I
was born in 1928, but at no time in my life since then have I ever expected to
be still alive in the equivalent decade, nearly 100 years later. Indeed, it is
only in recent years that I have begun to think of 1928 as a long time ago,
although there have been significant markers from time to time, attesting to the
fact that I was becoming long-lived. For example, although I was only eight at
the time of he 1936 Olympics in Berlin, nevertheless, the image of Jesse Owens
winning the sprints and humiliating
Hitler by doing so has always been a very lively thing in my mind.
I was just an insignificant little
kid in an insignificant litter country, not quite yet reached two million in
population, the youngest of six kids in the insignificant family of a village
carpenter.
And yet, in that, for us, enchanting global event, we produced our own
tiny rebuff to the world’s would-be dictator in the form of the man who won the
1500 metres race, Jack Lovelock, who left all competitors gasping for air behind him, Americans, Europeans, even the
Germans with their vain-glorious dreams of conquest, trailing in the wake of
this slight figure who overnight became hero to at least our two million,
indelibly printed into the fabric of our lives forever.
It is probably the event that started
me off with my lifelong obsession with sport, something I have never been able
to outgrow, even though in my later years the very mention of sports drew upon
me disapproving looks from my friends, as if I was in some way unhinged and
deficient in intelligence. Gunder Haegg? Arne Andersson? Who the hell are you
talking about? Herb Elliott? Peter Snell? Champions from our small corner of
the world who both beat everyone, broke all the records, and retired undefeated? For .god’s sake, would you give it up man,
with the sports!
And yet, when it came down to it, the
arena of sports was not a bad one in which to learn important life lessons:
about the inevitability of sometimes losing, the need to swallow defeat
gracefully and accept triumph modestly, useful stuff to know, learned from an older
brother over the dining room table transformed into a venue for ping-pong,
lessons easily transferable to the broader field of relationships beyond the
family, and work, as the decades flowed by in their inexorable way.
I left not only my family home, but
my home country at the age of 22, keen to take a look at the wider world. I am
not sure I ever expected to stay away for ever, but that is how it has turned
out. I associate countries and regions
with lessons learned. Australia, vast and empty, and yet for all their free and
easy assumptions, a place that seemed to be riven with racism against the
indigenous, and the non-Caucasian world; India, crammed to bursting with people,
people living on the pavements, on the railway stations, in their countless
impoverished villages under pieces of cardboard, tin and cloth, for me enough
exposure already to the grinding cruelty of intense global poverty; Britain,
distastefully divided between classes, marked off by signs such as accent and
dress, as well as by money, power and/or
the lack of these things; and finally Canada, where, by a series of what I can
only describe as accidents, I have ended up, another country where a few occupy
an immense land, much of it useless for habitation, but a country that has
emerged with slow deliberation from national infancy to responsible citizenship
in the world, as a place moderately welcoming to outsiders, in spite of being
preoccupied with trying to maintain its independent essence from the huge
neighbour state that, following the world war, emerged as the greatest power on
earth. Or as the Americans themselves so often describe it, “as the greatest
government, the wealthiest nation, the most advanced society that has ever
existed on the face of this Earth.”
Or, to put it another way, as I have
so often described it myself “as a wonderful
country in a gloriously beautiful landscape, occupied by a shitty
society marked by a pervading inequality
and injustice, in spite of their historical drive for openness and virtue in
all things.”
Well, wot the hell. So much for these
New Year musings. As the cockroach
Archie urged on Mehitabel the cat, “toujours gai, toujours gai.”
“as a wonderful country in a gloriously beautiful landscape, occupied by a shitty society marked by a pervading inequality and injustice, in spite of their historical drive for openness and virtue in all things.” Very apt ... about what I feel myself after having spent most of September and October in the US ... in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia no less. Beautiful, continually watered, verdent country so often let down by the people inhabiting it.
ReplyDelete