The Forbidden Thought, Part 1
My English Traits, Chapter 34. Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dollar
In response to the many very kind readers who have been writing to enquire if I’m “okay” after I posted my last rant or ramble (Fitzgerald’s Cave, Chapter 33), all I can say is, thank you. And that this probably isn’t a good time to be watching Dr Strangelove or to be digging too deeply into Orwell.
The first will have you worrying whether or not you can trust the people in charge of world affairs not to destroy it before next Thursday. The second will confirm that you can’t.
On the other hand, if you’re not reading Orwell right now you almost certainly aren’t paying attention.
I should also apologise for mentioning Russia. Not for having an opinion about Russia nor, apparently, for not having an opinion about Russia. But just for actually mentioning it.
Did I say a bad word?
If so, this might not be the best possible time to tell you that by the end of 1968, twenty-three of the twenty-four white girls and boys in the Standard 8, “A” (English) class of Estcourt High School had converted to Communism. The only dissenter was Henry Gibson whose father said he would have his balls blended for breakfast if he talked that kind of brotherly-love-shit at home.
I’ve used his real name to honour his strength of character. But he was a day-poop anyway, the affectionate term us boarders gave to the lily-livered day scholars too cosseted to endure the Spartan rigours and mediaeval abuses — corporeal, calumnious and culinary — that were designed to make the boys and girls of the hostels of Bergview, Sunnyside and Eastside into men.
I forgave him accordingly.
I have to be specific about the demographics because there was a Standard Eight “B” (English) class, maybe a Standard Eight “C” (English) class, a Standard Eight “O” for Ordinary (English) class, and a Standerd Agt (Afrikaans) Klas that included both die slim ouens and die dom foks, the pupils of all of which, together with the pupils slim and dom of all the other classes both English and Afrikaans were now, from our newly enlightened perspective, clearly unwitting stooges, puppets and yellow running dogs of the corporate fascists of capitalism.
We weren’t groomed to be Communists by silver-tongued Russian agents posing as Anglican preachers down at St Matthew's like the one who would get us to sing along with Bridge Over Troubled Water instead of Rock of Ages in 1970. It wasn’t the pernicious anti-apartheid propaganda of the BBC World Service. Nor were we seduced to extremism by the fiery rhetoric of Helen Suzman, the only moderately liberal voice in South Africa’s all-white Parliament. It wasn’t The Times They Are a-Changin', Satisfaction or All You Need Is Love. It wasn’t even the very thin edge of the socialist wedge that was Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme.
It was our history teacher, the brisk, bubbly and brilliant Fiona Cheeseman, who had the crazy idea that it was her duty to tell us the truth about, uh, history.
One brutally cold and shivering Double-History Lesson in the June of that year, the news having finally filtered through to Estcourt that the streets of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome were ablaze with indignation and actual blazes about issues and places we’d never heard of such as civil rights, Vietnam, Mexico and Prague, someone had the the temerity to ask her what the theoretical fuck was going on. Probably the feisty, fearless, magnificent and much-missed Maclagan, but possibly not in those exact words.
Some quirk of evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly explain how and why we end up looking back on the group of people randomly chosen by fate to spend our formative years sharing farts with in airless classrooms for five years as the most special group of individuals ever assembled in the spatial and temporal history of the human species. I do.
Less readily explicable would be the quirk that continued to constrain us from calling each other by our first names seven years after we had officially thrown off the yoke of British imperialist oppression by declaring ourselves a Republic in 1961.
I can think only that manners are more enduring than morals — that long after we gave up believing in the Father Christmas version of Empire we still clung to the notion that politeness, which is the well-spring and very essence of English manners, would eventually prevail, where our Republican politics had thus far so abjectly failed, to salvage a more equitable society out of the silt, dust and detritus the diamond-diggers and gold thieves of Empire no longer had a use for.
When nothing about the white privilege and power we had inherited from them could be justified on moral grounds; when we knew, as the Afrikaners kept reminding us, that we owed everything we had to the rapacity and greed of our British forebears; when no amount of sincere soul-searching could turn up a crumb of moral comfort to relieve us from the guilt of our undeserved white hegemony — we could still tell ourselves we were, at least, polite.
Don’t make a fuss. Don’t rub people up the wrong way. Don’t go against the grain. Don’t talk out of turn. Never get personal. Never be sincere. And never use the word weekend. People might mistake you for someone who has to work their money.
Of all my English traits, these seven unbreakable rules of politeness — also known as the Iron Codes of Ingsoc — are by far the most enduring. I’ve managed to let go of the embarrassment of my excent. I’ve given up trying to say Wimbledon instead of Wumbledon, and how do you do instead of howzit. I no longer care if I use my fork the wrong way up or the right way down.
But as angry as I am, and as controversial, as offensive and as downright Americanly ornery as I try to be, I can still feel their soft, warm and velvety manacles holding me gently but firmly back from plunging into that abyss of irretrievably rude rhetoric from which nice, white middle-class English people can never return.
Martin Amis, where are you?
I can only assume, then, that it was “Don’t go against the grain”, The Third Iron Code of Ingsoc, which is that fawningly, coweringly, spinelessly servile respect for precedent, no matter how ridiculous, outdated, inappropriate or absurd it might be, that obliged us to conform to the long established tradition of calling our friends and classmates by their surnames.
The precedent, it turns out, had an illustrious precedent.
"Burns" (such it seems was her name: the girls here were all called by their surnames, as boys are elsewhere), "Burns, you are standing on the side of your shoe; turn your toes out immediately." "Burns, you poke your chin most unpleasantly; draw it in." "Burns, I insist on your holding your head up; I will not have you before me in that attitude," &c. &c.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847
That and The Fifth Iron Code of Ingsoc: “Don’t ever get personal”. Because to call each other by our first names, or our Christian names as we still referred to them then, would anyway in those days have been considered unthinkably, injudiciously, inconceivably and indecently too intimate.
To call someone Wendy, for example, when her actual name was Charlton-Perkins, may quite easily have led someone, or me, in this particular case, to having a forbidden thought.
But that isn’t the forbidden thought of these brief chapters.
We became Communists the same way Orwell became a Socialist. It made sense.
And all the while everyone who uses his brains knows that socialism, as a world system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out… Indeed, socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
When Miss Cheeseman explained that someone called Marx (not the Springbok rugby player) had suggested that labour-power shouldn’t be regarded as a commodity, and hence that the working class should own the means of production because they then wouldn’t be able to sell their labour-power to themselves, we were astonished, once we had figured out the logic of the negatives and the double negatives, that it hadn’t established itself already.
Which, in very general terms, apparently accounted for the rioting in the streets of Paris, London, Rome and Berlin by people who wanted the obscenely wealthy Capitalists to share their spoils across a broader swathe of the population in the name of something called Human Rights, which included the right of one and all to affordable healthcare, habitable housing and, say, food. Most of us nodded our heads like the Nodding Dogs of Communism we had instantly become.
Except for the deeply-missed Glenn, the smartest person in Standard Eight A (English), who thought it all sounded a little bit too Christian.
“Well,” said Miss Cheeseman, “There’s that.”
And who then went on to explain that the opposite was true of Prague where it turned out that the very un-Christian workers who already owned the means of production were sick and tired of producing tractors and the spare parts for tractors and who occasionally wanted to produce things like Levi’s jeans, chewing gum and both varieties of coke, and to go back to church. But their Totalitarian Masters wouldn’t let them.
It was confusing. But such subtleties as hadn’t already been exorcised from the room by the ignorance of our questions were soon dispensed with entirely in a fractious debate between the Libertarians on one side and the Totalitarians on the other (no names, no pack-drill), and concluded under the equanimous guidance of Miss Cheeseman, in a messy but more or less satisfactory consensus, to the effect that some things were just cool (such as the godless sharing of common goods), and some things were just not cool (such as Christian or any other kind of totalitarianism, including Estcourt High School and the very un-Christian greed of capitalism).
So we would be nice, atheistic, Anti-Totalitarian Communists who loved their neighbours. Or tried to.
“Like Socialists,” Miss Cheeseman said.
To which the much-missed Maclagan, the second smartest girl in the class, responded with a disparaging: “Pussies.”
And the sorely-missed Mina, the smartest boy in the class said, “Yes, pussies!”
I remember watching Charlton-Perkins staring dreamily out of the window that looked out at the new red-brick, neo-fascist Science Block they were erecting at the time. Her right thumb and forefinger were toying with a lock of one of the delicate blonde curls that cascaded from the crown of her golden hair lit up in a ray of winter sunshine that had crept its way into Standard Eight English History. My attention may have wandered. Or it could have fixed that lesson in my mind and body forever.
Fifty-five years have mysteriously elapsed since then. If some of the verisimilitude of this account has elapsed with them, the sentiment hasn’t.
These were smart, decent, remarkable, open-minded, questioning people who went on to do smart, decent, remarkable, provocative and memorable things in the world. Our lives may have wavered, our politics didn’t.
Some things are cool and some things aren’t. You don’t need a theory to tell the difference.
Bravo, Miss Cheeseman.
Onwards to Cyril, Jeremy Taylor, the communes, the brinjal, The Forbidden Thought, Part 2, and Middlemarch.
Just a quick note of appreciation for your acknowledgement of, and early awareness of Fiona Cheesman's admirable qualities, and at such a young age.
I, too, am an admirer of hers and have been for the past 53 years.