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Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962
Doris Lessing
The second volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.‘Walking in the Shade’ begins in 1949, as Doris Lessing arrives in London with nothing but her young son and the manuscript of her first novel. With humour and clear-sightedness, she records her battles of the next decade: her involvement with communism, her love affairs, her struggle with poverty, the difficulties she faced as a young single mother.But as well there is the success of that first novel, ‘The Grass Is Singing’, and meetings with personalities and opinion-makers – Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Bertrand Russell and others.Describing, too, the genesis of ‘The Golden Notebook’, this book sees Lessing emerge as one of the most exciting, and groundbreaking, novelists of the post-war generation, and one of the twentieth century’s great writers.
DORIS LESSING
Walking in the Shade
Volume Two of
My Autobiography, 1949–1962
Copyright (#ulink_24207181-e49d-54d1-ae39-acd5a861f53d)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by Flamingo 1998
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1998
Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘Coercive Agencies’, reprinted by permission from Caravan of Dreams by Idries Shah (Octagon Press Ltd, London 1968).
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Source ISBN: 9780006388890
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780007396498
Version: 2016-02-15
Contents
Cover (#u91ee788e-92a9-5370-8e9a-e67bcd1040bb)
Title Page (#uc5b574a6-a00a-5afa-a7db-83244570ec41)
Copyright (#u1d3e292d-c6ce-5227-844a-7d976ae5a9be)
DENBIGH ROAD W11 (#u94e8f1ff-f19b-5ab8-b757-d1d74ec237bd)
CHURCH STREET, KENSINGTON W8 (#ud6fa053e-a4a8-5b85-a34b-621b37f120d1)
WARWICK ROAD SW5 (#litres_trial_promo)
LANGHAM STREET W1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
The individual, and groupings of people, have to learn that they cannot reform society in reality, nor deal with others as reasonable people, unless the individual has learned to locate and allow for the various patterns of coercive institutions, formal and also informal, which rule him. No matter what his reason says, he will always relapse into obedience to the coercive agency while its pattern is with him.
IDRIES SHAH, Caravan of Dreams
DENBIGH ROAD W11 (#ulink_37f1f998-5e4b-5352-b11c-6bfb6067bc36)
HIGH ON THE SIDE OF THE TALL SHIP, I held up my little boy and said, ‘Look, there’s London.’ Dockland: muddy creeks and channels, greyish rotting wooden walls and beams, cranes, tugs, big and little ships. The child was probably thinking, But ships and cranes and water was Cape Town, and now it’s called London. As for me, real London was still ahead, like the beginning of my real life, which would have happened years before if the war hadn’t stopped me coming to London. A clean slate, a new page – everything still to come.
I was full of confidence and optimism, though my assets were minimal: rather less than £150; the manuscript of my first novel, The Grass Is Singing, already bought by a Johannesburg publisher who had not concealed the fact he would take a long time publishing it, because it was so subversive; and a few short stories. I had a couple of trunkfuls of books, for I would not be parted from them, some clothes, some negligible jewellery. I had refused the pitiful sums of money my mother had offered, because she had so little herself, and besides, the whole sum and essence of this journey was that it was away from her, from the family, and from that dreadful provincial country Southern Rhodesia, where, if there was a serious conversation, then it was – always – about The Colour Bar and the inadequacies of the blacks. I was free. I could at last be wholly myself. I felt myself to be self-created, self-sufficient. Is this an adolescent I am describing? No, I was nearly thirty. I had two marriages behind me, but I did not feel I had been really married.
I was also exhausted, because the child, two and a half, had for the month of the voyage woken at five, with shouts of delight for the new day, and had slept reluctantly at ten every night. In between he had never been still, unless I was telling him tales and singing him nursery rhymes, which I had been doing for four or five hours every day. He had had a wonderful time.
I was also having those thoughts – perhaps better say feelings – that disturb every arrival from Southern Africa who has not before seen white men unloading a ship, doing heavy manual labour, for this had been what black people did. A lot of white people, seeing whites work like blacks, had felt uneasy and threatened; for me, it was not so simple. Here they were, the workers, the working class, and at that time I believed that the logic of history would make it inevitable they should inherit the earth. They – those tough, muscled labouring men down there – and, of course, people like me, were the vanguard of the working class. I am not writing this down to ridicule it. That would be dishonest. Millions, if not billions, of people were thinking like that, using this language.
I have far too much material for this second volume. Nothing can be more tedious than a book of memoirs millions of words long. A little book called In Pursuit of the English, written when I was still close to that time, will add depth and detail to those first months in London. At once, problems – literary problems. What I say in it is true enough. A couple of characters were changed for libel reasons and would have to be now. But there is no doubt that while ‘true’, the book is not as true as what I would write now. It is a question of tone, and that is no simple matter. That little book is more like a novel; it has the shape and the pace of one. It is too well shaped for life. In one thing at least it is accurate: when I was newly in London I was returned to a child’s way of seeing and feeling, every person, building, bus, street, striking my senses with the shocking immediacy of a child’s life, everything oversized, very bright, very dark, smelly, noisy. I do not experience London like that now. That was a city of Dickensian exaggeration. I am not saying I saw London through a veil of Dickens, but rather that I was sharing the grotesque vision of Dickens, on the verge of the surreal.
That London of the late 1940s, the early 1950s, has vanished, and now it is hard to believe it existed. It was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs – that was before the Clean Air Act. No one who has known only today’s London of self-respecting clean buildings, crowded cafes and restaurants, good food and coffee, streets full until after midnight with mostly young people having a good time, can believe what London was like then. No cafes. No good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’ from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty. The Dining Rooms, subsidized during the war, were often the only places to eat in a whole area of streets. They served good meat, terrible vegetables, nursery puddings. Lyons restaurants were the high point of eating for ordinary people – I remember fish and chips and poached eggs on toast. There were fine restaurants for the well-off, and they tended to hide themselves away out of embarrassment, because in them, during the war, the rigours of rationing had been so ameliorated. You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles. The sole civilized amenity was the pubs, but they closed at eleven, and you have to have the right temperament for pubs. Or, I should say, had to have, for they have changed so much, no longer give the impression to an outsider of being like clubs, each with its members, or ‘regulars’, where outsiders go on sufferance. Rationing was still on. The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people’s minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place. There was a wariness, a weariness.
On New Year’s Eve, 1950, I was telephoned by an American from the publishing scene to ask if I would share the revels with him. I met him in my best dress at six o’clock in Leicester Square. We expected cheerful crowds, but there was no one on the streets. For an hour or so we were in a pub but felt out of place. Then we looked for a restaurant. There were the expensive restaurants, which we could not afford, but nothing of what we now take for granted – the Chinese, Indian, Italian restaurants, and dozens of other nationalities. The big hotels were all booked up. We walked up and down and back and forth through Soho and around Piccadilly. Everything was dark and blank. Then he said, To hell with it, let’s live it up. A taxi driver took us to a club in Mayfair, and there we watched the successors of the Bright Young Things getting drunk and throwing bread at each other.
But by the end of the decade, there were coffee bars and good ice cream, by courtesy of the Italians, and good cheap Indian restaurants. Clothes were bright and cheap and irreverent. London was painted again and was cheerful. Most of the bomb damage was gone. Above all, there was a new generation who had not been made tired by the war. They did not talk about the war, or think about it.
The first place where I lived was in Bayswater, which was then rather seedy and hard to associate with the grandeur of its earlier days. Prostitutes lined the streets every evening. I was supposed to be sharing a flat with a South African woman and her child: I wrote about this somewhat unsatisfactory experience in In Pursuit of the English. The flat we were in was large and well furnished. Two rooms were let to prostitutes. When I discovered this – I did not realize at once who these smartly dressed girls were who tripped up and down the stairs with men – and tackled the South African woman, because I did not think this was good for the two small children, she burst into tears and said I was unkind.
I spent six weeks looking for a place that would take a small child. There was a heat wave, and I couldn’t understand why people complained about the English weather. My feet gave in on the hot pavements, and my morale almost did, but then a household of Italians welcomed the child and me, and my main problem was solved. This was Denbigh Road. Peter had been accepted by a council nursery. Circumstances had taught him from his very first days to be sociable, and he loved going there. When he came back from the nursery he disappeared at once into the basement, where there was a little girl his age. The house, dispiriting to me, because it was so grim and dirty and war-damaged, was a happy place for him.
We were at the beginning – but literally – in a garret, which was too small for me even to unpack a typewriter. I sent some short stories to the agent Curtis Brown, chosen at random from the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, and Juliet O’Hea wrote back what I later knew was a form letter: Yes, but did I have a novel or was I thinking of writing one? I said there was a novel, but it had been bought by a Johannesburg publisher. She asked to see the contract, was shocked and angry when she saw it – they were going to take fifty percent of everything I earned, as a reward for risking themselves over this dangerous book. She sent them a telegram saying that if they didn’t at once release me from the contract she would expose them as crooks. She then sold the book over the weekend to Michael Joseph.
Pamela Hansford Johnson was Michael Joseph’s reader. She wrote an enthusiastic report but said that these and those changes should be made. Since I had spent years writing and rewriting the book, I did not feel inclined to make changes, particularly as I had broken my shoulder. How? It cannot be regarded as anything less than a psychologically significant event. I was in Leicester Square, seeing Les Enfants du Paradis with a young man. We had been most romantically in love when he was in the RAF in Rhodesia. Our lives had already taken dramatically different routes: he was about to join the Federation of British Industry, and I was still, if uneasily, a Red – though not a member of the Party. I came out of the cinema and walked straight into slippery tar painted on the street by workmen who said I should have looked where I was going. Gottfried had arrived in London, where he proposed to live, and was staying with Dorothy Schwartz from Salisbury in a large flat near the Belsize Park underground station. He took Peter for six weeks, while my shoulder mended.
Hindsight has given a jaunty tone to my memories of that time, for if it was difficult, I was coping with it all. This little scene paints a different picture: I am standing on the platform at Queensway underground station. My left arm is in a sling, and my yellow wool jacket is buttoned over it. A button flies off, a draught lifts the jacket off my left shoulder, I stand revealed in my bra. In London you could walk down Oxford Street nude and earn hardly a glance, and my embarrassment is unnecessary. I try futilely to get myself covered. A woman emerges from the crowd, turns me to her, takes a large safety pin from her pocket, pins my jacket onto the sling. She stands examining my face. ‘Broken it, ’ave you? Well, a break takes forty-two days or six weeks, whichever is the shortest.’ I can’t speak. ‘Cheer up. The worst may never happen.’
‘This is the worst,’ I manage. She laughs, that anarchic, gruff, well-what-can-you-expect laugh still heard from people who lived through the Blitz.
‘Is that so? If that’s the worst you can manage, then …’ She gives me encouraging little pats, then shoves me gently towards the train and helps me onto it. ‘You just go and get yourself a nice cup of tea and cheer up,’ I hear, as the doors grind shut.
I sent The Grass Is Singing back to Michael Joseph in the same parcel it arrived in. I got a letter from them, congratulating me on the valuable changes I had made. I never enlightened them.
Soon Alfred Knopf in New York said they would take the book, if I would change it so that there was an explicit rape, ‘in accordance with the mores of the country’. This was Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, and the Knopfs were the stars of the publishing firmament then. I was furious. What did she know about the ‘mores’ of Southern Africa? Besides, it was crass. The whole point of The Grass Is Singing was the unspoken, devious codes of behaviour of the whites, nothing ever said, everything understood, and the relationship between Mary Turner, the white woman, and Moses, the black man, was described so that nothing was explicit. This was only partly out of literary instinct. The fact is, I have never decided whether Mary had sex with Moses or not. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. While it was a commonplace that white men had sex with black women, and the continually enlarging Coloured community was there to prove it, I had only once heard of a white woman having sex with her black servant. The penalty – for the man – was hanging. Besides, the taboos were so strong. If Mary Turner had had sex with Moses, this poor woman so precariously holding on to her idea of herself as a white madam would have cracked into pieces. Yes, but she was cracked, she was crazy – yes, but she would have been crazy in a different way: as soon as I say it, the phrases and words appear that would describe that different lunacy. No, on the whole I think she didn’t. When I wrote the book I was sure she didn’t. The episode from which the story grew was this: I overheard contemptuous and uneasy talk on the verandahs about a farmer’s wife on a near farm who ‘allowed her cook to button up her dress at the back and brush her hair’. This was – correctly, I think – described by my father as the ultimate in contempt for the man: like aristocrats permitting themselves every kind of intimate and filthy behaviour in front of servants, because they weren’t really human beings.
I decided that the Knopf demand was hypocrisy: an explicit rape would have the shock of novelty – this was true then. I said I would not change the book. I was supported all the way by Juliet O’Hea, who said of course I should never change a word I didn’t want to, but it was always worthwhile thinking about what they said. ‘After all, my dear, they are sometimes right.’ She thought that this time they were wrong. ‘Don’t worry. If they don’t take it I’ll get you another publisher.’ They took it anyway.
(#ulink_c0b64c31-a4a9-5ad7-9045-15b344fe9170)
I had very little money left. The £150 advance from Michael Joseph was at once swallowed up by rent and fees for the nursery school. I took a secretary’s job for a few weeks, where I did practically no work at all, for it was a new engineering firm, with young, inexperienced partners. I had taken the child out of the council nursery and put him in a rather expensive private nursery. How was I going to pay for this? But my attitude always was: decide to do something and then find out the way to pay for it. Soon I knew I was being stupid. I was supposed to be a writer: publishers enquired tenderly about what I was writing. But I had no energy for writing. I woke at five, with the child, as always – he went on waking at five for years, and I with him. I read to him, told him stories, gave him breakfast, took him by bus down to the nursery school, went to work. There I sat about, doing nothing much, or perhaps covertly writing a short story. At lunchtime I shopped. At five I fetched the child from the nursery, went back by bus, and then the usual rumbustious rowdy evening for him, downstairs, while I cleaned the place up. He did not sleep until ten or so. But then I was too tired to work.
I gave up the job. Meanwhile the publishers rang – twice – to say they were reprinting, and that was before publication. I said, ‘Oh good.’ I thought this happened to every writer. My ignorance was absolute. They thought I was taking my success for granted.
Michael Joseph invited me to the Caprice for lunch, then the smartest show business restaurant. I had moved downstairs from my garret and was in a large room that had been once – would be again – beautiful but was now dirty and draughty, heated by an inadequate fireplace. The whole house was cracked and leaking because of the bombing. There was a tiny room, where Peter slept. The Caprice was a dazzle with pink tablecloths, silver, glass, and well-dressed people. Michael Joseph was a handsome man, worldly, at home there, and he talked of Larry and Viv, and said it was a pity they weren’t lunching that day. Michael Joseph, for some reason unfit for fighting, had started the firm during the war, against the advice of everybody, for he did not have much capital. The firm was at once successful, chiefly because he had been an agent with Curtis Brown, and Juliet O’Hea, his good friend, saw that he got sent new books. He enjoyed his success, ran a racehorse or two, frequented London’s smart places. He kept greeting the people at other tables: ‘Let me introduce you to our new writer – she’s from Africa.’
The purpose of this lunch was not only because writers were supposed to feel flattered but because he was concerned that this author should not expect him to advertise. He told me exemplary tales, such as that a certain little book, The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico, published during the war, was reprinted several times before publication on word of mouth alone. ‘Advertising has no effect at all on the fate of a book.’ All publishers talk like this.
In certain military academies is set this exercise: The examinee is to imagine that he is a general in command of a battlefront. In one area his troops are only holding their own, in another are being routed, in a third are driving back the enemy. With limited resources, where is he to send support? The correct answer is: to the successful sector; the rest must be left to their fate. It seems few people give the right answer; they mislead themselves with compassionate thoughts for the less successful soldiers. This is how publishers think. An already successful or known author gets advertisements, but struggling or unknown ones are expected to sink or swim. When the public sees advertisements for a novel on the underground, they are seeing reserves being sent to a successful sector of the battlefront. They are seeing a best-seller being created from a novel that is already a success.
Inspired by the atmosphere of the Caprice, I told Michael Joseph that if there was one thing I adored above all else, it was chocolate eclairs, and no sooner had I got back to my slum than a long black car purred to a stop outside it and a pretty pink box was delivered by the chauffeur. It contained a dozen chocolate eclairs. These were added to the already bounteous family supper downstairs.
Nothing I experienced in that household matched what I had expected to find, which was rationing, a dour self-sufficiency, even semi-starvation. I had sent food parcels to Britain. The woman of the house, Italian, was one of the world’s great cooks. I don’t think she had ever seen a recipe book. She took six ration books to a shop in Westbourne Grove, then a slummy road. But she always got three or four times the rationed amounts of butter, eggs, bacon, cooking fat, cheese. How did she manage it? She was scornful when I asked. It’s time you knew your way around, she said. There were a couple of bent policemen, always dropping in and out, who were given butter and eggs from her spoils, in return for turning a blind eye. Did I share in this lawlessness? Yes, I did: our two ration books were given to her to manage. To make little shows of morality in that atmosphere would have seemed not only absurd but would have been incomprehensible to these amiable crooks. Besides, the newspapers were already clamouring for the end of rationing. There was no longer any need for it, they said. Never have I eaten so well. The rent did not include food, but like most fine cooks, our landlady could not bear not to feed anyone around who would sit down at her table. I ate downstairs two or three times a week, Peter most evenings. She asked for money for shopping when she ran out. Hers was an economy that absorbed not only me but other people in the house in complicated borrowings, lendings, cigarettes, a dress or shoes she fancied.
When I told middle-class acquaintances about the bent policemen and the butter and eggs and cheese, they were cold, and they were angry. ‘Our policemen are not corrupt,’ they said. They saw my sojourn on that foreign shore – the working class – as a whimsical foray for the sake of my art, for Experience. They waited for little anecdotes about the comic working classes, in the spirit of the snobbish Punch cartoons about servants.
From then until decades later, when it was admitted by Authority that all was not well with our policemen, I was treated by nearly everyone with the hostile impatience I was already earning when I said that South Africa was a hellhole for the blacks and the Coloureds – for this was still not acknowledged, in spite of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, which had just come out, a little before The Grass Is Singing – and even more when I insisted that Southern Rhodesia was as bad and, some blacks thought, even worse than South Africa. Only Reds and malcontents said this kind of thing.
In the household in Denbigh Road, Southern Africa was not of interest. Nothing was, outside this little area of streets. They talked of going up to the West End, a mile or so away, as a serious excursion.
The exuberance, the physical well-being of that household was certainly not general then. They were a tired people, the British. Stoical. The national low vitality, that aftermath of war, as if the horrors or endurances of war are earing away silently out of sight, swallowing energy like a black hole, was balanced by something very different. That is what strikes me most about that time – the contrast. On the one hand, the low spirits, a patient sticking it out, but on the other, an optimism for the future so far from how we are thinking now it seems almost like the symptom of a general foolishness. A New Age was dawning, no less. Socialism was the key. The troops returning from all over the world had been promised everything, the Atlantic Charter (seen sardonically at the time) was merely the summing-up of those Utopian hopes, and now they had returned a Labour government to make sure they would get it. The National Health Service was their proudest achievement. In the thirties, before the war, an illness or an accident could drag a whole family down to disaster. The poverty had been terrible and had not been forgotten. All that was finished. No longer was there a need to dread illness and the Dole and old age. And this was just a beginning: things were going to get steadily better. Everyone seemed to share this mood. You kept meeting doctors who were setting up practices that would embody this new socialist medicine, who saw themselves as builders of a new era. They could be Communists, they could be Labour, they could be Liberals. They were all idealists.
* (#ulink_2e4a8c59-b751-5b3e-b10a-4600eed406fb) I was soon to have a sharp little lesson in the realities of publishing. The first paperback edition of The Grass Is Singing had on its front a lurid picture of a blonde cowering terrified while a big buck nigger (the only way to describe him) stood over her, threatening her with a panga. My protests, on the lines of ‘But Moses the black man was not a great stupid murderous thug,’ were ignored with: ‘You don’t understand anything about selling books.’
THE ZEITGEIST, OR HOW WE THOUGHT THEN
Above all, a new world was dawning.
Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all – best. The British Empire, then on its last legs – the best.
The newspapers were full of warnings about rebuilding the area around St Paul’s, bombed into ruins. If this rebuilding was not planned, a nasty chaos would result. It was not planned, and nasty chaos did result.
Our prisons were a disgusting and shameful disgrace. Over forty years on, news from them is the same. There is something about prisons: we cannot get them right. Is it because deep in the British heart they believe, with the Old Testament, that there should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Retribution, that is what most citizens believe in. As I am writing this, the news is that women with small children are in prison for not paying their television licence. Their children are in care. When most citizens hear this for the first time they exclaim, No, it isn’t possible that this is happening! But Dickens would not have been surprised.
Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts.
In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not getthe hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority.
Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite – civilized – Britain was.
And now … what was I going to write next? What the publishers wanted was a novel. What I was writing was short stories. All of them were set in The District – Banket, Lomagundi – and they were about the white community and how they saw themselves, preserved themselves, saw the blacks around them. I would call it This Was the Old Chief’s Country. Juliet O’Hea said if that is what I wanted to do, then of course, but no publisher would be delighted at the news of short stories, which did not sell. In fact, I proved them wrong, for they did sell, and very well – for short stories – and have gone on selling ever since. But it was a novel I should be thinking about. And so I did think hard and long about the book that would be Martha Quest.
The Grass Is Singing had come about because people thought of me as a writer, I knew I would be one … and had been, so I know now, from an early age. I had forgotten this, believing that the decision to write came later, but when Under My Skin came out, a woman who had known me at the convent – Daphne Anderson, who wrote an admirable account of her childhood, Toe-Rags – told me she remembered us sitting on my bed in the dormitory, discussing what we would be, and I said I was going to be a writer. I must have been ten or eleven. But this figure – the writer – is a siren figure that comforts and sustains innumerable young people who are at sea, know it, and cannot direct their future in a conformable way. I left my job in the law firm in Salisbury, saying I was going to write a novel, since at some point I must stop talking about it and do it. Besides, it had occurred to me that those ideal conditions – solitude, time, freedom from care – would never happen. What was I to write? I had many ideas for a book. Now I am interested in how I then sat around, walked around and around the room, wool-gathering – an essential process – taking my time, and all this by instinct. From the many ideas one emerged … grew stronger … I remembered the talk on the verandahs, matrix for a thousand possible tales, I remembered the little newspaper cutting I had kept all those years. And so I wrote The Grass Is Singing. First novels are usually autobiographical. The Grass Is Singing was not. Dick Turner, the failing farmer, was a figure I had seen all my life. Only a minority of the white farmers were successful; most failed. Some struggled on, failing, for years. Some hated the country. Some loved it, like Dick Turner. Some were idealistic – like my father, who, if he were farming now, would be disdaining fertilizers, pesticides, crops that rob the soil, would be cherishing animals and birds. Mary Turner I took from a woman I had known for years, one of the Sports Club girls. When we went out into the bush for picnics, or simply to be in the bush, sit in it, absorbing it – for many town whites did this, as if the town were merely an unfortunate necessity and the bush was where they belonged – then this woman, who remained a girl until she was well into her forties, a good sort, every man’s kind sister, used to sit on a bit of rock, with her feet drawn up away from the soil, sit with her arms tight around her knees, peering over them to watch if an ant or a chameleon or beetle crawled up on her trousers. If she was so afraid of the bush, why then did she go off on these picnics? It was because she was a good sort and always did what others did and wanted her to do. She was a woman essentially of the town, of streets, of nice tamed gardens… I watched her and wondered what on earth she would do if fate deposited her somewhere on a farm, not one of the new big rich farms but a struggling farm, like farms I had seen, and I ran through the names of the poor farmers in my head, and saw the shallow brick verandahs, the corrugated-iron roofs, which expanded and contracted and cracked in the heat and the cold, the dust, the yelling of the cicadas … and then I had it, I had her, I had Mary Turner, the woman who loathed the bush and the natives and hated all natural processes, hated sex, liked to be neat and clean, her dress ironed afresh every time she put it on, her little girl’s hair tied with a ribbon at parties.
And now, again, in London: What should I write?
There was a point when it occurred to me that my early life had been extraordinary and would make a novel. I had not understood how extraordinary until I had left Southern Africa and come to England. Martha Quest, my third book, was more or less autobiographical, though it didn’t start until Martha was fourteen, when her childhood was over. First novels, particularly by women, are often attempts at self-definition, whatever their literary merits. While I was seeing my early life more clearly with every new person I met, for a casual remark could question things I had taken for granted for years, I was nevertheless confused. While I certainly ‘knew who I was’ (to use the American formula), I did not know how to define myself as a social being. In parenthesis – and it has to be that, for we touch on whole landscapes of query – this business of ‘finding out who I am’ (and it really was then American) has always left me wondering. What do they mean? Surely they can’t be without a sense of self. A sense of: Here I am, inside here. What can it be like, to live without that feeling of me, in here; of what I am?
What I did not know was how to define myself, see myself in a social context. Oh yes, easy enough to say I was a child of the end of the Raj – but that phrase had not yet come into use. The end of the British Empire, then. Yes, I was one of a generation brought up on World War I and then as much formed by World War II. But there was a hiatus, a lack, a blur – and it was to do with my parents and particularly my mother. I had fought her steadily, relentlessly, and I had had to – but what was it all about? Why? And I was not able to answer that, entirely, until I was in my seventies, and even then perhaps not finally.
I started to write Martha Quest while still in Denbigh Road, and it was going along at a good rate, but I had to interrupt myself, I had to get out of that house, that street – which for a long time now has been a fashionable area. Sometimes I drive or walk through it and see those discreetly desirable residences, and I think, I wonder what you people would say if you could see how these houses were and how carelessly they were ‘done up’ by War Damage.
The trouble was, the little boy, Peter, was happy there, and I knew I would not easily find anything as good. For him, that is.
By chance I went to an evening party, in the flat of the brother of a farmer in Southern Rhodesia, who was the essence of white conformity. But this brother was left-wing and pro-Soviet, as was then common. He had an elderly girlfriend, who had once been beautiful, as the photographs that stood about everywhere averred, and whom he called Baby. Baby, with her great dark eyes in her painted pretty old face, her little ruffles and bows, dominated the scene, but there was another focus of attention, a vibrant, dark-eyed, dark-haired stocky young woman, who at first I thought was French. She wore a tight black skirt, a white shirt, and a cheeky black beret. We talked; she heard how I was living; she at once responded with practical sympathy. She had herself been a young woman with a small child in one bed-sit room in New York. She had been rescued by a woman friend, with the offer of a flat in her house. ‘You can’t live like this,’ she had said. And now Joan Rodker said to me that she was getting rid of an unsatisfactory tenant, and she had been thinking for some time how to help some young woman with a child. There was a small flat at the top of her house, and I could live there, provided she liked Peter. So on the next Sunday I took Peter to see her, and they liked each other at once. So you could say that it was Peter who solved my housing problem for me.
And so I moved into Church Street, Kensington, an attractive little flat at the top of the house, where I lived for four years. It was summer 1950. But before I left Denbigh Road I saw the end of an era, the death of a culture: television arrived. Before, when the men came back from work, the tea was already on the table, a fire was roaring, the radio emitted words or music softly in a corner, they washed and sat down at their places, with the woman, the child, and whoever else in the house could be inveigled downstairs. Food began emerging from the oven, dish after dish, tea was brewed, beer appeared, off went the jerseys or jackets, the men sat in their shirtsleeves, glistening with well-being. They all talked, they sang, they told what had happened in their day, they talked dirty – a ritual; they quarrelled, they shouted, they kissed and made up and went to bed at twelve or one, after six or so hours of energetic conviviality. I suppose that this level of emotional intensity was not usual in the households of Britain: I was witnessing an extreme. And then, from one day to the next – but literally from one evening to the next – came the end of good times, for television had arrived and sat like a toad in the corner of the kitchen. Soon the big kitchen table had been pushed along the wall, chairs were installed in a semi-circle and, on the chair arms, the swivelling supper trays. It was the end of an exuberant verbal culture.
CHURCH STREET, KENSINGTON W8 (#ulink_25ec8d15-15d5-572c-935a-35e77a8365f4)
THE HOUSE NEAR THE PORTOBELLO ROAD was war-damaged and surrounded by areas of bombed buildings. The house in Church Street had been war-damaged, and near it were war ruins. Bonfires often burned on the bomb sites, to get rid of the corpses of houses. Otherwise the two houses had nothing in common. In the house I had left, politics had meant food and rationing and the general stupidities of government, but in Church Street I was returned abruptly to international politics, communists, the comrades, passionate polemic, and the rebuilding of Britain to some kind of invisible blueprint, which everyone shared. Joan Rodker worked for the Polish Institute, was a communist, if not a Party member, and knew everyone in ‘the Party’ – which is how it was referred to – and knew, too, most people in the arts. Her story is extraordinary and deserves a book or two. She was the daughter of two remarkable people, from the poor but vibrant East End, when it was still supplying the arts, and intellectual life generally, with talent. Her father was John Rodker, a writer and a friend of the well-known writers and intellectuals of that time, who mysteriously did not fulfil the expectations everyone had for him and became a publisher. Her mother was a beauty who sat for the artists, notably Isaac Rosenberg. They dumped Joan as a tiny child in an institution that existed to care for the children of people whose lives could not include children. It was a cruel place, though in outward appearance genteel. Her parents intermittently visited but never knew what the little girl was enduring. Surviving all this, and much else, she was acting in a theatre company in the Ukraine, having easily learned German and Russian, being endowed with that kind of talent, when she had a child by a German actor in the company. Since bourgeois marriage had been written out of history for ever, they did not marry. She was instrumental in getting him out of Czechoslovakia and into England before the war began. I used his appearance in Children of Violence, in the place of Gottfried Lessing, because I thought, This is Peter’s father. One man was middle class, the other rich, very rich, from Germany’s decadent time. My substitution of one man for another did not have the effect intended. Gottfried said I had put him in the book, yet all the two characters had in common was being German and communist. That could only mean Gottfried thought that what identified him was his politics. Hinze, a well-known actor, was around while Ernest – Joan’s child – was growing up, helping with money and with time. He, too, was a remarkable man, and his story deserves to be recorded. Hard times do produce extraordinary people. I don’t know what the practical application of that thought could be.
Joan returned to London after the war, from America, with the child – and found she had nowhere to live. She saw this house, in Church Street, open to the sky, and thought. That’s my house. She brought in buckets of water and began scrubbing down the rooms, night after night, when she had done with work. War Damage sent in workmen to repair the house and found Joan on her knees, with a scrubbing brush.
‘What you doing?’
‘Cleaning my house,’ she said.
‘But it isn’t your house.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘You’d better have documents to prove it, then.’
She had no money. She went to her father and demanded that he guarantee a bank loan. He was disconcerted; people who have had to drag themselves up from an extreme of poverty may take a long time to see themselves as advantaged. With a guaranteed bank loan, and her determination, she got her house, where she is living to this day.
All these vicissitudes had given her an instinct for the distress of others which was the swiftest and surest I have known. She knew how to help people. Her kindness, her generosity, was not sentimental but practical and imaginative. I had plenty of people to compare her with, because I was meeting people who had survived war, prison camps, every kind of disaster; my life was full of survivors, but not all of them had been improved by what had happened to them.
Peter had been happy in the other house, and he enjoyed this one as much. Joan’s son, Ernest, then adolescent, was as wonderfully kind as Joan herself. He was like an elder brother. People who have brought up small children without another parent to share the load will know I have said the most important thing about my life then.
If living in the other house was as strange to me as if I’d been immersed in a Victorian novel, life in Church Street, Kensington, was only a continuation of that flat in Salisbury where people dropped in day and night for cups of tea, food, argument, and often noisy debate. Going up or down the stairs, I passed the open door into the little kitchen, often crammed with comrades, having a snack, talking, shouting, or imparting news in confidential tones, for a great deal was going on in the communist world which was discussed in lowered voices and never admitted publicly. I was again in an atmosphere that made every encounter, every conversation, important, because if you were a communist, then the future of the world depended on you – you and your friends and people like you all over the world. The vanguard of the working class, in short. I was in conflict. Having lived with Gottfried Lessing, a ‘one hundred and fifty percenter’ – a phrase used at that time in communist circles – I was weary of dogmatism and self-importance. When I was with Gottfried, who was now at the nadir of his life and, because of his low spirits, even more violently rude about people and opinions not communist, I was seeing a mirror of myself – a caricature, yes, but true. A line from Gerald Manley Hopkins haunted me.
This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage, Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age.
I would wake out of a dream, muttering, ‘“and their packs infest the age”’. Me: Hopkins was talking about me.
I lived in a pack, was one of a pack. But when the comrades came up the stairs to the top of the house – and they often did, for up there lived a lively young woman and her delightful little boy, an exotic too, coming from Africa, which seemed always to be in the news these days – I found people interested in what I said about South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Anywhere outside communist circles, my information that Southern Rhodesia was not a paradise of happy darkies was greeted with impatience. You are so wrong-headed, those looks said. How patronized I have been by people who don’t want to know. But the comrades did want to know. An attraction of Communist Party circles was that if you happened to remark, ‘I have been in Peru, and …’ people wanted to know. The world was their responsibility. I was finding this increasingly ridiculous, but the thing wasn’t so easy. I looked back to Salisbury, where we had assumed, for years, that what we did and thought was of world-shattering (literally) significance, but from the perspectives of London our little group there seemed embarrassing, absurd – yet I knew that these absurd people were the few, in all of white Southern Rhodesia, who understood the truth about the white regime: that it was doomed, could not last long. It was not our views but our effectiveness that was in question. And here I was again, being part of a minority, and a very small one, who knew they were in the right. This was the height of the Cold War. The Korean War had started. The communists were with every day more isolated. The atmosphere was poisonous. If, for instance, you doubted that America was dropping wads of material infected with germs – germ warfare – then you were a traitor. I was undermined with doubts. I hated this religious language, and I was not the only one. ‘Comrade So-and-so is getting doubts,’ a communist might say, with that sardonic intonation that was already – and would increasingly become – the tone of many conversations. But again, this was not simple, for it was certainly not only the comrades who identified with an idealized Soviet Union.
Although I was not a member of the Communist Party, I was accepted by the comrades as one of them: I spoke the language. When I protested that I had been a member of a communist party invented by us in Southern Rhodesia, which any real Communist Party would have dismissed with contempt, they did not care – or perhaps they did not hear. It has been my fate all my life often to be with people who assume I think as they do, because a passionate belief, or set of assumptions, is so persuasive to the holders of them that they really cannot believe anyone could be so wrong-headed as not to share them. I could not discuss any ‘doubts’ I might have with Joan or anyone who came to that house – not yet, but, if I found the Party Line hard to swallow, there was something else, much stronger. Colonials, the children or grandchildren of the far-flung Empire, arrived in England with expectations created by literature. ‘We will find the England of Shelley and Keats and Hopkins, of Dickens and Hardy and the Brontes and Jane Austen, we will breathe the generous airs of literature. We have been sustained in exile by the magnificence of the Word, and soon we will walk into our promised land.’ All the communists I met had been fed and sustained by literature, and very few of the other people I met had. In short, my experience in Southern Rhodesia continued, if modified, not least because again I was having to defend my right to write, to spend my time writing, and not to run around distributing pamphlets or the Daily Worker. But a woman who had stood up to Gottfried Lessing – ‘Why are you wasting your time? Writing is just bourgeois self-indulgence’ – was more than equipped to deal with the English comrades. The pressure on writers – and artists – to do something other than write, paint, make music, because those are nothing but bourgeois indulgences, continued strong, and continues now, though the ideologies are different, and will continue, because it has roots in envy, and the envious ones do not know they suffer from a disease, know only that they are in the right.
