Walking in the Shade Read Free Page B

planned, a nasty chaos would result. It was not planned, and nasty chaos did result .
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    Our prisons were a disgusting and shameful disgrace. Over forty years on, news from them is the same. There is something about prisons: we cannot get them right. Is it because deep in the British heart they believe, with the Old Testament, that there should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Retribution, that is what most citizens believe in. As I am writing this, the news is that women with small children are in prison for not paying their television licence. Their children are in care. When most citizens hear this for the first time they exclaim, No, it isn’t possible that this is happening! But Dickens would not have been surprised .
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    Charity was for ever abolished by the welfare state. Never again would poor people be demeaned by gifts from others. Now we would dismantle all the apparatus of charity, the trusts, the associations, the committees. No more handouts .
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    In Oxford Street underground, I watched a little bully of an official hectoring and insulting a recently arrived West Indian who could not get the hang of the ticket mechanism. He was exactly like the whites I had watched all my life in Southern Rhodesia shouting at blacks. He was compensating for his own feelings of inferiority .
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    Everyone from abroad, particularly America, said how gentle, polite—civilised—Britain was .
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    And now…what was I going to write next? What the publishers wanted was a novel. What I was writing was short stories. All of them were set in The District—Banket, Lomagundi—and they were about the white community and how they saw themselves, preserved themselves, saw the blacks around them. I would call it This Was the Old Chief’s Country . Juliet O’Hea said if that is what I wanted to do, then of course, but no publisher would be delighted at the news of short stories, which did not sell. In fact, I proved them wrong, for they did sell, and very well—for short stories—and have gone on selling ever since. But it was a novel I should be thinking about. And so I did think hard and long about the book that would be Martha Quest .
    The Grass Is Singing had come about because people thought of me as a writer, I knew I would be one…and had been, so I know now, from an early age. I had forgotten this, believing that the decision to write came later, but when Under My Skin came out, a woman who had known me at the convent—Daphne Anderson, who wrote an admirable account of her childhood, Toe-Rags— told me she remembered us sitting on my bed in the dormitory, discussing what we would be, and I said I was going to be a writer. I must have been ten or eleven. But this figure—the writer—is a siren figure that comforts and sustains innumerable young people who are at sea, know it, and cannot direct their future in a conformable way. I left my job in the law firm in Salisbury, saying I was going to write a novel, since at some point I must stop talking about it and do it. Besides, it had occurred to me that those ideal conditions—solitude, time, freedom from care—would never happen. What was I to write? I had many ideas for a book. Now I am interested in how I then sat around, walked around and around the room, wool-gathering— an essential process—taking my time, and all this by instinct. From the many ideas one emerged…grew stronger…. I remembered the talk on the verandahs, matrix for a thousand possible tales, I remembered the little newspaper cutting I had kept all those years. And so I wrote The Grass Is Singing . First novels are usually autobiographical. The Grass Is Singing was not. Dick Turner, the failing farmer, was a figure I had seen all my life. Only a minority of the white farmers were successful; most failed. Some struggled on, failing, for years. Some hated the country. Some loved it, like Dick Turner. Some were