Buckle Up

Chapter 10 — The Promise

1.

Before Miss Cheeseman bustled into our classroom in the January of 1968, the story of my education, both formal and informal, had been one of slow and steady disenchantment. No sooner had I been forcibly removed from the happy certainties of New Dell to begin my boarding school life at Merchiston in 1961 than I discovered that apparently sane and sensible adults could also be unpredictable and unrepentant sadists. In 1962 I discovered that apparently sane and sensible adults could lie with straight, unremorseful faces. In 1963 I found out that my classmates knew startling things about the world that had been kept from me by my apparently sane and sensible parents. In 1964 and 1965 I discovered that apparently sane and sensible adults could turn a blind eye to evil when the arrow of its red tail was sticking out of its trousers for everyone to see.

Among my mother’s heirlooms at New Dell there was an ancient leather-bound copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. I don’t know what I made of the text, but I remember poring over the illustrations on the floor of a dark corner of the lounge near the radiogram. So the hostel at Merchiston became The Slough of Despond, and Estcourt Junior School became The Valley of Desolation. The town of Estcourt was The City of Destruction, Estcourt High School was The Doubting Castle, and New Dell, of course, was The Enchanted Ground, The House Beautiful and The Delectable Mountains. Like Christian the Pilgrim, I found obfuscation where I sought enlightenment, and where I hoped for sympathy I was met by lukewarm indifference or ice-cold malice. And so it continued, with one baffling disillusionment following inexorably upon another, until I had given up all but the faintest faith in decency and reason.

Even the smallest mercies were denied us. Remarking on his otherwise dubious education H.G. Wells’s George Ponderevo says, “We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual neglect.”

We had the kind of religious instruction that makes you think the crucifixion can’t come too soon.

It’s inconceivable that there couldn’t have been others, but I remember only a single gesture of kindness from a teacher between the saintly Miss Starkey of 1961 and the brisk and bubbly Miss Cheeseman of 1968. His name is lost to me, but I remember a big bland face and sausage-like fingers. And I remember that it was 1967 because we were in the prefabricated ovens that served as classrooms while they were building the new science block.

He called me aside after an English lesson and said, “I think you’re ready for this.”

If I didn’t know much about history at the age of thirteen, I was already an expert on the opening gambits of pederasts. So I braced myself as he opened his bulky leather briefcase and produced a thick book with a hard cover of faded pink. “You can touch it,” he said.

I picked it up gingerly. The Phenomenon of Man only heightened my apprehension.

But his intentions were entirely honourable, and I think the reason he didn’t stay long enough at Estcourt High for me to remember his name was because they discovered he had a genuine interest in enlivening the minds of his pupils.

I was much too young and it was much too soon. It was only when the implications of the internet were explained to me at a meeting in Detroit in 1993 that I understood what Teilhard de Chardin meant by the noösphere.

But I gathered from The Phenomenon of Man, in very general terms and in language a lot less sophisticated than this, that he thought of evolution as a process leading from simplicity to complexity: from individual cells to complex animals, and from complex animals to thinking creatures like us. The ability to think had led to a new level of complexity called consciousness, and Teilhard proposed that the combined consciousness of many thinking creatures like us would lead to a kind of emergent world consciousness, a process which would be accelerated as trade and the transmission of ideas increased. Then there would come a time when the whole planet was enveloped by a layer of our collective thinking called Omega, like an ionosphere of all our combined thoughts, and the world would be an altogether happier place.

It seemed logical. And in the Dickensian context of Bergview Hostel it felt highly desirable. But as football fans say, it’s the hope that kills you.

There were very few signs that the great epoch promised by The Phenomenon of Man would be dawning over Estcourt any time soon. The sky in the east was thick with the smoke of the Masonite factory. A dark stench of burning polymers and rotting coffee waste drifted up from the nylon stocking factory in the east and the Nestle packaging plant in the south. Apart from the hardy aloes, everything in the rudimentary gardens of the school grounds withered in the dry, pernicious heat. The combined wisdom of all the books in the school library was just as dry and dusty. The black blocks of copy redacted in its collection of Time magazines made me thirst the more for the drops of knowledge, deliberately withheld by unknown censors, which might water the deserts of my limitless ignorance.

If Teilhard was right, and Estcourt was the complex entity that had emerged from this formerly uncomplicated patch of thornveld alongside the Bushman’s River, the planet was heading towards a future rather less rosy than the one he’d envisaged. But it enthralled me nevertheless me to think that somewhere out there, perhaps on the other side of the world in a location directly opposite to Estcourt, there were people who dared to think about these things, who talked about these things, wrote books about these things, and cared about these things.

For that thrilling intimation, and for the hope he gave me that one day the combined ideas of sensible men and women or all creeds and nations might make of the world “a sane and just organisation”, I wish I could find that man with the sausage fingers and curse him to his big bland face.

2.

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 spent my first seven years growing up on a country estate in England in the 1880’s.

Everything on the dinner table except the salt and the pepper came from our 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 a bowl of boiled rhubarb.

My father was astonished by electricity.

I 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 understood from our phone number, the single digit “3”, that the telephone had been invented the day before yesterday, and that we happened to have been at the head of the queue when they handed them out. I assumed “1” had been given to the Queen. I envied the people who had got “2”.

I thought we were the Darlings by other names. Debby was the glamorous Wendy, Bruce was the fearless John, and I was the fanciful Michael. Baby Helen was the malicious Tinker Bell who would grow up to use her magical powers for good, and any minute now Rodney would fly in through the window wearing a tunic of jay feathers and maple leaves. Tootles, Nibs, Slightly, Curly, and The Twins were the Lost Boys who lived in the kayas above the wattle forest, waiting to be summoned to play their parts by a ring of the brass dinner bell from the kitchen door.

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. I thought we were invulnerable.

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 successful 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, and 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 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, unquestionably English, and unquestionably Victorian.

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, and it 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.

Both George Ponderevo and I arrived in London in the dead of winter at the beginning of a new century, his the 20th, mine the 21st, but our impressions of it were a similar distance apart.

“Yes, that first raid upon London under the moist and chilly depression of January had an immense effect upon me. It was for me an epoch-making disappointment. I had thought of London as a large, free, welcoming, adventurous place, and I saw it slovenly and harsh and irresponsive.

“I did not realise at all what human things might be found behind those grey frontages, what weakness that whole forbidding facade might presently confess. It is the constant error of youth to over-estimate the Will in things. I did not see that the dirt, the discouragement, the discomfort of London could be due simply to the fact that London was a witless old giantess of a town, too slack and stupid to keep herself clean and maintain a brave face to the world. No! I suffered from the sort of illusion that burnt witches in the seventeenth century. I endued her grubby disorder with a sinister and magnificent quality of intention.”

I thought I had never felt happier or more optimistic than I did in those first few months of 2000. London met me with a clean, brave face. London was in every respect the large, free, welcoming, adventurous place that George Ponderevo had expected. And I saw it, indeed, as the culmination of a conscious Will, as the finished product of centuries of English ingenuity, application and reason.

I thought London was what the world would look like if it came to its senses.

I saw English fairness, kindness and tolerance everywhere I went. I saw it in the mix of peoples and languages on London’s streets, in the variety of nationalities in the offices at Berkeley Square, and in small gestures of consideration on the trains and in the tubes. I met it first hand in my new colleagues, new friends and new acquaintances. I heard it in cockney accents, posh accents, Jamaican accents and Polish accents. I heard it in the enlightened tones of the political discourse on radio and on television. I came to believe I was living in the world that Rider Haggard had suggested and John Lennon had imagined.

It had taken me more than half a lifetime, but the paradise I lost when I left New Dell was at last regained.

And at another level, deep down in my unconscious, it felt like the fulfilment of the promise that Teilhard had made to me a long time ago, in a very different place and under very different circumstances: that the march of history, despite the resistance of those too blinkered to see it, was toward the greater unity of mankind — an unstoppable procession toward to a universal generosity of spirit and a grandeur of purpose beyond the petty divisions of race, religion, sex, class and national identity.

I was back where I started. I was Michael Darling driving a smart black Audi down the Cromwell Road. I was Michael Darling at the boardroom table discussing communications strategies with the heads of multinational corporations. But I was still Michael Darling; still as fanciful, still as naïve, and still as oblivious to the tick-tock-tick in the belly of the circling crocodile.

I am conscious of Bruce looking over my shoulder as I write this. Round about now he would be giving me a cuff on the back of my head and telling me to get a life.