Merky Mudrats

My English Traits - Chapter 3

"Politics?"

Mobbs’s word hung in the air for a stunned beat and a half. 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 the way they did, with that reflex mixture of shock and ribald amusement prompted always and 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 run the reputational risk of asking someone to explain, 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 Lang 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, our Standard Eight history teacher at Estcourt High School, 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 an accident of nature and not by the grace of God that I had a white skin, and 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 probably get worse before it got better, 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 before any kind of moderately equitable accommodation between them would ever be arranged, 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; 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 mostly 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 recently 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 added, us English-speaking sons and daughters of Empire knew with whom our allegiances were henceforth 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 of every colour, ceased by law to be British subjects, and Queen Elizabeth II ceased to be our head of state.

As if it wasn’t already clear enough to informed observers, the nature of the country’s progress after independence from Britain would be symbolised eloquently by the ox wagons that replaced the Crown on 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. I was a child, teenager and adult of apartheid.
 
The choice offered by the referendum of the 5th of October 1960, to a now spotlessly white electorate, was either 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.

Yes, history really does repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. 
 
You can probably see where this is heading.