As a South African living in a tiny village in the UK, I’m constantly examining the differences in daily life between the two countries, and pondering what effect these have on us psychologically. I grew up reading about Biggles and Douglas Bader, immersing myself in the stories of heroic fighter aces dashing from their deckchairs to their Spitfires & Hurricanes to take to the skies and hand out blood noses to the Jerries. Part of this love comes from my unrequited passion to be a pilot, but I suspect the majority stems from an unchecked admiration for those normal people who were able to behave heroically when circumstances demanded.
One of the by-products of living in Kent is that we are in the heart of Battle of Britain country. The village where my daughter goes to school has the unofficial title of Most Bombed Village in Britain. A short walk from the school is a little aircraft museum that displays pieces of aeroplanes retrieved from farms & fields around the area. One of the particularly moving exhibits is a map of the area including our school run route, in German, as retrieved from a downed Me110 bomber. Read the map carefully, and suddenly it’s real. Suddenly I am the young boy in the Biggles book sitting on the hillside above the village, watching the scores of Dorniers, Heinkels & Messerschmitts bound for London. I feel his elation at the magnificent sound of the V12 Merlins, scrambled from Biggin Hill to intercept Fritz and his mates. And I can start to imagine the terror as he sees a Me109 circle back over what is now Brands Hatch to strafe a train bound for Eynsford. Growing up in South Africa, it was never this real.
I’ve been watching the old TV series The World At War again, and the incredible resolve shown by so many when tested so sternly continues to amaze me. It seems to me that without adversity human nature piles on layers of fat, rendering it an amorphous mass unrecognisable from the magnificence it displays when trimmed back to the core. I’ve just returned from a motorcycle trip through Mpumalanga & Zululand with some mates, and there was something intangible that made it a brilliant few days. Something you never feel in the UK. There’s something about South Africa that just seems so much more alive than other places. In retrospect I recognise that it’s because South Africans have less of the fat that masks human nature. One is never so alive as when one is close to death, the old saying goes. It is only when one is tested that the essence of one’s humanity comes to the fore.
How unfortunate it is though, that our aspiration as a species is the establishment of a state where this testing never needs to exist. Unfortunate, but quite understandable. Why should people not wish for a safe future for their children? You’d think a world with no adversity should be the aggressively pursued end game for all mankind. But at what cost? Many of the Brits of today bear very little resemblance to their grandparents, whose fat was stripped away in the blaze of The Blitz. Today they find themselves whining about irrelevant problems, simply because (as Mr Maslow showed) we all need a certain level of problems to complain about in order to feel comfortable. Most of the world sees the USA as a bunch of sedentary, insular idiots, and I would argue that this perception is of nothing more than a thick layer of fat surrounding the core humanity that must surely still exist beneath. They have no real problems, so the rot sets in. The same argument could be made for the South African politician of your choice, who finds himself surrounded by a comfortable layer of social fat, and an apparent absence of fire.
So, is it possible to live an existence free of major problems without succumbing to this atrophy? Is it possible to have the comfort and security of the First World, while maintaining the raw edge of South Africa? I don’t believe it is. Perhaps the closest we get to this is when build our own adversity and then overcome it, like someone running the Comrades Marathon for the first time. I’m not sure. I just know I’m torn between the fantastic privilege of living in a society untempered by real problems, and the despair of seeing the inevitable fruits of this build onto the core essence of human nature, layer by layer.
