Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The evening was not exactly a success. Stella’s withdrawal was a betrayal of the mood in which the party had been spontaneously arranged; if the excuse had been one of the conventional ones of sickness, a headache, the commonplace jollity might have survived quite well in spite of her absence, but the uncomfortable oddity of her reason for absence seemed to show up the nature of the jollity for what it was — an alcohol-hearty camaraderie between rather incompatible strangers. Everard brought over two more officers and an amiable, fat Italian girl, and the party became very much her own. The consul excused himself early and went off unrepentant in the direction of the card-room. I was suddenly angry to find myself left with the wife, the frizz-haired, pathetic bore, with her plump silver shoes crossed at the ankle, patiently. Rather abruptly, I left too, going to my cabin by way of the deck.

I lay on my bunk, bored and wakeful. I felt a sickening at them all. A spoilt woman who got ill from the idea that she had put her foot back in Africa again. So that was the reason for the life of romantic, genteel exile in Italy: inability to face the husband, marriage, reality, inability to face even the fact of this inability, so that husband, marriage, reality took the discreet disguise of ‘Africa’. Poor devil of a husband, working his farm to foot the bill at the Pensione Bandolini. Even the daughter given the mock-Italian name, the label of escape, ‘Rina’, and taught to live her life on the move, because the mother could not bear to alight in the one place where she was, conventionally, bound to live.

And the other one, the diplomatic gentleman with his queenly dowager, dragging shamefully from country to country the suffering and insufferable ‘mistake’ he had made in one of them. Were these the sort of people Africa gets? Christ, poor continent!

Mombasa was our first port of call in Africa.

My mother sometimes says, with the mixture of polite diffidence and embarrassed culpability with which understanding parents are apt to regard their adult children, that there must be something of my grandfathers in me. The one, my mother’s father, was in the Indian Civil Service, and the other, who pre-dated him considerably, was killed in the Boer War. He was a colonel and a hero, and I discovered when I was quite young that my family was ashamed of him. When I was a child, the maternal grandfather was still alive, retired in Bournemouth, and they were ashamed of him, too. My father and mother were of the generation that, after the first World War, turned upon their parents and their heritage even more contemptuously than is usual with each succeeding generation. They felt themselves to be almost a new species. My mother refused to come out, with a presentation at Court and a party of her mother’s family house in the Cotswolds; she went to London and took a job as secretary to one of the international peace organizations which flourished hopefully at the time. My father left Oxford before taking Greats and went to Berlin with a young German student to carry a Socialist flag in the Revolution. He married there, too, and so although he and my mother lived together for several years after they met in England, they were not able to marry until he had managed to divorce his first wife — she was a Pole, I think. I barely scraped into legitimacy by being born when my parents had been respectably married for five months. My father edited two or three short-lived literary reviews, translated German and French political writings and some poetry, and although he was in his late thirties at the time, managed to get to Spain, if not exactly into the war, with the Republicans in 1936. He came back safely, but died of kidney disease in 1938. All this time, and, indeed, all through my childhood, we were supported in conventional comfort by his sinecure as a director in the publishing house which was, and is, his mother’s family business.

Our flat in Kensington and later our house in the Cotswolds near my maternal grandmother’s house — once it had been part of the estate — were places much frequented by victims and their champions. The world of my childhood was the beginning of the world of victims we now know, and each of these victims, like an ox attended by a group of tick-birds, had his attendant champions who, as tick-birds both batten on their ox’s misery and relieve him at the same time by eating the vermin on his skin, gave the victim succour and drew from him for themselves a special kind of nourishment. Do I sound sneering? I don’t mean to be. But I suppose I got tired of them, as a child and an adolescent; tired of the German refugee professors, and the earnest Christians and passionate Jews who ran the committees to care for them and protest for them, tired of the poets who limped in from their stint in Spain, and the indignant intellectual volubility of the brilliant people who spoke for them; tired of the committee members for the relief of Chinese war orphans, and the organizers of protest meetings in support of Abyssinia, and the saintly or urbane Indians who came to address the English committees for a free India on the best way to defeat the British Raj.

One day, when I was still a small boy, I found the sword that had belonged with my grandfather’s dress uniform and thought I would hang it up on the wall in the hall of our flat in London. I was busy assembling nails and hooks and hammer for the job when my mother came in with a friend. ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing with that?’ She pointed the toe of her shoe at the sword, lying on the carpet. ‘It’s grandfather’s sword; I found it at Grannie’s and she said I could have it. We can hang it up here. Won’t it look lovely? And look, she gave me this, too — it’s the citation about his bravery at Jagersfontein.’ Perhaps the friend my mother had with her was the representative of some spirited minority or other — I can’t remember who he was — but she obviously found it embarrassing, in a light sort of way (she was laughing, I know), to be confronted with a son who wanted to display his grandfather’s citation for Boer War bravery in a home where Imperialism was deplored. ‘Look at this,’ she said to her companion, pulling a face in mock pompousness, and handing him the framed citation. And then to me, ‘Toby, you don’t want to hang that thing up there, really, darling. .’ I said to the man, eager to explain, ‘Grandfather is buried at this place Jagersfontein. He killed a hell of a lot of Boers, though. He was a colonel.’ The two grown-ups roared with laughter. Then my mother said firmly, ‘Toby, I will not have that thing hanging here or anywhere. Not the sword. Not the citation. Positively not.’

Because her creed of living included a nervous and almost exaggerated respect for the feelings of her children, she took me aside later and quietly explained that to honour my grandfather’s exploits in the Boer War was almost like celebrating a victory for Franco in Spain. She thought this comparison would be the most meaningful for me because of my father. It was, but not in the way she thought. She did not understand a child’s uncomplicated personal loyalties. ‘But grandfather fought on the English side, daddy was against Franco — how do you mean nearly the same?’ My poor mother, if only she hadn’t taken so seriously her self-imposed task of impressing upon a schoolboy the ethical difference, irrespective of personal ties, between the Wrong Side and the Right Side, she might have realized that my interest in my grandfather was nothing more than the inspiration of the boy’s books that she considered suitable reading for me, in which great deeds were done and much face was gained in the name of dead ancestral heroes.