A Bosman Companion. Craig Mackenzie
Butler, David.
Cold Stone Jug (1949) Described by the author in an epigraph as “A chronicle: being the unimpassioned record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison”, Cold Stone Jug is a semi-autobiographical account of HCB’s four years in prison, from the memorable opening, which recalls his misery straight after the murder and interrogation by fellow prisoners (“‘Murder,’ I answered” CSJ: 45), to his release: “‘Look after yourself, now,’ the gate warder said, ‘You know boob is a bastard. See that you don’t come back.’ I answered, ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ Forgetting that I no longer had any need to call him ‘sir.’” (197). (See on trial.)
The early parts of the chronicle are deceptively light-hearted, but the narrative later shifts vertiginously under the pressure of the narrator’s descent into insanity. In the condemned cells, which he shares with another prisoner waiting to be either reprieved or hanged, the two convicts engage in casual banter with the warders: “Of course, Stoffels and I affected unconcern, there in the condemned cell. We spent much of our waking hours in pulling the warders’ legs. We didn’t know, then, that we were in actual fact engaged in a time-honoured prison pastime” (53). The account of Stoffels’s execution (61–62), recorded in icy detail, is one of the most moving passages of the entire text, and could serve as a highly persuasive anti-death-penalty tract.
The dull, brutal reality of prison life is never far below the surface. The narrator recalls his ironic envy at a hard-labour convict’s beating by a warder: “For no warder would dream of hitting a condemned man with a baton. To a warder a condemned man was something already dead” (53). A similar sense of unreality pervades the closing passages of the text, when the narrator becomes a ‘non-person’ after his release is suspended owing to a bureaucratic oversight: “Here was I, in the prison, a human being, of flesh and air and bone; I existed here, in the prison, as a physical reality. At least, that was what I had always believed [… .] What was really me were a lot of papers, dog-eared and yellowed with the years, lying between two cardboard covers and tied up with green string, in a filing cabinet at head office” (196).
For those attuned to HCB’s distinctive brand of wry, ironic humour, typified by Schalk Lourens’s throw-away lines, Cold Stone Jug yields some special moments: “Every man in the first offenders’ section I spoke to was innocent. And he would explain his innocence to me in such detail, and his countenance, as he spoke, would be lit up with so pure a radiance, so noble a refulgence, that I believed him implicitly, and I felt very sorry for him, and I wondered how he could bring himself, from the noble elevation of his guiltlessness, to hold converse with so sorry a worm as myself” (102).
Also of interest are the prison stories, which constitute an entire subgenre in Cold Stone Jug. The circular pointlessness of the yarns inevitably shows up the circularity and pointlessness of the prisoners’ lives. They are invariably disrupted by the resumption of prison routine and leave a weird, disembodied impression in their wake. On one occasion the narrator reports a story told to him by one ‘bluecoat’ (habitual criminal) about a safe-blowing that goes horribly awry when the dynamite the gang members use explodes in their faces. Typically, this storytelling session is terminated when exercise period ends. The narrator remarks: “The whole story ended just like that, in mid-air [… .] But I knew I could go back to him any time, and he would continue with that story from the point where he had left off, if I had asked him to. Or else he would have told me a brand new story, starting just from anywhere and ending up nowhere – exactly like his own life was” (69).
In tone Cold Stone Jug shifts from the jocular and sardonic to the anguished, desperate cry of a young man already half over the edge of insanity and hanging perilously on the precipice. This gives the chronicle its unique, haunting power, and enables Cold Stone Jug to transcend its more awkward moments, where the flat prose style threatens to trivialise what was clearly a most brutal and degrading experience. A further significance of Cold Stone Jug is its role as a pioneering work in the corpus of ‘prison literature’ – sadly, a genre that became well established in SA.
Pretoria Central Prison, showing the door through which HCB would have stepped upon his release in 1930 (Craig MacKenzie)
Collected Works of Herman Charles Bosman, The (1981 & 1988) A gathering of all of the published volumes by HCB at the time, initially in two hardback volumes in a slipcase (1981), and then in one hardback volume (1988), with a preface by Lionel Abrahams. It contains Mafeking Road, Unto Dust, Jacaranda in the Night, Willemsdorp, The Earth is Waiting, poems from The Blue Princess, poems from Mara, Cold Stone Jug, A Bekkersdal Marathon, Jurie Steyn’s Post Office, Selected Stories, and A Cask of Jerepigo. The Anniversary Edition was to see this collection of HCB’s work added to by at least a quarter, with many texts restored after intentional and unintentional meddling.
Colley, Major-General Sir George Pomeroy See Majuba Hill.
coloured See Cape Coloured.
Combrinck (no first name) Nervous leader of a commando, parallel to OSL’s, sent to flush Sijefu’s warriors from the thick bush; died at Dalmanutha during the Second Anglo-Boer War (UD: 109 “Funeral Earth”).
Combrinck, Hans Farmer who objects to drinking too early in the day (OTS: 64 “New Elder”).
comet Possibly Halley’s Comet, which appeared in 1910; used as substitute for or allusion to the Star of Bethlehem (S&H: 113 “Cometh Comet”).
“Cometh Comet” (S&H: 111) A comet brings great relief to farmers driven to desperation by drought. HCB at the height of his powers; not a word out of place in this beautiful nativity story. “It seemed that the further a tribe of kaffirs lived away from civilisation, the more detailed and dependable was the information they had about the comet.”
commando(s) (Afr. ‘kommando’) Mounted military unit(s), member(s) of mounted military unit. Formed during the early colonial years in SA in response to attacks by indigenous peoples, and cattle theft. Thereafter became a core aspect of Voortrekker life, and featured prominently during the two Anglo–Boer Wars. Because of their military prowess, the term was used later in the twentieth century to refer to crack troops in the military who usually operate in small, specially trained bands (OTS: 45 “A Boer Rip van Winkel”).
comp Abbreviated form for ‘compositor’; artisan who composited and set the type with which newspapers were printed (CJ: 163 “Street Processions”).
comping Abbreviation of ‘compositing’; setting the type by hand (CSJ: 64).
Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories, The (2006) A collection of all 60 OSL stories, together with the illustrations that originally accompanied the first publication of the stories in the 1930s and 40s, edited by Craig MacKenzie. The sequence is divided into three groupings: early stories (1930–31); those he wrote in London (1934–37); and those he wrote upon his return to SA in 1940 until his death in 1951.
Complete Voorkamer Stories, The (2011) A collection of all 79 Voorkamer stories, edited by Craig MacKenzie, with photographs by David Goldblatt. Half of the pieces first appeared in Lionel Abrahams’s two collections Jurie Steyn’s Post Office (1971) and A Bekkersdal Marathon (1971). The entire set was then re-edited by Craig MacKenzie and appeared as Idle Talk (1999) and Homecoming (2005), both of which are part of the Anniversary Edition.
concertina A small sausage-shaped instrument with free reeds and a bellows; when air is forced through the reeds musical notes are produced and a tune is played by pressing buttons situated on either side of the instrument; ironically, the type of concertina favoured by boeremusiek proponents is known as the English concertina, as it was produced by the English Wheatstone company (MR: 44 “The Music Maker”).
“Concertinas and Confetti” (S&H: 66) A cunning bully’s life changes for the better when he marries a loving woman. A wistful story of love and how past habits predict future behaviour. “And it seemed sad that life could not always be like that. It seemed a pity that life was not satisfied to let us always bear on our shoulders things only as light as confetti.”
Constable,