London of the late 1940s, the early 1950s, has vanished, and now it is hard to believe it existed. It was unpainted, buildings were stained and cracked and dull and grey; it was war-damaged, some areas all ruins, and under them holes full of dirty water, once cellars, and it was subject to sudden dark fogs – that was before the Clean Air Act. No one who has known only today’s London of self-respecting clean buildings, crowded cafes and restaurants, good food and coffee, streets full until after midnight with mostly young people having a good time, can believe what London was like then. No cafes. No good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’ from the war, dismal and ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty. The Dining Rooms, subsidized during the war, were often the only places to eat in a whole area of streets. They served good meat, terrible vegetables, nursery puddings. Lyons restaurants were the high point of eating for ordinary people – I remember fish and chips and poached eggs on toast. There were fine restaurants for the well-off, and they tended to hide themselves away out of embarrassment, because in them, during the war, the rigours of rationing had been so ameliorated. You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles. The sole civilized amenity was the pubs, but they closed at eleven, and you have to have the right temperament for pubs. Or, I should say, had to have, for they have changed so much, no longer give the impression to an outsider of being like clubs, each with its members, or ‘regulars’, where outsiders go on sufferance. Rationing was still on. The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people’s minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place. There was a wariness, a weariness.
On New Year’s Eve, 1950, I was telephoned by an American from the publishing scene to ask if I would share the revels with him. I met him in my best dress at six o’clock in Leicester Square. We expected cheerful crowds, but there was no one on the streets. For an hour or so we were in a pub but felt out of place. Then we looked for a restaurant. There were the expensive restaurants, which we could not afford, but nothing of what we now take for granted – the Chinese, Indian, Italian restaurants, and dozens of other nationalities. The big hotels were all booked up. We walked up and down and back and forth through Soho and around Piccadilly. Everything was dark and blank. Then he said, To hell with it, let’s live it up. A taxi driver took us to a club in Mayfair, and there we watched the successors of the Bright Young Things getting drunk and throwing bread at each other.
But by the end of the decade, there were coffee bars and good ice cream, by courtesy of the Italians, and good cheap Indian restaurants. Clothes were bright and cheap and irreverent. London was painted again and was cheerful. Most of the bomb damage was gone. Above all, there was a new generation who had not been made tired by the war. They did not talk about the war, or think about it.
The first place where I lived was in Bayswater, which was then rather seedy and hard to associate with the grandeur of its earlier days. Prostitutes lined the streets every evening. I was supposed to be sharing a flat with a South African woman and her child: I wrote about this somewhat unsatisfactory experience in In Pursuit of the English. The flat we were in was large and well furnished. Two rooms were let to prostitutes. When I discovered this – I did not realize at once who these smartly dressed girls were who tripped up and down the stairs with men – and tackled the South African woman, because I did not think this was good for the two small children, she burst into tears and said I was unkind.
I spent six weeks looking for a place that would take a small child. There was a heat wave, and I couldn’t understand why people complained about the English weather. My feet gave in on the hot pavements, and my morale almost did, but then a household of Italians welcomed the child and me, and my main problem was solved. This was Denbigh Road. Peter had been accepted by a council nursery. Circumstances had taught him from his very first days to be sociable, and he loved going there. When he came back from the nursery he disappeared at once into the basement, where there was a little girl his age. The house, dispiriting to me, because it was so grim and dirty and war-damaged, was a happy place for him.
We were at the beginning – but literally – in a garret, which was too small for me even to unpack a typewriter. I sent some short stories to the agent Curtis Brown, chosen at random from the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, and Juliet O’Hea wrote back what I later knew was a form letter: Yes, but did I have a novel or was I thinking of writing one? I said there was a novel, but it had been bought by a Johannesburg publisher. She asked to see the contract, was shocked and angry when she saw it – they were going to take fifty percent of everything I earned, as a reward for risking themselves over this dangerous book. She sent them a telegram saying that if they didn’t at once release me from the contract she would expose them as crooks. She then sold the book over the weekend to Michael Joseph.
Pamela Hansford Johnson was Michael Joseph’s reader. She wrote an enthusiastic report but said that these and those changes should be made. Since I had spent years writing and rewriting the book, I did not feel inclined to make changes, particularly as I had broken my shoulder. How? It cannot be regarded as anything less than a psychologically significant event. I was in Leicester Square, seeing Les Enfants du Paradis with a young man. We had been most romantically in love when he was in the RAF in Rhodesia. Our lives had already taken dramatically different routes: he was about to join the Federation of British Industry, and I was still, if uneasily, a Red – though not a member of the Party. I came out of the cinema and walked straight into slippery tar painted on the street by workmen who said I should have looked where I was going. Gottfried had arrived in London, where he proposed to live, and was staying with Dorothy Schwartz from Salisbury in a large flat near the Belsize Park underground station. He took Peter for six weeks, while my shoulder mended.
Hindsight has given a jaunty tone to my memories of that time, for if it was difficult, I was coping with it all. This little scene paints a different picture: I am standing on the platform at Queensway underground station. My left arm is in a sling, and my yellow wool jacket is buttoned over it. A button flies off, a draught lifts the jacket off my left shoulder, I stand revealed in my bra. In London you could walk down Oxford Street nude and earn hardly a glance, and my embarrassment is unnecessary. I try futilely to get myself covered. A woman emerges from the crowd, turns me to her, takes a large safety pin from her pocket, pins my jacket onto the sling. She stands examining my face. ‘Broken it, ’ave you? Well, a break takes forty-two days or six weeks, whichever is the shortest.’ I can’t speak. ‘Cheer up. The worst may never happen.’
‘This is the worst,’ I manage. She laughs, that anarchic, gruff, well-what-can-you-expect laugh still heard from people who lived through the Blitz.
‘Is that so? If that’s the worst you can manage, then …’ She gives me encouraging little pats, then shoves me gently towards the train and helps me onto it. ‘You just go and get yourself a nice cup of tea and cheer up,’ I hear, as the doors grind shut.
I sent The Grass Is Singing back to Michael Joseph in the same parcel it arrived in. I got a letter from them, congratulating me on the valuable changes I had made. I never enlightened them.
Soon Alfred Knopf in New York said they would take the book, if I would change it so that there was an explicit rape, ‘in accordance with the mores of the country’. This was Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, and the Knopfs were the stars of the publishing firmament then. I was furious. What did she know about the ‘mores’ of Southern Africa? Besides, it was crass. The whole point of The Grass Is Singing was the unspoken, devious codes of behaviour of the whites, nothing ever said, everything understood, and the relationship between Mary Turner, the white woman, and Moses, the black man, was described so that nothing was explicit. This was only partly out of literary instinct. The fact is, I have never decided whether Mary had sex with Moses or not. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. While it was a commonplace that white men had sex with black women, and the continually enlarging Coloured community was there to prove it, I had only once heard of a white woman having sex with her black servant. The penalty – for the man – was hanging. Besides, the taboos were so strong. If Mary Turner had had sex with Moses, this poor woman so precariously holding on to her idea of herself as a white madam would have cracked into pieces. Yes, but she was cracked, she was crazy – yes, but she would have been crazy in a different way: