Confessions of a Sarf Efrikin Abroad

An introduction to My English Traits

For my mother,

Rosemary Phillippa Leyland Torr, née Smith

1924 – 2013

She might have approved.

*

“I am not unconscious of a certain malevolence and hostility in my own breast, such as a man must necessarily feel, who lives in England without melting entirely into the mass of Englishmen.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in an 1857 letter from Liverpool to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, Massachusetts

*

I see it now for what it is. Not the parts, but the sum of them. It’s a love letter to England.

I’m writing to tell her how and why I fell in love with her. I’m trying to describe when and how and why I first came to worship her from afar, and how blissful it was when I met her in the flesh at last to hold her in my arms and see my affection reflected in her adoring eyes. I’m writing to tell her what made her so lovely, adorable and lovable in the gaze of my wide-eyed wonder. I’m listing all the things I came to love about her that made me feel as though I would never love anyone as much as I loved her ever again. I’m saying how happy she made me; how special and treasured I felt in the arms of her embrace. I’m saying all the soppy stuff we say when love makes us think that words have wings. Why I’ll always love her. How I’ll never forget her, why I’ll always cherish her. And why I won’t know how to live without her

      I’m writing to say how sad I am to have to tell her that I’m going to have to leave her. I knew she had other lovers, many of them. I understood. Who wouldn’t want to love her the way I loved her? That’s not the reason. And it’s not because I’ve changed. It’s not because I’m different. She loved me in the beginning because I was different. It was one of the reasons I fell in love with her in the first place, the way she embraced my differences, honoured them, loved me for them. No. The betrayal is deeper than any infidelity. 

      I refused to believe it at first. They were small things. Little distractions. Odd absences. Then the way she began to look at me as though I wasn’t there. To look through me.  Smiling only with her lips. The shoulder turning cold. The grin becoming a grimace. Then the mood swings. The performances. The sudden obsession with how she looked in the mirror. The incessant dressing up, the superfluous layers of make-up. The pride that never had to be justified metamorphing into a vanity that did. The cooling heart. The indifference she no longer tried to hide. Then the lies. Not just to me. 

       I’m writing to say I’m sorry. Not that she will care. Not that she would care even if she noticed. That’s the hard part. That I meant so little to her in the end.

      They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Buckle up.

*

My wife Karine and I spent New Millennium’s Eve, the last night of the thousand years that began on the 1st January 1000, on a balmy Huatulco beach in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. We chose it to be the swansong of our three-year aventura Mexicana because it was advertised, justifiably we would afterwards agree, as a little patch of paradise, and because if all the planes fell out of the sky and civilization as we knew it was reduced once again to trading beads for coconuts when Y2K struck at midnight, we would be in the pound seats. But then, too, in the worst-case scenario of all the computers in the world self-immolating when their digits ticked over from 99 to 00 and the millennium bug devoured the entire planet like a very fiery meatball in the ensuing cataclysmic apocalypse, we would at least have had our taste of paradise, if not for very long.

Purists, pedants, and horologists, professional and amateur, will already be itching to correct me. The third millennium began, technically speaking, 365 days later at midnight on the 31st of December 2000, the last day of the second millennium that began, technically again, on the 1st of January 1001. But after the sun sank somewhere into the silver surf and the lapping lilacs of Bahía Chahué, and when las kindly camareras in their blue frocks and white aprons had tempted our tiring toddlers off the beach and up to bed with whispered inducements we were pleased not to understand, and when the band in the wooden cabana in the moonlit grove under the green cliffs of the Gigante Dormido struck up a gringo-friendly version of El Año Viejo as the countdown began in a cosmopolitan cacophony of competing choruses, and because we were counting down the days to the imminent end of our three astonishing years in Mexico and the even more astonishing prospect of making new lives for ourselves in London, yes, England, timed by chance alone to coincide with the last year that would ever begin with the number 19, it felt, we thought, as epic as the end of a millennium deserved to feel. It also makes for a better story. 

Despite the heady mix of moonshine, mariachis and all that astonishment, I had the time – let’s not say the presence of mind – to reflect that here on the western seaboard of Mexico we would be among the last people on the planet, at least among those of us whose view of their place in the march of history is framed by the Gregorian calendar, to experience the vertiginous thrill of being released from the prison of the 20th century to fall into the seductive embrace of a century apparently promising to love us more than the last one ever did. Apparently because the numerals 2 and 0 that would prefix the designation of the years that remained of our lifetimes appeared to reassure us that the promises the 20th century broke in delivering the ugly history we actually got in the years between 1900 and 1999 would, through a numerological magic that has us reading meanings in the rune-like shapes of digits, now at least be honoured, if not redeemed. The numeral 2 says unity, fidelity and completion, even love. The sound of it echoes the additional togetherness of its homophone too, as well as, when you’ve heard it sung once in sentimental Spanish, the intimacy and affection of the informal tu. The numeral 1 says, you’re on your own, buddy. To me at least. Probably to you. 

The Chinese don’t leave the interpretation of the numerals of the years to the vagaries of the Western individual’s foolish pretension that they know what goes on in their own heads. 2000 was The Year of the Dragon. I wish I had known. 

We were one of five South African families resident in Mexico in 1997, the fifth and most recent to arrive and settle, albeit temporarily in our case, since the country opened its borders to South African visitors after the 1994 general election that ended apartheid, brought Nelson Mandela to power and, for the very first time in the 342 years since Jan van Riebeeck opened the Cape of Good Hope office of the Dutch East India Company in 1652, bothered to ask the people who actually inhabited the vast tract of land between the Limpopo River and Cape Agulhas how - and indeed, if - they would like to be governed. 

Only the fifth? This juicy little nugget was served up to us along with a splendid five course dinner at the muy elegante official residence of the very simpático South African Ambassador to Mexico, His Excellency “Call me Swannie” Swanepoel and his even more excellent wife, a few blocks from our own muy elegante home in the leafy expat haven of Lomas de Chapultepec, D.F. We assumed it was thrown in our honour. But as the evening wore on and the five courses turned into seven, and the world’s finest pinotage transitioned smoothly into the world’s most expensive KWV brandewyn, and the conversation transitioned along with them from painfully polite into frankly familiar, which is the default conversational mode of all South Africans who meet other South Africans anywhere in the world except in South Africa, and how by this time having marvelled collectively for the eighth or ninth time about how incredible it was that they were the first and we were the fifth, and only the fifth, South African family to settle in Mexico and he, of course, had the official statistics to verify it, boet, we discerned through the late evening haze that we were there for the company, never mind the honour.

There was a memorable moment in the middle. The lamb cutlets were served on beds of spinach under blankets of gravy surrounded by slivers of carrots and green beans with a ring of boiled baby potato halves carefully positioned around the circumferences of the plates of white china. For decoration, really, said the excellent Mrs Swanepoel. When Karine responded with, oh, I absolutely adore baby spuds, I noticed him watching my wife’s fork hovering over them with a mixture of dread and pained resignation.  What were the chances that she would stab and lift with the very first plunge of the sharp tines of her silver fork the specific potato precisely placed there to hide the little rectangular flag baked into the porcelain - the Oranje, Blanje, Blou of the apartheid state, so recently deceased its body would have been only slightly cooler than the gravy? Probably about one in eight for most people. Karine got all the luck the Irish never had.  

They were very nice about it. They were expecting the new crockery any year now. 

Not that Mexico struck me immediately as an egalitarian paradise unblemished by racial intolerance or in-your-face socioeconomic discrimination. I thought jóven was Spanish for waiter for the few embarrassing weeks it took before a colleague of mine, the magnificent and magnificently named Gloria López Villaseñor, pointed out to me that I was calling men who could have been twice my age “boy”, which is exactly what most white South Africans, including my father, called Zulu men of all ages. I protested, in my defence, that I was calling them only what I heard everyone else calling them. But given my provenance and my skin colour, she would have had reason to fear the worst. She confessed later that she had been observing me observing them - them being my equipo of copywriters and art directors in the creative department of JWT Mexico. She said she could tell. I believed her. 

Racism in South Africa was starkly Black and White. With capital letters for the avoidance of doubt. If you weren’t Black or White you had to be Indian or Coloured. They expanded Indian to Asian later to include the Cape Malays who they had mistaken for Coloured. There were no other options until they made an exception for Chinese people with money. They called them Honorary Whites when they objected to being classified as Yellow. Those were to days when money could buy you whiteness even if it couldn’t buy you love.

Racism in Mexico, as Gloria would explain, was based on a spectrum of skin colours graduating so delicately between the extremes of Castilian white and Indio black it would have had the architects of apartheid running out of their already severely limited Afrikaans vocabulary. The complex and mysteriously enduring demographic pyramid of Mexican society is best understood not by looking through the lens of history but by looking through the 1,867 colours of the Pantone catalogue. To be fair, as the English say when they want to say something blindingly obvious, mind-numbingly pointless or patently unfair, in 1812, while British troops were driving the Xhosa from their homes in the Zuurveld to turn the area between the Sundays and the Great Fish Rivers into a zone For Whites Only (as the benches in South African parks would later be painted to proclaim), the Mexican constitution was revised to recognise the indigenous communities known as the Repúblicas de Indios as participants in the Mexican body politic.

Gloria was woke when the rest of the liberal world was still rubbing its eyes and wondering whether it was worth getting out of bed. Left-leaning Latins don’t talk about politics. They breathe it and bleed it. If I could live my life over again I would beg her to marry me at the age of sixteen so we could have twelve children and a hundred and forty-four grandchildren who would all vote against the PRI for generations to come. 

Don’t get me wrong about Afrikaans, by the way. I love Afrikaans. The paucity of its vocabulary is its strength. What’s lacking in the sense of it is more than adequately compensated for in the singularly stentorious sound of it. It can express more with a single word than English can express with a hundred. Try translating voetsak in less. There isn’t a dog in the world that doesn’t understand it instantly. The Afrikaners don’t need as many words as we do to make ourselves misunderstood.

But South Africa, Mexico and Gloria have books of their own. This one is about England. Fast-forward, then, from Huatulco to Heathrow, January 2000, to Southwest London, to a life of incomparable privilege in one of the most precious patches of earth on the planet, to private schools and black-tie parties, to croquet and cricket, to village greens and picnic hampers, to Wimbledon, Twickenham and The Oval, to Range Rovers and roundabouts, to roses and daffodils, to wellies and brollies, to weather in general and rain in particular, to the BBC, the West End and The Crooked Billet, in short, to Tory heaven. If we didn’t open our mouths we could pass for any of them. And for fifteen years we did, we could and we would. For fifteen years I felt I belonged. 

Yes, this one is about England, specifically the England I found myself suddenly shocked to be living in when the debate about the UK’s place in the EU escalated, more rapidly than anyone of us could have imagined, from an amusing supposition to be discussed in tones of painfully patient civility with the idiotic proponents of leaving the EU into a rancorous rage against anyone who dared so much as to hint at the merest whisper of a suggestion that they might be motivated by anything other than a hearty, healthy, beamingly beneficent belief in what was best for Britain. My intention in writing the blog that began as Buckle Up (the first tentative drafts of which I published on Medium in early 2017) was not to rehearse the arguments for or against Brexit. Nor was it written with any particular narrative conclusion in mind, either personal or political. I had no idea where it would go or how it would end. It was, rather, an attempt to answer in public four questions the Brexit debate had unexpectedly obliged me to ask myself in private, viz:

Was I really and truly as English as I had always assumed myself to be? Secondly, if this was England and these were English people speaking English about the English of England, how did I ever come to think of myself as English in the first place? Thirdly, if in the absence of feeling culturally anything other than English, or having, as a writer, anything other than an English literary inheritance, or of being able to think, speak, read or write in any language other than English and if, furthermore, I continued to think in English, to speak English, to read English, to write in English and to live in England without feeling even the least bit English, what in the world was I doing here and where on earth would I have to go to feel as though I belonged there? And if, in the end, I had to accept the stupidly self-evident answer that I was a white English-speaking South African who ended up here less by design than by accident, why was I ever stupid enough to think I was coming home?  

Mihi quaestio factus sum, as Augustine said. I had become a question to myself.