The grass is singing lessing maternal role
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They – those tough, muscled labouring men down there and, of course, people like me – were the vanguard of the working class. Here they were, the workers, the working class, and at that time I believed that the logic of history would make it inevitable they should inherit the earth. A lot of white people, seeing whites work like blacks, had felt uneasy and threatened for me, it was not so simple.
#The grass is singing lessing maternal role manual
I was also having those thoughts – perhaps better say feelings – that disturb every arrival from Southern Africa who has not before seen white men unloading a ship, doing heavy manual labour, for this had been what black people did. In between he had never been still, unless I was telling him tales and singing him nursery rhymes, which I had been doing for four or five hours every day. I was also exhausted, because the child, two-and-a-half, had for the month of the voyage woken at five, with shouts of delight for the new day, and had slept reluctantly at ten every night.
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I had two marriages behind me, but I did not feel I had been really married. Is this an adolescent I am describing? No, I was nearly thirty. I felt myself to be self-created, self-sufficient. I had refused the pitiful sums of money my mother had offered, because she had so little herself, and besides, the whole sum and essence of this journey was that it was away from her, from the family and from that dreadful provincial country Southern Rhodesia, where, if there was a serious conversation, then it was – always – about the Colour Bar and the inadequacies of the blacks. I had a couple of trunkfuls of books, for I would not be parted from them, some clothes, some negligible jewellery.
#The grass is singing lessing maternal role full
I was full of confidence and optimism, though my assets were minimal: rather less than £150 the manuscript of my first novel, The Grass is Singing, already bought by a Johannesburg publisher who had not concealed the fact he would take a long time publishing it, because it was so subversive and a few short stories. A clean slate, a new page, everything still to come. As for me, real London was still ahead, like the beginning of my real life, which would have happened years before if the war hadn’t stopped me coming to London. The child was probably thinking, But ships and cranes and water was Cape Town, and now it’s called London. High on the side of the tall ship I held up my little boy and said, ‘Look, there’s London.’ Dockland: muddy creeks and channels, greyish rotting wooden walls and beams, cranes, tugs, big and little ships.