I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound. Because it is certainly a wound—I, like thousands of others can’t remember our time in or near ‘The Party’ without a terrible dry anguish. Yet that pain is like the dangerous pain of nostalgia, its first cousin and just as deadly. I’ll go on with this when I can write it straight, not in that tone.
I remember Maryrose put an end to the argument by remarking: ‘But you aren’t saying anything that you didn’t say earlier.’ That stopped it. She often did this, she had a capacity for silencing us all. Yet the men patronized her, they thought nothing of her capacity for political thought. It was because she could not, or would not, use the jargon. But she grasped points quickly and put them in simple terms. There is a type of mind, like Willi’s, that can only accept ideas if they are put in the language he would use himself.
Now she said: ‘There must be something wrong somewhere, because if not, we wouldn’t have to spend hours and hours discussing it like this.’ She spoke with confidence; but now that the men did not reply—and she felt their tolerance of her, she grew uneasy and appealed: ‘I’m not saying it right, but you see what I mean…’ Because she had appealed, the men were restored, and Willi said benevolently: ‘Of course you say it right. Anyone as beautiful as you can’t say it wrong.’
She was sitting near me, and she turned her head in the dark of the car to smile at me. We exchanged that smile, very often. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said, and put her head on my shoulder and went off to sleep like a little cat.
We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of a left movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day out; year in, year out. After all, we all earned our livings, and the men in the camps, at least the men actually being trained, were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organizing meetings, discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not we were up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. Ted took to extremes an attitude we all had, that anyone in any sort of trouble was our responsibility. And part of our duty was to explain to anyone with any kind of a spark that life was a glorious adventure. Looking back I should imagine that of all the appallingly hard work we did, the only part of it that achieved anything was this personal proselytizing. I doubt whether any of the people we took on will forget the sheer exuberance of our conviction in the gloriousness of life, for if we didn’t have it by temperament we had it on principle. All kinds of incidents come back—for instance Willi, who after some days of wondering what to do for a woman who was unhappy because her husband was unfaithful to her, decided to offer her The Golden Bough because, ‘when one is personally unhappy the correct course is to take a historical view of the matter.’ She returned the book, apologetically, saying it was above her head and that in any case she had decided to leave her husband because she had decided he was more trouble than he was worth. But she wrote to Willi regularly when she left our town, polite, touching, grateful letters. I remember the terrible words: ‘I’ll never forget that you were kind enough to take an interest in me.’ (They didn’t strike me at the time, though.)
We had all been living at this pitch for over two years—I think it’s possible we were all slightly mad out of sheer exhaustion.
Ted began to sing, to keep himself awake; and Paul, in a completely different voice from the one he had used in the discussion with Willi, started on a whimsical fantasy about what would happen in an imaginary white-settled Colony when the Africans revolted. (This was nearly a decade before Kenya and the Mau Mau.) Paul described how ‘two-men-and-a-half’ (Willi protested against the reference to Dostoevsky, whom he considered a reactionary writer) worked for twenty years to bring the local savages to a realization of their position as a vanguard. Suddenly a half-educated demagogue who had spent six months at the London School of Economics created a mass movement overnight, on the slogan: ‘Out with the Whites’. The two-men-and-a-half, responsible politicians, were shocked by this, but it was too late—the demagogue denounced them as being in the pay of the whites. The whites, in a panic, put the demagogue and the two-men-and-a-half into prison on some trumped-up charge; and, left leaderless, the black masses took to the forests and the kopjes and became guerrilla fighters. ‘As the black regiments were slowly defeated by the white regiments, dozens of nice clean-minded highly educated boys like us, brought all the way out from England to maintain law and order, they slowly succumbed to black magic, and the witch-doctors. This nasty un-Christian behaviour very properly alienated all right-minded people away from the black cause, and the nice clean boys like us, in a fury of moral condemnation beat them up, tortured them, and hanged them. Law and order won. The whites let the two-men-and-a-half out of prison, but hanged the demagogue. A minimum of democratic rights were announced for the black populace but the two-men-and-a-half, etc., etc., etc.’
We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognize it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.) He went on: ‘There is another possibility. Suppose that the black armies win? There’s only one thing an intelligent nationalist leader can do, and that is to strengthen nationalist feeling and develop industry. Has it occurred to us, comrades, that it will be our duty, as progressives, to support nationalist states whose business it will be to develop all those capitalist unegalitarian ethics we hate so much? Well, has it? Because I see it, yes, I can see it in my crystal ball—but we are going to have to support it all. Oh, yes, yes, because there’ll be no alternative.’
‘You need a drink,’ Willi remarked at this point.
The bars were all closed by this time in the roadside hotels, so Paul went to sleep. Maryrose was asleep. Jimmy was asleep. Ted remained awake beside Willi in the front seat, whistling some aria or other. I don’t think he had been listening to Paul—when he whistled bits of music or sang it was always a sign of disapproval.
Long afterwards, I remember thinking that in all those years of endless analytical discussion only once did we come anywhere near the truth (far enough off as it was) and that was when Paul spoke in a spirit of angry parody.
When we reached the hotel it was all dark. A sleepy servant waited on the verandah to take us to our rooms. The bedroom block was built a couple of hundred yards from the dining-room and bar block, on a slope at the back. There were twenty rooms under a single roof, built back to back, verandahs on either side, ten rooms to a verandah. The rooms were cool and pleasant in spite of having no cross ventilation. There were electric fans and large windows. Four rooms had been allotted to us. Jimmy went in with Ted, I with Willi; and Maryrose and Paul had a room each. This arrangement was afterwards confirmed; or rather, since the Boothbys never said anything, Willi and I always shared a room at the Mashopi hotel. We none of us woke until long after breakfast. The bar was open and we drank a little, mostly in silence, and had lunch, almost in silence, remarking from time to time how odd it was we should feel so tired. The lunches at the hotel were always excellent, quantities of cold meats and every imaginable kind of salad and fruit. We all went to sleep again. The sun was already going down when Willi and I woke and had to wake the others. And we were in bed again half an hour after dinner was over. And the next day, Sunday, was almost as bad. That first week-end was, in fact, the most pleasant we spent there. We all were in a tranquillity of extreme fatigue. We hardly drank, and Mr Boothby was disappointed in us. Willi was particularly silent. I think it was that week-end that he decided to withdraw from politics, or at least as far as he could, and devote himself to study. As for Paul, he was being genuinely simple and pleasant with everyone, particularly Mrs Boothby, who had taken a fancy to him.
We drove back to town very late on the Sunday because we did not want to leave the Mashopi hotel. We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny