Yes. Willi, with his guttural, so-correct English, and Paul, with his exquisite, cool enunciation—the two voices, hour after hour, at night, in the Gainsborough hotel. That is what I remember most clearly of the group during the period before we went to Mashopi and everything changed.
The Gainsborough hotel was really a boarding-house; a place people lived in for long stretches. The boarding-houses of the town were mostly converted private houses, more comfortable certainly, but uncomfortably genteel. I stayed in one for a week and left: the contrast between the raw Colonialism of the city, and the primness of the boarding-house full of English middle-class who might never have left England, was more than I could stand. The Gainsborough hotel was newly-built, a large, rattling, ugly place full of refugees, clerks, secretaries, and married people who couldn’t find a house or a flat; the town was jostling full because of the war, and rents were soaring.
It was typical of Willi that he had not been in the hotel a week before he had special privileges, and this in spite of being a German, and technically an enemy alien. Other German refugees pretended to be Austrians, or kept out of the way, but Willi’s name in the hotel register was Dr Wilhelm Karl Gottlieb Rodde, ex-Berlin, 1939. Just like that. Mrs James who ran the hotel was in awe of him. He had taken care to let her know his mother was a countess. In fact she was. She believed him to be a medical doctor, and he had not troubled to let her know what the word Doctor meant in Europe. ‘It’s not my fault she’s stupid,’ he said, when we criticized him for it. He gave her free advice about the law, patronized her, was rude when he did not get what he wanted and in short had her running around after him, as he said himself, ‘like a frightened little dog’. She was the widow of a miner who had died in a fall of rock on the Rand; a woman of fifty, obese, harried, sweating and incompetent. She fed us stews, pumpkin and potatoes. Her African servants cheated her. Until Willi told her how to run the place, which he did without being asked, at the end of the first week he was there, she lost money. After his instructions she made a great deal—she was a rich woman by the time Willi left the hotel: with investments chosen by him in property all over the city.
I had the room next to Willi. We ate at the same table. Our friends dropped in day and night. For us, the enormous ugly dining-room which closed finally at eight (dinner from seven to eight) was opened even after midnight. Or we made ourselves tea in the kitchen, and at the most Mrs James might come down in her dressing-gown, smiling placatorily, to ask us to lower our voices. It was against the rules to have people in our rooms after nine o’clock at night; but we ran study classes in our rooms till four or five in the morning several nights a week. We did as we liked, while Mrs James got rich, and Willi told her she was a silly goose without any business sense.
She would say: ‘Yes, Mr Rodde,’ and giggle and sit coyly on his bed to smoke a cigarette. Like a schoolgirl. I remember Paul saying: ‘Do you really think it’s right for a socialist to get what he wants by making a fool of an old woman?’ ‘I’m earning her a lot of money.’ ‘I was talking about sex,’ said Paul, and Willi said: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He didn’t. Men are far more unconscious than women about using their sex in this way; far less honest.
So the Gainsborough hotel was for us an extension of Left Club and the Party group; and associated, for us, with hard work.
We went to the Mashopi hotel for the first time on an impulse. It was Paul who directed us to it. He was flying somewhere in the area; the aircraft was grounded because of a sudden storm; and he returned with his instructor by car, stopping off in the Mashopi hotel for lunch. He came into the Gainsborough that night in high spirits, to share his good-humour with us. ‘You’d never believe it—slammed right down in the middle of the bush, all surrounded by kopjes and savages and general exotica, the Mashopi hotel, and a bar with darts and a shove-halfpenny board, and steak and kidney pie served with the thermometer at ninety, and in addition to everything, Mr and Mrs Boothby—and they’re the spitting bloody image of the Gatsbys—remember? The couple who run the pub at Aylesbury? The Boothbys might never have set a foot outside England. And I swear he’s an ex-sergeant-major. Couldn’t be anything else.’
‘Then she’s an ex-barmaid,’ said Jimmy, ‘and they’ve got a comely daughter they want to marry off. Remember, Paul, how that poor bloody girl couldn’t keep her eyes off you in Aylesbury?’
‘Of course you Colonials wouldn’t appreciate the exquisite incongruity of it,’ said Ted. For the purposes of such jokes, Willi and I were colonials.
‘Ex-sergeant-majors who might never have left England run half the hotels and bars in the country,’ I said. ‘As you might have discovered if you were ever able to tear yourselves away from the Gainsborough.’
For the purposes of jokes like these, Ted, Jimmy and Paul despised the Colony so much they knew nothing about it. But of course, they were extremely well-informed.
It was about seven in the evening, and dinner at the Gainsborough was imminent. Fried pumpkin, stewed beef, stewed fruit.
‘Let’s go down and have a look at the place,’ said Ted. ‘Now. We can have a pint and be back to catch the bus to camp.’ He made the suggestion with his usual enthusiasm; as if the Mashopi hotel was certain to turn out the most beautiful experience life had yet offered us.
We looked at Willi. There was a meeting that night, run by the Left Club, then at its zenith. We were all expected to be there. We had never, not once, defected from duty. But Willi agreed, casually, as if there were nothing remarkable in it: ‘That’s something we could very well do. Mrs James’ pumpkin can be eaten by someone else for this one night.’
Willi ran a cheap fifth-hand car. We all five of us got into it and drove down to Mashopi, about sixty miles away. I remember it was a clear but oppressive night—the stars thick and low, with the heavy glitter of approaching thunder. We drove between kopjes that were piles of granite boulders, characteristic of that part of the country. The boulders were charged with heat and electricity, so that blasts of hot air, like soft fists, came on to our faces as we passed the kopjes.
We reached the Mashopi hotel about eight-thirty, and found the bar blazing with light and packed with the local farmers. It was a small bright place, shining from polished wood, and the polished black cement floor. As Paul had said, there was a well-used darts board and a shove-halfpenny. And behind the bar stood Mr Boothby, six feet tall, portly, his stomach protruding, his back straight as a wall, his heavy face with its network of liquor-swollen veins dominated by a pair of cool, shrewd prominent eyes. He remembered Paul from midday and enquired how the repairs to the aircraft were progressing. It had not been damaged; but Paul began on a long story how a wing had been struck by lightning and he had descended to the tree-tops by parachute, his instructor clutched under his arm—so manifestly untrue, that Mr Boothby looked uneasy from the first word. And yet Paul told it with such earnest, deferential grace that it wasn’t until he concluded, ‘Mine is not to reason why; mine is but to fly and die’—wiping away a mock-gallant tear, that Mr Boothby let out a small reluctant grunt of laughter and suggested a drink. Paul had expected the drink to be on the house—a reward for a hero, so to speak; but Mr Boothby held out his hand for the money with a long narrowed stare, as if to say: ‘Yes, I know it’s not a joke, and you’d have made a fool of me if you could.’ Paul paid, with good grace and continued the conversation. He came over to us, beaming, a few minutes later to say that Mr Boothby had been a sergeant in the BSA Police; that he had married his wife on leave in England, and she had worked behind the bar in a pub; that they had