Walking in the Shade (32 page)

I remember nothing about those impassioned debates, but the atmosphere remains with me, vigorous, often acrimonious, and of course full of the enjoyment of political battle. Of course we would have talked about the invasion of Hungary, but this has become, with the passing of time,
the
event people remember now. For us, living through all that, Hungary was the culmination of a series of ugly events, one being the Soviet suppression of the uprising in East Berlin in—I think—1953.

I was sick, because of the tension of it all, and was not the only one.

I wrote a short story for
The New Reasoner
, ‘The Sun Between Their Feet', which I think is one of my better stories. I saw it then as my comment about the failures of communism, but now rather as on the vanity of human wishes.

I had nothing to do with the grind and effort of running the magazine, for that was left mostly to Edward and John.

We all still believed in Revolution as an article of faith.
*

 

A ferment of change…a gale…a hurricane…began with the dramas of 1956. Rather, the rapid changes that had been going on, mostly out of sight, certainly out of public sight, became visible. The Youth were back. Those of us who had complained of the indifference of youth towards politics now found young people vociferously everywhere and often knocking—no, banging—at our doors, to get our support for a hundred wondrous political plans. At a complaint that they were finding you lacking in fervour, you might murmur, ‘You see, this is far from my first Dawn—and I'm sorry, but I've learned to distrust fervour.' An unattractive posture, as I knew, for I had only to look back at my own first dawn—and surely that could not have been only fifteen years?—and see one's own flashing eyes, and burning beliefs, and dislike of temperate and temporising and humorous elders.

‘They're all Trots, you know,' one of us might say to another, perhaps on the telephone, announcing news to some former Stalinist. ‘Well, fair enough,' he or she might stoutly say. ‘After all, they could hardly be Stalinists these days.' ‘Why do they have to be any sort of
ist?
' But that was going too far.

But for some people this was not at all a time of euphoria and renewal. Let us take Haimi Levy, who went to confront ‘the Party itself in Moscow' about the fate of the Jews. He was a poor Jew from the East End. The Young Communist League and then the Communist Party had been everything for him and for many like him—university, education, rescue from the kind of poverty that does not exist now anywhere in Britain. He had a brother, equally clever. The family could afford to support only one of them through university. The brothers tossed for it. Haimi Levy went to university and became the brilliant and respected professor of mathematics at Imperial College, while his brother went into business and also did well, supporting Haimi financially and otherwise with the utmost tenderness. The brothers helped each other all their lives. For Haimi the collapse of communism was no mere temporary blow. He died soon afterwards, I am sure from the pain of disillusionment. And there were others like him, with broken hearts.

A Meeting

General de Gaulle was restricting the freedom of the French Press. There was a protest meeting in London: de Gaulle was becoming a dictator. It was an afternoon meeting, and I remember it for two reasons, one because it was there I had a glimpse of the past. Isaac Deutscher was speaking. He wore clothes of a military sort, and he strode onto the platform, looking sternly ahead into the future, and stood orating in a heavy rhetorical style, while his right fist rhythmically punched the air. Lenin himself! we were all thinking; here was the Old Guard incarnated. What did he say? I have no idea. The other reason the occasion stays in my mind is that as I took my place on the platform to defend democracy, a man shouted from the audience: ‘Have you just got out of bed?' Sympathetic laughter. I was indignant, having worked hard all morning. But I was wearing a red skirt and a black shirt, and doubtless fitted a template. Ah, La Pasionaria. Ah, Rosa Luxemburg. How the ghosts of these and similar women haunt the minds of left-wing men! (Not so much the women.) But I was then becoming more uneasy every day about our heroic imaginations, the intrepid postures. Who else was on the platform? I only remember Spike Milligan, day to Deutscher's night, who made a humorous mild sensible speech deprecating excess. I felt with him, because I knew he was there although he hated politics. As we speakers went to the door, there was Spike Milligan beside me, a hero to me as to everybody else because of
The Goon Show
. Seeing that I was about to say something invasive of his privacy, he shot out a hand: ‘And so we meet again'—sharply withdrew it—‘for the first time.' This startled my mental machinery into dislocation, and I could say nothing. I determined then and there to use the same technique when attacked by fans, but one has to be Spike Milligan for it to work. The point is, it isn't humiliating, as when, newly arrived in London, at an occasion at the PEN Club I found Eleanor Farjeon towering beside me and told her that her tales had meant so much to me when I was a child. At which she murmured, ‘You see, I wrote them especially for
you
.' I swore then that I would never ever be as unkind myself to some respectful fan, and I hope I never have been, despite temptation.

Another Meeting

The newly formed
New Left Review
organised a meeting almost certainly called ‘Whither Britain' or ‘Britain at the Crossroads'. I was on the platform with some others, speaking my thoughts, when a man stood up in the audience and asked, ‘How can you justify standing there giving us your opinions when you and your lot have been so wrong about everything?'

A very good question. One answer could be: ‘Why are you sitting there listening to us?' Or, ‘But there is a lot we have been right about.' Or, ‘But everyone was a communist.'

But we were bearing witness. Why? This can only be because we felt we were representative of others. ‘This has been my experience and that of many other people.' Is it that we do not trust our own experience until we know other people have felt it too? Surely that is because we live through times of such very great and often sudden change. You want to know what friends are thinking these days, for it goes without saying that they are not thinking what they did last time you met. (‘How do you see it all now?') Yet there have been societies, so we are told, when everyone thought the same for centuries. There probably still are pockets of such people. An American friend, Uzbek by inheritance, went to look up her roots, as we all feel impelled to do, and found that the clan or tribe, from where her grandparents had come, were living exactly as they had done, were traders and shopkeepers and were much involved with horses. Their lives centred around long, companionable communal meals where people sat talking. A relaxed sort of life, and surely beneficial, otherwise it wouldn't have gone on for so long. But meanwhile she, a little splinter from the clan, had been like a leaf in a whirlwind of modern people, with nothing staying the same for five minutes.

There are public figures whose fame is mainly because of how often and thoroughly their minds have changed about everything. ‘The winds of change blew into my head, and just look how it rearranged the furniture.' We bear witness. ‘I used to think this, now I think this.' As if ideas were anchors.

On the Shelf

John Wain and I remembered we had enjoyed dancing ‘when we were young'. Surely it goes without saying we were not thinking of ourselves as much more than young. I was not yet forty, he about that, I think. We took ourselves to the Jazz Club in Oxford Street, where Humphrey Lyttleton played his saxophone with his band, and found that all the young things were being very kind to these oldsters, who really had no right to be there. We jogged sedately about, inhibited by the tolerant but humorous stares, and then danced our way to the edge of the dancing floor—and off and out to drink coffee and to lick our wounds.

Salutary Occasion

John Berger had decided it was a bad thing that writers met only writers, painters painters, architects—their own kind. He was right. There should be a central meeting place, as existed in Paris, where there were cafés one could go to, knowing that there could be found artists, writers, thinkers. But not for the first time—and I am sure not the last—we all came up against the size of London, which can never be like Paris, so much more compact and centred, and the Dôme and the Flore and the Deux Magots ten minutes away. And then, in London, there were the licensing hours, for pubs closed at eleven. But John decided it was worth a try. He hired the large room over a pub a minute away from Oxford Circus—surely central enough—and invited a great many different kinds of people, to break down those incestuously defined barriers. Everyone was there. The place was full, it buzzed, it jumped, it vibrated. What a good idea, we all thought, how clever of John Berger to have thought of it, and of course there must be many more such occasions. And then John called us to order and made a speech. It was a good cause of some kind, political. At once it was observed that the painters, having exchanged looks, were making for the door. They went first, as people remarked, ‘They always did have good sense.' And then the others left, one by one and in groups, while John spoke bravely on. What was the good cause? Who knows now, who cared then, for we were leaving. ‘Not
again
,' people were saying. ‘We've been here before, too often.' And so ended a brave attempt; but if politics had not intruded, we would all be there yet….

The Social Life of the New Left

This was lively. They created a new café, as energetic as ours had once been and enjoyed themselves painting and doing it up, and intended it as the centre of the new political life, but idealistic thoughts are no substitute for a business sense, and it went bust. There was Jimmy the Greek, who served cheap and abundant food in a vast basement restaurant in Frith Street, full of the new comrades, day and night discussing politics—and Jimmy's is there still. Various cheap places were being hired to house
The New Left Review
and associated organisations, and these were all being painted by the faithful, and a very good time they all had. Just as we did. In these places, and in the coffee bars and in the cheap restaurants, the new youth sat about, talking. Talking is what one does most of in a New Dawn. I took no part in all this, but Clancy did, and I heard how things were going on through him.

 

In 1957 my mother died. This is what happened. Having failed to find a home with me, and back in Southern Rhodesia, she stayed with this and that old friend, but knew this could not be her future. She then informed my brother that she would come and live in Marandellas (now Marondera again), so as to be near him. She proposed to devote her life to him and his children: ‘What else am I good for, if not to be of use to others?'

My mother was in a decent and comfortable retirement place. She had a little garden. Nothing wrong with these arrangements—which she made herself. But she had nothing to do. She was a vigorous seventy-three. She played bridge and whist in her afternoons and evenings—she was an excellent player—and tried to persuade herself that she was usefully occupied. Really, she was waiting for a summons from her son: Monica is finding everything too much; please come and live with us and take over the children.

And then she had a stroke. Into her room came the priest—she was Church of England—to administer Extreme Unction. She tried to raise herself, tried to say No, no, no—with her thickened tongue—and fell back and died. She could have lived another ten years, if anyone had needed her.

I was grief-struck, but this was no descent into a simple pain of loss, but rather a chilly grey semi-frozen condition—an occluded grief. As usual I pitied her for her dreadful life, but this rage of pity was blocked by the cold thought: If you had let her live with you she would not have died. I drifted about the flat, returned to my very earliest self, the small girl who could see how she suffered but was muttering: No, I won't.
Leave me alone
. Clancy was intermittently there, and was kind. His feelings for his mother, whom he pitied and feared, enabled him to understand mine. The emotions I could not out of honesty allow myself, like simple tears, were expressed for me in blues music. For some weeks, or months, I listened to nothing else. ‘St. James Infirmary', ‘St. Louis Woman'…Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, others…I cannot hear them now without covering my ears or switching whichever machine it is off. Listening, I was thinking, At what point during this long miserable story of my mother and myself could I have behaved differently? Done differently? But I had to conclude that nothing could have been different. And if she returned to life and came to London and stood there, brave, humble, uncomprehending—‘But all I want is to be of use to others'—then I would say, and be, exactly the same. So what use grief? Pain? Sorrow? Regret?

It was a bad slow time, as if I were miles under thick cold water. Peter knew that his grandmother had died, but why should he care about an old woman who had been there for a while and then left? There are deaths that are not blows but bruises, spreading darkly, out of sight, not ever really fading. I sometimes think, Suppose she were to walk in now, an old woman, and here I am an old woman…how would we be? I like to think we would share some kind of humorous comprehension. Of what? Of the sheer damned awfulness of life, that's what. But most of all I think that I would simply put my arms around her…Around who? Little Emily, whose mother died when she was three, leaving her to the servants, a cold unloving stepmother, a cold dutiful father.

 

The New Left was not the only manifestation of young politics. The other was the Royal Court Theatre, now seen as a little theatrical golden age, under the benevolent aegis of George Devine. True, but it was a time of young, talented, clever young men, mostly from the north, mostly working class, and intending to make their mark. Which they have done, every one, for soon they were working in the highest levels of opera and theatre—and film. Then they were mere sparrows to George Devine's eagle, except for Tony Richardson, who in fact ran the theatre for a while. He was full of irreverence for the established order, like all the young men of the New Left. He was shortly to make the films which put new life into British cinema,
Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones, The Charge of the Light Brigade
. Meanwhile he was the Royal Court's cutting edge. He was a tall, bony, handsome young man, who had evolved a camp drawling style, full of darlings—da-h-ling—which probably began as a parody, a style, but took over, as styles so often do. Tony Richardson's strength came from being the very essence of The Outsider, both in situation and in temperament. Not middle class, not southern English, but with the directness and lack of cant of the northern English, he took a good, long, cool look at cozy middle-class London and soon was dominating any scene he was part of. Now when I look back at the people in and around the Royal Court, he is the one that stands out most, and they were a quite extraordinarily gifted lot.