Walking in the Shade (52 page)

On Sunday at midday, before they closed the square, hundreds of us made our way to the National Gallery, and there I met with John Osborne and we whiled away the time pleasurably enough. At the right time, we all grouped ourselves, and I took John's arm, to support him, for he hated doing this: he was miserable. We walked down the steps of the National Gallery, a large crowd of us, and went into the square and sat down. The police massed themselves around the perimeters. Many of the sitters-down steadily insulted and taunted the police, as usual, and some of us, as usual, found this childish and useless. It all went on and on. Everyone knew that the moment the press and television left, the police would pile into the square and start arresting us. I was sitting near John. Oscar Beuselink, his lawyer, with whom he later quarrelled, was there. Oscar said to me, ‘Why is it that there are all these hundreds of people, but John is being treated as if he is an invalid or a rookie going into battle for the first time?' True, but people get treated in the way they demand or need to be. The fact is, John was feeling ill. Most people thoroughly enjoyed themselves. There sat Bertrand Russell, like a little terrier with his acolytes. There was Lindsay Anderson, stern, martial, disapproving of everyone as usual. Nearly everybody I knew seemed to be there. I was unhappy for various reasons, one being that Peter was hovering about just beyond the ranks of police, very anxious, though I had promised him I would not permit myself to be beaten up. And he was not the only child there, afraid for parents or older siblings. And then I was beginning to question the value of ‘demos', of ‘sitting-downs', of clashes with the police, simply because some people did enjoy it all so much. Was it in fact that their first impulse was the enjoyment, the excitement, the thrills, or the socialising, and secondly came the politics? Now I believe this to be so. The cameras were rolling away, the journalists moved up on their bottoms to be close to their interviewees, the taunts at the police grew louder and louder, you could see how the police eyed certain people they were targeting, and then off went the press, the cameras—the witnesses—and in swooped the police. They lifted up the people sitting down who would not get up, took them to the vans, but ignored people like myself, who stood up and walked. I heard the mayor of one of the London boroughs shouting at the police, who in fact had not touched her, ‘Filthy beasts,' just like Miss Ball. I was with Oscar Beuselink, who was observing in his professional capacity how the vans went off with their loads. The police were careful not to handle famous people roughly, but they were knocking about those who had been taunting them. In one of the vans, a youth nearly died: he had been flung in with his jacket pulled up over his head in such a way he could not breathe. Others in the van, realising he had not moved or spoken, got the jacket off him and found him blue and unconscious. They told the police, ‘You nearly killed him,' but they replied, ‘Lucky you were there, then, wasn't it?'

I had difficulty then and have difficulty now about what I think about these ‘demos'. Did that one change government policy? Change anybody's mind when they saw it on national television? Was I saying, am I saying, that the fact there are people who adore fighting with the police means their efforts have no value? I know one thing, though: during subsequent Committee of a Hundred demonstrations, shortly to begin, when there was a real battle outside the American Embassy and confrontations outside nuclear installations, a hard core of people was there because of the thrill of it all.

As for that sit-down, it at once took its place on the roll call of great fights between citizens and authority in Trafalgar Square.

Shortly after that I was an observer of another political confrontation. It was decided to ‘sit down' outside No. 10 Downing Street to protest about the Bomb. I was standing on the pavement, watching. Ernest Rodker was sitting down, among a mass of people. He had been until then unpolitical, probably in reaction to his political mother. When the police came in to rout the sitters, Ernest performed his first political act. He tipped forward a policeman's helmet, not the cleverest thing to do. At once he was set on by six policemen, who kicked and punched him as he lay between their legs, trying to cover his head. Next morning I was in Bow Street when the judge sentencing him said, ‘You are obviously a young man with an inveterate propensity for violence.' So started Ernest's career as a political activist. He was a prominent member of the Committee of a Hundred for years.

 

Somewhere in this area belong thoughts of ‘the Bomb'. That is how the nuclear threat was perceived: as a single final conclusive dead-end explosion which would at a stroke kill everyone in the world and lay it waste probably for centuries. There were two initiatory exemplars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two bombs. Yet it was ‘the Bomb' that dominated our minds, our songs, the speeches, the manifestos. The idiot thumb presses down, the Bomb falls, and that is the end of everything. In the very distant future a few mutated survivors will creep about on poisoned soil, and life will begin again.

But where did that pattern come from—the pattern in our minds—because it had to be that, a pattern common to everyone marching, demonstrating, writing. The Apocalypse, Armageddon, the fire next time.

I got a letter from some young scientists—but that was in the seventies—asking why I was helping to perpetuate a false way of looking at the threat, which was not a single final doom, or apocalypse, but rather a multiplicity of dangers, such as, for instance, the fact that large areas of the Soviet Union had been devastated, poisoned, made uninhabitable by explosions and accidents which had never been reported officially. This kind of thing was much more of a danger than a single Bomb. (Still ahead, of course, was Chernobyl.) If I wanted to be useful, was the suggestion, I should not be adding to the talk about the Bomb but rather pointing out that there were many different dangers.

When I wrote
Shikasta
, the first volume of ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives', and I had the Bomb falling, it was the Northern Hemisphere that was devastated and uninhabitable—but this was not what people ‘took in' when they read, because readers talked as if I had described the ruination of the whole world. It is not the story, the plot, that interests me now, but the fact that it was taken absolutely for granted that if a Bomb fell, then it had to be totally destructive.
The
Bomb—and
the
end.

Is this pattern still in the collective mind, and if so, where is it operating? What did it—does it—contribute to what actually has happened? It certainly set me thinking about South Africa: for decades everyone thought there was going to be the ‘night of the long knives', the ‘bloodbath'—no two ways about it.

Somewhere towards the end of the sixties, I found that I was laughing, unexpectedly, helplessly: first, a disbelieving and incredulous yelp, and then a real laugh, ha ha, oh my God, but it's so funny…

What was? Sex, that's what. This laugh is out of its proper place only chronologically, because it was not merely the sixties I was looking at but the fifties too: as I have already hinted, sex did not begin in the sixties.

What distinguished the fifties, and then the sixties, was that there were no rules. Surely this must have been the first time in history—in any history that we remember—that there were no commonly accepted conventions and at the same time there was access to birth control. Anything went. And there were to be no rules until the advent of AIDS, which restored morality at a stroke.

I would say that in the fifties, in the way of love, or sex, the most obvious thing—obvious later—is that people were going to bed because it was expected of them. (The Zeitgeist demanded.) Some people were coupling like hypnotised fish bumping into each other. Curiosity? Perhaps, a little. Sexual fever, not at all. These embraces had nothing to do with love, and not much to do with sex either. I mean, real sexual attraction. There was a passivity about it all.

No one knew how to behave, neither men nor women. And this is why there was so much unhappiness, so much incomprehension. Do I exaggerate? Yes, I do, because I am leaving out of this account the enjoyable and happy encounters.

We are all now well equipped with handbooks explaining the basic differences between men and women, but the sixties coincided with a stage in the feminist movement which denied all differences between men and women. Or, as D. H. Lawrence put it, women were just as good as men, only better.

No ideological rages are likely to be aroused now at the news that men and women are biologically programmed to want different things—at the root of their natures, never mind how civilisation or culture or current morality decides to tame us. There is no man who has not dreamed of that brief encounter where emotion does not enter for even one moment, that quick fuck without any strings or obligations, and not with a prostitute either. A fantasy of some golden age hovers here, I think. And there is no woman whose first emotion is not ‘Is this the man I'm looking for?' and this even when she has resolved to set this aside, having decided to be more like men, enjoying the fun of it all, for a night or two. I am prepared to bet that there is no woman who has not been left after the most enjoyable night imaginable, and even if neither knows the other's name, or wants to, without, as he leaves—full of love, admiration, and gratitude for her aplomb—a suddenly dull and empty feeling, for she has gone against her real deep nature and she must pay for it, even if only for half an hour.

How often have women who have with the most honest, open-hearted intentions spent a night with a man not found themselves swearing, raging: ‘You bloody heel. Surely you could at least ring up? Can't you even send some flowers?' For the flowers would be ample, would be enough, a psychological balance would be redressed. And meanwhile the man, full of affection and pleasure, is thinking, Now, at last, a woman who understands how to enjoy life and who doesn't say, ‘Do you really love me?'

The Victorians knew what they were about, with their prescribed tributes of flowers from man to woman. I am tempted to say they knew what they were doing in laying down so many rules and restrictions. Romance is the child of prohibition. But let's leave romance out, for there are some parts of the world where it seems to have become obsolete, And already in the fifties there was the beginning of the feeling that sex was on an agenda, something that ought to be done, and blame would accrue if it was not performed.

I am walking down Church Street, Kensington, with Donald Ogden Stewart, and we are going to have dinner, his suggestion. He must be sixty or so, a lean, balding, freckly, sandy man, and I am thirty-something. He says to me, ‘I ought to tell you that these days I am more interested in food than in sex.' I was absolutely, coldly furious. That it was so graceless—well, what did one expect? meaning, specifically, from Americans; but there had never been, not for one second, any suggestion of a physical attraction, and anyway he was old. Now I see this as a quite sensible (if graceless) way of dealing with the situation. After all, he had come from Hollywood, and from the Left in America, and probably had had affairs by the dozen. To his contemporaries he must have seemed an attractive man. None of us find it easy to know that we are not as attractive as we once were. He had thought, I'm not going to sit through the whole dinner while she is wondering if I'm going to make a pass.

Again I have been out to dinner with a high executive in Granada Television, for I am going to write for them. He drinks heavily all evening. But everyone drank a lot then; these days if you invite people to dinner or a party, the amount of alcohol drunk is a tenth of what it was then. He drives me home and says, ‘I'm sorry, I can't make it, I'm too drunk.' Yet there had not been a flicker of sexual interest between us. I am furious. The oaf. The idiot. The conceited fool. The story ‘One Off the Short List' is apropos.

I look back and see myself, a forthright, frank young woman, often tactless out of a genuine outrage at what I still saw as dishonesty. I despised all female ruses, as insults to real friendship, to humanity, and to humanism itself. I would have scorned to play hard to get, to coquette, play hot and cold. I would say this is generally true of the Western female, but I was also a colonial and even more liberated from the hypocritical shackles of the past—as I saw it. A comradely equality, that was my style, easy friendliness, even intimacy.

To see the difference between liberated Western girls and, let's say, Indians, one only has to spend an hour in a mixed group and watch the languishing eyes, deep glances, sighs, little fluttering withdrawals, coquettish veils and scarves always at their work. It is not that such operators do not exist in the West, and when she appears then the liberated ones have to stand back helpless and watch men fall before her, for the traditional dishonesties are based on the soundest knowledge of male and female nature. A woman playing hot and cold is at the oldest and most successful game in the world—the rules are admirably set forth in Stendhal's
Love
. But how can one enjoy that ideal, perfect,
honest
, loving friendship with a man on whom you are playing such tricks? And yet for some women these aren't tricks, they're doing what comes naturally…and so we go around and around.

With Western women, particularly the English, men don't know where they are: except those men with an instinctive understanding of women, with whom one immediately sets up a current of happy complicity.

To put an end to this flounder in marshy waters: the comradely and helpful equality meant that (means that) a man may think a woman is in love with him—simply because he has been admitted into an easy intimacy—and may rejoice or run a mile. But equally, since she is still a woman and full of a certain residual shyness underneath all that friendliness, she may be madly in love with him and he never suspects it.