A Ripple From the Storm (9 page)

‘So there’s no one who wants to stay out. Well, of course not,’ said Marjorie excitedly.

One of the airmen, a young Scotsman with flaming hair, turned red and said with a consciously rueful despair: ‘But man, I’m no scholar. If it is going back to school, then I’m willing enough. I left my schooling at fourteen, but I’m an ordinary working lad, that’s all.’

At which the urchin Tommy Brown said: ‘I think the same. I’m not up to all this. I mean, I liked what you said, but I left my schooling at fifteen.’

Anton sat up, fixing his eyes first on the young Scotsman, then on the young Colonial. He said: ‘Comrades, do I understand you to say that the
workers
are not capable of studying? Of education?’

‘Ah, heck now,’ said the Scotsman. ‘No one says a word against the workers while I’m by. But all this is too highfalutin’ for me, it’s the truth.’

‘No, it is not the truth,’ said Anton Hesse. He leaned forward, holding Murdoch Mathews from the slums of Glasgow with his eyes, while the young man writhed under the cold stare. ‘Comrade, when you speak like that, it means that the propaganda of the capitalist class that the workers are not fit for the best, has affected you. You are a victim of their propaganda. As a worker, you are fit only for the best.’

Murdoch, having tried to exchange humorously desperate glances with Tommy the urchin, who was too serious to be humorous, said: ‘For all that, I don’t understand half of what you say, comrade.’ His tone was still weakly rueful. Under the peremptory urging of Anton’s eyes he sat up, however, and said differently, in a manly responsible tone: ‘But I’m willing. I’m willing to learn if you are willing to teach.’

Comrade Anton turned to Tommy. ‘Comrade Tommy, did you really not understand what I said?’

‘I understood the general thing,’ said Tommy apologetically. ‘But a lot of the words you used were too long.’

‘Then I’m sorry. You must correct me in future. It was always my worst fault. But in a foreign language it is not always the easiest, to find the right words.’

‘You speak English better than me,’ said Tommy, with a mixture of admiration and hostility.

‘Foreigners always speak English better than the English,’ said Marjorie, with such a warmth of admiration for Anton that he glanced up, giving her the small paternal indulgent smile she was used to receive. But Colin Black was admiring her with his eyes; Anton’s face darkened, and he said, looking around the room: ‘And so now, are we all going to work at our theory?’

At this, one of the airmen, who had not spoken at all, a very tall untidy youth with a pale bony face under a lank mass of black hair, said: ‘I would remind you, comrades, that theory should be linked with practice.’

Anton said: ‘You’ve been in the Party?’ He did not say
of course,
but it was in his manner: the young man’s tone had been as authoritative as his own.

‘Three years,’ said the airman.

‘You are quite right. We do not forget the unity of theory and practice. But before we put our ideas into practice, we need to know what our ideas are. In short, we need to analyse the situation …’ He acknowledged the indulgent glances of the old gang – Jasmine, Martha, Marjorie and Andrew – with an impatient movement of his shoulders. ‘We need, I say, to analyse the situation. Before we can analyse it, we need to discuss it. Before we can discuss it, we need to organize ourselves in such a way that the group has the benefit of the experience and knowledge of every comrade in it. Therefore, we need now to discuss organization.’

‘For the want of a nail the battle was lost,’ said Marie du Preez, smiling humorously. But the humour faded from her face as Anton turned to her and said: ‘Precisely so. We are Marxists – or so called. We therefore apply our minds to an existing situation and act accordingly.’

Marie gave the smallest swallow of resigned amusement, while her husband grinned broadly sideways at her lowered cheek.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Anton, and waited.

‘I formally propose,’ said Andrew, ‘that Comrade Hesse should put forward his plan for the organization of the group.’

‘Agreed,’ said Jasmine. No one disagreed.

Anton proposed that there should be a formal group meeting every week, attendance obligatory, for group business, reports on work done, criticism and self-criticism. Also, that there should be a meeting every week, attendance obligatory, for Marxist education. Also, that there should be a meeting every week, attendance obligatory, for education in political organization.

‘That’s three evenings,’ said the stern dark young man. ‘Some of us don’t get that off in a week.’

‘And what about my girl-friend?’ said Murdoch, waggishly: but Anton said; ‘Never mind your girl-friend,’ and he subsided, with a loud sigh.

Three evenings being out of the question, and it being pointed out that this small group of people were committed to running half a dozen of the town’s most lively and demanding organizations, it was agreed that there should be one obligatory group meeting, which would combine education with organization. That the airforce men should get lectures on Marxism from Andrew in the camp. That the group should be secret. That there should be no membership cards. That they would be bound only by their agreement to obey discipline and the will of the majority.

‘Why should it be secret?’ inquired young Tommy Brown at this point. ‘I mean to say, this is a democracy, isn’t it?’ There was a shout of laughter at these words, and they glanced at the African Elias, who said good-naturedly, ‘Yes, this is a democracy all right.’

‘I see what you mean,’ said Tommy uncomfortably. Then he leaned forward across the others, and said earnestly to Elias: ‘I’m sorry, Comrade Elias. I’ve got a lot to learn yet.’

Elias waved his large hand at him benevolently.

‘Having agreed that this is a democracy, and that a Party would not be allowed to exist, we shall keep it secret,’ said Anton.

Bill Bluett, the stern airman, said: ‘There’s nothing much secret about it – I heard there was a group months ago in the camp.’

‘Since we seemed unable to decide ourselves whether there was a group or not, we are not surprised you are confused,’ said Anton. ‘But in future we must behave like revolutionaries and not like a lot of chickens.’

The group rose from the hard benches, stretching and rubbing themselves. Elias said he must go at once. They all felt bad; he was going first, they knew, because it would be so awkward for them when they descended the stairs in a body and probably decided to go together to a café where he would not be allowed to enter. They all warmly said good night to him, shaking his hand. It occurred to them as they did so that they would not shake each other’s hands: the effort to avoid some forms of racial discrimination leads often enough to others.

Elias went; the airforce men departed to their bus. The civilians remained, and, finding it painful to part, went downstairs to Black Ally’s for coffee, where they talked, as always, with a painful yearning nostalgia about the Soviet Union.

The du Preez left first – the married couple. Then Marjorie departed with Colin. The small grimaces and raised eyebrows that followed their departure said that the group acknowledged these two as a good couple; the excitable charm of Marjorie seemed a satisfactory match with the phlegmatic common sense of Colin.

Anton, Jasmine, Martha, Tommy and Carrie remained.

Tommy, red with earnestness, his hair in tufts all over his head, was talking to Jasmine about the deficiencies of his education. She promised to meet him tomorrow at four, after work, to discuss a reading list. Carrie was keeping the pressure of her very pretty dark eyes on Anton. Martha thought she must be attracted to him, and was surprised to feel a small pang of jealousy. This made her abrupt and awkward in her manner to Anton. But neither of the two young women had the benefit of their emotions, for Anton rose, saying calmly: ‘I must get my sleep,’ and left them with a formal nod.

And now it was midnight, and there was no excuse to stay longer. Assuring each other of their reunion at the earliest possible opportunity next day, they parted.

Martha found Mrs Carson standing in her darkened kitchen in nothing but a thin nightdress, her ear pressed to the crack of the door which led into the garden, shivering with cold and with enjoyable fear. This evening it was easy for Martha to soothe the poor woman, and to persuade her into her bed.

Chapter Four

Cecil John Rhodes Vista spreadeagled at its upper end into a moneyed suburb known by the citizens as Robber’s Roost. In the lower town it expired in a sprawl of hot railway lines and a remnant of oily evil-smelling grass-laden soil, beyond which, side by side, lay the white cemetery and the Native Location.

Before it came to the railway lines, the Vista ran for several hundred yards bordered by hovels, shops and laundries, and it was one of the four parallel streets known collectively as the Coloured Quarter. Along these four streets Martha sold
The Watchdog from
house to house. In theory this activity was to take two hours once a week. But in practice it took three or four afternoons, and three of the RAF men had been allotted to help her. Since the Coloured Quarter was out of bounds to the RAF for the purposes of discouraging immorality and miscegenation, the three joined a large number of RAF men who kept civilian clothes hidden in various nooks and corners of the town and changed into them so that they could visit their Coloured friends or women.

The rendezvous for
The Watchdog
sellers was an Indian shop near the end of the Vista. At six o’clock one afternoon, Martha had deposited the four dozen copies of the paper the shop sold for her, and was idling outside it, looking for her colleagues, when a small girl came running across the street, her thin hips pistoning through a large rent in her dress. ‘Missus, missus,’ she said: ‘Mam wants you.’ A hundred yards away Murdoch Mathews came into sight surrounded by a swarm of small boys who were shouting joyously: ‘
The Watchdog!’
‘Uncle Joe,’ ‘Stalingrad.’ His lean jerky body was swathed in clothes three sizes too large, borrowed from Anton, and with his flaming hair and sun-hot face he was so spectacular a figure that groups of people had stopped to stare all down the street. These streets were wide, three times as wide as those in the upper town, for they had been built in the days when ox-wagons were expected to turn in them: ox-wagons often still did. A strip of tarmac, carwheels width, held the dust down in the centre, but on either side the rutted gritty earth was thick with a haze of dust, reddened by the glare of the setting sun, which must have been shining into Murdoch’s eyes, for she had to gesticulate several times before he saw her. She indicated that he should wait for her; he replied in a hushed shout that he would wait around the corner where he could not be seen, and went around the corner, followed by the stares of several dozen interested people,

Martha followed the child across the ruts and furrows of the road into the entrance of Mansion Court. The court was built on a common pattern of the old days fifty years before: single rooms opening off a three-sided veranda. The square in the middle was a filthy dust, and covered all over with washing-lines. Sitting in the middle of the court on a candlebox was a fat dark woman, whose ancient hat was skewered to her head with broken knitting-needles. She stared suspiciously at Martha from small, squashed-up, yellowing eyes, and said: ‘Why can’t I have a paper, why can’t I have it?’ and held out her hand for a
Watchdog
as if her being given it were a test. Her eyes became even more suspicious when Martha held out her hand for the penny.

‘Didn’t a man come around with
The Watchdog
this afternoon?’ asked Martha – for this street was supposed to have been covered by Murdoch.

‘A man never came. Men are not wanted here. The police don’t want men here.’ And then, insistent and suspicious: ‘When will I get my room in the new flats?’

‘I haven’t anything to do with the housing.’

‘You said I could have a flat when I signed the papers,’ she said, fanning some flies away from her face with the
The Watchdog.

‘If the man didn’t sell the papers in this court, then I’d better do it now.’

‘Yes, we all want new rooms in this court,’ said the woman.

There were twelve rooms to the court, and over a hundred people living in them. The first door, standing open, showed a man in his shirt-sleeves lying, arm over his face, on the bed; a woman knitting as she sat on the floor, four children, a baby in a candlebox, and a half-grown girl in a pink celanese petticoat who turned her head with a wide swing of her thick black plait as she hooked up a dish-cloth on a peg already loaded with clothes. The woman on the floor said to the dozing man:
‘The Watchdog.’
He brushed the sleep off his face with his forearm, plunged his fist into his trouser pocket, brought out a sixpence, took the paper, gave Martha a comradely nod, and fell backwards on to the bed again, arm over his face. The next room was locked, but felt as if it were full of people, listening, waiting for her to go away: they were afraid of the rent collector or a summons, and Martha quickly passed on to the next room. Six men squatted around the floor in the space between two beds, dicing, with a pile of pennies beside each. There were two babies asleep on one of the beds, and a woman asleep, rolled in a blanket, on the other. ? young man rose, leaned across the heads of the dice-throwers, handed over two pennies, took two
Watchdogs,
said: ‘How’s the Reds this week?’ and settled down to his dice. Martha went on, accompanied by the small girl who had summoned her from the Indian store, and who was hopping on one leg after and around her, watching her with steady curiosity from very bright black eyes.

The next door was closed, but did not have about it the feeling of people waiting behind it in anxiety. Martha knocked, and it was opened by a young white man who said in a Yorkshire voice: ‘Come in, we was waiting for you and all.’ Martha saw he had taken her for a white-skinned Coloured girl; but when he saw
The Watchdog
, the moment’s flash of suspicion on his face went, and he said: ‘Oh,
The Watchdog.
T’revolution for me, right enough.’ He took the paper and gave her a shilling, shaking his head when she offered change. Behind him through the half-open door Martha saw two half-naked girls, and another young man on the bed. One of the girls came, rested her naked breasts on the shoulder of the man at the door, and shouted over his head to the woman sitting on the candlebox: ‘Mam, did you buy the bread?’ The woman, without turning her body around, but with prim hoity-toity movements of her shoulders said: ‘Dirty bitch, I’ll put the police on to you.’ And she continued to fan herself with
The Watchdog.
‘Did you see the police?’ said the RAF man to Martha, one ally to another.

‘No,’ said Martha. ‘There’s two in the next street.’

“Then we’d better get moving on.’ He hastily pulled the door inwards, saying: ‘I’ll be along to one of the meetings one of these days, you’ll be seeing me.’

Here the small sparrow-like girl, still hopping on one leg, said to Martha again; ‘Mam wants you.’ Martha had imagined the woman on the candlebox was her mother, but now the girl darted off across the court shouting excitedly, ‘Mam, mam, mam.’

A half-open door across the court shifted and a youngish tired-looking woman put her face around it. She said to Martha: ‘Are you the Welfare?’

‘No.’

‘I thought you was the Welfare,’ she said disappointedly.

‘Can I do anything?’

The woman promptly opened the door. It was a small room, identical with the others, rough-plastered, with a red cement floor which was cracked. Small black ants swarmed along the cracks. There were clothes hanging from hooks and in a low bed a long knobbly body under a patched sheet. A shock of black hair protruded from the top of the sheet. The body was heaving with sharp, hard and irregular breath.

‘The Welfare said they would come this day,’ said the woman, looking at the bed. At which the sheet fell back and showed a very thin young man, in a grey shirt, which was open down the front, showing a cage of knobbed ribs. His face was extremely thin, his black eyes fevered and enormous. His skin had a dry greyish look.

‘What do you want?’ he asked Martha angrily.

‘She’s not the Welfare lady,’ said the woman. ‘It’s my son,’ she said to Martha. ‘He’s very sick.’

He said: ‘I told you, I’m not going to hospital.’

‘It’s your sickness makes you talk,’ said his mother. She stood at a short distance from the bed, hands folded before her. Her feet, in canvas shoes, moved irritably on the cement. Martha was reminded of a gesture of her mother’s: the way she would sit smoothing the stuff of her dress on her knee with the flat of her hand, over and over again, in a tired irritable gesture. So did the feet of this woman move on the floor, in a compulsive, pawing way, like a horse which has been standing too long. She said to Martha: ‘It’s his sickness makes him bad. It makes him hard to please.’

A spasm of anger crossed the bony sick face. The boy flung himself down again, his back turned, and again became a heavily-shrouded body breathing hoarsely.

‘Shall I fetch someone for you?’ asked Martha.

‘The Welfare said they would come this day.’

During this conversation the small girl twirled and twiddled her thin black legs as she hung from the doorknob, her eyes fixed relentlessly on Martha’s face. ‘Oh, leave off,’ said her mother, and smacked her lightly across the face, to relieve her own exasperation. The child moved her face sideways, automatically, from the sting of the blow, and continued to dangle from the knob, splaying out her legs over the floor.

Murdoch’s flaming mop of hair appeared on the veranda. ‘What’s up?’ he said.

Martha went to the veranda and the woman followed them. Her eyes moved from Martha’s face to Murdoch’s in a patient undemanding query.

‘A good day to ye,’ said Murdoch to her. ‘How’s the patient?’ His tone struck Martha as facetious, but the woman said, moving nearer to Murdoch, ‘It’s his chest, it’s not doing better.’

‘TB,’ said Murdoch to Martha, and the woman nodded, adding practically: ‘He will die soon, I think.’

Martha was shocked by the directness of this, but Murdoch nodded and said simply: ‘Aye, and he’d be better in hospital, with the right things for him.’

At this moment a large car stopped outside the entrance of the court, and a well-dressed young woman got out of it. Martha recognized Ruth Manners, now a young matron with children: two small girls sat in the back of the car with a native nanny. She came picking her way across the court on large well-polished shoes, and did not raise her eyes to see the group of people until nearly on them. She recognized Martha, and gave her a polite smile, while her pale cautious eyes were animated for the space of a startled second at the sight of Murdoch, before she decided that he, like Martha, was outside her radius of interest. On Murdoch’s face was a wild irreverent grin: ‘The Welfare,’ he said, audibly and derisively.

Ruth Manners ignored him, and said to the woman: ‘How is he?’

‘Very bad, miss.’

‘Has he changed his mind about coming into hospital?’

‘No, miss, sorry to tell you, he hasn’t, the sickness has him unreasonable, miss.’

Ruth Manners looked full of patient distaste for the whole situation. She asked in cold clear tones: ‘Shall I try and make him see reason?’

‘If you like, miss, but he’s not himself.’

Martha and Murdoch stood to one side while the young woman went to the doorway and stood looking down at the long knobbly form under the white sheet.

‘Ronald,’ she said, or rather stated.

The form did not stir.

‘It’s the Welfare,’ said the mother helplessly, but on a note of warning.

There was a growl and a mutter of obscenities from under the sheet. Ruth came back and stood in front of the mother, her expression of distaste even more marked. ‘You must see,’ she said in a high patient voice, ‘that there’s nothing at all we can do. Is he taking his medicines?’

‘Yes, miss, I make him.’

Ruth Manners continued to stand, frowning, looking around the court as from a long distance. Suddenly all her distaste focused: her pale eyes under the black crooked brows moved in a snap towards Murdoch and Martha; her face contracted with hatred, and she said: ‘I suppose you communists have been putting ideas into his head.’

The colour flamed into her thin angry cheeks and she walked stiffly back to her car.

Murdoch grinned and said: ‘It’s the Red Hand again. Man, but we get into everything, we’re under every bed.’

The woman, tugged backwards and forwards out of her stoic and patient stance by the pull of the lively swinging little girl on her hand, said: ‘There was a baas here yesterday talking to Ronald. Ron liked him. Perhaps he could make him go to hospital.’

‘Who was it?’ asked Martha, slowly translating the ‘baas’, in her mind, into who it must be – one of the men from the camp.

The woman, with her eyes on Murdoch’s extraordinary assortment of clothes, said with delicacy: ‘I think he was from the camp too.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was selling your newspaper.’

‘We’ll see if we can find out who it was,’ said Martha,

She and Murdoch left the court together, while the patient tired woman and the lively child looked after them, and the woman on the candlebox shouted: ‘You promised me faithfully my room. You promised it.’

‘I don’t see who it can be,’ said Martha, ‘unless Bill’s been doing our street. And by the way, you should have done this court – you forgot it.’

‘I was getting around to it, I was getting around to it,’ said Murdoch instantly, in an aggrieved voice. He had a way of suggesting he was unfairly accused at the slightest suggestion of criticism, but he was, above all, humorous. Now he grinned clowningly at Martha and said: ‘Give me a chance, comrade. I was having a talk to a nice girl in the street behind this one.’

Martha asked: ‘What girl,’ realized that she was thinking ‘white’ – because her first thought had been, there are no girls in this area, meaning white girls, was shocked at herself, and out of her guilty anger said: ‘You know quite well the group has taken a decision you’re not to have affairs with Coloured girls, it’s against the group decision.’

‘Have a heart,’ he said, ‘I was only talking to her.’

He looked as guilty as a schoolboy, and Martha, disliking herself, said: ‘But in any case, why shouldn’t you? It’s a bad decision, it’s undemocratic.’