Flight from Europe

During World War Two and the closing of the Suez Canal, Cape Town reverted to its maritime role as “the tavern of the seas,” the last point of Europe—albeit colonial Europe—before sailors entered the East, both mythical and actual. Troopships, battleships and supply vessels filled the great bay of the harbour, and soldiers being ferried from the European theatre of war to the East or Australians and New Zealanders heading for Europe poured off the transports and made free throughout the city. As schoolboys in our early teens, we found this marvellously exciting. The Australians in particular, with their disrespect for authority, conducting the traffic, turning cars upside down and taking girls into the woods above the city where we could spy on them, giving us their cap badges, their uniform buttons—the Australians delighted us. The hint of anarchy was a faint echo of the terrible disorder of war, its transgressive violence tamed to a sort of carnival.

Of course we...