In Pursuit of the English Read online

  ‘Mutated, too, has it?’

  ‘There are two kinds of pointed sense of humour now. The mutated kind and the old kind. Mind you, it’s not a bad thing. I like to see a pointed sense of humour on land now and then.’

  ‘Wasted down there in the sea, I grant you.’

  ‘Even the sea kind have got different shaped waists since the atom bomb.’

  ‘A sad thing, a pointed sense of humour without a waist.’

  ‘They’re sad, too. Need sympathy.’

  ‘Plenty of sympathy.’

  ‘Yes, Len, that’s what we need, you and me and the waistless pointed sense of humour. Sympathy.’

  ‘We’re not going to get it here, are we. Mick?’

  ‘No, Len. Not here.’

  ‘Good-bye, Auntie.’

  ‘Good-bye, Auntie Rose.’

  ‘They went upstairs.

  ‘Think they’re funny,’ said Rose. To me she said accusingly; ‘And you were laughing. Yes. I saw you. Don’t think I didn’t. You don’t want to encourage them.’

  ‘Yes, she was laughing,’ said Flo. ‘Well, I don’t blame you, dear.’

  ‘Yes? I blame her. Them kids. Go on and on for hours. You’d think there was nothing in the world to worry about the way they go on.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Flo. ‘Ah, my Lord, the way my life’s going, and Dan’s no time for some fun. I might as well go to my granny in Italy.’

  ‘But she’s dead,’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes, she died. And now I’ve nowhere to go if Dan doesn’t treat me right. Perhaps I’ll go to live with Jack in Australia.’

  ‘But he hasn’t sent you his address.’

  ‘Ah, my Lord, nobody cares for me no more and Doris is not our friend because she’s going.’

  ‘She has to go some time, it stands to reason. The way I look at it, some people have an itch in their feet, that moves them on from place to place.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, dear,’ said Flo to me. ‘But we’ve been good to you, haven’t we, darling?’

  ‘You make me sick,’ said Rose. ‘Do you want her to say sweet things, and all this time Dan’s as good as killing her because she has the sense to say no to your fancy rent?’

  ‘But I don’t understand these things, you know that, dear.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Rose.

  ‘But we have been good to your little boy, haven’t we, darling?’

  ‘Very,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  ‘That’s right. We should all be kind to each other. If we was all kind to each other all over the world it would be different, wouldn’t it now?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ said Rose. ‘A likely story.’

  Winner of the Nobel Prize

  NONFICTION

  AFRICAN LAUGHTER: Four Visits to Zimbabwe

  ISBN 978-0-06-092433-1 (paperback)

  GOING HOME

  ISBN 978-0-06-09730-9 (paperback)

  IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH: A Documentary

  ISBN 978-0-06-097629-3 (paperback)

  PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE

  ISBN 978-0-06-039077-8 (paperback)

  TIME BITES: Views and Reviews

  ISBN 978-0-06-083141-7 (paperback)

  UNDER MY SKIN: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

  ISBN 978-0-06-092664-9 (paperback)

  WALKING IN THE SHADE: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962

  ISBN 978-0-06-092956-5 (paperback)

  FICTION

  BEN, IN THE WORLD: The Sequel to The Fifth Child

  ISBN 978-0-06-093465-1 (paperback)

  THE CLEFT: A Novel

  ISBN 978-0-06-083486-9 (hardcover)

  THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

  ISBN 978-0-06-093140-7 (paperback)

  THE GRANDMOTHERS: Four Short Novels

  ISBN 978-0-06-053011-2 (paperback)

  THE GRASS IS SINGING: A Novel

  ISBN 978-0-06-095346-1 (paperback)

  LOVE AGAIN: A Novel

  ISBN 978-0-06-092796-7 (paperback)

  MARA AND DANN: An Adventure

  ISBN 978-0-06-093056-1 (paperback)

  THE REAL THING: Stories and Sketches

  ISBN 978-0-06-092417-1 (paperback)

  THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG: A Novel

  ISBN 978-0-06-053013-6 (paperback)

  THE SWEETEST DREAM: A Novel

  ISBN 978-0-06-093755-3 (paperback)

  THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE SERIES

  MARTHA QUEST

  ISBN 978-0-06-095969-2 (paperback)

  A PROPER MARRIAGE

  ISBN 978-0-06-097663-7 (paperback)

  A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM

  ISBN 978-0-06-097664-4 (paperback)

  LANDLOCKED

  ISBN 978-0-06-097665-1 (paperback)

  THE FOUR-GATED CITY

  ISBN 978-0-06-097667-5 (paperback)

  HARPER PERENNIAL

  About the Author

  DOMS LESSING was bom of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems and plays. Doris Lessing lives in London.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise

  “One of the most authentic books ever written about the English…. Funny, touching and so real that the smell and taste of London seem to rise from its pages.”

  —R.A. Fraser, San Francisco Chronicle

  In Pursuit of the English is a novelist’s account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you’ve probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English. The cast of characters—if that term can be applied to real people—includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing’s question “Don’t you ever like sex?” with “If you’re going to talk dirty, I’m not interested.”

  In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

  “Eloquent…. Wry and ribald…. [Lessing’s] impressive gifts for characterization and dialogue, her skill as a raconteur and her tartly humorous style combine to make In Pursuit of the English readable and amusing.”

  —Orville Prescott, New York Times

  “No other writer, from any continent, has this raceless, classless fellowship com bined with total physical receptiveness…. Mrs. Lessing has always been more than a regional moral messenger; she is a prospector into the minds, spirit and senses of all, imaginatively at home anywhere.”

  —The Times (London)

  “A magnificent book, quite staggering in its penetration of the ordinary working-class Londoner’s nature.”

  —Cyril Dunn, Washington Post

  ALSO BY DORIS LESSING

  NOVELS

  The Grass Is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  The Memoirs of a Survivor

  The Diaries of Jane Somers:

  The Diary of a Good Neighbor

  If the Old Could.

  The Good Terrorist

  The Fifth Child

  Love. Again

  “CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES

  Re: Colonized Planet 5. Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones

  Three. Four and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the
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  Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the

  Sentimental Agents in the

  Volyen Empire

  “CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple From the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  SHORT STORIES

  This Was the Old Chiefs Country

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney

  and Other Stories

  Stories

  African Stories

  The Real Thing: Stories and

  Sketches

  OPERA

  The Making of the

  Representative for Planet 8

  (Music by Philip Glass)

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  NONFICTION

  Particularly Cats

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live

  Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  Particularly Cats … And Rufus

  African Laughter

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin

  The Doris Lessing Reader

  Copyright

  This book was originally published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd. in 1960. First U.S. edition was published by Simon & Schuster in 1961.

  IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH. Copyright © 1960 by Doris Lessing.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03488-5

  First HarperPerennial edition published 1996.

  ISBN 0-06-097629-2

  07 08 09 10 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

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