Читать книгу Going Home - Doris Lessing - Страница 5

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider’s egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling flocks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.

Here is where the sun regulates living in a twelve-hour cycle. Here the sun is a creature of the same stuff as oneself; powerful and angry, but at least responsive, and no mere dispenser of pale candlepower.

When I was first in England I was disturbed all the time in my deepest sense of probability because the sun went down at four in the middle of an active afternoon, filling a cold, damp, remote sky with false pathos. Or, at eleven in the morning, instead of blazing down direct, a hand’s-span from centre, it would appear on a slant and in the wrong place, at eight o’clock position, a swollen, misshapen, watery ghost of a thing peering behind chimney-pots. The sun in England should be feminine, as it is in Germany.

During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now. Recently I found some pages I wrote then: it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year; endless miles of heavy, damp, dead building on a dead, sour earth, inhabited by pale, misshapen, sunless creatures under a low sky of grey vapour.

Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home. Now London is to me the pleasantest of cities, full of the most friendly and companionable people. But that year of horrible estrangement from everything around me was real enough. It was because, bred in Africa, I needed to be in direct physical touch with what I saw; I needed the cycle of hot, strong light, of full, strong dark.

One does not look at London, but at a pretty house, a glimpse of trees over rooftops, the remains of an old street, a single block of flats. The eye learns to reject the intolerable burden of the repetition of commercialization. It is the variegated light of London which creates it; at night, the mauvish wet illumination of the city sky; or the pattern of black shadow-leaves on a wall; or, when the sun emerges, the instant gaiety of a pavement.

On that morning over Africa I learned that I had turned myself inwards, had become a curtain-drawer, a fire-hugger, the inhabitant of a cocoon. Easy enough to turn outwards again: I felt I had never left at all. This was my air, my landscape, and above all, my sun.

Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But – a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that the love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps.

On this trip home a man with whom I had been arguing bitterly about politics said to me suddenly: Where did I come from? I said Lomagundi. He knew it well, he said. He liked the highveld, he remarked, defensively. For the highveld is reaches of pale, dry grass, studded with small, dry, stunted trees – wide, empty, barren country. I said yes, and the Kalahari, too. Yes, he said; and the Karroo. The Kalahari and the Karroo are stages nearer desert of the highveld, full of bitter shrubs, cacti, lizards and hot stones. They are enormous, with a scarifying, barren beauty. They, too, are almost empty.

For a moment we shared the understanding of people who have been made by the same landscape.

But I am not sure whether this passion for emptiness, for space, only has meaning in relation to Europe. Africa is scattered all over with white men who push out and away from cities and people, to remote farms and outposts, seeking solitude. But perhaps all they need is to leave the seethe and the burden of Europe behind.

I remember an old prospector came to our farm one evening when I was a child. He had spent all his life wandering around Africa. He said he had just gone home to England for a holiday of six months; but left at the end of a week. Too many people, he said; a tame little country, catching trains and keeping to time-tables. He had learned his lesson; he would never leave the highveld again. ‘People,’ he said, shouting at himself – for he was certainly arguing against his own conscience – ‘people are mad, wanting to change Africa. Why don’t they leave it alone? A man can breathe here, he can be himself. And,’ he went on, getting angrier and angrier, ‘when we’ve filled Africa up, what then? The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it – millions of people all crowded together, fighting and struggling, but behind them, somewhere, enormous, empty places. I tell you what I think,’ he said, ‘when the world’s filled up, we’ll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.’

That’s what he said. I remember every word, for he made a great impression on me.

Next morning he went away, and we heard he had gone up over the Zambezi escarpment into the bush with his bearer. On the verge of one of the hills overlooking the river he built a hut and thatched it, and settled to live there, entirely alone. But he got black-water fever, and the news travelled back, as news does in these parts, and at last reached his wife in the city, who – a bush-widow these many years – got herself a lorry and went off after him until she reached the end of the road, and then inquired of some passing Africans who took her to the hill where her husband was. Between one bout of fever and another, he sat on a candle-box under a tree, an old man of fifty or so, looking at the gorges of the river and at the hills. Africans from a neighbouring village had set water and some meat by him, and were waiting at a little distance in the shade of a tree. He was very ill.

‘And now,’ said she, ‘enough of this nonsense: it’s time you came back and let me look after you.’

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘I want to die alone.’

‘But there’s no need to die. You’ll get better in hospital.’

A look of revulsion came over his face, which she understood too well. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after you myself.’

He turned his face from her, and looked out and down to the river. And so she went to examine the inside of the mud hut which had nothing in it but a case of whisky and a roll of bedding and some quinine and a rifle; and then went over to the young men, who got to their feet as she approached.

‘Now, look after the baas nicely,’ she said.

‘Yes, Nkosikaas,’ they said.

She walked away down along the Kaffir paths several miles to the road, climbed back into the lorry and drove back to town. And when he died, which was several days later, the people of the village buried him and sang their mourning songs over him.

That was the story as we heard it from a group of young men travelling through our farm on their way to find work in the gold mines of the Rand.

It seems to me that this story of the man who preferred to die alone rather than return to the cities of his own people expresses what is best in the older type of white men who have come to Africa. He did not come to take what he could get from the country. This man loved Africa for its own sake, and for what is best in it: its emptiness, its promise. It is still uncreated.

Yet it is only when one flies over Africa that one can see it, as such solitary people do, as the empty continent. The figures are eloquent enough – that is, if one possesses the kind of mind that makes figures live. In Central Africa there are seven million Africans and two hundred thousand white people. It sounds quite a lot of people from one point of view, if one tries to imagine the word million in terms of a crowd of people. And if one has lived in a city there, one remembers the pressure of people. Yet it seems seven million people are nothing, not enough – this enormous area could hold hundreds of millions.

But now, steadily flying south for hour after hour, one sees forest, mountain and lake; river and gorge and swamp; and the great reaches of the flat, tree-belted grassland. The yellow flanks of Africa lie beneath the moving insect-like plane, black-maned with forest, twitching in the heat. A magnificent country, with all its riches in the future. Because it is so empty we can dream. We can dream of cities and a civilization more beautiful than anything that has been seen in the world before.

It was over Kenya that a subtle change of atmosphere announced we were now in white Africa. Two Africans sitting by themselves had a self-contained and watchful look. Perhaps they were reflecting on the implications of the fact that this being a South African plane the covers on the seats they used would have to be specially sterilized before re-use.

Until now the men making announcements over the loudspeaker had had the anonymous voices of officialdom. Now there was a new voice, unmistakably South African, stubbornly national. Jaunty and facetious, with the defensiveness of the Colonial who considers an attempt at efficiency as nothing but snobbishness, it began: ‘Well, ladies and gents, here I am; sorry about it, but I’m not a BBC announcer, but I’ll do my best. If you look down on your right now you’ll see the Aberdare Forest. You’ll understand why it took so long to bash the Mau Mau. See that thick bit over there? That’s where we got a whole bunch of them. Starved ’em out. Took six weeks.’ This man was not from Kenya, but he was white; and the problems of white Kenya were his, and – so he took for granted – ours too. He went on, swallowing his words, the ends of his sentences, most of the time inaudible. Once he clearly enunciated a whole series of sentences just to show that he could if he chose. ‘Down there is Masai country. Of course, I don’t know anything about the Masai, but they tell me the Masai are warriors. Or used to be. They like drinking blood and milk. They seem to like it. Or so I’m told. Of course, I don’t know anything about these things.’ Click, as the machine switched off, and we descended at Nairobi.

Nairobi airport is interesting for two things. One is that it is infested with cats of all shapes, colours and sizes. I have not seen so many cats since one year when my mother got into a mood where she could not bear to see a kitten drowned, so that very soon we had forty cats who almost drove us out of the house before we could bring ourselves to lay violent hands on them.

The other is that the lavatories are marked ‘European Type’ and ‘Non-European Type’. The word type, I suppose, is meant to convey to the critical foreign visitor that Non-Europeans prefer their own amenities. It was my first indication of how defensive the colour bar has become. Also, to what irrational extremes it will take itself under pressure. When I left no one thought ill of themselves for defending white civilization in whatever ways were suggested by pure instinct.

The two Africans sat in the restaurant at a table by themselves. The social colour bar is being relaxed here slightly. (The other day I asked an African from Kenya what he thought was the most important result of the war in Kenya; he replied grimly: ‘In some hotels they serve us with food and drink now.’)

It was at this point that I noticed the old attitudes asserting themselves in me again. If one went to sit at the same table, it would be something of a demonstration. Perhaps they would prefer not to be drawn attention to in the electric atmosphere of Kenya? Or perhaps … yes, I was certainly back home.

One of the reasons why I wanted to return was because so many people had asked me how it was I had been brought up in a colour-bar country and yet had no feeling about colour. I had decided that a lucky series of psychological chances must have made me immune. But it was surely impossible that I should be entirely unlike other people brought up in the same way. Therefore I was watching my every attitude and response all the time I was in Africa. For a time, the unconsciousness of a person’s colour one has in England persisted. Then the miserable business began again. Shaking hands becomes an issue. The natural ebb and flow of feeling between two people is checked because what they do is not the expression of whether they like each other or not, but deliberately and consciously considered to express: ‘We are people on different sides of the colour barrier who choose to defy this society.’ And, of course, this will go on until the day comes when self-consciousness can wither away naturally. In the meantime, the eyes of people of a different colour can meet over those formal collective hands, in a sort of sardonic appreciation of the comedies of the situation.

But what I did find was that while I am immune to colour feeling as such, I was sensitive to social pressures. Could it be that many people who imagine they have colour prejudice are merely suffering from fear of the Joneses? I dare say this is not an original thought, but it came as a shock to me.

In the Tropical Diseases Hospital in London, where I was last year for a few weeks, a middle-aged white woman was being treated in the same room. When she found there were dark-skinned doctors and patients, she suffered something not far off a nervous collapse. She got no sympathy at all from either nurses or her fellow patients about her dislike of being treated the same way as black people, so she became stiffly but suspiciously silent: bedclothes pulled up to her chin, like a shield, watching everyone around her as if they were enemies. And every bit of china she used, every fork or knife or spoon, was minutely examined for cracks or scratches. The presence of coloured people meant germs: germs live in cracks. Her worry about these utensils became an obsession. Before a meal, after she had sent back cups, plates, cutlery, several times to be changed, she would then wash each piece in the basin in strong disinfectant. Unable to express her dislike of coloured people through the colour bar, she fell back on the china. This is the real colour prejudice; it is a neurosis, and people who suffer from it should be pitied as one pities the mentally ill. But there is a deep gulf between this and being frightened of what the neighbours will say.

In writing this I am conscious of a feeling of fatigue and sterility, which is what I have to fight against as soon as I set foot in white Africa. For a long time I believed this was the result of being in a minority among one’s own kind, which means one has to guard against being on the defensive, which means one has to test everything one says and does against general standards of right or wrong that are contradicted all the time, in every way, by what goes on around one.

But I no longer believe this to be true. What I feel is a kind of boredom, an irritation, by all these colour attitudes and prejudices. There is no psychological quirk or justification or rationalization that is new or even interesting. What is terrible is the boring and repetitive nature of ‘white civilization’.

As soon as one sets foot in a white settler country, one becomes part of a mass disease; everything is seen through the colour bar.

‘The patient must get worse before he can get better.’ And I know this is a light phrase for human suffering and what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in frustration. I do not have to be told or made to feel what the Africans in white-dominated countries suffer in humiliation and frustration. I know it all.

But in thinking of the future rather than the bitter present, I believe I am one with the Africans themselves, who show their superiority to colour bars by their joyfulness, their good humour and their delight in living. People who imagine the ghettos of white-dominated countries to be dreary and miserable places know nothing about the nature of the African people.

Worse than the colour bars, which are more dangerous and demoralizing to the white people than to the black, for they live within a slowly narrowing and suffocating cage, like so many little white mice on a treadmill – worse than this is the fact that the Africans are being channelled into industrialization in such a way that what is good in European civilization cannot reach them. They are allowed to know only what is bad and silly. That is why I am so impatient that they should wrench themselves free before they have lost touch with their own rich heritage, before they have become exhausted by exploitation.

I long for the moment when the Africans can free themselves and can express themselves in new forms, new ways of living; they are an original and vital people simply because they have been forced to take the jump from tribalism to industrial living in one generation.

And yet – the stale patterns of white domination still exist. So because I was brought up in it I have a responsibility. And does that mean I must go on writing about it?

I have notebooks full of stories, plots, anecdotes, which at one time or another I was impelled to write. But the impulse died in a yawn. Even if I wrote them well – what then? It is always the colour bar; one cannot write truthfully about Africa without describing it. And if one has been at great pains to choose a theme which is more general, people are so struck by the enormity and ugliness of the colour prejudices which must be shown in it that what one has tried to say gets lost.

When I am asked to recommend novels which will describe white-settler Africa most accurately to those who don’t know it, I always suggest a re-reading of those parts of Anna Karenina about the landowners and the peasants – simply because colour feeling doesn’t arise in it.

For the interminable discussions and soul-searchings about ‘the peasant’ are paralleled by the endless talk about ‘the native’. What was said in pre-revolutionary Russia about the peasant is word for word what is said about the Africans – lazy, irresponsible, shiftless, superstitious, and so on.

And in the person of Levin one finds the decent worried white liberal who is drawn by the reserves of strength, the deep humanity of the African, but yet does not trust him to govern himself. Levin, in Africa, is always dreaming of going native, of escaping from the complexities of modern civilization which he sees as fundamentally evil. He philosophizes; goes on long trips into the bush with his African servant to whom he feels himself closer than to any other human being and to whom he tells everything; half-believes in God; knows that all governments are bad; and plans one day to buy a crater in the Belgian Congo or an uninhabited island in the Pacific where at last he can live the natural life.

All this has nothing to do with colour.

I am struck continually by the parallels between pre-revolutionary Russia as described in Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gorky, and that part of Africa I know. An enormous, under-populated, under-developed, unformed country, still agricultural in feeling and resisting industrialization.

For a novelist based in Africa it is discouraging that so much of what develops there is a repetition of the European nineteenth century. Time and again one seizes on a theme, looks at it carefully, discovers that unless the writer is very careful it will merely repeat what has already been said in another context – and then, trying to isolate what is specifically African, what is true of Africa at this time, one comes slap up against that complex of emotions, the colour bar. I believe it to be true that what unifies Africa now, what makes it possible to speak of ‘Africans’ as if they were the members of one nation instead of a hundred nations, is precisely this, that white domination has given them one overriding emotion in common, which makes brothers of them all from Cape to Cairo. Yet behind this, perhaps, there is something else that is more important. Perhaps in a hundred years, looking back, they will not say: ‘It was the century when we turned the white men out of our continent and regained our freedom,’ but … I don’t know. When a people struggles for freedom the struggle itself is always so much greater and more creative than what is being fought.

Perhaps they will say: ‘That is the century when we found we were not simply black men, but a company of peoples infinitely diverse, original, rich and varied. That is the century when we recovered the right to find out what we are.’

But now, for the writer, it is hard, because the infinite complexity and the richness always narrow into a protest against that monstrous thing, the colour bar.

In white Africa I do not think the Africans have yet produced types of people or forms of organization that have not been produced elsewhere. African nationalists speak the same language as congress leaders in any country; political leaders must reflect white domination as long as it remains: Generals China and Russia of the Mau Mau would not have been possible without Colonel Blimp.

As for the British, they either live as if they have never left Britain or proliferate into eccentrics or rogue elephants. Africa is full of colourful characters, adventurers, criminals, petty tyrants or solitaries. But I don’t think it can be said we have not seen them before – or read about them.

I think it is the Afrikaner who is the original; something new; something that cannot be seen in any other continent. He is a tragic figure. The Africans are not tragic – they have the future before them; they are a suppressed people who will soon free themselves as Colonial people are freeing themselves everywhere in the world. The British are not tragic, they are too flexible. I think most of the British in Africa will be back in Britain inside twenty years. But the Afrikaners are as indigenous as the Africans. And since they insist their survival as a nation depends on white domination what possible future can they have? Yet they are not a corrupted people, as the Germans were corrupted by the Nazis – Afrikaner nationalism is not a falling-off from a high peak of national cultural achievement. The Afrikaners have remained unaltered while the world has changed, and that is their tragedy. Their history as a people has been a long, courageous battle for independence and freedom; yet they do not understand other people’s desire for freedom: that is their paradox.

They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black–white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid. But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the segregation created by Smuts, the Afrikaner who became a spokesman for the British Empire, and his British-dominated United Party. Passes, segregation, farm-prisons, pick-up vans and the industrial colour bar were not introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalists: the system was created by the white people, Afrikaner and British together, and financed by British and American capital. But the Afrikaner has been made the villain of the scene; Smuts was called a great statesman, but Strydom is hissed in the streets when he comes to Britain.

And so the drive towards national isolation and self-sufficiency which is the basis of Afrikaner nationalism is strengthened.

Sooner or later it will be the Afrikaner and the African who will face each other as opponents in the southern tip of the continent. And they are very alike. I have yet to meet an African who does not say that he prefers the Afrikaner as a man to the British. ‘The Afrikaner calls me a Kaffir, he says what he thinks, but he is more humane, he treats me better.’ I have heard that very often.

And inevitably the two people are becoming fast mixed in blood – if one may use that convenient word – in spite of all the laws and the bars and the barriers. There is no sadder or more bizarre sight than to see a group of ‘white South Africans’, each with the marks of mixed descent strong in face and hair and body-build, arguing about the necessity of preserving racial purity.

On an aeroplane in Northern Rhodesia I sat next to a young Afrikaner flying back home. He was immediately recognizable as one, first because of his open, simple face, and next because the marks of mixed parentage were on his hair and his facial structure.

We got into conversation.

‘I am sad today,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know what to do. I’ve just been up to the Copper Belt, and that’s the place for me, man, you can earn money there, not the Kaffir’s wages you get back home now. But if I go to the Copper Belt, man, my heart will break.’

‘But why?’

‘Because of my pigeons. They’re my little sisters. How can I take my fifty pigeons all the way to the Copper Belt? They will be sad there. I’d have to sell them. I wouldn’t like to do that. I’d feel sad all the time.’

‘Perhaps you’d get over it? And you could buy some more pigeons?’

‘How can you say that? That’s not right. No, man, the way I feel now, I’ll have to stay at home, even if I don’t like it.’

I noticed he had broken his thumb.

‘Yes, and that’s another thing. I got that last year. On the job I’m a policeman. A man was beating up a Kaffir. He had no right to do that. The Kaffir hadn’t done anything. So I broke my thumb on him. People shouldn’t go hitting Kaffirs when they haven’t done anything. Well, the next thing was I broke it again. You know how you have to beat up Kaffirs when you arrest them: they don’t tell the truth if you don’t give them a good hiding. But now I keep thinking about my thumb, and I can’t do my work properly. You can’t do the job without your fists. No, I’ll have to get another job. Besides, the police is no good.’

‘You don’t like the work?’

‘Hell, man, it’s not the work. But things are bad now. I know you’ll think I’m saying this because you’re English and I’m trying to make up to you. But it’s God’s truth, I like the English. There’s an Englishman in the office, and he’s fair, and I like him. He treats everyone the same. But our men there, man, but you can’t trust them! They tell you to do something, and then it goes wrong, and then it’s your fault. They don’t stand by you. And they tell on each other all the time. But the Englishman’s going. He’s going back to England, he says. And so I’ll leave, too. I’m not staying where things aren’t fair. Don’t think I mean anything about South Africa; it’s God’s country. Why don’t you come and see it?’

This being after I was proscribed, I said his Government would not let me in and why.

He looked at me long and earnestly. ‘Never seen a commie before,’ he said.

‘There used to be plenty in South Africa before it was illegal.’

‘Never heard of that. Well, look then, tell me, what is it about?’

‘In South Africa, what is important now is that we are against racial inequality.’

His face fell; he was a small boy. ‘Now look, man, hell! I don’t see that.’

‘Sooner or later you’ll have to.’

‘But they’re nothing but children, man! You must know that. Look how they live! It makes me just about sick to go into one of their locations. Besides, I don’t like their colour, I just don’t like it.’

He paused, very serious, wrestling with himself. ‘You think I’ve just been brought up to be like that?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘It’s no good, I don’t see it. Now look here’ – and he turned earnestly towards me – ‘would you let a black man marry your daughter?’

‘If my daughter wanted it.’

He slowly went a dark red. ‘I don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. I just don’t like it.’ A pause. ‘Then I can see why they didn’t let you in, man. Women shouldn’t go around saying things like that. No, you mustn’t talk like that, I don’t like to hear it.’ His face slowly went back to normal. Then he said: ‘But I’ve enjoyed talking. I always want to know about these things. I’ve never been out of South Africa before. If I can leave my little pigeons and get up to the Copper Belt and earn some money, then I want to come to England. They say that Kaffirs are just like everybody else there?’

‘Just like everybody else.’

‘I don’t think I should like to see that. It wouldn’t seem right to me. But hell, man, that means they can go with the women? Sorry, talking like this, but it’s not personal. But you can’t have them going with the women. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t like …’

This is the stock South African conversation; and it goes on just as if nothing had happened. But what is happening is that the poorer of the white people are becoming more and more like the poorer of the Africans.

In the Lusaka airport there was a five-hour wait for the connection south to Salisbury.

Sitting in the little garden were a group of white people, toasting themselves in the sun, carefully accumulating pigment under their precious white skins.

The mystiques of sun-tanning are becoming as complicated and irrational as those of food and sex. What could be odder than to see people whose very existence depends on their paleness of skin deliberately darkening themselves on the preserved ‘white’ beaches of the coasts, or on the banks of ‘white’ swimming baths? But in a country where anyone who works in the open must become dark-skinned, and where it is impossible to distinguish between deep sunburn and the skin of a coloured person, one acquires a mysterious sixth sense that tells one immediately if a person is ‘white’ or not.

Having been in Britain for so long, I had lost this sense; and, sitting in a café in Bulawayo, I was pleased to see a group of people come in who had dark brown skins. The spirit of Partnership, I thought, was really relaxing the colour bar. A few minutes later a man came in who I thought was indistinguishable from those already sitting there. He went to sit at a table by himself. At once the woman behind the counter came over and said: ‘You know you are not allowed to come in here.’ He got up and went out without a word. It seemed that the first group were Italians.

In 1949, on the boat coming to Britain, where most of the passengers were elderly ladies playing bridge and knitting, were two attractive young women. They did not mix with the rest at all, were spoken of as ‘Durban society girls’. One was a tall, slim, pale creature with smooth, dark hair and intelligent, dark eyes kept deliberately languid. The other was a plump little yellow-head, not pretty, but as it were professionally vivacious. They were American in style, as most South African girls are: very well-kept, self-possessed, independent.

I got to know the cheerful little one, who told me that her friend was called Camellia. ‘She’s done well for herself if you like. She was just an ordinary secretary, working in the office, but the boss’s son married her. Then he got killed in an air crash. She’s married into one of the oldest families in Durban. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a damn for anybody.’ It seemed that this quality of not giving a damn was the bond between the girls; for Camellia had taken her typist friend Janet with her into society. Janet had consequently also done well for herself: she was engaged to a cousin in the same family. It seemed that the young widow had gone to Uncle Piet, executor of the estate, and said: ‘I’m fed up with life. I want a holiday in Europe.’

Janet said: ‘That silly old bugger Uncle Piet said she had a duty to her position in society, and she should set an example, and she wasn’t to go for more than four months. But he gave her a thousand. So that’s how I came too. She’s generous, Camellia is. And it’s not that she’s got all the money she wants. Actually she hasn’t got any money. Her husband didn’t know he was going to be killed, and anyway he was under age. They both were. When they got married the papers called it “the wedding of the beautiful children”. Because he was good-looking. So Camellia doesn’t get any money except what Uncle Piet lets her have, because she hasn’t any money by will. But when Camellia said I must come with her, Uncle Piet didn’t like it. He said it was my duty to stay with my fi-ance. But see the world before you get tied down with kids, that’s what I say.’

The two girls spent all day lying side by side in two deck chairs in the shade, refused to take part in the deck-sports, and at night did the few young men there were a favour by dancing with them. At least, this was Camellia’s attitude; though I think the little one would have liked to be less aloof.

Two years later I saw them in Trafalgar Square, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Camellia was with a man who was probably a West Indian; and Janet was tagging along. This set-up intrigued me for some days. Had they gone home to collect more money from Uncle Piet and then come back to Britain again? What had happened to Janet’s eligible fi-ance? And above all, how could a Durban society girl, even if she didn’t give a damn, get herself involved with a Negro? As I was on a bus when I saw the group, unfortunately there was no chance of finding out.

That was in 1951. In 1953 I was walking along the edge of the sea in the south of France, and there was the young man I had seen in Trafalgar Square with an extremely beautiful black girl. They were sitting side by side on a rock, arms and legs inextricably mixed, and on the sand watching them was Janet, who was her normal colour. Then I saw that the beautiful Negress was in fact Camellia. All that was visible of her – and she was wearing a minute red bikini – was burned a very dark bronze.

I went up to Janet and asked her how she did.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing well for yourself since I saw you last.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And how goes it with you?’

She looked at the couple on the rock. No doubt but that she was very upset. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘my mind is much broader since I came to Europe, but what am I to do? Tell me that?’

‘I can see your problem,’ I said. ‘But what happened to your fiancé?’

‘Which fiancé?’ she said, and giggled. ‘No, it’s not that. I can look after myself, but it’s Camellia. After we were here that time, we got a letter from Uncle Piet, asking when we were coming back. Camellia wrote and said she was still getting over her sad loss, so he sent her some more money. Actually, we were getting some culture. After all, you come to Europe to get some culture. South Africa has got everything, but it isn’t very cultured. So we got mixed up in artistic circles. I made Camellia do it, because at first she didn’t want to. There were coloured people, and she didn’t like that. But then she met Max and he and she quarrelled all the time. Besides, it intrigued her, you know how it is, you come here from South Africa and they just laugh at you. Max was always laughing at Camellia. The next thing was, my fi-ance came over, and said it was time I came home. But my ideas had changed. I said to him: “Now that I have been around a bit I am not sure that you and I are suited. My mind is much broader than it was.” So we broke it off and he went home.

‘Then Camellia and Max came here for a holiday. She said she couldn’t stick it without any sun any longer. She started lying about in the sun. And at home she never goes out without a big hat, and even gloves if the sun is hot, because she is so proud of her skin. I told her: “You are crazy to ruin your skin.” And Max said to her that the way everybody in Europe goes south to get sunburned every summer is an unconscious tribute to the superiority of the dark people over the white people. He said that a hundred years ago no one in Europe got sunburned. Max is very well educated and all that. But Camellia got mad, and they quarrelled badly, and so she and I went home. Camellia tried to settle down. Piet wanted her to marry cousin Tom to keep everything in the family. But Camellia said she wanted to go away to make up her mind about marrying Tom. So we both of us came back to England. Camellia met Max straight away. He is the son of a rich family from the Gold Coast. Did you know there were rich families among the natives in the Gold Coast? There are. He is a lawyer. Then they made it up and came here again for a holiday and when she came to England she might just as well have been born in the location. Just look at her.’

‘Luckily,’ I said, ‘there aren’t any locations here, so it doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, but now Uncle Piet has written saying that if she doesn’t go home before Christmas he will no longer consider her one of the family. No money, that means. And so she is going back. I’m taking her. I promised Uncle Piet I would take her. Next month. She and Max have decided that she would not be happy in the Gold Coast. For about one week they decided to get married, believe it or not. Then Max said she has not got the sense of social responsibility he wants in a wife – can you beat it? And she said that as far as she was concerned, he was primitive. They quarrelled, I can tell you!’

‘So it has all turned out well in the end,’ I said.

‘Yes, but how can I take her back like that? The boat goes in a month. She says she is going to stay here until it goes. Everyone will think she’s a Kaffir, looking like that. I can’t understand her. The magazines used to call her the girl with the skin like petals. Actually Camellia was her christened name, believe it or not, but she was proud of them calling her that, even though she pretended she didn’t give a damn.’

‘There are bleaching creams,’ I said.

Janet began laughing. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said, and admittedly she sounded not far off tears. ‘But if I take her back like that, Uncle Piet will blame me. And I’m going to marry a nice boy who is one of the family. I said to Camellia, “If you had fair hair,” I said to her, “then it wouldn’t matter. But you’re crazy with your dark hair to have such dark skin.”’

‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.

‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’

And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.

On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.

In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.

Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’

This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.

But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.

‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’

‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’

She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’

‘Jolly good,’ I said.

‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.

‘And Caroline?’ I asked.

‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’

‘And Janet?’

‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’

Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.

‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’

‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.

‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’