Walking in the Shade (44 page)

I had an inspiration and sent him off to Glasgow, a long way still from the attractive city it is today, where the Gorbals were everything he had been looking for. So he was appeased. These days, he would find the drug culture and at once be at home. He had the stunned, effaced, subdued quality that we then associated with a certain kind of American, the result, we thought, of trying too hard to conform to an over-rigid society, but in his case it was drugs.

 

I have a difficulty. In Warwick Road and even more in Langham Street, I was meeting quantities of people who were well known or on their way to being so. I could easily make a list of names. Rather, Names. This would be the equivalent of that experience when someone says to me, ‘I've met a good friend of yours.'

‘Oh, who?' But I've no recollection of him or her.

‘But he says he knows you well.' This person met me at a party for five minutes or was brought to my house by someone when there were a lot of people, and now he—or she—goes about, ‘Oh yes, I'm a good friend of hers.' You become their possession, they know all about you. ‘She told me that…' (It is precisely these people who are so ready with reminiscences when biographers are on the prowl.)

The important point, I think, is that there was more mixing between different kinds of people than there is now. Social life was more fluid. This was partly because of the Aldermaston Marches, where the most unlikely people met and mingled. If I made a list of people met on those marches, it would make a kind of Progressive Social Register. Would there be an equivalent now? Probably not. There was still that post-war effervescence, the feeling that suppressed energies were exploding, the arrival of working-class or at least not middle-class talent into the arts, and, above all, the political optimism, which has so completely evaporated.

I think the Aldermaston Marches have not been given enough attention, as a unique social phenomenon. Just consider: for half a dozen years, every year, in springtime, hundreds of thousands of people from all over Britain, Europe, America, even distant parts of the world, converged on Aldermaston and for four days walked to London, spending nights in schools and halls, welcomed or not by the towns or villages they came through, exciting the world's press, mostly to hostile reporting, making friends, learning, enjoying themselves—people who could never have met otherwise. Scientists and artists, writers and journalists and teachers and gardeners, politicians, every kind of person, met, walked together, talked—and often remained friends afterwards. Apart from war, what other social process could possibly create such a mingling of apparently incompatible people? To this day I meet people whom I walked with long ago on one of the marches, or who say, ‘I met such and such a professor from an American university, and that is how I got to spend four years there.' Or, ‘I met my wife on the 1959 March.'

 

For a time I saw a good bit of Joshua Nkomo, now a leader of Zimbabwe. He was putting in that obligatory term in London, for future African leaders, of hand-to-mouth living and fearful thoughts for the future. In his case with good reason, for he was to spend ten years in Southern Rhodesia in an internment camp as bleak and as awful, without books and newspapers, as a prison sentence on the moon. But now he was bemused by a new status: he was being described as a sell-out. This was because at the time, the Moral Rearmament people were wooing Africans who might turn out to be leaders, and he had spent some days at their headquarters in Caux, Switzerland. He could not see what was wrong with them. ‘But they are good people. They were good to me. They treated me well. And I am religious too.' I explained to him the niceties of the situation. He said he hated politics. What he wished was that he could have his own store in his village and be with his family. He was homesick and cold and lonely in London. Joshua was not the only African leader who has confided to me this ambition. He was a great orator. This was how he had come to be absorbed into politics. I had heard of him long before, enthralling crowds from a soapbox in Bulawayo.

I was certainly not the only woman giving Joshua advice and support. We would ring each other up and consult over knotty points, the chief one being that we felt Joshua had not been framed by nature to be political. There have been times in my life when I would have seen this as a criticism, but now, not.

For instance, Joshua was being pursued by our secret services. He came to me in a panic to say he had been at a meeting and a man had accosted him, taken him aside into a private room, showed him a suitcase full of paper money, and said all that money would be his if Joshua would tell him everything he knew about the Arabs—the Arabs make another entrance, as improbably this time as the last. But Joshua had never met any Arabs. I told him our secret services were obsessed with Arabs. I had been suspected of dealings with Arabs, and I had never met any either. The trouble was, Joshua was desperately poor. To show him all that money was cruel. I said flippantly that he should take it and then deny he had ever had it. This joke showed how distant I was from his harsh realities: he was terrified. This agent, whoever he was, MI6 probably, turned up more than once, with promises of money, and with threats too.

Having conferred on the telephone with other mentors, I wrote to a friend for enlightenment. Now here comes a little tale that is as good as a whole lecture on national moralities. The father of my friend—we will call him John—had been undone by the slump in the thirties, and as a result John had had a fairly precarious boyhood. But he had got to public school. The war began, and, apparently casually, he met a school chum, who enquired if he, John, felt like being really useful to his country—instead of
merely
going into one of the armed services was implied. Believe it or not, John was told to go to a certain gentlemen's club at lunchtime with a rolled-up copy of the
Times
in his hand. His interlocutor made no enquiries about his politics, which were on the extreme left, though whether this meant a Party card, I don't know. John served as a spy during the war, with distinction. But then many men with his background worked for the Security Services, and many were communists or fellow travellers. After the war John became a critic of the British Empire in all its manifestations and an expert on Africa. I had got to know him as a comrade-in-arms during campaigns about ending colonialism. I wanted to know why poor Joshua was being singled out like this. Was it right that some unfortunate black political exile should be persecuted by the secret services and his life made miserable by bribes of suitcases full of money? And what was all this about Arabs?

John went off to consult with his proper allegiances, the spymasters, and asked them what he should do, and the letter I got might have been framed by the senior head of department in the Ministry of Circumlocution. It said nothing at all, but nothing; it was a masterpiece of non-communication, and I kept it for years, reading it from time to time with awe for its skills. I lost it in one of my many moves. Its equivalent in a parallel area would go something like this:

‘You say that the police have been harassing the family at X Street, but firstly, we cannot find X Street on the map, and secondly, what is your evidence? We have no information that supports your accusation, which is in any case improperly framed. As you know, it is our policy to treat all the citizens in this country equally, and as it is not possible for a black citizen to be singled out for this kind of treatment, your queries remain without validity.'

The Arab connection remains a mystery to this day.

Joshua was having lunch with me, and while we were discussing the ways of this great country of ours, he said, ‘You are a good cook, girl. I want you to be my woman. And it is convenient not to have to explain African politics to you.'

‘But I have a man already,' I said.

Joshua laughed. He was a very large, likeable man, with a good deep laugh which really did shake his whole body. ‘Then give him the sack and take me instead,' he said.

This romantic offer was made to at least two of the other advisers—the ones I consulted with—in the same words and in the same circumstances, that is, over a good meal.

Soon I saw no more of Joshua, because he was swept up into the politics of exile. I did go and hear him speak, though. What an orator! What a magnifico! A spellbinder if there ever was one. And then came the years of exile, inside his own country, from everything good and kind and pleasant and decent, in the internment camp which was like being on the moon. This brutal treatment stands to the account of Ian Smith.

 

One visitor deserves special mention. He was a witch from Brighton, a town for some reason always a favourite haunt of witches. A white witch, he insisted; I really must understand that there were good and bad witches, and he was a male witch, not a warlock, for that was a very different thing. He had a serious problem. He needed to have sex with a virgin to further his spiritual development, but he could not find a girl who was a real virgin, immaculate, with a pristine hymen. He had looked everywhere in Britain for one. I enquired, ‘But how do you go about this? Do you go about asking girls, Have you an intact hymen?'

‘They're so ignorant about their bodies they wouldn't know what a hymen was. No, you don't understand. If you speak frankly and honestly to someone, they treat you the same way. I explain my situation and they listen and I ask some questions, but then I see that they aren't real virgins.' He was a lean, dun-coloured man with flattish colourless hair, and greenish eyes fixed not on the face of his interlocutor—me, several times, over a period of months—but off to one side as he frowned at the difficulties of his situation. This was a tormented man. He never smiled. God forbid that I should laugh or smile. Despairing of ever finding a real virgin in England, he went to Ireland, where he said the Irish girls were full of a fresh and natural attitude to sex long lost in this country. There he found a fourteen-year-old virgin, in County Clare. He intended to marry her and told her so, saying she must keep herself untouched for him, because legally they could not marry until she was fifteen. He said to her, ‘Don't you go spoiling yourself down there. Keep your hands off. It's a tragedy: girls don't realise it, but you have a treasure; it is a pearl beyond price, and you treat it as if it's just a piece of flesh.' A long, long time to wait, he complained, on a visit—or two, or three—sitting there all fretful impatience, a knee jerking, fingers a-fiddle with a button or his tie, for he was always properly dressed and clean and respectable. The law was stupid. Girls should be allowed to marry on the onset of menstruation. In the old days they knew better. Girls married at twelve or thirteen, as nature intended.

He was very busy, being convener of his coven and adviser to them all on emotional and magical matters. He could not visit Ireland as often as he wanted. Kept in Brighton by witching pressures, he sent his best friend over to County Clare to tell the girl to hold on, time was passing, if slowly, and soon…Yes, the classic tale was told again, and he came to see me, all bitterness and betrayal. ‘And he's not a witch, he's not one of us, it makes no difference to him if he has sex with a virgin. And it wasn't even serious, it was just an affair, and she's going to university next year.'

This was not his only obsession. He wanted to have sex with little girls: this was not part of his search for a virgin, since little girls were of no use for his road to spiritual development. ‘Everyone can see what little girls want,' he said. ‘Even a child of five or six, she'll stand there pointing her wee-wee at you, wriggling about, asking for it. Well, if that isn't what they are asking for, what, then?' he demanded, but never looking directly at me, always off somewhere, at a wall where perhaps his fantasies were projected, and meanwhile his aggrieved voice went on…and on: ‘You can see what they want, but if you lay a finger on them, it's prison.'

I don't know what happened. I never saw his name in the newspapers. Sometimes I wonder, does this sad soul, now at least seventy years old, between nights of dancing naked on the downs under the moon, still pursue his dream up and down the British Isles and Ireland? ‘Are you a virgin? Will you keep yourself for me?'…Don't you
see
, if you put something to someone fair and square, she always understands.

Now here is a real difficulty. There is a general agreement that sexual liberation began in the sixties. Philip Larkin the poet said it: Sex began in '63. He said it sarcastically, though when he is quoted, that seems to be forgotten. I meet people who say how repressed, how sex-frightened they were in the fifties, and if I tell my little tale about the white witch in search of a virgin, they are incredulous. But I don't remember any seasons of denial, people hovering timidly around beds fenced with prohibition. During the war, of course, sex flourished, because in wartime it always does, but it was romantic, because of imminent and possibly deadly partings. And in the fifties everyone seemed to be at it. ‘Then that must have been your lot in London,' come the protests. ‘Oh, if only I'd been the right age for the sixties. I spent all my time dreaming about girls.' Or men, as the case might be.

The novels of that time from the provinces—always an accurate picture of the times—don't record sexual dearth.

The whole thing is a mystery to me. Some things have to remain mysteries. I can only record that people seemed to be having a pretty good time: joy was unconfined—if joy is the right word, but of that later.

 

My most improbable visitor was Henry Kissinger. It was like this. Wayland Young,
*
still a long way from becoming Lord Kennet, had become a kind of liaison between the American Left and the British Left. This was probably because he had appeared in so many newspaper photographs on the Aldermaston Marches, for no one could resist this attractive family—handsome Wayland, his lovely wife, all the pretty children—so democratically marching with the multitudes. Henry Kissinger wanted to meet representative members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Most of the Left were busy with an election. I had said finally and firmly, No, I will not canvass for the Labour Party, beg money for good causes, sell the
New Left Review
, make speeches (‘Whither the Left?' or ‘What Price Britain?'). My job in this world is to write, and if you don't like it you can lump it. I had fought that battle in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, against much tougher opponents than anything London could come up with. So I was free to see Kissinger. I was not an adequate representative of the New Left but was of the Campaign for Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament (these were not distinctions likely to impress an American, for whom then we were all communists anyway). And Henry Kissinger might be German—for it was a healthy young German who bounded up those hideous cement stairs and into the flat—but he was also a crew-cut prosperous American, who seemed too large and fresh and glistening for these unattractive surroundings. It is hard to convey the flavour of this encounter, because the atmosphere of that time is now so utterly gone. This is always the difficulty, trying to record the past. Facts are easy: this and that happened; but out of the context of an atmosphere, much behaviour—facts—social and personal, seems, simply, lunatic. While the Cold War had become muted in Britain—mostly because the new youth thought it silly, and anyway the Cold War had never been as deadly in Britain—in the States it was still at its height. Americans leaving their homeland for political reasons described what was happening, and the British young found it all incredible. The Communist Party in the States was always tiny, and its thoughts and feelings did not emanate far outside it, but in Europe ‘everyone' had been a communist or been in a communist ambience. To have been a communist but not now to be one was normal and described most of the people one met. But the Americans have never understood this. Now, when you read accounts of Edgar Hoover of the FBI or Angleton of the CIA, it is evident that these gentlemen were fighting windmills, because they knew nothing of how ordinary communists thought and behaved. That is the most striking thing now about that time. Day and night, week in, week out, Hoover and his henchmen, Angleton and his, fought the enemy communism but would not have recognised a communist if they had met one. In Europe there were a thousand shades and degrees of opinion, of experience. In Europe, to say, But I ceased to be a Communist because of The Purges…the Stalin-Hitler Pact…the invasion of Finland…the Show Trials in Czechoslovakia…the suppression of the uprising in Berlin…in Hungary—all this was a Via Dolorosa well understood by everyone, but as far as the Americans were concerned, once a Red, always a Red.