Going Home - Doris May Lessing [99]
She was a good woman, strict with her children, and with her own behaviour in this city.
And now the elder children were growing up, and Samson thought hardly at all of the green village in the mountains. It was as if he had lived all his life here. But once, feeling tired and sometimes dizzy, and sometimes with pains in him, he went home with his wife, and the younger children, this time on the big lorries that go to and fro over the long distance. He found the village hard now; he had grown away from it. He loved it, and he didn’t love it. His wife would have stayed, but he fretted, and returned to the big city. His wife came with him. But he was growing to be an old man. He did not know how old he was, but it was harder to do the work, carrying messages around the offices on a bicycle, and the sweeping, and sometimes the moving of the luggage. And then there was a change in the way of work, for the union of the white men who worked on the railway was always very careful of what work the black men did. There was a reorganization, and work like Samson’s, which was neither one thing nor another, must be named and ordered. It was at this time that he changed from sweeping and running messages on the platforms, to becoming an assistant of one of the white men who tended the big engines. He might oil certain parts of the engine while the man watched him, or he might take tools and do small repairs under inspection. This was easier work for him, now that his back was stiffening. Also he had better hours. He was a real railway worker. And then the war came, and again it was as if the town had been fed with new life. It began to spread in all directions, and the trains were in and out all day, carrying troops wearing different coloured uniforms. That easy-going pace of the life along the platforms that he remembered was gone. Often he did not know the faces of the white men who drove and tended the trains. And only the older men in the offices of the station remembered him as a young man, the youth from Nyasaland.
In the location, too, things were changing. Instead of huts and shacks of all kinds, there were houses being built for the Africans, and it was called the township. The Superintendent of the township, who liked those he looked after to be willing and cheerful and obedient, liked Samson, and he was given one of the good houses for men with families. It had two rooms in it, and a kitchen. They all lived in it, the mother and father, and the oldest son, Dickson, who had been born in Nyasaland and had come down with his mother, and the four younger children, all of whom were working in the houses of the white city.
But the new house cost more money than the old one, the rent was higher, and because of the war, the prices of food and clothing were rising all the time, and although everyone in the family was working, it was hard to live, harder than it had ever been.
Around him on the railway, his people were talking whenever they met of the difficulty of living. Often they would send a spokesman to the management about their wages. But the management was not in the station buildings, it was as if whenever they spoke to a white boss, he said he was not the real boss, but there was another over him…they could never get at this real boss to speak to him face to face, as had been possible—so Samson told them—in the old days.
When the strike began, although there had been so much discontent for so long, it was a surprising and troubling thing even for those who had spoken most of it. To begin with, a strike was not legal. And to one like Samson, who had spent all his life avoiding trouble, learning the taboos that hedged his life so as to respect them, to do something illegal was frightening. But there came that evening when all about him walked off from their work, saying it was a strike, and of course he went with them.
There were no blacklegs in that strike.
And the white men, that is the white men who worked on the railways as workers, wished them good luck as they went; because