Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962. Doris Lessing

you stopped, too, in an anguish of fellow feeling, not unpoisoned by a pleasurable relish in the drama of it.

      And we went to the theatre, to see Brecht’s company, The Berliner Ensemble, put on Mother Courage. No German company had yet dared to put a play on in Paris. Jack said he thought there would be a riot: Germans so soon; surely that was too much of a risk; but we should go. It would be a historical occasion. After all, it was Brecht. The first night: the theatre was packed, people standing, and outside there were too many policemen. Things did not go smoothly. There had been time only for an inadequate rehearsal. That story of war, so apt for the time and place, unfolded in silence. No one stirred. There was a hitch with the props, and still no one moved. No interval, because everything was dragging on so late. Soon the silence became unbearable: Did it mean they hated it? that the audience would go rioting onto the stage for some sort of reprisal or revenge? When the play ended, with the words ‘Take me with you, take me with you,’ and the disreputable old woman, stripped of everything, again tried to follow the army, there was something like a groan from the French. Silence, silence, no one moved, it went on – and then the audience were on their feet, roaring, shouting, applauding, weeping, embracing, and the actors stood on the stage and wept. It all went on for a good twenty minutes. About halfway through, that demonstration stopped being spontaneous and became Europe conscious of itself, defeated and disgraced Germany crying out to Europe, Take me with you, take me with you.

      I’ve never had an experience like that in the theatre, and it taught me once and for all that a play can have its perfect occasion, as if it had been written for that performance alone. I’ve seen other productions of Mother Courage since.

      Later the Canadian writer Ted Allan told me that when Brecht was a refugee in California, he was baby-sitting for the Allans. He asked Ted to read the just completed Mother Courage, and Ted did, and told Brecht it was promising but needed this and that. Helene Weigel was indignant. ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ she said. Ted used to tell this story against himself, polishing it, as befits a real storyteller. His criticisms of Brecht became more crass, a parody of Hollywood film-makers. ‘Get rid of that old bitch. You’ve got to sex it up. You need a babe there. I’ve got it – how about a nun. No, a novice, real young. Let’s see … Lana Turner … Vivien Leigh …’

      One trip with Jack was to Spain for a month. This was our longest yet. My mother stayed with Peter for part of it, Joan had him for a week, he was with the Eichners for the rest. We had very little money. Jack was not a senior doctor, and he had a family to keep. Could we each manage twenty-five pounds? The trip, with expenses for the car, travel, cost us fifty pounds. We ate bread and sausage and green peppers and tomatoes and grapes. I can’t smell green peppers that still have the heat of the sun in them without being encompassed by memories of that trip. As you crossed the frontier from France, it was to go back into the nineteenth century. This was before tourism started. As we drove into the towns, like Salamanca, Avila, Burgos, crowds pressed forward to see the foreigners. Ragged boys competed to guard the car: sixpence for a day or a night. When we did actually eat in a cheap restaurant, hungry children pressed their faces against the glass. For Jack, we were driving through ghostly memories of the Spanish Civil War: he had lived, in his imagination, through every stage of every battle. He had suffered because of the betrayal of the elected Spanish government by Britain and France: for him and people like him, that was when World War II had begun. Now he was suffering over the hungry children, remembering his own childhood. He was angry to see the streets full of black-robed fat priests and the police in their black uniforms, with their guns. Spain was so poor then it broke your heart, just like Ireland.

      And yet … We slept wrapped in blankets out in a field, in the open because of the stars. One morning, already hot, though the sun was just rising, we sat up in our blankets to see two tall dark men on tall black horses, each wearing a red blanket like a serape, riding past us and away across the fields, the hot blue sky behind them. They lifted their hands in greeting, unsmiling.

      We ate our bread and olives and drank dark-red wine under olive trees or waited out the extreme heat of midday in some little church, where I had to be sure my arms were covered, and my head too.

      We went to a bullfight, where Jack wept because of the six sacrificed bulls. He was muttering, Kill him, kill him, to the bulls.

      In Madrid beggar women sat on the pavements with their feet in the gutters, and we gave them our cakes and ordered more for them.

      We felt in the Alhambra that this was our place – the Alhambra affects people strongly: they hate it or adore it.

      We quarrelled violently, and often. It is my belief and my experience that energetic and frequent sex breeds sudden storms of antagonism. Tolstoy wrote about this. So did D. H. Lawrence. Why should this be? We made love when we stopped the car in open and empty country, in dry ditches, in forests, in vineyards, in olive groves. And quarrelled. He was jealous. This was absurd, because I loved him. In a town in Murcia, where it was so hot we simply stopped for a whole day to sit in a cafe, in the shade if not the cool, he was convinced I was making eyes at a handsome Spaniard. This quarrel was so terrible that we went to a hotel for the night, because Jack, the doctor, said that our diet and lack of sleep was getting to us.

      We drove from Gibraltar up the costas, where there were no hotels, not one, only a few fishermen at Nerja, who cooked us fish on the beach. We slept on the sand, looking at the stars, listening to the waves. Nothing was built between Gibraltar and Barcelona then; except for the towns, there were only empty, long, wonderful beaches, which in a year or so would become hotel-loaded playgrounds. Near Valencia, a sign said, ‘Do Not Bathe Here – It Is Dangerous,’ but I went into the tall enticing waves, and one of them picked me up and smashed me onto the undersea sand, and I crawled out, my ears full of sand and grit. Jack took me to the local hospital, where the two doctors communicated in Latin, proving that it is a far from dead language.

      In high, windy Avila there were acres of wonderful brown jars and pots, standing on dry reeds. I bought the most beautiful jar I have ever owned, for a few pence.

      What struck me most then, and surprises me even now, is the contrast between the wild, savage, empty beauty of Spain and the stuffy stolidity of even the cheap hotels we could afford, between the poverty we saw everywhere and the churches loaded with gold and jewels, as if all the wealth of the peninsula had come to rest in them.

      We visited Germany, three times. The first was when I wanted to find Gottfried. Peter had gone the year before for a summer to visit his father. I had told Gottfried he must not have him do this unless he was sure he could keep it up. As usual he was contemptuous of my political acumen: of course he would be able to invite Peter whenever he liked. I said I wasn’t so sure; besides, Moidi Jokl said he was wrong. I turned out to be right. Germans who had spent the war abroad were suspect, and many vanished into Stalin’s camps. I was angry, partly for the ignoble reason that I had been insulted and patronized by Gottfried for years about politics but in fact had been more often right, and he wrong. I was angry because of Peter, who had had a wonderfully kind father who had apparently dropped him.

      Now I understand what happened. It was indeed a question of life and death. What I blame him for is for not smuggling out a little letter saying, I cannot afford to keep contact with the West; I might be killed for it. It would have been easy: there was a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing. Instead people would come back from some official trip to East Germany and say, I saw your handsome husband. He is a very important man. He sends you his love. ‘He is not my husband,’ I would say, ‘and it is Peter who needs his love.’ I hated East Berlin. For me it was like a distillation of everything bad about communism, but some comrades admired it. For years, right up to the time of the collapse of communism, they were saying, ‘East Germany has got it right. It is economically in advance of any other communist country. What a pity the revolution didn’t start in Germany.’

      Another trip was to Hamburg. Jack wanted to find a friend who had disappeared in the war. He failed. Hamburg had been badly bombed and was still full of ruins. It was February, dark, very cold, with a bitter wind coming off the North Sea. Jack said there was a trade-union festival, a traditional one; we should join in. In the gaps between buildings, among ruins, burned great bonfires, and around them leaped and staggered or swayed very