Walking in the Shade (36 page)

Normally I would walk from my big room along to the kitchen, look out of the kitchen window, wander back—the whole bottom floor of the flat was my field of concentration—but now I went into the big room, shut the door, and even took in vacuum flasks of tea there. All the time I was thinking of her upstairs, sitting on her bed, listening for me to stop. A too long silence, and down she would come, and I heard the little tap on the door. ‘Doris? Doris? Have you finished working?' And we sat in the kitchen over tea, and I heard about her village, her family, her mother, whom she missed so that she had to cry when she thought of her, and her sisters and her little brother and her cousins…I got to know her family better than I knew mine at that time. Within a week I had given up all thoughts of real work, did practical things in the short hours she was gone, and tried to stem the fever of exasperation and impatience that was poisoning me. ‘Shall we go and visit your friends?' she would suggest hopefully, when she came back. ‘Do you like looking at the shops?'

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work, but this was the worst experience I had ever had, for I felt so guilty because of her loneliness.

‘Do you have any friends at college? Have you met anybody you like there?'

‘You're my friend,' she said, and put her two hands around my forearm and looked up into my face. ‘You are my best friend in London.'

At last I rang her sponsors, and heard the cold disapproving voice. ‘Surely you can set aside some time for her.'

‘It's not a question of some time; it is all the time she isn't at college.'

‘I must say I am surprised to hear this from you.'

‘Look, I have to work, I can't work….'

‘But can't you work when she's at classes?'

‘I'm sorry, you must find some place where she has a lot of people around her—a large family.'

‘You mean a black family?' It was a cold sniffy self-righteous voice.

‘I didn't say a black family. Any large family. She's used to a lot of people around her, all the time.'

‘I don't see what I can do at the moment.'

‘I have to work, I have to earn a living—I have a child to keep.'

And at last a family was found, with a girl her age, and off went the poor exile with her tiny possessions, feeling she had failed in London, and I was left feeling a criminal—and counting the days of freedom left before the beginning of the school holidays.

 

About then my son John Wisdom came through London.
*
He wanted to be a forester, had gone to the University of Stellenbosch, but it was then very Afrikaans in feeling, anti-British, and no admirer of Southern Rhodesia, which had always taken its stand on being British. John, brought up to be British, could not tolerate this, and he left almost at once. In Vancouver, Canada, there were good forestry courses, and he decided to go there. He was not yet eighteen when I saw him for the first time since he had been eight or so. Although I was expecting him, when he walked into my room, I nearly said, Hello, Harry, for he walked, stood, held his shoulders, smiled, like my brother. He was in London for three days. He had expected the bright lights, and I did my best, but he was disappointed that I was not living better. A well-known author surely should be…. I don't know what he was expecting. We went to some good restaurants and to the theatre, and he enjoyed it all. He was a great enjoyer, John, all his life. We got on very well. We always had, after all. It is a strange fact that people can get on easily, instinctively, when they agree about nothing and their views on life are opposite. John had been brought up to believe that I was Hecate incarnate, a kaffir-lover, a communist. He had never heard anything good about me, and he had been forbidden to write to me. The letters and books I sent the children, the letters they sent me, had to stop. It could not have been easy for him to decide to see this problematical mother, but it all turned out well. He went off to the University of Vancouver, where he took his place in class—and, two weeks later, walked out of the class, the university, and Vancouver. In those days—and perhaps this is still true—there were men who lived hard and rough, earning good money for dangerous work, all through the winters, but in summer enjoyed life in the bars and on the water in Vancouver. This is what John did, for seven years. His first job was fire watching in the extreme north somewhere. The job is to stay at the top of a tower, set where a great sweep of country can be seen, and watch out for the smoke of bush fires and then radio waiting firefighters. John listened to jazz from the Voice of America and to classical music from Moscow. He watched the wolves moving about in the snow beneath his tower, for they were as curious about him as he was about them. He admired them and claimed they all became friends. He lived like this for six months, completely alone; he had just become eighteen. Later he said this was one of the best times in his life. Then he got all kinds of jobs. He worked as a surveyor: though he had not studied surveying; he had watched a surveyor friend of his during a weekend and then proved to the employer that he knew the job. He worked in lumber mills. In summer he had a very good time indeed. He was not one of the world's letter writers, but I did get a couple of long letters, full of the small details of his life, always the most interesting, and, twice, a tape. Last summer he had lived in a little house with two Australians, they cooked this and that—John was a famous cook—they had parties every night, they sailed every minute they could in the bay, and the ice had just broken up, and he had run out into the raging and tumbling waters, balancing on the tablets of ice, and they all called him Mad Wisdom, but he was still alive, mad or not. He had been working last winter in a lumber mill, had caught his left hand in the machinery, the doctors had wanted to cut his arm off, but he wouldn't let them. He made them operate so as to keep his arm whole, although they said it was useless. But he had been proved right, he could use his hand for almost everything. ‘I have been reading…' He read a lot of adventure and sea stories, war books. He loved the sea, but soon he would be living high and landlocked hundreds of miles from the sea. He had read my short stories. He liked the bits about the bush, he could see I knew what I was talking about, but he thought I was being unfair to the whites. ‘We must have a good chin-wag about that.' Seven years went by. And then he turned up in London again on his way through. He said he had been in a bar, looking at the men who were ten years older than he was, had not left the life, were still living a tough young man's life, and they were not twenty-five, like him, but thirty-five and forty, and they were getting fat and soft and alcoholic, and he had got such a fright that he decided to leave Canada and go back home, though he was very sad, for no life could have suited him better. And he returned to Southern Rhodesia, to try his luck there.

 

Again, writing this, I am brought up short with: But all this is outward, you'd think my life was all politics and personalities, though really most of the time I was alone in my flat, working. The capacious flat in Warwick Road was a very different affair from the compact, low-ceilinged, intimate little place in Church Street. Only in one way were they alike: noise. The buses roared up and down Church Street, and along Warwick Road lorries banged and ground all day and most of the night. Now I live high in a house where I might as well be in the country, all trees and even a field, although this is London, and it is quiet except for the birds and the wind in the trees and around the chimneys—and absolutely silent all night. How did I bear those eight years of din? I now wonder. I swear that as you get older your eardrums lose successive layers of soundproofing.

This was almost a little house, with its upstairs and downstairs. Up, in one large room, was Peter, during his holidays; his things overflowed into the little room next to it. The other large room had in it Clancy, when he was there, and the little room had my clothes. Up and down those stairs I ran all day—not heavily, as I do now, holding on to banisters—and walked around my big room, or from the big room to the kitchen, back and forth, for, writing, I have to move. Just as, looking back at Church Street, I see Joan and me sitting at her little table in the kitchen, talking, gossiping, setting life, love, men, and politics to rights, the best part of my time there—one of my best times in London—so now I look back at Warwick Road and remember how Clancy, or some visitor or other, sat at the kitchen table with me and we talked. And talked. Politics and literature, but so much politics in that difficult time when ‘everything' was falling apart; Now there have been a couple of generations who never talk anything but shopping or gossip, and when I am with them I wonder how they can bear it, this tiny, self-enclosed world they inhabit.

It was the big room, though, where I was most of the time. It had three tall windows, the bed recessed in one corner, the desk with the typewriter, the small table painted glossy black, with the ashtrays, the cigarettes, the mess and smell of the smoker, for I smoked so much that now I can't believe it. I walked up and down and around, and wrote a sentence, and walked some more, managed a paragraph, crossed it out, did it again, achieved a page that could stand, at least for a time. This process, this walking and thinking, while you pick up something from a chair and stare at it, hardly knowing what it is, and then let it drop, tidy something into a drawer, find yourself dusting a chair or straightening a pile of books against the wall, or standing at the window looking down while the lorries trundle past—this is the opposite of daydreaming, for it is all concentration, you are deep inside, and the outside world is merely material. And it is exhausting, for suddenly after an hour or two, with perhaps only a page or two done, you find yourself so heavy you tumble onto the bed and into sleep, for the necessary half hour, fifteen minutes, ten—and then up again, refreshed, the tension cut, and you resume the wandering about, the touching, the desultory tidying, the staring, while you approach the typewriter, and then you are seated, and your fingers fly for as long as they do—up again, movement again. How well I got to know that room, every fibre and thread of it, whose surfaces I had created: the plain white of the walls, the carpet I had dyed green, the floorboards I had painted glossy shiny black, the green-and-white curtains I had made on my Singer sewing machine, brought all the way from Africa.

While I was pottering, hesitating, tumbling into sleep and back, walking to the kitchen and back, I might hear Clancy's typewriter upstairs going like a machine gun, hour after hour, with never a moment's pause. And then long silences, then bursts of clattering sound, then silences.

In Warwick Road I wrote a lot of short stories, set in Africa, in France, in Germany. Some of them I think are good. Some are not up to much. If you are the kind of writer I am—that is, one who uses the process of writing to find out what you think, and even what you are—then it is surely dishonest to kick down the stepladder you came up by, but the fact is, I would be happy if some of the stories I wrote disappeared. Yet there are people who like the ones that I don't think much of. Isn't it a form of contempt to wish away what other people admire? I would be happy to be like those poets who at the end of their lives acknowledge a few survivors, rejecting everything but the best.

I wrote
A Ripple from the Storm
, which helped to put that frenetic time when ‘everyone' was a communist into perspective. When it came out it was described by many of the comrades as seditious, ‘fouling the nest', and so forth, but it has had a contradictory career. I still get letters from people saying that when they read it they thought it a betrayal of the Cause but later found they liked it. This book, which details the vagaries and dynamics of group behaviour—not merely political—caused a couple of young Americans as late as the early nineties to go off and join an extreme left group. I could not believe this when I was told about it, but apparently they were attracted to the intrigue and excitement. I am sure that is why many people join political or religious groups. They need the excitement. Regularly, through the decades, people have said to me that they were in this or that movement or group, and
A Ripple from the Storm
described their experiences—which was why they left the group, disillusioned. Later this was said of
The Good Terrorist
. ‘It was just like life in…' a feminist group, a black activist group, Greenpeace, animal rights. A group is a group is a group—just as a mob is a mob. The machineries that activate them are the same, whatever the cause. If you've been in one, you've been in them all. It is amazing to me that now, when so much is known about the mechanisms and dynamics of group behaviour, there is no attempt, when one is being set up, to make use of this information about what is bound to happen. If there was ever a block in the mind—a barrier, a division—it is this one: ‘We do not want to know' about our behaviour. But wait, there is one example of when people beginning something looked back at predecessors and decided to do better. The Bolsheviks agreed together that they would not be like the revolutionaries of the French Revolution: their own revolution would not devour its children, they would not kill each other. This noble aspiration, as we know, came to nothing, and they all murdered each other with rhetorical enthusiasm. So perhaps more is needed than a simple aspiration to do better.

How I felt about the reception of
A Ripple from the Storm
is in a letter I wrote to Edward Thompson. Here is part of it: