The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

Assistant Compound Manager went out, came in again. “Starting to push off now,” he said, assuring, belittling, comforting, the way one stands between a child and the undesirable, insistingly smiling, “all on their way.”
    Soon we left, too, passing the dwindling groups of natives, the emptying garden; my father holding my hand but talking closely to Mr. Bellingan and not knowing I was there.
    The boys at the Compound didn’t like the food they were given, and so they all came together to Mr. Ockert’s house to complain. Now they were going back to the Compound and they were glad because, although they had behaved badly, Mr. Ockert wasn’t taking their Sunday ration of kaffir beer away from them. Between the two men talking above my head I heard the word “strike”; “—But it wasn’t a strike, was it?” I said quickly. My father smiled down at me. “Well, yes, it was, really. They didn’t refuse to work, but they wouldn’t eat; that’s a strike, too.” He had told me often about the 1922 strike of white miners, when there were shots in the streets of Atherton, and my grandmother, his mother, had stayed shut up in her little house for days, until the commando of burghers came riding in to restore order. To me the word “strike” carried with it visions of excitement and danger; something for which, alas, I had been born too late.
    Those native boys sitting around making a noise the way they liked to in the garden, and the lovely tea all ready in Mrs. Ockert’s beautiful lounge (the scones collapsed into hot butter; I should have liked one more)—
That
couldn’t be a strike—?
    Hunger was whistling an empty passage right down my throat to my stomach.—I twisted my hand out of my father’s and ran on ahead, to bacon and egg put away for me in the oven.

Chapter 4
    My adolescence and the first years of the war were concurrent; both have a haziness in my mind that comes, I suppose, from the indefinite, cocoonlike quality of the one, and the distant remove from my life of the other.
    During that time my life was so much my mother’s that it seemed that the only difference between us was the insignificance of age. The significance of emotional experience that separates the woman, mated, her life balanced against the life of a man, that life again balanced against the life of a child begotten and born, from the girl-child, was as unrealized by my mother as by me. My mother, with her slightly raw-featured still-young face—the blood flowed very near the surface of the thin skin—accepted marriage and motherhood as a social rather than a mysterious personal relationship. Wives and husbands and children and the comfortable small plan of duties they owed to one another—for her, this was what living was. I accepted the outward everyday semblance of adult life, the men father-familiar yet creatures respected and allowed ununderstandable tastes of their own; ministered to because they were the providers and entitled to affection from their own families; women the friends, the co-workers, the companions, busy with one another in the conduct of every hour of the day. My mother’s weeks were pegged out to street collections and galas and dances and cake sales and meetings of this committee and that—remote from battlefields or air raids, with my father’s stomach ulcer excluding him from offering his services to South Africa’s volunteer forces, this was what the war meant in our lives. Outside of school, I too belonged to this busy to-and-fro that went on above the tunneling of black men and white in the Mine. I too had my place, the place of the Secretary’s daughter (my father had been promoted at last), in the hierarchy that divided the Mine Manager and his wife (tall in a clinging skirt, an exiled Mrs. Dalloway) giving the prizes in a certain order of rigid gradations from the busy small woman in