down to disaster. The poverty had been terrible and had not been forgotten. All that was finished. No longer was there a need to dread illness and the Dole and old age. And this was just a beginning: things were going to get steadily better. Everyone seemed to share this mood. You kept meeting doctors who were setting up practices that would embody this new socialist medicine, who saw themselves as builders of a new era. They could be Communists, they could be Labour, they could be Liberals. They were all idealists.
* I was soon to have a sharp little lesson in the realities of publishing. The first paperback edition of The Grass Is Singing had on its front a lurid picture of a blonde cowering terrified while a big buck nigger (the only way to describe him) stood over her, threatening her with a panga. My protests, on the lines of ‘But Moses the black man was not a great stupid murderous thug,’ were ignored with: ‘You don’t understand anything about selling books.’
THE ZEITGEIST, OR HOW WE THOUGHT THEN
Above all, a new world was dawning.
Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all – best. The British Empire, then on its last legs – the best.
The newspapers were full of warnings about rebuilding the area around St Paul’s, bombed into ruins. If this rebuilding was not planned, a nasty chaos would result. It was not planned, and nasty chaos did result.
Our prisons were a disgusting and shameful disgrace. Over forty years on, news from them is the same. There is something about prisons: we cannot get them right. Is it because deep in the British heart they believe, with the Old Testament, that there should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Retribution, that is what most citizens believe in. As I am writing this, the news is that women with small children are in prison for not paying their television licence. Their children are in care. When most citizens hear this for the first time they exclaim, No, it isn’t possible that this is happening! But Dickens would not have been surprised.
Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts.
In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority.
Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite – civilized – Britain was.
And now … what was I going to write next? What the publishers wanted was a novel. What I was writing was short stories. All of them were set in The District – Banket, Lomagundi – and they were about the white community and how they saw themselves, preserved themselves, saw the blacks around them. I would call it This Was the Old Chief’s Country. Juliet O’Hea said if that is what I wanted to do, then of course, but no publisher would be delighted at the news of short stories, which did not sell. In fact, I proved them wrong, for they did sell, and very well – for short stories – and have gone on selling ever since. But it was a novel I should be thinking about. And so I did think hard and long about the book that would be Martha Quest.
The Grass Is Singing had come about because people thought of me as a writer, I knew I would be one … and had been, so I know now, from an early age. I had forgotten this, believing that the decision to write came later, but when Under My Skin came out, a woman who had known me at the convent – Daphne Anderson, who wrote an admirable account of her childhood, Toe-Rags – told me she remembered us sitting on my bed in the dormitory, discussing what we would be, and I said I was going to be a writer. I must have been ten or eleven. But this figure – the writer – is a siren figure that comforts and sustains innumerable young people who are at sea, know it, and cannot direct their future in a conformable way. I left my job in the law firm in Salisbury, saying I was going to write a novel, since at some point I must stop talking about it and do it. Besides, it had occurred to me that those ideal conditions – solitude, time, freedom from care – would never happen. What was I to write? I had many ideas for a book. Now I am interested in how I then sat around, walked around and around the room, wool-gathering – an essential process – taking my time, and all this by instinct. From the many ideas one emerged … grew stronger … I remembered the talk on the verandahs, matrix for a thousand possible tales, I remembered the little newspaper cutting I had kept all those years. And so I wrote The Grass Is Singing. First novels are usually autobiographical. The Grass Is Singing was not. Dick Turner, the failing farmer, was a figure I had seen all my life. Only a minority of the white farmers were successful; most failed. Some struggled on, failing, for years. Some hated the country. Some loved it, like Dick Turner. Some were idealistic – like my father, who, if he were farming now, would be disdaining fertilizers, pesticides, crops that rob the soil, would be cherishing animals and birds. Mary Turner I took from a woman I had known for years, one of the Sports Club girls. When we went out into the bush for picnics, or simply to be in the bush, sit in it, absorbing it – for many town whites did this, as if the town were merely an unfortunate necessity and the bush was where they belonged – then this woman, who remained a girl until she was well into her forties, a good sort, every man’s kind sister, used to sit on a bit of rock, with her feet drawn up away from the soil, sit with her arms tight around her knees, peering over them to watch if an ant or a chameleon or beetle crawled up on her trousers. If she was so afraid of the bush, why then did she go off on these picnics? It was because she was a good sort and always did what others did and wanted her to do. She was a woman essentially of the town, of streets, of nice tamed gardens… I watched her and wondered what on earth she would do if fate deposited her somewhere on a farm, not one of the new big rich farms but a struggling farm, like farms I had seen, and I ran through the names of the poor farmers in my head, and saw the shallow brick verandahs, the corrugated-iron roofs, which expanded and contracted and cracked in the heat and the cold, the dust, the yelling of the cicadas … and then I had it, I had her, I had Mary Turner, the woman who loathed the bush and the natives and hated all natural processes, hated sex, liked to be neat and clean, her dress ironed afresh every time she put it on, her little girl’s hair tied with a ribbon at parties.
And now, again, in London: What should I write?
There was a point when it occurred to me that my early life had been extraordinary and would make a novel. I had not understood how extraordinary until I had left Southern Africa and come to England. Martha Quest, my third book, was more or less autobiographical, though it didn’t start until Martha was fourteen, when her childhood was over. First novels, particularly by women, are often attempts at self-definition, whatever their literary merits. While I was seeing my early life more clearly with every new person I met, for a casual remark could question things I had taken for granted for years, I was nevertheless confused. While I certainly ‘knew who I was’ (to use the American formula), I did not know how to define myself as a social being. In parenthesis – and it has to be that, for we touch on whole landscapes of query – this business of ‘finding out who I am’ (and it really was then American) has always left me wondering. What do they mean? Surely they can’t be without a sense of self. A sense of: Here I am, inside here. What can it be like, to live without that feeling of me, in here; of what I am?
What I did not know was how to define myself, see myself in a social context. Oh yes, easy enough to say I was a child of the end of the Raj – but that phrase had not yet come into use. The end of the British Empire, then. Yes, I was one of a generation brought up on World War I and then as much formed by World War II. But there was a hiatus, a lack, a blur – and it was to do with my parents and particularly my mother. I had fought her steadily, relentlessly, and I had had to – but what was it all about? Why? And I was not able to answer that, entirely, until I was in my seventies, and even then perhaps not finally.
I