The Sun Between Their Feet Read Online Free PDF Page A

of fifty or so, rather grey and beaten, who described himself as a teacher ‘planning the total reform of the entire educational system’; a woman of middle age, a widow, badly dressed and smoking incessantly, who looked as if she had long since gone beyond what she was strong enough to bear from life; an old man with an angelicpink face fringed with white tufts who said he was named after Keir Hardie; three schoolboys, the son of the widow and his two friends; the woman attendant from the ladies’ cloakroom who had unlocked this room to set out the chairs and then had stayed out of interest, since it was her afternoon off; two aircraftsmen from the RAF; Dick the convener; and a beautiful young woman no one had ever seen before who, as soon as Dick had finished his manifesto, stood up to make a plea for vegetarianism. She was ruled out of order. ‘We have to get power first, and then we’ll simply do what the majority wants.’ As for me, I was set apart from them by my lack of fervour, and by Dick’s hostility.
    This was in the middle of the Second World War, whose aim it was to defeat the hordes of National Socialism. The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was thirty years old. It was more than a hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution, and rather more than that after the American Revolution which overthrew the tyrannies of Britain. The Independence of India would shortly be celebrated. It was twenty years after the death of Lenin. Trotsky still lived.
    One of the schoolboys, a friend of the widow’s son, put up his hand to say timidly, instantly to be shut up, that ‘he believed there might be books which we could read about socialism and that sort of thing’.
    â€˜Indeed there are,’ said the namesake of Keir Hardie, nodding his white locks, ‘but we needn’t follow the writ that runs in other old countries, when we have got a brand new one here.’
    (It must be explained that the whites of Rhodesia, then as now, are always referring to ‘this new country’.)
    â€˜As for books,’ said Dick, eyeing me with all the scornful self-command he had acquired since leaving his cushion weeks before on the floor of our living-room, ‘books don’t seem to do some people any good, so why do we need them? It is all perfectly simple. It isn’t right for a few people to own all the wealth of a country. It isn’t fair. It should be shared out among everybody, equally, and then that would be a democracy.’
    â€˜Well, obviously,’ said the beautiful girl.
    â€˜Ah yes,’ sighed the poor tired woman, emphatically crushing out her cigarette and lighting a new one.
    â€˜Perhaps it would be better if I moved that palm a little,’ said the cloakroom attendant, ‘it does seem to be a little in your way perhaps.’ But Dick did not let her show her agreement in this way.
    â€˜Never mind about the palm,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’
    And this was the point when someone asked; ‘Excuse me, but where do the Natives come in?’ (In those days, the black inhabitants of Rhodesia were referred to as the Natives.)
    This was felt to be in extremely bad taste.
    â€˜I don’t really think that is applicable,’ said Dick hotly. ‘I simply don’t see the point of bringing it up at all unless it is to make trouble.’
    â€˜They do live here,’ said one of the RAF.
    â€˜Well, I must withdraw altogether if there’s any likelihood of us getting mixed up with kaffir trouble,’ said the widow.
    â€˜You can be assured that there will be nothing of that,’ said Dick, firmly in control, in the saddle, leader of all, after only half an hour of standing up in front of his mass meeting.
    â€˜I don’t see that,’ said the beautiful girl. ‘I simply don’t see that at all! We must have a policy for the Natives.’
    Even twelve people in one small room,