556
PARTISAN REVIEW
Our hearts were permanently swollen with compassion for the world.
Any leisure moments between meetings or selling newspapers or
"working on" some "contact" would find us sitting in a cheap cafe, talk–
ing about beautiful futures, our dreams fueled by the sick rage we lived in
because of the frightful war which we all believed could have been pre–
vented. And in any case, we were "defending the bad against the worst."
Quite soon there wouldn't be any more war - like our parents, like my
father, we believed this had to be the last because war would have been
seen - at last - to be so destructive. We would watch some ragged black
child loitering on the pavement, looking in at the amazing riches of this
eating place, and we would assure each other that quite soon, such chil–
dren would not exist. We lived on heroic myths and fantasies. The
Storming of the Bastille - only recently has it emerged that there were
only seven people in it and they were quite well treated: we imagined
ourselves swarming up grim walls, to release starving prisoners. The
Storming of the Winter Palace - we identified with heroic revolutionar–
ies, not a mob drinking themselves sick on the wines in the cellars. From
inside Nazi Europe came stories of heroic resistance, brave words on the
gallows, escapes to freedom in Switzerland, the feats of the French
Resistance. Yugoslavia was a potent symbol: we knew that Tito, snubbed
by the British Government, but recognized by Churchill, was fighting a
heroic war as pure and noble as the Battle of Britain. Of the myths that
fed us, only the Long March has survived untarnished.
Something else began almost from the start, so low on our agenda we
hardly noticed it. When I sold the
Guardian
around the Coloured quarter,
once a week, I was for the afternoon immersed in "toe-rag" poverty,
streets and courts crammed with people who were listless, drunk, de–
moralized. They grabbed at the newspapers as if they were tickets to the
Promised Land - America. A sick man, his eyes running pus, sits in the
sun, grabs my skirt. "Missus, missus, sit and pray with me, sit and pray."
But I do not believe in prayer. "I don't think that's going to help you
much," I say, gracious, matey. "But I'll tell my friend Mary who's on the
Church Committee - she'll come and see you." "When will she come?"
"Soon." "Tell her to come quick-quick, I'm sick."
In a small town all the members of the "caring" organizations - a
word not yet born - knew each other. We might be Reds and
Revolutionaries, tales told by the good citizens about us might make their
flesh creep, but some of us were also members of the network of welfare
workers. Informally, that is. When I left those poor and sorrowful streets I
might spend a couple of hours ringing Welfare, various churches, the
Education and Housing and Health departments. "There's a woman with
three children, her husband has left her, do you think you could ..."
