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

by Doris Lessing

  The first thing to be done was a damp course in the basement. Then a cork floor went in, and soon it became a warm and pleasant low-ceilinged room, the nicest in the house. The front ground-floor room was a kitchen, with the big dining table we all seemed to have in the sixties. The ground floor back, once the dining room, became a bathroom, large, luxurious by then British standards. The first floor was the living room. The dividing doors came out, but later I was to regret getting rid of those folding doors, painted red and gold, and the wood shutters, which were thief-proof, and, later still, the fireplaces. For as we were all doing then, the fireplaces were plastered over and the mantelpieces abolished.

  I had to fight radiator by radiator with the central-heating people.

  ‘You don’t want a radiator in the bedroom, love. It’s unhealthy.’ This was how they thought then, and some people still do.

  ‘I want two radiators, because here in your specifications it says to achieve such and such a level of heat there must be two.’

  ‘You’ll regret it.’

  And in the bathroom: ‘You don’t need a radiator in the bathroom. The steam will heat it.’

  ‘Yes I do, and a heated towel rail too. Please put them in.’

  ‘Well, you’re paying for it, but I don’t like to see you waste your money like this.’

  And why was I doing this fighting? Why was not a surveyor doing it for me?

  I was saving money, for Doug had said there was no need for an architect or a surveyor, trust me.

  Doug was a small firm. He employed two workmen on a regular basis and electricians and carpenters as he needed them. He had done the basics: damp course, the cork basement floor, making most of the floors good, some of the rewiring, and the windows. Then he went bankrupt. He came to tell me, looking not at all unhappy about it. ‘I have bad luck,’ he said. And then off he went to the Mediterranean on a holiday with his girlfriend. He had gone bankrupt several times before. I was enough out of tune with my times to be shocked by this.

  There I was with a half-done house, no builder, no one to fight in my corner, but then everything came right. The two workmen employed by Doug—he had left owing them two weeks’ wages—said they would finish the house for me, I could employ them myself. Everyone I knew, friends and experts of all kinds, said I would be mad to do it, I’d live to regret it: they would cheat me. In fact, the men were wonderful, and everything was easy. I paid them top-level union wages, once a week, and a good bit over, because they were saving me the profits of a builder, and they brought me bills for the materials they used. They called themselves the Two Pirates, they were Jack and John, and they had worked together since they left school, twenty years before. Jack was a large slow fair man, with calm blue eyes he fixed on your face while he told you about his mum, who looked after him, for he had never married, and who cooked all his favourites, so why did he need a wife? John had been married. He was spry and full of energy and apparently the boss in this partnership, but when they had to make decisions they stood looking at each other and then came to a silent agreement, and John turned to me and said, ‘No, you don’t want a shelf there, love; look, you wouldn’t be able to put your hand to it comfortable; better there.’ Or they would show me why a floor needed to be not relaid but only to be patched, and why an electric-light socket should be just there.

  When it was time for a carpenter, they brought in a mate, Jimmy, whom I think of to this day with affection. He was a tall, much too thin grey man, and he was sad, for his wife had run off, and his two children had grown, and he was alone. He had a bad cough and that shadowy look that says, This one won’t be around for long. The three men had often worked together. They would sit drinking tea around the trestles they had set up in the kitchen to stand on to paint the ceiling. They asked me to sit with them, and we gossiped about this and that. Jack and John both told me, separately, that Jimmy was the salt of the earth, and their manner to him was protective, considerate, tender. Jimmy did all the carpentering up and down the house, often putting me right when I made suggestions he knew were a mistake. And then there was another man, the electrician, Bill Connolly. I knew Bill until he died twenty years later, and at intervals he would recall how the three of them were in the kitchen, and suddenly my two feet appeared through the ceiling, for the floorboards had been taken up and there was only plasterboard. They were good for a laugh, my feet, for years.

  And in fact we all had many good laughs, and my knowing friends, dropping in to find out how I did, would discover us all sitting around in the kitchen, and they might want to sit down too, but the men said, ‘Time to go back to work,’ and went. They knew I had been warned against them.

  Jack, the fat pirate, was heartbreaking for reasons he never suspected. He loved to draw and paint, and wanted to put friezes of Bambis and Donald Ducks in every room. He was disappointed when I said no, and told me about the houses he had decorated with flowers and rabbits and robins. He made me presents of cards with cartoon animals. As soon as we sat down, a pencil and paper would appear, and he would start. He was an artist, he said, but when he used the word, he meant only what he knew, for he had never been introduced to real pictures, real art. He had never been to an art gallery. When I said they were free and anyone could go, he looked guilty, but reproachful too. I showed him reproductions, and he was full of admiration, but not as if they could have anything to do with him. Yet even his Mickey Mice and his Bambis had something original about them. If there was ever a case of a village Hampden, he was it.

  But I wasn’t spending all my time in Charrington Street, for I needed money and had to earn it. I had not written for money before—that is, not from an inner need or pattern but from an outside demand. And yes, it does weaken your real strengths. For your real work, which is an invisible-to-others growth curve—the growing point—is one thing, the real thing, and the rest is hackwork, no matter how skilled it is, how well it turns out. Apart from a couple of sketches written for The New Yorker, I had not written for money….No, the truth compels me to state: twice an impecunious friend and I had attempted frankly commercial film scripts, but you cannot write successfully for money with your tongue in your cheek, and these dishonest ventures had come to nothing. Serves me right, I had thought. Now I was secretly seeing myself as a fallen soul, yet there was nothing wrong with what I wrote for television. On the contrary. Quite soon I was to be one of three writers doing the Granada series of Maupassant stories, with Hugh Leonard, the Irish writer, and the Granada executive Philip Mackie. We sat around a big table and dealt the stories around like playing cards. ‘I want “Boule de Suif”!’

  ‘No, I’m having “Boule de Suif.”’

  ‘Then I’m having “The Diamond Necklace.”’

  ‘I want “La Maison Tellier.”’ We all knew enough French but used English translations as well.

  It was a wonderful series. Granada Television at that time was taking the kind of risks no television company would take now. They did series of Saki stories, A. E. Coppard, Somerset Maugham, Maupassant, and others, each of thirteen hours, with three one-hour plays and the rest of two or three tales each. Top-level directors, actors, writers, designers. So little did television value itself that it wiped them all. And yet these series were among the very best things ever done by television. ITV could be brave in those days too. Stella Richman did wonderful things for them, using all the best talent available. Half-Hour Story and Blackmail are still remembered. Again, ITV destroyed them all.

  Sometimes you want to put your head in your hands and weep, or howl with incredulity, because of this our great country, Britain. If television films of this quality had been made in any other country in Europe, they would be cherished, honoured, preserved, seen as national treasures. There would be festivals for them, as we now have festivals for classic black-and-white films. At the least, there would be archives of the work of the best directors, actors, designers, and writers of the time. But no, this is Britain—so into the wastebin with them all.<
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  I reckon that to live in London costs a good third of one’s resources—that is, the actual money. Then there is the time spent looking for a place to live, and once you have one, then the continual repairs, plumbing, roof, windows, and so on—the real cost of owning a house. Is it worth it? A thousand times, yes. London is a cornucopia of delights.

  Time was running out, I had to leave Langham Street, and still the house was not decorated. While the pirates worked on serious things, like floors and walls, a group of us, friends and Peter and I, stood on chairs and trestles and ripped layers of wallpaper off, seven, eight, nine, ten, and even more, and the layers at the bottom were Victorian, beautiful, on heavy thick paper. If you held a wad of the paper, then in your hands was seventy years of social history, of information, but into the bonfire at the back went all the coils and shreds and tatters of wallpaper, and the cracked and decaying linoleum that once had been shiny and good, and the worm-eaten wood from the floors, and old shelves and the rags of curtains. But the substance of the walls was solid, and when you looked under the plaster the lathes were new and clean, and the bricks bright and new. That was a solid serious house, built to last.

  Not a quarter of a mile away, streets of these houses were being pulled down. It was the beginning of the sixties and the heyday of official vandalism. When I said to the Pirates it was a tragedy that these good houses were disappearing in clouds of dust and debris, they thought and said yes, when you think of it, they are just like the houses in Chelsea; we were working down there on our last job, weren’t we, Jack? weren’t we, John? Yes, we were, that’s right, John, that’s right, Jack. You can’t buy those Chelsea houses now, not unless you’ve got more money than you or I are going to see in our lives, isn’t that right, Jack? isn’t that right, John? That’s right, John, you’re in the right of it there, Jack.

  I used to walk up and watch those houses come down, and my heart ached. I saw crash into dust the house the Sommerfields had made into a little paradise. Where it stood now stand coldly hideous grey council flats, hundreds of yards of them.

  I was in the newly fitted kitchen when an official from Camden came in, a left-wing councillor, and said, contemptuously waving her hand at the little knot of streets we stood in, ‘The sooner we clear all these people out into the new council flats the better.’ And I said, ‘But this is an old working-class community. They’ve been living here together for decades.’

  ‘We’ll clear them all out,’ she said. ‘We’ll get all this cleaned up.’

  What the people in the area wanted, if any official had cared what they thought, was for their houses to be done up, bathrooms and proper lavatories put in, and the dangerous wiring replaced. They were saying, ‘But we’ve all been living here for years. My mother was born here. My kids were born here.’ This was a plea to me, for I was middle class and therefore by definition knew the score and the ropes and probably had influence. But the tide of history was against them. Up and down this happy land, people whose hearts beat day and night with love and concern for the working classes were saying, ‘We’ll clear them all out, we’ll clean it all up,’ and that is what they did, and presumably they noted with concern how their charges, finding themselves in some cold grey tower, far from their old neighbours, kept dying and having strokes and heart attacks. ‘They just want to get rid of us all, dear, that’s all it is,’ said Mrs. Pearce, from No. 58. ‘It saves them trouble. What they like is to see another funeral.’

  The day I decided to buy No. 60, I knocked on the door of No. 58. During my visits to the street and the house, I was being observed from windows up and down Charrington Street. At No. 58, a large pale woman with pale ridged hair rested her arms and bosom on the window sill and commanded the street with her presence. By now a thousand surveys have instructed us in the role of working-class matriarchs, dominating their families and the community, and here she was, Mrs. Pearce, who would be my neighbour. It was not easy to knock at that door, because I believed such a close community would not welcome newcomers and particularly not one like me. The word ‘gentrification’ had yet to come into common use. I announced myself, said I was to be her new neighbour, and I hoped to be a good one. This was in the spirit of the times, the matey sixties, but policy too. And I meant it. Mrs. Pearce sat in the window, her back to it for once, and said, ‘Sit down, dear. We’re pleased you’re going to do right by that house. It’s been going to rack and ruin for years. Isn’t that so?’ A tiny man, a chip of a man, but as muscular, lean, and bow-legged as a jockey, agreed: ‘Rack and ruin,’ and grinned welcome to me, and an immensely ancient crone, all in black, without teeth and smelling bad, bobbed about, screeching, ‘Rack and ruin, rack and ruin.’ There was a dog, a cheerful mongrel, keeping out of the way of all the feet, the cleanest, prettiest thing in the room.

  ‘Tea,’ commanded Lil Pearce, and the little man at once put the kettle on.

  ‘He’s my husband,’ said Lil Pearce, ‘though he wasn’t always. And this is my friend Mrs. Rockingham.’ I think that was the name. ‘I took her in off the street, I took her out of the gutter. She was in the gutter, wasn’t you?’ she screeched at the crone. ‘She’s deaf. She’s deaf and almost blind. But I’m good to her.’ She leaned forward, hands on her thighs, and screamed, ‘I’m good to you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the crone yelled back, ‘you’re very good to me.’ She was arranging fancy biscuits on a plate and flicking biscuit crumbs at the dog, who snapped at them like flies.

  ‘Don’t you mind her,’ said Lil. ‘She’s a bit touched. You are a bit wrong in the head,’ she yelled at the old woman, who yelled back, ‘That’s right, dear.’

  ‘And now you ask me everything you need to know, and I’ll tell you,’ she said. And she did. She had lived next door to No. 60 since the end of the war. The old woman from whom I had bought No. 60 had been her good friend. Lil knew every detail of every happening in that house—who had been born, who had died, who had scarpered without paying rent, all the dogs and cats that had lived there.

  Mrs. Pearce had her house off the GLC, but was in complicated relation to the Camden Council too, and she rented out the two top rooms. The condition of No. 58 was the same as No. 60 when I first got it—gas light, dangerous wiring, no bathroom, a single nasty lavatory, and of course no heating. A fire burned permanently in the ground floor front, where the three of them in fact lived.

  Lil Pearce would have talked till the following morning, if I had had the time, and certainly I had seldom been as fascinated as by this Dickensian chronicle. When I left she said she was glad there was going to be a bit of life next door, and instructed the crone, ‘Tell her we’re pleased she’s come,’ and obediently the old woman shouted, ‘That’s right, dear, you make yourself right at ’ome.’

  As for Len Pearce, he is one of the people I think of when I need to cheer myself up about the state of the world and the people in it. He is right at the top of my private list of candidates for heaven. He was a good, kind, generous, sweet man, and he was treated like a dog by his wife: Do this, get that, fetch me the other thing. He never complained. He had worked as a market porter most of his life, but now he was too old, and he did little jobs for the local council. He was illiterate. He was so small and thin and bow-legged because he was the product of the dreadful poverty England provided for its working people between the two world wars. Many a day, he would tell me, he and his brothers and sisters had nothing to eat but a piece of bread and margarine with sugar on it, and he went to school without shoes on his feet. Married to Lil, he had found security and enough to eat and space at last, but now he had to share this space with Mrs. Rockingham, who was incontinent, foul-mouthed, and generally disgusting, yet he waited on her, too, when Lil commanded. If I was observed trying to lift something she thought too heavy for me, let’s say in the garden, Lil Pearce, who always knew what I was doing, would shout at Len Pearce, and he would be beside me, grinning. ‘Let me do that,’ and he did it, as if I were doing him a favour. He s
hone, that little man, he shone like a lamp in a dark place. Like the carpenter Jimmy. I often think of them both, grateful that I knew them.

  Only once, years later, when old age had made of Lil a real raging tyrant, did he ever refer to his situation. He said sadly to me, ‘If you’d known Lil when she was young, then you’d not think bad of her now. I always think of her the way she was then. She was lovely. She was a lovely young woman. I saw her the first time when she was cleaning the floors in Woolworth’s, to keep her kids fed, and she had no stockings on her legs and they were red and sore. She let me buy her some stockings, and then a pair of shoes for her feet. That was my happiest day. She had all those kids then, and she let me help her.’

  Lil Pearce expected to be kept informed. If I had left too long, let’s say three days, before dropping in, she summoned me from her window sill with a peremptory forefinger. ‘What are you paying for that cooker?…It’s too much. I know where you can get one ten pounds cheaper.’ She had the pirates in, together and separately, and instructed them in how to treat me well. She had to be told how much I was paying them and informed them I was doing well by them. She told me they were doing right by me and I could trust them. She sent cups of tea to the pirates and to Jimmy when he was there, with a bottle of cough mixture for him, or some cake to take home with him, since he didn’t look after himself. ‘He’s not long for this world,’ she shouted at the crone, ‘just like you.’