In Pursuit of the English. Doris Lessing
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mind and a dangerous influence on the blacks who were ever prey to unscrupulous agitators. I was trying to discuss this last bit reasonably, when I was informed that Cape Town was overflowing, that no one but a lunatic would arrive without arranging accommodation, and there was no hope of my finding a room. My situation was, in short, admirably deplorable. While my son has always been the most delightful, amiable and easy-going person, yet, being two years old, he needed to sleep and eat. My total capital amounted to £47. I was informed that the prices for even bad accommodation were astronomical. They telephoned some boarding houses which turned out, much to their satisfaction, to be full. They then summoned a taxi. On my suggestion.
The taxi-driver was an Afrikaner and he had an aunt who ran a boarding house. He instantly took me there, refused payment for the trip, arranged matters with his aunt, carried in my luggage – which was extensive, because I had not yet learned how to travel – taught my son some elementary phrases in Afrikaans, gave me a lot of good advice, and said he would come back to see how I was getting on. He was a man of about sixty, who said he had forty-four grandchildren, but had it in his heart to consider my son the forty-fifth. He was a Nationalist. It was not the first time I had been made to reflect on that sad political commonplace that one’s enemies are so often much nicer than one’s friends.
Sitting in the taxi outside Mrs Coetzee’s boarding house, the mirage of England was still strong. While features like the white-slaving father-figure and the night-clubs had disappeared, and it was altogether more adjusted to my age, it can’t be said to have had much contact with fact – at least, as experienced. The foundation of this dream was now a group of loving friends, all above any of the minor and more petty human emotions, such as envy, jealousy, spite, etc. We would be devoted to changing the world completely, and very fast, at whatever cost to ourselves, while we simultaneously produced undying masterpieces, and lived communally, with such warmth, brilliance, generosity of spirit and so on that we would be an example to everyone.
The first thing I saw from the taxi was that the place was full of English. That is, English, not South African British. Several English girls were sitting on the wooden steps, their famed English complexions already darkened, looking disconsolate. The boarding house was on one of the steep slopes of the city, and overpowered by a great many dazzlingly new hotels that rose high above it on every side. It was very old, a ramshackle wandering house of wood, with great wooden verandahs, a roof hidden by dense green creeper, and surrounded by a colourful garden full of fruit-trees and children. It had two storeys, the upper linked to the lower only by an outside wooden staircase. The place was filthy, unpainted, decaying; a fire-trap and a death-trap – in short, picturesque to a degree. A heavy step upstairs made the whole structure tremble to its foundations. My room was in the front, off the verandah, and it had bare wooden floors, stained pink walls, stained green ceiling, a wardrobe so large I could take several strides up and down inside it, two enormous sagging double beds, and four single beds. My friend the grandfather had gone, so I went in search of authority, my feet reverberating on the bare boards. It was mid-afternoon. Towards the back of the house was a small room painted dingy yellow, with a broken wood-burning stove in it, a large greasy table dotted with flies, a hunk of cold meat under a great fly-cover, and the fattest woman I have ever seen in my life dozing in a straight-backed chair. It was as if a sack of grain was supported by a matchbox. Her great loose body strained inside a faded orange cotton dress. Her flesh was dull yellow in colour, and her hair dragged in dull strands on her neck. I thought she must be the coloured cook; but when I learned this was Mrs Coetzee herself, suppressed the seditious thought. I went back to my room, where a small, thin, chocolate-coloured girl who looked about twelve, but was in fact eighteen, was engaged in replacing the dirty sheets on the biggest of the beds with slightly less dirty sheets. She was bare-footed, and wore a bright pink dress, rent under the arm. Her name was Jemima. She did all the housework of the boarding house, which had between fifty and sixty people in it, and helped Mrs Coetzee in the kitchen. She earned three pounds a month, and was the most exploited human being I have known. To watch her do my room out was an education in passive resistance. She would enter without knocking, and without looking at me, carrying a small dustpan and brush, which she dropped on an unmade bed and did not use again. She would direct her small sharp body in a straight line to my bed, while her completely expressionless round black eyes glanced about her, but unseeing. With one movement she twitched the bedclothes up over the rumpled pillows. She then smoothed the surface creases on the faded coverlet out with the right hand, while already turning her body to the next bed, in which my son slept. She twitched up the bedclothes on that with her left hand, while she reached out the other for the dustpan and brush. She was already on her way to the door before her right hand, left behind, had picked up the dustpan. She then turned herself around in such a way that at the door she was facing into the room. She used the edge of the dustpan to pull the doorknob towards her. The door slammed. The room, as far as she was concerned, was done.
Mrs Coetzee and she carried on warfare in shrill Afrikaans which I did not understand. But like all wars that have been going on for a long time, it sounded more like a matter of form than of feeling.
I got all the information I needed as soon as I approached the loaded staircase. A dozen resigned voices told me the facts. These were all brides of South African soldiers. They were all waiting for some place to live in. They had all arrived on recent ships. Mrs Coetzee was a disgusting war profiteer. For horrible food and conditions she charged the same as that charged by respectable boarding houses on the beach. If one could get into them. And if they would take children without making a fuss – which Mrs Coetzee did. But the fact that she was easy about the children did not outweigh her hatred of the English, about which she made no secret.
I rang up the shipping offices who said there was no sign of the ship, which was well known for taking its time at ports around the coast. It might be next week or the week after, but of course they would let me know. I was sitting on one of the beds, waving the flies off my cheerfully sleeping child, when a crisp white envelope slid under the door. It said: ‘I and my husband would be very happy if you would care to join us for a drink after dinner. Yours sincerely, Myra Brooke-Benson. (Room 7.)’ Room 7 was opposite mine, and I could hear English voices male and female, from behind the closed door. A high voice, clearly at the end of its tether: ‘But, my dear, I really do think that this DDT must have lost its strength.’ And a low voice, firm and in command. ‘Nonsense, my dear, I bought it this morning.’
Towards five in the evening I went again in search of the landlady. Mrs Coetzee was now awake, seated at the kitchen table, slicing pale yellowish slices off an enormous golden pumpkin. Her arms stuck out at her sides like wings, supported by wads of shaking fat. Great drops of sweat scattered off her in all directions. Jemima stood beside her, rapidly squeezing pale pink ground meat into flat cakes between her palms. I coughed. Mrs Coetzee nodded. She returned to her work. She had no English.
The supper was served in a room into which refinement had been injected in the shape of a dozen small tables that were covered with red tissue paper, and set with a knife, fork and spoon at each place. A coloured paper lantern was tied with string to the naked light bulb. We ate roast pumpkin, fried meat cakes, and fried potato hash. Afterwards, there were fried pumpkin fritters. Everyone was eating avidly from starvation. The portions were no larger than necessary to maintain life. I immediately pinpointed my hosts for after dinner. They were a small, fair pretty woman, looking incredibly clean and neat; and a bald, fierce-looking man with a well-brushed moustache. I smiled at them, but as they stiffened and merely nodded back, I imagined I must be mistaken. When I presented myself at the door of No. 7, however, they were smiling and full of welcome. They had been here for three weeks, and were waiting for a flat to fall vacant in Ndola, where he was to work on the copper mines. ‘I will not, I simply will not stay here, Timothy,’ she kept saying, with crisp plaintiveness. And he kept saying, with bluff reassurance: ‘But, my dear, of course we are not going to stay here.’ We drank brandy, and made small talk. We offered each other many commiserations. We said goodnight, smiling. As far as I was concerned the evening had passed without any of that vital communication essential to real human relationships. I imagined it had been a failure.
Next morning, when I woke, the double bed opposite had two elderly women in it. They were asleep. I shushed my son and we waited. They woke, good-natured, smiling and unembarrassed when Jemima came in, without knocking,