Sickly and cross, they cease to lay. His mother consults her sister in Stellenbosch, who says they will return to laying only after the horny shells under their tongues have been cut out. So one after another his mother takes the hens between her knees, presses on their jowls till they open their beaks, and with the point of a paring-knife picks at their tongues. The hens shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. Boyhood'' is full of shuddering.
Sadism percolates through South African society.
Relief comes on his grandfather's sheep farm, where in the solitude of fields and woods Coetzee finds intimations of an ecstatic freedom. But even here there is no escaping the ubiquity of violence. With queasy fascination, the boy watches the slaughtering and castrating of sheep, catching in the animals' eyes, he imagines, a glimpse of ''a resignation, a foreknowledge . . But he gets an inkling of where his apprenticeship in fear and loathing may someday take him. At school, he chafes at the essay assignments in English, dull pieces on sports and holidays.