Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

by Doris Lessing

  I went once with Jack to the Czech Embassy and was as bored as I usually am at such affairs. An unlikeable young man stuck to us, kept bringing us drinks, and, when we said we were leaving and would find a taxi, insisted on driving us both back to Church Street. Uninvited, he nevertheless insisted on coming upstairs with us. There, he boasted about rich and powerful friends, invited us to all kinds of parties, tried to wring promises from us to see him again. When he left we joked that no one in his right mind, rich and powerful or not, would voluntarily spend half an hour with this pathetic little name-dropper. His name was Stephen Ward. Later it turned out that he was not only some kind of pimp for the rich and powerful but also involved in espionage. He was Christine Keeler’s friend or lover. When he got into bad trouble, the people who had been making use of him dropped him, and he committed suicide. Similarly, you would meet people who had met the fascinating Christine Keeler at dinner parties—‘She’s such good value…. She’s so witty….She’s so clever.’ But these admirers did not come to her aid when she needed it.

  What else did I do that I would not have done, had I not been a communist? I went to sell the Daily Worker and canvass for some council election in a big block of flats. It was daytime. It was women who opened the doors. ‘I leave this kind of thing to my husband.’ They invited me in, because they were lonely. Women and children, shut into dingy, meagre, poor rooms—this was well before the explosion of affluence described as ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ At once I was in an only too familiar situation. What they wanted was advice about hire purchases,* about child allowances. They did not know what was due them, or how to obtain it. Whereas in Rhodesia, leaving such scenes, I had only to telephone someone: ‘The woman in number 23, she needs…,’ now I scarcely knew the rules myself or whom to telephone. I told the Party that these people were not interested in communism; they needed a social worker. I did this only once. Anything to do with the Party was grim, was depressing, and not only because of my being in my usual false position.

  I went to Hull University, to lecture on Southern Rhodesia. There were about fifty Nigerian students. Now, that was an experience which taught me a thing or two. They literally could not understand me: that is, take in the fact that a tiny white minority—about 150,000 people—kept in subjugation a million and a half blacks. ‘But why don’t they tell them to leave?’ ‘Why do they let the white people tell them what to do?’ ‘Tell me, please—I do not understand what you are telling us.’ I said that Southern Rhodesia had been physically conquered, by force of arms. ‘But we would not allow ourselves to be turned into—what did you call it?—hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ I have never had a more uncomprehending audience.

  I was asked to speak to the IRA about conditions in Rhodesia—their invitation. About fifteen people, all young men. I learned it was usual for IRA members to be arrested without a warrant, imprisoned without trial, and kept there without being sentenced and without hope of release, except at the whim of the British. The war between the IRA and the British had far older roots than most people think now.

  I was asked to put the Party Line on literature to a meeting organised by the Kensington communists. I didn’t agree with the Party Line, I never had. But I went—as always—partly out of curiosity. The proposition demanded that Graham Greene must be dismissed as a reactionary. I admired Graham Greene. I was, however, well able to expound the Party Line on literature. Why did I do it? It was, I think, the only time in my life I did this. I began stammering. I have never stammered. I could hardly finish my speech. I did not have to be told by Mrs. Sussman that I had stammered because I did not believe what I was saying. ‘Don’t you think’, said she, ‘it is time you learned to say no?’

  All these activities went on to the accompaniment of commentaries by Mrs. Sussman, by Jack, and, as well, by my mother, who was frantic, sorrowful, bitter, reproachful, and kept saying I should think of the future of my son. When was Jack going to marry me? Why did I run around with communists? Who was this Mrs. Sussman? Why was I prepared to listen to a foreigner and a stranger, and not to her?

  Meanwhile there was an undercurrent in the Party—at least in the circles I was in—of talk about the news coming in from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That is, not the news in the newspapers, which we automatically discounted as lies, but word-of-mouth news. This talk went on in bewildered, frightened voices: the arrests, the disappearances, the prisons, the camps, all summed up by ‘a pity the Revolution didn’t take place in a developed country; then none of this would have happened.’ The Party—officially—denied that anything was happening, even when Party members went in to see them in ones and twos, or in delegations from branches. ‘Capitalist lies.’ Unofficially…that was a different matter. There was a phrase current then: ‘knowing the score’. A bitter acknowledgement. Still not the whole truth; far from it.

  The phrase knowing the score admitted you into an élite of political sophistication.

  A great deal has been said about the financial corruption in high-level Communist circles in Britain but I think money was the least of it. They prided themselves, the top brass—and all the Party members would boast—that these officials’ pay was never more than the average working man’s wage. Did they take handouts from the Soviet Union that there was no record of? No one could say they lived luxuriously. Trips to the Soviet Union and other communist countries there certainly were, but these wouldn’t be thought of as perks, I am sure, more as visits to their alma mater. No, it’s power—that’s the drug, that’s the lure. Having inside information, having the ear of the powerful, knowing the score. It is my belief that a lot of people stayed communists, long past the time when they should have left, because of belonging to this élite privileged to know the score. The need to belong to an élite is surely one of the most basic needs of all. Aristocracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Garrick Club, secret societies—it is all the same.

  About then I met my aunt Margaret, my mother’s brother’s widow, and her sister. This was my mother’s world, another élite, the upper middle class, the one she admired and wanted me to be part of. Yet she had never liked her sister-in-law. It wasn’t that I disliked them, these two conventionally dressed ladies, with their careful hats, their gloves, their fox stoles. It was a world I had nothing to do with. Even to come near it was like being threatened with prison. I felt I had turned my back on it years before, yet now my mother was urging me to take my place in it, among ‘nice people’.

  I did try and meet my father’s brother Harry. It was he who had left his wife, Dolly, after thirty years or so of marriage, saying he had stuck out an empty marriage for the sake of their child and had found at last the love of his life. She was, said the family, ‘a red-haired hussy’. If you are red-haired, among ‘nice people’, the epithet is always imminent. She was—they said—a barmaid. She wasn’t, but a red-haired hussy of a barmaid was too good to resist. My father, who had never liked his brother, found at last something to admire and pleaded for him, but it was no good. I wrote to my uncle Harry, said I was not like the rest of the family, could we meet? He did not reply. I tried again—no. His daughter, Joan, came to see me and spent an hour reviling her father. I did ask if he didn’t deserve some credit for sticking out decades of a bad marriage for her sake. I did not want to see her again.

  In fact, I did not see many people, and those I did were mostly for the sake of the child. This is true of most mothers with small children.

  For instance, the Bulgarian Embassy held a weekly folk-dancing evening. I took Peter. Many parents who were not communists went because of their children.

  In a garden on the canal known as Little Venice, now very smart, then dingy and run down, there were held ceilidhs, where Ewan MacColl sang, and there was the usual extraordinary mix of people to be found in Communist Party cultural circles. The house belonged to Honor Tracy, an upper-class young woman whose education had destined her for a very different life, and her husband, Alex McCrindl
e, who was Jock in Dick Barton, Special Agent, a radio series of immense popularity. There were people from the worlds of radio, music, and nascent television, and, of course, women with children. Most of them were communists, but none of them were communists ten years later, except for Alex. And Ewan MacColl, the communist troubadour and bard.

  I found these occasions pretty dispiriting, all these people doing Scottish folk dances, often in a cold drizzle.

  At Guy Fawkes, and on any occasion that gave an excuse for them, there were bonfires on the bomb sites, and the parents with their children came from all the streets around. I contrasted these occasions, with their air of amiable amateurishness, with the great Walpurgis Night bonfires I had seen on the bomb sites in Hamburg.

  My initiations into the hardihood of the British in the realms of cold were many. Basil Davidson* invited Peter and me to his cottage in Essex. There was Marion, his wife, and his three children, and the cottage had one electric heater in it, with a single bar, and most often it was not on. Their attitude was that it was summer, and therefore one didn’t need extra heat. Mine was that it was freezing. We all wore carapaces of jerseys, and I, for one, wore a blanket. Then they said, We need some fresh air, and we got into the car, drove to a hillside where the wind swept in melancholy blasts. We must find a sheltered spot, they cried. This was done, a mild hollow, where the wind blew no less, carrying sharp stinging raindrops. There we huddled, eating sandwiches and drinking tea out of flasks. ‘Mad,’ I was saying to myself. ‘These people are mad.’ But now I don’t think so, and find cold rain no reason to stop me walking, and am just as mad myself.

  The Party often organised marches on weekends to protest about this or that—Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, usually. Peter adored them. Most children did. They were like picnics, family occasions, people ringing each other up to meet, or go to a pub before or after, or discuss CP business en route. I was privately thinking they were a continuation of church picnics. These marches, or ‘demos’, whether large or small, were affirmations of togetherness, we are in the right against the whole world. And in those Cold War days people could shout abuse, even throw things at us, confirming our willing martyrdom. Every time the organisers would claim that there were so many hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands, the newspapers would say there had been half that, or even less. The truth lay somewhere between. There was an occasion when we were protesting against reductions in funding for education, the ‘Butler Cuts’, and the children marched along gaily, singing, ‘Down with the Buttercups’. The fact that it is so pleasurable to march, demonstrate, protest, even—for some people—riot and fight with the police, is seldom acknowledged. For many people, these ‘demos’ were their social life.

  In fact, occasions for my revolutionary duty were few. Partly, they were limited to what I could do, with a small child; partly, the Party wasn’t going to ask too much of me: ‘intellectuals’ were leaving the Party all the time.

  Once, I went to lobby at the House of Commons and waited with a couple of miners who had come especially from the Welsh pits to lobby their member of Parliament, an old mate, who had been a miner with them. They sent their card in, and we waited. And waited. A long time; a couple of hours. We became friends. I told them about my experience in the mining town near Doncaster, but they said their conditions were much worse. At last we three stood in the great ornate hall, with its flunkeys, its statues, its grandeur. The Welshman who came to see his old friends, now his constituents, who had voted him there, was affable and a mite embarrassed. He asked after wives and parents. He said he might be coming back home in a month or so. He could spare only a minute now; he had to be in the House. Yes, he agreed that the government policy was…And off he went. The flunkey indicated that we must leave. We stood for a moment, looking around. Then one of the miners said, not bitterly, not angrily, but with the deadly what-can-you-expect, ‘Now that I’ve seen it, I understand what happens to them when they come up here. Not many could stand up to this’—indicating the marble halls. And then, another: ‘I won’t waste my time and money coming again.’

  This was the period when the Soviet Union sent circuses, concerts, dancers, to London. The Russian clowns were wonderful; we had—or have—nothing like them. About the treatment of the animals, that is another matter. The concerts, the choirs, the dance troupes, were all distinguished by a certain coy whimsicality, a sentimentality. Monstrous cruelties produce these qualities in the arts. Sentimentality and cruelty are siblings: cruelty often wears a simpering smile. Jonathan Clowes says he was on a bus and saw a discarded magazine with what he thought he recognised as Soviet art. On closer examination, these heroic figures turned out to be in a feature on Nazi art. On another day he was reading the Daily Worker, and the painter David Bomberg, who also used the number 36 bus, told him how barbaric the Soviet system was and said he should read Arthur Koestler, particularly Darkness at Noon. Jonathan did, but it was the similarity between Soviet and Nazi art that clinched it for him.

  A Soviet cute or heroic maiden was indistinguishable from a Nazi maiden. The empty eroticism of a naked youth striving towards the future could be Communist or Nazi. Ditto the banal cheerfulness of heroic soldiers who could not wait to die for their fatherland/motherland. Ditto the fruitful mothers with overflowing breasts. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany went in for military parades with columns of healthy, bouncy-breasted mädchens and devushkas, all secretly yearning for the touch of Hitler and Stalin. Probably the most horrible thing I have seen on stage was a woman in a Soviet variety show, about forty, stout, ugly, in a short tight dress, being a small girl, coy, arch, sly, writhing with flirtatiousness, lisping baby language. This was what she was, this was no act, and it was because of the power of this unnatural thing, a middle-aged woman being a winsome child, that she was able to earn her living on the stage.

  To offset all this communist propaganda, my mother took Peter to the changing of the Guard, to Royal Tournaments, the Tower of London, the Boat Race, museums in South Kensington, and similar wholesome fare.

  There were wonderful children’s concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Saturday mornings, organised by Sir Robert Mayer. Peter and I went most Saturdays, and Joan sometimes came too. More than once, Benjamin Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera, for children, was put on. Packed audiences of—of course—middle-class children. Well, better some than none. What could children from poor streets or—soon—the council housing estates have made of these tales that have as their matrix the Victorian nursery, nanny, servants, mummy and daddy?

  What Peter enjoyed most of all was Naomi Mitchison’s place in Scotland, where we went three or four times. This large house on the Mull of Kintyre had been bought by Naomi during the war, as a refuge for the family. At Easter and at Christmas, and in the summers, it was full of people. Naomi’s sons were doctors and scientists, and their wives were all remarkable in their own right. They all invited friends. The famous divide in the culture between science and the arts did not exist here, because Naomi’s friends, writers and journalists from London and from Edinburgh, came, and politicians too, since Dick Mitchison was one. Naomi had begun her association with Botswana, where she soon became adopted as a Mother of a tribe, and so there were Africans. The local fishermen—Naomi owned a fishing boat—and town councillors mingled with guests from London. Naomi has not been given her due as a hostess, for surely this was an unusual achievement, mixing and matching so many different kinds of people. Above all, there were children of all ages, since this was a fecund clan. These days I meet people in their forties, their fifties, who say that the holidays in Carradale House were magical, the best times in their childhoods. How could this not be so? The enormous house, full of rooms and nooks and corners and turrets; the soft, mild airs of West Scotland, which might suddenly begin to rage and roar, buffeting and whining through all those chimneys; the miles of heather and fields, where they could run and play unsupervised and safe; the beaches and the waves of the Mull of Kintyre, just dow
n a short road. There could be thirty or forty people tucked into the house somewhere, or into annexes. The atmosphere was boisterous, noisy, not only because of the children. In the evenings, astonished foreigners might find all these eminent people playing ‘Murder’ or ‘Postman’s Knock’, like children. The next minute there was chess, or a noisy game of Scrabble. Voices were often loud, and sharp. The daughters were jealous of Naomi, their exuberant and uninhibited and clever mother, and were bitchy. I would think, Well, if you don’t get on with your mother, why don’t you leave, as I did, instead of making use of all the amenities and then giving her such a hard time? But I was seeing the beginning of a new era, when children criticise, bitch—but stay.