Going Home

They are the most likeable of people: simple, salty, tough, earthy, shrewd and humorous and hospitable. They are also childlike: like a child of seven they cannot understand that their own standards of right or wrong are not immediately acceptable to everyone else. And they are likely to go down to defeat as a nation in the black–white struggle supported by a proud consciousness of being misunderstood by the world in the nobility of their motives. For the self-pity that is always the basis of a false position is in their case half-justified: they feel aggrieved and are right to do so, because the world fastens on them all the guilt for apartheid. But Malan would not have come into power without British votes; and apartheid is only the logical crystallization of the segregation created by Smuts, the Afrikaner who became a spokesman for the British Empire, and his British-dominated United Party. Passes, segregation, farm-prisons, pick-up vans and the industrial colour bar were not introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalists: the system was created by the white people, Afrikaner and British together, and financed by British and American capital. But the Afrikaner has been made the villain of the scene; Smuts was called a great statesman, but Strydom is hissed in the streets when he comes to Britain.

And so the drive towards national isolation and self-sufficiency which is the basis of Afrikaner nationalism is strengthened.

Sooner or later it will be the Afrikaner and the African who will face each other as opponents in the southern tip of the continent. And they are very alike. I have yet to meet an African who does not say that he prefers the Afrikaner as a man to the British. ‘The Afrikaner calls me a Kaffir, he says what he thinks, but he is more humane, he treats me better.’ I have heard that very often.

And inevitably the two people are becoming fast mixed in blood – if one may use that convenient word – in spite of all the laws and the bars and the barriers. There is no sadder or more bizarre sight than to see a group of ‘white South Africans’, each with the marks of mixed descent strong in face and hair and body-build, arguing about the necessity of preserving racial purity.

On an aeroplane in Northern Rhodesia I sat next to a young Afrikaner flying back home. He was immediately recognizable as one, first because of his open, simple face, and next because the marks of mixed parentage were on his hair and his facial structure.

We got into conversation.

‘I am sad today,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know what to do. I’ve just been up to the Copper Belt, and that’s the place for me, man, you can earn money there, not the Kaffir’s wages you get back home now. But if I go to the Copper Belt, man, my heart will break.’

‘But why?’

‘Because of my pigeons. They’re my little sisters. How can I take my fifty pigeons all the way to the Copper Belt? They will be sad there. I’d have to sell them. I wouldn’t like to do that. I’d feel sad all the time.’

‘Perhaps you’d get over it? And you could buy some more pigeons?’

‘How can you say that? That’s not right. No, man, the way I feel now, I’ll have to stay at home, even if I don’t like it.’

I noticed he had broken his thumb.

‘Yes, and that’s another thing. I got that last year. On the job I’m a policeman. A man was beating up a Kaffir. He had no right to do that. The Kaffir hadn’t done anything. So I broke my thumb on him. People shouldn’t go hitting Kaffirs when they haven’t done anything. Well, the next thing was I broke it again. You know how you have to beat up Kaffirs when you arrest them: they don’t tell the truth if you don’t give them a good hiding. But now I keep thinking about my thumb, and I can’t do my work properly. You can’t do the job without your fists. No, I’ll have to get another job. Besides, the police is no good.’

‘You don’t like the work?’

‘Hell, man, it’s not the work. But things are bad now. I know you’ll think I’m saying this because you’re English and I’m trying to make up to you. But it’s God’s truth, I like the English. There’s an Englishman in the office, and he’s fair, and I like him. He treats everyone the same. But our men there, man, but you can’t trust them! They tell you to do something, and then it goes wrong, and then it’s your fault. They don’t stand by you. And they tell on each other all the time. But the Englishman’s going. He’s going back to England, he says. And so I’ll leave, too. I’m not staying where things aren’t fair. Don’t think I mean anything about South Africa; it’s God’s country. Why don’t you come and see it?’

This being after I was proscribed, I said his Government would not let me in and why.

He looked at me long and earnestly. ‘Never seen a commie before,’ he said.

‘There used to be plenty in South Africa before it was illegal.’

‘Never heard of that. Well, look then, tell me, what is it about?’

‘In South Africa, what is important now is that we are against racial inequality.’

His face fell; he was a small boy. ‘Now look, man, hell! I don’t see that.’

‘Sooner or later you’ll have to.’

‘But they’re nothing but children, man! You must know that. Look how they live! It makes me just about sick to go into one of their locations. Besides, I don’t like their colour, I just don’t like it.’

He paused, very serious, wrestling with himself. ‘You think I’ve just been brought up to be like that?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘It’s no good, I don’t see it. Now look here’ – and he turned earnestly towards me – ‘would you let a black man marry your daughter?’

‘If my daughter wanted it.’

He slowly went a dark red. ‘I don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. I just don’t like it.’ A pause. ‘Then I can see why they didn’t let you in, man. Women shouldn’t go around saying things like that. No, you mustn’t talk like that, I don’t like to hear it.’ His face slowly went back to normal. Then he said: ‘But I’ve enjoyed talking. I always want to know about these things. I’ve never been out of South Africa before. If I can leave my little pigeons and get up to the Copper Belt and earn some money, then I want to come to England. They say that Kaffirs are just like everybody else there?’

‘Just like everybody else.’

‘I don’t think I should like to see that. It wouldn’t seem right to me. But hell, man, that means they can go with the women? Sorry, talking like this, but it’s not personal. But you can’t have them going with the women. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t like …’

This is the stock South African conversation; and it goes on just as if nothing had happened. But what is happening is that the poorer of the white people are becoming more and more like the poorer of the Africans.

In the Lusaka airport there was a five-hour wait for the connection south to Salisbury.

Sitting in the little garden were a group of white people, toasting themselves in the sun, carefully accumulating pigment under their precious white skins.

The mystiques of sun-tanning are becoming as complicated and irrational as those of food and sex. What could be odder than to see people whose very existence depends on their paleness of skin deliberately darkening themselves on the preserved ‘white’ beaches of the coasts, or on the banks of ‘white’ swimming baths? But in a country where anyone who works in the open must become dark-skinned, and where it is impossible to distinguish between deep sunburn and the skin of a coloured person, one acquires a mysterious sixth sense that tells one immediately if a person is ‘white’ or not.

Having been in Britain for so long, I had lost this sense; and, sitting in a café in Bulawayo, I was pleased to see a group of people come in who had dark brown skins. The spirit of Partnership, I thought, was really relaxing the colour bar. A few minutes later a man came in who I thought was indistinguishable from those already sitting there. He went to sit at a table by himself. At once the woman behind the counter came over and said: ‘You know you are not allowed to come in here.’ He got up and went out without a word. It seemed that the first group were Italians.

In 1949, on the boat coming to Britain, where most of the passengers were elderly ladies playing bridge and knitting, were two attractive young women. They did not mix with the rest at all, were spoken of as ‘Durban society girls’. One was a tall, slim, pale creature with smooth, dark hair and intelligent, dark eyes kept deliberately languid. The other was a plump little yellow-head, not pretty, but as it were professionally vivacious. They were American in style, as most South African girls are: very well-kept, self-possessed, independent.

I got to know the cheerful little one, who told me that her friend was called Camellia. ‘She’s done well for herself if you like. She was just an ordinary secretary, working in the office, but the boss’s son married her. Then he got killed in an air crash. She’s married into one of the oldest families in Durban. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a damn for anybody.’ It seemed that this quality of not giving a damn was the bond between the girls; for Camellia had taken her typist friend Janet with her into society. Janet had consequently also done well for herself: she was engaged to a cousin in the same family. It seemed that the young widow had gone to Uncle Piet, executor of the estate, and said: ‘I’m fed up with life. I want a holiday in Europe.’

Janet said: ‘That silly old bugger Uncle Piet said she had a duty to her position in society, and she should set an example, and she wasn’t to go for more than four months. But he gave her a thousand. So that’s how I came too. She’s generous, Camellia is. And it’s not that she’s got all the money she wants. Actually she hasn’t got any money. Her husband didn’t know he was going to be killed, and anyway he was under age. They both were. When they got married the papers called it “the wedding of the beautiful children”. Because he was good-looking. So Camellia doesn’t get any money except what Uncle Piet lets her have, because she hasn’t any money by will. But when Camellia said I must come with her, Uncle Piet didn’t like it. He said it was my duty to stay with my fi-ance. But see the world before you get tied down with kids, that’s what I say.’

The two girls spent all day lying side by side in two deck chairs in the shade, refused to take part in the deck-sports, and at night did the few young men there were a favour by dancing with them. At least, this was Camellia’s attitude; though I think the little one would have liked to be less aloof.

Two years later I saw them in Trafalgar Square, sitting on the edge of a fountain. Camellia was with a man who was probably a West Indian; and Janet was tagging along. This set-up intrigued me for some days. Had they gone home to collect more money from Uncle Piet and then come back to Britain again? What had happened to Janet’s eligible fi-ance? And above all, how could a Durban society girl, even if she didn’t give a damn, get herself involved with a Negro? As I was on a bus when I saw the group, unfortunately there was no chance of finding out.

That was in 1951. In 1953 I was walking along the edge of the sea in the south of France, and there was the young man I had seen in Trafalgar Square with an extremely beautiful black girl. They were sitting side by side on a rock, arms and legs inextricably mixed, and on the sand watching them was Janet, who was her normal colour. Then I saw that the beautiful Negress was in fact Camellia. All that was visible of her – and she was wearing a minute red bikini – was burned a very dark bronze.

I went up to Janet and asked her how she did.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing well for yourself since I saw you last.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘And how goes it with you?’

She looked at the couple on the rock. No doubt but that she was very upset. ‘It’s all very well,’ she said, ‘my mind is much broader since I came to Europe, but what am I to do? Tell me that?’

‘I can see your problem,’ I said. ‘But what happened to your fiancé?’

‘Which fiancé?’ she said, and giggled. ‘No, it’s not that. I can look after myself, but it’s Camellia. After we were here that time, we got a letter from Uncle Piet, asking when we were coming back. Camellia wrote and said she was still getting over her sad loss, so he sent her some more money. Actually, we were getting some culture. After all, you come to Europe to get some culture. South Africa has got everything, but it isn’t very cultured. So we got mixed up in artistic circles. I made Camellia do it, because at first she didn’t want to. There were coloured people, and she didn’t like that. But then she met Max and he and she quarrelled all the time. Besides, it intrigued her, you know how it is, you come here from South Africa and they just laugh at you. Max was always laughing at Camellia. The next thing was, my fi-ance came over, and said it was time I came home. But my ideas had changed. I said to him: “Now that I have been around a bit I am not sure that you and I are suited. My mind is much broader than it was.” So we broke it off and he went home.

‘Then Camellia and Max came here for a holiday. She said she couldn’t stick it without any sun any longer. She started lying about in the sun. And at home she never goes out without a big hat, and even gloves if the sun is hot, because she is so proud of her skin. I told her: “You are crazy to ruin your skin.” And Max said to her that the way everybody in Europe goes south to get sunburned every summer is an unconscious tribute to the superiority of the dark people over the white people. He said that a hundred years ago no one in Europe got sunburned. Max is very well educated and all that. But Camellia got mad, and they quarrelled badly, and so she and I went home. Camellia tried to settle down. Piet wanted her to marry cousin Tom to keep everything in the family. But Camellia said she wanted to go away to make up her mind about marrying Tom. So we both of us came back to England. Camellia met Max straight away. He is the son of a rich family from the Gold Coast. Did you know there were rich families among the natives in the Gold Coast? There are. He is a lawyer. Then they made it up and came here again for a holiday and when she came to England she might just as well have been born in the location. Just look at her.’

‘Luckily,’ I said, ‘there aren’t any locations here, so it doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, but now Uncle Piet has written saying that if she doesn’t go home before Christmas he will no longer consider her one of the family. No money, that means. And so she is going back. I’m taking her. I promised Uncle Piet I would take her. Next month. She and Max have decided that she would not be happy in the Gold Coast. For about one week they decided to get married, believe it or not. Then Max said she has not got the sense of social responsibility he wants in a wife – can you beat it? And she said that as far as she was concerned, he was primitive. They quarrelled, I can tell you!’

‘So it has all turned out well in the end,’ I said.

‘Yes, but how can I take her back like that? The boat goes in a month. She says she is going to stay here until it goes. Everyone will think she’s a Kaffir, looking like that. I can’t understand her. The magazines used to call her the girl with the skin like petals. Actually Camellia was her christened name, believe it or not, but she was proud of them calling her that, even though she pretended she didn’t give a damn.’

‘There are bleaching creams,’ I said.

Janet began laughing. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said, and admittedly she sounded not far off tears. ‘But if I take her back like that, Uncle Piet will blame me. And I’m going to marry a nice boy who is one of the family. I said to Camellia, “If you had fair hair,” I said to her, “then it wouldn’t matter. But you’re crazy with your dark hair to have such dark skin.”’

‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.

‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’

And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.

On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.

In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.

Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’

This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.

But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.

‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’

‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’

She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’

‘Jolly good,’ I said.

‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.

‘And Caroline?’ I asked.

‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’

‘And Janet?’

‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’

Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.

‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’

‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.

‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’

2

Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing – not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.

I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting – all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other – confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.

The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.

To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.

But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.

The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.

I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls – even parks and gardens – are an urban shell.