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

  She made free with my clothes, for she had brought none with her. She pushed the clothes she was prepared to consider to one side of my cupboard, despising the others, and dressed herself up. In those days I wore a lot of black. ‘Why are all your things black?’ Clancy had asked the same question, and I had replied, ‘Obviously, I am in mourning for my life,’ but to her I said, ‘Because black suits me.’ She put on me a red shirt, a white one, tried this and that garment, said I was right, I should wear black, but she thought my lipstick…She made me up with her make-up, then shook her head and said yes, I should stick with what I had. Absolute concentration, this inspection of me, my clothes. But that did not last long, and she was bored. She was waiting for something to happen. Clancy and Alex came, and when she asked—shyly—what they had brought her here for, they said, had she thought about going to school, getting this or that certificate, perhaps university? I was amazed at them, the way women are with men when they can’t see something obvious. There she sat in my cherry-coloured dressing gown—she hardly took it off during the ten days she was with me—smoking, while they admired her breasts, for she allowed the gown to fall open to her waist, and her white knees emerging from the cherry-coloured folds, and she said she didn’t think school, no. Then, they said, Doris would make enquiries about being a hairdresser. ‘What do they earn?’ she enquired languidly, her beautiful blue eyes heavy with boredom.

  She was too short to be a model, by several inches. Asked if she fancied modelling bras and underwear, she said she didn’t think her Dimitri would let her. She didn’t want to upset him. He said he would marry her one of these days. Well, perhaps he would; miracles happen. Yes, she did like him. She liked being hit about a bit—‘He never bruises me, Mrs. Lessing, don’t think that’—and then thrown on the bed. One day she did not come down from her room, which she usually did about midday, and when I went up I found my dressing gown laid out on the bed, which she had made neatly up, like a good girl, and on the pillow was a note: ‘Ta a lot. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Ha Ha.’ So she had gone back to her Greek, and after that, who knows. By now she must be a fat, dyed old woman, probably a lush, and the thought hurts.

  In Warwick Road I used to go walking at night, late. Now it would not be late, but people went to bed so much earlier then. The streets were still empty by eleven, as they had been when I first came, and there was nothing of what we take for granted now, as if it has all been going on for ever: animated streets long after midnight, lively groups of mostly young people in search of pleasure and adventure. I would go out only when Peter was at school or at the Eichners’. This was not because I feared to leave him alone: there were people living downstairs, and at the beginning, when I was still being a landlady, people in the flat, then later Clancy was there, and his typewriter would be going like a machine gun. No, Peter was fearful for me, because one parent had disappeared, and so I might too. He never spoke about this fear, but I knew.

  Walking around and about the London streets was like my nocturnal wanderings in Salisbury; when I set off, the houses would have lights in them, and by the time I got home again they were dark, and the radios, which had been spilling music from house to house, were silent. But now it was the small flickerings of the televisions on curtains that were extinguished as I walked.

  What was I doing? What was I looking for? There was the need to move, for I had all that physical energy, earned by the ritual needed to write, when I walked around the room, blind to it, wrote a little, working up into a crescendo of effort so intense it was exhausting and sent me off into a few minutes’ sleep, and then up again into walking around and about the room. This process might go on for hours, the stints at the typewriter and the little restoring sleeps, yet all that, mysteriously, did not discharge physical energy but left me with energy that I needed to use up.

  It was not into the streets I knew in the day that I came down from the upper part of the house. This nighttime London was a foreign land, and I did not think, as I walked, This is Kensington High Street; This is Earls Court. I tended to avoid the big streets, because I felt them to be alien, with a hard self-sufficiency that excluded me. This is how a child experiences a certain street, or even a room: turning a corner to be met by an unfamiliar row of shops where a scarlet postbox seems hostile and the little public garden across the road is full of unknown trees and shrubs—yet there are children playing there, as if they recognise nothing dangerous—or opening a door into a new house where the furniture is standing heavily about in an ordered arrangement that says Keep Out, and then coming suddenly on a chair that welcomes you, or into a doorway in a shop where there is a woman who raises her head to smile at you…There are no street names, no house names or numbers, in this geography, and no grown-up person would recognise the way a child knows a street, a house, a room, even the corner of a sofa. And the inhabitants of a city cannot share a newcomer’s apprehension of it.

  There were streets where I went quickly, to get through them, for I did not like them, others where I dawdled. When I came on the great warehouse-like buildings of Earls Court, standing about all darkened, silent, indifferent to me, I went by fast, not wanting to provoke them into attack, for they seemed full of incipient violence. When I found I had come upon the Albert Hall, which perhaps an hour ago had been as crammed full of people as a box with toys, its sober rotundities reassured me: yes, you are welcome here; but I went on perhaps a short way down Kensington High Street, as deserted as if the plague had struck. Yet it was only midnight. Perhaps there was someone waiting at the all-night bus stop, and I went slowly past, seeing the glow of a cigarette illuminating a face that took no notice of me, for a red bus was trundling along from the West End, headed out to a suburb that I thought of as I might Far Tartary, but not with the glow of pleasure you may get from thoughts of places you may one day visit; no, a vast darkened semicity, made up of little self-contained and self-satisfied houses in tidy gardens—that was what I envisaged while the sole passenger trod up onto the platform and the bus bore him away. How London’s enormousness does dismay its newcomers, and I was still that, six, seven, eight years after my arrival, for I was always trying to come to terms with it, take it in. A practised dweller in London learns to subdue it by living—that is, with heart and mind and senses—in one part of it, making that a home, and says, ‘London is a conglomeration of villages,’ and chooses one, blanking out the frightful immensities of the rest, and waits for the greeting from the woman across the street, or a wave from the man who owns the vegetable shop, or a miaow of welcome from the cat at number 25, or the turn into the road where year after year in spring a certain tree appears in glittering white, or in autumn a shrub decorates itself with scarlet.

  There was nothing convivial in the streets I walked through those nights, not a restaurant, not a coffee bar, and the pubs had closed long before. If I had got out early, before the pubs shut, then each one would be an island of enjoyment, closed off from the street behind its glowing windows, full of people who knew each other, for pubs are like clubs, without the benefit of rules and membership: the same people go there, making little communities, a companionship. But once the pubs had shut, only ill-lit streets and dark houses. Along one street, turn a corner into another, then another, whose name I never looked at, for I did not care where I was, though when I moved from one little knot of streets, or even one street, into another, it was moving from one territory to another, each with its own strong atmosphere and emanations, bestowed by me and by my need to understand this new place. Not to know its name, so that I could find it again, for I am sure I often walked along the same streets, past the same houses, but did not know it, for the capacities and understanding I brought with me were different on different nights. And besides, even in daytime a change of light or a shift of perspective will create a new view. You use a certain underground station often, you walk down the steps onto a platform you know as well as you do the street outside your house, but when you stop at the same statio
n after your excursion, on your way home, you go up steps from a platform quite different from the one you set off from, ten paces away.

  I might walk for two or three hours, not afraid of getting lost, because I was bound to pass an underground station I knew, or a police station. I’d go in. ‘Well, you’re a good way from home, aren’t you?’ the policeman would reprove.

  ‘Yes, I lost my way,’ I’d say brightly, offering my incompetence as a fee for his help.

  ‘You can catch the all-night bus at the corner there.’

  ‘No, I’d rather walk.’

  ‘Right, then,’ and he would come out to the door. ‘You just go along there, and then turn left, and then…’

  It seems a long time since we could wander at all hours of the night in London, or, for that matter, in any big city, without it once occurring to us to be afraid. I took my safety for granted.

  At a suggestion I might be raped, which is what young women think of now, I would have said, indignant, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But women have changed. Sometimes—but in the day as well as the night—some sad man in a furtive coat or a mac would suddenly part it to show…but I had walked on, thinking, Poor thing. If a car slowed to see if I was for sale, I shook my head and walked on, faster. It never occurred to me to feel insulted. Is it a good thing that women have become so squeamish, so easily shocked—and resourceless too? Like Victorian ladies (or so we are told they did, though I have never believed it), contemporary women scream or swoon at the sight of a penis they have not been introduced to, feel demeaned by a suggestive remark, and send for a lawyer if a man pays them a compliment. And all this in the name of the equality of the sexes. I was never once in danger, not in all those nights of walking, and sometimes in the most unappetising, shadowy streets, where, if I felt threatened, it was only because of my inability to understand what I was seeing. It is a long time since I have felt that kind of cold exclusion, in London or anywhere else in the world—the same as a small child’s feeling when taken into a room full of very tall solid falsely smiling adults sitting on chairs and sofas that have become alien, though when the room is empty of strangers, they are friends and familiars, where you play and hide.

  When I got home, perhaps at two or three in the morning, the rooms of the flat—in particular the living room, which was in fact quite large, and the kitchen, a large room too—seemed small and overbright and banal. Where had I been? I did not know, did not care. My mind was full of dark streets and buildings. And if, suddenly, a light had come on in a house where the windows had been reflecting a dim street light, then it had been as if the place had raised its eyes to look at me: Who are you?

  That was the night, when what London’s streets really were was hidden. Daylit London was not the city I had arrived in, so grey, so battered, so colourless. Already the war was becoming history, buildings were being painted, and the new coffee bars enlivened the streets. When I first came, every person I met had talked of this or that battlefront—the war in North Africa…Egypt…Burma…India…France…Italy…Germany—and of the bombing of London. The new young ones did not talk about the war, which had ended ten years before; they wanted to have a good time. And they wore clothes a million miles from the dreary wartime Utility. Now there were Indian restaurants opening everywhere, rescuing us from that choice: eating in an expensive restaurant, which most of us couldn’t afford, or eating at home. The Cold War was still blasting us with bombast and rhetoric, but inside the Left—and I would say left-wing attitudes permeated thinking that did not even call itself left—all kinds of new thoughts were growing. It was that stage in a process where ideas, opinions, fresh opinion—all critical of a predominant cast of thought—are building up behind a dam and will shortly burst it open…to become a new conformity.

  It was already hard for me to remember how dismayed I had been when first in London, how any time I left the little protective shell I lived in, and ventured forth, I needed an inner stiffening of defences: No, I will not let myself be depressed by it.

  And now my first cat, in my home, my place. My responsibility. I had loved most fiercely the cats on the farm, long ago, but I did not know much about them. My mother cared for them. A good place for a cat, someone said, desperate to find a home for a kitten. You’ve got two floors, and outside your front door a wooden staircase down to a yard, and a large flat roof too—of course you must have a kitten. And that is how we acquire a cat. What’s a cat—a mere cat? A creature without rights, living as it can, where it can, and when in our houses often ill-treated through ignorance. I did not know how to look after a cat. On the farm there were indoor cats and outdoor cats, they drank water from the dogs’ drinking bowls, were given milk when the pails came up from the milking, caught their food in the bush and were given leftovers and tidbits. They died easily: a cat wasn’t worth a vet, who was so many miles away and who in any case dealt with serious animals, working animals, like dogs and cattle, and the horses for the gymkhanas. They easily went wild with the real wildcats; they were bitten by snakes or went blind from a cobra’s spitting into their eyes and had to be ‘put down’. There were innumerable litters of kittens, and most were drowned at birth.

  With this apprenticeship, I acquired a cat, a black and white cat, your basic moggy—plump, sweet, rather stupid, and dependent, for she would have liked to be with me every second of the day and night.

  She did not like tinned food and slowly persuaded me she should have calves’ liver—in those days, before the culinary revolution, liver, kidneys, any ‘offal’, was so cheap that its price alone attested that it was not worth eating. She liked steak. She liked a bit of fish. She was fed too well, for I did not know then that a diet of liver and steak and fish was not good for a cat. I hope I had a bowl of water down for her and her kittens. Most cats like plenty of water and don’t like milk all that much. No, she did not get ill, she flourished, but did not live for long, because she fell off the flat roof and broke her pelvis—in this way at least continuing what I knew from the farm, where cats used up their nine lives so quickly.

  She was kindly treated, she was fed, she was taken to the vet, she was petted and fussed over, she slept on my bed. But it was only later that I learned to appreciate cats, as individuals, each one different, just like humans. Later there were cats who impressed themselves on me by their force of character, their intelligence, their bravery, their fortitude when suffering, their sensitiveness to what you are thinking, their care for their kittens—in my experience, this is true of male cats too. But this cat, my first as an adult, was, simply, just a sweet cat.

  I had to learn how to observe a cat, interact with it and its emotional life, its loves, its affections, its jealousies. For like humans, cats are jealous creatures, want to be first in your affections. From a cat you get back what you give to it—rather you get back a hundredfold—in the way of attention, observation, above all, observation, so that you know what the cat is thinking and feeling. All this is missed by people who think that cats are all alike, are ‘independent’ and ‘don’t care for people’ and ‘are only interested in you because you feed them’.

  How often do you see that sad thing, an intelligent cat in some house with ignorant owners, trying to persuade these blocks of insensitivity that here is a loving creature ready to be a real friend—but yet again it is rebuffed, roughly thrown off a lap or even hit, and it goes away, sullen but patient, a captive of stupidity.

  Now I know I missed a whole range of responses and affections with that first cat, because I had decided she was sweet but not very bright. If you look at it from her point of view: this very dependent cat, who by nature should have been with one person, night and day, found herself in a flat with a mistress who would not pay her attention when she was working, who was always walking restlessly about or lying down for short naps, from which she jumped up, dislodging her. This friend went away often, once for six weeks, and how very long that must seem to a cat, probably the same as our years. Yes, she went away for
years at a time, leaving her with people who might or might not love her. When this mistress came home, and once again the cat could look forward to a warm place on the foot of the bed, then that might not happen, for it was by no means certain there was only one person in the bed, and often she had to retreat to a chair, make herself small, not be a nuisance. There was a young boy, and he was kind, but he didn’t have time for her, and he came and went all the time. The currents of feeling in that place where she had found herself taken—no choice of hers—they were disturbing, very often they were frightening: cats pick up every nuance of feeling. This was not a calm and reassuring place; all the people in it were restless, or anxious, going and coming, and that was why this cat always wanted to be with this mistress, who might disappear altogether—if she could vanish for years, why not for ever?

  The cat, like everyone who came into that flat, did not have much faith in the roof over her head.