The Golden Notebook

For the purposes of jokes like these, Ted, Jimmy and Paul despised the Colony so much they knew nothing about it. But of course, they were extremely well-informed.

It was about seven in the evening, and dinner at the Gainsborough was imminent. Fried pumpkin, stewed beef, stewed fruit.

‘Let’s go down and have a look at the place,’ said Ted. ‘Now. We can have a pint and be back to catch the bus to camp.’ He made the suggestion with his usual enthusiasm; as if the Mashopi hotel was certain to turn out the most beautiful experience life had yet offered us.

We looked at Willi. There was a meeting that night, run by the Left Club, then at its zenith. We were all expected to be there. We had never, not once, defected from duty. But Willi agreed, casually, as if there were nothing remarkable in it: ‘That’s something we could very well do. Mrs James’ pumpkin can be eaten by someone else for this one night.’

Willi ran a cheap fifth-hand car. We all five of us got into it and drove down to Mashopi, about sixty miles away. I remember it was a clear but oppressive night—the stars thick and low, with the heavy glitter of approaching thunder. We drove between kopjes that were piles of granite boulders, characteristic of that part of the country. The boulders were charged with heat and electricity, so that blasts of hot air, like soft fists, came on to our faces as we passed the kopjes.

We reached the Mashopi hotel about eight-thirty, and found the bar blazing with light and packed with the local farmers. It was a small bright place, shining from polished wood, and the polished black cement floor. As Paul had said, there was a well-used darts board and a shove-halfpenny. And behind the bar stood Mr Boothby, six feet tall, portly, his stomach protruding, his back straight as a wall, his heavy face with its network of liquor-swollen veins dominated by a pair of cool, shrewd prominent eyes. He remembered Paul from midday and enquired how the repairs to the aircraft were progressing. It had not been damaged; but Paul began on a long story how a wing had been struck by lightning and he had descended to the tree-tops by parachute, his instructor clutched under his arm—so manifestly untrue, that Mr Boothby looked uneasy from the first word. And yet Paul told it with such earnest, deferential grace that it wasn’t until he concluded, ‘Mine is not to reason why; mine is but to fly and die’—wiping away a mock-gallant tear, that Mr Boothby let out a small reluctant grunt of laughter and suggested a drink. Paul had expected the drink to be on the house—a reward for a hero, so to speak; but Mr Boothby held out his hand for the money with a long narrowed stare, as if to say: ‘Yes, I know it’s not a joke, and you’d have made a fool of me if you could.’ Paul paid, with good grace and continued the conversation. He came over to us, beaming, a few minutes later to say that Mr Boothby had been a sergeant in the BSA Police; that he had married his wife on leave in England, and she had worked behind the bar in a pub; that they had a daughter aged eighteen, and they had been running this hotel for eleven years. ‘And very admirably too, if I may say so,’ we had heard Paul say. ‘I very much enjoyed my lunch today.’

‘But it’s nine o’clock,’ said Paul, ‘and the dining-room is closing, and mine host didn’t offer to feed us. So I’ve failed. We shall starve. Forgive my failure.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Willi. He went over to Mr Boothby, ordered whisky, and within five minutes had succeeded in getting the dining-room opened, especially for us. I don’t know how he did it. To begin with, he was such a bizarre note in this bar full of sun-burned khaki-clad farmers and their dowdy wives that the eyes of everyone had been returning to him, again and again, ever since he came in. He was wearing an elegant cream shantung suit, and his hair shone black under the strident lights, and his face was pale and urbane. He said, in his over-correct English, so unmistakably German, that he and his good friends had travelled all the way from town to taste the Mashopi food they had heard so much about, and he was sure that Mr Boothby would not disappoint him. He spoke with exactly the same arrogant hidden cruelty that Paul had used in telling the story about the parachute descent, and Mr Boothby stood silent, staring coldly at Willi, his great hands unmoving on the bar counter. Willi then calmly took out his wallet and produced a pound note. I don’t suppose anyone had dared to tip Mr Boothby for years. Mr Boothby did not at once reply. He slowly and deliberately turned his head and his eyes became more prominent still as he narrowed them on the monetary possibilities of Paul, Ted and Jimmy, all standing with large tankards in their hands. He then remarked: ‘I’ll see what my wife can do,’ and left the bar, leaving Willi’s pound note on the counter. Willi was meant to take it back; but he left it there, and came over to us. ‘There is no difficulty,’ he announced.

Paul had already engaged the attention of the daughter of a farmer. She was about sixteen, pretty, pudgy, wearing a flounced flowered muslin dress. Paul was standing in front of her, his tankard poised high in one hand, and he was remarking in his light pleasant voice: ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you ever since I came into this bar, that I haven’t seen a dress like yours since I was at Ascot three years ago.’ The girl was hypnotized by him. She was blushing. But I think that in a moment she would have understood he was being insolent. But now Willi laid his hand on Paul’s arm and said: ‘Come on. All that will do later.’

We went out on to the verandah. Across the road stood gum-trees, their leaves glistening with moonlight. A train stood hissing out steam and water on to the rails. Ted said in a low passionate voice: ‘Paul, you’re the best argument I’ve ever known for shooting the entire upper-class to be rid of the lot of you.’ I instantly agreed. This was by no means the first time this had happened. About a week before Paul’s arrogance had made Ted so angry he had gone off, white and sick-looking, saying he would never speak to Paul again. ‘Or Willi—you are two of a kind.’ It had taken hours of persuasion on my part and Maryrose’s to bring back Ted into the fold. Yet now Paul said, lightly: ‘She’s never heard of Ascot and when she finds out she’ll be flattered,’ and all Ted said was, after a long pause: ‘No, she won’t. She won’t.’ And then a silence, while we watched the rippling silver leaves, and then: ‘What the hell. You’ll never understand it as long as you live, either of you. And I don’t care.’ The Idon’t care was in a tone I had never heard from Ted, almost frivolous. And he laughed. I had never heard him laugh like that. I felt bad, at sea—because Ted and I had always been allies in this battle, and now I was deserted.

The main block of the hotel stood directly by the main road, and consisted of the bar and the dining-room with the kitchens behind it. There was a verandah along the front supported by wooden pillars, up which plants grew. We sat on benches in silence, yawning, suddenly exhausted and very hungry. Soon Mrs Boothby, summoned from her own house by her husband, let us into the dining-room and shut the doors again so that travellers might not come in and demand food. This was one of the Colony’s main roads, and always full of cars. Mrs Boothby was a large, full-bodied woman, very plain, with a highly-coloured face and tightly-crimped colourless hair. She wore tight corsets, and her buttocks shelved out abruptly, and her bosom was high like a shelf in front. She was pleasant, kindly, anxious to oblige, but dignified. She apologized, that as we were so late, she could not serve a full dinner, but she would do her best. Then, with a nod and a good night, she left us to the waiter, who was sulky at being kept in so long after his proper hours. We ate plates of good thick roast beef, roast potatoes, carrots. And afterwards, apple pie and cream and the local cheese. It was English pub food, cooked with care. The big dining-room was silent. All the tables gleamed with readiness for tomorrow’s breakfast. The windows and doors were hung with heavy floral linen. Headlights from the passing cars continually lightened the linen, obliterating the pattern, so that the reds and blues of the flowers glowed out very bright when the dazzle of light had swept on and up the road towards the city. We were all sleepy and not very talkative. But I felt better after a while, because Paul and Willi, as usual, were treating the waiter as a servant, ordering him about and making demands, and suddenly Ted came to himself, and began talking to the man as a human being—and with even more warmth than usual, so I could see he was ashamed of his moment on the verandah. While Ted made enquiries about the man’s family, his work, his life, offering information about himself, Paul and Willi simply ate, as always on these occasions. They had made their position clear long ago. ‘Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?’ ‘Yes,’ Ted had said. ‘Then I can’t help you,’ Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy was demanding more to drink. He was already drunk; he got drunk more quickly than anyone I’ve known. Soon Mr Boothby came in and said that as travellers we were entitled to drink—making it plain why we had been allowed to eat so late in the first place. But instead of the hard drinks he wanted us to order, we asked for wine, and he brought us chilled white Cape wine. It was very good wine; and we did not want to drink the raw Cape brandy Mr Boothby brought us but we did drink it, and then some more wine. And then Willi announced that we were all coming down next week-end, and could Mr Boothby arrange rooms for us. Mr Boothby said it was no trouble at all—offering us a bill that we had difficulty in raising the money to settle.

Willi had not asked any of us if we were free to spend the week-end in Mashopi, but it seemed a good idea. We drove back through the now chilly moonlight, the mist lying cold and white along the valleys, and it was very late and we were all rather tight. Jimmy was unconscious. When we got into town it was too late for the three men to get back to camp; so they took my room at the Gainsborough, and I went into Willi’s. On such occasions they used to get up very early, about four, and walk to the edge of the little town, and wait for a lift that would take them out to the camp where they all had to start flying about six, when the sun rose.

And so the next week-end we all went down to Mashopi. Willi and myself. Maryrose. Ted, Paul and Jimmy. It was late on Friday night, because we had a Party discussion on the ‘line’. As usual it was how to draw the African masses into militant action. The discussion was acrimonious in any case because of the official split—which did not prevent us from considering ourselves a unit for this particular evening. There were about twenty people, and the end of it was that while we all agreed the existing ‘line’ was ‘correct’—we also agreed we weren’t getting anywhere.

When we got into the car with our suitcases or kitbags, we were all silent. We were silent all the way out of the suburbs. Then the argument about the ‘line’ began again—between Paul and Willi. They said nothing that hadn’t been said at length, in the meeting, but we all listened, hoping I suppose, for some fresh idea that would lead us out of the tangle we were in. The ‘line’ was simple and admirable. In a colour-dominated society like this, it was clearly the duty of socialists to combat racialism. Therefore, ‘the way forward’ must be through a combination of progressive white and black vanguards. Who were destined to be the white vanguard? Obviously, the trade unions. And who the black vanguard? Clearly, the black trade unions. At the moment there were no black trade unions, for they were illegal and the black masses were not developed yet for illegal action. And the white trade unions, jealous of their privileges, were more hostile to the Africans than any other section of the white population. So our picture of what ought to happen, must happen in fact, because it was a first principle that the proletariat was to lead the way to freedom, was not reflected anywhere in reality. Yet the first principle was too sacred to question. Black nationalism was, in our circles (and this was true of the South African Communist Party) a right-wing deviation, to be fought. The first principle, based as it was on the soundest humanist ideas, filled us full of the most satisfactory moral feelings.

I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound. Because it is certainly a wound—I, like thousands of others can’t remember our time in or near ‘The Party’ without a terrible dry anguish. Yet that pain is like the dangerous pain of nostalgia, its first cousin and just as deadly. I’ll go on with this when I can write it straight, not in that tone.

I remember Maryrose put an end to the argument by remarking: ‘But you aren’t saying anything that you didn’t say earlier.’ That stopped it. She often did this, she had a capacity for silencing us all. Yet the men patronized her, they thought nothing of her capacity for political thought. It was because she could not, or would not, use the jargon. But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi’s, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.

Now she said: ‘There must be something wrong somewhere, because if not, we wouldn’t have to spend hours and hours discussing it like this.’ She spoke with confidence; but now that the men did not reply—and she felt their tolerance of her, she grew uneasy and appealed: ‘I’m not saying it right, but you see what I mean…’ Because she had appealed, the men were restored, and Willi said benevolently: ‘Of course you say it right. Anyone as beautiful as you can’t say it wrong.’

She was sitting near me, and she turned her head in the dark of the car to smile at me. We exchanged that smile, very often. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said, and put her head on my shoulder and went off to sleep like a little cat.

We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organizing meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytizing. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back—for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her The Golden Bough because, ‘when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.’ She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: ‘I’ll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.’ (They didn’t strike me at the time, though.)

We had all been living at this pitch for over two years—I think it’s possible we were all slightly mad out of sheer exhaustion.

Ted began to sing, to keep himself awake; and Paul, in a completely different voice from the one he had used in the discussion with Willi, started on a whimsical fantasy about what would happen in an imaginary white-settled Colony when the Africans revolted. (This was nearly a decade before Kenya and the Mau Mau.) Paul described how ‘two-men-and-a-half’ (Willi protested against the reference to Dostoevsky, whom he considered a reactionary writer) worked for twenty years to bring the local savages to a realization of their position as a vanguard. Suddenly a half-educated demagogue who had spent six months at the London School of Economics created a mass movement overnight, on the slogan: ‘Out with the Whites’. The two-men-and-a-half, responsible politicians, were shocked by this, but it was too late—the demagogue denounced them as being in the pay of the whites. The whites, in a panic, put the demagogue and the two-men-and-a-half into prison on some trumped-up charge; and, left leaderless, the black masses took to the forests and the kopjes and became guerrilla fighters. ‘As the black regiments were slowly defeated by the white regiments, dozens of nice clean-minded highly educated boys like us, brought all the way out from England to maintain law and order, they slowly succumbed to black magic, and the witch-doctors. This nasty un-Christian behaviour very properly alienated all right-minded people away from the black cause, and the nice clean boys like us, in a fury of moral condemnation beat them up, tortured them, and hanged them. Law and order won. The whites let the two-men-and-a-half out of prison, but hanged the demagogue. A minimum of democratic rights were announced for the black populace but the two-men-and-a-half, etc., etc., etc.’

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognize it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.) He went on: ‘There is another possibility. Suppose that the black armies win? There’s only one thing an intelligent nationalist leader can do, and that is to strengthen nationalist feeling and develop industry. Has it occurred to us, comrades, that it will be our duty, as progressives, to support nationalist states whose business it will be to develop all those capitalist unegalitarian ethics we hate so much? Well, has it? Because I see it, yes, I can see it in my crystal ball—but we are going to have to support it all. Oh, yes, yes, because there’ll be no alternative.’

‘You need a drink,’ Willi remarked at this point.

The bars were all closed by this time in the roadside hotels, so Paul went to sleep. Maryrose was asleep. Jimmy was asleep. Ted remained awake beside Willi in the front seat, whistling some aria or other. I don’t think he had been listening to Paul—when he whistled bits of music or sang it was always a sign of disapproval.

Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.

When we reached the hotel it was all dark. A sleepy servant waited on the verandah to take us to our rooms. The bedroom block was built a couple of hundred yards from the dining-room and bar block, on a slope at the back. There were twenty rooms under a single roof, built back to back, verandahs on either side, ten rooms to a verandah. The rooms were cool and pleasant in spite of having no cross ventilation. There were electric fans and large windows. Four rooms had been allotted to us. Jimmy went in with Ted, I with Willi; and Maryrose and Paul had a room each. This arrangement was afterwards confirmed; or rather, since the Boothbys never said anything, Willi and I always shared a room at the Mashopi hotel. We none of us woke until long after breakfast. The bar was open and we drank a little, mostly in silence, and had lunch, almost in silence, remarking from time to time how odd it was we should feel so tired. The lunches at the hotel were always excellent, quantities of cold meats and every imaginable kind of salad and fruit. We all went to sleep again. The sun was already going down when Willi and I woke and had to wake the others. And we were in bed again half an hour after dinner was over. And the next day, Sunday, was almost as bad. That first week-end was, in fact, the most pleasant we spent there. We all were in a tranquillity of extreme fatigue. We hardly drank, and Mr Boothby was disappointed in us. Willi was particularly silent. I think it was that week-end that he decided to withdraw from politics, or at least as far as he could, and devote himself to study. As for Paul, he was being genuinely simple and pleasant with everyone, particularly Mrs Boothby, who had taken a fancy to him.

We drove back to town very late on the Sunday because we did not want to leave the Mashopi hotel. We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I remember Ted saying: ‘Look at us all sitting here, with not a word to say. It’s a dangerous place, Mashopi. We’ll come here, week-end after week-end and hibernate in all this beer and moonlight and good food. Where will it all end, I ask you?’

We did not return for a month. We had all understood how tired we were, and I think we were frightened what might happen if we let the tension of tiredness snap. It was a month of very hard work. Paul, Jimmy and Ted were finishing their training and flew every day. The weather was good. There was a great deal of peripheral political activity like lectures, study groups and survey work. But ‘the Party’ only met once. The other sub-group had lost five members. It is interesting that on the one occasion we all met we fought bitterly until nearly morning; but for the rest of the month we were meeting personally all the time, and with good feeling, to discuss details of the peripheral work we were responsible for. Meanwhile our group continued to meet in the Gainsborough. We made jokes about the Mashopi hotel and its sinister relaxing influence. We used it as a symbol for every sort of luxury, decadence and weakmindedness. Our friends who had not been there, but who knew it was an ordinary roadside hotel said we were mad. A month after our visit there was a long week-end, from Thursday night to the following Wednesday—in the Colony they took their holidays seriously; and we made up a party to go again. It consisted of the original six and Ted’s new protégé, Stanley Lett from Manchester, for whose sake he later failed himself as a pilot. And Johnnie, a jazz pianist, Stanley’s friend. We also arranged that George Hounslow should meet us there. We got ourselves there by car and by train and by the time the bar closed on the Thursday night it was clear that this week-end would be very different from the last.

The hotel was full of people for the long week-end. Mrs Boothby had opened an annexe of an extra dozen rooms. There were to be two big dances, one public and one private, and already there was an air of pleasant dislocation of ordinary life. When our party sat down to dinner very late, a waiter was decorating the corners of the dining-room with coloured paper and strings of light bulbs; and we were served with an especial ice pudding made for the following night. And there was an emissary from Mrs Boothby to ask if the ‘airforce boys’ would mind helping her decorate the big room tomorrow. The messenger was June Boothby, and it was clear she had come out of curiosity to see the boys in question, probably because her mother had talked of them. But it was equally clear she was not impressed. A good many Colonial girls took one look at the boys from England and dismissed them for ever as sissy and wet and soft. June was such a girl. That evening she stayed just long enough to deliver the message and to hear Paul’s over-polite delight in accepting ‘on behalf of the airforce’ her mother’s kind invitation. She went out again at once. Paul and Willi made a few jokes about the marriageable daughter, but it was in the spirit of their jest about ‘Mr and Mrs Boothby, the publican and his wife’. For the rest of that week-end, and the succeeding week-ends they ignored her. They apparently considered her so plain that they refrained from mentioning her out of a sense of pity, or perhaps even—though neither of these men showed much sign of this emotion generally—a sense of chivalry. She was a tall, big-bodied girl, with great red clumsy arms and legs. Her face was high-coloured, like her mother’s; she had the same colourless hair prinked around her full clumsy-featured face. She had not one feature or attribute with charm. But she did have a sulky bursting prowling sort of energy, because she was in that state so many young girls go through—a state of sexual obsession that can be like a sort of trance. When I was fifteen, still living in Baker Street with my father, I spent some months in that state, so that now I can’t walk through that area without remembering, half-amused, half-embarrassed, an emotional condition which was so strong it had the power to absorb into it pavements, houses, shop windows. What was interesting about June was this: surely nature should have arranged matters so that the men she met must be aware of what afflicted her. Not at all. That first evening Maryrose and I involuntarily exchanged glances and nearly laughed out aloud from recognition and amused pity. We did not, because we also understood that the so obvious fact was not obvious to the men and we wanted to protect her from their laughter. All the women in the place were aware of June. I remember sitting one morning on the verandah with Mrs Lattimore, the pretty red-haired woman who flirted with young Stanley Lett, and June came into sight prowling blindly under the gum-trees by the railway lines. It was like watching a sleep-walker. She would take half a dozen steps, staring across the valley at the piled blue mountains, lift her hands to her hair, so that her body, tightly outlined in bright red cotton showed every straining line and the sweat patches dark under the armpits—then drop her arms, her fists clenched at her sides. She would stand motionless, then walk on again, pause, seem to dream, kick at the cinders with the toe of a high white sandal, and so on, slowly, till she was out of sight beyond the sun-glittering gum-trees. Mrs Lattimore let out a deep rich sigh, laughed her weak indulgent laugh, and said: ‘My God, I wouldn’t be a girl again for a million pounds. My God, to go through all that again, not for a million million.’ And Maryrose and I agreed. Yet, although to us every appearance of this girl was so powerfully embarrassing, the men did not see it and we took care not to betray her. There is a female chivalry, woman for woman, as strong as any other kind of loyalty. Or perhaps it was we didn’t want brought home to us the deficiencies of imagination of our own men.

June spent most of her time on the verandah of the Boothby house which was a couple of hundred yards to one side of the hotel. It was built on ten-foot-deep foundations away from the ants. Its verandah was deep and cool, white-painted, and had creepers and flowers everywhere. It was extraordinarily bright and pretty, and here June lay on an old cretonne-covered sofa listening to the portable gramophone, hour after hour, inwardly fashioning the man who would be permitted to deliver her from her sleep-walking state. And a few weeks later the image had become strong enough to create the man. Maryrose and I were sitting on the hotel verandah when a lorry stopped on its way down East, and out got a great lout of a youth with massive red legs and sun-heated arms the size of ox-thighs. June came prowling down the gravelled path from her father’s house, kicking at the gravel with her sharp sandals. A pebble scattered to his feet as he walked to the bar. He stopped and gazed at her. Then, looking repeatedly over his shoulder, with a blank, almost hypnotized glance, he entered the bar. June followed. Mr Boothby was serving Jimmy and Paul with gins-and-tonic and talking about England. He took no notice of his daughter, who sat in a corner and posed herself, looking dreamily out past Maryrose and myself into the hot morning dust and glitter. The youth took his beer and sat along the bench about a yard from her. Half an hour later, when he climbed back into his lorry June was with him. Maryrose and I suddenly and at the same moment burst into fits of helpless laughter and we only stopped ourselves when Paul and Jimmy looked out of the bar to find out what the joke was. A month later June and the boy were officially engaged, and it was only then that everyone became aware that she was a quiet, pleasant and sensible girl. The look of drugged torpor had gone completely from her. It was only then that we realized how irritated Mrs Boothby had been because of her daughter’s state. There was something over-gay, over-relieved in the way she accepted her help in the hotel, became friends with her again, discussed plans for the wedding. It was almost as if she had felt guilty at how irritated she had been. And perhaps this long irritation was the part cause of her later losing her temper and behaving so unjustly.

Shortly after June had left us on that first night, Mrs Boothby came in. Willi asked her to sit down and join us. Paul hastened to add his invitation. Both spoke in what seemed to the rest of us an exaggeratedly, offensively polite way. Yet the last time she had been with Paul, on the week-end we had all been so tired, he had been simple and without arrogance, talking to her about his father and mother, about ‘home’. Though of course, his England and hers were two different countries.

The joke among us was that Mrs Boothby had a weakness for Paul. We, none of us, really believed it; if we had we wouldn’t have joked—or I hope very much that we wouldn’t. For at this early stage we liked her very much. But Mrs Boothby was certainly fascinated by Paul. Yet she was also fascinated by Willi. And precisely because of the quality we hated in them both—the rudeness, the arrogance that underlay their cool good manners.

It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again. If there was a woman the rest of us found difficult, whom we humoured, whom we made allowances for, Willi would say: ‘You just don’t know anything, what she needs is a damned good hiding.’ (The ‘good hiding’ was a Colonial phrase, usually used by the whites thus: ‘What that kaffir needs is a damned good hiding’—but Willi had appropriated it for general use.) I remember Maryrose’s mother, a dominating neurotic woman who had sapped all the vitality out of the girl, a woman of about fifty, as vigorous and fussy as an old hen. For Maryrose’s sake we were polite, we accepted her when she came bustling after her daughter into the Gainsborough. When she was there Maryrose sank into a state of listless irritation, a nervous exhaustion. She knew she ought to fight her mother, but did not have the moral energy. This woman, whom we were prepared to be bored by, to humour, Willi cured in half a dozen words. She had come into the Gainsborough one evening and found us all sitting around the deserted dining-room talking. She said loudly: ‘So there you all are as usual. You ought to be in bed.’ And she was just about to sit down and join us, when Willi, without raising his voice, but letting those spectacles of his glitter at her, said: ‘Mrs Fowler.’ ‘Yes, Willi? Is that you again?’ ‘Mrs Fowler, why do you come here chasing after Maryrose and making such a nuisance of yourself?’ She gasped, coloured, but remained standing by the chair she had been about to sit down in, staring at him. ‘Yes,’ said Willi, calmly. ‘You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense.’ Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs Fowler, after a moment’s silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father. And it was not only Mrs Fowler and the woman who owned the Gainsborough.

Now it was Mrs Boothby, who was not at all the bully who seeks a bully stronger than herself. Nor was she insensitive about intruding herself. And yet, even after she must have understood with her nerves, if not her intelligence—she was not an intelligent woman—that she was being bullied, she would come back again and again for more. She did not succumb into flustered satisfaction at having been ‘given a hiding’, like Mrs Fowler, or get coy and girlish like Mrs James at the Gainsborough; she would listen patiently, and argue back, engage herself so to speak with the surface of the talk, ignoring the underlying insolence, and in this way she sometimes even shamed Willi and Paul back into courtesy. But in private sometimes I am sure she must sometimes have flushed up, clenching her fists, and muttering: ‘Yes, I’d like to hit them. Yes, I should have hit him when he said that.’

That evening Paul almost at once started on one of his favourite games—parodying the Colonial clichés to the point where the Colonial in question must become aware he or she was being made fun of. And Willi joined in.

‘Your cook has, of course, been with you for years—would you like a cigarette?’

‘Thank you, my dear, but I don’t smoke. Yes, he’s a good boy, I must say that for him, he’s always been very loyal.’

‘He’s almost one of the family, I should think?’

‘Yes, I think of him like that. And he’s very fond of us, I’m sure. We’ve always treated him fair.’

‘Perhaps not so much as a friend as a child?’ (This was Willi.) ‘Because they are nothing but great big children.’

‘Yes, that’s true. They’re just children when you really understand them. They like to be treated the way you’d treat a child—firm, but right. Mr Boothby and I believe in treating the blacks fair. It’s only right.’

‘But on the other hand, you mustn’t let them take advantage of you,’ said Paul. ‘Because if you do, they lose all respect.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say that, Paul, because most of you English boys have all kinds of fancy ideas about the kaffirs. But it’s true. They have to know there’s a line they must never step over.’ And so on and so on and so on.

It wasn’t until Paul said—he was sitting in his favourite pose—tankard poised, his blue eyes fixed winningly on hers: ‘And, of course, there’s centuries of evolution between them and us, they’re nothing but baboons really,’ that she blushed and looked away. Baboons was a word already too crude for the Colony, although even five years before it was acceptable, and even in the newspaper leaders. (Just as the word kaffirs would have become in its turn, too crude in ten years’ time.) Mrs Boothby could not believe that an ‘educated young man from one of the best colleges in England’ would use the word baboons. But when she again looked at Paul, her honest red face prepared for hurt, there he sat, his cherubic smile just as winningly attentive as it had been a month ago when he had been, undeniably, nothing more than a rather homesick boy glad to be mothered a little. She sighed abruptly, and got up, saying politely: ‘And now if you’ll excuse me I’ll go and get the old man’s supper. Mr Boothby likes a late snack—he never gets time for his dinner, serving in the bar all evening.’ She wished us good night, giving Willi, then Paul, a long, rather hurt, earnest inspection. She left us.

Paul put back his head and laughed and said: ‘They’re incredible, they’re fantastic, they are simply not true.’

‘Aborigines,’ said Willi, laughing. Aborigines was his word for the white people of the Colony.

Maryrose said quietly: ‘I don’t see the point of that, Paul. It’s just making fools of people.’

‘Dear Maryrose. Dear beautiful Maryrose,’ said Paul, chuckling into his beer.

Maryrose was beautiful. She was a tiny slender girl, with waves of honey-coloured hair and great brown eyes. She had appeared on magazine covers in the Cape, had been a dress model for a while. She was entirely without vanity. She smiled patiently and insisted in her slow good-humoured way: ‘Yes, Paul. After all, I’ve been brought up here. I understand Mrs Boothby. I was like that too until people like you explained I was wrong. You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.’

Paul again gave his deep chuckle, and insisted: ‘Maryrose, Maryrose, you’re too good to be true too.’