Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 7

Over Sea, Under Stone redux

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my second time of reading, and if anything I liked it even more on the second reading than on the first, so it still gets 5 stars, and much of what I said in my review of an earlier edition also applies to this one, apart from the comments on the illustrations, since this edition is not illustrated.

I was prompted to reread it on reading the announcement of a course on it at Signum University in September 2023, which I can't afford to participate in, but looks interesting nevertheless.

I first heard of this book, or rather of The Dark is Rising series, of which it is the first part,  when a number of readers of my children's books (listed in the sidebar) compared them with that series, and that made me keen to read them, but I failed to find any copies in either libraries or bookshops. Eventually I ordered the first two from Amazon, but before they arrived I found a copy of Over Sea, Under Stone in our local library and so read that one first. Having read it and liked it, I also liked the comparison readers had made with my books, especially as other readers had compared my books with Enid Blyton's Famous Five, a comparison I liked less.

When re-reading a book, one has more time to pay attention to smaller details, perhaps influenced by what other people tell you. Even on my first reading I was influenced by online comments that the language was old fashioned, and I commented on that in my review after my first reading. 

This time round, I was influenced by discussions about advice given to authors to avoid adverbs. There seems to be, at least among some authors of advice-to-writers books, an absolute taboo on adverbs. I noticed that Susan Cooper uses adverbs quite a lot, even the dreaded "Tom Swifties" that are used to qualify "said". But I'm pretty sure that I would not have noticed if I had not been consciously looking for them. I agree that some writers use too many adverbs, or use then inappropriately, but I don't think Susan Cooper is among them. When I was looking out for them, she seemed to use them well, and there was nothing that struck me as wrong about them. And when I wasn't looking out for them, I didn't notice them.

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Fecund fertility in the Appalachian mountains

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord."

A book about sex and death, seen through the eyes of of three characters in a fecund fertile summer in a small farming community in the Appalachian Mountains of the USA, and the adjacent forest reserve.

Deanna Wolfe is a forest warden, concerned about predators, and develops a relationship with a man whose main aim is to hunt predators. Lusa Landowski is a young widow, who has inherited her husband's farm after he was killed in a motor accident, and feels the burden of her sisters-in-law's envy. Garnett Walker is a farmer and a widower, but old, and forever quarreling with his neighbour for allowing weeds from her property to infest his.

All three are concerned about and have studied sex and reproduction, but in species other than their own. Deanna is concerned about the reproduction of predators, and especially of coyotes, which are new to the area. Lusa is an entomologist, and has studied the sex life of moths. Garnett is concerned about the American chestnut trees, virtually extinct from an imported disease, and is trying to breed a new variety that will be resistant to the disease. But their own efforts to reproduce have been unsuccessful for various reasons. Over the summer, however, their lives gradually become intertwined, and many changes are evident in their attitudes and relationships.

I found the characters interesting. As I often find with Barbara Kingsolver's books, the characters a quite difficult to relate to at first, but then one becomes absorbed, and wants to learn about their fate, and, in the case of this book, one also learns quite a lot about the ecology of the area, and the environmental effects of different farming methods.

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Gods of Power - allegedly

Gods of Power by Philip M. Steyne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is quite extraordinary. The author presents a kind of Platonic ideal of animism, as he sees it, and then criticises it from the point of view of "biblical Christianity". As I read it I kept reminding myself of the saying, "To the person whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so, for this author, everything looks like animism.

There is page after page about what "animist man" believes and does, because that is that the author tells us "animist man" believes and does. One page of vague generalisations follows another, often quite contradictory. "Animist man" we are told feels powerless in a universe where everything is controlled by powerful spirits, but with the right rites "animist man" can control and manipulate these spirits and become omnipotent. So the picture emerges of "animist man" as simultaneously powerless and omnipotent.

The main problem with such an approach is that "animism" appears as a purely external construct. The ubiquitous "animist man" is never asked for his opinion of what his beliefs and practices are, and there aren't even any empirical examples. The "Gods of Power" of the title is an abstraction, because none of the gods referred to is named or described.

"Animism" is a term used by anthropologist Edward Tyler (1832-1917) to describe and explain the beliefs of some people, who were not raised in the culture of Western modernity, that non-human life forms, such as animals and plants, and even objects regarded as inanimate by Western man, such as rocks, mountains and rivers, had their own personality or soul. Since it is an attempt to interpret one kind of culture in terms of another, such attempted interpretations often tell us as much or more about the interpreting culture than about the one ostensibly being interpreted. 

Steyne, however, tells us nothing of this, but instead asserts, "Animism's chief presupposition is the sovereignty of man." This is almost diametrically opposed to Tyler's point, which was that animism's chief presupposition is that humanity is merely one life-form among many, and that other life forms have their own purposes which might not necessarily coincide with human ones.

There are lots of references and the book has a fairly comprehensive bibliography; one would only have hoped that the author had made better use of it.

I said at the beginning that this was an extraordinary book. Most of it is extraordinarily bad, in that one will learn very little about animism or a Christian evaluation of it from its sweeping over-generalisations, and even less about gods of power. The first 14 chapters range from mediocre to very bad. Chapter 15 is somewhat better, but of questionable relevance. The final chapter, however, is quite extraordinarily good, and contains some excellent missiological advice, whether one is evangelising animists or not.

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Well, that's my review though why anyone should now be interested in a review of a 30-year-old book I'm not sure. But for anyone interested (and if you've read this far you might be), here are some more personal thoughts on and inspired by the book. 

I spotted this book on the library shelf and took it out because I was attracted by the title, Gods of Power. I was attracted by the title because I'm exploring a theme, or a trope, in a novel I'm writing. Yes, I am a missiologist, and that no doubt influences my fiction writing when it touches upon missiological topics, as in this case.

The theme that I'm writing about in my novel is what happens to gods of people when they lose their power? Neil Gaiman wrote on a similar theme in his American Gods, about what happens to gods when their worshippers are transported to a new environment. My theme is somewhat different, though -- it's more what happens to the gods of vanished empires who have lost their worshippers. Will they go searching for new sources of power in other lands?

Unlike Steyne, I don't think all such deities are "animist", or that they were worshipped by "animist man". Several religions in the ancient Near East had notions of divine kingship, where a god personified the power of the state, and was linked to the king. Regarding rocks, mountains and rivers as personalities, or at least as occupied by spirits, is animist, but seeing abstract entities, like the state, in the same way, it seems to me, falls outside the definition of animism. So Steyne's labelling them all as animist, without giving any specific instances, was of little use to me. So his book didn't suit my purpose, but does that mean that my reaction to it is just sour grapes? I don't think so. I think that if he had stuck to the generally accepted understanding of animism and based it more on empirical evidence of actual animist beliefs and practices to justify his description and labelling, it would have been a better an more useful book generally.

And in the mean time I'm still looking for stories of gods who have lost their power because no one worships them any more.

Vampire stories: the good, the bad, and the mediocre

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'd heard a lot about Twilight, but most of what I had heard was not good, and I borrowed a copy to see what it was like. It's about a group of vampires attending an American high school, and one of the other pupils, Bella Swan, gets a crush on one of them.

I found the first three-quarters of the book very slow paced. It was full of teenage angst and gut reactions to Edward Carlisle, the vampire. It was slightly better than the vampire books of Anne Rice, but not much. It seemed to take the "show, don't tell" advice given to authors to ridiculous lengths, and just made the book tedious. The pace speeded up a bit towards the end, which is why I gave it three stars rather than two. 

It also had some weirdnesses that had nothing to do with vampires. Some distances were given in miles, others in meters [sic]. I didn't expect American high school kids to think of distances in meters, or even metres. Do they?

If you'd asked me 15 years ago, I would have said I liked vampire stories, but now I would say I like some and hate others, and some are just "meh!". This was one of the meh! ones. . For more on that, see At last -- a good vampire story



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St Boniface of Crediton, church history, and missiology

Today (June 5) is the feast of St Boniface of Crediton, Apostle of Germany. 

As a missiologist, I've always found him interesting, and one of the most interesting missiologial things about him is that most missiologists pay little attention to him, and quite a lot of them are perhaps not even aware that he existed. 

He was born in Crediton in Devon in England about AD 680, and died a martyr's death in Frisia about 754. His original name was Wynfrith and he became a Benedictine monk. He went on a missionary journey to Frisia but found that no one was interested in his message there and the King opposed the Christian message.

He then travelled to Rome, and got the support  of the Roman Pope to reorganise and beef up the infant German church (which had been established by earlier rather haphazard Irish missionaries) and get it more active in mission. He did this with considerable success in Thuringia, Bavaria and Hesse. The Roman Pope Gregory II, on getting news of this summoned him to Rome and gave him more enthusiastic support. 

Boniface then returned to Germany, and the Hessian Christians, we are told, approached him with a problem. Some were pure in their faith, but others still retained practices that the purer ones thought were not compatible with the Christian faith, such as divination using the entrails of sacrificed animals, or from the flight of birds, and engaging in incantations and sacrifices. They urged Boniface to cut down a large oak tree that was much revered by pagans, and as he began to do so, amid the angry mutterings of the pagan spectators, a "blast from above" felled the tree without any human help, and we are told that most of the pagan spectators were so impressed that they converted on the spot. Boniface himself, however, in a report to Pope Gregory II, said that this account was exaggerated.

Boniface went on to reform the Frankish Church, and later became Archbishop of Mainz. Perhaps he found that too dull, and felt that he wasn't cut out to be an administrator, so he resigned and went back to being an active missionary again, on the scene of his earlier unsuccessful mission to the Frisians. He was reading the scriptures to a group of new Christians when a group of pagans attacked and killed him.

The treatment of Boniface by church historians and missiologists

My daughter, Julia Bridget Hayes, has painted an ikon of St Boniface, and he is remembered in the Orthodox Church as well as in the Western Church, though not perhaps as well as he might be, but the different treatment by church historians and missiologists is something else. 

I had done a BA degree at the University of Natal, majoring in Biblical Studies and Theology, with a couple of years of secular history as well. Later I did a BTh degree at Unisa, majoring in Church History and Missiology, which I found more interesting. The church historians made quite a big thing of Boniface, and went into some detail, and I wrote an assignment on him. 

Some time later I mentioned him in a missiology assignment. I thought it was perhaps significant that Boniface was English, and that the English had migrated to Britain from Germany over the preceding 200 years, and their kingdoms in southern Britain eventually amalgamated to form England. 

Boniface therefore went to the land that the English had originally come from, and so the language and culture of the people would not be entirely alien to him. We can still read and understand the English of the 1820s now, and so Boniface would hot have had any more difficulty in making himself understood than a US evangelist in the UK would today. He might annoy people with his message and some of his new-fangled cultural ideas, but he would be understood. 

I mentioned this in a missiology essay on cross cultural mission, and my professor, David Bosch, was quite astounded. It was clear that such a thing had never occurred to him before. He had no doubt heard of St Boniface, but obviously had never thought of him as missiologically significant. 

I began wondering about church historians and missiologists living in separate silos, each being unaware of the others were doing. The church historians found Boniface tremendously important, but not for his missionary work or his missionary methods. No, what they found important was not what he did in Germany, but the fact that he went to Rome. The significant thing about this for church history was that it marked a stage in the growing influence and power of the Pope of Rome, and it was therefore a stage in the development of the papacy.

But as a missiologist I thought there were other things worth noticing. The wandering Irish missionaries who had preceded Boniface were travelling evangelists, perhaps like the tent evangelists of the 20th century; they may have made converts, but they did not plant functioning churches. Boniface was a church-planting missionary, and one of his priorities was to establish Benedictine monasteries ans centres of Christian life and growth. He was so good at this that the Roman Pope asked him to reorganise the whole Frankish Church.

And one more thing worth remembering is that it was monastic missionaries who took the Christian message throughout Europe, and the tool for the evangelisation of Europe was forged in Africa, where Christian monasticism first developed. Long before Europeans evangelised Africa, African Christians created the tools that evangelised Europe.

Rites & Ceremonies: The Coronation of King Charles III

I watched the coronation of King Charles III on TV, I was interested in it primarily as ritual, a liturgical spectacle. I wanted to see what kind of theological understanding of kingship, rulership and authority it expressed. On the whole I was rather favourably impressed.

On the other hand someone who is a Tolkien scholar, commented on Twitter

I am forced to conclude that no fantasy author has ever conjured up a more ostentatiously outlandish ritual than a real-world British coronation.

I found that rather strange. I somehow think Tolkien would have approved of the rite.

Christian theology, like Jewish theology before it, has been rather suspicious of kings. When the people of Israel told Samuel they wanted a king, he was unhappy about it. If Israel was God's people, they didn't need an earthly king. But God was prepared to compromise. Let them have a king, but tell them they should not be surprised if the king introduces things like taxes and military conscription. For the surrounding nations kings were a part of their religion. They had a mystique of political power, and saw it as divine, and therefore those who held such power were, at the very least, semi-divine. Kings were very much a pagan thing.

When Christianity got going the Roman empire was one of the most powerful the world had ever seen, and the emperor cult was also a political loyalty test. Christians, however, reinterpreted the principalities and powers that the Romans and others worshipped. As the lesson read at the Coronation service pointed out (read by the Hindu prime minister -- I wonder what he made of it) the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities, were not independent and autonomous powers: they were creatures, created by the creator God, who made all things, whether visible (like the flesh and blood bodies of kings and emperors) and invisible (like their power and authority).

When Christians became emperors of Rome, or Roman emperors became Christian, there was a conflict of interest. The pagan idea of a divine emperor clashed with the Christian notion of a creator God who was "Almighty", YHWH Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, the ruler of the powers. In the later Roman Empire (the so-called "Byzantine" empire) the ideal of a Christian emperor developed -- of a ruler who was to make the earthly kingdom as much like the heavenly kingdom as possible, ruled not for the benefit of the rulers, but of the ruled, to establish justice and mercy. The earthly empire was to be an ikon of the heavenly kingdom. 

Most of the flesh and blood emperors and empresses failed, of course, but the ideal was there. And this notion that political power was not absolute came out quite strongly in the coronation ceremony of King Charles III. The king was responsible to God and not for him, he was responsible for establishing justice and mercy in the land. The theme of justice and mercy was repeated again and again; the only jarring legalistic note came when he had to promise to maintain the establishment of the Protestant faith by law.

That particular feature is described in the "Liturgy" blog as "an excellent example of Anglicanism as protestant software running on catholic hardware" and

But in this, actions (as in liturgy generally) speak louder than words. The coronation procession was led by a cross. Two shards of wood given by Pope Francis, shards that the Vatican says are from the “True Cross” on which Jesus Christ was crucified, had been incorporated into this new processional cross.

Mitred bishops, indistinguishable in attire from Roman Catholic bishops, were front and centre. The chrism oil, central to the coronation rite, was made from olives of the Mount of Olives at the Monastery of the Ascension, and the Monastery of Mary Magdalene [The Monastery of Mary Magdalene is the burial place of Charle’s grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece]. It was pressed in Bethlehem. This chrism was consecrated in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where Jesus died and rose again). It was consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos III, and the Anglican archbishop in Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum.

Things strike people in different ways. We see what we want to see. The symbolism of the cross in the ceremony, for example. To some the symbol of the cross above the orb symbolises Christianity as a conquering imperialist religion, embedded in colonialism, going out to conquer the world. But in the context of the coronation rite as a whole, it appeared to me in its true light, that Christian kings (as the rite assumed Charles is) are to rule in the spirit of Jesus as he explained to James and John: The rulers of the nations lord it over them, but it is not to be so among you. Christians often get it wrong, and invert this, falling back into the way of the world (if you want to see just how wrong Christians can get it, there's a good example here: Beware the Christian Prince).

As another Anglican hymn puts it:

Conquering kings their titles take
from the lands they captive make
Jesus, by a nobler deed
from the thousands he has freed

but for more on that, see here: The Church as the Liberated Zone.

The Island by Victoria Hislop -- book review

The Island by Victoria Hislop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is really about two islands, the bigger island of Crete, and the small island of Spinalonga, just off its north-eastern coast, which, in the time that the story opens, is used as a leper colony. It is also a book about family history, especially of two families that live on the coast of Crete opposite Spinalonga. Giorgias, the paterfamilias of the Petrakis family, is a kind of go-between -- he operates the ferry between Plaka, the village on the Cretan shore, and the lepers' island.

The book is full of description: description of Cretan life, society and customs, description of leprosy and its effects, physical, psychological and social. Where it describes things I know about, it seems pretty accurate, so I assume that the accuracy extends to things that I didn't know about before reading it. It seems to me that part of the purpose of the book was to describe these things, and inform the reader about them. The problem I found with the book, though, is that the description tended to dominate the story, so that the story became a kind of embellishment to the description, rather than the description being a setting for the story. In some places, therefore, the story becomes unconvincing, and the plot seems contrived. When things seem to be going well for the characters, and it seems they are all going to live happily ever after, disaster has to strike, and just when everyone starts to have a good time, something must go wrong. A kind of diabolus ex machina, as it were.

The story covers four generations of the families, and begins when Alexis Fielding, of the youngest generation, goes from London to Crete with her boyfriend, whose unattractiveness is becoming more and more evident to her. She decides to visit her mother's home village at the other end of the island, and, encouraged by her mother, visits her grandmother's best friend, who tells her the family saga, which takes up most of the book. In the family story, each generation has kept secrets from the next, for reasons that are never adequately explained. The symptoms and treatment of leprosy are explained in some detail, but the symptoms and secrets of the family malaise are not.

I first learned about leprosy at school; being a church school we had evangelistic meetings on Sunday evenings with invited speakers, and one of the regular speakers, who spoke about once a year, was Mr Ford of the Mission to Lepers, which later changed its name to the Leprosy Mission -- so I was interested to see that The Island was not at all squeamish about using terms like "lepers" rather than some euphemism like "people living with leprosy". Mr Ford told us about the (then fairly recent) discovery of a cure for leprosy, and distributed little plastic money boxes to collect money for the lepers, labelled "SOS", which stood for send over sufones -- the drugs used to treat leprosy. Though the drugs were effective, they were expensive, and many poor people could not afford them. Much of this information is given in the book, and in that way it reads a bit like a documentary.

Other things that seemed to be fairly accurately described were the rites and ceremonies of the Orthodox Church, and the place they seemed to hold in the life of the people and in community life generally. 

It was from such things that it seemed to me that the information given in the story was generally accurate. It was just that the documentary side and the story side did not seem to be very well integrated, which is why I gave it four stars rather than five.



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What is Extremism?

The use of terms like "extremism" and "extremist" seems to be increasing, but frequency of use seems to be inversely proportional to clarity of meaning.

Most people who use the terms frequently seem to think extremism is a bad thing, but they rarely say what it is that they are denouncing as bad.

I assume, since the opposite of extremism is moderation, middle-of-the road, mediocrity or sitting-on-the-fence, that people who denounce extremism favour vagueness, and not holding strong opinions about anything. One gets the impression that the role model for anti-extremists is Wither, the deputy-director of N.I.C.E. -- the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments in C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.

It is the custom of some Christian bishops to sign their official correspondence with a self-designation like "the humble mediocrity", or words to that effect, and this might give the impression that the Christian faith is anti-extremist, until one reads the words in the Revelation of St John the Divine:

And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

Whatever the Church of Laodicaea was back then, it certainly could not be accused of extremism, but its lack of extremism brought not praise, but denunciation. And people like Christian saints seem to have bee characterised by extremism. Most of us mediocrities admire them, but do not really seek to emulate them. That would be over-the-top. The safest position is a moderate disapproval of evil, and a moderate approval of good, but nothing extreme, you understand. 

Being extremist is, in fact, neither intrinsically good not intrinsically bad. It is not being it extreme that is good or bad, but rather what you are being extreme about.

Extremism and extremist are weasel words. Avoid using them, and be wary of people who use them too much. Those who are extremely anti-extremist are themselves being extremist.

Life Off the Grid -- then and now

We were off the grid for 42 hours this week  It was quite scary.

On Monday morning I woke up early, as I often do. It was dark, and there was no electricity. Nothing unusual, I was prepared for that, it was one of Eskom's scheduled load-shedding periods, so I booted up my laptop, lit a candle and worked for a couple of hours. Some time between 4:00 and 4:30 am the power should come on and charge up my laptop, and I'd copy my work to a USB flash drive, boot up my desktop computer and continue working there. Only by 4:30 the power had not come on again. and my laptop began beeping that its battery was getting low. There must be a fault in the power supply, so at 4:34 I sent an SMS to the municipal Electricity Department to report it. 

Usually when one sends such an SMS to the Electricity Department a reply comes back in a couple of minutes saying "Your reference number for the power failure at (your address) is xxxx", but this time it didn't. That usually means that the power failure is widespread and the system is jammed with lots of such messages. 

At about 7 am our son Simon got up, and said the power had gone off at about 9:00 pm on Sunday evening -- Western Easter Sunday. That might mean that a lot of the staff of the Electricity Department might have gone off for the long weekend so repairs might take a bit longer. T thought I'd better go on to Facebook and warn family, friends and acquaintances that I might not be replying to email for a while, so I switched on mobile data on my phone and tried to get on to Facebook. "Connect to a network" it tells me. Oops, that must mean that the standby batteries  in the cell phone towers have run down (perhaps with all those SMSs reporting the power failure). 

My wife Val went to the shop to buy bread. Because of load shedding they have generators, and perhaps they use gas for baking the bread, so they had bread, but cash only. Their card machines won't connect to the bank, and no one uses those old zip-zap card thingies any more. It seems like we're well and truly off the grid. Our other son has Whatsapp on his phone and had managed to connect to the neighbourhood watch group, where someone had heard that some pylons had blown down in a storm on Sunday night.

We went to the Alkantrant library to renew our books -- we used to be able to do it by email. On the way we tried to charge our phones with a USB cord plugged into the cigarette lighter (does anyone actually light cigarettes in cars any more?)  The robot was working in Stanza Bopape Street, and the lights were on in the library, so it was only to the north of that that the power was off. The librarian said that, though the lights were on, the library computer was down because the server was in the area where the power was off. She also told us that the pylons that had blown down in the storm on Sunday night were on the highway between Simon Vermooten and Solomon Mahlangu Roads, and that the power had been off in Mamelodi where she lived too. 

We drove out along the highway to see the scene, and see the progress, if any, on repairs. There were a few vehicles at the side of the road, and in a gap in the bush I caught a quick glimpse of a fallen  pylon, but no sign of progress on repairing them. It looked like it might not be a matter of days, but more like weeks, or even months, before it could be repaired. 

We went to The Grove shopping mall, and while Val was inside she left the car engine running to carry on charging the phones, and I took advantage of the signal to put a message on Facebook that we might be incommunicado for an indefinite period. We got a newspaper at another shop, and there was report on what had happened. About six pylons, weakened by the depredations of metal thieves, had blown over in a storm on Sunday night, The mayor was quoted as saying that the public would be kept informed about when the power was likely to be restored, though how that information was to reach those most affected, he did not say.

So all the things that we have become dependent on that rely on electricity are suddenly no longer there, indefinitely. No phones -- cell phones won't connect, and even if they did, the batteries would soon be flat. The landline won't work -- since it was converted from copper to optical fibre it needs electricity for the ONT. Get a UPS, they say, but does a UPS last for 42 hours? We'll be scared to go out because the burglar alarm battery will be flat. You can't draw cash from an ATM, so you can't buy anything at the shop, no card, and no cash either. It's a daunting prospect. 

Yet in my youth, between the ages of 8 and 12, I lived off the grid for more than four years, and survived.

We lived on a smallholding in  Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg/ The municipal boundary ran along George Avenue, Sandringham. South of George Avenue was Sandringham, which got municipal electricity, north of it was Sunningdale, which did not. We'd have to ask Escom, which had no plans to supply the area for several years to come. The house had a 32V DC system, driven by a petrol generator, with a bunch of car batteries, but it soon stopped working. So we used paraffin lamps for light -- ordinary ones with wicks for bedrooms and bathrooms, Coleman lamps with mantles for the kitchen, dining room and sitting room. For music we had a wind-up gramophone that played 78 rpm records. There was no telephone. We applied for one at the post office, but their waiting list was four years long, and, like Escom, they didn't have wires in the area, and would have to erect the infrastructure if enough people applied. We did eventually get a phone when I was about 11 I'd almost forgotten how to use one; the last time we'd had one was when we'd lived in Westville, near Durban, when I was 6. The number we got, 45-1870, is the only previous phone number I've ever had, apart from the current one, that I can still remember.

We had an ice box, a real icebox, a wooden affair that you put a big block of ice in, with a drip tray underneath to catch the water as it melted, Fortunately for us, my father was a chemist and the factory where he worked made dry ice -- frozen carbon dioxide at -78 degrees, but whether F or C I can't remember. It didn't drip, it evaporated, and my father brought it home in a cardboard box once a week. We'd just take out the old empty box and put in the new full one. When my parents had parties they filled the bathtub with water, put in a few dozen bottles of beer with a chunk of dry ice in it. It bubbled away as it evaporated, and there was a plentiful supply of cold beer.

We also had cows and chickens and fruit trees and almond trees and (cape) gooseberry bushes. In school holidays I would go round with my mother in her little Wolseley 8 helping to deliver eggs, butter and cream to customers all over Sandringham and Sydenham.

When I was 12 we got a diesel engine and generator which produced 220V electricity, and suddenly the appliances that had sat gathering cobwebs for 5 years began to be used again -- the washing machine, the radiogram, the electric sowing machine (in the mean time my mother had got used to using a treadle one).

But back then, living off the grid wasn't a big deal. People paid by cash or cheque, no credit cards. Accounts came by snail mail, no email (I've just heard a rumour that the post office has filed for bankruptcy -- is it true? Another of Maggie Thatcher's chickens coming home to roost).

When we lived off the grid my father took me to school in the morning, to Fairmount Government School, a mile away. In the afternoon I'd walk home, at the age of 8, over the bare veld, which is now the leafy suburb of Glenhazel. But now we have become so dependent on electronic devices that living off the grid becomes so daunting as to be almost unthinkable.

Rebellious Victorian schoolboys: Stalky & Co

Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book, and perhaps for that reason I took so long to read it.

It's a school story about three teenage schoolboys at a boarding school in North Devon in England, where Rudyard Kipling himself went to school. These three, Beetle, Turkey (M'Turk) and the eponymous Stalky himself are rebels in the school, rebelling against the teachers, the prefects, and the system of authority. Since the school is in the same area, and shares many of the characteristics of the school that Kipling himself attended, it probably reflects Kipling's own response to his schooling, and his thoughts on education, authority and discipline.

Many of the pupils at the school are children of British army officers, and, since it is set in the late 19th century, it was at the height of British imperialism, so most of the boys were born outside the UK, and many of them plan to have careers in the army.

The school also appears to be run on the lines of a neo-liberal dream, except that it was probably the economic proto-liberalism that neo-liberalism is nostalgically trying to bring back, and which was satirised by its contemporaries, Gilbert and Sullivan in their comic opera Utopia Limited. So the school pays a dividend of 4% to its sharefolders. 

I myself went to a school like that, though it wasn't a high school, it was Mountain Lodge Preparatory School in Magaliesberg, which was private not just in the sense of not being run by the government, but privately run for profit. It came to an end in 1952 when the "Bursar" Mr Burnford absconded with the funds.

One thing I liked about the book is that though many schools of that kind are run on authoritarian lines, and are calculated to foster an authoritarian outlook in their pupils, the three heroes of the story cock a snook at authority and put down authoritarian teachers and prefects. What I didn't much like about it was the sadistic and vengeful manner in which they often did so, and most especially Kipling's evident approval of this.

At Mountain Lodge we had some similar rebellions against authority, though, since we were all pre-teens, they were not as sophisticated and planned as those in Stalky & Co. On one occasion the whole school went on strike over an authoritarian teacher. And, rather as in the book, the whole school was caned, but the following term that teacher did not return.

Kipling makes the point, which I think is a good one, that much of the learning in school actually takes place in extra-curricular activities and is quite unplanned. This would go right against the idea of the Outcomes-Based Education that was recently tried in South African schools with not much success. The outcomes in Stalky and Co are without exception unplanned and unexpected, at least by the school authorities. That too, as been part of my own experience, though mo0re at the level of tertiary education than secondary. Most of the real learning takes place outside the classroom.

The last chapter shows some of the main characters, with the exception of Stalky himself, meeting again after having been out of school for some years, having all seen military service in India, and they share some of their experiences and rumours of Stalky, who has been disciplined by the army as he had been at school. It appears that he had been a military success, but in an unconventional way. Kipling's idea of a good army officer is an irregular and unconventional one. Perhaps Kipling's ideal military leader would be a guerrilla leader, like Che Guevara, or a mercenary leader, like Mad Mike Hoare.

Nearly sixty years later, in 1968, someone made a film with a similar theme. The film was called If, and it is now nearly sixty years since it was made, so Stalky & Co is about life in a school more than 120 years ago, and much of the contemporary schoolboy slang is difficult to follow, but education and its problems seem to continue, regardless of period. The most recent school stories I have read are the Harry Potter books, and even they are now 20-25 years old -- do the current crop of school children still read them, or perhaps they have them set as compulsory boring texts. But some things persist, regardless of period, like Zemblanity in eduction.   

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