Walking in the Shade (2 page)

I gave up the job. Meanwhile the publishers rang—twice—to say they were reprinting, and that was before publication. I said, ‘Oh good.' I thought this happened to every writer. My ignorance was absolute. They thought I was taking my success for granted.

Michael Joseph invited me to the Caprice for lunch, then the smartest show business restaurant. I had moved downstairs from my garret and was in a large room that had been once—would be again—beautiful but was now dirty and draughty, heated by an inadequate fireplace. The whole house was cracked and leaking because of the bombing. There was a tiny room, where Peter slept. The Caprice was adazzle with pink tablecloths, silver, glass, and well-dressed people. Michael Joseph was a handsome man, worldly, at home there, and he talked of Larry and Viv, and said it was a pity they weren't lunching that day. Michael Joseph, for some reason unfit for fighting, had started the firm during the war, against the advice of everybody, for he did not have much capital. The firm was at once successful, chiefly because he had been an agent with Curtis Brown, and Juliet O'Hea, his good friend, saw that he got sent new books. He enjoyed his success, ran a racehorse or two, frequented London's smart places. He kept greeting the people at other tables: ‘Let me introduce you to our new writer—she's from Africa.'

The purpose of this lunch was not only because writers were supposed to feel flattered but because he was concerned that this author should not expect him to advertise. He told me exemplary tales, such as that a certain little book,
The Snow Goose
, by Paul Gallico, published during the war, was reprinted several times before publication on word of mouth alone. ‘Advertising has no effect at all on the fate of a book.' All publishers talk like this.

In certain military academies is set this exercise: The examinee is to imagine that he is a general in command of a battlefront. In one area his troops are only holding their own, in another are being routed, in a third are driving back the enemy. With limited resources, where is he to send support? The correct answer is: to the successful sector; the rest must be left to their fate. It seems few people give the right answer; they mislead themselves with compassionate thoughts for the less successful soldiers. This is how publishers think. An already successful or known author gets advertisements, but struggling or unknown ones are expected to sink or swim. When the public sees advertisements for a novel on the underground, they are seeing reserves being sent to a successful sector of the battlefront. They are seeing a best-seller being created from a novel that is already a success.

Inspired by the atmosphere of the Caprice, I told Michael Joseph that if there was one thing I adored above all else, it was chocolate éclairs, and no sooner had I got back to my slum than a long black car purred to a stop outside it and a pretty pink box was delivered by the chauffeur. It contained a dozen chocolate éclairs. These were added to the already bounteous family supper downstairs.

Nothing I experienced in that household matched what I had expected to find, which was rationing, a dour self-sufficiency, even semi-starvation. I had sent food parcels to Britain. The woman of the house, Italian, was one of the world's great cooks. I don't think she had ever seen a recipe book. She took six ration books to a shop in Westbourne Grove, then a slummy road. But she always got three or four times the rationed amounts of butter, eggs, bacon, cooking fat, cheese. How did she manage it? She was scornful when I asked. It's time you knew your way around, she said. There were a couple of bent policemen, always dropping in and out, who were given butter and eggs from her spoils, in return for turning a blind eye. Did I share in this lawlessness? Yes, I did: our two ration books were given to her to manage. To make little shows of morality in that atmosphere would have seemed not only absurd but would have been incomprehensible to these amiable crooks. Besides, the newspapers were already clamouring for the end of rationing. There was no longer any need for it, they said. Never have I eaten so well. The rent did not include food, but like most fine cooks, our landlady could not bear not to feed anyone around who would sit down at her table. I ate downstairs two or three times a week, Peter most evenings. She asked for money for shopping when she ran out. Hers was an economy that absorbed not only me but other people in the house in complicated borrowings, lendings, cigarettes, a dress or shoes she fancied.

When I told middle-class acquaintances about the bent policemen and the butter and eggs and cheese, they were cold, and they were angry. ‘Our policemen are not corrupt,' they said. They saw my sojourn on that foreign shore—the working class—as a whimsical foray for the sake of my art, for Experience. They waited for little anecdotes about the comic working classes, in the spirit of the snobbish
Punch
cartoons about servants.

From then until decades later, when it was admitted by Authority that all was not well with our policemen, I was treated by nearly everyone with the hostile impatience I was already earning when I said that South Africa was a hellhole for the blacks and the Coloureds—for this was still not acknowledged, in spite of Alan Paton's
Cry, the Beloved Country
, which had just come out, a little before
The Grass Is Singing—
and even more when I insisted that Southern Rhodesia was as bad and, some blacks thought, even worse than South Africa. Only Reds and malcontents said this kind of thing.

In the household in Denbigh Road, Southern Africa was not of interest. Nothing was, outside this little area of streets. They talked of going up to the West End, a mile or so away, as a serious excursion.

The exuberance, the physical well-being of that household was certainly not general then. They were a tired people, the British. Stoical. The national low vitality, that aftermath of war, as if the horrors or endurances of war are eating away silently out of sight, swallowing energy like a black hole, was balanced by something very different. That is what strikes me most about that time—the contrast. On the one hand, the low spirits, a patient sticking it out, but on the other, an optimism for the future so far from how we are thinking now it seems almost like the symptom of a general foolishness. A New Age was dawning, no less. Socialism was the key. The troops returning from all over the world had been promised everything, the Atlantic Charter (seen sardonically at the time) was merely the summing-up of those Utopian hopes, and now they had returned a Labour government to make sure they would get it. The National Health Service was their proudest achievement. In the thirties, before the war, an illness or an accident could drag a whole family down to disaster. The poverty had been terrible and had not been forgotten. All that was finished. No longer was there a need to dread illness and the Dole and old age. And this was just a beginning: things were going to get steadily better. Everyone seemed to share this mood. You kept meeting doctors who were setting up practices that would embody this new socialist medicine, who saw themselves as builders of a new era. They could be Communists, they could be Labour, they could be Liberals. They were all idealists.

T
HE
Z
EITGEIST, OR
H
OW
W
E
T
HOUGHT
T
HEN

Above all, a new world was dawning
.

Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all—best. The British Empire, then on its last legs—the best
.

 

The newspapers were full of warnings about rebuilding the area around St. Paul's, bombed into ruins. If this rebuilding was not planned, a nasty chaos would result. It was not planned, and nasty chaos did result
.

 

Our prisons were a disgusting and shameful disgrace. Over forty years on, news from them is the same. There is something about prisons: we cannot get them right. Is it because deep in the British heart they believe, with the Old Testament, that there should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Retribution, that is what most citizens believe in. As I am writing this, the news is that women with small children are in prison for not paying their television licence. Their children are in care. When most citizens hear this for the first time they exclaim, No, it isn't possible that this is happening! But Dickens would not have been surprised
.

 

Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts
.

 

In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the
hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority
.

 

Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite—civilised—Britain was
.

 

And now…what was I going to write next? What the publishers wanted was a novel. What I was writing was short stories. All of them were set in The District—Banket, Lomagundi—and they were about the white community and how they saw themselves, preserved themselves, saw the blacks around them. I would call it
This Was the Old Chief's Country
. Juliet O'Hea said if that is what I wanted to do, then of course, but no publisher would be delighted at the news of short stories, which did not sell. In fact, I proved them wrong, for they did sell, and very well—for short stories—and have gone on selling ever since. But it was a novel I should be thinking about. And so I did think hard and long about the book that would be
Martha Quest
.

The Grass Is Singing
had come about because people thought of me as a writer, I knew I would be one…and had been, so I know now, from an early age. I had forgotten this, believing that the decision to write came later, but when
Under My Skin
came out, a woman who had known me at the convent—Daphne Anderson, who wrote an admirable account of her childhood,
Toe-Rags—
told me she remembered us sitting on my bed in the dormitory, discussing what we would be, and I said I was going to be a writer. I must have been ten or eleven. But this figure—the writer—is a siren figure that comforts and sustains innumerable young people who are at sea, know it, and cannot direct their future in a conformable way. I left my job in the law firm in Salisbury, saying I was going to write a novel, since at some point I must stop talking about it and do it. Besides, it had occurred to me that those ideal conditions—solitude, time, freedom from care—would never happen. What was I to write? I had many ideas for a book. Now I am interested in how I then sat around, walked around and around the room,
wool-gathering—
an essential process—taking my time, and all this by instinct. From the many ideas one emerged…grew stronger…. I remembered the talk on the verandahs, matrix for a thousand possible tales, I remembered the little newspaper cutting I had kept all those years. And so I wrote
The Grass Is Singing
. First novels are usually autobiographical.
The Grass Is Singing
was not. Dick Turner, the failing farmer, was a figure I had seen all my life. Only a minority of the white farmers were successful; most failed. Some struggled on, failing, for years. Some hated the country. Some loved it, like Dick Turner. Some were idealistic—like my father, who, if he were farming now, would be disdaining fertilisers, pesticides, crops that rob the soil, would be cherishing animals and birds. Mary Turner I took from a woman I had known for years, one of the Sports Club girls. When we went out into the bush for picnics, or simply to be in the bush, sit in it, absorbing it—for many town whites did this, as if the town were merely an unfortunate necessity and the bush was where they belonged—then this woman, who remained a girl until she was well into her forties, a good sort, every man's kind sister, used to sit on a bit of rock, with her feet drawn up away from the soil, sit with her arms tight around her knees, peering over them to watch if an ant or a chameleon or beetle crawled up on her trousers. If she was so afraid of the bush, why then did she go off on these picnics? It was because she was a good sort and always did what others did and wanted her to do. She was a woman essentially of the town, of streets, of nice tamed gardens….I watched her and wondered what on earth she would do if fate deposited her somewhere on a farm, not one of the new big rich farms but a struggling farm, like farms I had seen, and I ran through the names of the poor farmers in my head, and saw the shallow brick verandahs, the corrugated-iron roofs, which expanded and contracted and cracked in the heat and the cold, the dust, the yelling of the cicadas…and then I had it, I had her, I had Mary Turner, the woman who loathed the bush and the natives and hated all natural processes, hated sex, liked to be neat and clean, her dress ironed afresh every time she put it on, her little girl's hair tied with a ribbon at parties.

And now, again, in London: What should I write?

There was a point when it occurred to me that my early life had been extraordinary and would make a novel. I had not understood how extraordinary until I had left Southern Africa and come to England.
Martha Quest
, my third book, was more or less autobiographical, though it didn't start until Martha was fourteen, when her childhood was over. First novels, particularly by women, are often attempts at self-definition, whatever their literary merits. While I was seeing my early life more clearly with every new person I met, for a casual remark could question things I had taken for granted for years, I was nevertheless confused. While I certainly ‘knew who I was' (to use the American formula), I did not know how to define myself as a social being. In parenthesis—and it has to be that, for we touch on whole landscapes of query—this business of ‘finding out who I am' (and it really was then American) has always left me wondering. What do they mean? Surely they can't be without a sense of self. A sense of: Here I am, inside here. What can it be like, to live without that feeling of me, in here; of what I am?