Doris Lessing - Landlocked

‘Public opinion changes.’

A couple of decades, a decade, in these rapid days even a year, demonstrate how suddenly the season of a belief can turn. Into its own opposite, the rule seems to be – or at least, often enough to make it safe to ignore the exceptions.

This was Martha’s first experience of it. Last time there had been a change, she had changed with it. Four years before, the present ‘politically conscious’ Martha had been born, out of – that’s what it amounted to – The Battle of Stalingrad. How odd that ‘a busybody who ran around all the time’ (Anton had said it again only last night) could be born out of a great battle thousands of miles away. Which was a ridiculous thought: Martha found herself sitting with a smile on her face, when the speaker on the platform was in the middle of a sentence about people starving to death in Europe.

But the hall was half full, and the audience were restless, not because they were bored, far from it, but because they were angry with the speaker. Martha ought to be making up with her appreciation for their lack of it. The chair she sat in had a hard edge which cut across the back of her thighs. It was very hot. When she stood up, her pink dress would be marked by a wet line, unless she – she wriggled forward on her seat, and Anton gave her a look – do be still!

This winter, Professor Dickinson was saying, millions of people in Europe would be without enough to eat; the children would be marked for life by what happened to them; thousands would die. Yet international capitalism was quite prepared to … A man shouted: ‘Cut out the gramophone record and let’s have facts.’

‘Yes, yes,’ shouted several people.

It was the most extraordinary thing, being part of this audience. Everything was suddenly different. At the beginning of this same year, 1945, the war still gripped half the world, and when people said: It will soon be over, they did not really believe it. One had only to mention the Soviet Union to create a feeling of warm participation with a mighty strength used for the good and the true. Germany was a sub-human nation so brutalized, so sadistic in its very essence, that it could only expect ‘to work its passage back to membership of the civilized world’ by long, slow degrees. Japan was not far behind in villainy. All these were major axioms. A minor change: six months ago the Tories had governed Britain and, it seemed, always would. But Labour had won the election after all. As for this country, this enormous tract of land nevertheless made unimportant by the fewness of the people it supported – well, its long prosperity, because of the war, was threatened. Its own soldiers returned from various battlefronts, mostly in small numbers, while the RAF left daily in thousands. But if to be in this country was to feel like being churned in a whirlpool, it was no more than what happened everywhere: all over the world human beings were shifting in great masses from one country, one continent, to another: myriads of tiny black seeds trickled from side to side of a piece of paper shifted about in the casually curious hand.

As for ‘the group’, that ridiculous little organism, it did not exist – which was proved by the fact that most of its former members were here tonight, friendly enough, if wary, towards each other.

This was ‘a big meeting’ and therefore everyone had turned out, responsible to the end towards something they had begun and which now was ending. They sat along the back of the Brazen Hall, which was even scruffier and dingier than before, a dozen or so people. There were present Anton Hesse and his wife, Piet du Preez and Marie, Athen from Greece, Thomas Stern from Poland, Solly Cohen, Marjorie and Colin Black, Boris Krueger and his wife, young Tommy Brown, and Johnny Lindsay who looked very ill, but was being supported by Flora.

As for the dozens of others, comrades, friends, lovers, who everyone thought about tonight, because of their sense of an occasion which marked an end, they were all over the world – in England, and Scotland, in America and in Israel. Nearer home, Joss had settled ‘up North’; and Jasmine was living ‘down South’ in Johannesburg.

Coming into the hall, Marjorie had said: ‘Isn’t it awful, when you think …’ And big Piet had said: ‘Man, it gives me the skriks, I can tell you that!’ And Solly had said: ‘O?, so I’m a traitor – but how about closing the ranks just for tonight!’

What could more sharply epitomize the general change than that ‘a big meeting’ should be taking place here, in this dirty little hall, even though the speaker was the famous Professor Dickinson from Johannesburg? Only six months before, it would have been enough to ask the authorities for the big State Hall, to be given it. But permission had been mysteriously delayed until Mrs Van, asking for the reason in person, had been give the verbal explanation that ‘it was not considered desirable that the State Hall should be used for such purposes.’ The letter of refusal had of course been bland: the hall was booked for all the nights they had asked for it. Acting on the sound old principle that ‘they should never be allowed to get away with anything’, Marjorie Black had written in offering the authorities twenty more dates supplied by the obliging Professor. But this letter had earned an exact repetition of the first; the hall was booked for all the mentioned dates. Again Mrs Van, respected Town Councillor, enquired ‘off the record’. And off the record she was told that ‘the Reds’ need not think they would ever get the State Hall again – a decision had been taken and was written into the minutes. And how, Mrs Van had demanded to know, was ‘a Red’ defined these days? Anyone who was a member of the following organizations, she was told.

And what, she asked, had happened to make these organizations unsafe which for at least four years had been respectable? A decision had been taken by whom?

At this tempers had been lost, and voices raised. A chill wind blew – that was all. The atmosphere had changed. ‘Public opinion had changed.’ What people were afraid of – that is what had changed. Fear had shifted its quarters.

Another difference: Mrs Van had said that obviously Thomas Stern could not be chairman. Now during the war, or at least since the end of ‘the phoney war’, the atmosphere had been such that of course a corporal from the Health Corps could chair a public meeting, of course a twenty-year-old aircraftsman could address five hundred solid citizens on revolutionary poetry – one needed no other credentials than one’s enthusiasm.

But Mrs Van had put Mr Playfair into the chair – he who had once been reserved for the most tricky of ‘respectable’ meetings. She had said to Marjorie Black: ‘Really, dear, now that everything’s changed, you must have more sense.’

The hall was less than half full. The faces were all familiar, of course. These were the public who had made so many activities possible, had raised money, given it, bought pamphlets, and applauded every variety of left-wing sentiment. And here they sat, their faces for the most part stiff and hostile. And where were the others?

Well, public opinion had changed, that was all.

Professor Dickinson was a lively, handsome little man, even more vigorous than usual tonight because he thrived on opposition. What he was saying was no more than what had been said up and down these platforms for four years. The Soviet Union had been allowed a truce by the capitalist powers for the duration of the war, since it was taking the brunt of the war against Hitler (who of course had been if not created, at least supported, by the said capitalist powers as an anti-communist insurance) but that now the Soviet Union was exhausted, bled white, had lost its usefulness, the capitalist powers would revert to type and do everything to destroy the socialist country, taking up where they had left off in 1940. The war need never have taken place if Britain had responded to the Soviet Union’s invitation to make a pact against Hitler: the war had suited certain financial interests extremely well, millions of people had died because finance capital was more interested in making profits than in …