Streaky Bacon
My English Traits, Chapter 20 - Confessions of a Sarf Efrikin Abroad
“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages? What's grownups going to think?”
Piggy, in Lord of the Flies - William Golding, 1954
Before they have meanings, words have flavours in the mouths of children. Disagreeable tasted like boiled cabbage.
“Disagreeable” was the word my mother used to divert conversations away from topics that had the potential to veer off the straight and narrow rails of the decorous, the decent, the polite and the proper.
“Unsavoury” was the word she used to stop them dead in their tracks.
She couldn’t have married a soldier disembarked only yesterday from the privations of the North African desert and the bloody trenches of Italy without having learned something about the impolite and the improper. Nor could she have raised six children to maturity on remote cattle, sheep and pig farms among the Xhosa and the Zulu people in the late forties, fifties and sixties without being exposed to the indecorous, the indelicate and the downright indecent.
Or perhaps it was because of them — precisely because of everything she had seen and heard in the lurid light and the violent vociferations of those indecorous, indelicate improprieties — that she was able to draw such a firm and unwavering line between the unacceptable and the acceptable, the disagreeable and the agreeable.
By intimation, by repetition, by intuition — by the mysterious alchemy of smiles and frowns that children hear in the earliest of their mother’s murmurings, the synonyms she used to fence the border between the mentionable and the unmentionable were perfectly clear to our ears, our tastes and our tongues. In the middle of the imaginary no-man’s land that separated one from the other, poised to freeze us in stone or reduce us to ashes with a casual glance of her glassy gaze, stood the beady-eyed monitor of our Medusa-induced nightmares known as The Pale, into the peripheries of whose indifferent stare only Bruce would dare to venture.
Beyond The Pale was every word we couldn’t say, every gesture we couldn’t make, every body-part or bodily function we couldn’t name or hint at naming; every act that couldn’t be acted, every doubt that couldn’t be doubted out loud; every idea that wasn’t allowed imagining, every thought that couldn’t be thought, every fantasy that wasn’t fantastical, every wonder that couldn’t be wondered at, every intimacy that lacked an inoffensive medical or scientific translation, every reference to flesh and blood that wasn’t biblical, fictional, metaphorical or hypothetical.
We knew these things without knowing them. We had learned them by never having heard them. It was an etiquette of evasions, an index of omissions, a dictionary of dissimulations, an encyclopaedia of absences. They included every subject, object, topic, phrase and expression that wouldn’t be found in the Complete Works of A.A. Milne, that couldn’t be replaced by a Victorian euphemism, and anything and everything an Afrikaner would say without thinking twice.
By happenstance or habituation, most families will develop a unique set of strictures and shibboleths regarding what can and can’t be said at the dinner table or around the fire. Some may be laid down by the laws, precedents and traditions of their cultures or creeds. Some will emerge from the combinations of the quirks and characters of the individual parents or children evolving quite naturally into an accommodation of more or less tolerable family discourse and behaviour, polite or not. Some will simply inherit them along with the silver, the teak dresser and the mahogany dining table with its matching chairs of barley-twist legs, as we did.
My mother was neither a prude nor a racist— she was English. And along with her English sensibilities, her culture and her class came a distaste for the crass, the rude, the tawdry and the vulgar.
Afrikaans was crass. If she understood it at all, she was never heard to utter a single word of it. She couldn’t bear the guttural, throaty, phlegmy sound of it. She couldn’t stand what it stood for. She abhorred apartheid as much for its inhumanity as for its poor taste. Maybe not quite as much.
The Afrikaners she had unofficial or official dealings with in the shops and streets of Mooi River and Estcourt, or in the peeling polystyrene offices of the local municipalities or the Natal Provincial Administration in Pietermaritzburg or Durban, were as rude as their wardrobes were tawdry, and as ill-mannered as she thought them ill-informed. As a race, as a culture, as a presence in the otherwise perfectly green and pleasant lands of her old Natal, they were as insidious as the appearance of khakibos among the dahlias, foxgloves and delphiniums of her English garden, and just as vulgar.
Since 1948, the Afrikaners had planted themselves firmly in the seats of government. In the sovereign province of my mother’s fancy, they were weeds to be eradicated before they could take root.
My father respected her disrespect for them, but never shared it. He had grown up with salt-of-the-earth Afrikaners in Dordrecht and Queenstown, ridden wild horses with them through the white veld trails of Barkly East, Clanville and Rossouw, hunkered down with them in Benghazi, Fort Capuzzo and the Halfaya Pass, and played golf with them in Lady Grey. He loved their filthy jokes and their filthier expressions, their instinct for reducing life’s big issues to questions of wire, fire, wood or blood; for shrinking the existential to the edible, the inexplicable to the braai-able, and the rest could gaan kak in die mielies.
So he kept his counsel when she sniffed at them. But later, or if had she excused herself to powder her nose, he would share expurgated translations of verboten Afrikaans expressions with those of us who were old enough to appreciate them —only the boys, of course — restraining his giggles with watering eyes and a flushed, red face.
Afters a few Lion Ales down at The Highwayman he’d heard some chap from Winterton saying to a cheeky young fellow from up the Kamberg:
"Ek wens jou vingers verander in vishoeke, en jou balle begin te jeuk!"
No, you really wouldn’t want an itchy scrotum if your fingers turned somehow to fish-hooks. Not when you thought about it.
She would return to to lounge to take her place alongside him on the Sanderson sofa. He would stand instantly to attention, the officer and gentleman perfectly upright again, arranging the cushions for her comfort, topping up her cane with a dash of Coke, lighting the Ransom cigarette in her elegant, black quellazaire with his brown farmer’s hands cupped around the flame of the smoothly struck Lion match to protect her lips from the sparks and her eyes from the glare. She would lower her eyelids and lift her chin, and dignity would be restored.
Dignity, the cleansing vinegar of the soul.
But she knew all along. And he knew that she knew. And he loved her, worshipped her, and adored her for it. Because when she was called upon to deal with the inevitable calamities, crises and catastrophes of babyhood, childhood or adolescence, she confronted them with grim English defiance, treated them with a mixture of tight-lipped disdain and Kiplingesque grit, and never spoke about them, mentioned them or referred to them ever again. They simply vanished into the bookless library of our ignorance, adding by subtraction to the great repository of everything we didn’t and couldn’t know because we weren’t supposed to know. They were brushed, as if by magic, under the wall-to-wall carpet of our Neverland innocence.
It was in manners thus that the store of our knowledge of the world’s vulgarities expanded in exponential increments of puzzled prurience.
And always — but always — there behind the kitchen and down the slope into the sunless orchard, like the mephitic fog that drifted up from the septic tanks and the trash pits beneath the dark undergrowth of autumn’s rotting plums, from the deepest, foulest shadows of it, at the nether end of her spectrum of disrelish, symbolically and not so symbolically, came the unsayable stench of the unsavoury.
The word suggested the inedible and the indigestible, its flavour more difficult to decipher than the candid cabbage stink of disagreeable. The sticky syllables of unsavoury reached the tongue in a liquorice all-sort of contradictory synesthetic signals. It tasted the more bitter for promising to taste so salivatingly juicy.
It didn’t taste sweet; it couldn’t. It would have to taste savoury to be the opposite of unsavoury. Sweets weren’t savoury, they were sweet. Violets were sweet. Kittens, baby lambs and piglets were sweet. Andy was sweet.
But there are limits to logic. When reason fails, taste prevails. And the tastiest of all the most savoury things our tastes had ever tasted was, inevitably, bacon.
Bacon wasn’t unsavoury. Bacon was the most savoury thing in the world. Bacon was what saved us. Bacon was what my father brought home.
He had built or rebuilt two dozen pigsties under the great London plane trees, the English oaks and the dark and scaly deodars planted soon after the Boer War on the southwestern slopes of Drakesleigh farm. There he bred Large Whites, the progenitor specie of the popular American Yorkshire, a breed that is especially suitable for the profitable production of pork and bacon, not by virtue of their lovably erect ears or their sweet if slightly dished faces, but for a characteristically long, lean body-profile that tends not to fatten.
The lifespan of a pig is between eighteen and twenty years. Those destined to be fried with eggs, or to add that extra special yumminess to a Fettuccine Alfredo, are slaughtered before they’re one year old.
The journey that my father took every six weeks to ferry his oven-ready Large Whites from Rosetta to the Eskort Bacon Factory happened to be the same car journey that took Helen and me four times a year from our holidays at the farm to boarding school in Estcourt in the mid-1960s, first to Estcourt Junior School and then to Estcourt High School. It wasn’t very long before it stopped feeling coincidental.
Like the young baconers crammed into the wire-mesh cage on the back of his rusty white Toyota bakkie, and like the young English, Welsh and Scottish recruits who had signed up for the jolly adventure of shooting the dastardly Boers only sixty-something years before, Helen and I had no idea what would greet us on the other side of the Bushman’s River, aka, die Boesmansrivier.
Thereby hangs a tale — four of them, actually. The first is primeval. The second and the fourth are just evil. The third, quite logically, is about Estcourt.
They will be as difficult to write as they may be to read. There are sensitivities still too sensitive to touch. There are memories I don’t want to spoil. There are issues of legacy, of reputation, of family history, of names and associations and of social connections, all or any of which could set Twitter a-twittering in the next few minutes, or set Facebook on fire tomorrow, to consume me and mine in conflagrations of anger, shame or disgust.
There are monsters that prudence would leave to their slumbers. There are accusations that could still have legal implications. I’m no stranger to those. The law still doesn’t know where the bodies are buried.
There are things that need to be said that are much broader than the personal. I’ve waited half a century and no one has said them. The consequence of the unspoken is the unspeakable.
If we don’t know what we’ve done, we won’t know who we are. If we don’t know who we are, we won’t know what to do next.
So fuck prudence. And let’s see what’s grownups going to think.
I’ll try to keep it light. That way the dark shows up better.
Wonderful way to meet your parents again, and this time through the resonances and dissonances around agreeable, disagreeable, and (parental warning)... unsavoury.
My mother was fond of polite circumlocutions. An almost unbearably rude and overbearing woman who was also (inexplicably) a frequent visitor, would be described by mother as ‘unfortunate’. ‘She has an unfortunate manner’.
And if a baby (hers, or a visiting baby) had a full nappy, the odour clearly detectable across the room, my mother would say (to whoever was holding the child)... ‘Is he unpleasant?... Shall I change him?’ We only ever heard this word... unpleasant... to describe a nappy full of shit. Which is, of course, to an older brother or sister, the most revolting thing imaginable.
One day, mother took my brother and me with her to the railway station to see some visiting aunties off on the train (a thing you don’t see often these days). I remember we had to get ‘platform tickets’. We walked them onto the train and then stood outside their carriage window as they leaned out, and whistles blew, and we all waved to each other as the train pulled away... and my mother called to them...”Have a pleasant journey!”
We only had one meaning and one image for that word. We creased up with barely stifled laughter as we imagined our aunties’ train carriage full of shit.
Laughing out loud! Thanks Gordon.