Walking in the Shade Read Online Free PDF Page A

the little kitchen, often crammed with comrades, having a snack, talking, shouting, or imparting news in confidential tones, for a great deal was going on in the communist world which was discussed in lowered voices and never admitted publicly. I was again in an atmosphere that made every encounter, every conversation, important, because if you were a communist, then the future of the world depended on you—you and your friends and people like you all over the world. The vanguard of the working class, in short. I was in conflict. Having lived with Gottfried Lessing, a ‘one hundred and fifty percenter’—a phrase used at that time in communist circles—I was weary of dogmatism and self-importance. When I was with Gottfried, who was now at the nadir of his life and, because of his low spirits, even more violently rude about people and opinions not communist, I was seeing a mirror of myself—a caricature, yes, but true. A line from Gerald Manley Hopkins haunted me.
    This, by Despair, bred Hangdog dull; by Rage ,
    Manwolf, worse; and their packs infest the age .
    I would wake out of a dream, muttering, ‘“and their packs infest the age’”. Me: Hopkins was talking about me.
    I lived in a pack, was one of a pack. But when the comrades came up the stairs to the top of the house—and they often did, for up there lived a lively young woman and her delightful little boy, an exotic too, coming from Africa, which seemed always to be in the news these days—I found people interested in what I said about South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Anywhere outside communist circles, my information that Southern Rhodesia was not a paradise of happy darkies was greeted with impatience. You are so wrong-headed, those looks said. How patronised I have been by people who don’t want to know . But the comrades did want to know. An attraction of Communist Party circles was that if you happened to remark, ‘I have been in Peru, and…,’ people wanted to know. The world was their responsibility. I was finding this increasingly ridiculous, but the thing wasn’t so easy. I looked back to Salisbury, where we had assumed, for years, that what we did and thought was of world-shattering (literally) significance, but from the perspectives of London our little group there seemed embarrassing, absurd—yet I knew that these absurd people were the few, in all of white Southern Rhodesia, who understood the truth about the white regime: that it was doomed, could not last long. It was not our views but our effectiveness that was in question. And here I was again, being part of a minority, and a very small one, who knew they were in the right. This was the height of the Cold War. The Korean War had started. The communists were with every day more isolated. The atmosphere was poisonous. If, for instance, you doubted that America was dropping wads of material infected with germs—germ warfare—then you were a traitor. I was undermined with doubts. I hated this religious language, and I was not the only one. ‘Comrade So-and-so is getting doubts,’ a communist might say, with that sardonic intonation that was already—and would increasingly become—the tone of many conversations. But again, this was not simple, for it was certainly not only the comrades who identified with an idealised Soviet Union.
    Although I was not a member of the Communist Party, I was accepted by the comrades as one of them: I spoke the language. When I protested that I had been a member of a communist party invented by us in Southern Rhodesia, which any real Communist Party would have dismissed with contempt, they did not care—or perhaps they did not hear. It has been my fate all my life often to be with people who assume I think as they do, because a passionate belief, or set of assumptions, is so persuasive to the holders of them that they really cannot believe anyone could be so wrong-headed as