner’s* children even if they were white.”
“The Berghs are great snobs,” said my Dad, “ they think nobility lies only in blood but where I come from nobility lies in the character that has withstood the test of fire. Your Oupa Benadé was such a man. Anyway Mr. Truncellito is not a bywoner. He is a proper farm manager and he has character, I know.”
I was flabbergasted.
“How do you know him, Pappa?”
“He worked for Oom Giel when he was a prisoner of war. Oom Giel picked him out at the camp at Zonderwater.”
I knew about the Second World War: there were shortages because of the war, there were few photos of me as a baby because there was no film. But camps?
“A concentration camp, Pappa?”
“No, a prisoner of war camp. You know Jan Smuts sent his soldiers to fight for the British. They fought the Italians in North Africa and Ethiopia and Somaliland.”
I was confused.
“But Hitler was not Italian?”
“No, Mussolini was Italian and he was on Hitler’s side.”
Now I understood the goodwill towards Angelina’s father; he was really on our side since we were against Smuts and the British. Much later I realised that many Afrikaners and Italian fascists shared attitudes on race. Apartheid South Africa was tailor made for eugenically-minded white immigrants. They were welcomed to swell the ranks of voters for a new era when racial discrimination would be institutionalized and enforced by laws made by whites, elected by whites protecting their own interests. The ideology of the likes of Angelina’s father may have been forced underground in Europe but for fifty years it flourished in South Africa. So, the irksome question of theology was dwarfed by the need to bolster ideology.
“What is a prisoner of war camp, Pappa?”
My father seized on the opportunity to increase my civic understanding:
“When you catch enemy soldiers you can’t just go and shoot them. That’s not civilized. No, you have to hold them in camps until the war is over and then give them back to their country. They did this with our soldiers in the Boer War too, banished them to places like India and Ceylon and St Helena…”
More places to find in my mother’s old school atlas.
“…So many died from drinking dirty water and eating rotten food – just like in the concentration camps. But that’s not what happened to these I-ties we caught up there. No, the camp at Zonderwater was a veritable holiday camp and university rolled into one. They had a big hospital, they were allowed to worship in their own idolatrous way and since many of them were illiterate, they were even taught to read and write Italian. No wonder a man like Mr Truncellito and many of his fellow POWs think this is a great country and want to stay here. Yes, the British can learn from us about POW camps.”
The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ had become blurred I was too young to make the argument that the ‘we’ who ran Camp Zonderwater were Smuts men and really on the side of the British. In other words ‘our’ adversaries.
The Truncellito home sat, humble and ungentrified, behind a chicken wire fence, close to the road. It could well have been a bywoner’s dwelling: a door and two windows, no porch, no overhang, no flower beds, no lawn, functional trees like orange, lemon and papaya, no garage. It was just slightly grander than the houses I remembered from my last visit to the Mission Church in the location. It was clear Angelina’s family was starting over from the very bottom.
I hesitated. My mother’s snobbery had already taken hold, it seemed.
But then appeared the whole welcoming party: Angelina and her sister in their long dresses and flowing hair, gold on ears and necklines catching the sun. They were followed by their plump mother and wiry father who arranged the time of pick-up with mine in Afrikaans. They led me into their home like a princess.
It was a day of firsts. Before he went to supervise the sorting in Oom Giel’s tobacco sheds, Angelina persuaded her father to sing along to a recording of O Sole Mio. I knew the song; it was a popular request on the radio program we listened to on Saturday nights but I had never heard it live. The record was scratchy, the gramophone ancient but Mr Truncellito’s voice overshadowed both as it filled the small room. The high notes sent shivers down my spine. Ever since I have been in awe of Italian tenors in general and the Italian language in particular. For the rest of the day I bathed in the language as I was introduced to several saints in holy pictures and statues. I sunk my fingers into the thick pile of the velvet sofa and marvelled at the heaviness of the gold fringing of the brocade table cover. There was a sensuality in that modest house I had never felt before.
Lunch consisted of sausages and risotto. My taste buds were transported! The only sausage I knew was boerewors. Every winter when my grandmother made these traditional sausages us children did the ritual pounding of the coriander, cloves and allspice. I tasted none of these in Mrs Truncellito’s sausages; instead I tasted the chilli pepper they put on my fingers to stop me sucking them. And there was something almost like the aniseed my grandma put in rusks. The risotto was another revelation: Yes, rice was a daily staple at our table but it was plain and fluffed ready to accommodate the gravy of the day. Rice was rice as far as I knew; that day taught me differently. The Truncellito risotto was more like a savoury rice pudding, each succulent plump grain saturated with rich gravy. I tasted celery and garlic for the first time and marvelled at the strange, hard cheese grated on top. Later they took me on a sniffing tour through the herb garden. It was a wonder; the only herb my mother ever used was parsley. The Italian names passed me by but I tucked the bouquet of basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme and sage firmly into my memory for sensual things. I do believe it was the beginning of my predilection for Mediterranean food. Now I also know the difference between Basmati and Arborio rice.
In October I turned eight. My birthday fell on a Sunday that year and in deference to the Sabbath the party would be on the preceding Saturday. I took a secret pleasure in this bending of the normally rigid rules which dictated that a person should receive their presents on the very day of their birthday and not a day before. For once the Sabbath worked to my advantage. My mother must have been going through a flexible phase because she did not object to Angelina being invited and even suggested that she stayed until Sunday.
“Provided her parents agree that she goes to church with us.”
Now I wonder at my mother’s agenda, then I just saw it as another hurdle in the name of friendship with an outsider.
Angelina was a fast learner; in three months she had picked up enough Afrikaans to hold her own on the playground. Because she was sweet and attractive others soon followed my lead and made friends with her, exchanging snacks and charms and silkworms. She soon followed the fashion of braids and ribbons, her dresses were shortened but somehow the school made an exception on the jewellery. Our lessons under the jacaranda included the words to hymns and popular songs – an initiative I took without Juffrou’s direct instruction. Soon Angelina’s strong voice could clearly be heard at assembly. We sort of, kind of hinted that her father was really an opera singer, now fallen on hard times. I basked in the glamour this story afforded her.
It was a jolly party with all the stops pulled out. There was a generous supply of things reserved only for high days and holidays: iced cup cakes with hundreds and thousands, fudge and coconut ice, chips, peanuts, a case of assorted carbonated drinks, a large birthday cake and a license to be greedy. There were prizes for winners in a series of games; there was pass the parcel and musical chairs followed by chasing and hiding games.
That night we were exhausted. When I came back to my room from brushing my teeth, I found a vision straight from a Children’s Bible – a Catholic Children’s Bible that is. Angelina was kneeling by her bed in a long flowing white nightgown, her hair pouring down her back, almost reaching the floor. In her hand she held a string of beads, her eyes were closed but she mumbled as she moved the string, bead by bead through her fingers. The sight of her prohibited intrusion. I stood transfixed in my chequered pyjamas. If only she had wings, she would have been the picture of an angel. In the face of such grace I felt clumsy and uncouth. I quickly crawled into my bed, recited a psalm, said a quick prayer and wondered about where exactly in Heaven Angelina and I would meet.
The next year we all moved from Junior to Primary School. Angelina was put in a class of her own age and soon found friends among them. My reputation as tutor had followed me and I was given a new immigrant to teach. This time I found out what all teachers know: all learners are not alike. Despite many hours under the wild fig tree Arie made little progress. He spoke Dutch and did not think he needed to learn Afrikaans. As for English, when was he ever going to need that?
Before the year was out Angelina disappeared from the playground. My father heard from Oom Giel that Mr Truncellito had rented land of his own and had sent his girls to a Convent School in Johannesburg.
When I was fourteen Angelina called unexpectedly to say she was visiting in the district and could we have a coke together? I hardly recognized her; she had grown into a young woman with a style sophistication that made revived the chequered pyjama feeling. Her English was much more fluent than mine and she confessed to hardly ever speaking Afrikaans. She told me of her visit to Italy and life in the Convent School. We reminisced about the months under the jacaranda when we were little girls. We parted with promises of future visits just to fend off the fact that we would never see each other again.
Whenever I see a jacaranda, be it in Petropolis or Palm Springs, I think of Angelina and how the indelible impression she made on me fed my curiosity and contributed to my life as a cultural chameleon.