Last year’s coronation of the British Queen called forth astonishing “royalist” effusions and demonstrations not only in Britain but in very republican America. No jarring note was allowed to intrude into the public chorus of reverence and piety. Had the spirit of irreverence and dissent, one wondered, completely departed? Perhaps not, to judge by Dan Jacobson’s recollections of a visit of the late George VI and the royal family to South Africa.

_____________

I have been reading an article—one of a series—by Miss Rebecca West on the Coronation. The article appeared in the Rand Daily Mail of Johannesburg, and in it I read about the London crowds who had gathered to look at the decorations and wait for the ceremony to take place. I read that the people came to Buckingham Palace because, “. . . in a world spoiled by war the Queen proves that not all is spoiled; there is still youth, still loveliness, still gaiety, still goodness. Since she is the emblem of our State, these people hope that now our national life will burst into flower with all these attributes.” And I wondered if Miss West was being accurate; if crowds in England are so very much different from crowds in South Africa. Perhaps they are—if so, this article can be considered a kind of anthropological report on the behavior of white South Africans; if not, its interest may be more general, and it may serve as a corrective to the kind of report from England that fills the newspapers whenever the royal family makes a major excursion. One can take only so much of it: sooner or later one has to compare these reports with one’s own memories of a royal occasion.

_____________

I have seen royalty only once, in Johannesburg. The royal visit was the most ballyhooed event ever that I can remember in this country. The royal family was dinned into us from every newspaper, every cinema, every wireless broadcast, every shop window, every decoration hung across every street. The royal family was here; the royal family was there; the royal family did this; the royal family did that. They had been in South Africa for weeks before they arrived in Johannesburg, and by that time hysteria was inescapable. A female announcer of the South African Broadcasting Corporation burst into tears over the air when the royal family came round her corner; a reporter on one of the dailies claimed that he had been stopped by “an ordinary man in the street” in one of the Reef mining towns, who had exclaimed: “What a golden eagle among men is the King!” The reader can imagine the rest of what went on; or can always look up a newspaper describing the Coronation.

And at last, one rather cloudy day, the royal family came to beflagged, ecstatic Johannesburg. I saw them in the morning, whizzing up Eloff Street in an open car, with outriders on motorcycles, and a ripple of applause coming from the people, fading before it had begun because the car was gone so quickly. It was followed by a succession of big American cars with nameless people in them, nothing to cheer, and all moving at a breathtaking pace. The policemen relaxed, an officer took his hand away from his cap, and the people turned to one another with reluctant, drawn faces, like sleepers awakened from a dream. As though waking, the crowd began to move, people began picking up their folding chairs, and children ran across the street where the cars had passed, and the policemen let them. The two rows of people on either side of the street broke up, wavered, walked towards the station or the tram termini, carrying the little flags they had hardly had time to wave. Now they were talking to one another, and it was all over, and the street was moving. It had been so queer. I do not know what the people had been expecting, for I had not been among them before the convoy of cars had come past, and had, indeed, been taken by surprise by the tired, known faces rushing past, and the quick too-late ripple, succeeded for a moment by languor, and then the waking. The people dispersed with no exaltation or disappointment: they were strange to see at that moment, as though one were in a thousand bedrooms as day returned and the sleepers reluctantly and inevitably admitted the light between their lids.

_____________

In the evening the emotions were different, and I was among them, for I was sitting on one of the stands that had been erected along Commissioner Street. There were thousands of people, and this time, with night, with darkness, with the thousands of colored lights, the people were awake and wild. All over Johannesburg there were huge throngs of people, walking, yelling; the bars were full and noisy, and as one does so often in Johannesburg, one caught the feel of violence in the dark streets with their dark buildings towering tall on either side. The liveliness of the streets that are usually deserted except for cars after nightfall had something terrifying about it: the city was awake and alive, bristling like an animal. And the passion that filled the people, that kept them awake and in the streets, that drove them to walk up and down and in and out of bars and on to the stands, and wait on street corners, was elemental and powerful. It was curiosity.

I have never known anything like it. There was a huge animal passion of curiosity among the people, that was like a hunger, and was later to become a rage. They walked and waited and talked, with their souls quivering open as though something would be shown to them that night without which they could not live. It seemed to be some final, lasting knowledge that they were seeking; something that would satisfy them forever. And all the night was tedious and tense, until the knowledge would be given to them. Now they had to wait among these buildings, and then they would see.

We waited. The policemen forbade people to cross Commissioner Street, and we waited. We settled down and waited, and then became restive again. Someone threw some orange peel at a policeman, and he grew angry and drew his baton. He said he would kill the person who did it. But the crowd told him to be quiet. They called him Major, and Colonel, and even, in a flight of fancy, Field-Marshal Smuts. And the young constable put his baton away and muttered to himself. Then a new sport began. People started slipping across the road, and the policemen would try to stop them. Somebody would wait until all the policemen on a particular stretch of road were busy chasing someone else, and then he would dash across, a small hurrying figure running across the dark tar, with the policemen after him. If he did manage to get across, a cheer went up from the crowd; if he didn’t, a groan of commiseration. People called to the police, distracting their attention to help others get across. It was all quite good-humored, but eventually one of the policemen hit one of the people he caught, and the game stopped in anger.

_____________

But we soon forgot the man led away with blood coming from his forehead. We were waiting for the two princesses to go to a ball, and now there were young couples walking past us, the men wearing evening suits and the girls in long dresses. So we cheered them, but mockingly, for white South Africans are democrats among themselves, and do not readily admit anyone else’s right to be cheered just like that, unless he is a politician or a rugby player. The people we cheered were not flattered, and also, being white South Africans too, most of them were extremely embarrassed, not being used to that sort of thing, being unable to accept it. When we saw that, we cheered louder of course; and made rude remarks about the girls, and commented on the thinness of their dresses. “Sis! “ a woman next to me exclaimed, using our national emphatic expression of disgust. “These people have got no respect.” She must have been one of nature’s Englishwomen, for the rest of us had no respect at all, and no shame at not having any.

But all this, we knew, was preparatory, and everyone was relieved when at last the street was cleared and the policemen came to attention. “When they coming, General Smuts?” someone asked the policeman nearest to us. He said: “Two minutes time,” and now we settled down in silence. We hunched, waiting for their coming. Hardly anyone spoke, and we waited in the dark street. Then—a bright glow of car headlights, and a shout from the people farther down the road, the shout coming nearer, not yet really loud, and then it was upon us—a glimpse, a vision of pale glittering faces in a black car that was past us, again, before we could really shout, before we could really do anything. And now it was gone. There was nothing now, except for empty Commissioner Street, the receding tail light of a motor car.

Nothing had been given us. As in the morning, there was a momentary silence, a kind of numbness. Then the animal awoke—not begrudgingly, as in the morning, but with a full throat. A roar went up from the crowd, a huge animal yell that rang in the streets. All along the road people were shouting, no words, no statement, just a cheated roar. No answer had been given to them. And the yell died into silence as suddenly as it started.

_____________

At this point my brother and I started a stampede. I don’t know why we did it, to this very day, but it was something that I would probably do again if I were to get a chance. Perhaps we were all a little bit mad that night, and I do think the stampede would have started anyway: all we did was make it wilder and more noisy than it otherwise might have been. My brother slid off the stand and gave a frantic scream, and began running down the road, past the Kensington tram terminus and towards the City Hall. I did the same. We both screamed and ran, but for a few paces only. We stopped, unable to go on. We were laughing too much to go on running. For now the whole mob was doing what we had been doing: they were running past us towards the City Hall, all screaming at the tops of their voices, and running as though life depended on what they were doing. They screamed and ran, coming from both sides of Commissioner Street. The police were unable to stop them. Jackets and dresses were flying loose, hundreds of feet were beating on the pavement, hundreds of voices were screaming at the night, at nothing. A woman fell, and nobody stopped to pick her up. They jumped over her, or side-stepped to get away from what was just an obstruction in their path and not a crying woman on the pavement. In guilt, we helped to pick her up, and no sooner was she on her feet than she jerked away from us and ran, screaming like all the others.

The princesses apparently had entered the City Hall through the door facing the Cenotaph, for our mob ran straight into another huge crowd gathered there. In the blaze of floodlights, the mobs of people were pushing and screaming and waving their hands. There was nothing to wave at, for the princesses had already gone inside. Policemen with linked arms were pushing the people away from the doors. The people were possessed; in a rage, a frenzy, their passion unabated. Something had to be given to them—glimpses of two shining girls could not slake this thirst. So their passion focused itself on the nearest thing to hand, though that was a neutral enough thing: the car the princesses had arrived in. The car became their target. To see the car, to touch, to hold it, to clasp it, to destroy it perhaps. But no, they did not want to destroy it. The pain of their longing was almost unbearable, to judge by their eagerness to do what was in itself insignificant. They had to touch the car. They pushed and fought with one another, driving forward in surges towards the car. A woman next to me was carrying a baby in her arms, but she too was pushing, and the child’s face was smothered in her sleeve. She screamed at me in Afrikaans, “Eina! You are pushing like a kaffir!” and for one moment I remembered reading in one of the papers about the almost miraculous spirit of good will between the races that had been spread throughout the country by the royal visit. Miraculous, apparently, was the word. But that was lost, the woman, her words, the baby, as the crowd again gave a heave and we were all carried forward, this time right against the backs of the policemen who, with linked arms, were shoving us away from the car as determinedly as we were shoving towards it. The night was pandemonium, bedlam, and all in a blaze of light that made every white face shine as though transfigured, paradisal, except for the expressions the faces wore, the twisted mouths, the open mouths, the eyes lit by passion, the muscles drawn tight across cheekbones, the lifting lips, illumined. The people abandoned themselves to a passion I can no longer name. The car was there: they saw it, they drove towards it, some of them touched it; and still the passion was unfulfilled, their faces unrelaxed. And the police shoved them back, shoved them back, until a passage was cleared and the car drove away, though a thousand voices called after it in a gasp, like this, “Ah!” and again, as the car turned a corner, “Ah!” from the back of a thousand throats.

_____________

I had had enough by this time, and after some searching and pushing I managed to get hold of my brother. We linked arms and made our way through the bodies and feet and hands and handbags, and finally got out of the pressure of the crowd, to the side of the City Hall. Few people seemed to be leaving: most of the crowd was still heaving about immediately around where the princesses’ car had been. God knows what they were looking for now, on what new point they hoped to focus their passion.

The last thing I remember that evening before leaving the crowd was a small, English-speaking South African, in a neat brown suit and shirtcuffs neat at his wrists, speaking to himself, or possibly to others, in hope of whipping them into action that he himself was afraid to take. He was pointing at a group of Indian youths on the outskirts of the crowd, and his face bore that pale, fanatical look, self-absorbed, as though listening to God within himself, that white South Africans often wear when they are planning violence on those with darker skins than their own. “Look at them,” he was saying. “Look at them. Filthy—coolies, coming to look at the King and Queen, as if they were white men. Look at them—cheeky coolies. Let’s do something.” His voice broke. “For God’s sake, let’s do something.” Now his mouth was trembling. I knew the trembling would soon spread to his hands, his body. He stared at the Indians: he also was committing himself to a passion, perhaps a related one to that which still sent the crowds in surges across the road, the crowds that, as the next morning’s papers put it, had gathered to show their love to the princesses.

_____________

The only footnote I can add is that some months later the university which I was attending at that time held a Rag through the streets of the city. One of the floats was an act of lèse-majesté so blatant that I could scarcely believe my eyes. The float showed four people on a motor car, two of them riding on the luggage carrier at the back, and all of them grotesquely made up, all of them ogling the crowd, blowing kisses and waving bottles, and all of them completely and disgustingly drunk, including the two repulsive male students on the back dressed up as girls. It was by far the most successful float in the procession, and it was greeted with gales of laughter by the same crowds that had gathered in the streets at the time of the royal visit. The people laughed and pointed, and gave yell after yell of applause. I have heard that sort of spontaneous good-humored jeer go up from a group of people in one other place, and that was in a cinema in Rehovoth, Israel, where an audience composed mostly of refugees from the Christian world greeted with a clamor of catcalls and laughter a particularly syrupy Hollywood shot of a soldier crossing himself. Obviously, the Israelis were getting some of their own back.

_____________