Extravagant Strangers, page 13
Yet from out of all the bewildering diversities of the night-life some sounds and smells remained constant and unchanging, and for these he treasured recognition as he did for those two or three inhabitants of the café opposite his house. The wheels of a taxi on the smooth black road never made anything but the sound of a choir of gnats, even in wet or frosty weather; and those gaunt men who wheeled their barrows of fruit through the dark squares never looked anything but furtive and hunted; their filthy cloth caps were pulled down low over their faces, and they lowered their voices when they spoke as though there were something shameful in the act of peddling their rich merchandise through the midnight city.
In a little street off Fitzroy Square there was always a light in the basement, and if you stood on the gleaming glass slab fretted with metal, your body was shaken by the pulsing of the machines that baked bread all night; and at each fresh throb of sound the wholesome smell of bread came out upon you from the grating in great heartening whiffs. He would stand upon the pitted glass and let the hot draught pour out around him, permeating his clothes, while he sniffed the sweet odours of the bakery. Once, as he stood there, taking great breaths of the pure warm air, a man, clad in a white smock, came to the grating and handed him two huge hunks of newly baked bread on a long fork, inviting him to eat it, smiling very kindly upon him:
‘I get lots of you poor artists round ’ere. Always ’ungry, aren’t yer?’
And as Walsh let his teeth sink into the warm crumbly richness of the bread he said, after thanking the man:
‘That’s settled it. I’m going to be a baker.’
But there were other things that he hated. Down by Leicester Square, in the little burrows behind the theatres, he found many a bundle of rags that had once been a human being curled up asleep in the doorway where tomorrow it would be turned away to make room for a pit queue; and once, a ragged little old man with a tabby beard who was burrowing in a dustbin. Beside him on the pavement lay a very old and very worn violin with only three sound strings, and a minute parcel of his belongings, girded up in a stained handkerchief. Walsh gave him a florin, but the poor creature seemed hardly to comprehend the meaning of the act, and he stared at the coin as it lay in his creased brown palm. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, he nodded his head and turned back to the dustbin, rummaging among the scattered paper and filth. His little frog-head was ducked flat as he tried to reach some object deep in the bin, while unconsciously with his boots he trampled the little round parcel which held his belongings, trampled and tore the red handkerchief.
On these late walks Walsh would often be filled with the feeling that he alone among the living trod the gloomy streets; his moving body and the feel of his clothes hanging on him, they were the only knowledge of substance in an illusory world. Even the sleek and silent men who stood night-long at the street-corners, and the women with their chalk-pale vermilion-rouged masks hiding what little self was left them, were but puzzling symbols of actualities that existed only in the squalid turbulence of the daytime. With the knowledge that so many activities, so many interests, so many personalities lay submerged in the second-sleep of dawn, his own perceptions quickened and briskly demanded food, as if given a freedom which the day denied them.
Doris Lessing
[1919-]
The oldest of two children, Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia. In 1925, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia and settled on the 1,000-acre farm where Lessing would spend most of her childhood. The joy of living in the adventurous African landscape contrasted sharply with her unhappy home life. Her relationship with her mother was characterized by emotional abuse and, as is evident in Lessing’s autobiography, left deep psychological scars.
Lessing attended a convent boarding school and was enrolled for a brief time at an all-girls high school. However, she dropped out of the formal educational system at age thirteen. Although she had already written two full-length manuscripts and had published several short stories by the time she was eighteen, she made her living working in various secretarial positions. In 1939 she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant who was much older than she was, and they had two children, John and Jean. After the couple’s divorce in 1943, the children remained with their father.
Inspired by the charged political atmosphere that followed the battle of Stalingrad, Lessing embraced Communism. She met her second husband, a Jewish-German immigrant named Gottfried Lessing, through a Marxist organization in Salisbury. The two were married in 1945, but the union was a troubled one that existed more for convenience than any emotional involvement. It ended in divorce in 1949, after Gottfried’s application for British citizenship had been approved. That same year Lessing emigrated to London, taking the couple’s two-year-old son, Peter, with her. Thus began her relationship with England, a country she found to be full of ‘quiet, mad maniacs – behind closed doors’. In 1950 she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was unanimously acknowledged to be a highly accomplished debut. The protagonist is a woman whose spiritual isolation, both a product and a reflection of the racist society in which she was raised, results in a mental breakdown.
In 1956 Lessing paid a visit to Rhodesia. It was not a pleasant homecoming, for the government labelled her a prohibited immigrant’ and restricted her travel. She subsequently returned to England and, later that year, officially left the Communist Party. Nonetheless, she remained politically active, participating in mass nuclear disarmament demonstrations in the late 1950s and serving, until 1961, on the editorial board of an independent Marxist publication, The New Reasoner (later the New Left Review). Her experiences with the Communist Party are recorded in the first three of the five Children of Violence novels (1952–69). In 1962 Lessing’s most celebrated work, The Golden Notebook, was published. In it she chronicles the life of novelist Anna Wulf from the Second World War to 1957, and explores the idea that modern women are bound by the ‘rules’ of the society in which they live.
In the late 1960s Lessing became involved in theatre work and wrote several plays that were produced. During this time she also began to take an avid interest in Sufism, and its influence has been evident in her work. Over the course of her career Lessing has received several awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (1954) and the Prix Medici (1976). Most recently, Lessing published the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994), and a novel Love, Again (1996). She is acutely aware that while she is a member of the British literary establishment, she is also a white African whose sensibilities were formed in and by Africa. Her relationship with British culture and her constant struggle to reconcile her status as a woman writer and a white African figure largely in her work.
In her essay ‘In Defence of the Underground’ (1987), Lessing finds reason to celebrate multicultural, heterogeneous London. Given the nature of her upbringing as a white African, this is an author who fully understands the interrelationship between race, class and colonialism, and she remains optimistic about the manner in which these societal components come together in modern-day Britain.
In Defence of the Underground
In a small cigarette and sweet shop outside the Underground station, the Indian behind the counter is in energetic conversation with a young man. They are both so angry that customers thinking of coming in change their minds.
‘They did my car in, they drove past so near they scraped all the paint off that side. I saw them do it. I was at my window – just luck, that was. They were laughing like dogs. Then they turned around and drove back and scraped the paint off the other side. They went off like bats out of hell. They saw me at the window and laughed.’
‘You’re going to have to take it into your own hands,’ says the Indian. ‘They did up my brother’s shop last month. They put burning paper through the letter box. It was luck the whole shop didn’t burn. The police didn’t do anything. He rang them, and then he went round to the station. Nothing doing. So we found out where they lived and we went and smashed their car in.’
‘Yes,’ says the other, who is a white man, not an Indian. ‘The police don’t want to know. I told them. I saw them do it. They were drunk, I said. What do you expect us to do? the police said.’
‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ says the Indian.
All this time I stand there, disregarded. They are too angry to care who hears them and, it follows, might report them. Then the young white man says – he could be something in building, or a driver, ‘You think I should do the same, then?’
‘You take a good-sized hammer or a crowbar to their car, if you know where they live.’
‘I’ve a fair old idea, yes.’
‘Then that’s it.’
‘Right, that’s it.’ And he goes out though he has to return for the cigarettes he came to buy, for in his rage he has forgotten them.
The Indian serves me. He is on automatic, his hands at work, his mind elsewhere.
As I go out, ‘Cheers,’ he says, and then, continuing the other conversation, ‘That’s it, then.’
In our area the Indian shopkeepers defend their shops at night with close-meshed grilles, like chain mail – and it is not only the Indian shops.
Now I am standing on the pavement in a garden. It is a pavement garden, for the florist puts her plants out here, disciplined ranks of them, but hopeful plants, aspiring, because it is bedding-plant time, in other words, late spring. A lily flowering a good month early scents the air stronger than the stinks of the traffic that pounds up this main route north all day and half the night. It is an ugly road, one you avoid if in a car, for one may need half an hour to go a few hundred yards.
Not long ago just where I stand marked the end of London. I know this because an old woman told me she used to take a penny bus here from Marble Arch, every Sunday. That is, she did, ‘If I had a penny to spare, I used to save up from my dinners, I used to look forward all week. It was all fields and little streams, and we took off our shoes and stockings and sat with our feet in the water and looked at the cows. They used to come and look at us. And the birds – there were plenty of those.’ That was before the First World War, in that period described in books of memoirs as a Golden Age. Yet you can find on stationers’ counters postcards made from photographs of this street a hundred years or so ago. It has never not been a poor street, and it is a poor one now, even in this particular age of Peace and Plenty. Not much has changed, though shop fronts are flashier, and full of bright cheap clothes, and there is a petrol station. The postcards show modest self-regarding buildings and the ground floor of every one is a shop of a kind long since extinct, where each customer was served individually. Outside them, invited from behind a counter to centre the picture, stand men in bowler hats or serving aprons; if it is a woman she has a hat on of the kind that insisted on obdurate respectability, for that is a necessary attribute of the poor. But only a couple of hundred yards north-west my friend sat on Sundays with her feet in the little streams, while the cows crowded close. ‘Oh, it was so cold, the water’d take your breath away, but you’d soon forget that, and it was the best day of the week.’ A few hundred yards north there used to be a mill. Another woman, younger than the first, told me she remembered the mill. ‘Mill Lane – the name’s because there used to be a mill, you see. But they pulled the mill down.’ And where it was is a building no one would notice, if you didn’t know what it replaced. If they had let the mill stand we would be proud of it, and they would charge us to go in and see how things used to be.
I enter the station, buy a ticket from a machine that works most of the time, and go up long stairs. There used to be decent lavatories, but now they are locked up because they are vandalized as soon as repaired. There is a good waiting room with heating, but often a window is smashed, and there is always graffiti. What are the young people saying when they smash everything they can? – for it is young people who do it, usually men. It is not that they are depraved because they are deprived, for I have just visited a famous university up north, where they have twenty applications for every place, where ninety-nine per cent of the graduates get jobs within a year of leaving. These are the privileged young, and they make for themselves a lively and ingenious social life their teachers clearly admire, if not envy. Yet they too smash everything up, not just the usual undergraduate loutishness, boys will be boys, but what seems to be a need for systematic destruction. What need? Do we know?
At the station you stand to wait for trains on a platform high above roofs and the tree tops are level with you. You feel thrust up into the sky. The sun, the wind, the rain, arrive unmediated by buildings. Exhilarating.
I like travelling by Underground. This is a defiant admission. I am always hearing, reading, I hate the Underground. In a book I have just picked up the author says he seldom uses it, but when he did have to go a few stops, he found it disgusting. A strong word. If people have to travel in the rush hour, then all is understood, but you may hear people who know nothing about rush hours say how terrible the Underground is. This is the Jubilee Line and I use it all the time. Fifteen minutes at the most to get into the centre. The carriages are bright and new – well, almost. There are efficient indicators, Charing Cross: five minutes, three minutes, one minute. The platforms are no more littered than the streets, often less, or not at all. ‘Ah but you should have seen what they were like in the old days. The Tube was different then.’
I know an old woman, I am sure I should say lady, who says, ‘People like you …’ She means aliens, foreigners, though I have lived here forty years … ‘have no idea what London was like. You could travel from one side of London to the other by taxi for half a crown.’ (In Elizabeth I’s time you could buy a sheep for a few pence and under the Romans doubtless you could buy a villa for a silver coin, but currencies never devaluate when Nostalgia is in this gear.) ‘And everything was so nice and clean and people were polite. Buses were always on time and the tube was cheap.’
This woman was one of London’s Bright Young Things, her young time was the twenties. As she speaks her face is tenderly reminiscent, but lonely, and she does not expect to persuade me or anyone else. What is the point of having lived in that Paradise Isle if no one believes you? As she sings her praise-songs for the past one sees hosts of pretty girls with pastel mouths and rouged cheeks wearing waistless petal-hemmed dresses, their hair marcelled in finger-waves, and as they flit from party to party they step in and out of obedient taxis driven by men only too happy to accept a penny tip. It was unlikely those women ever came as far north as West Hampstead or Kilburn, and I think Hampstead wasn’t fashionable then, though in D. H. Lawrence’s stories artists and writers live there. What is astonishing about reminiscences of those times is not only that there were different Londons for the poor and the middle class, let alone the rich, but the pedlars of memories never seem to be aware of this: ‘In those days, when I was a little girl, I used to scrub steps. I did even when it was snowing, and I had bare feet, they were blue with cold sometimes, and I went to the baker’s for yesterday’s bread, cheap, and my poor little mother slaved sixteen hours a day, six days a week, oh those were wicked times, cruel times they were.’ ‘In those days we were proud to live in London. Now it’s just horrid, full of horrid people.’
In my half of the carriage are three white people and the rest are black and brown and yellowish. Or, by another division, five females and six males. Or, four young people and seven middle-aged or elderly. Two Japanese girls, as glossy and self-sufficient as young cats, sit smiling. Surely the mourners for old London must applaud the Japanese, who are never, ever, scruffy or careless? Probably not: in that other London there were no foreigners, only English, pinkogrey as Shaw said, always chez nous, for the Empire had not imploded, the world had not invaded, and while every family had at least one relative abroad administering colonies or dominions, or being soldiers, that was abroad, it was there, not here, the colonies had not come home to roost.
These Japanese girls are inside an invisible bubble, they look out from a safe world. When I was in Japan I met many Japanese young ladies, who all seemed concerned to be Yum Yum. They giggled and went oooh – oooh – oooh as they jumped up and down, goody goody, and gently squealed with pleasure or with shock. But if you got them by themselves they were tough young women with a sharp view of life. Not that it was easy, for there always hovered some professor or mentor concerned to return them to their group, keep them safe and corporate.
A young black man sits dreaming, his ears wired to his Walkman, and his feet jig gently to some private rhythm. He wears clothes more expensive, more stylish, than anyone else in this travelling room. Next to him is an Indian woman with a girl often or so. They wear saris that show brown midriffs as glossy as toffee, but they have cardigans over them. Butterfly saris, workaday cardigans that make the statement, if you choose to live in a cold northern country, then this is the penalty. Never has there been a sadder sartorial marriage than saris with cardigans. They sit quietly conversing, in a way that makes the little girl seem a woman. These three get out at Finchley Road. In get four Americans, two boys, two girls, in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts and sports shoes. They talk loudly and do not see anyone else. Two sprawl opposite and two loll on either side of a tall old woman, possibly Scottish, who sits with her burnished shoes side by side, her fine bony hands on the handle of a wheeled shopping basket. She gazes ahead of her, as if the loud youngsters do not exist, and she is possibly remembering – but what London? The war? (Second World War, this time.) Not a poor London, that is certain. She is elegant, in tweeds and a silk shirt and her rings are fine. She and the four Americans get out at St John’s Wood, the youngsters off to the American School, but she probably lives here. St John’s Wood, so we are told by Galsworthy, for one, was where kept women were put in discreetly pretty villas by rich or at least respectable lovers. Now these villas can be afforded only by the rich, often Arabs.
