Walking in the Shade (27 page)

It was already hard for me to remember how dismayed I had been when first in London, how any time I left the little protective shell I lived in, and ventured forth, I needed an inner stiffening of defences: No, I will not let myself be depressed by it.

 

And now my first cat, in my home, my place. My responsibility. I had loved most fiercely the cats on the farm, long ago, but I did not know much about them. My mother cared for them. A good place for a cat, someone said, desperate to find a home for a kitten. You've got two floors, and outside your front door a wooden staircase down to a yard, and a large flat roof too—of course you must have a kitten. And that is how we acquire a cat. What's a cat—a mere cat? A creature without rights, living as it can, where it can, and when in our houses often ill-treated through ignorance. I did not know how to look after a cat. On the farm there were indoor cats and outdoor cats, they drank water from the dogs' drinking bowls, were given milk when the pails came up from the milking, caught their food in the bush and were given leftovers and tidbits. They died easily: a cat wasn't worth a vet, who was so many miles away and who in any case dealt with serious animals, working animals, like dogs and cattle, and the horses for the gymkhanas. They easily went wild with the real wildcats; they were bitten by snakes or went blind from a cobra's spitting into their eyes and had to be ‘put down'. There were innumerable litters of kittens, and most were drowned at birth.

With this apprenticeship, I acquired a cat, a black and white cat, your basic moggy—plump, sweet, rather stupid, and dependent, for she would have liked to be with me every second of the day and night.

She did not like tinned food and slowly persuaded me she should have calves' liver—in those days, before the culinary revolution, liver, kidneys, any ‘offal', was so cheap that its price alone attested that it was not worth eating. She liked steak. She liked a bit of fish. She was fed too well, for I did not know then that a diet of liver and steak and fish was not good for a cat. I hope I had a bowl of water down for her and her kittens. Most cats like plenty of water and don't like milk all that much. No, she did not get ill, she flourished, but did not live for long, because she fell off the flat roof and broke her pelvis—in this way at least continuing what I knew from the farm, where cats used up their nine lives so quickly.

She was kindly treated, she was fed, she was taken to the vet, she was petted and fussed over, she slept on my bed. But it was only later that I learned to appreciate cats, as individuals, each one different, just like humans. Later there were cats who impressed themselves on me by their force of character, their intelligence, their bravery, their fortitude when suffering, their sensitiveness to what you are thinking, their care for their kittens—in my experience, this is true of male cats too. But this cat, my first as an adult, was, simply, just a sweet cat.

I had to learn how to observe a cat, interact with it and its emotional life, its loves, its affections, its jealousies. For like humans, cats are jealous creatures, want to be first in your affections. From a cat you get back what you give to it—rather you get back a hundredfold—in the way of attention, observation, above all, observation, so that you know what the cat is thinking and feeling. All this is missed by people who think that cats are all alike, are ‘independent' and ‘don't care for people' and ‘are only interested in you because you feed them'.

How often do you see that sad thing, an intelligent cat in some house with ignorant owners, trying to persuade these blocks of insensitivity that here is a loving creature ready to be a real friend—but yet again it is rebuffed, roughly thrown off a lap or even hit, and it goes away, sullen but patient, a captive of stupidity.

Now I know I missed a whole range of responses and affections with that first cat, because I had decided she was sweet but not very bright. If you look at it from her point of view: this very dependent cat, who by nature should have been with one person, night and day, found herself in a flat with a mistress who would not pay her attention when she was working, who was always walking restlessly about or lying down for short naps, from which she jumped up, dislodging her. This friend went away often, once for six weeks, and how very long that must seem to a cat, probably the same as our years. Yes, she went away for years at a time, leaving her with people who might or might not love her. When this mistress came home, and once again the cat could look forward to a warm place on the foot of the bed, then that might not happen, for it was by no means certain there was only one person in the bed, and often she had to retreat to a chair, make herself small, not be a nuisance. There was a young boy, and he was kind, but he didn't have time for her, and he came and went all the time. The currents of feeling in that place where she had found herself taken—no choice of hers—they were disturbing, very often they were frightening: cats pick up every nuance of feeling. This was not a calm and reassuring place; all the people in it were restless, or anxious, going and coming, and that was why this cat always wanted to be with this mistress, who might disappear altogether—if she could vanish for years, why not for ever?

The cat, like everyone who came into that flat, did not have much faith in the roof over her head.

 

And now, simply for the pleasure of writing about it, a marriage made in heaven. A young communist idealist, a Russian woman, met in Moscow Bill Rust, the editor of the
Daily Worker
, the British communist paper. He was there on some official trip. Well known and well liked was Bill Rust, respected outside the communist world, for within the limits of the communist imperatives he was a forthright and independent editor. Because of his position, permission was given at once for her to leave the Soviet Union and marry him. Some hopeful brides languished for years, no permission forthcoming. Soon Bill Rust died, and Tamara was left a widow. She was by temperament and belief and training a communist activist. She was also still very Russian, an exotic for the insular British workers. The Party gave her the job of activating the peasantry in Britain. (This formulation was very much the Party's idea of a joke.) On a trip to the West Country, Tamara met Wogan Phillips, the eldest son of a lord, a gentleman farmer near Cheltenham. His father, furious that he was a communist, cut him off without the proverbial penny but could not deprive him of the title, which in due course he inherited. Wogan wanted to marry Tamara. Understandably. She wanted to marry him, but the doubts inseparable from committing oneself to that enormity, marriage, caused her to spend some days before the wedding in acutest conflict, most of them with me. ‘How can I,' she demanded, ‘Bill Rust's widow, marry an English lord?'

‘Easily,' I said. (At that time a joke in the Party was that the CP might not be able to get anyone elected to the House of Commons but it had no difficulty in attracting lords. There were three communists in the House of Lords, and quite soon there would be Wogan. Another communist aristocrat, Ivor Montague, was in love with Communist China. He introduced table tennis to that vast empire, where it flourishes to this day.)

Tamara wanted to marry Wogan. Understandably. He was probably the handsomest man I have ever known. He had all the virtues of an aristocrat and not one of the vices. He was, but truly, a lovely man, and I've never met anyone who didn't think so. But she was of good communist Russian stock and…‘Of
course
you should marry him,' urged this romantic, unable to bear that true love was being thwarted by mere politics.

There was a wedding in a house in North London somewhere. A not very large room, and not many people in it. Wogan was imperturbably affable and kind, Tamara was in a fizz of elation, love, and doubt, and there, too, was Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British Communist Party. If he was not actually giving Tamara away, he was representing the approval of the proletariat of both countries. He had with him a lieutenant. These two, short stubby men in stiff Sunday-best suits, held their own by force of character in these most improbable circumstances. Who else was there? I can only remember two tall, fair youngsters leaning against a mantelpiece and looking benignly on, shedding charm generally over us all. These were Sally, Rosamond Lehmann's daughter by Wogan—two beautiful people had produced a girl who is remembered by everyone who ever met her as a rare and lovely creature—and Patrick Kavanagh, the poet and man of letters. They were either already married or about to be. She was to die quite soon and suddenly. Sally and Patrick should, like Wogan and Tamara, have lived happily ever after for many many decades.

I went twice or three times with Peter to visit Wogan and Tamara on their farm. He might have been cut off without a penny by his father, but luckily there must have been a halfpenny or two from somewhere or other. Their life was a dream of Englishness, all affability and kindness, on a gentleman farmer's farm, and Peter loved going there, and so did I.

Tamara and Wogan used to drive into Cheltenham, a city that could not have known a seditious thought since the Civil War, and sell the
Daily Worker
on the streets to astonished citizens. I was remembering equally quixotic attempts in Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia) to sell the communist
Guardian
newspaper around suburbs populated entirely by white kaffir-haters. Their revolutionary duty done, Wogan and Tamara went to their favourite pub, where farm labourers, some their employees, bought the
Daily Worker
because they liked Wogan.

Wogan had been left an estate in north Italy and decided to divide it up and give it to the peasants who worked it. Very soon they came and begged him to take it back or at least administer it, because they were being cheated by the surrounding landowners. Tamara and Wogan couldn't see anything funny about this, or about selling the
Daily Worker
in Cheltenham, or if they did, they weren't going to admit it.

Another wedding was Arnold and Dusty Wesker's. All Arnold's family were there, from well-off businessmen to people still not far from the East End. Dusty's family were farm workers and small farmers from Norfolk; Arnold used them in his play
Roots
. There were also actors, directors, and writers from the Royal Court Theatre, a couple of dozen of us. Blond, large, slow, ruddy-faced farm people, quick, dark, dark-eyed Jews, and us, the job lot from the Court, this improbable mix of people sat in three separate parts of a big room, eyeing each other until at the end we all became one soul, united by dancing the hora, around and around, and on and on.

 

Not all my associates were dedicated to social progress. A visitor from Canada stayed for some weeks. She gave me a yellow silk umbrella, a little graceful umbrella with an ivory handle. It came from an altogether different life. It leaned against the wall in my kitchen, and I thought, If I use that I'll have to buy different clothes, live in a different kind of flat and certainly in another part of London. The umbrella reminded me of a wonderful short story, in
New Writing
. It was from that post-war time in London when high-minded refugees from everywhere lived their precarious lives in cold shabby flats and scarcely knew where their next meal was coming from. A certain poet—Hungarian, I think—said to a friend, ‘If you're going to throw that coat out, give it to me. I'm freezing.' The coat was elegant, if threadbare. He wore it day and night. His comrades said, ‘We're not going out with you in that coat; we've got our reputations as serious people to consider.' The poet wore the coat to a publisher's party, and the publisher's daughter noticed him. He said to his own girlfriend, ‘Why don't you buy yourself a new dress?' She said, ‘Once you loved me for myself. Now you've become just another rotten bourgeois.' He had to get a new job, which he despised, to support a new wardrobe and new friends, and then he moved to a new flat, with the publisher's daughter. His comrades spoke of him as a lost soul, but he was merely ahead of the times.

 

And now, again, the tricky question of time: I had been in London for nearly eight years. What's eight years? I would say now. It's nothing at all, a mere breath; but I was still living in young-adult time, and it seemed I had been in London for an age, packed and crammed with new people, events, happenings, ideas. I was being urged to go back to Southern Rhodesia by friends there—Mrs. Maasdorp, the Zelters, the comrades generally, but certainly not my brother, with whom I exchanged polite letters—to write articles ‘which told the truth'. I needed to go back, because my Rhodesian years seemed so distant, so cut off from me, and I was dreaming every night, long sad dreams of frontiers and exile and lost landscapes. There were, however, two reasons I couldn't easily go back. I had no money, and there was Peter, who could hardly be left with the Eichners for as long as I needed. Six weeks. I began with the money.
Picture Post
, a wonderful magazine, one of the first to use picture reporting, always fighting the proprietor, who was timid, was edited by Tom Hopkinson, who was brave. In the end, cowardice defeated courage. Meantime
Picture Post
could be relied on. I went to see Tom Hopkinson and asked if
Picture Post
would pay my travel expenses to Southern Rhodesia. The way I saw it, I was as well equipped for this as anyone. I had been listening to nonsense about Southern Africa ever since I had come, though about South Africa the truth was becoming known—partly, of course, because of people like me. Now there was something called the Federation of Central Africa, which was uniting Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland—both had always been Colonial Office Protectorates, with the interests of the natives paramount—and Southern Rhodesia, which had always been modelled on the iniquitous laws of South Africa. Everyone in Britain, and all the newspapers, including the dear old
Guardian
, were in love with this federation: there is something about high-minded formulas that the British find irresistible. Only two newspapers, the
Tribune
and the
Daily Worker—
both at the extreme left—were pointing out that oil and water could not mix and that ‘unrest' was inevitable. ‘Unrest' was already breaking out everywhere in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. As I and some others had foretold. I told Tom Hopkinson that I could travel from person to person in all three territories, friends or contacts, that I would cost his magazine only the airfare, and that I was in a much better position to come up with news than the real journalists. He was cautious, said he thought yes but would let me know. He wrote to say no, he was sorry. What had happened, obviously, was that he checked with the secret services, whose members were bound to be chums of his, because this is true of nearly all the male Establishment, and had been told not only that I was communist—which of course he knew—but that I was dangerous (this was the Cold War). I did not know then that I had been made a Prohibited Immigrant in South Africa and in Southern Rhodesia too. Meanwhile Mervyn
*
and Jeanne Jones had generously offered (on their own impulse; I had not asked them) to take Peter to be with their own children for six weeks. All I needed was the airfare.