One thing could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
I can safely say this about myself: I loved Englishness because the Afrikaners could not endure it.
I was so unduly proud of my Englishness because it appeared to me, looking down through my mother’s eyes from the elevated portals of Drakesleigh’s stately veranda upon the unwashed masses of them, we were everything the Afrikaners so duly weren’t.
Musil was right. We arrive at our tastes, our beliefs and our political opinions not through a dispassionate process of considering the merits of all of the alternatives, but in passionate opposition to the tastes, the beliefs and the political opinions of the people we despise the most.
In my case it was just as zealous, irrational and instinctual. It was also weirdly geographical. This was no pathetic fallacy — the cultural divide between Afrikaner and English was written in the roadmap of Natal, illustrated by its changing landscapes, chronicled by the R103, annotated by the names of the towns it passed through, and clearly signposted along the way in diminishing increments of hope.
That was before the N3 was built to replace it, paving the 350 miles between Durban to Joburg with a splendid double-lane highway that took only four decades to finish.
It was also before Natal became KwaZulu-Natal, before the Vaal Triangle became Gauteng, before they planted the trees that would draw a kindly green veil over the façade of South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, but not long before it began to dawn on me that my Edwardian childhood and my Victorian education hadn’t prepared me for things like life and girls, if not in that order.
Everyone has to go to school somewhere. Let me qualify that. If you were a white South African born in the 1950s you had to go to school somewhere.
But Estcourt.
The R103 wound its way north-westwards and upwards from Durban’s fading Art Deco splendour to the Victorian magnificence of colonial Pietermaritzburg. If, along the way, you studiously ignored the vast rural slum romantically known as The Valley of a Thousand Hills, you could picture yourself driving home to your pretty-as-a-picture semidetached house in South West London after a fun day with donkeys at the Brighton seaside.
The illusion of travelling through the shires of ancient Wessex prevails uninterrupted as you climb the cool and misty green slopes of Hilton into the very English Natal Midlands’ villages of Howick, Lidgetton West, Balgowan, Nottingham Road and the hamlet of Rosetta. The notable landmarks on this quintessentially pastoral stretch of the R103 include the Highgate Wine Estate, Granny Mouse’s Country House, Lavender Trout Farm, Rawdon’s Hotel, Caversham Mill, and Michaelhouse, Africa’s Eton-of-the-South.
The “Mooi” of Mooi River, the town after Rosetta, strikes the first discordant note in this otherwise perfectly English idyll. Mooi means beautiful in Afrikaans, but as a child you’ve heard it pronounced so often in the plummy accents of the local horse breeders and Land Rover drivers you assumed it must Old Norse, or Norman at worst.
Nor did you know that the graceful green willows on the banks of its limpid waters were weeping not for the accident that ended Mr Toad’s wild spree in his Rolls Royce Limousine, but for the Scots Fusiliers who died on its muddy banks for the greater glory of Empire in 1899.
Which last odd and arbitrary nugget unearthed from history’s deep mine of misinformation may one day happen to shed some light on the provenance of Balgowan. The thought occurs to you thirty miles later. You look it up. Yes, it’s a suburb of Dundee. Not the Dundee that’s on the road to Vryheid where we played rugby in the frost. The one on the east coast of Scotland, just a few miles north of Edinburgh.
With Mooirivier thankfully disappearing in your rear-view mirror, and the majestic Drakensberg looming large on the western horizon, the R103 curves gracefully northwards, past the gates of Treverton where the ghosts of the former selves of you and your brothers are still stuffing marbles into the inner folds of your orange-and-white striped ties to hurl them slingshot-like into the highest branches of the sycamore tree in front of the school hall in the hope they’ll never come down again.
You pass the turn-off that leads to Hidcote and New Dell, back to the bridge where this whole thing began.
Hidcote?
It was named after Hidcote Manor Garden, located in the village of Hidcote Bartrim, near Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. In the Cotswolds, of course. One of the most beautiful gardens in all of England, they say, created by one Lawrence Johnston, an American who settled in Britain at the turn of the 19th century, became a British citizen, and rushed off immediately to South Africa to fight with the British army against the Boers.
Only a sudden and severe case of homesickness could explain how he superimposed Chipping Campden on this:
It’s so reminiscent of my pretty little estate in Gloucestershire. We’ll call it Hidcote, shall we?
Oh.
History came to South Africa and walked all over it with muddy boots. It left nothing behind apart from the crusts and clods of its dry footprints that are the names and words it gave to the places and things that reminded it of where it had come from. The rains came and washed the rest of it away.
When history got bored, it went back home to where everyone remembered it.
South Africa is the opposite of England. We want to forget everything of what little we remember. The English want to remember everything apart from the things the rest of the world can’t forget.
You can’t walk down a street in London with an English person without them wanting to tell you in laboriously authentic and historically verifiable detail how it got its name.
“Ah, Mincing Lane,” they will say with a kindly smile and a patronising nod aimed less at you than at the ignorance of the world in general. “Mincing is in fact derived from an Old English term for a female monk; Mincheon or Minchun. In John Stow’s Survey of London, in 1598 you know, he recalls the name as Mincheon Lane, because the residents here were Minchuns of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, that church around the corner, just a hop and a skip from here. Nothing to do with minced meat nor, let’s say, a rather feminine way of walking. Ha, ha.”
In South Africa we remembered nothing that didn’t happen last Christmas or yesterday. We just grew up there, in all innocence.
Where innocence is just ignorance with golden locks and a halo made of cardboard and tinfoil held up by a stick taped down the back of your spine.
After a bumpy journey on the dirt road from New Dell farm, it’s here at the Hidcote turnoff that we joined the R103 that would take Helen and me to check in for the first time at the boarding establishment of Estcourt Junior School in the January of 1964. They called the hostels “boarding establishments”. Actually.
Turning right at the T-junction would have taken us back to Mooi River and the familiar stretches of road that led eventually through Pietermaritzburg to the inexpressible delights of Durban’s South Beach, bumper-cars and ice-cream. When we turned left, it was towards the unimaginable.
So long before iPads, Netflix and seatbelts, it was the landscape spooling through the panoramic rectangles of the Peugeot 403’s rear-seat windows that told us the comforting story of where we had come from, and that hinted at the not so reassuring story of where we were going.
If the pictures had a musical soundtrack laid over the hiss of the tyres on the tarmac and the French purr of the Peugeot’s engine it would be here, at the crest of Griffin’s Hill, that the jolly syncopation of the music hall piano would have skipped a beat and stumbled down the scales to join softly shrieking strings and a heart-thumping timpani in a terrifying progression from D to E to F# to A and to B flat.
Griffin’s Hill has no history apart from anecdotes told in dark whispers of the mothers, fathers and children decapitated, crushed to death or crippled for life in the car crashes that happened as regularly as clockwork when the temptingly long, straight, Formula One-like downhill race from the dizzying height of its peak twisted unexpectedly at the end of its plunging descent at Willow Grange, where the eponymous hotel has since witnessed more carnage than was recorded at the Battle of Willow Grange in 1899.
Wikipedia helpfully suggests that Griffin’s Hill was probably named after a local farmer.
But it’s not its history or the lack of it that’s worrying you now.
It’s how, in the rectangular screen of the Peugeot’s window, the green and pleasant English pastures of the Midlands have changed to the flat, hot thornveld of Boer country.
From green to brown. From roses to thorns. From English to Afrikaans.
Past Lowlands, round the koppie, and Estcourt hoves into view. There’s a reason the author of 1984 wrote this:
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
- George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
To be continued…
Oh, this is all too vivid. We would travel from Mooi River (never Mooirivier) to Estcourt, to school. The change in vegetation always fascinated me. The day in 1969 I entered Heidelberg Military Army Base my Englishness was shaken to its roots when it dawned on me that there were more of them than us. Natal never let you believe that this was the case.
Thanks, Peter, so true. Especially when you got to Voortrekkerhoogte.