Читать книгу In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing - Страница 4

I came into contact with the English very early in life, because as it turns out, my father was an Englishman. I put it like this, instead of making a claim or deprecating a fact, because it was not until I had been in England for some time that I understood my father.

I wouldn’t like to say that I brooded over his character; that would be putting it too strongly, but I certainly spent a good part of my childhood coming to terms with it. I must confess, to be done with confessions right at the start, that I concluded at the age of about six my father was mad. This did not upset me. For a variety of reasons, none of which will be gone into here, the quintessential eccentricity of the human race was borne in upon me from the beginning. And aside from whatever deductions I might have come to for myself, verbal confirmation came from outside, continuously, and from my father himself. It was his wont to spend many hours of the day seated in a rickety deck-chair on the top of the semi-mountain on which our house was built, surveying the African landscape which stretched emptily away on all sides for leagues. After a silence which might very well have lasted several hours, he would start to his feet, majestically splenetic in shabby khaki, a prophet in his country, and, shaking his fist at the sky, shout out: ‘Mad! Mad! Everyone! Everywhere Mad!’ With which he would sink back, biting his thumb and frowning, into sombre contemplation of his part of the universe; quite a large part, admittedly, compared to what is visible to, let us say, an inhabitant of Luton. I say Luton because at one time he lived there. Reluctantly.

My mother was not English so much as British, an intrinsically efficient mixture of English, Scottish and Irish. For the purposes of this essay, which I take it is expected to be an attempt at definitions, she does not count. She would refer to herself as Scottish or Irish according to what mood she was in, but not, as far as I can remember, as English. My father on the other hand called himself English, or rather, an Englishman, usually bitterly, and when reading the newspapers: that is, when he felt betrayed, or wounded in his moral sense. I remember thinking it all rather academic, living as we did in the middle of the backveld. However, I did learn early on that while the word English is tricky and elusive enough in England, this is nothing to the variety of meanings it might bear in a Colony, self-governing or otherwise.

I decided my father was mad on such evidence as that at various times and for varying periods he believed that (a) One should only drink water that has stood long enough in the direct sun to collect its invisible magic rays. (b) One should only sleep in a bed set in such a position that those health-giving electric currents which continuously dart back and forth from Pole to Pole can pass directly through one’s body, instead of losing their strength by being forced off course, (c) The floor of one’s house should be insulated, probably by grass matting, against the invisible and dangerous emanations from the minerals in the earth. Also because he wrote, but did not post, letters to the newspapers on such subjects as the moon’s influence on the judgment of statesmen; the influence of properly compounded compost on world peace; the influence of correctly washed and cooked vegetables on the character (civilized) of a white minority as against the character (uncivilized) of a black, indigenous, non-vegetable-washing majority.

As I said, it was only some time after I reached England, I understood that this – or what I had taken to be – splendidly pathological character would merge into the local scene without so much as a surprised snarl from anyone.

It is, then, because of my early and thorough grounding in the subject of the English character that I have undertaken to write about this business of being an exile. First one has to understand what one is an exile from. And unfortunately I have not again succeeded in getting to know an Englishman. That is not because, as the canard goes, they are hard to know, but because they are hard to meet.

An incident to illustrate. I had been in London two years when I was rung up by a friend newly-arrived from Cape Town. ‘Hey, Doris, man,’ she says, ‘how are you doing and how are you getting on with the English?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘the thing is, I don’t think I’ve met any. London is full of foreigners.’ ‘Hell, yes, I know what you mean. But I met an Englishman last night.’ ‘You didn’t?’ ‘I did. In a pub. And he’s the real thing.’ At first glance I knew he was the real thing. Tall, asthenic, withdrawn; but above all, he bore all the outward signs of the inward, intestine-twisting prideful melancholy. We talked about the weather and the Labour Party. Then, at the same moment, and from the same impulse – he was remarking that the pub was much too hot, my friend and I laid delighted hands on him. At last, we said, we are meeting the English. He drew himself up. His mild blue eyes flashed at last. ‘I am not,’ he said, with a blunt but basically forgiving hauteur, ‘English. I have a Welsh grandmother.’

The sad truth is that the English are the most persecuted minority on earth. It has been so dinned into them that their cooking, their heating arrangements, their love-making, their behaviour abroad and their manners at home are beneath even contempt, though certainly not comment, that like Bushmen in the Kalahari, that doomed race, they vanish into camouflage at the first sign of a stranger.

Yet they are certainly all round us. The Press, national institutions, the very flavour of the air we breathe indicate their continued and powerful existence. And so, whenever confounded by some native custom, I consider my father.

For instance. It is the custom in Africa to burn fireguards for dwelling-houses and outhouses against the veld fires which rage across country all through the dry season. My father was burning a fireguard for the cow shed. It was a windless day. The grass was short. The fire would burn slowly. Yet it was in the nature of things that any small animal, grounded bird, insect or reptile in the two-hundred-yard-wide, mile-long stretch of fire would perish, not, presumably, without pain. My father stood, sombrely contemplating the creeping line of small flames. The boss-boy stood beside him. Suddenly there fled out from the smoke-filled grass at their feet, a large fieldmouse. The boss-boy brought down a heavy stick across the mouse’s back. It was dying. The boss-boy picked up the mouse by the tail, and swinging the still-twitching creature, continued to stand beside my father, who brought down his hand in a very hard slap against the boss-boy’s face. So unprepared was he for this, that he fell down. He got up, palm to his cheek, looking at my father for an explanation. My father was rigid with incommunicable anger. ‘Kill it at once,’ he said, pointing to the mouse, now dead. The boss-boy flung the mouse into a nest of flames, and stalked off, with dignity.

‘If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s cruelty of any kind,’ my father said afterwards, in explanation of the incident.

Which is comparatively uncomplicated, not to say banal. More obliquely rewarding in its implications was the affair with the Dutchman. My father was short of money, and had undertaken to do, in his spare time, the accounting for the small goldmine two miles away. He went over three times a week for this purpose. One day, several hundred pounds were missing. It was clear that Van Reenan, who managed the mine for a big company, had stolen it, and in such a way that it looked as if my father had. My father was whitely silent and suffering for some days. At any moment the company’s auditors would descend, and he would be arrested. Suddenly, without a word to my mother, who had been making insensitively practical suggestions, such as going to the police, he stalked off across the veld to the mine, entered the Dutchman’s office, and knocked him down. My father was not at all strong, apart from having only one leg, the other having been blown off in the First World War. And the Dutchman was six-foot, a great, red-faced, hot-tempered trekox of a man. Without saying one word my father returned across country, still silent and brooding, and shut himself into the dining-room.

Van Reenan was entirely unmanned. Although this was by no means the first time he had embezzled and swindled, so cleverly that while everyone knew about it the police had not been able to lay a charge against him, he now lost his head and voluntarily gave himself up to the police. Where he babbled to the effect that the Englishman had found him out. The police telephoned my father. Who, even whiter, more silent, more purposeful than before, strode back across the veld to the mine, pushed aside the police sergeant, and knocked Van Reenan down again. ‘How dare you suggest,’ he demanded, with bitter reproach, ‘how dare you even imagine, that I would be capable of informing on you to the police?’

The third incident implies various levels of motive. The first time I heard about it was, when very young indeed, from my mother, thus: ‘Your governess is not suited to this life here, she is going back to England.’ Pause. ‘I suppose she is going back to the smart set she came from.’ Pause. ‘The sooner she gets married the better.’

Later, from a neighbour who had been confidante to the governess. ‘That poor girl who was so unhappy with your mother and had to go back to England in disgrace.’

Later, from my father: ‘… that time I had to take that swine Baxter to task for making free with Bridget’s name in the bar.’

What happened was this. My mother, for various reasons unwell, and mostly bedridden, had answered an advertisement from ‘Young woman, educated finishing school, prepared to teach young children in return for travel.’ The Lord knows what she, or my mother, expected. It was the midtwenties, Bridget was twenty-five, and had ‘done’ several London seasons. Presumably she wanted to see a bit of the world before she married, or thought of some smart Maugham-ish colonial plantation society. Later she married an Honourable something or other, but in the meantime she got a lonely maize farm, a sick woman, two spoiled children, and my father, who considered that any woman who wore lipstick or shorts was no better than she ought to be. On the other hand, the district was full of young farmers looking for wives, or at least entertainment. They were not, she considered, of her class, but it seemed she was prepared to have a good time. She had one, and danced and gymkhana’d whenever my parents would let her. This was not nearly as often as she would have liked. She was being courted by a farmer called Baxter, a tough ex-policeman from Liverpool. My father did not like him. He didn’t like any of her suitors. One evening, he went into the bar at the village and Baxter came over and said: ‘How’s Bridget?’ My father instantly knocked him down. When the bewildered man stood up and said: ‘What the f~ing hell’s that for?’ my father said: ‘You will kindly refer, in my presence at least, to an innocent young girl many thousands of miles from her parents and to whom I am acting as guardian, as Miss Fox.’

Afterwards, he said: ‘I must not allow myself to lose my temper so easily. Quite obviously, I don’t know my own strength.’

When stunned by The Times or the Telegraph; when – yes, I think the word is interested, by the Manchester Guardian; when unable to discover the motive behind some dazzlingly stupid stroke of foreign policy; when succumbing to that mood which all of us foreigners are subject to, that we shall ever be aliens in an alien land, I recover myself by reflecting, in depth, on the implications of incidents such as these.

Admittedly at a tangent, but in clear analogy, I propose to admit, and voluntarily at that, that I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone’s, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does not mean, simply, those people who can be found by walking out of one’s front door and turning down a side-street. Not at all. Like love and fame it is a platonic image, a grail, a quintessence, and by definition, unattainable. It took me a long time to understand this. When I lived in Africa and was learning how to write, that group of mentors who always voluntarily constitute themselves as a sort of watch committee of disapprobation around every apprentice writer, used to say that I could never write a word that made sense until I had become pervaded by the cultural values of the working-class. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, these mentors claimed that not one truthful word could ever be written until it was first baptized, so to speak, by the working-class. I remember even now the timidity with which, just as I was about to leave Africa, I suggested that having spent twenty-five years of my life in the closest contact with the black people, who are workers if nothing else, some knowledge, or intimation, or initiation by osmosis must surely have been granted me. And I remember even now the indignant tone of the reply: ‘The Africans in this country are not working-class in the true sense. They are semi-urbanized peasants.’ I should have understood by the tone, which was essentially that of a defender of a faith, that I must stick by my guns. But it always did take me a long time to learn anything.

I came to England. I lived, for the best of reasons, namely, I was short of money, in a household crammed to the roof with people who worked with their hands. After a year of this, I said with naïve pride to a member of the local watch committee that now, at last, I must be considered to have served my apprenticeship. The reply was pitying, but not without human sympathy: ‘These are not the real working-class. They are the lumpen proletariat, tainted by petty bourgeois ideology.’ I rallied. I said that, having spent a lot of my time with Communists, either here or in Africa, a certain proportion of whom, even though a minority, are working-class, surely some of the magic must have rubbed off on me? The reply came: ‘The Communist Party is the vanguard of the working-class and obviously not typical.’ Even then I didn’t despair. I went to a mining village, and returned with a wealth of observation. It was no good. ‘Miners, like dockworkers, are members of a very specialized, traditionalized trade; mining is already (if you take the long view) obsolete. The modes of being, mores and manners of a mining community have nothing whatsoever to do with the working-class as a whole.’ Finally, I put in some time in a housing estate in a New Town, and everyone I met was a trade unionist, a member of the Labour Party, or held other evidence of authenticity. It was then that I realized I was defeated. ‘The entire working-class of Britain has become tainted by capitalism or has lost its teeth. It is petit bourgeois to a man. If you really want to understand the militant working-class, you have to live in a community in France, let’s say near the Renault works, or better still, why don’t you take a trip to Africa where the black masses are not yet corrupted by industrialism.’

The purpose of this digression, which is not nearly so casual as it might appear, is to make it plain that when set on something I don’t give up easily. Also to – but I must get back to why it took me so long to get started for England in the first place.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England. This was because, to use the word in an entirely different sense, I was English. In the colonies or Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent. This definition is sentimental and touching. When used by people not English, it is accusatory. My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition. They hated Rhodesia because of its newness, lack of tradition, of culture. They were English, also, because they were middle-class in a community mostly working-class. This use of the word can be illustrated by the following incident. Scene: the local tennis club. The children are playing tennis, watched by their mothers. The hostess for the afternoon is a woman from the Cape, a member of an old Dutch family, newly married to a Scots farmer. She is shy, dignified, and on her guard. Mrs Mathews, a loquacious Scots farmer’s wife, attempts to engage her in conversation. She fails. She turns to my mother, and says: ‘That one’s got no small-talk to change with a neighbour. She’s too good for us. She’s real English and that’s a fact.’ Then she blushes and says: ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean …’ thus revealing how often she has made the same criticism of my mother.

My parents were, now I come to think of it, grail-chasers of a very highly developed sort. I cannot even imagine a country in which they would have been definitively ready to settle down without criticism. The nearest I can get to it would be a combination of the best parts of Blackheath or Richmond, merged, or mingled with a really large ranch, let’s say about fifty thousand acres, in the Kenyan Highlands. This would have to be pervaded by a pre-1914 atmosphere, or ambience, like an Edwardian after-glow. Their Shangri-La would be populated thickly, for my mother, with nice professional people who were nevertheless interesting; and sparsely, for my father, with scamps, drunkards, eccentrics and failed poets who were nevertheless and at bottom decent people.

I would, of course, be the first to blame my parents for my own grail-seeking propensities.

England was for me a grail. And in a very narrowly-defined way. Not long ago people set foot for the colonies – the right sort of people, that is – in a spirit of risking everything and damning the cost. These days, a reverse immigration is in progress. The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London, determined to conquer it, but on their own terms.

I have an anecdote to illustrate this. I had been in England for about five years, and was just beginning to understand that I had got the place whacked, when an old acquaintance telephoned to say that he had arrived in London to write a book. He had forever turned his back on his old life, which consisted of making enormous sums of money out of gold mines, drinking a lot, and marrying a succession of blonde and beautiful girls. I visited him in his flat. It was in Mayfair, furnished at immense expense in the most contemporary taste, with two refrigerators. He was very excited that at last he had had the strength of mind to cut all his profits and tackle England. I remember on the whole without regret, the strong, involuntary moral disapprobation that I radiated as he talked. Finally, and the remark welled up from the depths of my being, from the perfervid heart of the myth itself: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you are going to live in a flat that costs twenty-two guineas a week, in Mayfair, with a refrigerator, to write a novel?’

Looking back, I can see that there were several occasions when I could have come to England years before I did. For instance, there was talk of my being sent to school here. That would have meant my being taken on by a section of my family which I detested – I see now quite rightly – by instinct, and without ever having met them. I used to get ill with mysterious spontaneity every time this plan was discussed. I would lie in bed and dream about England, which of course had nothing in common with that place inhabited by my cousins. That England was almost entirely filled with rather dangerous night-clubs, which had a strong literary flavour. I was then fourteen. I think the only person I would have allowed to bring me to England at that time was a father-figure in appearance like Abraham Lincoln, with strong white-slaving propensities, yet fundamentally decent, and with an untutored taste for the novel Clarissa. My most powerful fantasy was of how I would gently release the captives, all of them misunderstood girls of about fourteen, all of them incredibly beautiful, but full of fundamental decency. I would press enough money into their hands (willingly given me by my master for this purpose) to enable them to find themselves, and set them free. At the same time I would be explaining to my master the real and inner significance of the novel Clarissa, while he gently toyed with my breasts, and, kissing me on the brow, willingly handed me large sums of money which would enable me to find myself.

The other occasions when nothing prevented me from coming to England but enough energy to do it, were the same: a powerful inner voice said it was not yet the time. The time, finally, was in 1949, when England was at its dingiest, my personal fortunes at their lowest, and my morale at zero. I also had a small child.

I have it on the highest secular authority that this propensity of mine to do things the hard way amounts to nothing less than masochism, but a higher authority still, the voice of the myth itself, tells me that this is nonsense.

By the time I came, things had been satisfactorily arranged in such a way that the going would be as hard as possible.

For instance. The ships for years after the war were booked months in advance. Yet I know now – and it would have been obvious to anyone but me – that the simple process of bribing someone would have got me a passage on one of the big regular boats. Instead I decided on a much cheaper, but slower, Dutch boat for which I would have to wait in Cape Town. Of course, by the time I had hung about in Cape Town, and spent money for four weeks on that terrible slow boat, it would have been much cheaper to fly.

The moment of arriving in England, for the purposes of the myth, would be when I got to Cape Town. This is because the Cape is English, or, as the phrase goes, is pervaded by the remnants of the old English liberal spirit.

It so happened that the first people I met in Cape Town were English. This was an immediately disturbing experience. They were a university professor and his wife, who had been, the last time I saw them, bastions of the local Communist Party. That had been eighteen months before. Now they had left the Communist Party. Things have now changed so that it is quite possible to leave the Communist Party and retain a sense of balance. In those days, one was either an eighteen-carat, solid, unshakable red, or, if an exred, violently, and in fact professionally anti-Communist. The point was, that this volte-face had taken place about six weeks before, and in a blinding moment of illumination at that, like on the road to Damascus. I went into their beautiful house, which was on one of the hills overlooking the bay. I was full of comradely emotions. The last time I had seen it, it was positively the area office for every kind of progressive activity. I was greeted with an unmistakable atmosphere of liberal detachment, and the words: ‘Of course we have left the Party and we are no longer prepared to be made use of.’ Now I was hoping I might be asked to stay a few days while looking for a room; in fact I had been invited to stay any time I liked. I became even more confused as the conversation proceeded, because it seemed that not only had they changed, I had, too. Whereas, previously, I had been fundamentally sound, with my heart in the right place, yet with an unfortunate tendency towards flippancy about serious matters which ought to be corrected, now I was a dogmatic red with a closed mind and a dangerous influence on the blacks who were ever prey to unscrupulous agitators. I was trying to discuss this last bit reasonably, when I was informed that Cape Town was overflowing, that no one but a lunatic would arrive without arranging accommodation, and there was no hope of my finding a room. My situation was, in short, admirably deplorable. While my son has always been the most delightful, amiable and easy-going person, yet, being two years old, he needed to sleep and eat. My total capital amounted to £47. I was informed that the prices for even bad accommodation were astronomical. They telephoned some boarding houses which turned out, much to their satisfaction, to be full. They then summoned a taxi. On my suggestion.

The taxi-driver was an Afrikaner and he had an aunt who ran a boarding house. He instantly took me there, refused payment for the trip, arranged matters with his aunt, carried in my luggage – which was extensive, because I had not yet learned how to travel – taught my son some elementary phrases in Afrikaans, gave me a lot of good advice, and said he would come back to see how I was getting on. He was a man of about sixty, who said he had forty-four grandchildren, but had it in his heart to consider my son the forty-fifth. He was a Nationalist. It was not the first time I had been made to reflect on that sad political commonplace that one’s enemies are so often much nicer than one’s friends.

Sitting in the taxi outside Mrs Coetzee’s boarding house, the mirage of England was still strong. While features like the white-slaving father-figure and the night-clubs had disappeared, and it was altogether more adjusted to my age, it can’t be said to have had much contact with fact – at least, as experienced. The foundation of this dream was now a group of loving friends, all above any of the minor and more petty human emotions, such as envy, jealousy, spite, etc. We would be devoted to changing the world completely, and very fast, at whatever cost to ourselves, while we simultaneously produced undying masterpieces, and lived communally, with such warmth, brilliance, generosity of spirit and so on that we would be an example to everyone.

The first thing I saw from the taxi was that the place was full of English. That is, English, not South African British. Several English girls were sitting on the wooden steps, their famed English complexions already darkened, looking disconsolate. The boarding house was on one of the steep slopes of the city, and overpowered by a great many dazzlingly new hotels that rose high above it on every side. It was very old, a ramshackle wandering house of wood, with great wooden verandahs, a roof hidden by dense green creeper, and surrounded by a colourful garden full of fruit-trees and children. It had two storeys, the upper linked to the lower only by an outside wooden staircase. The place was filthy, unpainted, decaying; a fire-trap and a death-trap – in short, picturesque to a degree. A heavy step upstairs made the whole structure tremble to its foundations. My room was in the front, off the verandah, and it had bare wooden floors, stained pink walls, stained green ceiling, a wardrobe so large I could take several strides up and down inside it, two enormous sagging double beds, and four single beds. My friend the grandfather had gone, so I went in search of authority, my feet reverberating on the bare boards. It was mid-afternoon. Towards the back of the house was a small room painted dingy yellow, with a broken wood-burning stove in it, a large greasy table dotted with flies, a hunk of cold meat under a great fly-cover, and the fattest woman I have ever seen in my life dozing in a straight-backed chair. It was as if a sack of grain was supported by a matchbox. Her great loose body strained inside a faded orange cotton dress. Her flesh was dull yellow in colour, and her hair dragged in dull strands on her neck. I thought she must be the coloured cook; but when I learned this was Mrs Coetzee herself, suppressed the seditious thought. I went back to my room, where a small, thin, chocolate-coloured girl who looked about twelve, but was in fact eighteen, was engaged in replacing the dirty sheets on the biggest of the beds with slightly less dirty sheets. She was bare-footed, and wore a bright pink dress, rent under the arm. Her name was Jemima. She did all the housework of the boarding house, which had between fifty and sixty people in it, and helped Mrs Coetzee in the kitchen. She earned three pounds a month, and was the most exploited human being I have known. To watch her do my room out was an education in passive resistance. She would enter without knocking, and without looking at me, carrying a small dustpan and brush, which she dropped on an unmade bed and did not use again. She would direct her small sharp body in a straight line to my bed, while her completely expressionless round black eyes glanced about her, but unseeing. With one movement she twitched the bedclothes up over the rumpled pillows. She then smoothed the surface creases on the faded coverlet out with the right hand, while already turning her body to the next bed, in which my son slept. She twitched up the bedclothes on that with her left hand, while she reached out the other for the dustpan and brush. She was already on her way to the door before her right hand, left behind, had picked up the dustpan. She then turned herself around in such a way that at the door she was facing into the room. She used the edge of the dustpan to pull the doorknob towards her. The door slammed. The room, as far as she was concerned, was done.

Mrs Coetzee and she carried on warfare in shrill Afrikaans which I did not understand. But like all wars that have been going on for a long time, it sounded more like a matter of form than of feeling.

I got all the information I needed as soon as I approached the loaded staircase. A dozen resigned voices told me the facts. These were all brides of South African soldiers. They were all waiting for some place to live in. They had all arrived on recent ships. Mrs Coetzee was a disgusting war profiteer. For horrible food and conditions she charged the same as that charged by respectable boarding houses on the beach. If one could get into them. And if they would take children without making a fuss – which Mrs Coetzee did. But the fact that she was easy about the children did not outweigh her hatred of the English, about which she made no secret.

I rang up the shipping offices who said there was no sign of the ship, which was well known for taking its time at ports around the coast. It might be next week or the week after, but of course they would let me know. I was sitting on one of the beds, waving the flies off my cheerfully sleeping child, when a crisp white envelope slid under the door. It said: ‘I and my husband would be very happy if you would care to join us for a drink after dinner. Yours sincerely, Myra Brooke-Benson. (Room 7.)’ Room 7 was opposite mine, and I could hear English voices male and female, from behind the closed door. A high voice, clearly at the end of its tether: ‘But, my dear, I really do think that this DDT must have lost its strength.’ And a low voice, firm and in command. ‘Nonsense, my dear, I bought it this morning.’

Towards five in the evening I went again in search of the landlady. Mrs Coetzee was now awake, seated at the kitchen table, slicing pale yellowish slices off an enormous golden pumpkin. Her arms stuck out at her sides like wings, supported by wads of shaking fat. Great drops of sweat scattered off her in all directions. Jemima stood beside her, rapidly squeezing pale pink ground meat into flat cakes between her palms. I coughed. Mrs Coetzee nodded. She returned to her work. She had no English.

The supper was served in a room into which refinement had been injected in the shape of a dozen small tables that were covered with red tissue paper, and set with a knife, fork and spoon at each place. A coloured paper lantern was tied with string to the naked light bulb. We ate roast pumpkin, fried meat cakes, and fried potato hash. Afterwards, there were fried pumpkin fritters. Everyone was eating avidly from starvation. The portions were no larger than necessary to maintain life. I immediately pinpointed my hosts for after dinner. They were a small, fair pretty woman, looking incredibly clean and neat; and a bald, fierce-looking man with a well-brushed moustache. I smiled at them, but as they stiffened and merely nodded back, I imagined I must be mistaken. When I presented myself at the door of No. 7, however, they were smiling and full of welcome. They had been here for three weeks, and were waiting for a flat to fall vacant in Ndola, where he was to work on the copper mines. ‘I will not, I simply will not stay here, Timothy,’ she kept saying, with crisp plaintiveness. And he kept saying, with bluff reassurance: ‘But, my dear, of course we are not going to stay here.’ We drank brandy, and made small talk. We offered each other many commiserations. We said goodnight, smiling. As far as I was concerned the evening had passed without any of that vital communication essential to real human relationships. I imagined it had been a failure.

Next morning, when I woke, the double bed opposite had two elderly women in it. They were asleep. I shushed my son and we waited. They woke, good-natured, smiling and unembarrassed when Jemima came in, without knocking, and slopped down four cups of tea on the floor just inside the door. They smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded. Conversing in smiles and nods, we all dressed, and they departed in an ancient dust-covered car in a direction away from Cape Town.

I went into the kitchen. Mrs Coetzee was slicing pumpkin. Jemima was slicing beef into pale strips. I said: ‘Mrs Coetzee, I would like to ask what those two strange women were doing in my room last night.’ Jemima spoke to Mrs Coetzee. Mrs Coetzee spoke to Jemima. Jemima said: ‘Says they are cousins from Constantia.’ ‘But why in my room?’ ‘Says boarding house is full.’ ‘Yes, but it was my room.’ ‘Says you can go.’

I retired. Myra Brooke-Benson was just going into No. 7. She gave me a pretty but measured smile, appropriate to our having bumped into each other, with apologies, on the pavement a week ago. Nevertheless, I told her what had happened. ‘My dear, anything is possible here,’ she said. ‘As for me, I simply will not have it. I have been trying to get her to give me a carafe for drinking water for a week, and if I don’t get it, I shall report her to the city authorities.’

I gave the question of my correct relations with the Brooke-Bensons some thought, and at last hit upon the right mode, or method. I found a piece of writing paper, and a clean envelope, and wrote: ‘Dear Mrs Brooke-Benson. I would be so happy if you and your husband would join me tonight after dinner for a drink. Yours sincerely.’ This I pushed under her door. I was sitting on my bed waiting for her reply, in another envelope, to insinuate itself under my door, when she knocked, and said: ‘Timothy and I would be delighted to accept your kind invitation for this evening. It is so very kind of you.’

Meanwhile, it was observable from my windows that a great deal of human energy was being misapplied. The deeply lush garden was teeming with small children, and about two dozen young mothers were perched on the outside stairs, on the front steps, or on the grass, each anxiously watching her own offspring. I knew that they were all waiting for that blessed moment when these children would be sleepy, so they could put them to bed and rush off down into the city in order to interview housing agents and employment agents. For my part, I wanted to look up friends. I therefore approached a woman sitting rather apart from the rest, a small, plump, dark, fiery-cheeked person, who was guarding a small girl, and said it would be a good idea if we all took turns to look after the children, thus freeing the others. ‘You’ve just come,’ she said. ‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘This is not a place I would leave my child alone in,’ she said. ‘But surely, they wouldn’t be alone,’ I said. She said: ‘Some of these girls here I wouldn’t trust a dog with, let alone a child.’ I went to my room and considered this. It was only afterwards I realized she was middle-class and most of the other women were not. Believing that Myra Brooke-Benson’s knock on my door entitled me to the same intimacy, I knocked on hers. She opened it with annoyance. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was trying to get the baby to sleep.’ I apologized and withdrew.

After dinner, at what was the right time, I put my plan to her. She thought it was admirable. ‘The trouble is, there’s only one other woman here I’d trust with my poor little boy. She has a delightful little girl. Some of these women here are quite appallingly careless with their children.’ I realized she meant Mrs Barnes, the red-cheeked woman in the garden. I still did not know what was the matter with the others, but suggested that in that case we three might take turns with the children. ‘I should be quite delighted to keep an eye on your charming little boy,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid that mine doesn’t take easily to strangers.’

We spent the evening discussing the carafe. It turned out that Mrs Coetzee didn’t have a carafe. Through Jemima, Mrs Brooke-Benson had insisted she should buy one. Mrs Coetzee had said, through Jemima, that if Mr Brooke-Benson wanted a carafe so badly he could buy one for himself.

We all went to bed early. The boarding house resounded until late every night with people coming in, going out, shouting good-bye and singing. Noises in the passage sounded as if they were in my room. I did hear furtive sounds in the night, but imagined they were made by some lucky reveller creeping in so as not to disturb the rest of us. As if this were likely. When I woke in the morning there was a young man asleep in the double bed opposite. My son was watching him with much interest. I got up, shook him, and demanded what he was doing in my room. He started awake, let out a furious exclamation in Afrikaans, shook his fist, exclaimed some more, and strode out to the bathroom. Luckily, the taxi-driver dropped in to see his aunt after breakfast, so I stopped him and explained what was happening. He sat on the edge of my unmade bed, picked up my son, set him on his knee and said: ‘You have the best room in the house. It is too big for you and your child.’ ‘But I’d be quite happy to have a smaller one.’ ‘But there is no smaller one.’ ‘Well, that isn’t my fault.’ ‘But my Aunt Marie has a kind heart and is not happy to turn away a man who has no place to sleep.’ ‘But you must see I can’t go to bed every night not knowing who I’m going to find when I wake in the morning. Besides, it’s not good for my son.’ ‘Ach, he is a very fine child, your son.’ ‘You must talk to your aunt.’ ‘Ya, man, but this terrible war we have had, the English started it, and now we are all suffering.’ ‘But please talk to your aunt.’ ‘Ach, Gott, she has had a hard life. Her husband – you’ve seen him by this time – he is no good for any woman.’ I had seen a furtive little man around the back of the premises but not connected him with Mrs Coetzee. ‘Ya, ya, God is unkind to many women sometimes. He could not even give her a child. Now your husband gave you a child. You should thank God for it.’ ‘Please will you speak to your aunt.’ ‘A poor woman, without a man to help her and without children. She is a brave woman and she works hard.’ By this time my son was clambering all over him, and Mr Coetzee was chuckling and smiling with pleasure. ‘I will tell her what you said. But it is a hard world for a woman without a man. If you are uncomfortable, I have a cousin who keeps a boarding house in Oranjezicht.’ ‘No, no, I’m very happy here, if you could just explain to your aunt.’ ‘This is a very good child you have here, and when he grows up he will be a good strong man.’ With which we went into the passage, my son on his shoulder. There stood Mr Brooke-Benson, scarlet with anger, scarlet even over his bald pate. ‘That bloody woman,’ he said, ‘she will not give me a carafe.’ ‘And what is this?’ enquired Mr Coetzee. I explained. He nodded. ‘Ach. Ya. I will speak to her.’ That afternoon he came in with a carafe which he presented to the Brooke-Bensons. They were furious, and kept saying it was a question of principle. He suggested, with courtesy, that to buy a carafe was a small thing to do for a woman who had no man to look after her, and it was a pleasure for him to do things for his auntie. He gave me a great bag of peaches, and my son a pound of sweets. Then he took my son for a drive in his taxi to visit his cousin Stella.

That night, the envelope slipped under my door contained an invitation to morning tea next day. Myra Brooke-Benson was equipped with every kind of instinct for domesticity. She had a spirit lamp, a silver teapot, and some fine china teacups. Her room, every bit as unpromising as mine, had flowers, clean linen, even cushions. She said there was a most unfortunate misunderstanding which she felt bad about even having to mention. It appeared that Mrs Barnes said she was going to complain to Mrs Coetzee that I had been observed to have a man, not my husband, in my bedroom. She, Myra Brooke-Benson, had explained the situation to Mrs Barnes, but Mrs Barnes had said that if a strange man entered her room in the night she wouldn’t have been able to sleep at all. Her sixth sense would have warned her. But the point was, any plan for guarding each other’s children was now out of the question.

I now resigned myself. The days, and then the weeks passed. I wrote notes of invitation for after-dinner drinks and morning tea with the Brooke-Bensons, and they wrote them to me. We ate pumpkin and fried meat for every meal. Mr Coetzee came to see me and my son often, and we talked about his children and his grandchildren. I rang up the shipping agents daily. Only once was my room invaded again, and that was when a man and a wife and five children arrived, apologetically, at three one morning, explaining they were maternal relatives of Mrs Coetzee. Mrs Barnes coloured and stiffened whenever she saw me. She spoke only to the Brooke-Bensons. My son had a nice time playing in the garden. I found one of the English girls who was prepared to let her children out of her sight occasionally, and we took turns to relieve each other. The English girls continued to sit on the stairs and to talk, with bitter homesickness, about England. I was bored to death, but consoled myself by dreaming about England which I knew by now would not actually begin until the moment I set foot on its golden soil.

Suddenly I got a letter from an old friend, an Afrikaans painter, who had been out of Cape Town on a painting trip. While I was reading the letter he arrived in my room with flowers, fruit and an enormous fish, which he had just caught.

‘Ya,’ he said, looking at me severely, ‘you must get the management to cook it for you. I can tell you, you need feeding up. I can see it. The English can’t cook. They can’t eat. You look very bad.’

‘The management,’ I said, ‘is Afrikaans.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I will go and make enquiries.’ I heard him stride over the bare boards of the passage. A silence. He came back, still swinging the fish by a loop of string through his forefinger. ‘I can’t give her this fish,’ he said. ‘She would not cook it as it should be cooked. And what are you doing here? This place is going to be pulled down, and instead we shall have a fine modern hotel with all conveniences for the tourists.’ He laid the fish on the floor. The room was pervaded with a loud smell of salt, sea and fish. It was an extremely hot afternoon.

‘Piet, I wish you’d take that fish away. People are very sensitive in this place. You’d be surprised.’

He nodded, with solemnity. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘It’s that English colony you’ve been living in. It makes people suspicious and conventional. In a minute you will be telling me not to speak so loudly.’

Piet did not look himself at all. Or rather, he was wearing his smug look, which went with his public personality. He was a tall man, rangy, with a high bounding stride. He had a long, pale portentous face. He wore his hair rather long. He also wore, for the benefit of his trade, flapping and colourful clothes. He had the ability to appear, by slightly tightening the muscles of his face, like a pale and enduring Christ. This is not at all what his character was. In fact I have never known a man who enjoyed himself more wholeheartedly than he did. He had a smile that spread, wicked and sly, from cheekbone to cheekbone, and eyes that crinkled amusement. Not, however, at the moment.

‘You have come at a bad time,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. I have realized that in three months I shall be forty. I have only ten years to live. I have always known that I shall die at fifty. It is a terrible thing to understand suddenly – death is approaching in great silent strides.’ He smiled, slightly, sideways, his eyes narrowed, as it were listening to the footsteps of death. ‘Ya,’ he said. ‘Ya. Ten years. So much to do, so little done.’ With a great effort he prevented himself from laughing, and sighed deeply instead.

Piet is not the only man I’ve known who has sentenced himself to death in advance. I know a doctor, for instance, a man of the highest intelligence moreover, who decided when he was thirty-six that he had ten years to live, and planned his life accordingly. It seems the Medical Association, or some such body, had announced that the average age for doctors to die was at forty-six, and from coronary thrombosis. Meeting this man after an interval, I pointed out that he now had only five years to live, and I trusted he was making good use of his time. But the BMA had meanwhile raised the statistical life of a doctor by ten years, and so things were not so urgent after all.

‘But there will be a silver lining to my personal tragedy,’ said Piet. ‘When my death is announced in the Press, for the first time in her history South Africa will be united.’

‘How is that?’

‘Surely you can imagine for yourself? Ya, think of it. Think of that morning. It will be very hot. The pigeons will be cooing in the trees. Then the news will come. The pigeons will stop cooing. In every town, in every village, in every little dorp, there will be a silence like the end of the world. Then there will rise into the still air a single cry of agony. Then from every house will come wailing and weeping. From every house will rush weeping women, old women, young women, wives, mothers, the Mayor’s daughter and the wife of the linesman. They will look at each other. By their tears they will know each other as sisters. They will run into each other’s arms. English and Afrikaans, Jewish and Greek, they will weep and cry: Piet is dead. Our Piet is dead.’

‘And the men?’

‘Ya, the men. Well, they will be united by the inconsolable grief of the women.’ He sighed again. ‘I have been thinking of that day all the way back in my car. I have had a terrible trip this time, because of my new understanding of my approaching death. But I have made a lot of money this time. I have been painting pondokkies all over the Free State. Thank God, now I can pay my debts.’

Piet was a man of talent. He had even painted in Paris and London. But he had been unable to make a living in the Cape. Therefore, whenever short of money, he drove off into the interior, his clothing subdued and his expression mournful. He introduced himself to the Mayor or some bigwig in each city, as a sound son of the Afrikaans nation, and explained that it was a terrible thing that this great people should be so uncultured as not to support its talented child. He painted them, their houses, their children, and their wives. He also painted points of local interest, which, as he explained, always turned out to consist of pondokkies. In other words, African huts, slums, broken-down villages, shabby sheds and picturesque houses.

‘And why do you come on holiday to Cape Town when I am not even here? My poor child, with no one to look after you. But as it happens now I must rush off, because I must take this beautiful fish home to my wife. I shall cook it myself. No woman can cook as well as I do. I caught it in a pool where I caught its brother last year. That is probably the most beautiful pool in the whole world. I’ll take you there tomorrow.’

‘I can’t. My son isn’t the right age for fishing.’

‘A child? Of course, I forgot. Where is he?’

I pointed out of the window.

‘A fine child.’ He almost groaned. ‘Ya, ya, and when I am dead he will be a fine young man, enjoying life, and I will be forgotten.’

‘No, not that one, that one.’

‘They are all fine children. And all of them, they will be fishing and – painting pondokkies when I am dead. But now you have this child you will be very dull and full of responsibility. Why is it, all women have children. Sometimes I think you do it to spite me.’

‘All the same. And besides, my morale is very low due to living in this Afrikaans boarding house. I am weak from malnutrition and haven’t the heart for fishing.’

‘And why do you put me and my nation at a disadvantage by taking a holiday in such a place?’

‘I am not on holiday. I am waiting for my boat to England.’

He groaned. ‘England. So that’s it. Ya, that’s it. Well, you’ll be sorry, I am telling you. And what will you do, in a country full of these Englishmen? They are no good for women. I know this. When I arrived in London all those poor women, they rushed out with their arms extended saying: “Piet, Piet, is that you? Thank God you’ve come at last.”’

‘We shall see,’ I said.

‘Ya, it is a terrible thing.’

‘It’s a fact that men of all nations are convinced that men of any other nation are no good for women. I’m sure a statistically significant number of women would be able to vouch for this.’

‘And listen to how you talk. You are bitter already. When I hear a woman use words like statistics, I know she is bitter. It is that English colony. It has very likely marked you for life. Ya. I shall come tomorrow and cheer you up. Now I shall take my fish. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, and I can tell it is time.’

With which he left, jerking the fish after him along the floor and saying: ‘Come, come, little fish, come with me, come and leap into the great black pot where you will die another death for me.’ Over his shoulder he said: ‘And I shall bring you a real picture I have painted, to show you that all these pondokkies have not ruined my talent.’

Mrs Barnes knocked. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I am afraid I really must ask you not to have fish in your room. This place is bad enough without fish as well.’

‘It was caught this morning,’ I said.

‘The whole building smells.’

‘I didn’t invite the fish.’

‘Is your friend a fisherman?’ Her soft English cheeks were a clear red, and her full brown eyes, that had no whites to them, were glazed with suspicious fascination.

‘He is a painter,’ I said. ‘He has won prizes in Paris, not to mention London.’

‘How interesting,’ she said.

Next day Piet arrived in a severe black suit. He looked like a predicant. His face was a solemn yard long. He carried a very large picture of a nude girl. He lifted it past the miserable English girls on the steps with an air of critical detachment. He put down the nude, and said: ‘There, you see I can still paint. And what is more, this afternoon I have been furthering the cause of art in this continent. I am now, you must know, a leading representative of the Council for Art. I am very respectable. There is an exhibition on. It is by a homosexual poor boy. He wrote to me and asked for my encouragement and patronage. His pictures are all of male nudes and in very great detail. The arts teacher at the school here for nice English girls wrote to me and asked for my help and encouragement. So this afternoon I met this teacher, poor woman, at the door, wearing my beautiful black suit and an expression of cultural integrity. I lowered my voice to an official note. And I entered the hall followed by the teacher and a hundred and fifty pretty girls, all in search of artistic experience. And I escorted them around for an hour, all around those pictures on one subject only, pointing out the technique and the line and the quality of the paint. With severity. He is a bad painter. And not once did I smile. Not once did that poor English teacher smile. Not once did all those little girls smile. We were in the presence of art.’ He flung himself across my bed and laughed. The whole building shook.

‘For the Lord’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t shout.’

‘There, what did I tell you? Already you are asking me to lower my voice. The English will finish you, man. Ya.’

‘All the same, I wish you could hurry on that boat. I’ve been here six weeks, and I’m very unhappy. Apart from anything else, there’s an English couple across the passage and we have morning tea together all the time. And as soon as I say anything at all, about anything, they look very nervous and change the subject. It’s a bad augury for my life in England.’

‘Poor little one. Poor child. There, what did I tell you?’ He roared with delight. I heard a door open on to the passage.

‘Piet. And there’s a woman called Mrs Barnes. She’s very bad-tempered.’

‘Poor woman,’ he said. He took two large soundless strides to the door, opened it with a jerk, and there was Mrs Barnes in the passage. She frowned. He smiled. Slowly, unwillingly, and hating every second of it, she smiled. Then, furious, she went dark plum colour, glared at us both, and went into her room, slamming the door hard.

‘It is a terrible thing,’ said Piet sentimentally. ‘A bad-tempered woman. It is all the fault of her husband. I suppose he’s English.’

‘Scottish.’

‘It is all the same thing. That reminds me …’ He told a story. By the time he had ended I was laughing too hard to ask him to lower his voice. He was rolling in an agony of laughter back and forth over the floor. The whole boarding house was hushed.

‘That reminds me,’ said Piet again. He talked, listening with delight to the silence of his invisible audience. Then he told his story about his visit to a brothel in Marseilles. Unfortunately it is too indecent to write down. It was not too indecent for him to shout at the top of his voice. The end of the story was: ‘Imagine me, in her room, in such a predicament, and the boat was leaving. It was giving out long, sad hoots of pain, to warn us all there was no time to waste. And there I was. My friends came in. They bandaged me. And I walked down to the ship through the streets of Marseilles, cheered on by the onlookers, with a bloodstained bandage a foot and a half long sticking out in front of me. I climbed up the gangway, supported on either side by my loyal friends, watched by the captain, a very fine fellow, and at least five thousand women. That was the proudest day of my life. That afternoon they gave me the gold medal for my artistic talent was nothing compared to it.’

Mrs Barnes came in. ‘I am afraid I have to tell you that I have had no alternative but to complain to the management.’ She went out.

‘Poor woman,’ said Piet. ‘It is a very sad thing, a woman like that. Don’t worry. I shall now go to Mrs Coetzee and tell her I’ll paint a picture for her.’

Half an hour later I went to the kitchen. Mrs Coetzee was wheezing out helpless, wet laughter. Jemima, her face quite straight, her eyes solemn, had her hand cupped over her mouth, to catch any laughter that might well up and press it back again. Her narrow little body shook spasmodically. ‘I told you,’ said Piet. ‘It is all right. I have explained to her that she must have a picture of this fine boarding house. I shall paint it for her, at a medium cost. I shall also make a copy and donate it to the city’s archives, for the memory of a building such as this must not be lost to mankind. I feel it will be the finest pondokkie I have ever painted. Poor woman, she is very bitter. The war makes her unhappy.’

‘She’s doing very nicely out of it.’

‘No, the Boer War. Those concentration camps you had. Ya, ya, the English were never anything but savages. Now, please, think no more about it. I have made everything right for you.’

He went. Almost at once Mrs Coetzee came in, with Jemima. It was a visit of goodwill. She was smiling. Then she noticed the picture, which unfortunately Piet had forgotten. Her face sagged into folds of disapproval.

She spoke to Jemima. Jemima said: ‘Says will not picture her house.’ ‘Tell her it’s not my picture.’ ‘Says take it away.’ ‘I’ll tell my friend to take it tomorrow.’ ‘Says your picture, not his picture.’ ‘But it is his.’ ‘Says he is Afrikaans. A good boy.’ ‘It is a picture of his wife. She is a very good Afrikaans girl.’ ‘Says good boy does not make bad picture like that.’ Jemima’s face was expressionless, but her body shook. I tried to catch her eye. It was blank. Only her body was amused. ‘Says you bad woman, says you go,’ said Jemima.

That evening, the shipping agents rang to say the boat would be in tomorrow. As a favour, Mrs Coetzee allowed me to stay for the one night. Mrs Barnes came in to say she was sorry there had been this unpleasantness. If she had known she would not have complained to Mrs Coetzee. I have never been able to understand this. But my chief problem was to find the right way to say good-bye to the Brooke-Bensons. At last, my suppressed instinct for communication blossomed into a large bunch of flowers. I presented these, not so much to the Brooke-Bensons, as to a failed relationship. I shook hands. I noticed Myra’s eyes were wet. She said, with formality: ‘I will be so sorry when you’ve gone. I feel I have made a real friend in you.’ Her husband said: ‘And please keep in touch. Now that we’ve got to know each other.’ I shook hands again and we said good-bye.

The boat was full of English. That is, South African British, going home. I had no time to meet them. My son was so excited by the experience of being on the boat that he woke at five every morning and did not sleep until eleven at night. In between, he rushed, hurled himself, bounded and leaped all over the boat. I arrived in England exhausted. The white cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The Thames looked dirty. I had better confess at once that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me a city of such appalling ugliness that I wanted only to leave it. Besides, I had no money, I could have got some by writing to my family, of course, but it had to be the bootstraps or nothing.

The first place I stayed in was a flat off the Bayswater Road. I passed the house the other day, and it now seems quite unremarkable. This is how it struck me at the time:

‘A curving terrace. Decaying, unpainted, enormous, ponderous, graceless. When I stand and look up, the sheer weight of the building oppresses me. The door looks as if it could never be opened. The hall is painted a dead uniform cream, that looks damp. It has a carved chest in it that smells of mould. Everything smells damp. The stairs are wide, deep, oppressive. The carpets are thick and shabby. Walking on them is frightening – no sound at all. All the way up the centre of this immense, heavy house, the stairs climb, silent and ugly, flight after flight, and all the walls are the same dead, dark cream colour. At last another hostile and heavy door. I am in a highly varnished little hall, with wet mackintoshes and umbrellas. Another dark door. Inside, a great heavy room, full of damp shadow. The furniture is all heavy and dead, and the surfaces are damp. The flat has six rooms, all painted this heavy darkening cream, all large, with high ceilings, no sound anywhere, the walls are so thick. I feel suffocated. Out of the back windows, a vista of wet dark roofs and dingy chimneys. The sky is pale and cold and unfriendly.’

My arrangements for living here had been made with great intelligence by a friend. The idea was, I should share this flat with another woman, an Australian, who had a small child. We should share the rent and expenses, and the children would share each other.

They took to each other at sight and went off to play.

The Australian lady and I had now to make acquaintance.

She was a woman of inveterate sensibility. Her name was Brenda. She was sitting in a huddled mass in a deep chair by an empty grate. She was a large woman, of firm swarthy flesh. She had a large sallow face, and black hair cut doll-like across her forehead. She wore artistic clothes. She had been crying, and was still damp. Almost the first thing she said was, ‘I do hope your child is sensitive. My Daphne is very sensitive. A highly-strung child.’ I knew then that the whole thing was doomed.

Daphne was three, a strapping, lively-eyed child with a healthy aggressiveness. Peter was two and a half. They were well-matched. They began to fight, with much enjoyment. Brenda went next door, pulled Daphne to her, and said in a weak voice: ‘Oh, darling, he’s such a nice little boy, don’t hit him.’ She set Daphne in a chair with a picture book.

Then she said everything was too much for her, and so I went out and bought the rations and had some keys cut. While I did this, I reflected on the value of helplessness. During the next weeks I reflected about this often. Brenda was renting the flat for seven guineas a week. I don’t know how she managed it. I’ve never since seen a flat of such size, class, and solid furnishing going at such a low rent. She had already let two rooms in it, at three and a half guineas each. That left four rooms. The largest room was her sitting-room, because she had to have privacy. The children had a room each, because Daphne could not sleep unless she was by herself. The largest room upstairs was Brenda’s bedroom. That left one for me. She had put the dining-room table in it, where we would all eat, as she said this would be more convenient for all of us. She intended to charge me seven guineas a week. I did all the shopping and the washing-up and the tidying, because life was too much for her, particularly in England. Also I had to keep my son away from Daphne, because they would play together, and in the most insensitive manner.

I have often wondered about that remarkable phenomenon – that for sheer innate delicacy and appreciation of the finer sides of life, one has to seek for a certain type of Colonial.

Piet for instance. Robust is the word I would use to describe him. Yet his tastes in art, save when he was painting pondokkies, were all exquisite. Corot he liked. Turner he liked. A passage of nature description in Chekhov would make him screw back the tears from his eyes. A couple of the more oblique sentences in Katherine Mansfield would send him into a melancholy ecstasy. But Balzac was coarse, and Rubens had no poetry. A letter from Piet would end something like this: … the exquisite veil of translucent twilight drawn gently down to the horizon, and I sit, pen in hand, and dream. The fire crepitates in the grate, and the shadows deepen on the wall. Ach, my God, and life is passing. Your old friend, Piet. P.S. – We went to the Bay this afternoon and swam and bought three crayfish for sixpence each. I boiled them till they squeaked and we ate them in our fingers with melted butter. My God, man, they were good. I bet you don’t get crayfish in that godforsaken colony full of English. Christ but you’re crazy, I’m telling you.

For real perception into the side-channels of British culture, one has to go to a university in Australia or South Africa. The definitive thesis on Virginia Woolf will come, not from Cambridge, but from Cape Town. Brenda was writing a thesis on: Proust – a nature poet manqué.

In short, we were temperamentally unsuited. I began looking for somewhere to live. Besides, I still had not met the English.