Buckle Up

Gordon Torr
Jul 30, 2017 · 14 min read

Chapter 16, Jacob’s Ladder

“The only thing that is screwed up in this office, Barnes, is your head, which I would be more than happy to serve on a silver platter if I weren’t worried about my family getting food poisoning!” — J.R. Ewing, Dallas

The advantage of growing up speaking English in a former British colony in the days before the internet is that you got the BBC World Service but not the talk shows. You got the Telegraph but not the Daily Mail, or the Guardian but not the Mirror. You got the news but not the gossip, you got the language but not the nuance, you got the words but not the inflections, you got the meaning but not the mood, you got the education but not the intelligence, you got the facts but not the knowledge, you got the books but not the reviews, you got the comedy but not the humour, you got the music but not the message, you got the policies but not the politics, you got the wars but not the peace — you got the British but not the English.

The disadvantages of growing up speaking English in a former British colony are the same as the advantages.

It is now generally agreed by all parties that one of the things inexplicably lost overboard on the way to Plymouth Rock, the Cape, the Cook Islands, Tasmania, Ceylon and Calcutta was that native English aptitude for irony. The Australians and the New Zealanders can’t affect it; North America, as we know, is an irony-free zone; India has a gentle, head-wobbling remnant of it, but it’s entirely absent, almost painfully absent, from South African English conversation. Now and then you will hear hollow echoes of it in colonial speech, but it’s expressed as sarcasm or hyperbole, which are very blunt instruments compared with the original. From an English point of view, the consequence of its loss is the irksome habit that colonials have of saying what they mean.

The distance between the mother country and her colonies seems to have acted as some sort of refining filter, as if the broad frequencies of English culture had been compressed into a very narrow band of shortwave in order for it to survive the journey across the equator. The other colonies may have heard a stronger signal; to get to the South Africa of my experience it had to squeeze through the Equity ban in the north and the apartheid censors in the south, arriving at last in intermittent squeaks.

The effect of this on the wider English-speaking white South African population was to contextualise the scraps of news, politics and culture that reached us from London, Manchester or Liverpool in a conception of England frozen in the period between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of cultural and sporting boycotts of the 1960s, an indelibly British, peculiarly conservative idea of England, associated with neatly clipped moustaches, Spitfires, Terry Thomas and the Carry On films, with Just a Minute and Giles cartoons: with Buckingham Palace and Queen Elizabeth II standing immutable against the fluctuating waves of taste and fashion — the mini-skirts and the Mini-Minors, the floral shirts and the bell-bottom trousers; the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks and the Animals, the Camden hippies and the King’s Road punks.

In this context it was possible to read the very best intentions into Maggie Thatcher’s war on the unions, her adventures in the South Atlantic and her political romance with Ronald Reagan; and for some to see a sort of English boarding school justice, a polite but unavoidable detention for disobedience, in her refusal to treat the jailed Mandela as anything other than a terrorist.

We were able to believe that we still shared the same values because both nations played cricket, even if we could no longer play each other. We thought of rugby as the lingua franca of comradeship without understanding that English rugby was played by the sons of only the most rarefied class of English gentlemen, the vestigial equivalent of sending them off to the Sudan, Lahore or Elandslaagte to make men of themselves.

My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins confirmed the illusion of a country fundamentally unchanged and unchangeable, simultaneously ante-Victorian, Victorian and modern, still delighting in the idiosyncrasies of the classes that divided it, that sacrosanct dispensation of entitlements and handicaps ordained long ago by a very Anglican god, the hymnal courtesy of Lonnie Donegan.

Without television and without the running commentary of the English versions of the English papers, we took what we got at face value. We knew the names of the individual Beatles but had no sense of their place in English society, by which I mean the way they viewed themselves in the context of 1960s England, and the way the various strata of English society viewed them in return. They were four mop-heads who wrote and sang great songs, and we assumed everyone in England from the Queen to my old man the dustman saw them the way we did, as the cuddly, mischievous boys on the cover of Please Please Me.

The English novelists were names, not faces; not people with pasts and husbands and wives and children; not aristocrats or commoners, not individuals from this or that class related to this or that branch of royal descent or this or that twig of the haut monde or married to this or that large or small celebrity, from this or that school or university, or from this or that city or county, the names of all of the above would anyway have meant little or nothing. They were authors stripped of associations, connections and references, emerging into recognisable personalities only within the white spaces between the interstices of Monotype Baskerville.

We approached them with staggering ignorance, and we read them with the innocence of children. We made no distinction of provenance or period between Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, or between Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf. We liked them if their stories and characters resonated with something within our range of personal experience, and we didn’t if they didn’t.

For me it meant that I could love W.H. Auden oblivious of his sexual preferences. I could embrace the literary theory of F.R. Leavis without knowing he had long since been superannuated into a literary joke, someone Stephen Fry would describe as a “sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance”.

But reading a text without knowing the subtext is like watching a movie with the subtitles on and the sound turned off, which is fine if you’re watching a Danish documentary about the climate of Greenland, but which becomes dangerously misleading when the central characters of a drama don’t mean what they say.

I was not so naïve as to be entirely deaf to that light-hearted ironic nuance so characteristic of the speech of the English-born English. My mother had inherited some of it, although she tended to use it to full sardonic effect only in the afterglow of a cane or two. It shared something with the self-deprecating warmth I heard in the voice of my father, but I had a vague sense of something different in the quality of it, something less self-conscious, less overtly clever. Her version of it reminded me of Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward; his version reminded me of Kipling’s Saxon who “…never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.”

But I had no way of knowing how much of the subtext I’d been missing until I found myself living and working among the English-born English — how antiquated my father’s self-deprecation and stoic good humour would appear in 21st century Britain, nor how attenuated by time and distance had been the faint strain of irony in my mother’s voice when compared to the living, breathing, speaking thing.

Neither of my parents, not my schooling, not the books I’d read, not my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and English Literature, not the bootlegged VHS copies of Fawlty Towers, not even The Life of Brian watched in a huddle behind closed doors and blackout curtains for fear of the thought-police, nor anything in my experience before we came to settle in London, had prepared me for it.

The walk from Piccadilly via Dover Street to Berkeley Square that was the final leg of my first regular commute brought to mind the quaintly familiar London of Dickens. But when I found myself trying to decode the meaning of the office repartee it felt as if I’d stumbled out of Dombey and Son and into a parody of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

It was here that I realised that I didn’t understand the language I had spoken all my life, and it wasn’t because of the accents. It was because of Dallas.

When television eventually arrived in South Africa in 1976 it came in the form of one official channel divided into equal time-slots of Afrikaans and English. Six years later the SABC would introduce TV2, broadcasting in Zulu and Xhosa, and TV3, broadcasting in Sotho and Tswana. Before the Equity ban on the sale of British programming to South Africa came into full effect, South Africans were treated to a strange and eclectic mix of entertainments.

The Sweeney, that ground-breaking police drama set in a very cockney London, was dubbed into Afrikaans and called Blitspatrollie (Rapid Patrol), Miami Vice became Misdaad in Miami (Crime in Miami), The Six Million Dollar Man became Die Man van Staal (The Man of Steel) and The Jeffersons, those former neighbours of Archie and Edith Bunker, became a Zulu-speaking family with a dry-cleaning business in the heart of Manhattan.

If your Afrikaans couldn’t keep up with Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Detective Sergeant George Carter, and if your Zulu wasn’t good enough for you to relish the banter between George and Louise Jefferson, there was only one option left: you watched Dallas. You watched it with reverence, you watched it in awe. You watched it for thirteen years, and you watched it long after the entire planet knew who shot J.R. and how Bobby arose from the dead. You watched it so assiduously and with such close intent that the politics of the Texan oil industry began to feel more demanding of your attention than the politics outside your front door.

Suddenly, and quite arbitrarily, the Anglo-Saxon cultural stream that had come to rest in the quiet mill-pond of the Natal Midlands was diverted into the rapids of the lower Colorado. My father exchanged his slouch hat for a Stetson; my mother arrived at the view that Miss Ellie hadn’t been firm enough with her children. And all the while we were analysing Sue Ellen’s moral laxity on the veranda of Drakesleigh the writers and producers at the forefront of English television were laying siege to middle-class complacencies, hunting down the last of Victoria’s holy cows, and inventing a new, post-punk, post-modern, post-ironic culture of iconoclasm that was both radically fresh and desperately self-regarding. Coronation Street and EastEnders had continued to reassure the same middle-class that nothing in England had changed since Edward VII. But we discovered when we switched on the TV in the flat in Fulham in 2000 that the originality of Fawlty Towers had given way in the 1980s and 1990s to an impenetrable self-referential surrealism that would soon hypostasize into the unapologetic post-Orwellian cynicism of Big Brother.

I would piece this together only in retrospect, and then only by amateur deduction and uneducated conjecture. But even if we hadn’t been cut off from British television and the way it was reflecting the changing tastes of its audience in the UK, I’m not sure that I would have paid much attention to it. By the end of the 1970s, certainly no later than the December of 1980, I was no longer looking to England to satisfy my appetite for the cultural titbits denied us by our self-inflicted status as the least touchable of the pariah nations of the world.

Today Professor Nigel Penn is a globally recognised expert on the Dutch and British colonial genocides in Africa, Australia and elsewhere. Then he was just Nigel, Helen’s very complicated boyfriend, who read much more than was good for him, or maybe not, the way things have turned out. We were at a braai in the garden of a house in a suburb of Johannesburg, one of those hot and lazy days next to a blue swimming pool with the Kreepy Krauly chugging its lonely path up and down the fibreglass walls, rising every now and then to splutter and burp on the surface before submerging again to its Sisyphean labour against the inevitability of algae. We gave our bones to the obligatory Doberman and he gave me a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Thomas Pynchon led me by way of Nabokov and Günter Grass to John Barth, William Gaddis, De Lillo and the rest of the American school now being called “the hysterical realists”. I wondered if it was only a coincidence that I was reading Gaddis’s JR at just about the time J.R. was roasting Cliff Barnes with his excoriating wit, but it hardly mattered because I had discovered the new America and I wasn’t going to look back. I imagined Tyrone Slothrop watching the last train pulling out of Waterloo Station and seeing the pale-faced ghost of Phineas Finn in a carriage window looking out in bewilderment at the smoking ruins of Vauxhall. It seemed to me then that the American conquest of South Africa had also occupied the place in my mind once populated by Anthony Trollope, Anthony Powell and the Allahakbarries.

Consequently, in the interval between my first visit to London in 1974 and my first day at the office in Berkeley Square, familiar words had acquired unfamiliar meanings. They had resonances I was deaf to, and implications I was blind to. In 1976 I could read Clive James’s Crystal Bucket and appreciate his droll take on British television. Twenty-three years later the reviews in Time Out appeared to have been written in the language of alien conquerors from a distant galaxy.

The cockneys had apparently been wiped from the face of the earth. In their place on the streets of Hackney and Harrow were kids in hoodies speaking an unknown patois into portable telephones. Instead of the obligatory black, the creative classes in Soho, Farrington and Islington were wearing the kind of shirts my mother made us wear back in the fifties, and talking in riddles that weren’t from Beano. In the South West postcodes I was reassured to hear an occasional “awfully kind” or “terribly nice” that wouldn’t have been out of place in Nottingham Road, Kwa-Zulu Natal. But this charming English habit of inverting the meaning of words seemed to have spread through the dictionary the way the bur oak blight spread through the forests of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire.

I was pleased to be told that an idea of mine was “worthy”, and confused when I discovered that the word was commonly understood to be among the worst of all possible advertising insults.

I learned that “good” meant irredeemably awful. Anything described as “fun” needed to be avoided at all costs. I learned that “nice” had lost its 20th century meaning of “moderately pleasing” and had reverted to its original sense of appropriateness, but now with an ironic exclamation mark, as in the phrase, “How inadvertently apposite!” The word “brilliant” was loaded with the implication of something unspeakably moronic. “Lovely” covered all the shades of meaning on the spectrum between almost bearable and unbearable. All words relating to abstract ideals such as sincerity, fairness, faith, honour and glory had been hollowed out as if by a scalpel, and relegated to the domains of hunting, shooting and fishing. But none of these imputed meanings were fixed. They could change with changing contexts and changing circumstances, as predictably as the weather.

Even now it remains peculiarly difficult to describe because the graduated shades of its expression appear to be bound up with those fine gradations of English class that are so obscure to the rest of us. It sounds like sarcasm to the foreigner but it’s several degrees less crass than that. It’s far smarter, far more layered and far more subtle. There’s a self-directed ridicule about it that chafes at earnestness and mocks its own mannerisms. It has a way of puncturing pretence and poking fun at high-mindedness that makes words such as liberty and fraternity sound rude and inappropriate, like boorish gate-crashers at a Wimbledon garden party, probably South Africans.

It’s not the heavy-handed irony we colonials use to score crude political points. It’s a dry, jocular disingenuousness gently and consistently undermining the overt meaning of the casual exchanges between the English-born English. At its sparkling best it is humane and inclusive: it’s Stephen Fry (again), Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. It’s a little bit of Russell Brand and a lot of Jonathan Agnew, the cricket commentator. It’s the cabbie pointing out London’s landmarks for the benefit of the foreigner in the backseat: “That’s Lord’s,” he said, directing my attention to the large building on my left, “the home of some of England’s most famous defeats.”

At its worst it is self-referential and excluding of others, a circular conversation that refers back to the punchline of a joke that we weren’t privy to and wouldn’t have understood even if we were, because that punchline was a reference to the punchline of an earlier joke, and so on and so forth in a hermeneutic labyrinth that has the effect of making English disingenuousness itself sound disingenuous to the baffled ears of outsiders, like two enigmatic negatives making a puzzling positive. But “joke” is too strong a word. The colonials have jokes, the English have witticisms.

And it can equally be used as a sharp-edged weapon that intimidates by its cleverness, the way someone like Boris Johnson uses it to disrespect the intelligence and demean the opinions of people who disagree with him, when it’s just obnoxious.

It took me a year or two to realise that the point of English conversation was to gloss over difficult subjects as amusingly as possible, and never, under pain of excommunication, to address them in earnest.

There was that famous dinner party with newly-made friends at their gracious home in Putney. We didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to ask people what they did. When the husband replied politely that he worked in “the city” I thought he meant in London so I said, “So do I”. They were nice enough to make light of our colonial ignorance. We navigated our way to the safer shores of children, schools and foreign holidays. Things were going swimmingly until we ran out of things to say about the English climate. Karine broke the strained silence over the Eton Mess by informing our astonished hosts that the stem cells of a baby boy’s foreskin could be grown to cover the width and breadth of a rugby field.

She never got used to the reticence the way I did. I liked it that no one spoke on the train. She continues to strike up conversations with people who hide behind the sports pages to avoid her attentions.

I grew to love the banter. I admired its quick-wittedness, its playfulness and its delicious seditiousness. I began to see the world through the distancing lens of irony: that peculiarly English filter that reduces a global cataclysm to the scale of a cricket match on a village green while amplifying The Ashes to the scale of a war between continents.

Not all the English, of course; not even the majority of a certain class of English men and women. But the default position of many, nevertheless, a reflex of national consciousness, or of the unconscious of a nation never humiliated by a defeat on its own soil and never disgraced at home by its actions abroad except in the eyes of the small minority Arthur Conan Doyle called “the pusillanimous few”, those Little Englanders made cowards by Britain’s might.

I was conscious of its artificiality, conscious of my skin thickening against the penetration of guilt or responsibility for the suffering of those outside my magic circle, a process of moral numbing as welcome as anaesthesia to a skin chafed too long by shame and regret, but I was happy to acquiesce to the unusual comfort of it, the unanticipated relief of not having to care very much about what happened at the wrong end of the telescope. South Africans like me were never afforded this luxury. We could build high walls and electric fences, but instead of keeping the urgent injustices of society without they served only to make more insistent the claims on the consciences within.

So I renounced my American affair and succumbed to the agreeable consolation of it. I flirted with its Tory tongue-in-cheekness; I read Private Eye, watched Have I Got News for You and had a go at The Times crossword. I mimicked it as successfully as a Boerboel might master the foxtrot. My new passport consummated my right to it. But my infatuation with it lasted only as long as British politics remained a game played by civil servants from the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Then Jacob Rees-Mogg stepped out of his cardboard cut-out caricature and into the world of creepy flesh and cold blood.

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