Going Home. Doris Lessing

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      Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing – not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.

      I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting – all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other – confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.

      The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.

      To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.

      But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.

      The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.

      I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls – even parks and gardens – are an urban shell.

      But in Africa the wildness of the country is still much stronger than the towns.

      But even so, this house was wrong; it was not this that I had come home to find. For me all houses will always be wrong; all bungalows, cottages, mansions and villas will be uncomfortable and incongruous and confining. I only like blocks of flats, the most direct expression of crammed town-living. I did not understand why this should be so for a long time, until I took to dreaming nightly of the house I was brought up in; and then at last I submitted myself to the knowledge that I am the victim of a private mania that I must humour. I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. In order to find a place I live in tolerable, I have not to see it. Or rather, I work on it until it takes on the colouring suggested by its shape, and then forget it. If, in an unguarded moment, I actually see it, all of it, what it is, then a terrible feeling of insecurity and improbability comes over me. The fact is, I don’t live anywhere; I never have since I left that first house on the kopje. I suspect more people are in this predicament than they know.

      But that first house crumbled long ago, returned to the soil, was swallowed by the bush; and so I was glad after we had had dinner to go out again in the car, ostensibly to look for someone whose address we did not know, but hoped we might find by chance – in fact to get out of the town into the bush.

      In five minutes we were there.

      And now for the first time I was really home. The night was magnificent; the Southern Cross on a slant overhead; the moon a clear, small pewter; the stars all recognizable and close. The long grass stood all around, tall and giving off its dry, sweetish smell, and full of talking crickets. The flattened trees of the highveld were low above the grass, low and a dull silver-green.

      It was the small intimate talking of the crickets which received me and made me part of that nightscape.

      Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier between me and the steady, solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.

      It was only so the first night; for at once habit took over and erected its barriers; and if I had had to fly back to England the next day, I would have been given what I had gone home for.

      For to stand there with the soft dust of the track under my shoes, the crickets talking in my ear, the moon cold over the bush, meant I was able to return to that other house.

      There are two sorts of habitation in Africa. One is of brick, cement, plaster, tile and tin – the substance of the country processed and shaped; the other sort is made direct of the stuff of soil and grass and tree. This second kind is what most of the natives of the country live in; and what I, as a child, lived in. The house was not a hut, but a long, cigar-shaped dwelling sliced several times across with walls to make rooms.

      To make such a house you choose a flat place, clear it of long grass and trees, and dig a trench two feet deep in the shape you want the house to be. You cut trees from the bush and lop them to a size and insert them side by side in the trench, as close as they will go. From the trunks of living trees in the bush, fibre is torn; for under the thick rough bark of a certain variety of tree is a thick layer of smooth flesh. It is coloured yellow and pink; and when it is still alive, newly torn from the tree, it is wet and slippery to the touch. It dries quickly; so it is necessary to have several labourers stripping the fibre, with others ready immediately to use it for tying the trees of the walls into place. At this stage the house will look like a small space enclosed by a palisade – tall, uneven logs of wood, greyish-brown in colour, laced tightly with yellow СКАЧАТЬ