The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

me up from the camp the day after to say his premonition had been justified because in fact he had ‘nearly pranged his kite’, and it was sheer luck he wasn’t dead. His training was a continual torment to him.

      Yet Jimmy flew bombers, and apparently very well, over Germany right through the last phase of the war, when we were systematically laying the German cities in ruins. He flew continuously for over a year, and he survived.

      Paul was killed the last day before he left the Colony. He had been posted to India, so his uncle was right. His last evening was spent with us at a party. Usually he controlled his drinking, even when pretending to drink wild with the rest of us. That night he drank himself blind, and had to be put into a bath in the hotel by Jimmy and Willi and brought around. He went back to camp as the sun was coming up to say good-bye to his friends there. He was standing on the airstrip, so Jimmy told me later, still half-conscious with alcohol, the rising sun in his eyes—though of course, being Paul, he would not have shown the state he was in. A plane came in to land, and stopped a few paces away. Paul turned, his eyes dazzling with the sunrise, and walked straight into the propeller, which must have been an almost invisible sheen of light. His legs were cut off just below the crotch and he died at once.

      Jimmy was also middle-class; but Scotch, not English. There was nothing Scots about him, except when he got drunk, when he became sentimental about ancient English atrocities, like Glencoe. His voice was an elaborately affected Oxford drawl. This accent is hard enough to take in England, but in a Colony it is ludicrous. Jimmy knew it, and would emphasize it deliberately to annoy people he didn’t like. For us, whom he did like, he would make apologies. ‘But after all,’ he would say, ‘I know it’s silly, but this expensive voice will be my bread and butter after the war.’ And so Jimmy, like Paul, refused—at least on one level of his personality—to believe in the future of the socialism he professed. His family was altogether less impressive than Paul’s. Or rather, he belonged to a decaying branch of a family. His father was an unsatisfactory retired Indian Colonel—unsatisfactory, as Jimmy emphasized, because, ‘He isn’t the real thing. He likes Indians and goes in for humanity and Buddhism—I ask you!’ He was drinking himself to death, so Jimmy said; but I think this was put in simply to round off the picture; because he would also show us poems written by the old man; and he was probably secretly very proud of him. He was an only child, born when his mother, whom he adored, was already over forty. Jimmy was the same physical type as Paul—at first glance. A hundred yards off, they were recognizably of the same human tribe, hardly to be distinguished. But close to, their resemblances emphasized their total difference of fibre. Jimmy’s flesh was heavy, almost lumpish; he carried himself heavily; his hands were large but podgy, like a child’s hands. His features, of the same carved clear whiteness as Paul’s, with the same blue eyes, lacked grace, and his gaze was pathetic and full of a childish appeal to be liked. His hair was pale and lightless, and fell about in greasy strands. His face, as he took pleasure in pointing out, was a decadent face. It was over-full, over-ripe, almost flaccid. He was not ambitious, and wanted no more than to be a Professor of History at some university, which he has since become. Unlike the others he was truly homosexual, though he wished he wasn’t. He was in love with Paul whom he despised and who was irritated by him. Much later he married a woman fifteen years older than himself. Last year he wrote me a letter in which he described this marriage—it was obviously written when he was drunk and posted, so to speak, into the past. They slept together, with little pleasure on her side, and none on his—‘though I did put my mind to it, I do assure you!’—for a few weeks. Then she got pregnant, and that was the end of sex between them. In short, a not uncommon English marriage. His wife, it appears, has no suspicion he is not a normal man. He is quite dependent on her and if she died I suspect he’d commit suicide, or retreat into drink.

      Ted Brown was the most original. A boy from a large working-class family, he had won scholarships all his life and finally to Oxford. He was the only genuine socialist of the three—I mean socialist in his instincts, in his nature. Willi used to complain that Ted behaved ‘as if he lived in a full-blown communist society or as if he’d been brought up in some damned kibbutz’. Ted would look at him, genuinely puzzled: he could not understand why that should be a criticism. Then he’d shrug and choose to forget Willi in some new enthusiasm. He was a lively, slight, lank, black-shock-haired, hazel-eyed, energetic young man, always without money—he gave it away; with his clothes in a mess—he had no time for them, or gave them away; without time for himself, for he gave that away to everyone. He had a passion for music, about which he had taught himself a good deal, for literature, and for his fellow human beings whom he saw as victims with himself of a gigantic and almost cosmic conspiracy to deprive them of their true natures. Which of course were beautiful, generous, and good. He sometimes said he preferred being homosexual. This meant that he had a succession of protégés. The truth was he couldn’t stand that other young men of his class hadn’t had his advantages. He would seek out some bright mechanic in the camp; or, at the public meetings in town some youth who seemed to be there out of real interest and not because he had nothing better to do; seize hold of him, make him read, instruct him in music, explain to him that life was a glorious adventure, and come to us exclaiming that ‘when one finds a butterfly under a stone one has to rescue it’. He was always rushing into the hotel with some raw, bemused young man, demanding that we should jointly ‘take him on’. We always did. During the two years he was in the Colony, Ted rescued a dozen butterflies, all of whom had an amused and affectionate respect for him. He was collectively in love with them. He changed their lives. After the war, in England, he kept in touch, made them study, directed them into the Labour Party—by then he was no longer a communist; and saw to it that they did not, as he put it, hibernate. He married, very romantically and against every kind of opposition, a German girl, has three children, and teaches English at a school for backward children. He was a competent pilot, but was typical of him that he deliberately made himself fail the final tests, because he was at the time wrestling with the soul of a young ox from Manchester who refused to be musical and insisted on preferring football to literature. Ted explained to us that it was more important to rescue a human being from darkness than to add another pilot to the war effort, fascism or no fascism. So he stayed on the ground, was sent back to England, and served in the coal-mines, which experience permanently affected his lungs. Ironically enough the young man for whom he did this was his only failure.

      When ejected from the coal-mine as unfit, he somehow got himself to Germany in the role of an educator. His German wife is very good for him, being practical and competent and a good nurse. Ted now needs looking after. He complains bitterly that the state of his lungs forces him to ‘hibernate’.

      Even Ted was affected by the prevailing mood. He could not endure the wranglings and bitterness inside the Party group, and the split when it came was the last straw. ‘I’m obviously not a communist,’ he said to Willi, sombrely, with bitterness, ‘because all this hair-splitting seems to me nonsense.’ ‘No, you obviously are not,’ replied Willi, ‘I was wondering how long it’d take you to see it.’ Above all Ted was disquieted because the logic of the previous polemics had led him into the sub-group led by Willi. He thought the leader of the other group, a corporal from an aircamp and an old Marxist, ‘a dried-up bureaucrat’, but he preferred him as a human being to Willi. Yet he was committed to Willi…which leads me to something I’ve not before thought about. I keep on writing the word group. Which is a collection of people. Which one associates with a collective relationship—and it is true we met day after day for months, for hours every day. But looking back, looking back to really remember what happened, it is not at all like that. For instance I don’t think Ted and Willi ever really talked together—they jibed at each other occasionally. No, there was one time they made contact and that was in a flaming quarrel. It was on the verandah of the hotel at Mashopi, and while I can’t remember what the quarrel was about I remember Ted shouting: ‘You’re the sort of man who’d shoot fifty people before breakfast and then eat six courses. No, you’d order someone else to shoot them, that’s what you’d do.’ And Willi in reply: ‘Yes, if it were necessary I would…’ And so on, for an hour or more, and all this while the ox-wagons rolled by in the white dust of the sandveld, the trains rocked by on the way from the Indian Ocean to the capital, while the farmers drank in their khaki in the bar, and groups of Africans, in search of work, hung about under the jacaranda