At Sixty-Three I Went Back to School Because My Granddaughter Would Not Stop Doing Sums

The child in the back room

Lerato came to live with me in the March. She was fourteen then, and she brought two bags and a school shoe box full of pens, and she did not cry at the house. She cried at the church, once, briefly, and then she stopped, and I have not seen it since.

My daughter Palesa died in the February. I am not going to write much about that here. People want you to make it into a story with a shape, and it has no shape. She was thirty-six. It was quick and then it was slow and then it was quick again. I sat with her. That is all I want to say. I still have her handbag in my wardrobe and I have not opened it and I am not sure I ever will, and I do not think that makes me weak, it makes me sixty-three.

So then there was Lerato, in the back room, with the wardrobe that sticks.

I want to be honest about her because if I make her sweet, none of this means anything. She is not sweet. She is withdrawn in a way that can feel like an insult. She will sit through an entire supper and answer in single syllables and then go to her room and shut the door with a click that says more than a slam would. She has told me, in a flat voice, that I chew loudly. She once said "you wouldn't understand" to me about a thing I actually did understand, and I let it go, and I am still a bit cross about it two years later. She leaves her hair things everywhere. She is fifteen and her mother is dead and she is rude to the only person left, which is me, because I am the only one safe enough to be rude to. I know that. Knowing it does not make it pleasant.

But she does mathematics the way other children breathe.

I first saw it properly on a Sunday. She was sitting on the stoep with a maths exam paper she had found somewhere, from another province, from another year, and she was doing it for nothing. Not for marks. For nothing. There was no teacher. There was nobody to show. She was just doing it, with her tongue slightly out, filling the page with those little towers of working, and when she got stuck she made a noise like a kettle and went at it again. I stood in the doorway with a dish cloth and watched a child of mine, of ours, do a thing I could not follow one line of, and I felt two things at the same time, which were pride and a kind of fright.

What I did not have

I must say this part or the rest is dishonest.

I have Standard Six. That is all. I left school because there was no money and I was the eldest and that is simply what happened to girls like me in that time and place, and I have carried it my whole life like a stone in a shoe. I worked thirty-one years behind the counter at the post office in our town, and I was good at it, I was quick with the money and the forms and I knew every farmer's box number by heart, and none of that ever quite cancelled the stone. When people at church talk about their children's degrees I go quiet and smile and hold my cup. I have never told anyone that at the age of forty-one I bought myself a grammar book and hid it in the cupboard so that my husband would not laugh. He would not have laughed, actually. But I hid it anyway.

So when Lerato said, in that flat way of hers, "I want to do engineering," I said "yes, my girl," and inside me a voice said: with what. With who. You cannot even help her with Grade Nine.

Then it got worse. At the start of the year the school here told us they were not offering pure Maths and Physical Sciences to the FET phase anymore. Not out of spite. They could not keep a teacher. They had had three in four years, and the last one, a decent young man from Bethlehem, lasted two terms and then took a post in Gauteng, and who can blame him. So the children get Maths Literacy and that is that. Maths Literacy is a fine subject. It is not the door Lerato needs.

The nearest school that offers what she needs is a long way off. I worked it out on the back of a Shoprite slip: the fees, the boarding, the transport at the start and end of each term. I did that sum three times. My sums are correct even when everything else about me is not. There was no version of it where I could pay. My pension is my pension. The house is paid, thank God, but the house does not produce money, it eats it.

I told her at the kitchen table. She did not shout. She said, "Okay," and took her plate to the sink, and washed it, and went to her room, and the click of that door was the worst sound of that year.

Mev Bezuidenhout and the machine

It was Mev Bezuidenhout next door who started it, and she would hate that I am writing this because she is the sort of woman who leaves a bowl of soup on your step and walks away before you can open the door.

She is seventy-one, Afrikaans, sharp as a tack, and she has a grandson in Pretoria who set up her computer and taught her, over the phone, with much swearing on both sides. She came over with a Tupperware and I ended up telling her the whole thing, which I had not meant to do, and she listened with her hands flat on my table and then she said, "Anna. Daar is skole op die internet."

There are schools on the internet.

I did not believe her. I want to record my exact reaction, because it was ugly and it was mine: I thought, that is not a real school. That is a thing for rich children, or a scam, or a way to take a widow's money. Everything I had ever heard about the internet in my life was somebody being robbed on it. And I thought, quietly and shamefully: and how would I ever check? I would not be able to tell the difference between a real one and a false one. That is what being uneducated actually feels like, by the way. It is not that you are stupid. It is that you cannot verify anything, so you must either trust or refuse, and refusing feels safer.

She lent me her laptop. Just like that. Put it in my hands with the charger wrapped around it and said bring it back when you are finished, and finished has now stretched to a very long time.

The kitchen table

The first weeks were an embarrassment I would not repeat for money.

I did not know that you could scroll. I genuinely did not. I sat there stabbing at the little arrow and Lerato, who had come to see what the noise was, said "Ouma. Two fingers. Like this," and did not laugh at me, which I noticed and did not comment on.

Then the data. Ah, the data. We have no fibre in our street and I do not know that we ever will. I bought airtime and converted it and it evaporated. Thirty rand, gone before I had understood one page. I did not know that a video eats data and a page of writing does not. Nobody tells you this. I found out by watching my balance fall like a stone down a well while some cheerful person on a screen explained something to me that I had not asked to have explained. I actually said a word out loud that I have not said since 1987.

We worked out a system, Lerato and I. There is a corner of my kitchen, near the window above the sink, where the signal is one bar better than anywhere else in the house. So the laptop lives there, on the end of the kitchen table, on top of two telephone directories from the days when such things existed, because that lifts it high enough. I cook around it. The table is a table for eating at, from half past six, and a table for school the rest of the time, and there is a permanent ring on the varnish where a mug of tea lived through an entire term of trigonometry.

And of course, load shedding. Stage 4 that winter. We learned the schedule the way you learn a hymn. The battery gave us about two hours if we were careful, so if the power went at half past four she would work by the window until the light went orange and then blue and then gone, and I would light the paraffin lamp and put it behind her so it did not shine on the screen.

I read about the online school option for eleven nights before I said one word to Lerato about it, because I did not want to lift her hope with my clumsy hands and then drop it.

The low point

In August I nearly stopped it.

I had made an error with a form. A date, of all things. Me, who did forms for thirty-one years. I had put in the wrong thing and something did not go through and I found out late, and I sat at that kitchen table at eleven o'clock at night with my reading glasses on and my chest tight and I thought: you are too old and too ignorant and you are going to ruin this child's life with your fumbling, and she should have been taken by somebody younger, somebody with a computer of their own and a matric certificate, and everybody knows it and nobody will say it.

I cried at the table. Quietly, because of the door.

The door opened anyway. She stood in the passage in her pyjamas with her arms folded and looked at me for a while and then she said, "It's fine. It's fixable. Move." And she sat down and fixed it in four minutes, and did not once look at me while she did it, which I understood to be a kindness. Then she said, "You're going to have to learn the password thing, Ouma, because I'm not doing this every time," and went back to bed.

That was the worst night and it was also the turn.

What I learned to do

I want to list, without shame now, the things I was afraid of and can now do.

I can send an email with something attached to it. I can find the settings and turn off the automatic video playing, which was the thing eating my thirty rand. I can put my phone on the shelf above the fridge and make it into a hotspot, which is a word I did not know two years ago and now use in conversation like a woman of the world. I know the difference between a night bundle and a day bundle, and I know that anytime data costs more, and I have opinions about it. I know how to check whether a thing is a real institution or a nonsense, because I made Mev Bezuidenhout's grandson explain it to me over the phone for forty minutes while she stood in my kitchen saying "toe nou, Anna, vra hom."

I looked at a great many online schools in South Africa before we settled, and I asked questions that I am sure sounded ridiculous, and I asked them anyway, because a woman who is afraid of looking stupid will pay for that fear with her granddaughter's future.

The thing I could not have known from the outside: it is not that the child sits alone. There are lessons and there are times and there is somebody on the other end. She still has to be at that table at a particular hour with her book open. She still gets told when she has not done the work. And she still has to do the sitting and the sweating, which is the whole of education anyway, and which no school of any kind has ever been able to do for a child.

I will also say the true part that nobody puts in the brochures, and I am not putting it in any brochure either: it is lonely. She misses having people to be irritated by. Some days the connection drops in the middle and she goes flat and cold for an hour. Some days I hear the kettle noise from the kitchen and know she is fine. It is not a miracle. It is a hard, workable arrangement, held together by my pension and Mev Bezuidenhout's old laptop and one bar of signal by the window.

I do not think online schools are for everyone and I would not stand at the church door recommending them to strangers. I only know what we did in this house because there was nothing else.

The small thing at the end

Last month there was a test. Not a big one. A test.

She came into the kitchen where I was doing the beans, and she put the laptop on the counter next to me, turned around so I could see, and she pointed at one line with one finger. Not the mark. A comment from the teacher, next to a question she had done in some way that was apparently not the way it is normally done. It said: this is elegant.

She did not say anything. She just wanted me to see it, and she stood there while I read it twice, and then she took the laptop away.

Elegant. A word from a teacher I have never met, on a screen I did not know how to open two years ago, about a page of working I cannot follow one line of, done by a child who has not once in her life said thank you to me in those exact words.

I finished the beans. I did not make a fuss, because she would have hated a fuss.

I stood at the sink afterwards for longer than the dishes needed.