A Basic Grammar
Lesson 27
COMPREHENSION
You'll make mistakes no power can mend
Unless you strive to comprehend
Please read the following passage, trying to understand (comprehend)
the contents of the passage.
Then answer the questions in the Exercise.
Remember there is no single correct answer.
Any of a number of answers may be correct, if they demonstrate
that you comprehend (understand) the passage.
After you have answered the questions, please find sample answers
available in the next blog post.
STORM IN A TEACUP
As a first generation immigrant into South Africa, I had a high
regard for the value of a good reputation in my youth.
In middle age, however, I discovered for myself that you cannot
defend yourself against the malice of a lying tongue.
It was my father who inculcated my strong regard for a good
reputation.
Newly matriculated and all of sixteen years old, I was working
in a municipal library.
On Wednesdays and Fridays I had the afternoon off, and worked
from five to eight in the evenings instead.
On those nights, I'd have coffee in a cafè until nine when the bus
left the terminus.
At a bus stop around the corner from our street, my father would
be waiting.
He'd put me on the steel bar of his bike and ride me home.
The colleague with whom I worked evening duty wanted to catch
the bus to her suburb, which left at eight exactly.
The terminus adjoining the library, she suggested she leave five
minutes earlier, leaving me to lock up with the handyman.
My father objected, and suggested I change partners with someone
who owned a car, so that we could leave together.
He didn't mind if I had coffee in a cafè in a brightly lit street but
wanted me to have a fellow assistant with me in the library until
it was locked up.
With trepidation I informed the colleague concerned of my dad's
comments next morning at teatime.
Despite my yearning to be be accepted as part of the team, I had
been sensing a deep hostility from the group of older colleagues,
as they always seemed to go silent when I entered the staffroom.
I felt that if I stepped out of line in the slightest degree, their
dislike for me would come to the surface.
And I was too young and respectful of adults to believe that I could
handle open animosity.
My fears were well founded.
My colleague went blood red and venomously sputtered,
"I'm amazed at the concern of your dad, since he seems to have no
problem with you roaming the streets at night."
Another colleague in her fifties, daggers in her eyes, joined the fray:
"That's right. You're a bad girl," she said.
I gathered the shreds of my dignity around me.
"I'm not," I stammered.
That night I told my father, that most inoffensive of men.
You could tell him anything in the world.
He never seemed to get shocked or angry the way my mother would.
I needed the reassurance of his leavening humour but that time it
was not forthcoming.
His eyes steely, he told me to see the boss the next day to ask him
to get the colleague to explain her remark.
"The only thing we immigrants possess in this country is our
reputation.
Take that away from us and we're left destitute."
I always think of these words when I hear the Shakespearean
reference to the stealing of a purse.
The funny thing about the anger of a patient man is that it really
spurs the recipient on to action, far more than one who is always
cross anyway.
So the next morning found me in my elderly boss's office.
After my father he was my favourite man.
Having heard my account of the incident, he called in my
colleague and made me repeat it in front of her.
When I mentioned the attack on my alleged roaming of the streets,
she denied it to my face, no doubt aware that the six people present
when she made it would back up her story rather than mine.
The boss took no sides but told us to "kiss and make up."
When we left the office, she whispered:
"I'll get you back, Miss!
Just you wait and see.
I'm going to tell the librarian you never charge the Dutch immigrants
any fines."
There she was probably quite right.
Not only I, but she herself and the majority of our mutual
colleagues gave those whose books were overdue a hefty reduction
when they seemed short of funds.
(Twenty years later I visited the town again and found that many of
them were now driving BMW's.)
While my colleague was still nursing her wounded spirits, our
Solomon-like librarian phoned the town clerk and arranged that
the five to eight evening bus be rescheduled to take in my suburb
as well as my colleague's, and that the departure time be put on
ten minutes.
Then we were all happy and there were no repercussions.
Ironically, she and the others and I became firm friends and we all
cried when I left the library three years later.
She used to tell my future from leaves left in my teacup and predict
a wonderfully romantic life for me.
Although this looking into the future conflicts with my religious
principles, I felt in this case that it marked a fitting end to what
amounted to little more than a storm in a teacup.
Looking back today, I no longer agree with my dad that reputation
is all-important, for in regarding it so one renders oneself too
vulnerable to the malice of one's detractors.
Though the incident did teach me that it may be healthy for all
concerned on occasion to drop the mask and clear the air, I cannot
feel that it really matters what people think or say of you, for they
usually get the wrong end of the stick anyway.
In the end the only thing that really counts is what God knows of you.
EXERCISE
1. Do you think the writer is being truthful when she says she is not
interested in having a good reputation?
If she is not, why would she express the contrary?
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2. Why would her easy-going father have been so unusually firm
about the attack on her?
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3. Would you rather work for the librarian than for Miss Mark's
supervisor?
Refer to
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4. Why do you think the story is titled; "Storm in a teacup?"
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5. Why was the librarian Solomon-like?
To what story in the Bible does this refer?
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6. What does the librarian's refusal to take sides say of the man as a
supervisor?
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Dr Luky Whittle
