Walking in the Shade (35 page)

The journalists on those scandal sheets were not exactly admired, but I don't think we loathed and despised them, as decent people do now, for their lies and dishonesty and their cruelty to their victims. They certainly hadn't evolved anything like their present levels of hypocrisy. We have indeed gone from bad to worse. It would be nice to report that Murray at once became the world-famous journalist he is now, but in fact he had a hard time at first, and virtue had to be its own reward. A novel he wrote got into trouble with the libel law and had to be withdrawn. His life loitered in the doldrums. For a while he was earning his living as a salmon putcher on the Severn Estuary. This is the person who takes salmon out of the traps when the tide falls. He was in a minute house and eating far too much salmon, as he complained, serving delicious salmony meals to his friends when we visited. The saga of adventures continued, with Shoulders Moresby an attendant knight. True or false, who cares? The storytellers of this world should not be held to account for tedious exactitudes.

 

A scene: Facing me across a low table scattered with ashtrays, cigarettes, and teacups sits Betty, a plain young woman frowning with earnest endeavour, her eyes all anxiety. Yet there is a certain little complacency there too, for she has on her string in the role of agony aunts, Tessa Sayle, Joan Rodker, and others. She holds on her lap a neat white handbag that looks as if it was bought at a church bazaar. She is a bishop's daughter: the daughters of bishops do seem far more often than most of us to flounder in mires of moral adventure.

If with Babu Mohammed and Murray Sayle, both younger than I am, it doesn't matter—for we are confreres in enjoyment and farcical conspiracy—with Betty my ten years' seniority makes me into a matronly adviser. Like Tessa, like Joan Rodker, and who knows how many others, I often sit listening to her dilemmas.

‘You see, Mrs. Lessing, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to think. I can't sleep, I keep tossing about, because what I like is black men, ever since I went to that dance for Colonial Advancement and went home with Mahmoud. I got used to everything, Mrs. Lessing. He used to say, Now go home for the weekend, Betty, I don't want you around, I fancy a bit of boy. Yes, it's part of their culture, I know that, and I just said, I don't want to get in your way, and I went home to my parents, but they get ever so worried. They say, Have you thought of the difficulties of interracial marriage? but I don't like to say that marriage isn't on my mind. I'm very young, Mrs. Lessing, I'm only twenty-two, I don't have to worry about settling down yet, what do you think? But now I'm used to Mahmoud, and he's gone to fight against the British—that's us—in Zanzibar, and what shall I do? You see, I don't fancy white men any more.'

‘Have you thought of getting yourself another black man? You could try another dance at Colonial Advancement.'

‘Oh no, I know you mean well, but you see, I love Mahmoud. And that's what I meant to ask you: Do you think it's all right that I've booked my seat out?'

‘But, Betty,' I say, telling her what she knows already, ‘he has a new wife and a girlfriend too, and they are leaders of the Militant Women. And they are both beautiful.'

‘Yes, I know, but when he sees me I know he'll remember what we've been to each other and he'll choose me.'

‘Has he invited you?'

‘But I've got just as much right to be there as he has, haven't I? I'm British, aren't I? Well, then. It's a British country.' And off she went, to tell her tale again.

Time passes. And again she is sitting opposite me, in her neat little blouse, her hair tidily done, her little handbag in front of her. ‘I don't know what to do, Mrs. Lessing. I did go out there, but he didn't answer the message I left for him. He waved at me when he saw me at the rally, so I waited around for a month, but I've come home. I think my heart is broken, Mrs. Lessing. What shall I do?'

She thought of going to South Africa, for she could find a black man there, and I said, ‘Don't be silly. It's a prison sentence for fancying a black man there.' But she did go to South Africa, where things were as I said, and travelled up through Africa and found herself in the middle of the wars in the Congo. Horrific wars: the whole world was shocked, appalled.

Once again we are drinking tea and sharing cigarette smoke and her news. ‘I like Brazzaville,' says she. ‘There were a lot of black men there. I had a good time.'

‘But there's a terrible war on,' I say.

‘I didn't see any war, not where I was.'

‘So how are things going?'

‘Well, I'm married now, and Daddy is pleased.' She met a crocodile hunter on the shores of Lake Victoria, and he had fallen for her. ‘You'd think he'd like a black girl, wouldn't you? There were plenty of them around. But he liked me.'

The marriage had not succeeded. She was back with us, still dreaming that one day Mahmoud—now in terrible trouble, being one of those accused of assassinating his leader—would return to claim her.

John Dexter was a friend then. That was before the law about homosexuality was changed, and he was caught with a boy. I forget the details. He got six months and was sent to Wormwood Scrubs. All his friends visited him there. I went twice. The first time was frightening, not because of the prison being so grim and nasty, for I had expected that, but because John seemed to have turned into his own opposite, repeating that he deserved to be punished, the police were quite right, because he had done wrong. By the next visit he had gone back to normal, but meanwhile I was thinking how fragile we all are, poised so lightly on beliefs, on principles—on what we think we are. John had suffered no physical ill treatment, but he had been a target for newspaper insults, he had stood in court and been despised, been sentenced as an evildoer, then found himself in that grim place, being punished. No wonder people make false confessions and say, Yes, I am guilty. But I had not seen this before, and I did not understand it, and I was afraid, seeing what a frail skin civilisation paints over our pretences.

Long after this, I was giving a lecture about barriers to perception—what prevents us seeing more clearly—and one was guilt. At question time they were all, one after another, getting up to ask about guilt. Guilt, only guilt, as if nothing else had been said. I don't think this is at all a simple question.

I have just found this in a book,
The Prospect Before Her
by Olwen Huston. It is 1707. A Jesuit is preaching.

Little scenes, mere flashes:

It is afternoon. John Wain is there. And Robert Conquest. A mutual friend is about to marry. ‘Memento mori,' says Robert Conquest, tragically. And John Wain says, ‘Marriage can be undone; it is not like ordering a coffin.'

‘Oh yes, it is,' says handsome Robert, looking at us women standing about.

I have hyacinths growing, but not yet in flower, in an earthenware bowl, and certainly they are an emanation from a world very far from the noisy flat and the thundering lorries. Clancy is standing staring at them, full of horror. ‘What is the matter?' I ask. He is pale with disgust. I try to see them as he does, for he often sees the ordinary as monstrous or amazing, and manage a glimpse of something like a green mandrake, which might start hopping about or even screaming. ‘They are hyacinths,' I say firmly.

‘Put them where I can't see them,' he says. I had never known anyone so much a product of streets, buildings. (Later he was at ease in the country.) Since then I have known others. They get unhappy if they so much as step off a tarmac path in a park on to grass. Sometimes I make myself stop, switch off my usual ways of seeing, and look with neutral eyes at a configuration in a cloud, a hairy fold in a curtain, the way light falls on a railing, raindrops clustered like diamonds on a pane. I see it as a madman might, so full of threat or of intimations of otherness you have to switch off, reclaim your ordinary mind—and yet there are a great many people who live like this, with some climate of menace in their minds, that focuses like a spotlight on cloud, or fold, or the glitter of crystal drops, and they can never escape these enemies who are inside them, moving with them everywhere they go, even if they cross continents or oceans to escape them. My story ‘Dialogue' is an attempt to portray this.

I have met an Indian somewhere, who takes it into his head that I need him in my life. He turns up at my door and is insistent about coming in. I throw him out. I realise afterwards that it has never crossed my mind that I must be ‘nice' to him because he is a person with a dark skin, whereas when I first came to London I would have been full of colonial guilt. I realise I am cured of the sentimentalities of ‘The Colour Bar' and I am pleased with myself. (The Colour Bar—now there's a phrase that has gone with the wind.)

One night I was standing at the kitchen window, looking down, and saw a man vault over the tall wooden fence and stand staring up at me. I moved back out of sight. I had seen him loitering about when I went to the shops, watching me. Builders had left a plank, and now the man placed the plank on some bricks, slanting up, laid himself on it, and began masturbating. I rang the police and said, There is a man in my yard, and he is annoying me. They came around, found a door in the fence. One said, ‘Now then, old son, what are you doing? You can't do that kind of thing here.' They all four stood on the pavement, out of sight, but I heard a policeman say, ‘Now you just run along and don't do that again.' I was impressed by how they handled the incident.

 

There was a Britain that some say has gone for ever, is nowhere to be found—like the readers of
John O'London's Weekly
, who made a provincial literary culture. Easy to believe that it has gone.

Reynolds News
, a socialist Sunday paper read by labour supporters, trade unionists, socialists of all kinds—but not, I think, communists—was a decent, sober, unexcitable, unscandalous paper, whose readers would have despised our lying sensational newspapers. It ran a short-story competition, and I was asked to judge. Hundreds were submitted. I was sent the final forty. They were of a high standard, of the realistic kind; Dickens, Hardy, A. E. Coppard, Somerset Maugham, Chekhov, and Gorky were their progenitors.

Most stories came with a letter describing the difficulties of the writer. This was a time of high employment, and the culture of leisure had not arrived. Not easy then for people who might have unsympathetic families, small children, long hours, to find the time and space to write. Some said they had written novels; would I read them? I read perhaps thirty. I had not done anything of this sustained kind before and was surprised by what I know now is common. First, these novels were all
nearly
good. All writers—I have not met one who is different—go through the stage when what we write is nearly good: the writing lacks some kind of inward clinching, the current has not run clear. We go on writing, reading, throwing away not-quite-good-enough work, and then one day something has happened, a process has been completed, a step forward has been taken: these clichés are here because it is hard to say what has happened. But the process of writing and rewriting, and of reading the best, has at last succeeded. Professional writers all know this period of apprenticeship. Amateur writers cling to their early uneven drafts and won't let them go. Every one of the novels I was sent was the work of a talented person. Every one needed to be rewritten, or put away and another attempted. There is something I call the ‘my-novel syndrome'. So much of the writer has gone into it, often there have been sacrifices made to acquire the time and space to write, and then the product of this investment of self and time becomes sacred; the author will not let it go and may spend ten years hawking it around to publishers.

To every one of these authors I wrote carefully, with advice, and saying, When you have rewritten this one or done another, send it to me. Not one of them was heard of again. There is a sad waste of talent going on. But things have improved; there are writing classes and courses, and above all, it is easier to find time to write.

I am remembering this because of the current sad query: Where is that England, that Britain? All the stories, all the novels, were about small, sensible, decent, hopeful lives, with no aspirations to be fashionable or sensational. After Richard Hoggart, so much a representative of that Britain, went on
Desert Island Discs
,
*
he said he had seventy-three letters, all from people asking that question. Somewhere out there is still an honesty, an integrity—or so I believe—and a slight shift in our political fortunes would bring this face of Britain forward. At least, I hope so.

 

Now I see that overlarge flat which always had people coming through it as a continuation of the easy ways of the places I lived in with Gottfried: someone staying the night or the weekend, friends, the friends of friends. The ‘bohemia' of the comrades (mostly now ex-comrades) was infinitely hospitable, undemanding, anticipating the youth culture of the sixties. Any number of young poets, promising playwrights, novelists, male and female, came and went, all moneyless, passed from hand to hand, from city to city, and sometimes from country to country.