DIARY
When I tell people that I have just come back from two weeks in South Africa, they seem either to be shocked or look jealous, nothing in between. I mollify the shocked ones by revealing that my wife and I went to stay with her father, who decided to stay on in South Africa after his last job, observing elephants in the forest of Kynsna. This didn't cut much ice, though, with the South African visa people in Trafalgar Square, beforehand. 'It may be a personal visit,' they said, 'but you are a writer and your wife is a television producer, so you must sign an undertaking not to write or film any of your experiences while out there.' Look,' I said, 'I went out to South Africa once before to see him, and I signed the same undertaking then, and all it meant when I got back was that I could not write about any of the nice things that had happened to me.' Like what?' they said, taken aback. 'Oh, things like the steam railway line from Kynsna to George, which I would love to have written about, being a writer about trains. But you wouldn't let me. That sort of thing.' 'Hmm. We'll have to think about that.' Which explains why, when my entry au- thority finally was granted, it stated as purpose of trip: VACATION AND POSSIBLE ARTICLE ON STEAM LINE FROM KYNSNA TO GEORGE. Who says the South African government is inflexible?
My father-in-law, Nick Carter, was in tanks during the second world war, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, and had therefore been following the Gulf war with great excitement — it was a long time since tanks had been given such a starring role. 'What I still can't begin to understand,' he said, as he picked us up at George airport, 'is how any army can knock out 200 tanks in a day, as the allies are said to have done to the Iraqis. In the desert we thought we had done incredibly well if we knocked out two tanks in a day. Mark you, standards of accuracy were lower then. See that over there?' He pointed to an old Dakota, standing darkly and mysteriously on the periphery of George airport. 'I can remem- ber being bombed by them,' he said fondly. 'Hold on,' I said. 'I thought they were on our side.' So they were, but from the air it is quite hard to tell tanks apart, and bombing was a little speculative. I remember once we were facing a whole group of German tanks and our Dakotas arrived and proceeded to give us a pasting. And when they had flown off, the German Stukas arrived.' And bombarded you too?"Luckily, not. They saw we had been attacked by the Dakotas, assumed we were German, and proceeded to bomb hell out of their own side. I don't think either side suffered a direct hit, though.' MILES KINGTON If I had drifted south through Africa to end up in Kynsna, I too would find it hard to leave such a place. In a bowl of mountains, on a blue lagoon, with the sea just visible through a gap in the cliffs, it is like a 1930s American small town set down blinking in the 1990s, all verandahs, side- walks and low white houses. 'There is absolutely no compulsion at all, but your help with a spot of gardening would be appreciated,' says Nick. Not in his garden, other people's. He has built up a small gardening service over the years which must seem humdrum after tank warfare and charging rhinos, but is a lot better than thumb-twiddling. 'Trouble is, my black assistant gardener Richard died last week after ten years' faithful service, so I'm short of someone to help lift mowers into the old combi, and sweep cuttings after me.' It's just like old times. On arriving in London in 1963 as a penniless freelance writer I got a job, part-time, as assistant gardener in Notting Hill's Ladbroke Square, all seven acres of it, and became a pretty good raker, digger and sweeper. It all comes back to me as I bend my back over the immaculate lawns of Kynsna. I pause briefly to admire the blazing bougainvillaea. 'Bloody weed out here,' says Nick. 'That and the hibiscus. They just grow.' We are already at work by 9 a.m. on the Heads, the posh cliff entrance to the lagoon. Black servants wander up the road to work, staring curiously at uS, exchanging good mornings. A friend of Nick's passes.
'How many "Os" in "loony"?' 'This is the new South Africa you see before you,' says Nick. 'Whites doing manual work.' Hmm,' says the friend. 'It really needs a black overseer to complete the picture.' Job completed, we go home and change because we are going to the Heads again at lunchtime for polite drinks with a friend, to admire the view and her many paintings. While I am in her kitchen getting a beer from the fridge, the kitchen maid says to me: 'I have seen the master somewhere already."Really? Where?' 'Sweeping the side of the road this morn- ing.' She clearly thinks I am a social adventurer of the worst kind. At 9 a.m., a garden sweeper. At 12.30, cadging a drink off her wealthy mistress. The look in her eyes is caustic, as if to say: Don't worry, mate, your secret is safe with me.
It's autumn now in South Africa, so people are putting on their warmer shorts and planting their spring bulbs. Every day they look at the sky and say the weather is going to break, but every day it is blazing hot and we .go to the beach. There are no black people on the beach, but this is not apartheid either; it's after Easter, and must therefore be cold, so there are almost no white people either. Every day the steam train gets in at 11.24 from George and every day it sets off again at 12.50 to go back. The mournful whistle echoes round the lagoon and off the hills. On the train all the whites get into one coach and the blacks into another, but this is not apar- theid either; it's finance. The blacks travel second-class because they need to get cheaply to George; the whites are on their hols and splash out on a first-class treat. Nick has never been on the train before, and never will again, so we go first class and have a picnic on board in the magnifi- cent trundling scenery. 'If you only have clearance to write about the train,' says Nick, 'how are you going to mention anything else in South Africa?' I'll do what Paul Theroux does and pretend it all happened on the train,' I tell him. This is an obscure reference to The Great Railway Bazaar, in which Theroux recounts a long chat he had on the train from Mandalay to Maymyo with an Indian hotel-keeper from Maymyo. In 1987 I stayed at that very same hotel and asked the man's son (Dad had died meanwhile) if Theroux had in- deed met his father on the train. 'No, no, no,' he said. 'He never met him on the train at all. But he had a long talk with my father here, in the middle of that room there, where nobody could hear what he was saying to Mr Theroux. Mr Theroux must have been very persuasive with my father, because my father told him many things he had never told us at all.' I see,' says Nick. `So that's how it's done.'
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