Old friends, old comrades—old people generally—must beware that moment when appears a young person all shining eyes and ‘I’ve always so much admired you.’ Almost certainly no good will come of it.
Bertrand Russell had a serious problem apart from Ralph Schoenman: he was canonized, seen as this dear sweet old man, full of years and wisdom. The appetite for saints of either sex, gurus, wise women and men, is unappeasable, and this means that the most unlikely material becomes sanctified. I myself have had to fight off attempts to turn me into a wise old woman. All that happens is that disillusioned fans and disciples attack unfairly where once they unwisely venerated. This is what happened to Russell.
I was four years in Langham Street and have lively memories of it, quite unlike Warwick Road, which I try not to think of at all. This was not only because my life had become easier, with more money, less worry, and the beginnings of emotional freedom, but because the general atmosphere had lightened. War-damaged and darkened Britain was in another age and could be recalled only with an effort. Ten years had done it, and already there was a generation who did not know what you meant when you said bomb sites, cracking facades, dreary unpainted buildings; when you talked of Utility clothes, the awful food, undrinkable coffee, and people going to bed by ten in the evening. The new coffee bars were full of young people remaking the world, there were the first good cheap restaurants, and the clothes were youthful and inventive. All kinds of small, pleasant things were happening, unthinkable ten years before. For instance, a band called the Happy Wanderers played traditional jazz up and down Oxford Street, which made it a pleasure to go shopping. Window boxes and hanging baskets and decorous little trees in tubs were appearing in new-painted streets. Now it is acknowledged that the recovery of shattered Europe after that war was an economic miracle, for it was not only Britain that had bounced back but all the countries in Europe, some of them laid flat by war. From ruins and hunger to affluence in fifteen years, less, but living through it, we took it for granted, hardly noticed it, and needed to have it pointed out to us. As by Eric Hobsbawn’s Age of Extremes, which I read amazed, thinking, But why were we not more aware of how well we were doing?
Once again a new age was upon us, and its most dramatic sign was the Russian sputnik (in Russian, the word means ‘travelling companion, satellite, comrade’), for it was the first of the new technical apparitions in the sky, and a lot of people stayed up all night to catch a glimpse of it bowling past overhead. I was on the roof, hoping clouds would not obstruct. I didn’t see it, but what elation, what pleasure, and feelings of achievement: we really did feel that this was a step forward for all humankind. The blackbirds sang. For some reason blackbirds loved that area, and their song at once brings back the dawns and evenings of Langham Street.
The roof was reached by a tricky little ladder. I sunbathed up there, using the shadow from chimneys to temper the heat. The short story ‘A Woman on a Roof’ comes from that time. It was another world, because I was not the only one to use the roofs; there were plants and little gardens and deck chairs. Over near the BBC, building was going on, and the great yellow machines clambered and swung halfway up the sky, and the men operating the machines waved at us, shouting invitations and compliments.
The little market in the street was only a couple of stalls but people came from the BBC to get vegetables. The sounds from the market, cries where the meaning had eroded, so they were like shouts from the past, when the streets were full of hawkers and vendors, led to a story, a mere breath of a story, ‘A Room’, that came from lying on my bed in the daytime behind the dark-blue curtains of thick soft cotton. Touching them reminded me that now we could buy such material, so recently not in existence. Lying there in the half dark, with the street cries in my ears, I fell into a dream and visited, or thought I did, that room as it had been in the dreadful threadbare cold poverty of the 1914-1918 war.
I went to the theatre a lot, meeting people there, often walking back alone afterwards from Shaftesbury Avenue, St. Martin’s Lane, the Haymarket, even the Old Vic. There were people in the streets, enough to make a street companionship, though it wasn’t as it is now, the streets of Central London filled with young people enjoying themselves and looking for adventure till long after midnight. It still did not occur to me to be nervous, walking at night, stopping to have a bit of a chat. ‘What are you doing out so late, dear?’
‘I’ve been to see Laurence Olivier in…’
‘Have you, now? That’s nice, then. Enjoyed it, did you?’
That was the time when Joan Littlewood was making theatre in Stratford East. I saw there productions more original, more brilliant, than any I had seen till then: standards of production have risen, partly due to her. The theatre was always nearly empty, had a dozen or twenty people in it, all of us Lefties who had made the trip from Central London. Joan’s idea had been to make a theatre for the working people of the area, but they did not come. Joan was in those days a vociferous communist, or rather made loud communist noises. I do not find it easy to see her actually in the Party. The Party did not do more than tolerate her.
For a couple of years, a handful of us knew we were seeing the most extraordinary theatre in Britain, and then Kenneth Tynan saw some productions, told the Observer readers, and thereafter the tube train to Stratford, in London’s East End, a tedious journey, was crowded with smart Londoners, and it was hard to get a ticket.
Joan Littlewood has never been given the credit she deserves. This is partly because of her loathing for the middle classes, who were in fact her supporters. She could not stop insulting the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the BBC, and the West End theatre and West End theatre audiences. It was a necessity for her, her style, her trademark. When she was on television, she dropped a handkerchief over the back of her chair and turned to reach over and get it, so that her bum was offered as an insult to the camera. Childish. But she had to do this kind of thing. And she was a great director, a great force in the theatre. She and her team were really a continuation of the old tradition of strolling players, and she had made theatre in provincial towns with no money, no resources: political theatre, satirical political morality plays, improvised theatre.
I was visited by Nelson Algren. According to the newspapers and general report, he was bitter about having been put into The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir’s novel about post-war Paris, as the evasive American lover—straight from life. Surely this could not have been true, because when he was brought to my flat by Clancy, who had the air of a successful marriage broker, Nelson’s smile was all bashful sexual willingness, like a very young bridegroom. Yet I was a writer, female, and on the left—surely poison? But there is another ingredient in this puzzling brew. London was then glamorous for Americans in a way it has not been since the sixties ended. Sometimes when I was being presented by a male American to another as a good thing: ‘She’s a real mensch, you know’—for a woman could be as much of a mensch as a man—I felt as if I was being seen as a kind of trophy, a valuable piece of Englishness. The fact is, he didn’t really fancy me, nor I him, but we did like each other and spent several agreeable days together, he telling me about the experiences that made The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. He made it all sound picaresque, and glamorous. In London he was in search of romantic poverty, intending to write about it. Where are your slums? he demanded. He went down to the East End with Clancy, but the old working-class communities had gone. Back he came, discontented, to me. He wanted to find the slums of Dickens’s London, just as to this day people come hoping to encounter a real fog, a pea-souper, a London Particular, and are sad when they are told of the Clean Air Act. I explained to him that all along the streets of this area were extremely poor people, living in poor flats, even houses, but poverty in London was often concealed; a well-off house could be next door to one crammed with poor people. All he had to do was walk around a bit. He did, could not understand what he saw, so I went with him. ‘Look—see that house? See that little street
there?’ But gone were the days when people starved in Britain, or lived on tea, dripping, cheap jam, and bread, and children were without shoes. He was looking for the dramatic and evident squalor of certain slums in America. The goodwill we did feel for each other had to overcome a very basic difficulty. By now I had come to think that romanticising poverty as a style—for it is often that—was most irritating and puerile. It goes on all the time. The middle classes have always adored squalor—La Bohème, for instance. Nelson’s novels were above all a celebration of the romanticism of poverty, the drug culture, prostitution. At that very time the slummy townships of South Africa, truly horrible poverty and destitution, were giving certain people a pleasant frisson: exciting to think that the inhabitants of a slum like Alexandra township were every one gold-hearted prostitutes, cheeky child thieves without a care in the world, gamin guttersnipes, singing and dancing vagabonds.
I had an inspiration and sent him off to Glasgow, a long way still from the attractive city it is today, where the Gorbals were everything he had been looking for. So he was appeased. These days, he would find the drug culture and at once be at home. He had the stunned, effaced, subdued quality that we then associated with a certain kind of American, the result, we thought, of trying too hard to conform to an over-rigid society, but in his case it was drugs.
I have a difficulty. In Warwick Road and even more in Langham Street, I was meeting quantities of people who were well known or on their way to being so. I could easily make a list of names. Rather, Names. This would be the equivalent of that experience when someone says to me, ‘I’ve met a good friend of yours.’
‘Oh, who?’ But I’ve no recollection of him or her.
‘But he says he knows you well.’ This person met me at a party for five minutes or was brought to my house by someone when there were a lot of people, and now he—or she—goes about, ‘Oh yes, I’m a good friend of hers.’ You become their possession, they know all about you. ‘She told me that…’ (It is precisely these people who are so ready with reminiscences when biographers are on the prowl.)
The important point, I think, is that there was more mixing between different kinds of people than there is now. Social life was more fluid. This was partly because of the Aldermaston Marches, where the most unlikely people met and mingled. If I made a list of people met on those marches, it would make a kind of Progressive Social Register. Would there be an equivalent now? Probably not. There was still that post-war effervescence, the feeling that suppressed energies were exploding, the arrival of working-class or at least not middle-class talent into the arts, and, above all, the political optimism, which has so completely evaporated.
I think the Aldermaston Marches have not been given enough attention, as a unique social phenomenon. Just consider: for half a dozen years, every year, in springtime, hundreds of thousands of people from all over Britain, Europe, America, even distant parts of the world, converged on Aldermaston and for four days walked to London, spending nights in schools and halls, welcomed or not by the towns or villages they came through, exciting the world’s press, mostly to hostile reporting, making friends, learning, enjoying themselves—people who could never have met otherwise. Scientists and artists, writers and journalists and teachers and gardeners, politicians, every kind of person, met, walked together, talked—and often remained friends afterwards. Apart from war, what other social process could possibly create such a mingling of apparently incompatible people? To this day I meet people whom I walked with long ago on one of the marches, or who say, ‘I met such and such a professor from an American university, and that is how I got to spend four years there.’ Or, ‘I met my wife on the 1959 March.’
For a time I saw a good bit of Joshua Nkomo, now a leader of Zimbabwe. He was putting in that obligatory term in London, for future African leaders, of hand-to-mouth living and fearful thoughts for the future. In his case with good reason, for he was to spend ten years in Southern Rhodesia in an internment camp as bleak and as awful, without books and newspapers, as a prison sentence on the moon. But now he was bemused by a new status: he was being described as a sell-out. This was because at the time, the Moral Rearmament people were wooing Africans who might turn out to be leaders, and he had spent some days at their headquarters in Caux, Switzerland. He could not see what was wrong with them. ‘But they are good people. They were good to me. They treated me well. And I am religious too.’ I explained to him the niceties of the situation. He said he hated politics. What he wished was that he could have his own store in his village and be with his family. He was homesick and cold and lonely in London. Joshua was not the only African leader who has confided to me this ambition. He was a great orator. This was how he had come to be absorbed into politics. I had heard of him long before, enthralling crowds from a soapbox in Bulawayo.
I was certainly not the only woman giving Joshua advice and support. We would ring each other up and consult over knotty points, the chief one being that we felt Joshua had not been framed by nature to be political. There have been times in my life when I would have seen this as a criticism, but now, not.
For instance, Joshua was being pursued by our secret services. He came to me in a panic to say he had been at a meeting and a man had accosted him, taken him aside into a private room, showed him a suitcase full of paper money, and said all that money would be his if Joshua would tell him everything he knew about the Arabs—the Arabs make another entrance, as improbably this time as the last. But Joshua had never met any Arabs. I told him our secret services were obsessed with Arabs. I had been suspected of dealings with Arabs, and I had never met any either. The trouble was, Joshua was desperately poor. To show him all that money was cruel. I said flippantly that he should take it and then deny he had ever had it. This joke showed how distant I was from his harsh realities: he was terrified. This agent, whoever he was, MI6 probably, turned up more than once, with promises of money, and with threats too.
Having conferred on the telephone with other mentors, I wrote to a friend for enlightenment. Now here comes a little tale that is as good as a whole lecture on national moralities. The father of my friend—we will call him John—had been undone by the slump in the thirties, and as a result John had had a fairly precarious boyhood. But he had got to public school. The war began, and, apparently casually, he met a school chum, who enquired if he, John, felt like being really useful to his country—instead of merely going into one of the armed services was implied. Believe it or not, John was told to go to a certain gentlemen’s club at lunchtime with a rolled-up copy of the Times in his hand. His interlocutor made no enquiries about his politics, which were on the extreme left, though whether this meant a Party card, I don’t know. John served as a spy during the war, with distinction. But then many men with his background worked for the Security Services, and many were communists or fellow travellers. After the war John became a critic of the British Empire in all its manifestations and an expert on Africa. I had got to know him as a comrade-in-arms during campaigns about ending colonialism. I wanted to know why poor Joshua was being singled out like this. Was it right that some unfortunate black political exile should be persecuted by the secret services and his life made miserable by bribes of suitcases full of money? And what was all this about Arabs?
John went off to consult with his proper allegiances, the spymasters, and asked them what he should do, and the letter I got might have been framed by the senior head of department in the Ministry of Circumlocution. It said nothing at all, but nothing; it was a masterpiece of non-communication, and I kept it for years, reading it from time to time with awe for its skills. I lost it in one of my many moves. Its equivalent in a parallel area would go something like this:
‘You say that the police have been harassing the family at X Street, but firstly, we cannot find X Street on the map, and secondly, what is your evidence? We have no information that supports your accusation, which is in any case improperly framed. As you know, it is our policy to treat all the citizens in th
is country equally, and as it is not possible for a black citizen to be singled out for this kind of treatment, your queries remain without validity.’
The Arab connection remains a mystery to this day.
Joshua was having lunch with me, and while we were discussing the ways of this great country of ours, he said, ‘You are a good cook, girl. I want you to be my woman. And it is convenient not to have to explain African politics to you.’
‘But I have a man already,’ I said.
Joshua laughed. He was a very large, likeable man, with a good deep laugh which really did shake his whole body. ‘Then give him the sack and take me instead,’ he said.
This romantic offer was made to at least two of the other advisers—the ones I consulted with—in the same words and in the same circumstances, that is, over a good meal.
Soon I saw no more of Joshua, because he was swept up into the politics of exile. I did go and hear him speak, though. What an orator! What a magnifico! A spellbinder if there ever was one. And then came the years of exile, inside his own country, from everything good and kind and pleasant and decent, in the internment camp which was like being on the moon. This brutal treatment stands to the account of Ian Smith.
One visitor deserves special mention. He was a witch from Brighton, a town for some reason always a favourite haunt of witches. A white witch, he insisted; I really must understand that there were good and bad witches, and he was a male witch, not a warlock, for that was a very different thing. He had a serious problem. He needed to have sex with a virgin to further his spiritual development, but he could not find a girl who was a real virgin, immaculate, with a pristine hymen. He had looked everywhere in Britain for one. I enquired, ‘But how do you go about this? Do you go about asking girls, Have you an intact hymen?’
‘They’re so ignorant about their bodies they wouldn’t know what a hymen was. No, you don’t understand. If you speak frankly and honestly to someone, they treat you the same way. I explain my situation and they listen and I ask some questions, but then I see that they aren’t real virgins.’ He was a lean, dun-coloured man with flattish colourless hair, and greenish eyes fixed not on the face of his interlocutor—me, several times, over a period of months—but off to one side as he frowned at the difficulties of his situation. This was a tormented man. He never smiled. God forbid that I should laugh or smile. Despairing of ever finding a real virgin in England, he went to Ireland, where he said the Irish girls were full of a fresh and natural attitude to sex long lost in this country. There he found a fourteen-year-old virgin, in County Clare. He intended to marry her and told her so, saying she must keep herself untouched for him, because legally they could not marry until she was fifteen. He said to her, ‘Don’t you go spoiling yourself down there. Keep your hands off. It’s a tragedy: girls don’t realise it, but you have a treasure; it is a pearl beyond price, and you treat it as if it’s just a piece of flesh.’ A long, long time to wait, he complained, on a visit—or two, or three—sitting there all fretful impatience, a knee jerking, fingers a-fiddle with a button or his tie, for he was always properly dressed and clean and respectable. The law was stupid. Girls should be allowed to marry on the onset of menstruation. In the old days they knew better. Girls married at twelve or thirteen, as nature intended.