Walking in the Shade Read Free Page A

To make little shows of morality in that atmosphere would have seemed not only absurd but would have been incomprehensible to these amiable crooks. Besides, the newspapers were already clamouring for the end of rationing. There was no longer any need for it, they said. Never have I eaten so well. The rent did not include food, but like most fine cooks, our landlady could not bear not to feed anyone around who would sit down at her table. I ate downstairs two or three times a week, Peter most evenings. She asked for money for shopping when she ran out. Hers was an economy that absorbed not only me but other people in the house in complicated borrowings, lendings, cigarettes, a dress or shoes she fancied.
    When I told middle-class acquaintances about the bent policemen and the butter and eggs and cheese, they were cold, and they were angry. ‘Our policemen are not corrupt,’ they said. They saw my sojourn on that foreign shore—the working class—as a whimsical foray for the sake of my art, for Experience. They waited for little anecdotes about the comic working classes, in the spirit of the snobbish Punch cartoons about servants.
    From then until decades later, when it was admitted by Authority that all was not well with our policemen, I was treated by nearly everyone with the hostile impatience I was already earning when I said that South Africa was a hellhole for the blacks and the Coloureds—for this was still not acknowledged, in spite of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country , which had just come out, a little before The Grass Is Singing— and even more when I insisted that Southern Rhodesia was as bad and, some blacks thought, even worse than South Africa. Only Reds and malcontents said this kind of thing.
    In the household in Denbigh Road, Southern Africa was not of interest. Nothing was, outside this little area of streets. They talked of going up to the West End, a mile or so away, as a serious excursion.
    The exuberance, the physical well-being of that household was certainly not general then. They were a tired people, the British. Stoical. The national low vitality, that aftermath of war, as if the horrors or endurances of war are eating away silently out of sight, swallowing energy like a black hole, was balanced by something very different. That is what strikes me most about that time—the contrast. On the one hand, the low spirits, a patient sticking it out, but on the other, an optimism for the future so far from how we are thinking now it seems almost like the symptom of a general foolishness. A New Age was dawning, no less. Socialism was the key. The troops returning from all over the world had been promised everything, the Atlantic Charter (seen sardonically at the time) was merely the summing-up of those Utopian hopes, and now they had returned a Labour government to make sure they would get it. The National Health Service was their proudest achievement. In the thirties, before the war, an illness or an accident could drag a whole family down to disaster. The poverty had been terrible and had not been forgotten. All that was finished. No longer was there a need to dread illness and the Dole and old age. And this was just a beginning: things were going to get steadily better. Everyone seemed to share this mood. You kept meeting doctors who were setting up practices that would embody this new socialist medicine, who saw themselves as builders of a new era. They could be Communists, they could be Labour, they could be Liberals. They were all idealists.
    T HE Z EITGEIST, OR H OW W E T HOUGHT T HEN
    Above all, a new world was dawning .
    Britain was still best: that was so deeply part of how citizens thought, it was taken for granted. Education, food, health, anything at all—best. The British Empire, then on its last legs—the best .
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    The newspapers were full of warnings about rebuilding the area around St. Paul’s, bombed into ruins. If this rebuilding was not