NF (1957) Going Home Read online

  It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.

  High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to fragments of mud from the wall flopping down on to the floor.

  And if the wall was in a continual state of disintegration and repair, an irregular variegated surface of infinite interest, then the floor was not at all the flat and even surface of convention.

  Long ago, the good, hard surface of dung, mud and blood had been protected by linoleum; and this in its turn had hollowed and worn as the earth beneath had hollowed or heaved because of the working of roots or the decay of old roots. A young tree used to shoot up under my bed every wet season. There was a crack in the mud there; the linoleum began to bulge upwards, and then split; and out came a pale, sickly, whitey-yellowish shoot which immediately turned a healthy green. We cut it off; but it sprouted up once or twice every wet season. As soon as the rains stopped, the shoot sank back, sullen and discouraged until next year, biding its time. One year I decided not to cut it. The first thing every morning I put my head out from under the mosquito net, over the edge of the bed, to see how the shoot was getting along. Very soon it was a small, green bush, pushing up against the wire of the mattress. The next thing, it would have split the mattress as it had split the linoleum. I moved the bed, thinking it would be attractive to have a tree growing in the middle of my bedroom, but my mother would have none of it. She had it chopped down, and a lot of fresh mud laid and stamped hard and flat. Next season the shoot came up at the side between the fresh bit of floor and the old, near the wall. It came pushing up with a watch clutched in its leaves. This was because my father, who had many theories about life, had a theory about watches. Foolish, he said, to buy watches costing 5 or 10 guineas which, being delicate and expensive, were bound to break soon. Better to buy a dozen turnip watches at a time, at 5s. each, from the Army and Navy Stores; and then when they broke it would not matter. He ordered a dozen watches, but they never broke: they were indestructible. As a result we had watches propped all over the house; and I had one by my bed. When it fell into a crack in the mud, I did not bother, because there were plenty more. But it reappeared in the first rains of that year, from the mud of the floor, held in the green arms of the little tree, like a Dali picture.

  The only creatures that were really a threat to this house were the white ants. All that part of the country was full of ant-heaps. They can be 10, 20 feet high. After the rains, a grass-covered peak of earth which has looked dead will suddenly sprout up an extra foot or so overnight of new red granulated earth, like the turrets and pinnacles of a child’s fairy castle.

  A good, hard kick will send the new earth flying and expose a mass of tunnels and galleries leading down far, far into the earth. There is always water under ant-heaps. People digging wells look for a good, old, well-established ant-heap. They follow down the tunnels. Sixty feet, a hundred feet, sometimes deeper, they are bound to come on water.

  There was an ant-heap in front of the house, and another to one side; most of the time the ants remained there, but occasionally they sent outriders into the house.

  On my white bedroom wall, for instance, would appear a red winding gallery, like an artery, irregularly branching. These galleries were wet at first, and granular, because each particle of earth is brought in the mouth of an ant. It is a mistake to wipe these galleries off while they are still wet, for all you achieve is a smear of red earth and crushed ants on the wall. Once dry, they can be easily brushed off, leaving only a faint, pinkish mark on the white. It is exciting to see a new gallery where none existed three hours before, and to shrink yourself ant-size and imagine yourself scurrying along under fragrant tunnels of fresh, wet earth.

  It was the ants, of course, who finally conquered, for when we left that house empty in the bush, it was only a season before the ant-hills sprouted in the rooms themselves, among the quickly sprouting trees, and the red galleries must have covered all the walls and the floor. The rains were heavy that year, beating the house to its knees. And we heard that on the kopje there was no house, just a mound of greyish, rotting thatch, covered all over with red ant-galleries. And then in the next dry season a big fire swept up from the bush at the back, where the kopje fell sharp and precipitous over rocks into the big vlei, and there was nothing left of the house. Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.

  One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.

  Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush—supposing then that the house was still there after all?

  For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live.

  Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.

  It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls—I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.

  One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.

  On the left stretched some lower hills. There appeared a small white vapour glistening in the moonlight in a gap between the peaks. Over the edge of the gap came a wisp of white cloud, a small tendril, curling down. Then the sky on that side was a whirl of moonlit mist, and instead of one curling finger, cloud came pouring down and through the gap like a flood of celestial milk. It sank as it came, covering first the flank of the mountain, then blotting out the lights of the houses on that side. The lights went out swiftly, and the mist came pouring steadily in, and soon half of the city had gone, and the sky on that side was a high bank of white and shining cloud. Then all the city was gone and the ships and the sea, and below a great white floor of moonlit cloud heaved and rose, and over on the right side the stars were dimming. Then there was cloud overhead, and cloud at my feet, rising. The fir trees just bel
ow sank in mist till only their black tops showed. As the cold dampness came up, the trees went.

  It took only ten minutes, from the time that the city lay open and glittering to the time when it had gone, gone completely.

  And so, when this dream began to recur, together with the dream of the heap of red, sinking earth and dead grass with the trees growing through it, I first restored the house, and then forced the mist back, rolled it back off the city and the sea and the lighted ships and back through the gap in the mountains. It took a long time, but at last the city was free and illuminated again.

  3

  On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.

  I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.

  ‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can—if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’

  Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.

  I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.

  At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.

  I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.

  And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.

  The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.

  ‘In short,’ we concluded, ‘we are seeing a process whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’

  But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.

  After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.

  My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone knew about apartheid. South Africa was doomed to race riots, civil war and misery. Central Africa was committed to Partnership and I had much better spend my time, if I insisted on being a journalist, finding out about Partnership.

  But it was not that I wanted to be a journalist, I said; I had to be one, in order to pay my expenses. And besides it would be good for me to be a journalist for a time, a person collecting facts and information, after being a novelist, who has to go inwards to probe out the truth.

  Well, if you are going to be a journalist, said my friends, then wait until you come back from South Africa. In the meantime, let’s go on a jaunt to Umtali.

  That was on a Friday morning, and we would go to Umtali tomorrow. Meanwhile a whole succession of old friends dropped in, either to make it clear how they had matured since I had seen them last, and believed in making haste slowly, or to say that a new wind was blowing in Southern Rhodesia; and things had changed utterly since I left, and segregation and race prejudice were things of the past.

  Then I went downtown to do the shopping in the car, as one does here. Driving along the glossy avenues, between the pretty houses with their patios, their gardens, their servants; driving in a solid mass of reckless, undisciplined cars which half-remembered the old law of each man for himself,
half-paid irritated but erratic attention to traffic lights and policemen—driving along the comfortable streets of my home town, I understood suddenly and for the first time that this was an American small town; it is the town we have all seen in a hundred films about Mom and Pop and their family problems. I do not know why I had not perceived this before. Often, pursuing some character in a story I was writing, or describing an incident, I have thought: But this is American, this is American behaviour. But I had not seen the society as American. It was because I have been hypnotized by the word British.

  Southern Rhodesia is self-consciously British; she came into existence as a British colony, opposed to the Boer-dominated Union of South Africa, although she has taken her political structure from the Union. Her turning north to federate with Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland is an act of repudiation of the Afrikaner Nationalists, an affirmation of being British. Central Africa is British Africa. But even now the British are in the minority among the white people; there are far more Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians; and with all the people together, dark-skinned and white, the numbers of British people are negligible.