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1. Pale Moon Rising
- Weaver Press
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1 1 P PA AL LE E M MO OO ON N R RI IS SI IN NG G When George J. George mistook his white Ford Escort for the moon, he knew that his time was up. He would turn his face to the evening star and, guided by the nests of white-browed sparrow-weavers, keep walking . Would he walk alone? “Mr George!” hissed the headmaster turning from the podium in midspeech to face the errant school-teacher, who still had the straw in his mouth – “you will see me without fail first thing tomorrow morning! In my office, Mr George!” Then he turned back to the auditorium and proceeded with his speech as if nothing untoward had happened. George pushed the straw down the neck of the bottle and surreptitiously screwed on the blue cap. He kept his beetroot-coloured face busy scanning his knee-caps and those of the teachers sitting on his immediate left and right. He was for it! So, Mrs Maphosa is wearing a tartan skirt! Wonder what clan it represents ? George was only half listening to the headmaster droning on about sporting achievements… er… inflation… er… Friday detention… er… how honoured the school would be to host the Deputy Secretary of Education and Urban (sic) Beauty Pageants… er… the immeasurable contribution to the running of the school by the prefects (most of them sons and daughters of board members)… er… the support he constantly received, in these times of trial and tribulation from his dogs, Bella and Fella (Grey Street terriers who were notorious for stealing sandwiches from the pupils’ school bags), and… er… last but not least… er… his secretary , Miss Poops who… er… short of darning his socks… er… was like a mother to him… er… (tremendous applause from His Worship the Mayor, distinguished guests, parents, and those pupils who did not have access to play stations and who were, consequently, still capable of sentimentality ). 1 Half preparing a lesson for his A-Level English class, Mrs Maphosa’s skirt reminded him of Andrew Marvell’s scurrilous depiction of the Scots in his ‘Horatian Ode’: The pict no shelter now shall find Within his parti-coloured mind; But from this valour sad Shrink underneath the plaid: Happy if in the tufted brake The English hunter him mistake; Nor lay his hounds in near The Caledonian deer. His pupils couldn’t understand why he found these lines so funny, so he had to explain (did you, though, George, did you really have to?) that ‘shrink beneath the plaid’ was an allusion to the penis under the kilt, and that ‘mistake’ – if you knew your Shakespeare – suggested adultery or, in this case, sodomy. How does Gower put it in Henry 5 : ‘Gentlemen, both, you will mistake each other.’ And Jamy replies, ‘A! That’s a foul fault.’ Suddenly the English soldier becomes the hunter while the Scottish soldier becomes the deer (dear). The hunt, boys and girls, is an allegory of sexual conquest. But it was the moon, not a characteristic Marvell image (now we’re in Coleridge territory), that haunted George, drunk as he was, after Speech Night. The ceremony had been held at the amphitheatre in the Centenary Park, and when George, shunned by colleagues and parents alike, but attracting some appreciative stares from the more rowdy element of school pupil, stumbled groggily out in search of his car – now where the heck did I park it? – he mistook a pale moon on the horizon for a white 1978 Ford Escort 1.3L . George could not understand why his car seemed to recede as he approached it, keys in hand. As an English teacher he was familiar with paradoxes, concordia discors and all that. He could go on for hours about the necessity of opposites; that it was the dust that proved the sweetness of a shower; that you needed light to cast a shadow; that if it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times… paradoxes didn’t scratch your face, skin your shin, stub your toe – useless bloody items… cardboard 2 [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:47 GMT) junk… transported on junks… juncque… junco… jonk…djong went his Chinese-made shoes as they negotiated anthills, plastic litter, rusty tins, dog and human turds, grass clumps, roots, chongololas and all the other things you’d expect your footwear to encounter in Bulawayo’s Centenary Park, which straddles the road out...