If with Babu Mohammed and Murray Sayle, both younger than I am, it doesn’t matter—for we are confreres in enjoyment and farcical conspiracy—with Betty my ten years’ seniority makes me into a matronly adviser. Like Tessa, like Joan Rodker, and who knows how many others, I often sit listening to her dilemmas.
‘You see, Mrs. Lessing, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to think. I can’t sleep, I keep tossing about, because what I like is black men, ever since I went to that dance for Colonial Advancement and went home with Mahmoud. I got used to everything, Mrs. Lessing. He used to say, Now go home for the weekend, Betty, I don’t want you around, I fancy a bit of boy. Yes, it’s part of their culture, I know that, and I just said, I don’t want to get in your way, and I went home to my parents, but they get ever so worried. They say, Have you thought of the difficulties of interracial marriage? but I don’t like to say that marriage isn’t on my mind. I’m very young, Mrs. Lessing, I’m only twenty-two, I don’t have to worry about settling down yet, what do you think? But now I’m used to Mahmoud, and he’s gone to fight against the British—that’s us—in Zanzibar, and what shall I do? You see, I don’t fancy white men any more.’
‘Have you thought of getting yourself another black man? You could try another dance at Colonial Advancement.’
‘Oh no, I know you mean well, but you see, I love Mahmoud. And that’s what I meant to ask you: Do you think it’s all right that I’ve booked my seat out?’
‘But, Betty,’ I say, telling her what she knows already, ‘he has a new wife and a girlfriend too, and they are leaders of the Militant Women. And they are both beautiful.’
‘Yes, I know, but when he sees me I know he’ll remember what we’ve been to each other and he’ll choose me.’
‘Has he invited you?’
‘But I’ve got just as much right to be there as he has, haven’t I? I’m British, aren’t I? Well, then. It’s a British country.’ And off she went, to tell her tale again.
Time passes. And again she is sitting opposite me, in her neat little blouse, her hair tidily done, her little handbag in front of her. ‘I don’t know what to do, Mrs. Lessing. I did go out there, but he didn’t answer the message I left for him. He waved at me when he saw me at the rally, so I waited around for a month, but I’ve come home. I think my heart is broken, Mrs. Lessing. What shall I do?’
She thought of going to South Africa, for she could find a black man there, and I said, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a prison sentence for fancying a black man there.’ But she did go to South Africa, where things were as I said, and travelled up through Africa and found herself in the middle of the wars in the Congo. Horrific wars: the whole world was shocked, appalled.
Once again we are drinking tea and sharing cigarette smoke and her news. ‘I like Brazzaville,’ says she. ‘There were a lot of black men there. I had a good time.’
‘But there’s a terrible war on,’ I say.
‘I didn’t see any war, not where I was.’
‘So how are things going?’
‘Well, I’m married now, and Daddy is pleased.’ She met a crocodile hunter on the shores of Lake Victoria, and he had fallen for her. ‘You’d think he’d like a black girl, wouldn’t you? There were plenty of them around. But he liked me.’
The marriage had not succeeded. She was back with us, still dreaming that one day Mahmoud—now in terrible trouble, being one of those accused of assassinating his leader—would return to claim her.
John Dexter was a friend then. That was before the law about homosexuality was changed, and he was caught with a boy. I forget the details. He got six months and was sent to Wormwood Scrubs. All his friends visited him there. I went twice. The first time was frightening, not because of the prison being so grim and nasty, for I had expected that, but because John seemed to have turned into his own opposite, repeating that he deserved to be punished, the police were quite right, because he had done wrong. By the next visit he had gone back to normal, but meanwhile I was thinking how fragile we all are, poised so lightly on beliefs, on principles—on what we think we are. John had suffered no physical ill treatment, but he had been a target for newspaper insults, he had stood in court and been despised, been sentenced as an evildoer, then found himself in that grim place, being punished. No wonder people make false confessions and say, Yes, I am guilty. But I had not seen this before, and I did not understand it, and I was afraid, seeing what a frail skin civilisation paints over our pretences.
Long after this, I was giving a lecture about barriers to perception—what prevents us seeing more clearly—and one was guilt. At question time they were all, one after another, getting up to ask about guilt. Guilt, only guilt, as if nothing else had been said. I don’t think this is at all a simple question.
I have just found this in a book, The Prospect Before Her by Olwen Huston. It is 1707. A Jesuit is preaching.
He presented to them (women and girls) the enormity of their sins and the abuses that they had made so very often of the blood of Jesus Christ (by taking communion in a state of sin). He put before them the image of Christ crucified reproaching them for their ingratitude and their perfidy. I would scarcely have believed the effect of this discourse had I not been a witness. They prostrated themselves face downwards on the ground. Some beat their breasts and others their heads upon the stones all crying for forgiveness and pardon from God. They vowed their guilt in the excesses of their grief. They took these excesses so far that the priest feared they would do themselves harm and ordered them to stop groaning so that he could finish his exhortations. But he could not silence them. He had himself to shed tears and to cease his discourse.
Little scenes, mere flashes:
It is afternoon. John Wain is there. And Robert Conquest. A mutual friend is about to marry. ‘Memento mori,’ says Robert Conquest, tragically. And John Wain says, ‘Marriage can be undone; it is not like ordering a coffin.’
‘Oh yes, it is,’ says handsome Robert, looking at us women standing about.
I have hyacinths growing, but not yet in flower, in an earthenware bowl, and certainly they are an emanation from a world very far from the noisy flat and the thundering lorries. Clancy is standing staring at them, full of horror. ‘What is the matter?’ I ask. He is pale with disgust. I try to see them as he does, for he often sees the ordinary as monstrous or amazing, and manage a glimpse of something like a green mandrake, which might start hopping about or even screaming. ‘They are hyacinths,’ I say firmly.
‘Put them where I can’t see them,’ he says. I had never known anyone so much a product of streets, buildings. (Later he was at ease in the country.) Since then I have known others. They get unhappy if they so much as step off a tarmac path in a park on to grass. Sometimes I make myself stop, switch off my usual ways of seeing, and look with neutral eyes at a configuration in a cloud, a hairy fold in a curtain, the way light falls on a railing, raindrops clustered like diamonds on a pane. I see it as a madman might, so full of threat or of intimations of otherness you have to switch off, reclaim your ordinary mind—and yet there are a great many people who live like this, with some climate of menace in their minds, that focuses like a spotlight on cloud, or fold, or the glitter of crystal drops, and they can never escape these enemies who are inside them, moving with them everywhere they go, even if they cross continents or oceans to escape them. My story ‘Dialogue’ is an attempt to portray this.
I have met an Indian somewhere, who takes it into his head that I need him in my life. He turns up at my door and is insistent about coming in. I throw him out. I realise afterwards that it has never crossed my mind that I must be ‘nice’ to him because he is a person with a dark skin, whereas when I first came to London I would have been full of colonial guilt. I realise I am cured of the sentimentalities of ‘The Colour Bar’ and I am pleased with myself. (The Colour Bar—now there’s a phrase that has gone with the wind.)
One night I was standing at the kitchen window, looking down, and saw a m
an vault over the tall wooden fence and stand staring up at me. I moved back out of sight. I had seen him loitering about when I went to the shops, watching me. Builders had left a plank, and now the man placed the plank on some bricks, slanting up, laid himself on it, and began masturbating. I rang the police and said, There is a man in my yard, and he is annoying me. They came around, found a door in the fence. One said, ‘Now then, old son, what are you doing? You can’t do that kind of thing here.’ They all four stood on the pavement, out of sight, but I heard a policeman say, ‘Now you just run along and don’t do that again.’ I was impressed by how they handled the incident.
There was a Britain that some say has gone for ever, is nowhere to be found—like the readers of John O’London’s Weekly, who made a provincial literary culture. Easy to believe that it has gone.
Reynolds News, a socialist Sunday paper read by labour supporters, trade unionists, socialists of all kinds—but not, I think, communists—was a decent, sober, unexcitable, unscandalous paper, whose readers would have despised our lying sensational newspapers. It ran a short-story competition, and I was asked to judge. Hundreds were submitted. I was sent the final forty. They were of a high standard, of the realistic kind; Dickens, Hardy, A. E. Coppard, Somerset Maugham, Chekhov, and Gorky were their progenitors.
Most stories came with a letter describing the difficulties of the writer. This was a time of high employment, and the culture of leisure had not arrived. Not easy then for people who might have unsympathetic families, small children, long hours, to find the time and space to write. Some said they had written novels; would I read them? I read perhaps thirty. I had not done anything of this sustained kind before and was surprised by what I know now is common. First, these novels were all nearly good. All writers—I have not met one who is different—go through the stage when what we write is nearly good: the writing lacks some kind of inward clinching, the current has not run clear. We go on writing, reading, throwing away not-quite-good-enough work, and then one day something has happened, a process has been completed, a step forward has been taken: these clichés are here because it is hard to say what has happened. But the process of writing and rewriting, and of reading the best, has at last succeeded. Professional writers all know this period of apprenticeship. Amateur writers cling to their early uneven drafts and won’t let them go. Every one of the novels I was sent was the work of a talented person. Every one needed to be rewritten, or put away and another attempted. There is something I call the ‘my-novel syndrome’. So much of the writer has gone into it, often there have been sacrifices made to acquire the time and space to write, and then the product of this investment of self and time becomes sacred; the author will not let it go and may spend ten years hawking it around to publishers.
To every one of these authors I wrote carefully, with advice, and saying, When you have rewritten this one or done another, send it to me. Not one of them was heard of again. There is a sad waste of talent going on. But things have improved; there are writing classes and courses, and above all, it is easier to find time to write.
I am remembering this because of the current sad query: Where is that England, that Britain? All the stories, all the novels, were about small, sensible, decent, hopeful lives, with no aspirations to be fashionable or sensational. After Richard Hoggart, so much a representative of that Britain, went on Desert Island Discs,* he said he had seventy-three letters, all from people asking that question. Somewhere out there is still an honesty, an integrity—or so I believe—and a slight shift in our political fortunes would bring this face of Britain forward. At least, I hope so.
Now I see that overlarge flat which always had people coming through it as a continuation of the easy ways of the places I lived in with Gottfried: someone staying the night or the weekend, friends, the friends of friends. The ‘bohemia’ of the comrades (mostly now ex-comrades) was infinitely hospitable, undemanding, anticipating the youth culture of the sixties. Any number of young poets, promising playwrights, novelists, male and female, came and went, all moneyless, passed from hand to hand, from city to city, and sometimes from country to country.
For instance, and typically, there was Balwant, a young Indian, who arrived in London by way of the British Council. He had no money, was from a poor village, had written some good plays on timeless village themes: the wicked moneylender, the cruel parents, the brave lovers, the villagers confronting poverty. They had been performed in India. Joan Rodker, Tana Ship, Reuben Ship’s ex-wife and I—we looked after him. My Three Graces, he called us, sitting smiling like a dear child, his head wagging, philosophically solicitous about our efforts on his behalf. Tana typed his work, Joan and I fed and nurtured and found him shelter. He was around for a couple of years, and then off he went, to find himself captured and married by a Polish woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer. But that is another story. The trouble is, if you are a novelist, your typewriter is always longing to go clattering off after some tale.
A sad thing happened, a sad visitor, a black girl who came to my flat because of that by now so familiar telephone call: ‘I hear you have an empty room.’
‘I’m not going to be a landlady, never again. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s up to you how you settle with her. She’s at college; she’ll be out all day.’
Lucy was perhaps twenty, so clever she had attracted attention in some poor mission school in Southern Rhodesia, had been sent on a scholarship to a better one, and now found herself in gold-paved London, in a small room with grey rain slashing at the windows and, outside, a hideous street where the great lorries thundered day and night. She had come from a large family, sunlight, warmth, and a culture that did not understand the need for solitude. She was desperate with loneliness and homesickness. Now, my situation was that Peter had just gone to boarding school and for the first time, instead of fitting in my work where I could, I had a clear run of some weeks in front of me, and I planned to finish A Ripple from the Storm. I had worked myself gently into the slow, underwater state, where exterior events sound a long way off, and was ready to start—and there was this unhappy girl hanging over the banisters to hear when my typewriter stopped. It is amazing how little time students need spend at classes or lectures. She never seemed to be at her classes more than five or six hours a day. Many days she did not go in at all, and there were the weekends. She had no friends. ‘Look, Lucy, I spend a lot of time just pottering about, looking out of the window, sleeping a few minutes—do you see? This is how I write.’ Her wide anxious eyes fixed on my face: Is this the racial prejudice they warned me about? Is this white woman trying to snub me? she is thinking. And I am thinking, Oh, Lord, I hope she isn’t thinking that….
Normally I would walk from my big room along to the kitchen, look out of the kitchen window, wander back—the whole bottom floor of the flat was my field of concentration—but now I went into the big room, shut the door, and even took in vacuum flasks of tea there. All the time I was thinking of her upstairs, sitting on her bed, listening for me to stop. A too long silence, and down she would come, and I heard the little tap on the door. ‘Doris? Doris? Have you finished working?’ And we sat in the kitchen over tea, and I heard about her village, her family, her mother, whom she missed so that she had to cry when she thought of her, and her sisters and her little brother and her cousins…I got to know her family better than I knew mine at that time. Within a week I had given up all thoughts of real work, did practical things in the short hours she was gone, and tried to stem the fever of exasperation and impatience that was poisoning me. ‘Shall we go and visit your friends?’ she would suggest hopefully, when she came back. ‘Do you like looking at the shops?’
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work, but this was the worst experience I had ever had, for I felt so guilty because of her loneliness.
‘Do you have any friends at college? Have you met anybody you like there?’
‘You’re my friend,’ she
said, and put her two hands around my forearm and looked up into my face. ‘You are my best friend in London.’
At last I rang her sponsors, and heard the cold disapproving voice. ‘Surely you can set aside some time for her.’
‘It’s not a question of some time; it is all the time she isn’t at college.’
‘I must say I am surprised to hear this from you.’
‘Look, I have to work, I can’t work….’
‘But can’t you work when she’s at classes?’
‘I’m sorry, you must find some place where she has a lot of people around her—a large family.’
‘You mean a black family?’ It was a cold sniffy self-righteous voice.
‘I didn’t say a black family. Any large family. She’s used to a lot of people around her, all the time.’
‘I don’t see what I can do at the moment.’
‘I have to work, I have to earn a living—I have a child to keep.’
And at last a family was found, with a girl her age, and off went the poor exile with her tiny possessions, feeling she had failed in London, and I was left feeling a criminal—and counting the days of freedom left before the beginning of the school holidays.
About then my son John Wisdom came through London.* He wanted to be a forester, had gone to the University of Stellenbosch, but it was then very Afrikaans in feeling, anti-British, and no admirer of Southern Rhodesia, which had always taken its stand on being British. John, brought up to be British, could not tolerate this, and he left almost at once. In Vancouver, Canada, there were good forestry courses, and he decided to go there. He was not yet eighteen when I saw him for the first time since he had been eight or so. Although I was expecting him, when he walked into my room, I nearly said, Hello, Harry, for he walked, stood, held his shoulders, smiled, like my brother. He was in London for three days. He had expected the bright lights, and I did my best, but he was disappointed that I was not living better. A well-known author surely should be…. I don’t know what he was expecting. We went to some good restaurants and to the theatre, and he enjoyed it all. He was a great enjoyer, John, all his life. We got on very well. We always had, after all. It is a strange fact that people can get on easily, instinctively, when they agree about nothing and their views on life are opposite. John had been brought up to believe that I was Hecate incarnate, a kaffir-lover, a communist. He had never heard anything good about me, and he had been forbidden to write to me. The letters and books I sent the children, the letters they sent me, had to stop. It could not have been easy for him to decide to see this problematical mother, but it all turned out well. He went off to the University of Vancouver, where he took his place in class—and, two weeks later, walked out of the class, the university, and Vancouver. In those days—and perhaps this is still true—there were men who lived hard and rough, earning good money for dangerous work, all through the winters, but in summer enjoyed life in the bars and on the water in Vancouver. This is what John did, for seven years. His first job was fire watching in the extreme north somewhere. The job is to stay at the top of a tower, set where a great sweep of country can be seen, and watch out for the smoke of bush fires and then radio waiting firefighters. John listened to jazz from the Voice of America and to classical music from Moscow. He watched the wolves moving about in the snow beneath his tower, for they were as curious about him as he was about them. He admired them and claimed they all became friends. He lived like this for six months, completely alone; he had just become eighteen. Later he said this was one of the best times in his life. Then he got all kinds of jobs. He worked as a surveyor: though he had not studied surveying; he had watched a surveyor friend of his during a weekend and then proved to the employer that he knew the job. He worked in lumber mills. In summer he had a very good time indeed. He was not one of the world’s letter writers, but I did get a couple of long letters, full of the small details of his life, always the most interesting, and, twice, a tape. Last summer he had lived in a little house with two Australians, they cooked this and that—John was a famous cook—they had parties every night, they sailed every minute they could in the bay, and the ice had just broken up, and he had run out into the raging and tumbling waters, balancing on the tablets of ice, and they all called him Mad Wisdom, but he was still alive, mad or not. He had been working last winter in a lumber mill, had caught his left hand in the machinery, the doctors had wanted to cut his arm off, but he wouldn’t let them. He made them operate so as to keep his arm whole, although they said it was useless. But he had been proved right, he could use his hand for almost everything. ‘I have been reading…’ He read a lot of adventure and sea stories, war books. He loved the sea, but soon he would be living high and landlocked hundreds of miles from the sea. He had read my short stories. He liked the bits about the bush, he could see I knew what I was talking about, but he thought I was being unfair to the whites. ‘We must have a good chin-wag about that.’ Seven years went by. And then he turned up in London again on his way through. He said he had been in a bar, looking at the men who were ten years older than he was, had not left the life, were still living a tough young man’s life, and they were not twenty-five, like him, but thirty-five and forty, and they were getting fat and soft and alcoholic, and he had got such a fright that he decided to leave Canada and go back home, though he was very sad, for no life could have suited him better. And he returned to Southern Rhodesia, to try his luck there.
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