Boks need to moer the English – in English!

MY WIFE is getting concerned about Saturday.

“It won’t be like last year, will it?” she said this week.

“Of course not,” I said reassuringly.

She didn’t look convinced, the way the wife of a werewolf isn’t convinced when he tells her that this full moon it’ll be different, and there’s no need to lock him in the dungeon till it’s over.

“Maybe we shouldn’t watch the game,” she said.

“Now my love,” I said, “you know that’s not an option.”

“My friends are visiting.”

“Don’t worry.”

“It’s just … Fran and Mark are English, so …”

And as she said that I felt a prickle down the nape of my neck, the way I suppose a werewolf feels his hackles rising and his muzzle lengthening and his canines growing as the full moon emerges from behind a cloud.

“It’ll be fine,” I said, looking away to the horizon, trying to keep my voice normal. “It’ll be fine.”

Poor English, poor Afrikaans

Once when I was a very young boy I asked my father: “Are we English?”

He looked at me with an expression I’d never seen before. “No,” he said.

I was disappointed. I’d been reading Enid Blyton books, and England seemed to be a magical, exciting place, where all the kids were brave and handsome and clever and had adventures and picnic baskets and knew how to sail small boats to mysterious islands. None of this was true of the Bluff in Durban, where I’d lived all of my six years to that point, and none of it seemed true of us. Who were we, we English-speaking South Africans? What literature did we have, what traditions, what history, what sense of humour, what community, what belonging? All we were was what we weren’t – we weren’t black, we weren’t coloured or Indian or Afrikaans, we hadn’t done anything to be proud of, we weren’t particularly interesting.

“I wish we were English,” I said.

He jumped to his feet, splenetic, the way I imagine the Times rugby writer Stephen Jones is whenever the Springboks win. “Don’t ever say that again,” he said in a strangled voice.

My father was born in Pretoria but his parents arrived here from England in the 1920s, penniless, just in time for the Great Depression. The 1930s were a rough time for everyone in South Africa, and my dad’s version was being an impoverished English kid in a neighbourhood of impoverished Afrikaans kids. If he wanted to leave the house he had to fist-fight his way out and back again. He didn’t blame the Afrikaans kids – times were what they were, and they were just doing their job. He blamed the other English kids, who never once helped him.

My grandmother on the other side, my mother’s mother, came from a rich family in Constantia, Cape Town. She was born in South Africa and had lived here all her life, but she spoke with a strange imitation of an English accent and she referred to England as “home”. She didn’t approve of my father, and when my mother married him, she disinherited them and refused so much as to receive us in her home.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” my dad said to me, “there is Englishness in our blood, like a fine crack through a fine porcelain bowl. We can’t get rid of it, but we don’t have to give in to it. Vigilance, my boy. It takes lifelong vigilance.”

My father died in 1981, just after the Springbok tour of New Zealand, so I couldn’t watch the 1984 England tour of South Africa with him. I watched on my own, on our Sony Trinitron TV set with fake wood panelling on the sides, sitting in my father’s La-Z-Boy leatherette recliner. My legs weren’t quite long enough to reach the footrest.

Danie from Despatch

There were two tests, and Danie Gerber scored four tries.

I mainly remember two things now: how England’s white jerseys showed their blood better and Danie’s swerve past Dusty Hare down the right to score his first try at Boet Erasmus. It was beautiful; it was violent, even though they never made contact. Danie never broke stride, never slowed or accelerated – he wasn’t a jagged lightning bolt, like Cheslin going past Owen Farrell in 2019, he was a Zambezi shark, he was a Karoo river in flood after the rains. Dusty Hare looked like an old man, like a scarecrow, like a tree stump. To this day he must still wake from dark nightmares in which he’s standing on a midnight plain with something fast and frightening rushing past him. Dusty Hare was the first and last Englishman for whom I ever felt pity.

“It’s not enough to beat England,” my father once said. “You should always feel regret you haven’t beaten them by more.”

We have never lost a game against England when I have been watching. I wasn’t watching in 1998 when England beat us at Twickenham to snap Nick Mallett’s record of 17 consecutive victories. I wasn’t watching in 2002 when they beat us 53-3 and Jannes Labuschagne was sent off without even successfully injuring Jonny Wilkinson. I was young then, and I hadn’t yet fully accepted the burden of my responsibilities: vigilance. Lifelong vigilance.

On the day of the semi-final against England last year, my wife and I were invited to a wedding in a rich part of London.

“I can’t go,” I said. “I have to watch the game.”

“Can’t you record it and watch it later?” she said, which is disappointing, because you think someone knows and understands you and accepts you for who you are, and then they go and say something like that.

Finally, we worked out that the wedding was in the afternoon, and the reception was at some swanky venue in Farringdon, and I’d be able to slip away and watch the game.

I did my recce in the morning and established the location of a pub near the venue. I went to the wedding and kept an eye on the time. But even the most important members of a winning team can have a lapse of concentration; even Pieter-Steph will sometimes miss a tackle. When I checked the kick-off time, somehow I checked the South African broadcast time, and I miscalculated what the time would be in London.

There was an open bar at the wedding, and an open bar is another responsibility I take very seriously, so I was halfway through a brave and stunning solo dance performance to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy – I don’t mean to boast, but everyone cleared a space around me to stare in what I’m telling you was appreciation – when suddenly I realised the error I’d made.

I fled the dancefloor mid-song and ran from the venue and through the wet and miserable streets and burst into the Fox & Anchor, as wild-eyed and furious as the dark north wind. It was already the 58th minute of the game.

Posh English twats sat in a bar ...

There was a row of posh English twats grinning at the TV. The score was 15-6 to England. As I arrived, Kurt-Lee Arendse fielded a kick five metres from our try line and fumbled it forward, and Owen Farrell roared and pumped his fist.

“Big nights like these were made for Owen Farrell,” chortled the English commentator on the TV.

I swore loudly in South African, and the nearest Englishman nudged his twat friends and said loudly: “Bad night to be South African.”

Have you ever heard a row of posh English twats chuckling to themselves? It is a sound that causes any normal man to grow fangs and a wolf’s twitching tail.

I turned to the twats and said, trying very hard and with dignity to sound sober, “Gentlemen, you look very confident, but I too am confident. I am confident that you will lose because you are English, and neither God nor the invisible random collisions and broken clockwork of the universe love the English.”

That was the gist of it, anyway.

We turned our attention back to the screen. The English set the attacking scrum. “If England score here,” oozed the commentator, “they’ll book their tickets for the final.”

When Ox bent Kyle Sinckler in half – sideways, like a bendy straw in a vanilla milkshake – and the Springboks won the penalty, I started yelling. I am not proud of the things I yelled, nor of the fact that I didn’t stop yelling until the final whistle. But I am a little bit proud that when Handré Pollard kicked the final penalty, I climbed onto the bar to complete my solo dance performance of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

“I want you to know,” I explained to the English twats, “that I’m not just happy we won – I’m happy that we beat you.”

It was fortunate that these were posh rugby-watching English twats, and so less inclined to casual violence than their track-suited football-watching brethren, but still, it’s a good thing that round about then my wife tracked me down and rescued me from the Fox & Anchor.

“Stop apologising to them!” I yelled as she wrestled me out of the door. “They deserve all of it and more!”

She tells me that a Scottish fellow patted me approvingly on the shoulder as we left and said: “Yikes, mon, and I thought we didn’t like the English”, but I have no memory of that.

It’s not libel if it’s true

Time passed. Things went back to normal. Until last Monday. Then, out of nowhere, as we were having breakfast, I found myself saying: “Can you imagine a player from any other team going to the ref in the middle of a match and complaining that someone swore at him? Can you picture Jasper Wiese doing that? Or Ardie Savea? Or Peter O’Mahony?”

“Um, no …?”

“If a Springbok did that, I would spontaneously combust with shame.”

“Wait a minute …” she said, slowly realising. “Are the Boks playing England on Saturday?”

“Did Bongi Mbonambi call Tom Curry what Tom Curry claimed Bongi Mbonambi called him? Of course, he did. But it’s not libel if it’s true!”

“Oh no,” she said. “Not again.”

I explained how the English have been calling for the 7-1 split to be banned, how they can’t stop insisting that Springbok success is solely down to dumb muscle and thuggish brawn, even when our front row is the same size as theirs, even when our back three are the combined weight of one of their centres, even when we’re scoring tries praised by poets and conceived of by angels in their flight. Still, they refuse to recognise reality.

“Please don’t do this in front of Fran and Mark.”

“You know where it’s from? 1899! The Boer War!”

“I think it’s called the South African War these days.”

“Their tabloids ran caricatures of the brutish low colonials, uncultured, unrefined, characterised by animal strength and endurance with nothing resembling wit or smarts or strategy. That’s still the way they think. There’s no talking with these people. You can’t reason with them. All we can do is beat them, over and over again until it sinks in. As hulle nie wil luister nie, dan moet hulle voel.”

She sighed, the way the wife of a werewolf sighs and knows there’s nothing for it but to wait till the fever has passed.

“You do remember,” she said tiredly, “that I’m an English citizen.”

“I know,” I said. “And I love you dearly, and as long as the Boks keep winning, that will never be an issue.”

♦ VWB ♦

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