African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [30]
‘Harry, does it strike you as odd that it’s only now you are saying you had a bad time in that war?’
‘I never said that,’ he protested at once. ‘A lot of people had it much worse than I did.’
‘I don’t think anyone would criticize you for exaggerating if you happened to remark you had a bad war.’
He was silent, looking humorous, rueful, deprecating.
‘This bloody stiff-upper-lip business of yours–you pay a pretty heavy price for it.’
He looked genuinely surprised.
‘I don’t know, I don’t think one should make a fuss, that sort of thing.’
‘Why not? Do you realize, when I asked you after the War, how was it when the Repulse went down, you said, Oh it wasn’t too bad.’
He was silent and then he began to talk about his son. My brother’s son, whom I have not met since he was seven or so, was in the Selous Scouts. For those who have forgotten, let us put it this way: the whites in new Zimbabwe were not talking about the Selous Scouts as the blacks did, or as they were spoken of in our newspapers in Britain; we do know that one person’s thug and murderer is another’s hero.
This young man, who had distinguished himself in the Scouts, suffered a sudden conversion to fundamental Christianity, then took himself to Texas where he was trained as a preacher. He now preached to black and white in South Africa.
‘Pretty fiery stuff,’ says Harry, looking at me in a certain way.
‘Ah, you mean you go for it?’
‘I’ve been to some of their services. Quite a bit different from the good old Church of England. It quite sweeps you off your feet.’
‘Literally, so I hear. Have you been dancing in the aisles?’
‘Well, just about.’
‘Funny thing, his having that conversion, after that fighting. Would you agree it wasn’t pretty, what he was doing?’
‘You could say that, yes.’ A pause. ‘A conversion, you call it?’ he says, casual, pouring himself a drink, offering me one.
‘Yes. A sudden thing. Quite common really. People in great danger, scared stiff, they suffer conversion. They get God. The psychologists know about it.’
‘Interesting thing, that.’
‘Like astronauts.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘Or people just about to fall off a mountain peak or lost in a small boat in the middle of an ocean.’
‘Anyway, I didn’t have a conversion. I’ve always gone to church.’
He drinks, gulp after gulp, but carefully. It was as if he were listening to each mouthful as it went down. Suddenly I understood something: again, I could have seen it before: nothing is more exasperating than this, that you can flounder about in a mist, and then, all at once, everything is clear. What my brother and my father had in common was not genes: at least, genes were not why both were slow, hesitant, cautious, dream-logged men who seemed always to be listening to some fateful voice only they could hear: they were both men hurt by war. This thought was such a shock to me, illuminating all kinds of old puzzles, old questions, that I had to set it aside for the moment: Harry was obviously planning to say something difficult. His lips were moving together over words he was discarding as they came to him: his eyes stared inward. At last he lifted his head and made himself look at me.
‘You say we spent a lot of time together in the bush?’
‘Yes, every school holidays, sometimes all day. We used to take a bottle of cold tea and sandwiches and stay out from sunrise till after the sun went down.’
‘After that Japanese was here–funny chap he was–I read one of your short stories.’
‘Well, what did you think?’
‘It was about you and me in the bush. And the dogs. But it really got to me, that story. I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t remember anything, you see.’
‘What, nothing?’
‘No. I realized then I didn’t remember anything very much before I was about eleven or twelve. At least, I remembered quite a bit about school, but nothing about the farm.’
‘Nothing?’
‘You could say nothing.’
‘You don’t remember things like lying in the rocks