NF (1957) Going Home (24 page)

And then we got on to the Colonial Office, and kindred matters, and I agreed not to quote him.

As I might not be allowed to return to Salisbury, I spent a sentimental morning driving around it, looking at the innumerable places I have lived in. Most, so fast are things changing, no longer exist. Most are not to be regretted. The house I would have been pleased to see go was still there. In it, for over a year, I was very unhappy. I have since learned to distinguish between unhappiness which is simply temperamental, and has to be suffered through, like an attack of flu; and the unhappiness caused by circumstances. At that time I could not distinguish between them. I was dumbly, hopelessly unhappy; I could not believe I would ever have a hopeful thought or feeling again. It was therefore salutary to go and look at the small brick house, in its garden, warm in the sunlight, with children playing on the verandah. It was hard to identify it as the same place, indeed. A year is a long time to waste in being unhappy; a year is a good part of one’s life.

IN TIME OF DRYNESS

Outside that house I walked up and down a few minutes, doing penance on behalf of the selective memory: after all, just because I don’t like to remember that year, and disapprove entirely of my state of mind at that time, it doesn’t mean to say it didn’t exist…

I am canvassed by innumerable people to support Capricorn.

Capricorn is not a political party, but a kind of ginger group. It deplores racial prejudice and makes all sorts of intelligent suggestions about breaking down the colour bar. It is admirable in a country like this that black and white people, even if only a few of them, should be able to sit around the same table at a committee meeting. It is admirable that white audiences should
listen, at times, to black speakers. It is good that people should talk about harmony and understanding.

But then, so do the Partners—who have no intention of letting the African have any real share in the government of the country. Here is Lord Malvern, quoted in the
Rhodesia Herald
for May 19, 1956: ‘We want to indicate to the Africans that provision is made for them to have a place in the sun as things go along. But we have not the slightest intention of letting them control things until they have proved themselves and perhaps not even then. That will depend on my grandchildren.’

Lord Malvern’s recipe, and Sir Roy Welensky’s, for keeping the Africans in their place, is the weighted vote. A minority of privileged Africans will be allowed to vote, in key with the general policy of creating a malleable middleclass.

With this, Capricorn agrees. As a result of Capricorn, one finds all sorts of people sitting about and earnestly discussing the real nature of democracy. Obviously it cannot mean what it has come to mean in Europe; it does not mean ‘no taxation without representation’ or ‘one head one vote’. Not at all: only the civilized may vote. And the definitions of civilization all depend, directly or indirectly, on property qualifications. Therefore I cannot possibly support it. Not that I don’t believe that many of its supporters are quite sincere in saying that they hope, some time in the future, that the franchise will be extended to everybody. But a sop thrown out to keep hungry people quiet never becomes a satisfying meal: it becomes a minimum right; it hardens and becomes a bulwark against just those forces which are not satisfied with the sop.

The Africans in Central Africa are hungry for the vote. Democracy may be tarnished in Europe; here we may be as cynical as we please about Parliament and the vote. But in Africa the vote has become the symbol of equality in the system the white man has imposed upon the black man. It has become a symbol of human dignity.

People concerned with human dignity, people who care that others may respect themselves—such people must support democracy, must support the principle of the universal fran
chise in Central Africa. When the African there asks for the vote, he is asking for more than it has ever meant in Europe. There no person has been refused the rights of citizenship because of the colour of his skin.

A white trade-union leader came to see me, to put the white trade-union case. What he was saying in effect was: ‘For God’s sake! The white trade unionists are human, aren’t they? What do you expect?’

All the time he was talking I was remembering the Whartons, who used to live opposite to us in the Mansions.

The Mansions had been built by a young architect who wanted to astonish the city with modern design. (That was fifteen years ago—now the city has fine modern buildings.) They were flats, shaped rather like a magnet standing on the closed end, with the open ends bent inwards.

We had a flat on the top, on one side, and the Whartons had the flat on the other. Between the flats was a gulf, crossed by a small iron stairway shaped like a rounded bridge.

We first got into acquaintance with the Whartons because they sacked their servant, Dickson, and he came to us. The Whartons never kept a servant longer than a month. Dickson was a gay and amiable person, who spent all his money on
clothes. At any reference to the Whartons, or at the sound of the raised voices, the quarrelling, that came continuously from over the gulf, he would roll up his eyes, grimace, shrug deeply, and then laugh.

Sometimes Alice Wharton would yell across to him to bring in that cloth or keep an eye on her baby while he swept out our rooms, but he went on working as if he had not heard her. Alice Wharton shared the attitude that any black man in sight was available for doing odd jobs for her. Once she came across to complain that he was cheeky, just as if he had not stopped working for her weeks before. Alice Wharton’s servants were always cheeky. One could hear her, or Bob Wharton, shouting to their servant. Their voices held that tense exasperation, that note of nagging despair, that means an obsession. In places like the Residence and the Mansions one heard that note often. Paternalism, that fine feudal kindness with one’s servants, does not occur below a certain income level.

Bob Wharton came from England with his wife and two children in the hungry ’thirties. He was a bricklayer and a Socialist, interested in his trade union, and on his bookshelves were Keir Hardie, Morris, Shaw, the old stalwarts of British Socialism.

At first things went well with him. He rented a small house, the two children went to school, his head was well above water. He became an official of the trade union, and was well liked by his mates. And then there was a third child, a spastic; and it was too bad to be cured. Both parents adored this child; and soon, with hospitals and doctors and the illnesses that he kept having, their heads were no longer above water. They were in debt.

There was no sense in having a fourth child, but one was born, and Mrs Wharton, who was now a tired and harassed woman in her late thirties, swore that she would never, never have another child. She would no longer sleep with her husband, and went into the bed beside Robbie, the sick boy, as if she were married to him. And the marriage, which had been a good one, was full of bitterness. As for the two elder children, they were tender with the sick brother, but there was a terrible resentment in them. Deep down they felt as if they had done
wrong in being born healthy and strong, for their mother’s love went on the sick child, and she was only brisk and irritable with them. Bob Wharton began to drink, not heavily but enough to make a difference to the monthly bills. One night when he came home quite drunk he made a scene with his wife, and after the scene they broke down and wept together, and from this moment of warmth there began another child. But now Alice Wharton was determined. She used a knitting needle on herself, and killed the child, and nearly killed herself, but she could never have children again, and that, as she told me often, was the one bright thing in her life, the one weight off her shoulders. She used to say it loudly, and the elder children heard it, and they used to look at each other helplessly, trying to share the awful guilt of being born at all, and being such a burden to their parents.

After Alice Wharton came out of hospital, they could not pay the hospital bills, or the doctor. Bob Wharton was too proud to ask for the relief hospitals give to poor people. They sold what furniture they had, or nearly all of it, and they moved to the Mansions, which was cheaper, being only two small rooms, and they sold their little motor-car.

At this time, things were like this: Bob Wharton held his job steadily, and worked all the overtime he could get. He was not afraid for his job, for he was strong, not fifty yet, a tall man, rather thin, bent a little at the shoulders, with a way of poking his head forward, chin up, to look into your face with anxious, serious eyes, as if he might find a reason there why he had come to such a permanent morass of worry and unhappiness. He was still an official of his union, and this was what he was most proud of in his life.

Alice Wharton went out to work for a time, not as a cleaner or a charwoman, as she probably would have done in Britain, because here there were black people to do such work: she found a job as saleswoman in one of the stores. But if she worked, she had to pay for someone to look after the sick child, who was inert all day, sitting where he was put. They would not let her take the child with her to the store: it might put customers off. So, finding that it cost more to pay for the
child in a nursery than she earned, she stayed at home and earned a little extra making dresses for friends.

The baby was healthy, and no trouble to her. The two elder children were at school; and when they came home it was usually to go straight off to friends’ houses, where they were not shouted and nagged at. Alice Wharton used to come crying across the iron bridge to me, saying she did not mean to shout and nag at the two children, but she could not help it, something got into her and she could not help it.

So the family all day was Alice Wharton, making dresses and underclothes on her sewing machine, and the sick boy, laying beside her in a wheeled chair, never speaking, never moving, his big, loose head swaying on the top of a long, skeleton neck, looking vaguely around him with large painfully bright blue eyes, and the baby, who rolled and staggered around the two rooms, and terrified the mother by trying to climb out over the edge of the small porch where it met the iron bridge that came over to us.

In the evenings the family was also Bob Wharton, doing his trade-union books at another table, and the two elder children, trying to find some space to do their homework in.

Alice used to complain all the time to Bob that he was mad to waste his time on the union; hadn’t he got enough to do, didn’t he care about his family; if he wanted to spend his evenings working, then he might just as well get work that was paid for. But Bob would not give up his union. It was the one thing that held him in his idea of himself, and connected him with Britain, where he had had such hopes for the future.

He used to work under the lamp, while Alice nagged and grumbled, a tired woman, chained every moment of her life to the sick boy, until he would fling down his things and bang out to the bar around the corner, or shout at the servant, and then the whole flat would ring with quarrelling and complaints, and the two elder children shrank away to their beds.

Things were bad. But they might get better. Why not?

They could at least not get worse, provided there was work. For Bob Wharton, with the memory of the ‘thirties and unemployment behind him, there was always the terror of finding himself out of work.

And there was only one thing that could put him out of work, and that was if the blacks were allowed to do skilled work.

Of an evening he would come over to us, and say, ‘We don’t mind if the employers pay the blacks the same as us. That’s fair, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it fair?’ But he was always uneasy, always guilty about it. Here he was, a trade unionist with experience of trade unionism in Britain; and he was standing shoulder to shoulder with his white mates, keeping the black men out of skilled work. He knew it, and he was tormented by it. He would sit on our little porch, keeping an eye over on the windows beyond the gulf, where his wife sat sewing beside the sick child, her face rigid with hostility and bitterness, and he talked and talked endlessly about the native problem. ‘After all, they aren’t on our level, are they? It’s not so bad as it is for us, being hard up: we’re civilized, aren’t we; they aren’t civilized yet, are they?…’

That winter, the spastic child got pneumonia and went to hospital where he nearly died. Both parents were sick with worry, and good friends again because of it. Mrs Wharton visited the hospital three times a day, taking the baby with her.

When the spastic child came out, the bills were over £50, and now they really could not meet them. There was no money and Bob Wharton had to accept charity from a fund that existed for such needs, and to do it changed him in his own eyes from an independent man to a beggar.

But this was not the worst. During those weeks when the child was nearly dying, he neglected his trade-union work, and when it came to re-election, one of his mates got up at the meeting, and said that Brother Wharton was having too much personal trouble; he should be released from trade-union activities for the time being. And so Bob Wharton was no longer an official. He felt as if he had been condemned by his society.

He grew morose, and began to drink badly. Mrs Wharton nagged at him, and he shouted back; and they would sit together, frightened because they were hating each other. And things would be all right for a little while.

Then the eldest child, a girl, got ill for the first time in her
life; and it was terrible, for there was no person in that family with the right to be ill but the spastic child. The bills were there again, the doctor’s bills and the hospital bills. And when the girl came out, they said she must go for a holiday, so she went to the seaside on charity.

But Alice Wharton was saying to Bob that they could have paid for that holiday on what he spent on brandy.

They quarrelled and bickered, and Dickson, our servant, would stand on his broom, listening, and say with a small shake of his head: ‘That child it should die. That sick boy, it is no good for them.’

Which is how everybody in the Mansions felt, but no one dared to say it.

Bob used to come over the iron bridge to our porch and sit and talk, not about the native problem now, but about his own.

There were two solutions to his difficulties, as he saw them. First, since all their debts and troubles came from illness, they should go back to Britain. There was no unemployment in Britain now, and above all, there was the health service. Of course, one paid for the health service indirectly, but one could go to a hospital and have a doctor and not have to face these heavy bills afterwards. But to pay the fares back to Britain would cost over £300. He had not got it.

The second solution was this: Bob had worked out that during his ten years in this country he had spent enough on rent to have bought a house by this time. If he had had the capital to buy a house in the beginning, or to put down a payment on one, he would be out of the woods now.

Capital. Capital was what he needed. It was not fair that capitalists had capital and the working-man had not.

It was extraordinary to hear Bob, a Socialist all his life, say these words, as if he had never heard them before, as if this was the first time he really understood them.

He would sit on our porch, railing against the capitalists like a man with a fresh vision.

And it was at this point that Mr McCarran-Longman came into our lives. Bob met him in the bar, and brought him up the long, winding stairs to meet Alice. She said to us that Bob was very taken with him. She said it drily, meaning us to understand
that
she
was neither taken, nor taken in. And yet there was an uncertainty in her manner. Some time later Bob brought Mr McCarran-Longman to see us, with the manner of presenting something without prejudice for our judgement. And yet he was feverishly anxious to believe in Mr McCarran-Longman.

He was a man of 45 or so, heavily built, an open good-fellow’s face. He was well dressed, very neat about the wrists and collar. He used to talk, without interest, of the weather and so on, until he was asked a direct question about himself, and then his polite eyes took fire and he shifted himself in his chair, to a talking position, and began.

It was a question of several people grouping together to buy a large piece of ground, and building houses on it instead of buying houses already built by a company. It would be cheaper this way. Why should one put money into the pockets of the capitalists? About ten people would be the right number. He knew of a good piece of ground, in the path of the town’s growth, but one needed to raise at least £10,000. It was after the ground was bought that Mr McCarran-Longman’s special talents would come into play. For he had thought of a wonderful invention. One took a large tank, which should be square, more like a swimming bath than a fish-pool, and one filled it with water. Then one shook into the water some chemicals, like shaking salt into soup. Then one stirred the mixture with a large stick or spoon, and behold, it would foam into a myriad bubbles, like the baths of Hollywood film stars. This would set solid in about twenty-four hours, and one should cut it into suitable bricks or pieces with a very large sharp instrument. The resulting walls, or roofs, or portions of house would be rain-proof, dirt-proof, sound-proof, wear-proof—proof against any risk one might tentatively mention, only delicately, however, to Mr McCarran-Longman, who grew tense and uneasy when one made such suggestions.

Water, he said, would cost nothing, particularly if we were prepared to wait for a receptacle to fill with rainwater. And the chemicals were dirt-cheap. He would tell us the ingredients if it were not that he had applied for a patent. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust us, but it was a legal matter. The problem really
wasn’t the consistency of the bricks the houses would be built of, but the tanks to put the water and chemicals into.

He said he had considered having made several dozen shapes or forms, some ordinary brick-size, and some wall-or roof-shape, into which one could pour the water and then the chemical, so as not to have to cut the stuff with a knife or saw afterwards. But if you considered the thing practically, he said, perhaps fifty or a hundred receptacles, lying side by side in some barn or shed, or even in the open air, with water in them, and then shaking chemical in, it would be a tricky thing, and unless one was very careful, the stuff of the walls, roofs, etc., would come out a different consistency each time. Much better to have a large, square tank, big enough to give the stuff a thorough-going stir, and be done with it. So, in addition to the £10,000 needed for the ground for the building stands, and for the lawyers, one would need about £500 to buy or have made a really large square or perhaps oblong tank.