A Writer's World (38 page)

The young people of the townships are the first blacks of South Africa to achieve a revolutionary cohesion. ‘We don’t need any communists to teach us,’ as one burning young activist told me in Soweto. ‘We know what we want, and we know what to do about it.’ They are as much like Puritans as they are like Maoists – contemptuous of their elders’ servility, austere and earnest in their lifestyles. They have furiously attacked the township
speakeasies, the ‘shebeens’, which have been for generations the emblems of black degradation, and they have imposed upon the townships a macabre regime of mourning for the victims of the riots. Thousands of them have boycotted school, in protest against the educational system, thousands more have escaped from the country altogether, over the borders into the independent states of Lesotho, Botswana or Swaziland. They have been imprisoned by the hundreds, beaten up, reviled, herded about like animals, tear-gassed and snatched from their homes by security police: yet in all the years of apartheid theirs has been the first group of citizens to risk all in opposing the system, and to resist institutional violence by violence in the streets.

It is not all sublime idealism. It has often been vicious. Innocent blacks have been bullied and intimidated. Children have been frightened out of school. Above all, black racialism, which for so long seemed almost a contradiction in terms, has been given an ominous new impetus.

There was a moment in the 1930s when observers of the Indian scene realized that, though the British Empire still held all the guns, in a deeper sense the Indians had already won their struggle for independence. I think this is true in South Africa now. Though their oppressors are far more ruthless than the British ever were, already the black Africans feel like winners. They see Black Power supreme throughout most of Africa; they observe the world unanimous in their support; they realize at last that though the white South African looks powerful and important when he towers across the charge desk, bullies you from the prosecutor’s stand or floods your school with poison gas, he is not important really, nor anything like omnipotent. The White Man’s Magic has evaporated in this last segment of his empire.

There is no missing this new black assurance. It is everywhere, in the swagger of young men in the street, in the startling outspokenness of black leaders, in the progressive collapse, absurdity by insult, of petty apartheid. ‘We will take no more nonsense,’ one young black swore to me, assuring me that he no longer even bothered to carry his pass book, once the sine qua non of black existence in South Africa, ‘no more nonsense at all.’ Even the housemaid at my hotel in Johannesburg, when I asked her how she felt about her situation in life, answered me in one conclusive word:
‘Angry
.’

The tables are turning. To the black militants the concessions already won are contemptible, and the slow relaxing of petty apartheid means nothing – it is not separate lavatories or demarcated bathing beaches that
matter, but the realities of power. The blacks no longer wish merely to enter the white man’s world, but actually to take it over. The papers are full of terrorist training camps, of schoolboys spirited away for Marxist indoctrination, of border infiltrations and secret armoires. Sometimes casualty lists appear from the running conflict, misted in secrecy, being waged by the South African security forces on their northern borders, or heroes of the battle are honoured with bands, medals and patriotic addresses. Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of the 4 million Zulus, openly and with impunity calls for mass civil disobedience, and says of himself, as a man speaking not out of weakness but of strength: ‘I am the hand that my people offer in friendship, but I am also the hand they will withdraw in their anger.’ Sometimes the rioters of the townships will let a white man pass if he gives the Black Power salute; and this seems proper enough, for the most profound recognition in South Africa today is the dawning realization, among blacks and whites alike, that
force
majeure
works both ways.

There are still moderate, liberal blacks about, pro-white blacks even, but they begin to seem indecisive, dated people. The conviction of compromise lacks bite, and no fiery black evangelist has yet made the middle way, the conciliatory way, seem virile and exciting. A Christ might achieve it, but not even a Gandhi, I fear, could convince the blacks of South Africa that moderation is the best policy. The very suggestion of cooperation with whites, even the most enlightened whites, is enough to blight a reputation among the fiercest of the young black patriots.

It is not one of your planned revolutions, organized from some central cell. It is happening organically, almost seismically, as though Nature herself is restoring a balance. In twenty years, by current trends, there will be 37 million black people in South Africa, outnumbering the whites seven to one. ‘What will happen to us then?’ replied a government official when I asked him the eternal South African question. ‘We’ll be bred into the sea, that’s what!’

Still, it is upon the Afrikaners, they of the Sacred Flame, that the whole future of South Africa depends: they hold the power still, they have the jets and the machine guns, and they alone can dictate, by opting for conciliation with the blacks or persevering with oppression, what becomes of this marvellous and miserable country. The issue is gigantic – who is going to be boss, the black man or the white? – and the Afrikaner understands it instinctively, as part of his heritage.

Among all the tribes of Africa, the most formidable is this white tribe of the Afrikaners, who have a right to be called Africans since they have been indigenous to this soil almost as long as there have been white men living in North America. They are truly tribal people. They have their own atavistic version of the Christian god, their own distinctive mores, their own colourful language – not a very old one, it is true, having started life in the eighteenth century as a kind of kitchen Dutch, but still recognizably a tongue of its own, with a lively, growing literature and a fine lexicon of phrases like
Foeitog
(‘What a pity!’) or
Reddingsbaadjie
Onder U
Sitplek
(‘Life Vest under Your Seat’). They are bound by a rigid sense of kin and origin, and the concept of the Volk, which enters so many of their usages, is more than just ‘the people’ in the American constitutional sense, but is something nearer to cult or fraternity – the innermost society of Afrikanerdom is actually called the Broederbond.

There are only 2.5 million Afrikaners. They form a very introspective community, and the development of their culture, the fostering of their history, the formation of their national purpose, have all been highly self-conscious processes. Little in Afrikaner history is haphazard. It is a history of extremes and abruptness, a constant instinct toward separateness – no blurs, no blends, no overlaps. Until now the Volk have prospered by these uncompromising techniques, and have turned all their disadvantages into success. Having been defeated by the British in war, they used the subsequent peace to turn the tables. Being vastly outnumbered by the blacks, they subdued them by sheer arrogance. Every attempt to dominate or alter their society they have fought off or sidestepped – by trekking ever deeper into the African hinterland, by starting their own business enterprises, by the calculated instrument of apartheid. They have fought their battles all alone, and so far they have won through.

All is now at risk, because of the one great error in the Afrikaner creed. Those forces of darkness, so graphically conjured in the mysteries of the Voortrekker Monument, are
not
the black men after all. God did not mean it that way. The revelation is mistaken, and the conviction that Afrikaner society can survive only by the perpetual subjection of the black African is the one fatal flaw in the courageous outlook of the Volk. It has brought out the worst in them, the narrowness, the intolerance, the bigotry that goes with their patriotism and their religion. It has muddled their thinking and coarsened their merits. And though it has served them well enough during the first 300 years of their history, it is almost inconceivable that it can succeed much longer. They are in their last laager, symbolically
represented in that circle of ox wagons around the monument. They have nowhere else to retreat, and they cannot fight on for ever.

Time passes, the whole towering edifice of white supremacy sways, and apartheid proves itself to have been one of the most terrible of all historical miscalculations. Its system is cracking anyway, by the momentum of history, and the blacks are forcing their way into the white man’s world by plain force of circumstance. ‘Change’, which Afrikaner last-ditchers call a communist word, is nevertheless on every politician’s lips, for it is evident that the apparatus of racialism is doomed. Three decades of apartheid have been a tragic waste of time and life and passion. It has not worked. It is a fateful moment, a breathless moment, for nobody knows whether the Afrikaners will submit to history or defy it. Perhaps they are going to hang on after all, whatever happens elsewhere. They are unlikely to be toppled by internal revolution, however inflamed the blacks, and they may well be right when they claim that the capitalist West will save them from invasion. Besides, the spirit of laager still excites the Afrikaners, the urge to ultimate defiance, even to national self-immolation perhaps, holding the Eternal Flame while savagery, atheism, communism and barbarism burn the wagons and storm the shrine.

But they will be defeated in the end anyway, if not by force then by the misery of it all, by the relentless threat of catastrophe which debilitates the life of the country, by the demoralizing boycott of the world, by the slow decay of their own certainties and the awful realization of error. Why, I asked an old black man once, did not Mr Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa, frankly admit the misjudgement of apartheid and make a fresh start while there was still time? His answer I suspect, came somewhere near the truth. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it would make him look a fool.’

It would make him look silly: more pertinently still, it would reveal the whole Afrikaner mystique, so full of pride and achievement, so inspired and so genuinely inspiring, to be fallible after all – as though that mystic sunshaft, one fine December noonday, were to miss the hole in the roof altogether, owing to an inaccuracy in the mathematics. 

I craved the Trollopian scene not for itself exactly, but for its myth of a Golden Age. Of course I wanted the incidentals too, the bells across the close, the fine old ladies taking tea beneath college rowing groups featuring, at stroke, their uncle the late Precentor. I wanted the mingled smell of dry rot and market cabbage. I hoped to catch a glimpse of the Organist and Choirmaster, pulling his gown over his shoulders as he hurried across to evensong. But like many other romantics, all over the Western world, I hungered really for the hierarchal certainty of the old England, that amalgam of faith, diligence, loyalty, independence and authority which Trollope mischievously enshrined in the legends of his little city.

At least Wells looks impeccably the part. As one descends from the spooky heights of Mendip, haunted by speleologists and Roman snails, it lies there in the lee of the hills infinitely snug and wholesome. No motorway thunders anywhere near. It is fourteen miles to the nearest railway station. Though Wells has been a city since the tenth century, it is still hardly more than an ample village, dutifully assembled around the towers of the cathedral: and although beyond it one may see the arcane bumps and declivities of the Glastonbury plain, there is nothing very mystical to one’s first impression of the place. Its accent is homely Somerset, and its aspect rubicund.

In no time at all I had found myself a room, low-beamed and flower-patterned, in the Crown Hotel overlooking the Market Square, where a rivulet swims limpidly down the gutter past the old town conduit: and hardly less promptly, as it happened, I found myself fined £2 for parking too long outside Penniless Porch, through whose squinted archway the great grey mass of the cathedral itself looked benignly down upon traffic-warden and miscreant alike.

Almost at once, too, I met the Dean, actually in the shadow of the Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. In the cathedral, I later discovered, they call him ‘Father Mitchell’, a disconcerting usage to one of my purposes, but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity
qua
Dean. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there on the beggars’ bench watching the citizenry pass by. ‘Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday – what
would
we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (
John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on medieval
church architecture
…)’

The Dean of Wells is a very busy man indeed. He showed me his diary, and it was chock-a-block – even Thursday, resolutely marked as his day off, was nibbled into by a meeting of the Judge’s Lodgings Committee. It seemed more the life of an impresario than a cleric, and this is because a cathedral nowadays is far more than just a shrine, but is partly a social centre, partly a concert hall, partly a tourist attraction, and in the case of Wells, very largely a National Concern. A few years ago it was realized that the west front of Wells Cathedral, incorporating an unrivalled gallery of not very exciting but undeniably medieval statuary, was crumbling away: the consequent appeal, launched by an urbane firm of professional appealers, suddenly made Wells, like Venice, better-known for its decay than for its survival, and added a new dimension to the life of the Very Reverend the Dean.

It crossed my mind, indeed, so ubiquitous were the symptoms of restoration, that the cathedral’s chief function had become its own repair. The building itself, clouded with scaffolding, tap-taps with the hammers of the masons. One frequently sees the Dean, cassocked and umbrella’d, gazing with solicitous eyes at a leprous evangelist or precarious cornice. Outside the west doors there stands a superannuated Victorian pillar box, painted bright blue, for the acceptance of contributions, and hardly a week seems to pass without some fund-raising function beneath the bold inverted arches
of the nave (themselves a restorative device, for they were hastily erected when, in 1338, the central tower lurched twelve feet out of true).

But no, the Dean reassured me over lunch, the true focus of cathedral life remained the daily services which, however infinitesimal the congregations, are held now as always in the panelled seclusion of the choir. Behind the scenes the immemorial functions of the cathedral continue, each with its titular chief: the Baron of the Exchequer, the Chancellor, the Master of the Fabric, the Communar, the Chief Steward. The Dean still presides over the Quinque Personae of his Chapter. The Priest-Vicars, the Lay-Vicars, the Canons Residentiary, the vergers, the twenty-one choristers, all are there to offer their gifts and energies to the daily affirmation of the faith.

I took him at his word, and went that afternoon to evensong: or rather, like nearly everybody else in sight, I loitered about the interior of the cathedral while evensong proceeded beyond the narrow entrance of the choir, allowing me, from the dimmer recesses of the nave, suggestive glimpses of surplices, shaded lamps, anthem sheets and musical motions within. It was magical. The rest of the great building lay in hush, haunted only by self-consciously shuffling groups of sightseers, and encapsulated there in their bright-lit chamber, as though in heavenly orbit, the Dean, his canons, the musicians and a handful of devoted worshippers performed their evening ritual.

The anthem was S. S. Wesley’s ‘Thou Wilt Keep Him’, among the most lyrical in the repertoire, and it was touching to see how many of the tourists leant in silence against pillars, or paused thoughtfully in their decipherment of epitaphs, as the sweet melody sounded through the half-light.

‘Can I go and meet Daddy now?’ I heard a voice say from the cathedral shop, near the west door. ‘He’s bound to be down from the loft by now.’ He was, the last note of the voluntary having faded away into the Lady Chapel, and presently the Organist and Choirmaster, his wife, his two daughters and I were comfortably before a fire in Vicars’ Close, the exquisite double row of fourteenth-century houses which runs away to the north of the Chapter House (and which is the only part of the Wells cathedral precinct properly called the Close). Here was Barchester all right! An Oxford print hung above the fireplace; a cat luxuriated on the hearth; books, musical instruments, edibles and Cinzano were all equally at hand. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ said the children. ‘Don’t we live in a lovely place? Isn’t this a lovely house? We tidied it all up specially for you!’

It was by no means the only musical house in the neighbourhood, for the cathedral precinct of Wells, if it sometimes suggests showbusiness, and often package tours, sometimes feels like one gigantic conservatoire. Muffled from within the cathedral walls, any hour of the day, one may hear the organ rumbling. Celestial through the open doors come snatches of ‘Thou Wilt Keep Him’. From old grey houses around the green sound snatches of string quartet, trombonic arpeggios or tinkles of Czerny. Hardly has the Organist and Choirmaster finished one performance than he is up there again with his choristers, high in their medieval practice room behind Penniless Porch, rehearsing Wood in C Minor for the following day.

If faith is the reason for Wells, music is its most obvious diligence. Wells Cathedral School is one of the three schools in England offering specialist education for musically gifted children, tracing its origins to a Song School of the thirteenth century, while the music of the cathedral itself is intensely professional. I much enjoyed this feeling of disinterested technique, so remote from commercial competition or union claim. I saw something truly noble to the spectacle of that daily choral celebration, performed to the last degree of excellence, attended by almost nobody but the celebrants themselves: a practice more generous, more frank, more
English
(I ventured to suppose) than monasticism or meditation – and more acceptable actually, one might think, to the sort of gods I myself cherish, the gods of the stones and the lavender, than to the Christian divinity to whom it has, for a thousand years, uninterruptedly been offered.

Before I left Vicars’ Close, the children invited me to write something in their autograph books. Visitors always did, they said. I looked with interest at the previous entries, expecting to find there, as one would in a Barchester book, the names of visiting politicians, magnates or men of law: but no, they were musicians almost to a scrawl – the composers, the instrumentalists, the teachers who pass in a constant stream these days through the busy precincts of Wells. (When I saw what witty things they had written there, I could think of nothing comparably pithy to say myself, so I drew a couple of pictures of the cathedral instead. ‘Thought you said you couldn’t draw,’ the children kindly said. ‘We think you’re
jolly
good
.’)

The loyalty essential to the myth of Englishness is of course embodied in Wells in the fabric of the cathedral itself, and the enclosure of grass, garden and old stone that surrounds it. For a millennium there have been people in Wells who have devoted themselves to this structure, and it seemed to
me that this corporate possession of the little town, like some grand totem or fetish, must powerfully augment the citizenry’s sense of community or comradeship.

How easy it would be, I thought, to fall in love with such a building, and to spend one’s life getting to know it, or more usefully perhaps, keeping it there! In the shadow of such permanence, surely life’s transient miseries would pass one by? The Master-Mason of the cathedral smiled enigmatically, when I expressed this thought. He is a very practical man. He first fell victim himself to the enthralment of the cathedral when as a small boy he wriggled through a prohibited aperture somewhere in the masonry, and so discovered for himself the infinite complexity of the place. Now he knows it all, its unsuspected corridors and hidden galleries, its vaults and its cloisters, and through his yards and offices pass all the architects, the restorers, the masons, the accountants, the surveyors and the builders’ merchants perpetually engaged, as they have been for so many centuries, in maintaining the holy structure. He was like the Master-at-Arms on a warship, I thought, beneath whose experienced eye the workaday life of the vessel goes on, leaving the men on the bridge above, like those priests and choristers at evensong, free to attend to the navigation.

Then there is the Horologist. The most beloved single artefact in Wells Cathedral, I would say, is the medieval Great Clock in the north transept. It is claimed to possess the oldest working clock in Europe: whenever it strikes the hour four little horsemen, whirring round and round, knock each other off their wooden horses with lances, while a dead-pan character called Jack Blandiver, sitting stiffly on his seat high on a wall near by, nods his head, hits one bell with a hammer, and kicks two more with his heels.

Every morning at half past eight or so, if you hang around High Street, you may see the Horologist on his way to wind this endearing timepiece. His father did it before him, his son will doubtless follow, and never was a labour more cherished. ‘There’s old Jack,’ he says affectionately as he unlocks the door to the clock gantry, and looks up at the quaint old figure on the wall: and when you have climbed the narrow winding steps, looking through the inverted arches to the empty nave beyond, then he opens the big glass doors of the mechanism as one might open a cabinet of treasures. The works are Victorian, the originals being in the Science Museum at South Kensington, and the Horologist admires them enormously. What workmanship! What precision! Look at those cogs! Feel how easily the handle turns! I caught his mood at once. Everything felt wonderfully
handmade
up there, so rich in old wood and dressed stone, with that elaborate
gleaming mechanism slowly ticking, and the beautiful cool space of the cathedral beneath one’s feet.

‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ I said, ‘if
everything
in life felt like this?’ ‘Ah wouldn’t it,’ said he, resuming his coat after the exertion of the clock-winding. ‘But you have to work for it, you see. It doesn’t look after itself! Come here now, look down here,’ – and he showed me down a little shaft to the circular platform on which the four knights of the Great Clock, relieved from their eternal joust until the next quarter-hour, were resting woodenly on their arms. ‘Now those fellows down there take a lot of looking after. They break so easily, you see. Well they would, wouldn’t they, hitting each other with their lances every quarter of an hour? You can’t expect them to last for ever, knocking each other about like that!’

In a curious way, I felt, the cathedral was more the property of the Town than of the Close. Bishops, Deans and Canons come and go, but the shopkeepers and the businessmen, the farmers, even the traders who bring their vans and stalls to Wells Market every week – these people live all their lives in the presence of the great building, and must feel it to be part of their very selves. Wells has its own magnificent parish church of St Cuthbert, often mistaken by the tourists for the cathedral itself. It has a substantial landed interest and some thriving small industries. But still every street seems to look, every alley seems to lead, almost every conversation seems somehow to turn, to that ancient presence beyond Penniless Porch.

To discover how jealously Wellensians, as citizens of Wells complicatedly call themselves, regard the affairs of the Close, I went to see the newspaper editor. Like nearly everything in Wells, his office is only a step or two from the cathedral, almost opposite the Star (and just up the road from the King’s Head which has been unnervingly metamorphosed into a Chinese restaurant). The paper is shortly to move to more modern premises, but for the moment its funny old gimcrack buildings are in High Street, all ramshackle and disjointed, like the kitchen quarters of some dilapidated mansion. How knowingly, I thought, those Linotypes chattered! What intrigues, vendettas and innuendos had found their way through those presses, during the 128 years in which the
Wells
Journal
has kept its eye impartially on precinct and marketplace!