Free NF (1957) Going Home by Doris Lessing Page A

labour; the Government favoured the townsfolk. This at least hadn’t changed at all. They wore the farm uniform—short khaki shorts, showing yards of brown leg, bush shirts, short socks.
    Time passed, nearly an hour of it; the queue had hardly moved forward.
    They were now talking of one Jerry, and here, it seemed, was a matter they approved of, for the fatalistic shrug of the Government-oppressed countryman had given way to the earnest manner of two children swapping confidences.
    ‘I’m with you. Jerry is a good type. Not like some magistrates. We are lucky to have him in our district.’
    ‘Fair’s fair with Jerry. He warns you—then he gets you, square and legal.’
    ‘That’s what I say. He came to my place one sundown—he said, “Now look here, man, that’s the third time I saw you doing seventy through the township. Next time I’ll see there’s a fine.”’
    ‘Then he will. Because he does what he says. He sent a chit around to me. “Tom,” he said, “it was nearly eighty you were doing today. You only have to slow down to thirty for a mile through the village. Is that so much to ask?” Yes, that’s what he wrote to me.’
    ‘Yes, that’s Jerry all right. He said to me, “There’s a school, too. The place is full of kids. Use your head,” he said. “Think how you’d feel if you got a couple of those kids. Use your heart.”’
    ‘Yes, that’s what he said to me when he came to see me. He gave me fair warning. Next day, that was yesterday, I got asummons. I was doing eighty, mind.’ Here he paused and looked with dark solemnity at the other. ‘Eighty. So I was summoned. Fair’s fair.’
    ‘Yes, you can always trust Jerry to do what’s right.’
    ‘Yes, he never lets you get away with it. Not more than what’s fair.’
    Which conversation may, perhaps, throw light on another: three weeks later, a friend of mine who inspects African schools, in that voice of exasperated affection which is common among liberal members of the administration who have to work constantly against their own beliefs, ‘Damn it, man, they’re mad. Say what you like. Yes, all right, we’re mad, but they’re madder. There are times I could throw the whole thing up. You know what? There’s a teacher. He’s been swotting and struggling for that ruddy Standard IV certificate for years, and then he got it, and he was in a kraal school at last, a big man with all his six years’ schooling behind him and all’s hunkydory. So then I went out to inspect. I found him there in that pitiful, bloody little school, next door to a whacking great church, needless to say, and he had his sixty kids sitting on the mud floor in neat little rows all chanting the ABC in Shona, and there he was drunk as a lord and staggering around like a sick chicken. I said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed, Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savingsfor fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at