Heaven Help Us

My English Traits - Chapter 10

The Lament for Icarus, 1898 - Herbert James Draper

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“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

— Virginia Woolf

I have come to accept that there’s nothing certain about place, and nothing linear about time.

I was born on a farm in the Eastern Cape in 1953, but I appear to have spent my first seven years growing up on a country estate in Edwardian England.

Everything on the dinner table except the salt and the pepper came fresh from the land. My father made the butter in a glass churn with wooden paddles. My mother made preserves from our apples, plums, and blackberries. Dessert was boiled rhubarb with cream still warm from the dairy.

My father was astonished by electricity.

I understood from our telephone number, the single digit “3”, that the miraculous device that allowed us to talk to Aunty Mon in Zululand to thank her for our Christmas presents had been invented the day before yesterday, and that Dad must have been near the front of the queue when they handed them out.

I assumed “1” had been given to the Queen.

I envied the people who got “2”. They probably had horses.

The view through the semi-transparent envelope of my early consciousness was of the Hundred Acre Wood with Owl’s House in the foreground. Come me with and you may remember too.

The path that led to Piglet’s House lay to the left of Owl’s tree. The path on the right led to Pooh Bear’s House and ended at Toad Hall where, through the pantry window, you might catch a glimpse of Jeeves pouring himself a stiffening sherry. If you took the path beyond Tigger’s House at the northern verge of the wood you would find Alice sitting fast asleep in the shade of an oak. A book without pictures or conversation would be lying open on her lap.

You tiptoe around her, taking care to avoid the rabbit holes. A wooden stile in a hedgerow of hawthorn and asphodel looks down on a maze of green meadows. An avenue of poplars leads you to a broad stream where you stop to listen unobserved as three men on the opposite bank argue about the ingredients of Irish stew, their little boat moored to a willow against the gentle current. At the water’s edge below your feet, Rat is teaching Mole the ways of the river.

You follow the course of the stream through glades of chestnuts. Its shimmering surface turns green, grey, and greasy under the shade of giant fig and fever trees. Sudden squeals of alarm arrest your attention. In the shallow waters a baby elephant is struggling to extricate its trunk from the vice of a crocodile’s jaws. The distant report of a shotgun echoes off the granite walls of the ravine. A rabbit in a blue jacket dashes into the undergrowth.

The vista widens. The sky darkens. Time shifts and loosens. Swords clash in the riparian shadows where white knights save distressed damsels from ghouls and dragons. The Mary Celeste drifts on the tide of a swollen estuary, a ghostly silhouette against the gas-lit fog of a sleeping city where a mischievous shadow dances among the chimney pots. A woman’s muffled cry is followed by the sound of hasty footsteps on a cobbled street. The chimes of Big Ben are swallowed in the yaw of the night.

The remarkable thing about these creatures and creations isn’t that a toad should drive a car or that a shadow should detach itself from its owner. The remarkable thing isn’t how familiar they are to so many of us — how conclusively, how comprehensively and how steadfastly they have colonised the dreams and imaginations of the descendants of that generation of boys and girls who first heard those stories in the few years between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the Great War in 1914.

What is extraordinary is that all of the authors and illustrators of these fictional worlds were close contemporaries, producing their defining work in the last decade of the 19th century.

What is truly astonishing is that nine of them played for the same cricket team.

Active from 1890 to 1913, the Allahakbarries were an amateur cricket team founded by J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. It included, not necessarily in batting order, the creators of Mowgli, Jeeves, Winnie-the-Pooh, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and Father Brown, the authors of The Time Machine and Three Men in a Boat, the men who inspired Detective Poirot, Raffles and Eeyore; a Punch cartoonist, the first cousin of Daphne du Maurier, the son of Alfred Tennyson, and the illustrator of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books that so captured the imagination of children throughout Britain and the Empire in the 1880s and 1890s.

They were Barrie himself, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, G. K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, A. A. Milne, E. W. Hornung, Henry Justice Ford, A. E. W. Mason, Walter Raleigh, E. V. Lucas, Maurice Hewlett, Owen Seaman, Bernard Partridge, Augustine Birrell, Paul Du Chaillu, Henry Herbert La Thangue, George Cecil Ives, and George Llewelyn Davies, Barrie’s inspiration for George Darling.

Only Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Lewis Carroll never made the first XI, but I can see the three of them reclining on the grass around a picnic hamper in a patch of shade on the square-leg boundary.

An uncomfortable footnote to the story of the Allahakbarries is that Barrie named his team in the mistaken belief that Allah Akbar meant, “Heaven help us”.

If their combined confections of the Allahakbarries weren’t enough to infantilize me and my generation for the 20th century and beyond, we fed greedily on Robert Louis Stevenson, and devoured Rider Haggard. We thought Treasure Island, The Jungle Book and King Solomon’s Mines were hot off the press. I couldn’t wait for the next instalment of She.

I was, in short, one of the “very little boys” described in 1896 by H.G. Wells in his review of Rider Haggard’s The Heart of the World:

“It’s tiresome reading for a reviewer, but there’s not the shadow of a doubt that very little boys like to identify themselves with a successful ‘bounder’ of the type of the Rider Haggard hero. Whether it is good for them is another matter. It must take up a lot of their time reading the replicas of romance over and over again, and it must fill their heads with very silly ideas about the invulnerability and the other privileges of the Englishman abroad.”

Romance had a different meaning then. Today it refers to the period of mutual delusion between two parties before they get to know each other. In the 19th century it referred to the exotic adventures of white men abroad. I’m disappointed that neither Wikipedia nor Goodreads appear to know the difference.

I read those replicas of romance over and over again. My head was filled with very silly ideas about my Englishness and the privileges I thought it bestowed on me. So when Bruce and I clambered into the backseat of the Peugeot 403 that would take me to Merchiston for my first year of boarding school in January 1961, I imagined that he was the adventurous bounder James Strickland, and I was his faithful companion Don Ignatio, and we were sailing off to find the lost city of El Dorado.

Fifty miles and fifty years later I discovered that time had skipped forward to 1899. I was in the wrong book, and I’d got on the wrong boat. Instead of a graceful schooner navigating the tropics of the south Atlantic, it was a little tin tub of a sea-going steamer, and Bruce was the Swedish captain, and I was Marlow, and we were heading down the uncoiled snake of the Congo River in search of Mr Kurtz.

Only three years separated the publication of Rider Haggard’s The Heart of the World from the first issue of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But they are as different in spirit as the 19th century is from the 20th, and as different, I see now, as the England I thought I grew up in and the England I live in.

Part of my present dismay I can blame on obdurate naiveté. Long after the age of seven I still clung to the idea of the world that Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling had conjured up for me: a world populated throughout by brave hearts and noble souls; a globe of blue skies, green jungles, white rapids, and golden deserts; of extraordinary mysteries, discoveries, and adventures; of fair play, civilised conduct, honourable intentions, and happy endings. It was unquestionably good because it was unquestionably English.

And long after I realised it wasn’t 1893 and New Dell wasn’t in Devon, I still clung to the romance of it.

As I grew older it became clearer with each passing day that South Africa was everything my imagined world was not. White men with noble souls and honourable intentions seemed few and far between. I began to think that some kind of horrible shadow loomed over Pietermaritzburg and Estcourt that couldn’t be dispelled even by the brightest South African sunshine. And the feeling began to grow in me that I’d been born on the wrong continent at the wrong time.

Consciously or not, but certainly before my teenage years, I came to transfer my hopes and dreams for a kinder, fairer world to the England of those romances — not to the country located in the geographical reality of the northern hemisphere, because that was remote and unimaginable — but to my inherited idea of England, to my mother’s England, to Victoria’s England, to that fictional realm where the men were as smart and courageous as John Darling, and the women were as brave and beautiful as Wendy, and where babies never fell out of their perambulators and got lost.

Then later, after I had read more widely, and after Miss Cheeseman had laid out the range of ideological options available to national governments between the extremes of right and left, the idea became fixed in my mind that if any country in the world was likely to be administered by fair and sensible adults with the best interests of the polity at heart, it was my England of apple blossoms, cricket, rugby and cream scones: the “…royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war.”

Despite a reasonably good university education, a life of salutary incident, and a career of global travel, I failed to realise until 2016 that I was clinging to the silliest idea of all.

The stories of my childhood were not told and retold to inspire me to great deeds of kindness and courage. They were fed to me and my generation, inadvertently or not, to perpetuate our childish dreams, to fix us forever in a state of childish wonder, to have us believing long into our adult years that there are grown-ups who know better.

Only the generation infantilised by the fables of the Allahakbarries could have believed in the sunlit uplands. Only the generation infantilised by Harry Potter will continue to imagine a happy ending.