The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  He wrote: ‘Dear Captain Stubbs, I was one of the lucky men who disembarked for four days at Cape Town some months ago. I was the guest of Daphne, who lives next door to you. I would be grateful if you could drop me a line with her address. Sincerely. Second Lieutenant James Reid.’

  This innocuous letter, giving nothing away – he was certain – was sent off, through the usual monitored channels. The very earliest he could expect a reply, even if everything went perfectly, was a month, let’s say six weeks.

  The six weeks passed.

  In the intensity of concentration of his dream James hardly noticed that the rains had stopped, the earth was parching, the heat was beating. Outside his hut someone had thrown down a mango pip which had rooted and was already a vigorous six inches of growth. So the soil of India might be unconsidered but it certainly wasn’t spent.

  James sent another letter to Simonstown. After all, letters went astray, ships sank, his first letter to Simonstown had been like a paper dart with a message on it thrown into the dark.

  Months passed. A letter came. It read:

  Dear James,

  Daphne has asked me to write. She says please don’t write again. She is very well and happy. She is having another baby, which will be born by the time you get this, I expect. So she will soon have two children. Joe is named after his father, and if it is a little girl – Daphne is sure it will be – her name will be Jill.

  She sends greetings.

  With our best wishes,

  Betty Stubbs. Daphne Wright

  Greetings! She sent greetings! James dismissed the greetings – that is not what she meant, it is what she had to say.

  To his intimate memories, little pictures, the two lovely women in their flowery wrappers under a tree, Daphne in a hundred different guises, all of them smiling, he now added Daphne with a little boy, a fair pretty child, absolutely unlike the dark babies with their golden bangles on chubby wrists that he saw on their mothers’ hips, on the roads, in the shops, in doorways. When the war was over he would go to Cape Town and claim Daphne, claim his son. He knew he rejected all these pleasant Indian babies because their mothers weren’t Daphne.

  War is not a continuum, but long periods of inaction and boredom interrupted by fits of intensive activity; that is to say, fighting, danger, death, and then boredom and quiescence again. So the news has always come from the fronts. ‘How was the war for you?’ ‘God, the boredom, that was the worst.’ ‘But I thought you were at Dunkirk … Borodino … in Crete … in Burma … the Siege of Mafeking?’ ‘Yes, but the bits in between, my God, the boredom, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ In Camp X boredom was like an illness, one of those diseases where a virus lays your immune system low. Boredom alleviated by a fever of rumour-mongering.

  Rumours in wartime: now that’s a theme. Prognostications that have the sheen of dreams, bred of terror and loneliness and hope from unlikely places in the human mind, seethe and simmer and then spill out in words from the mouth of some careless talker in a pub or barracks, and then they fly, fly from mouth to mouth, until in no time, a day, a week, the truth is out: ‘We are being posted to Y Camp, no, to Z camp, to be nearer when the Japs attack.’ ‘They’re going to attack next week, that’s why the 9th Empire Rifles are going up there.’ ‘We are being sent to Burma – the Adjutant told Sergeant Benton.’ ‘This camp is too unhealthy, it’s going to be closed down and we’ll be sent to the hills.’ ‘They’ve hushed up an outbreak of cholera. Keep that under your hat or we’ll have a riot.’ ‘They’re putting sedatives in our food to keep us quiet.’

  Boredom and rumours.

  The Japs were closer: they swarmed over Asia, but it was not James’s regiment sent to fight them. James’s regiment in Camp X, where James dreamed and had his being, was sent nowhere. Life went on, day by uncomfortable day, the hot winds blew about, saliva tasted of dust and the eyes stung and then the monsoon rain … the third. 1943. The soldiers saw how Indians came running from their houses and shops and held up their arms to the rain and turned themselves about, singing. No soldiers ran from their huts to stand in the rain; it was their job to give an example, to behave properly, preserve decorum.

  Colonel Grant and his lady had invited James to the odd weekend. The Colonel had taken a shine to James, whose diffidence diagnosed things thus: I suppose he likes having someone to talk to about Kipling.

  A conversation had taken place. Mrs Grant said to her husband, ‘I don’t want any more of these Other Ranks. They don’t behave. Last time there was vomit all over the place.’

  ‘You exaggerate, my dear.’

  ‘No. They’re not of our class, and they don’t really enjoy coming to us.’

  Colonel Grant suspected this was true, but he said, ‘They’re having a thin time of it out here. We should do what we can.’

  ‘I’m putting my foot down, only officers, I’m simply not having it.’

  There were hinterlands here. Long ago Colonel Grant had been a clever poor boy who got a rare scholarship to Sandhurst, which, as he progressed up the hierarchy, was proved amply justified. His had been a fine career. But he had not been of his lady wife Mildred’s class, not to start with. That is why the Grants had always invited Other Ranks. Not any longer. Mrs Grant was putting her foot down.

  ‘I don’t mind that boy, what’s his name, James something, he knows how to behave.’

  ‘He’s an officer now, my dear.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  Ten young officers, James one of them, had spent a long weekend with the Grants and behaved well enough, though they, like the earlier guests, took themselves off into the town’s clubs.

  James did not.

  Colonel Grant said to James, while they sat companionably on the verandah, a tray of tea between them, ‘James, tell me, what is the talk in camp, about things in general?’

  ‘You mean, being kept here in India, doing nothing?’ This was direct, and it was bitter, and not only on his own account.

  ‘Yes, what are they saying?’

  Now the Colonel must know what ‘they’ were saying, since his friend Colonel Chase heard it all, in the Officers’ Mess. Had he forgotten James was no longer with the ordinary soldiers?

  ‘When I was in with the men, there was a lot of grumbling. They don’t like it. But you know, the men grumble about everything.’ Yes, the Colonel did know, he hadn’t forgotten. ‘It seems to me, sir, that the men dislike officers as a matter of form … but is that what you were asking?’

  What Colonel Grant was asking came from many levels and motives in him. He and Colonel Chase had sat together, talking intemperately – for them – about disaffection, and feeling that they were out of touch.

  ‘In the Officers’ Mess – is there bad feeling? Dangerous bad feeling?’

  Since Colonel Chase heard the kind of thing said, this must be a question of interpretation: and James was startled.

  ‘I don’t like politics, sir, I never did.’

  To say that, straight out, wasn’t something he would have done in the mess.

  He had, at the beginning, said, ‘I’m not interested in politics,’ as he might have said, ‘I don’t take sugar in my tea.’

  He could have said he was Conservative, or – daringly – that he intended to vote Labour, but not, that he was uninterested, any more than in the time of, let’s say, Luther’s Theses, someone might have said, I’m not interested in religion.

  To be not interested in politics: that meant he was callously indifferent to the fate of humanity, at the very least misinformed. On that early evening a dozen young men set themselves to inform him. And so he had evolved some polite ways of indicating interest without committing himself.

  But this explosion of interest in his lack of proper feeling had made him think back to the glorious days of 1938. Now he knew that the intense political feeling of that time had not been the nation’s usual condition. Mostly left-wing feeling. There had been a boiling up of political thought, because of th
e Spanish Civil War, because of the Slump and the poverty, because of the threat of the coming war and so there had been all those politics, mostly left-wing. He had gone through it listening, but reading poetry.

  In the Officers’ Mess most of the young men were left-wing, in various ways, but the talk was – loudly – about India. The young officers, not the older ones. The whole sub-continent was effervescing with talk of freedom, freedom from Britain, and here, in Camp X, their main task was to suppress it.

  What had Colonel Chase said to Colonel Grant? He would have talked of troublemakers, Bolshies, even communists. About the Fifth Column, and possibly there might even have been talk of courts-martial.

  ‘You may not like politics, James, but I don’t imagine you can avoid them.’

  James said truthfully, ‘I never think about it.’

  Now the Colonel protested, in an old man’s aggrieved voice, ‘Does what we’ve done here in India mean nothing to you? We’ve built all these fine railways, we’ve built roads, we’ve kept order …’ He had to stop. Order was not the word for what was happening now: agitators everywhere, the Congress, people in prison. Then, ‘Does the British Empire mean nothing to you, James?’

  ‘The Captains and Kings are going to have to depart, sir, that’s what I think.’

  ‘I see, and you don’t care.’

  James might have said that if he were in Daphne’s arms the whole bloody British Empire could sink into the sea.

  He said, ‘Well, sir, I don’t imagine what we think about it will make much difference to what happens.’

  And now his voice was full of trouble. One reason why he didn’t like to think about politics was that if he did he had to think about the war, and that meant being engulfed in horror, an incredulous, unbelieving, protest that this war was happening at all. He knew that he dreamed about it, the enormity, the weight of it.

  Colonel Grant looked sharply at the young man, whom he had been ready to convict of unfeeling. But no, that was not it, there was real pain there, and those blue eyes, which the Colonel thought of as English, were unhappy.

  The Grants asked James and some others, one of them Second Lieutenant Jack Reeves, at the height of the hot season, for a week in the hills. They took the long slow train up into the hills and found themselves in a little cottage, that had English flowers in the garden. The winds blew cool and fresh and there was no dust. The villas and houses were called Elm Place, Wisteria Lodge, Kent Cottage, Hollyhock Close. Mrs Grant, no longer flushed with heat, though the neck of her dress showed a raddled red vee, revealed herself as an unremarkable, non-complaining hostess, but with a tendency to fuss, perhaps because she was feeling guilty. ‘James, you really must take care, I heard you coughing again last night. And you too Jack, here’s some linctus.’ The Colonel, evidently and touchingly relieved by his wife’s return to normality, could be seen looking at her with – was that actually affection? Concern? Love? The young observe their elders’ marriages with politeness and a secret resolve never to marry; or, ‘if I do it won’t be to anybody like that old bag’.

  The walks up here were pleasant. There was riding. James didn’t ride but the others did. Simply to sit and breathe clean air was a treat. Down in the plains, in the heat, at Camp X, they were sweating as they stood, and it was impossible to sleep. Soon, too soon, these four soldiers would be back down in it, but in the meantime …

  James sat on the little verandah with a book and sometimes the Colonel sat with him. There was a wistfulness about him now that James, schooled by long observation of his father, had to recognise as regret, ‘It is a sad thing,’ the Colonel observed, more than once, ‘to have spent your life doing a job you thought was worthwhile and then you find you’re not valued.’

  Colonel Grant was lonely: that was James’s discovery on this holiday. But he had a wife, didn’t he? Well, yes, he did, but … Presumably he had cronies? Now James thought of his father and knew he was lonely: he came to his father’s loneliness by way of Colonel Grant’s. Yet there were the old soldiers’ evenings in the pub, and he did come home to a wife – with whom he did not talk. What would Colonel Grant like to say, if he could, and to whom? Was his trouble only a need to grumble about not being appreciated? No, there was something deeper there and James knew how to respond, in his thoughts at least: after all, he could never speak to anyone about his real self. And his father: what thoughts was he holding safe, in his silences?

  Even when the Colonel was not there, James was not alone. In the bungalow (‘Butler’s Lawn’) was a young English couple with a child, a little boy, just walking, or rather, staggering, with his ayah always on the watch. This little creature had taken a fancy to James, perhaps because of the young man’s interest in him, and from the verandah of his house he watched James, who was standing watching him on the verandah of the next house. The ayah took to bringing the infant over, to play his new games of crawling, and sitting, clambering up and sitting, while James, tucking his long legs well aside so as not to impede the child’s efforts, was as ready as the nanny to prevent harm. The child did not like sitting on laps, but he did like standing in front of James, legs apart, and then sitting, thud, on his padded bottom, and laughing, and getting up, assisted by James. All this the Colonel watched and so did Mrs Grant. Not usual for a young man to bother with an infant.

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ enquired the Colonel.

  ‘No, I was an only child.’

  ‘Perhaps that accounts for it … that child really does like you – look, Mildred.’ And Mrs Grant stood in the door, briefly, to commend the young man, who could have done without the attention. He would have liked to be alone with this little creature, roughly the same age as his child, far away in South Africa. He wanted to persuade the little boy to sit on his knee, so he could look close into those blue bright eyes and perhaps hug him, feel the warm energetic body – hold this child and think of his own. But the ayah never let him out of her sight.

  The Colonel sat with his old legs stretched out, his old hands trembling a little, a glass of whisky beside him, watching the young man and the child. His sons were grown up and were about the world, soldiers, one in danger in Burma. The Colonel was perhaps remembering his own children as attractive imps of promise, contrasting them with what they were now, as the old tend to do, when he saw this little lump of love, clutching at James’s knees as he fell back, to save himself, laughing and crowing with delight. On the Colonel’s face the tenderest smile. And on James’s face too.

  ‘When the war is over it will be your turn,’ said the Colonel to the young man.

  It is my turn already, exulted James privately, while he said, ‘Yes, sir, I hope so.’

  Time passes … well, it does, one has to acknowledge that, but it does not pass evenly, and that quite apart from the everyday phenomenon of the different pace of time at three years, thirteen, thirty, sixty, ninety, which we all experience. Time moves differently in different places: in Camp X it crawled.

  Colonel Grant, appealed to (tactfully) by James as to whether there would ever be a prospect of being sent somewhere more interesting, replied only that ‘They had to be always ready for trouble wherever it appears.’

  ‘Trouble’ was already not only evident, but increasing, even if you didn’t read the papers or listen to the wireless. ‘Troublemakers’, as the Colonel put it, were increasingly at their work, and ‘disaffection’ was everywhere like a heat rash.

  Companies from Camp X were sent to ‘deal with it’. James, too, more than once. He did sympathise with the soldiers grumbling openly that they were expected to fight an enemy, not to ‘put down’ Indians. Jack Reeves, too, said he was a bit of a Red, but was even more so now he was seeing the Raj at work.

  A song was being sung everywhere in Camp X, not only by the Other Ranks:

  What did you do in the war, Dad?

  I kept the Indians down,

  Yes, we kept the Indians down …

  Complaints and grumbling at Camp X we
re alleviated in one way by the arrival of an Entertainment Officer – Donald Enright, now Adjutant Enright – but exacerbated in another because Donald was an open and proselytising Red.

  That these hundreds of bored young men needed entertainment no one could deny.

  Donald was pleased to see James, but surely not as much as deserved a year of companionship? Well, he had had acolytes since. He was now a large, assertive, extrovert young man, full of bonhomie and goodwill. Wherever he went he was in the centre of a loud group. He moved about the camp collecting admirers like – well, like a politician.

  He at once organised a concert party, using an impressive number of the troops, but the audience was bound to outnumber performers by many times to one. James was roped in: he was a girl, but this did not bother him at all: not for him the protests and bad jests obligatory at such moments. In his mind he often embraced the loveliest woman in the world, and he was the father of a delightful boy child. He surprised himself and the audience with his vigorous interpretation of a coy maiden. Jack showed a talent for this kind of thing and was soon writing sketches for Donald. Then Donald put on Priestley’s They Came to a City, that play which during the war more than any other embodied idealistic and perfervid dreams for a better life. He ventured on Shakespeare and Twelfth Night. The soldiers went to see it because there was nothing better to do, but were persuaded that they enjoyed it. Some did.

  They Came to a City sparked a demand for debates. The first was: ‘A Socialist Britain’. A noisy success. Soon Donald had lectures and debates going as well as concert parties. He organised a library – how, no one seemed to know. He begged and borrowed books, failing to return them; he went into the town’s clubs and posted up notices begging for books. When there was a demand for a book on a socialist economy, and no such book was in the camp library, he actually wrote a thick pamphlet himself and got it cyclostyled in fifty copies – there was a paper shortage, so he scrounged and probably stole paper.