Walking in the Shade (3 page)
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 Rajâbut 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 blurâand it was to do with my parents and particularly my mother. I had fought her steadily, relentlessly, and I had had toâbut 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 streetâwhich 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 âdone 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. âYou 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 dirtyâa 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 nextâbut literally from one evening to the nextâcame 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.
T
HE HOUSE NEAR THE
P
ORTOBELLO
R
OAD 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 âthe Party'âwhich is how it was referred toâand 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 ErnestâJoan's childâwas 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 childâand 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.
âWhat you doing?'
âCleaning my house,' she said.
âBut it isn't your house.'
âYes it is.'
âYou'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 youâyou 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 âone hundred and fifty percenter'âa phrase used at that time in communist circlesâI 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 myselfâa 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, â“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 houseâand 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 daysâI 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 patronised 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, âI have been in Peru, andâ¦,' 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, absurdâyet 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 germsâgerm warfareâthen you were a traitor. I was undermined with doubts. I hated this religious language, and I was not the only one. âComrade So-and-so is getting doubts,' a communist might say, with that sardonic intonation that was alreadyâand would increasingly becomeâthe tone of many conversations. But again, this was not simple, for it was certainly not only the comrades who identified with an idealised 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 careâor 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 âdoubts' I might have with Joan or anyone who came to that houseânot 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. âWe will find the England of Shelley and Keats and Hopkins, of Dickens and Hardy and the Brontës 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 LessingââWhy are you wasting your time? Writing is just bourgeois self-indulgence'âwas more than equipped to deal with the English comrades. The pressure on writersâand artistsâto 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 recognised 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 organised 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 caricatureâlike 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
âit was not unlike the
Sun
âlong 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 journalistâhe would train meâand 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.
There were other offers on the same lines, temptations of the Devil. Not that I was really tempted. But I did linger sometimes in an editor's office out of curiosity: I could not believe that this was happening, that people could be so low, so unscrupulous. But
surely
they can't really believe writers should write against their own beliefs, their consciences? Write less than their best,
for money?
The most bizarre result of
The Grass Is Singing
, which was being execrated in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, was an invitation to be âone of the girls' at an evening with visiting members of the still new Nationalist government. I was too intrigued to refuse, fascinated that Southern African customs could hold good here: âThe English cricket team is comingâjust round up some of the girls for them.' There were ten or so Afrikaners, ministers or slightly lesser officials, living it up on a trip to London. I knew them all by name, and only too well as a type. Large, overfed, jovial, they joked their way through a restaurant dinner, about all the ways they used to keep the kaffirs down, for it was then a characteristic of these ruling circles to be proud of being âslim'âfull of cunning tricks. After dinner we repaired to a hotel bedroom, where I was in danger of being fondled by one or more. Another of âthe girls' told the men that I was an enemy and they should be careful of what they said. Why was I an enemy? was demanded, with the implicit suggestion that it was not possible to disagree with their evidently correct views. âShe's written a book,' said this woman, or girl, a South African temporarily in London. âThen we're going to ban it,' was the jocular reply. One man, whose knee I was trying to refuse, said, âAch, man, we don't care what liberals read, what do they matter? The kaffirs aren't going to read your little book. They can't read, and that's how we like it.' The word âliberal' in South Africa has always been interchangeable with âcommunist'.
All the places where I had lived with Gottfried, in Salisbury, people had dropped in and out, and the talk was not only of politics, and of changing the world, but of war; in Church Street it was the same, except that here war was not all rumour and propaganda but men who had returned from battlefronts, so that we could match what really had happened with what we had been told was happening. Similarly, I was in a familiar situation with Gottfried, who disapproved of me more with every meeting. He was having a very bad time. He had believed he would easily get a job in London. He knew himself to be clever and competent: had he not created a large and successful legal firm, virtually out of nothing, in Salisbury? There were relatives in London, to whom he applied for work. They turned him down. He was a communist, and they wereâor felt themselves to beâon sufferance in Britain, as foreigners. Or perhaps they didn't like him. He was applying for jobs on the level which he knew he deserved. No one would even give him an interview. The joke was, ten years later it would be chic to be German and a communist. Meanwhile he was working for the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. This organisation owned a house in Kensington Square, where there were lectures on the happy state of the arts in the USSR. At every meeting the two back rows of chairs were filled with people who had actually lived under communism: they were trying to tell us how horrible communism was. We patronised them: they were middle-aged or old, they didn't know the score, they were
reactionary
. A well-chosen epithet, flattering to the user, is the surest way of ending all serious thought. Gottfried earned very little money. He was being sheltered by Dorothy Schwartz, who had a large flat near Belsize Park Underground. The heightâor depthâof the Cold War made him even more bitterly, angrily, coldly contemptuous of any opinion even slightly deviating from the Party Line. I was finding it almost impossible to be with him. I did not say to myself, But how did I stick him for so long? For we had had no alternative. About the child there were no disagreements. Peter spent most weekends with Gottfried and Dorothy. I would take him over there, sit down, have a cup of this or that, and listen to terrible, cold denunciations, then leave for two days of freedom. I went to the theatre a lot. In those days you queued in the mornings for a stool in the queue for the evening and saw the play from pit or gallery for the equivalent in today's money of three or four pounds. I saw most of the plays on in London, in this way, sometimes standing. I continued madly in love with the theatre.
