In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing

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in Africa to burn fireguards for dwelling-houses and outhouses against the veld fires which rage across country all through the dry season. My father was burning a fireguard for the cow shed. It was a windless day. The grass was short. The fire would burn slowly. Yet it was in the nature of things that any small animal, grounded bird, insect or reptile in the two-hundred-yard-wide, mile-long stretch of fire would perish, not, presumably, without pain. My father stood, sombrely contemplating the creeping line of small flames. The boss-boy stood beside him. Suddenly there fled out from the smoke-filled grass at their feet, a large fieldmouse. The boss-boy brought down a heavy stick across the mouse’s back. It was dying. The boss-boy picked up the mouse by the tail, and swinging the still-twitching creature, continued to stand beside my father, who brought down his hand in a very hard slap against the boss-boy’s face. So unprepared was he for this, that he fell down. He got up, palm to his cheek, looking at my father for an explanation. My father was rigid with incommunicable anger. ‘Kill it at once,’ he said, pointing to the mouse, now dead. The boss-boy flung the mouse into a nest of flames, and stalked off, with dignity.

      ‘If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s cruelty of any kind,’ my father said afterwards, in explanation of the incident.

      Which is comparatively uncomplicated, not to say banal. More obliquely rewarding in its implications was the affair with the Dutchman. My father was short of money, and had undertaken to do, in his spare time, the accounting for the small goldmine two miles away. He went over three times a week for this purpose. One day, several hundred pounds were missing. It was clear that Van Reenan, who managed the mine for a big company, had stolen it, and in such a way that it looked as if my father had. My father was whitely silent and suffering for some days. At any moment the company’s auditors would descend, and he would be arrested. Suddenly, without a word to my mother, who had been making insensitively practical suggestions, such as going to the police, he stalked off across the veld to the mine, entered the Dutchman’s office, and knocked him down. My father was not at all strong, apart from having only one leg, the other having been blown off in the First World War. And the Dutchman was six-foot, a great, red-faced, hot-tempered trekox of a man. Without saying one word my father returned across country, still silent and brooding, and shut himself into the dining-room.

      Van Reenan was entirely unmanned. Although this was by no means the first time he had embezzled and swindled, so cleverly that while everyone knew about it the police had not been able to lay a charge against him, he now lost his head and voluntarily gave himself up to the police. Where he babbled to the effect that the Englishman had found him out. The police telephoned my father. Who, even whiter, more silent, more purposeful than before, strode back across the veld to the mine, pushed aside the police sergeant, and knocked Van Reenan down again. ‘How dare you suggest,’ he demanded, with bitter reproach, ‘how dare you even imagine, that I would be capable of informing on you to the police?’

      The third incident implies various levels of motive. The first time I heard about it was, when very young indeed, from my mother, thus: ‘Your governess is not suited to this life here, she is going back to England.’ Pause. ‘I suppose she is going back to the smart set she came from.’ Pause. ‘The sooner she gets married the better.’

      Later, from a neighbour who had been confidante to the governess. ‘That poor girl who was so unhappy with your mother and had to go back to England in disgrace.’

      Later, from my father: ‘… that time I had to take that swine Baxter to task for making free with Bridget’s name in the bar.’

      What happened was this. My mother, for various reasons unwell, and mostly bedridden, had answered an advertisement from ‘Young woman, educated finishing school, prepared to teach young children in return for travel.’ The Lord knows what she, or my mother, expected. It was the midtwenties, Bridget was twenty-five, and had ‘done’ several London seasons. Presumably she wanted to see a bit of the world before she married, or thought of some smart Maugham-ish colonial plantation society. Later she married an Honourable something or other, but in the meantime she got a lonely maize farm, a sick woman, two spoiled children, and my father, who considered that any woman who wore lipstick or shorts was no better than she ought to be. On the other hand, the district was full of young farmers looking for wives, or at least entertainment. They were not, she considered, of her class, but it seemed she was prepared to have a good time. She had one, and danced and gymkhana’d whenever my parents would let her. This was not nearly as often as she would have liked. She was being courted by a farmer called Baxter, a tough ex-policeman from Liverpool. My father did not like him. He didn’t like any of her suitors. One evening, he went into the bar at the village and Baxter came over and said: ‘How’s Bridget?’ My father instantly knocked him down. When the bewildered man stood up and said: ‘What the f~ing hell’s that for?’ my father said: ‘You will kindly refer, in my presence at least, to an innocent young girl many thousands of miles from her parents and to whom I am acting as guardian, as Miss Fox.’

      Afterwards, he said: ‘I must not allow myself to lose my temper so easily. Quite obviously, I don’t know my own strength.’

      When stunned by The Times or the Telegraph; when – yes, I think the word is interested, by the Manchester Guardian; when unable to discover the motive behind some dazzlingly stupid stroke of foreign policy; when succumbing to that mood which all of us foreigners are subject to, that we shall ever be aliens in an alien land, I recover myself by reflecting, in depth, on the implications of incidents such as these.

      Admittedly at a tangent, but in clear analogy, I propose to admit, and voluntarily at that, that I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone’s, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does not mean, simply, those people who can be found by walking out of one’s front door and turning down a side-street. Not at all. Like love and fame it is a platonic image, a grail, a quintessence, and by definition, unattainable. It took me a long time to understand this. When I lived in Africa and was learning how to write, that group of mentors who always voluntarily constitute themselves as a sort of watch committee of disapprobation around every apprentice writer, used to say that I could never write a word that made sense until I had become pervaded by the cultural values of the working-class. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, these mentors claimed that not one truthful word could ever be written until it was first baptized, so to speak, by the working-class. I remember even now the timidity with which, just as I was about to leave Africa, I suggested that having spent twenty-five years of my life in the closest contact with the black people, who are workers if nothing else, some knowledge, or intimation, or initiation by osmosis must surely have been granted me. And I remember even now the indignant tone of the reply: ‘The Africans in this country are not working-class in the true sense. They are semi-urbanized peasants.’ I should have understood by the tone, which was essentially that of a defender of a faith, that I must stick by my guns. But it always did take me a long time to learn anything.

      I came to England. I lived, for the best of reasons, namely, I was short of money, in a household crammed to the roof with people who worked with their hands. After a year of this, I said with naïve pride to a member of the local watch committee that now, at last, I must be considered to have served my apprenticeship. The reply was pitying, but not without human sympathy: ‘These are not the real working-class. They are the lumpen proletariat, tainted by petty bourgeois ideology.’ I rallied. I said that, having spent a lot of my time with Communists, either here or in Africa, a certain proportion of whom, even though a minority, are working-class, surely some of the magic must have rubbed off on me? The reply came: ‘The Communist Party is the vanguard of the working-class and obviously not typical.’ Even then I didn’t despair. I went to a mining village, and returned with a wealth of observation. It was no good. ‘Miners, like dockworkers, are members of a very specialized, traditionalized trade; mining is already (if you take the long view) obsolete. The modes of being, mores and manners of a mining community have nothing whatsoever to do with the working-class

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