NF (1957) Going Home Read online

  It is hot there, very hot and steamy. This is not the high, dry climate of the bushveld; it is tropical, and after a few days there one becomes languid and disinclined to move. I know because I have stayed there for long stretches three times. Because those times were separated by periods of years, I know three Umtalis, and on that day I went back, dropping fast down the mountainside into it, those three towns remained separate from each other and from the town I saw then.

  The first time I was eleven and I had never stayed away from home before except for boarding school. It was in a tiny house at the very bottom of Main Street, which is three miles long; the upper end of Main Street was respectable and rich, but the lower end was poor and near the railway. The house was of wood—wooden walls and floor, and lifted high off the earth on a platform, in the old style. It was in a small, fenced garden, crammed with pawpaw trees, avocado pear trees, mangoes, guavas; and around the fence nasturtiums grew as thick and bright and luxuriant as swamp-flowers. That garden quivered with heat and dampness. Under the thick shade of the mangoes the earth was sticky with fallen, decaying fruit and green with moss. The house was crammed, too; it was a large family; but I cannot remember the other children, only Cynthia, who was fourteen and therefore very grown up in my eyes. The others were all boys; and the two women, Cynthia and her mother, despised the men of the family utterly and all the time. Mrs Millar was a big, dark, ruddy-skinned woman with heavy black hair and black, full eyes. She was like a big laying hen. Cynthia was the same, a dark, big girl, full-bosomed, with fierce red cheeks. The father was a little man, wispy and ineffectual and pathetically humorous, making bad jokes against his wife’s bitter scorn of him because he had a small job as a clerk in a hardware shop. They were gentlefolk, so they said all the time; and this job and what he earned made it impossible to keep up the standards they wanted. And certainly they were very poor. I had always imagined our family was; but my mother’s generous scattiness over money was luckily always too strong for my father’s prudence; so that no matter how he laboured over the accounts, emerging on a Sunday morning with incontrovertible proof that we could not afford this or that, she would look at him with the stubborn wistfulness of a deprived small child and say: ‘Why don’t you get some out of the bank?’ ‘But, damn it, you have to put money into a bank before you can get it out.’ ‘Then get a loan from the Land Bank.’ ‘But we’ve already had a loan; we can’t have any more.’ ‘Nonsense!’ she would say at last with determination. ‘Nonsense!’

  Not so in the Millar household, where Mamma would tell the guilty family the exact cost of the meal they must be thankful they were about to receive—they were religious. Or rather, she and her daughter were. I had imagined I was persecuted by religion, and had rebelled against it; but religion with us never intruded too uncomfortably into practical life.

  But the difference between the Millars and ourselves that made me most uneasy was this insistence on being gentlefolk. It was a word that I had never heard before out of novels.

  Once again, it was the fortunate clash of temperaments between my parents that saved us from it, for while my mother was nothing if not conscious of having come down in the world, my father was oblivious to all such things, and had, in fact, emigrated from England to be rid of the whole business of being respectable. And so, when she was in one of her organizing moods, he would merely listen, with irritable patience, until she had finished, and say: ‘O Lord, old girl, do as you like, but leave me alone.’

  But the little house near the railway lines, which was shaken day and night by the shunting trains, almost under the great water-tanks which dripped and splashed over the mango trees—that house which would have been a perfect setting for one of Somerset Maugham’s tropical dramas was, in fact, saturated with the atmosphere of coy, brave, decaying gentility that finds its finest expression in Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. Yet there were two women in that house to, I think, five males.

  Mother and daughter would sew, knit, patch, darn, sitting together on the verandah, a unit of intense femininity, exchanging confidences in a low voice, while father and sons would hastily slip out of the house, father to the bar, sons to their friends’ houses.

  And when the father returned, fuddled and apologetic, mother and daughter would raise their eyes from their sewing, exchange understanding glances, and let out in unison a deep, loud sigh, before dropping them again to their work, while the little man slunk past.

  I was appalled and fascinated by the talk of the two females, for such confidences were not possible in our house. I would sit, listening, burning with shame, for I was not yet in a position to contribute anything of my own.

  I was there six weeks. At night I used to lie in bed across the tiny room from Cynthia and listen while father and mother argued about money in the room next door. One could hear everything through the wooden wall.

  ‘Poor, poor, poor mother,’ Cynthia would say in a burning passionate whisper.

  I would fall off to sleep, and wake to see her in the light that fell through the window past the moonflowers and the mango trees, leaning up in bed on her elbow, listening, listening. Listening for what? It reminded me of how I used to listen avidly to her talk with her mother. Then a train rumbled in, and stood panting on the rails outside, the water rushed in the tanks, and Cynthia lay down again. ‘Go to sleep, ‘she would hiss in a cross, low voice. ‘Go to sleep at once.’

  Before I slept I would think of my home, the big mud-walled, grass-roofed house on the kopje where the winds came battering and sweeping, and where I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing Chopin and Grieg two rooms off, against the persistent thudding of the tom-tom from the native village down the hill. When I woke the piano would still be sending out its romantic, nostalgic music and the drums still playing. I would imagine how in the compound the people were dancing around the big fire between the little grass-roofed huts while the drummers sat making their interminably repeated and varied rhythms on and on. But the other picture in my mind was not of my mother as she was now, middle-aged and tired, but of an early memory: her long, dark hair knotted low on her neck, bare-shouldered under the light of the candles set at either end of the piano, playing with shut eyes as she, in her turn, remembered something far off and unreachable. And the drums were beating, even then, as long ago as that.

  The drums beat through all the nights of my childhood stronger even than the frogs and the crickets, ultimately stronger even than the piano, for when I woke in the morning with the sun standing over the chrome mountain, a single, tired, indefatigable drum was still tapping down the hill. And there came a time when my mother could not trouble to get the piano tuned.

  But waking in the house near the railway lines, sweating with heat, half-sick with the sweet smell of the decaying fruit and vegetation outside, it was to see Cynthia and her mother standing together in the corner of the room, hands folded, heads bent in prayer. Then, with a deadly look at her husband Mrs Millar would say in her womanly resigned voice, ‘You can’t have bacon and eggs—not on what you earn.’

  I was badly homesick. I hated that house. I longed for my cool, humorous, stoical mother, who might sentimentally play Chopin, but would afterwards slam down the piano lid with a flat: ‘Well, that’s that.’ I wanted, too, to lay certain questions before my father.

  When I got home I went in search of him, managed to distract his attention from whatever philosophical problem was engaging him at the time, and remarked that I had had a lovely time at the Millars’.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, and gave me a long, sideways look.

  ‘They have grace before every meal,’ I said.

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Millar goes to the bar every night and comes home drunk, and Mrs Millar prays for his soul.’

  ‘Does she now?’

  There was a pause, for I was very uncomfortable.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’

  ‘Mrs Millar came on to the verandah one m
orning, and said in a loud voice to Cynthia…’

  ‘Cynthia? Who’s she?’

  ‘Of course you know, she’s been here to stay.’

  ‘Has she? I suppose so. Lord, you don’t mean that girl—very well, go on.’

  ‘She said in a loud voice to Cynthia, “I’ve been praying, Cynthia. O Cynthia, our horrible, horrible bodies!”’

  I was hot all over. Never had anything made me as uncomfortable and wretched as that moment. But my father had shot me a startled look and gone red. He struggled for a moment, then dropped his head on the chair-back and laughed.

  I said: ‘It wasn’t funny. It made me sick.’

  ‘Lord, lord, lord,’ said my father, lifting his head to give me an apologetic, embarrassed look between roars. ‘Lord, I can see the old hen.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, and walked away with dignity.

  I was furious with him for laughing; I had known he would laugh. I had come home a week earlier than was arranged to hear that laugh. And so I was able to put that unpleasant household behind me and forget it. My father could always be relied on in these matters.

  Living down by the railway line, the upper part of the town was represented by three houses where the Millars, mother and daughter, with the painful writhings of inverted snobbery, permitted themselves to be accepted—as they saw it. The inhabitants of the three houses were certainly innocent of the condescension ascribed to them. Living with the Millars, I knew the lower mile of Main Street and its shops, particularly the Indian shops which had cheap cottons and silks from the East. Mrs Millar would send Cynthia and myself up to Shingadia’s for half a yard of satin and a reel of sewing silk, and Cynthia walked proud and slow up Main Street, and into the Indian shop, her eyes busy for signs of the enemy, those girls who bought at the big stores farther up the street, and would certainly despise her if they saw her in Shingadia’s.

  And if one of these envied girls came in sight, as likely as not on her way to Shingadia’s, she would turn to face her, head high, dark eyes burning, waiting to say in the voice of an exiled duchess: ‘I have come to buy mother a yard of crêpe de Chine.’ Then, the encounter over, we would walk back, and I waited for that moment when she would sigh and say: ‘It’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you.’

  Three years later I returned to Umtali to the upper part of the town for a two months’ stay with a childless elderly couple who liked to have young people in the house. And the house by the railway line was part of an old nightmare, for the Millars had gone. White people are always flitting from town to town, as restless as the Africans who move from Reserve to town and back again throughout their lives. For most people are in the Service or on the railways, and must expect to be moved from one part of the country to another; most are in any case afflicted with wanderlust, or they wouldn’t be in the colony at all. The Millars had gone to Bulawayo, a scattered town that does not have a long, central spine of a Main Street shading from small, ugly, poor houses to big, beautiful ones—and what material would those two women have now for their fantasies of proud, persecuted poverty?

  The elderly couple’s house was large and darkened by cedrilatoona trees that stood in clumps all round it, whose glossy fronds of leaves kept up a perpetual susurration day and night, as if one were on a green and murmuring island on a lake. The golden-shower creeper that draped the roof and the walls filled the rooms with its sweet honey-smell; and blocked out the small light that came through the massed trees. And inside, books darkened every room. I came, then, from the house on the kopje into a warm darkness, where Mr Boles, who was a journalist, lay in bed until lunchtime under a heap of newspapers and books; and Mrs Boles lay in a bed opposite sleeping endlessly under a vast silk eiderdown.

  I was not permitted to disturb them until lunchtime; but the night before I’d be given a list of shopping to do by Mrs Boles; and I spent the mornings sauntering up and down Main Street, brilliant with its flame trees and its bordering gardens, visiting all the shops and particularly Shingadia’s, because Mrs Boles who had a thousand cousins, nieces and nephews was always sending them presents; and she would give me an extra pound note and tell me to go and snap up any bargains there might be in town.

  When I knocked at the door of that dark room, at one o’clock, she was sitting up in bed, an enormous mass of loose flesh, with her grey hair straggling, exchanging love-talk with her old husband across the room; she would demand to see what I had bought, and as I spilled flowered muslins, bright cottons and sheaves of shining crêpe de Chine all over the bed, she would snatch them up, hold them to her face and cry: ‘Oh, how beautiful! Oh, how clever of you. Oh, no, I can’t send them away. You must call in Miss Betty and she’ll make you some dresses.’

  Miss Betty, an old, frail English spinster, lived almost entirely off Mrs Boles’s generosity; and in the afternoons, when Mr Boles had gone to the offices of the newspaper he worked for, the three of us stayed in the dim living-room, discussing the materials that lay glimmering and glowing over the floor and the furniture, and how they should be made, and if that would suit cousin Elizabeth, and this niece Jane.

  They were very good to me, that old couple, and I loved them dearly; though it was not until long after that I understood the pathos of Mrs Boles, that gigantic and hideous old woman who had wanted children and could not have them, and who had been beautiful and elegant, and now must direct her passion for pretty clothes and materials towards other people.

  Mr Boles always addressed her in the tenderest tones: ‘My little dove, my little heart, my beautiful girl’ and she spoke to him like a spoilt young bride. Once he saw my incredulous, embarrassed face, and, waiting until she had left the room, took out of a drawer beside his bed an old photograph of an exquisite young woman in full trailing skirts, and a big flowered hat, with the face of a cool young angel. After that, my puritan disapproval of the way they lived (for I knew what my parents would have said of them) vanished; and I could see that that photograph justified the way he sheltered her, protected her, inquired after her headaches and her aches and pains, for she was tacitly an invalid. There was nothing wrong with her save that she ate too much. They fussed and pampered each other’s ailments endlessly, in between discussing what they would have for the next meal: I had never heard such expert attention being given to food; and Mr Boles would send me two miles downtown to a certain butcher on a certain day of the week for a particular cut of meat. He knew everything about meat, as he knew everything about, it seemed, any subject in the world. ‘Facts,’ he would say, looking at me over the top of his spectacles. ‘Facts. You should be ashamed to be so ignorant. If you want to get on—collect facts.’

  All morning in bed he collected facts from books and newspapers piled all over and around and above him. He lived in a cocoon of paper. ‘How many miles from the earth to the moon?’ he would inquire sternly. ‘How many miles is it around the earth? You don’t know. I know you don’t know. Well, read this. Do you know anything about the habits of the termite? Do you understand the chemistry of the soil? Of course not.’ And he thrust into my hands half a dozen books and cross-examined me about them afterwards.

  He wore a hat on top of his long, yellowing white hair, a thick jersey over his pyjamas, and between long, narrow, sarcastic lips was always clenched a pipe.

  ‘My little bird,’ he would say to his hulking old wife. ‘Do you know how many miles from here to Venus?’

  ‘No, my sweetheart, no, my angel, you know I don’t.’

  ‘No, I know.’ And he puffed with satisfaction at his pipe.

  Mrs Boles was content to be stupid; and she would gaze fondly at her clever husband from her bed where she was reading some love-story. One of my duties was to read to her, but I never got farther than half a page, for Mr Boles listened, his long, white moustaches writhing with incredulous scorn, while she gave him nervous glances and my voice faltered to a stop. ‘You cannot fill that child’s mind with that nauseating rubbish.’

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nbsp; ‘No, my heart, no, my dove.’ And she took back the romance from my hand and patiently read it to herself with her weak red-rimmed eyes.

  Mr Boles was an old China hand, and spent many hours enlightening my political ignorance about the Far East. He was Far Eastern expert for the newspaper, and no crisis occurred anywhere beyond the Mediterranean without an illuminating article from him. It was he who greeted the Communist revolution in China with the words: ‘There have always been war-lords in China,’ and he who put Mr Nehru in his place when he became Prime Minister of India with: ‘Familiar as I am with Bombay bazaar agitators…’

  Several years later, in another town, just after I had read a paper to the Left Club on the Chinese Revolution, I got a message from him to go to his office in the newspaper building. I went at once, and found him behind his desk, his long hair on his neck, his long moustaches drooping as usual over thin, cold lips, his hat on his head and scarf around his neck in case of draughts. It was a very hot afternoon just before the rains.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said. I sat, unwillingly, for if I say that at that time I was politically active the phrase can give no idea of the amount of agitation I and my fellow Socialists got through in a week. We considered a day wasted in which we had not been to at least four meetings, after we had done a full day’s work in our respective offices.

  Mr Boles told me a long story about how a group of anarchists had blown up a power station in Japan in, I think, 1905. I listened patiently, critical of the deplorable tactics of these misguided revolutionaries, for I was at that time undergoing a thorough course based on the Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (B).

  When he had finished, I said, puzzled, ‘Well?’

  He was watching my face with cold, narrow, blue eyes.

  ‘I wanted to let you know,’ he said, ‘that we have our eyes on the power-station.’

  Since I was late for a meeting, I thanked him and hurried off; it was some days before I had time to think about what he had said; and even so it was months before it occurred to me that he had been warning me that the CID, because of his vigilance and political nous, considered us likely blowers-up of the Salisbury power-station.