DORIS LESSING
557
"Can do. What's the house number? Thanks a lot. " "There's a coloured
child not going to school at Number 43 Selous Court." "Hey, is that you
Tigger man? Leave it with me."
When we sold the
Guardian
in the Coloured quarter we did not ask
for money, and were criticized in the group.
"Since when do we stand for charity, comrades?"
"Oh for God's sake, have a heart, comrade, you make me sick some–
times."
This comrade was more often than not Gottfried. He was always the
embodiment of cold, cutting, Marxist logic, and his favorite phrase was
"And now let us analyse the situation." His analyses at least exposed the
bones of a situation, and even now, bombarded with information or
rhetoric I find myself summoning the ghost of that voice, and I think:
Well then, right, so do let's analyse the situation.
Another man, who was not among the founders , increasingly earned
irritated dislike. He was newly from England, part of that bureaucracy
that ran one of the RAF camps, a tall, thin, handsome young man, and all
the women had a brief crush on him. He was the very essence of young
working-class hero. In fact he was putting it on, as was the way then; he
was middle-class. Like Gottfried he wa always analysing situations, and in
fact was made Political Education Officer for a time. He presented himself
as a fanatic, Lenin's progeny, was serious, unsmiling, and sat apart, making
tidy notes and consulting authorities, Lenin, Stalin. He would sit listening
critically while Gottfried analysed something, and then deliver judgment,
not necessarily in his favor. There was a meeting about the situation in
South Africa - that is, an inner or secret meeting. It is I think worth
recording that then, the early 1940s, the political situation in South
Africa, the treatment of Africans, Coloureds and Indians, was judged by
us as so cruel that there was a revolutionary situation which must shortly
explode in a blood-bath. We might spend whole evenings discussing how
we could aid this process, "when the moment comes." The Chamber of
Mines had put forward some proposal for its labour force. This comrade,
John Miller his name was, sat silent long enough to get our attention, and
then: "In situations like this, comrades, it is enough
to
ask ourselves,
What would the Chamber of Mines want? What would be their priority?
Establish that fact and then ... " A pause, while the tension mounts. He
smiles coolly, "And then it goes without saying that our line must be the
opposite." Storms of applause. Yes, this was indeed the level of our politi–
cal thinking.
But the storms of applause were already much less. In fact, this young
hero had come in when things were falling apart, or at least changing.
Now I see that if we had really been a Communist group, in a
