In Pursuit of the English: A Documentary

  ‘No, the Boer War. Those concentration camps you had. Ya, ya, the English were never anything but savages. Now, please, think no more about it. I have made everything right for you.’

  He went. Almost at once Mrs Coetzee came in, with Jemima. It was a visit of goodwill. She was smiling. Then she noticed the picture, which unfortunately Piet had forgotten. Her face sagged into folds of disapproval.

  She spoke to Jemima. Jemima said: ‘Says will not picture her house.’ ‘Tell her it’s not my picture.’ ‘Says take it away.’ ‘I’ll tell my friend to take it tomorrow.’ ‘Says your picture, not his picture.’ ‘But it is his.’ ‘Says he is Afrikaans. A good boy.’ ‘It is a picture of his wife. She is a very good Afrikaans girl.’ ‘Says good boy does not make bad picture like that.’ Jemima’s face was expressionless, but her body shook. I tried to catch her eye. It was blank. Only her body was amused. ‘Says you bad woman, says you go,’ said Jemima.

  That evening, the shipping agents rang to say the boat would be in tomorrow. As a favour, Mrs Coetzee allowed me to stay for the one night. Mrs Barnes came in to say she was sorry there had been this unpleasantness. If she bad known she would not have complained to Mrs Coetzee. I have never been able to understand this. But my chief problem was to find the right way to say good-bye to the Brooke-Bensons. At last, my suppressed instinct for communication blossomed into a large bunch of flowers. I presented these, not so much to the Brooke-Bensons, as to a failed relationship. I shook hands. I noticed Myra’s eyes were wet. She said, with formality: ‘I will be so sorry when you’ve gone. I feel I have made a real friend in you.’ Her husband said: ‘And please keep in touch. Now that we’ve got to know each other.’ I shook hands again and we said good-bye.

  The boat was full of English. That is, South African British, going home. I had no time to meet them. My son was so excited by the experience of being on the boat that he woke at five every morning and did not sleep until eleven at night. In between, he rushed, hurled himself, bounded and leaped all over the boat. I arrived in England exhausted. The white cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The Thames looked dirty. I had better confess at once that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me a city of such appalling ugliness that I wanted only to leave it. Besides, I had no money, I could have got some by writing to my family, of course, hut it had to be the bootstraps or nothing.

  The first place I stayed in was a flat off the Bayswater Road. I passed the house the other day, and it now seems quite unremarkable. This is how it struck me at the time:

  ‘A curving terrace. Decaying, unpainted, enormous, ponderous, graceless. When I stand and look up, the sheer weight of the building oppresses me. The door looks as if it could never be opened. The hall is painted a dead uniform cream, that looks damp. It has a carved chest in it that smells of mould. Everything smells damp. The stairs are wide, deep, oppressive. The carpets are thick and shabby. Walking on them is frightening – no sound at all. All the way up the centre of this immense, heavy house, the stairs climb, silent and ugly, flight after flight, and all the walls are the same dead, dark cream colour. At last another hostile and heavy door, I am in a highly varnished little hall, with wet mackintoshes and umbrellas. Another dark door. Inside, a great heavy room, full of damp shadow. The furniture is all heavy and dead, and the surfaces are damp. The flat has six rooms, all painted this heavy darkening cream, all large, with high ceilings, no sound anywhere, the walls are so thick. I feel suffocated. Out of the back windows, a vista of wet dark roofs and dingy chimneys. The sky is pale and cold and unfriendly.’

  My arrangements for living here had been made with great intelligence by a friend. The idea was, I should share this flat with another woman, an Australian, who had a small child. We should share the rent and expenses, and the children would share each other.

  They took to each other at sight and went off to play.

  The Australian lady and I had now to make acquaintance.

  She was a woman of inveterate sensibility. Her name was Brenda. She was sitting in a huddled mass in a deep chair by an empty grate. She was a large woman, of firm swarthy flesh. She had a large sallow face, and black hair cut doll-like across her forehead. She wore artistic clothes. She had been crying, and was still damp. Almost the first thing she said was, ‘I do hope your child is sensitive. My Daphne is very sensitive. A highly-strung child.’ I knew then that the whole thing was doomed.

  Daphne was three, a strapping, lively-eyed child with a healthy aggressiveness. Peter was two and a half. They were well-matched. They began to fight, with much enjoyment. Brenda went next door, pulled Daphne to her, and said in a weak voice: ‘Oh, darling, he’s such a nice little boy, don’t hit him.’ She set Daphne in a chair with a picture book.

  Then she said everything was too much for her, and so I went out and bought the rations and had some keys cut. While I did this, I reflected on the value of helplessness. During the next weeks I reflected about this often. Brenda was renting the flat for seven guineas a week. I don’t know how she managed it. I’ve never since seen a flat of such size, class, and solid furnishing going at such a low rent. She had already let two rooms in it, at three and a half guineas each. That left four rooms. The largest room was her sitting-room, because she had to have privacy. The children had a room each, because Daphne could not sleep unless she was by herself. The largest room upstairs was Brenda’s bedroom. That left one for me. She had put the dining-room table in it, where we would all eat, as she said this would be more convenient for all of us. She intended to charge me seven guineas a week. I did all the shopping and the washing-up and the tidying, because life was too much for her, particularly in England. Also I had to keep my son away from Daphne, because they would play together, and in the most insensitive manner.

  I have often wondered about that remarkable phenomenon – that for sheer innate delicacy and appreciation of the finer sides of life, one has to seek for a certain type of Colonial.

  Piet for instance. Robust is the word I would use to describe him. Yet his tastes in art, save when he was painting pondokkies, were all exquisite. Corot he liked. Turner he liked. A passage of nature description in Chekhov would make him screw back the tears from his eyes. A couple of the more oblique sentences in Katherine Mansfield would send him into a melancholy ecstasy. But Balzac was coarse, and Rubens had no poetry. A letter from Piet would end something like this: … the exquisite veil of translucent twilight drawn gently down to the horizon, and I sit, pen in hand, and dream. The fire crepitates in the grate, and the shadows deepen on the wall. Ach, my God, and life is passing. Your old friend. Piet. P.S. – We went to the Bay this afternoon and swam and bought three crayfish for sixpence each. I boiled them till they squeaked and we ate them in our fingers with melted butter. My God, man, they were good. I bet you don’t get crayfish in that godforsaken colony full of English. Christ but you’re crazy, I’m telling you.

  For real perception into the side-channels of British culture, one has to go to a university in Australia or South Africa. The definitive thesis on Virginia Woolf will come, not from Cambridge, but from Gape Town. Brenda was writing a thesis on: Proust – a nature poet manqué.

  In short, we were temperamentally unsuited. I began looking for somewhere to live. Besides. I still had not met the English.

  Chapter Two

  I had already moved away from the counter when some instinct turned me back to ask: ‘I suppose you don’t know somewhere I could live?’ The girl behind the counter shrugged profoundly, sighed and said: ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure.’ I took this as a dismissal, but she looked at me shrewdly and said: ‘Depends on what you’re looking for, doesn’t it now?’

  When I had first entered the shop the girl was standing motionless, hands resting palm downwards, while she gazed past me into the street, her face set into lines of melancholy resignation. She was a small girl, her face broad under very black and glossy hair that was piled into a dense and s
culptured mound. Her hair, and her thin black crescent brows, made her look like a cockney Madame Butterfly, particularly as she was wearing a loose flowered wrap over her clothes. Her mouth might have been any shape; the one she had painted was another crescent in cherry pink, as deep as the half-circle eyebrows. Her voice toned with the sad lips and eyes.

  I said: ‘I’ve been looking for six weeks.’ My voice was by this time drenched with self-pity. ‘I’ve got a small child.’ I said.

  Her face became shrewd as she examined me from this new point of view. Then she said, with confidence: ‘I don’t know whether it would suit, but my friend where I live has a flat.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I don’t know, dear, I’m sure. But she’s ever so nice, and she likes having kids about the place.’

  ‘What sort of a flat?’

  ‘It’s upstairs,’ she said, doubtful again. But added: ‘One room, but ever such nice furniture. It’s only a minute from here.’

  I hesitated. My companion, who was directing this conversation with a skill I only learned to appreciate later, said, with casualness: ‘You just tell her Rose sent you. She’ll know it’s all right if you say Rose. Besides, she likes young people. She likes a bit of life about.’ She glanced at me, waited a moment, then raised her voice to shout: ‘Nina, are you busy?’ A woman appeared in the back. This was a jeweller’s shop, very dark and crowded, and she had to push her way through trestles burdened with clocks, watches, trinkets, rubbish of all kinds. She was fat and pale, with rusty dyed hair, but her look of puffy ponderousness was contradicted by her eyes, which were calculating. After a rapid summing-up look, she stood beside Rose, with the air of one putting herself completely at disposal.

  ‘Flo doesn’t take just anyone, does she, dear?’ suggested Rose, and the woman said promptly: ‘That’s right. She likes to pick and choose.’

  ‘I’ll give you the address,’ said Rose, and wrote it down.

  Seeing she had served her purpose, the pale woman pulled her lips back and exposed her teeth in a sweet smile. Then she threaded her way back to the room she had emerged from. At the door she turned back and said: ‘How about that other place – you know, that you heard about this morning?’

  Rose seemed displeased. She said unwillingly: ‘I don’t know anything about it – not to recommend.’

  The pale woman’s submissive helpfulness vanished. She said to me with a ferocious smile: ‘I hope Rose is looking after you properly.’ She disappeared. Rose was annoyed. She raised her voice to say: ‘You come back tomorrow, dear, and your watch will be ready.’ She had been saying this every day for the past week.

  ‘What’s the address of this other place?’ I asked Rose.

  ‘I’ll write it for you. Mind you, I’m not recommending it.’ Then, the desire to do her friend Flo a service dissolved into the fellowship of the suffering, and she said: ‘Of course, these days, you grab what’s going.’

  I thanked her and left. Glancing back, I saw she had taken up her former position, and her face was all lifeless curves.

  I decided to try the second address immediately. About the first I felt like the horse dragged to water. I could have said, of course, that Rose’s insistence showed there must be something wrong with it. But there was more to it than that. For six weeks I had been tramping the streets with a guidebook, standing in queues outside telephone booths, examining advertisement boards. Stoicism can reach a point where, if someone says: I’m sure you’ll be lucky sooner or later, one feels positively indignant. I was defensively rejecting possibilities in advance. This state of mind was not only mine. Talking to other home-hunters I learned it was an occupational disease. It means one cannot enter a house-agent’s office without an air of hostility; or open the advertisement columns of a newspaper without a cynical (and consciously cynical) smile, as if to say: You don’t imagine I’m going to be taken in by this, do you?

  During those weeks I had formed alliances with various people I met in the agents’ offices, or under the advertisement boards. I remember, particularly, a lady with a grownup daughter and a grand piano. The daughter was talented, come all the way from Australia to study in London, For three months these women had been looking for a shelter for their piano. At the time we met they had become so bitter that on several occasions, setting out for some possible address, they exclaimed: ‘What’s the use, they won’t have us!’ – and turned aside into a café to brood over a cup of tea.

  It is a curious fact that at a time when we were all short of money, when getting a place to live was essential before we could start to live at all, we would spend the larger part of each working day (for me the hours that my son was in nursery school) sitting in teashops gripped by bitter lethargy. We used to discuss the various places we had lived in, the climate of this country or that, landladies, the woman who had affronted us the day before, the harpy who had offered one room and use of the kitchen at four guineas a week provided one agreed not ‘to walk on the floor before eight in the morning’. The teashop had become our home, our refuge, the bedclothes we pulled over our heads. We could no longer face another long walk, another set of dingy lodgings, another refusal. We could not face seeing our fantasies about what we hoped to find diminished to what we knew we would have to take.

  I went in search of the second address with a grim and barbed gaiety. My by now highly-developed instinct told me it would be useless. Besides, the interminable streets of tall, grey, narrow houses that became half-effaced with fog at a distance of a hundred yards, the pale faces peering up from basements past rubbish cans, the innumerable dim flights of stairs, rooms crowded with cushioned and buttoned furniture, railings too grimy to touch, dirty flights of steps – above all, an atmosphere of stale weariness: had worked on me in a way I did not understand myself.

  The street I wanted was not in my guidebook. I was directed back and forth by passers-by, each one saying helpfully, ‘It’s just around the corner,’ and looking impatient when I said: ‘Which corner?’ This business of the next corner is confusing to aliens, who will interpret it as the next intersection of the street. But to the Londoner, with his highly subjective attitude to geography, the ‘corner’ will mean, perhaps, a famous pub, or an old street whose importance dwarfs all the intervening streets out of existence, or perhaps the turning he takes every morning on his way to work.

  The house I wanted was a broader, taller house than most, and separated from its neighbours by a six-inch space on either side. The steps were scrabbed white; the doorknob gleamed; the wood of the door was newly-varnished chocolate brown. While I waited for the bell to be answered, a young man came out, carrying suitcases, which he left on the bottom step. Soon a young woman followed him, vehemently slamming the door, and looking to him for approval of this action. But he said irritably: ‘Don’t give them grounds for complaint.’ She was a tall slender girl, wearing an enormous black picture hat, very high black heels, a deep black decolletage crowded with crimson roses, and furs slung over one shoulder. Because of her appearance I looked again at the man. He was as unfamiliar to me as she was. He wore a sharply-angled brown suit, and pointed brown shoes. He was tall, dark, slickly good-looking, with prominent brown eyes that were now suffused with uneasy anger. The door swung inwards, this time to show an elderly grey woman in a stiff white nurse’s uniform. She looked past me at the couple and said: ‘You must have all your things out in half an hour or I’ll call the police.’ The young woman gave a shrill laugh; the young man frowned and began to say something; but the nurse interrupted him by saying to me: ‘Come in.’ Her voice still held the sharpness which she had directed at the other two.

  Inside there was a narrow hall carpeted with crimson. A grey satin wallpaper was sprinkled all over with small gilt coronets and harps. Small gilt-framed mirrors hung at various levels, chandelier, sprouting large electric bulbs.

  The nurse left me in these surroundings of dispirited opulence, saying: ‘I’ll ask for the keys.’ Soon a very old lady, swathed
in pink and mauve wool, wheeled herself in a chair across the hall, giving me a cold stare. Then she turned herself around and rolled back, with another prolonged stare. When the inspection was over the nurse came back with a bunch of keys, and led me up one, two, three, four, five flights of stairs, all muffled in crimson carpet, the walls thick with large brownish pictures. She unlocked a door that barred our way into a more bleak corridor. The stairs were now very narrow and twisted sharply after each short flight. There was no carpet. It was dark, save when we passed the windows, which shed a pallid glow over our heads on to more pictures, so that at short intervals the gloom was broken by a confusion of dimly inter-reflecting lights.

  All the way up were doors with names written on cards beside the bells. I imagined vistas of passageways, opening on to yet more rooms, more lives. It was very silent, a humming breathing quiet, like listening to someone sleep. It was as if I had become a midget and was walking up the main gallery of a large antheap.

  On the top landing it was completely dark; we were standing in a closed box, ‘Here we are,’ said the nurse briskly, and flung open a door. There was a dim space before us, filled with jostling furniture. The colours were dull crimson and purple, with a dark plummy wallpaper, and so many armchairs, buttoned pouffes and small hard tables that it was difficult for the nurse to move in a straight line to the window, where she jerked back heavy curtains. They were red damask lined with black silk, which absorbed the filtering light so that the room became only slightly less obscure than before.

  ‘There!’ she exclaimed with pride, turning to gaze lovingly at the oppressive room. ‘This used to be the old lady’s room before she got too ill to climb the stairs. She liked it for the view. It’s a lovely view.’ At the window I saw crowding roofs, and beyond them, the tops of trees shadowed with cold sunlight.

  ‘Has she been ill for long?’

  ‘Thirty years,’ said the nurse with pride. ‘Yes, I’ve been nursing her for thirty years. She won’t have anything changed up here, even though she can’t come up herself It was her room she used to sit in when she first got married. She used to paint. No one was allowed up here, not even her husband.’