DORIS LESSING
beaten, who described himself as a teacher "planning the total re–
fOffil of the entire educational system"; a woman of middle age, a
widow, badly dressed and smoking incessantly, who looked as if she
had long since gone beyond what she was strong enough to bear
from life; an old man with an angelic pink face fringed with white
tufts who said he was named after Keir Hardie; three schoolboys,
the son of the widow and his two friends; the woman attendant
from the ladies' cloakroom who had unlocked this room to set out
the chairs and then had stayed out of interest, since it was her after–
noon off; two aiffilen from the R.A.F.; Dick the convenor; and a
beautiful young woman no one had ever seen before who, as soon
as Dick had finished his manifesto, stood up to make a plea for
vegetarianism. She was ruled out of order. "We have to get power
first, and then we'll simply do what the majority wants."
As
for me,
I was set apart from them by my lack of fervour, and by Dick's
hostility.
This was in the middle of the Second World War, whose aim
it was to defeat the hordes of National Socialism. The Union of
Socialist Soviet Republics was thirty years old.
It
was more than a
hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution, and rather
less than that after the American Revolution which overthrew the
tyrannies of Britain. The independence of India would shortly
be
celebrated. It was twenty years after the death of Lenin. Trotsky still
lived.
One of the schoolboys, a friend of the widow's son, put up
his
hand to say timidly, instantly to
be
shut up, that "he believed there
might be books which we could read about socialism and that sort
of thing."
"Indeed there are," said the namesake of Keir Hardie, nodding
his white locks, "but we needn't follow the writ that runs in other
old countries, when we have got a brand new one here."
(It must be explained that the whites of Rhodesia, then as now,
are always referring to "this new country.")
"As for books," said Dick, eyeing me with all the scornful self–
::ommand he had acquired since leaving his cushion weeks before on
the floor of our living room, "books don't seem to do some people
any good, so why do we need them? It is all perfectly simple. It
isn't right for a few people to own all the wealth of a country. It
