Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

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 get the 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

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.

It did help that I was now one of the recognized new writers. The Grass Is Singing had got very good reviews, and was selling well, and was bought in other countries. The short stories, This Was the Old Chief’s Country, did well. Needless to say, I was attacked by the comrades for all kinds of ideological shortcomings. For instance, The Grass Is Singing was poisoned by Freud. At that stage I had not read much Freud. The short stories did not put the point of view of the organized black working class. True. For one thing, there wasn’t one. There is no way one can exaggerate the stupidity of communist literary criticism; any quote immediately seems like mockery or caricature – like so much of Political Correctness now.

It was not only pressures from my own side that I had to resist. For instance, the editor of a popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic – it was not unlike the Sun – long since defunct, invited me to his office and offered me a lot of money to write articles supporting hanging, the flogging of delinquent children, harsher treatment for criminals, a woman’s place in the home, down with socialism, internment for communists. When I said I disagreed with all these, the editor, a nasty little man, said it didn’t matter what my personal opinions were. If I wanted, I could be a journalist – he would train me – and journalists should know how to write persuasively on any subject. I kept refusing large sums of money, which got larger as he became more exasperated. I fled to a telephone in the street, where I rang up Juliet O’Hea. I needed money badly. She said on no account should I ever write one word I did not believe in, never write a word that wasn’t the best I could do; if I started writing for money, the next thing would be I’d start believing it was good, and neither of us wanted that, did we? She did not believe in asking for advances before they were due, but if I was desperate she would. And she would tell the editor of the Daily Graphic to leave me alone.