Mobbs’s word hung in the air for a stunned beat and a half. Then I heard a few sharp intakes of breath to the left and to the right of me, and a titter of embarrassed giggles behind me. Robert McAravey tells me that Freddy Jowett nearly choked on what later turned out to be the larger part of a Staedtler eraser, which would only have added to the general murmur of muffled hilarity that soon surrounded and so surprised me.
I thought at first that Mobbs had dared to say a very rude word. But when Toffee simply shook his head and smiled, as opposed to marching Mobbs to the headmaster’s office for an immediate lashing, I was suddenly dazed by both the abjectness of my ignorance and the terror of it being discovered.
It was bad enough not understanding the meaning of it. Much worse was not understanding why my classmates reacted to the word in the way they did, with that reflex mixture of shock and ribald amusement prompted only by inadvertent references to matters salacious or scatological, more frequently the latter. I drew from this that it was something polite society, as personified by my mother, would regard as unmentionable, objectionable or possibly even prosecutable.
But why Toffee’s philosophical smile? And how was it that I appeared to be the only boy in the class who had never heard of it?
It came to me at last, like an epiphany in slow-motion, that there were people in the world with minds much broader than my own, and that Mr “Toffee” Sharp, together most likely with the mums or dads of the majority of my classmates, was one of them, and that my mother, bless her, was not.
I waited until no one was watching and looked it up in the dictionary. It said something like, “Politics: the total complex of relations between people living in society.”
It sounded neither thrillingly lurid nor especially funny, which made me think I’d misheard the word, or I’d got the spelling wrong. Perhaps it was something the dictionary-makers had chosen deliberately to withhold from the eyes of young children.
I couldn’t take the risk of asking someone, not the mild-mannered Mobbs, nor less a grown-up. I decided to wait until I got home where I could find a way to consult Arthur Mee, or Winston Churchill if necessary, in private. But by the time we arrived at the farm several hours later it felt a lot less interesting than Bruce’s proposed venture down to the empty reservoir with the .22 and the pellet gun to shoot the platannas trapped in its muddy bottom.
If I didn’t bother to pursue it, I was never quite able to forget it. I’m sure that most children, and probably a fair proportion of adults, have a library well-hidden in the back of their minds where they store life’s little embarrassments alongside the more substantial collections of their disappointments, frustrations and guilty secrets. It took some effort, but I managed eventually to squeeze My Abject Ignorance Regarding the Meaning of Politics between The Unfortunate Fart in Miss Starkey’s Arithmetic Lesson, September 1961 and Why Is Mr Lane So Interested in My Bowel Movements?
And that was where it gathered dust for the five long years before the sensational revelations of Miss Cheeseman enabled me to connect the dots between the incident on the dusty bridge and “the complex of relations between people living in society”.
You may be thinking it was remiss of my parents not to have sat me down sometime between 1961 and 1967 to explain the facts of life. During my later school years I thought pretty much the same thing: that they were cowards, or that they lived in stubborn denial of the status quo, or, worse still, that they were complicit in shoring it up. It was desperately unfair of me.
They didn’t explain it to me because they would have had to tell me that it was only by the grace of God that I had a white skin, but that having a white skin didn’t make me superior in any way to people who didn’t, and that many but not all of the people who didn’t would come to despise me for having one even if I fully and truly understood that it didn’t make me superior to them in any way and I did my best to tell them so, and that as far as they, my parents, could see into the future, if anything was going to change it would be for the worse, and there would only be more acrimony and hate and suspicion between the good and the bad people with white skins and the good and the bad people with black skins and between every combination of the above, and the only thing I would ever be able to trust to guide me through the maze of lies and hate and acrimony and suspicion that lay ahead was my conscience.
I realised later that there were two reasons why they wouldn’t have wanted to subject me to that. The first was that they thought it would be too much for any child to grasp, and the second was that they had a deep and abiding faith that my siblings and I would learn it in time through their example, and we did.
I have no reason, by the way, not to take Robert at his word. He remembers more about life at Merchiston in the early sixties than I remember about yesterday afternoon. He kindly reminded me by email this morning that, along with the little flags, we were each given “a large coppery-coloured coin” with the words Republiek van Suid-Afrika and Republic of South Africa on one side, and an impression of the head of Oom Paul Kruger on the other, just to make sure, Robert adds, we English-speaking sons and daughters of Empire knew henceforth with whom our allegiances were expected to lie.
When the republic was proclaimed on the 31st of May 1961, Bruce and I and the man on the bridge, and every other citizen of South Africa, ceased by law to be British subjects, and Queen Elizabeth II ceased to be our head of state.
As if it weren’t already clear enough to informed observers, the nature of the country’s progress after independence from Britain was eloquently symbolised by the ox wagons that replaced the Crown at the head of the parliamentary mace.
The significance of all this was lost on Bruce and me, but if I’m ever going to get round to Thomas Henry Buckle, I need to explain what it meant to the tall black man in the elegant black suit.
It started with a referendum, as these things tend to do.
For those less familiar with this distasteful history, the forces that led to the referendum had been set in motion twelve years earlier when D.F. Malan’s National Party won the mandate, from an overwhelmingly white electorate, to implement its official policy of apartheid in 1948.
My mother told me that when her mother heard the news of Malan’s victory, she said to my mother, “Well, dear, a change is as good as a holiday.”
1948 was five years before I was born. By the time the National Party was defeated by the African National Congress in the country’s first truly democratic election, I was 41.
The choice offered by the referendum of the 5th of October 1960, to a now spotlessly white electorate, was for South Africa to remain a constitutional monarchy with the Queen as head of state, or to proclaim a republic and throw off the last of the country’s colonial shackles - in essence, a simple Remain or Leave.
The Leavers, led by Hendrik Verwoerd, argued that only a sovereign republic cut loose entirely from the meddling bureaucrats in London could defend itself from the chaos of British decolonisation in Africa. Their slogan was, “Ons republiek nou, om Suid-Afrika blank te hou”, which didn’t rhyme quite as felicitously in the English, “Our republic now, to keep South Africa white”.
The Remainers, unsurprisingly, did everything they could to scare the electorate into limp compliance by shamelessly exaggerating the dire consequences of leaving. One advertisement claimed that a lack of access to the Commonwealth markets would risk a loss to the country of more than two hundred million pounds a year. Sir De Villiers Graaff, leader of the opposition United Party, warned of international isolation, and the vulnerability of a nation unprotected by the collective might of the Commonwealth to “Communism and hot-eyed African nationalism”.
A lone voice in the wilderness, the inconsequential, liberally-minded Progressive Party tried to make the typically inconsequential liberal point, sic: “The issue is not monarchy or republic, but democracy or dictatorship.”
History records that the Leavers won the referendum by 52.29% against the 47.71% who voted Remain.
You can probably see where this is heading.
"Do you think the King knows all about me?"
There may have been other places formerly coloured pink on the map of the world where, as late as 1961, it was still possible for pre-adolescent grandsons and granddaughters of Empire to believe they lived just a one- or two- hour train journey from Buckingham Palace, and that if you left in the next ten minutes you might get there in time for the Changing of the Guards and catch a glimpse of Christopher Robin arriving with Alice.
Maybe there were kids of my age imagining the same thing at the same time on ranches in Kenya or at school in St Kitts, or at some far-flung outpost in Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh. But I can’t imagine a place more conducive to the illusion than the Midlands of Natal.
There were the rolling green hills. There were the gins and tonics. There was the Received Pronunciation of the inhabitants. There were the farmers and their wives who gathered of an evening at The Argyle or The Highwayman to sing, “Roll out the Barrel”, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “We’ll Meet Again”, and who said things like, “The sun’s over the yardarm” and “Jolly good show” and “Bottom’s up!” and “Bang up to the elephant” whenever Susie the barmaid turned to reach up for the whisky. There was the Anglican service on Sundays. There was the communal worship of the well-executed cover drive. There was my father who said, “By Jove!”, a lot, and my mother who said things like, “As right as a trivet” and “As happy as a lark in spring”.
There was the awful winter weather.
For several years of my early childhood I thought Natal was a county bordering on Devon or Dorset. A close reading of Great Expectations gave me the ammunition I needed to convince myself that the skins of the peasants and labourers in the fields, and of the cooks and nannies in the homesteads, had been irretrievably blackened by the accumulated soot of the industrial revolution, and that my father spoke to them in a dialect of Cornish.
While Harold Macmillan’s winds of change were whipping up ferocious storms from Cape Town to the Cameroons, only a whispered breath of them stirred the larkspurs and snapdragons in the gardens of the Midlands gentry. There was a reason Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal, was referred to by locals as “sleepy hollow”. Nobody in the city or its rural surroundings had heard of anything of any note happening within its limits since the magnificent bronze statue of Queen Victoria was erected in the gardens opposite the gracious red-brick City Hall in the 1920’s.
The towns to the north, from Hilton to Mooi River, were even sleepier. One day my father took a lawnmower to be repaired at Willie Groenewald’s garage in Rosetta, the local hamlet where the most notable commercial enterprise was Willie Groenewald’s garage. On the morning of the same day of the calendar a few years later he had my mother bake a cake, stuck some candles in the icing, and took it down to Willie’s where the pair of them celebrated the lawnmower’s fourth or fifth anniversary with a bottle of brandy until The Highwayman opened for business.
But in late 1960, while I was blithely going about the business of being a seven-year-old, the announcement of the referendum startled the English-speaking gentlefolk of Natal from their long colonial slumber. The Pietermaritzburg-based Natal Witness issued a grave warning: “Not to vote against the Republic is to help those who would cut us loose from our moorings and set us adrift in a treacherous and uncharted sea, at the very time that the winds of change are blowing up to hurricane force.”
They would have known the game was up if they had paid any attention at all to the words of Macmillan when he had spoken to parliament in Cape Town a few months earlier. Surely there was no mistaking the brutal candour of, “…it is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement, but I hope you won’t mind my saying frankly that there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible for us to do this without being false to our own deep convictions about the political destinies of free men…”
It’s churlish, of course, but I can’t help wondering which aspects of apartheid the British Prime Minister considered not so inimical to Britain’s deep convictions about the political destinies of free men.
But it was the referendum that galvanised white Natal. Nearly eighty percent voted against a republic. The Anti-Republican League drew cheering crowds numbering upwards of two thousand people in Durban, and some fifteen hundred in Pietermaritzburg. Thirty-three thousand, my father and mother almost certainly among them, signed the Natal Covenant. I quote it here in full as documentary proof of just how English we thought we were.
“Being convinced in our consciences that a republic would be disastrous to the material well-being of Natal as well as of the whole of South Africa, subversive of our freedom and destructive of our citizenship, we, whose names are underwritten, men and women of Natal, loyal subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending the Crown, and in using all means which may be found possible and necessary to defeat the present intention to set up a republic in South Africa. And in the event of a republic being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right, we hereto subscribe our names.”
It signed itself off with a strident, “GOD SAVE THE QUEEN”, as if the writers thought she might be persuaded to care if they said it loudly enough.
The substantive part of the Natal Covenant was freely plagiarized from the Ulster Covenant of 1912, which I likewise quote in full because it’s such a striking example of Santayana’s maxim that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it:
“Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V., humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children, our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognise its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right, we hereto subscribe our names.”
The young queen did to the Natal Covenant exactly what her grandfather had done to the Ulster Covenant, i.e., met it with royal indifference.
The obvious point to be drawn from this quirky repetition of history is how deaf and blind the monarchs of England were to the consequences of their imperialist meddling when it came back to bother them. But hey-ho, that’s the thanks you get for taking the trouble to put the world to rights.
What makes it so poignant and so personal isn’t that pathetic appeal of the Irish protestants to “the unity of the Empire” when the Empire was so patently doomed to disintegrate, nor that pitiable pledge of the Natalians “to stand by one another in defending the Crown” when the Crown had long since turned its back on them, but just how desperately and wretchedly they all believed that their Englishness would save them.
In 2017 we know better. It’s not the depth of your devotion to the Crown or to those good old-fashioned British values that saves you — it’s the accent with which you enunciate it.
My father got over the shock of the republic because it was his nature to look forward. If a cow got into the lucerne and died of bloat, or if one of us skinned a knee or broke an arm, he liked to quote the first two lines of that Gaelic prayer, “May the road rise up to meet you, May the wind be always at your back.” If October came and the rains didn’t, he would add the next two lines: “May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields…” He never ventured further than that because he thought God belonged in my mother’s department along with the preserves and the pickled pork.
My mother never did. Until 1961 she had been active in the Black Sash, a resistance movement of white, mostly English-speaking, middle-class women, founded in 1955 to campaign against the steady erosion of human rights under the Nationalist governments of Malan, Strijdom and Verwoerd.
She had remained optimistic that peaceful protest by decent, fair-minded people, with the help of some judicious advice from the Queen’s representatives in Pretoria, could still restrain the worst excesses of apartheid. But the final severance of our ties to the Crown and the Commonwealth dashed her last hopes of British intervention. Deeply saddened, but never wavering in her liberal convictions, she put all talk of politics aside and retreated, as the years went by, from social intercourse with anyone outside a very small circle of like-minded friends.
So I knew who the Black Sash were, and I recognised them when I saw them.
It was at Merchiston in 1962. I don’t remember if we were playing marbles or tops. It must have been one of them because they were the only available forms of playground recreation. If you ran out of marbles you would just have to wait until top season came around. And if all your tops got destroyed in battle you’d just have to wait until marble season.
Someone shouted, “Tanks!”
We ran to the fence. There I saw them, those phalanxes of white women of all ages, standing in fearless silence on the pavements either side of Commercial Road with only those distinctive black ribbons speaking for their mourning, as a convoy of yellow-green British Saracens rolled eastwards towards Durban, the personnel carriers mounted with Browning .30 machine guns shepherding between them the heavily armoured truck that transported the man who was to become the world’s most celebrated prisoner.
I understood what I had witnessed only many years later, of course. And it took many more years to connect the arrest of Mandela to the proclamation of the republic, and both of those events, at last, to the incident of the tall black man in the elegant black suit on that dusty little Hidcote bridge.
But I know now where he was coming from, both physically and metaphysically.
