Читать книгу Going Home - Doris Lessing - Страница 8

On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.

I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.

‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can – if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’

Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.

I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.

At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.

I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.

And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.

The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.

‘In short,’ we concluded, ‘we are seeing a process whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’

But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.

After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.

My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.

But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.

Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.

That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.

Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself, half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen – driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.

Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.

That would not matter: I do not think the numbers of a dominant class or group matter in stamping their imprint on a society. Portuguese territory is unmistakably Latin in feeling, though the Portuguese whites are a small minority.

What is it, then, that makes British white Africa American? What, for that matter, is that quality we all recognize as American? Partly it is the quality of a society where people are judged by how much they earn: it is the essence of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘a man is a man for all that, because in this country there is no class feeling, only money feeling.’

Again, just as America is permeated with the values and attributes of the two groups of people supposedly non-assimilable – the Negroes and the Jews – so the white people here who think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, but the qualities they ascribe to the Africans are inevitably absorbing those qualities.

It is a society without roots – is that why it has no resistance to Americanism? Or is being rootless in itself American?

The myths of this society are not European. They are of the frontiersman and the lone-wolf; the brave white woman homemaking in lonely and primitive conditions; the child who gets himself an education and so a status beyond his parents; the simple and brave savage defeated after gallant fighting on both sides; the childlike and lovable servant; the devoted welfare-worker spending his or her life uplifting backward peoples.

Yet these images have no longer anything to do with what is going on now in Central Africa.

On that first morning I went shopping to try to get the feel and atmosphere of the place.

First into a vegetable shop. Shopping has certainly changed: now the counters are refrigerated, self-service shops everywhere, and above all Coca-Cola has moved in. The Coca-Cola sign is on every second building, from the high new blocks of offices and flats to the scruffy little store in the Native Reserve.

In the vegetable shop were three white people and two Africans. Two of the white people were serving behind the counter; then two African men, with shopping baskets. Then me. I waited my turn behind the two Africans to see what would happen. The woman behind the counter eyed the Africans coldly, and then in the cool, curt voice I know so well said: ‘Can’t you see the white missus, boy? Get to the back.’ They moved back, I moved in and was served. Another white woman came in; she was being served as I went out. The Africans patiently waited.

And for the thousandth time I tried to put myself in the place of people who are subjected to this treatment every day of their lives. But I can’t imagine it: the isolated incident, yes; but not the cumulative effect, year after year, every time an African meets a white person, the special tone of voice, the gesture of impatience, the contempt.

In the next shop, which was a bakery, a young girl in jeans, striped sweat-shirt and sandals, was greeted by a boy in sweat-shirt and jeans. ‘Hiya, Babe!’ ‘Hiya, Johnny.’ ‘See you tonight?’ ‘Ya, see you at the flicks.’ ‘Bye.’ ‘Bye.’

The main street is crammed with cars, with white women drifting along, talking, or standing in groups, talking. They wear cool, light dresses, showing brown bare arms and legs. The dresses are mostly home-made, and have that look of careful individual fit that one sees in the clothes of women in Italy and Spain.

These are the women of leisure; and, having been one of them for so long – or at least expected to play the role of one – I know that their preoccupations are in this order: the dress they are making for themselves or their daughter, the laziness of their servants, and an infinite number of personal problems. Or, as the Americans would say, Problems.

Their husbands are now busily engaged in getting on and doing well for themselves in the offices; and their children are at school. The cookboy is cooking the lunch. They will take back the car laden with groceries and liquor, dress-lengths, bargains. Then there will be a morning tea-party. Then lunch with husband and family. Then a nap. Then afternoon tea, and soon, sundowners. Then the pictures. And then, bed. And, in the words of a personal servant of a friend of mine: ‘The white man goes to bed, he makes love, twice-a-week, bump, bump, go-to-sleep.’

Though this did not occur to me until later, at the end of my trip, when my mind had cleared of the fogs induced by the word Partnership, is it possible that the white men of Central Africa are so anxious to create a class of African in their own image, equally preoccupied with getting on and doing well for themselves – is it possible that one of the reasons for it is that other anxious white myth, the potent and sexually heroic black man? Is it possible that (of course in a very dark place in their minds) they are thinking: ‘Yah, you black bastard! You start worrying about money, too! That’ll fix you!’

A group of these slow-moving, heavy-bodied women turned: one advanced towards me. Another school-friend. ‘My old man heard it from his boss, and he heard it from a friend at the airport, so I knew you were back. Things have changed here, don’t you think so? I hope you are going back to write something nice about us for a change. Hell, man, what have we done to you? You were always doing well for yourself before you left, weren’t you, so what are you getting excited about? Hell, man, what have we done? I’ve had my cookboy for fifteen years, since I got married, and I’ve always treated him right. And what do you think of the lights of London? I was there last spring, did you know? But we went to Paris. Man, I don’t know what they see in Paris. It cost ten pounds for a cabaret and a bottle of some champagne and some night-life.’

‘They were cheating you,’ I said.

‘Is that so? Well, next time we are going to Johannesburg. We’ve got just as good night-life there. And the Belgian Congo, too. They’ve got some night-life just as good as Paris. And if my old man wants to go and see some nudes, then he can go and see them there, because those nudes in Paris haven’t got anything we haven’t got. And it only costs half. Seen our new nightclub? Seen our new restaurant? Jesus, we’ve got as good here as you’ve got in London, I’m telling you. Things have really changed since you’ve left, they have. It’s a fact.’

After this conversation, I walked down First Street. On the pavement, sitting with their feet comfortably in the gutter, five African women, knitting, watching life pass by. They looked relaxed and happy. They wore good print dresses, crocheted white caps, sandals. Clothes have changed much for the better in a decade. Gone are the old blue-printed cottons, which were almost a uniform for African women. A man I know who imports for the African trade said: ‘The days of “Kaffir-truck” are over. Now we import quantities of cheap, bright stuff for the native trade. But already some Africans buy as good quality as the Europeans. In five or six years they won’t be manufacturing special goods for the African trade.’

In Meikle’s lounge, a place where I spent a good part of my adolescence, I drank beer and watched what went on. Women having morning tea, farmers in for the tobacco auctions, everything the same.

At the next table, two women, an American and an Englishwoman. It appeared they were both making trips through Africa, had met in Durban, were travelling back to England together for company. They knew each other previously. Now they were discussing some mutual friend who, it seemed, had come to no good.

AMERICAN: So now I don’t know what he’ll do. You can’t start all over at fifty.

ENGLISH: It seems such a shame. And what can it have been? Yes, of course he always drank too much, but why suddenly … I mean, he never drank too much.

AMERICAN: Well, dear, he had problems.

ENGLISH: But no worse than usual? And there was that nice wife of his. She always pulled him together when – I mean, I remember once, when they were visiting us in London, he was rather depressed, and she pulled him together. It was not that they needed to worry about money.

AMERICAN: He was basically unstable, that’s all.

ENGLISH: But suddenly? There must have been something definite, something must have happened. Of course, people don’t drink too much for nothing. But everything must have suddenly piled up? Perhaps he was working too hard. He always did, didn’t he?

AMERICAN: Now Betty, there’s no point in going on. He had a character defect.

ENGLISH (slightly irritated, but persistent): I dare say, but his character couldn’t suddenly have got all that much more defective? There must have been some reason?

AMERICAN: I keep telling you, he was psychologically maladjusted.

ENGLISH (after a pause, drily): You always put your finger straight on to a thing, dear.

AMERICAN (very faintly suspicious): What? But what more is there to say?

Walking out of the hotel I was looking for the lavatory where it used to be. Coming towards me, a middle-aged woman. I used to know her well. ‘Where’s the lavatory these days?’ I asked. ‘Really, dear!’ she said. ‘It’s the powder-room since you left. Third door on the right.’

At the post office, it says Natives and Europeans. I went to my part of the building, and watched the long queues of Africans patiently waiting their turn to be served.

Then I went to get a copy of my driving licence, which I had lost. The office was in makeshift buildings on a waste lot; the growth of administration due to Federation has spread government departments everywhere there is room for them.

There was a long queue of about 150 white people, and another parallel queue of black people. The sun was burning down, and puffs of pinkish dust settled from the shifting, bored feet. Pleasant to see these sunburned skins, the red-brown, glistening, healthy sunburn of the highveld; pleasant to stand in the hot sun, knowing it would not withdraw itself capriciously in ten minutes behind cloud.

In front of me in the queue were two young farmers in for the day. Farm-talk: prices, cost of native labour; the Government favoured the townsfolk. This at least hadn’t changed at all. They wore the farm uniform – short khaki shorts, showing yards of brown leg, bush shirts, short socks.

Time passed, nearly an hour of it; the queue had hardly moved forward.

They were now talking of one Jerry, and here, it seemed, was a matter they approved of, for the fatalistic shrug of the Government-oppressed countryman had given way to the earnest manner of two children swapping confidences.

‘I’m with you. Jerry is a good type. Not like some magistrates. We are lucky to have him in our district.’

‘Fair’s fair with Jerry. He warns you – then he gets you, square and legal.’

‘That’s what I say. He came to my place one sundown – he said, “Now look here, man, that’s the third time I saw you doing seventy through the township. Next time I’ll see there’s a fine.”’

‘Then he will. Because he does what he says. He sent a chit around to me. “Tom,” he said, “it was nearly eighty you were doing today. You only have to slow down to thirty for a mile through the village. Is that so much to ask?” Yes, that’s what he wrote to me.’

‘Yes, that’s Jerry all right. He said to me, “There’s a school, too. The place is full of kids. Use your head,” he said. “Think how you’d feel if you got a couple of those kids. Use your heart.”’

‘Yes, that’s what he said to me when he came to see me. He gave me fair warning. Next day, that was yesterday, I got a summons. I was doing eighty, mind.’ Here he paused and looked with dark solemnity at the other. ‘Eighty. So I was summoned. Fair’s fair.’

‘Yes, you can always trust Jerry to do what’s right.’

‘Yes, he never lets you get away with it. Not more than what’s fair.’

Which conversation may, perhaps, throw light on another: three weeks later, a friend of mine who inspects African schools, in that voice of exasperated affection which is common among liberal members of the administration who have to work constantly against their own beliefs, ‘Damn it, man, they’re mad. Say what you like. Yes, all right, we’re mad, but they’re madder. There are times I could throw the whole thing up. You know what? There’s a teacher. He’s been swotting and struggling for that ruddy Standard IV certificate for years, and then he got it, and he was in a kraal school at last, a big man with all his six years’ schooling behind him and all’s hunkydory. So then I went out to inspect. I found him there in that pitiful, bloody little school, next door to a whacking great church, needless to say, and he had his sixty kids sitting on the mud floor in neat little rows all chanting the ABC in Shona, and there he was drunk as a lord and staggering around like a sick chicken. I said to him, “Aren’t you ashamed, Joshua? Aren’t you ashamed, my man, with all these poor little kids dependent on you for their education?” He wept bitter tears and said, “Yes, sir,” he would never do it again. “You’d better not,” I said to him, and I went off in my fine government lorry to the next school 100 miles off. Then I heard it was time I went and had another look, so I packed myself into my lorry and off I went, 300 miles, and there was Joshua, lying on the ground under the tree outside the school, and there were his class, still sitting in neat rows in the hut on the floor, repeating after themselves, “Mary had a little lamb,” maintaining perfect discipline in their efforts to get educated even without a teacher. So I lost my rag, I can tell you. I got him to his feet and shook him sober and said he’d have one more chance. Six months later, out I went, there he was, drunker, if possible, so I gave him the sack. I gave him the sack there and then. The poor bastard wept and wailed and he said all his father’s savings for fifteen years had gone into his getting Standard IV; but what could I do? I sacked him. Then I went off to stay the night at Jackson’s farm, and I lay awake all night tortured – man, but tortured! – thinking of that poor silly bugger and his dad’s life savings. Because, my God, if I was stuck out on that Reserve 150 miles from anywhere on £6 a month I’d drink myself to death in a month, man. Next morning I woke up more dead than alive, having decided I was going to clear out of this bloody country – no, really, I can’t stand it, I’m going – when who should I see but Joshua on his bicycle? He had cycled 20 miles since dawn through the bush with a chicken. The chicken was for me. You could have knocked me down with a – I said to him, “Damn it, you poor fool, Joshua, damn it! I’ve given you the sack, I’ve ruined your life, now you’ll have to go off and dig a ditch somewhere, and you bring me a chicken. Have a heart,” I said, “don’t do that to me.” “Sir,” he said. “It came into my heart last night to bring you a chicken. It is for you, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that off he went back to his bicycle. So I brought the chicken home, and here was my wife with psychological troubles, and my kids, damned spoilt brats who are so blasé and full of experience from the pictures they can’t get a thrill out of anything, and the big baas, that’s me. And the happy family, we ate that poor bastard’s chicken, and I don’t know why it didn’t choke us.’

‘Now, now, darling,’ said his wife, ‘you must keep a sense of proportion.’

After two and a half hours I had reached the door of the office. It seems that this was the time of the year for renewing licences, and so the whole countryside moves into town for that purpose, and patiently queues behind the single counter that does duty for the ordinary run of business during the rest of the year. Then I discovered I was in the wrong queue, so I started again. At last, I was told I must go to an inner office; and the official invited me to do so through an inside passage, because otherwise I would have to pass through a crowd of natives, and I wouldn’t want to do that, would I?

Inside there was a nice girl, who in the best tradition of the country, which is to have no respect for institutions, said, ‘Well, I can’t help you, because that silly lot of MPs we’ve got have absent-mindedly passed a law saying that everyone who loses his licence must take another driving test. I expect when they’ve noticed what they’ve done, they’ll change it back again, but in the meantime I think you’ve had it, because there’s queues miles long of people waiting to be tested for new licences and I can only hope there are some MPs among them.’

‘But last time I lost my licence,’ I said, ‘all I did was to go to the office and they looked up a file and gave me a new one.’

‘That was in the good old days. That was before Federation. No, things aren’t what they used to be. And besides, it seems the files have got mislaid.’

So I went back to the house and telephoned the police at Banket where sometime in the ’thirties I was given my licence by a young policeman who was not interested in the quality of my driving. But they said the records were always destroyed after five years, and they couldn’t help me – the place I wanted was that office in town.

I fell into despair; but after reflecting that it was unlikely that the whole character – or, as the Americans would say, the mores – of the country had changed in seven years, I walked back to the licensing office, past the white queue that still waited, through the black queue, into the inner office, and said I had lost my driving licence. Whereupon a young man who had either not heard of the law just passed by Parliament, or who didn’t care, charged me 1s. and gave me a substitute licence. And so the magnificent empty roads of the country were open to me.

Down the empty road to Umtali we drove. It is the road running east to the Portuguese border – a road that drives straight up one rise, down the other side, up again; first through hills tumbled all over with granite boulders like giant pebbles balancing on each other, sometimes so lightly it seems a breath of wind would topple them apart; then through mountains; for nearly 150 miles, and one looks down on Umtali from above, a small, pretty, sleepy town that never changes, in a hollow in the mountains.

It is hot there, very hot and steamy. This is not the high, dry climate of the bushveld; it is tropical, and after a few days there one becomes languid and disinclined to move. I know because I have stayed there for long stretches three times. Because those times were separated by periods of years, I know three Umtalis, and on that day I went back, dropping fast down the mountainside into it, those three towns remained separate from each other and from the town I saw then.

The first time I was eleven and I had never stayed away from home before except for boarding school. It was in a tiny house at the very bottom of Main Street, which is three miles long; the upper end of Main Street was respectable and rich, but the lower end was poor and near the railway. The house was of wood – wooden walls and floor, and lifted high off the earth on a platform, in the old style. It was in a small, fenced garden, crammed with pawpaw trees, avocado pear trees, mangoes, guavas; and around the fence nasturtiums grew as thick and bright and luxuriant as swamp-flowers. That garden quivered with heat and dampness. Under the thick shade of the mangoes the earth was sticky with fallen, decaying fruit and green with moss. The house was crammed, too; it was a large family; but I cannot remember the other children, only Cynthia, who was fourteen and therefore very grown up in my eyes. The others were all boys; and the two women, Cynthia and her mother, despised the men of the family utterly and all the time. Mrs Millar was a big, dark, ruddy-skinned woman with heavy black hair and black, full eyes. She was like a big laying hen. Cynthia was the same, a dark, big girl, full-bosomed, with fierce red cheeks. The father was a little man, wispy and ineffectual and pathetically humorous, making bad jokes against his wife’s bitter scorn of him because he had a small job as a clerk in a hardware shop. They were gentlefolk, so they said all the time; and this job and what he earned made it impossible to keep up the standards they wanted. And certainly they were very poor. I had always imagined our family was; but my mother’s generous scattiness over money was luckily always too strong for my father’s prudence; so that no matter how he laboured over the accounts, emerging on a Sunday morning with incontrovertible proof that we could not afford this or that, she would look at him with the stubborn wistfulness of a deprived small child and say: ‘Why don’t you get some out of the bank?’ ‘But, damn it, you have to put money into a bank before you can get it out.’ ‘Then get a loan from the Land Bank.’ ‘But we’ve already had a loan; we can’t have any more.’ ‘Nonsense!’ she would say at last with determination. ‘Nonsense!’

Not so in the Millar household, where Mamma would tell the guilty family the exact cost of the meal they must be thankful they were about to receive – they were religious. Or rather, she and her daughter were. I had imagined I was persecuted by religion, and had rebelled against it; but religion with us never intruded too uncomfortably into practical life.

But the difference between the Millars and ourselves that made me most uneasy was this insistence on being gentlefolk. It was a word that I had never heard before out of novels.

Once again, it was the fortunate clash of temperaments between my parents that saved us from it, for while my mother was nothing if not conscious of having come down in the world, my father was oblivious to all such things, and had, in fact, emigrated from England to be rid of the whole business of being respectable. And so, when she was in one of her organizing moods, he would merely listen, with irritable patience, until she had finished, and say: ‘O Lord, old girl, do as you like, but leave me alone.’

But the little house near the railway lines, which was shaken day and night by the shunting trains, almost under the great water-tanks which dripped and splashed over the mango trees – that house which would have been a perfect setting for one of Somerset Maugham’s tropical dramas was, in fact, saturated with the atmosphere of coy, brave, decaying gentility that finds its finest expression in Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. Yet there were two women in that house to, I think, five males.

Mother and daughter would sew, knit, patch, darn, sitting together on the verandah, a unit of intense femininity, exchanging confidences in a low voice, while father and sons would hastily slip out of the house, father to the bar, sons to their friends’ houses.

And when the father returned, fuddled and apologetic, mother and daughter would raise their eyes from their sewing, exchange understanding glances, and let out in unison a deep, loud sigh, before dropping them again to their work, while the little man slunk past.

I was appalled and fascinated by the talk of the two females, for such confidences were not possible in our house. I would sit, listening, burning with shame, for I was not yet in a position to contribute anything of my own.

I was there six weeks. At night I used to lie in bed across the tiny room from Cynthia and listen while father and mother argued about money in the room next door. One could hear everything through the wooden wall.

‘Poor, poor, poor mother,’ Cynthia would say in a burning passionate whisper.

I would fall off to sleep, and wake to see her in the light that fell through the window past the moonflowers and the mango trees, leaning up in bed on her elbow, listening, listening. Listening for what? It reminded me of how I used to listen avidly to her talk with her mother. Then a train rumbled in, and stood panting on the rails outside, the water rushed in the tanks, and Cynthia lay down again. ‘Go to sleep,’ she would hiss in a cross, low voice. ‘Go to sleep at once.’

Before I slept I would think of my home, the big mud-walled, grass-roofed house on the kopje where the winds came battering and sweeping, and where I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing Chopin and Grieg two rooms off, against the persistent thudding of the tom-tom from the native village down the hill. When I woke the piano would still be sending out its romantic, nostalgic music and the drums still playing. I would imagine how in the compound the people were dancing around the big fire between the little grass-roofed huts while the drummers sat making their interminably repeated and varied rhythms on and on. But the other picture in my mind was not of my mother as she was now, middle-aged and tired, but of an early memory: her long, dark hair knotted low on her neck, bare-shouldered under the light of the candles set at either end of the piano, playing with shut eyes as she, in her turn, remembered something far off and unreachable. And the drums were beating, even then, as long ago as that.

The drums beat through all the nights of my childhood stronger even than the frogs and the crickets, ultimately stronger even than the piano, for when I woke in the morning with the sun standing over the chrome mountain, a single, tired, indefatigable drum was still tapping down the hill. And there came a time when my mother could not trouble to get the piano tuned.

But waking in the house near the railway lines, sweating with heat, half-sick with the sweet smell of the decaying fruit and vegetation outside, it was to see Cynthia and her mother standing together in the corner of the room, hands folded, heads bent in prayer. Then, with a deadly look at her husband Mrs Millar would say in her womanly resigned voice, ‘You can’t have bacon and eggs – not on what you earn.’

I was badly homesick. I hated that house. I longed for my cool, humorous, stoical mother, who might sentimentally play Chopin, but would afterwards slam down the piano lid with a flat: ‘Well, that’s that.’ I wanted, too, to lay certain questions before my father.

When I got home I went in search of him, managed to distract his attention from whatever philosophical problem was engaging him at the time, and remarked that I had had a lovely time at the Millars’.

‘That’s good,’ he said, and gave me a long, sideways look.

‘They have grace before every meal,’ I said.

‘Good Lord,’ he said.

‘Mr Millar goes to the bar every night and comes home drunk, and Mrs Millar prays for his soul.’

‘Does she now?’

There was a pause, for I was very uncomfortable.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

‘Mrs Millar came on to the verandah one morning, and said in a loud voice to Cynthia …’

‘Cynthia? Who’s she?’

‘Of course you know, she’s been here to stay.’

‘Has she? I suppose so. Lord, you don’t mean that girl – very well, go on.’

‘She said in a loud voice to Cynthia, “I’ve been praying, Cynthia. O Cynthia, our horrible, horrible bodies!”’

I was hot all over. Never had anything made me as uncomfortable and wretched as that moment. But my father had shot me a startled look and gone red. He struggled for a moment, then dropped his head on the chair-back and laughed.

I said: ‘It wasn’t funny. It made me sick.’

‘Lord, lord, lord,’ said my father, lifting his head to give me an apologetic, embarrassed look between roars. ‘Lord, I can see the old hen.’

‘Very well,’ I said, and walked away with dignity.

I was furious with him for laughing; I had known he would laugh. I had come home a week earlier than was arranged to hear that laugh. And so I was able to put that unpleasant household behind me and forget it. My father could always be relied on in these matters.

Living down by the railway line, the upper part of the town was represented by three houses where the Millars, mother and daughter, with the painful writhings of inverted snobbery, permitted themselves to be accepted – as they saw it. The inhabitants of the three houses were certainly innocent of the condescension ascribed to them. Living with the Millars, I knew the lower mile of Main Street and its shops, particularly the Indian shops which had cheap cottons and silks from the East. Mrs Millar would send Cynthia and myself up to Shingadia’s for half a yard of satin and a reel of sewing silk, and Cynthia walked proud and slow up Main Street, and into the Indian shop, her eyes busy for signs of the enemy, those girls who bought at the big stores farther up the street, and would certainly despise her if they saw her in Shingadia’s.

And if one of these envied girls came in sight, as likely as not on her way to Shingadia’s, she would turn to face her, head high, dark eyes burning, waiting to say in the voice of an exiled duchess: ‘I have come to buy mother a yard of crêpe de Chine.’ Then, the encounter over, we would walk back, and I waited for that moment when she would sigh and say: ‘It’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you.’