NF (1957) Going Home Read Online Free PDF

Caroline?’ I asked.
    ‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’
    ‘And Janet?’
    ‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’
    Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.
    ‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’
    ‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.
    ‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’

2
    Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing—not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.
    I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting—all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other—confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.
    The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.
    To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my senseof space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.
    But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.
    The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.
    I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous