To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing Page B

finished the sandwich she had begun, adjusted her spectacles, and gave me a short lecture about the necessity for unremitting vigilance on the part of the working class. She then said she must go, because she had to be at her office at two. She said that the only way an intellectual with my background could hope to attain to a correct working-class viewpoint was to work harder in the Party; to mix continually with the working class; and in this way my writing would gradually become a real weapon in the classstruggle. She said, further, that she would send me the verbatim record of the Trials in the thirties, and if I read this, I would find my present vacillating attitude towards Soviet justice much improved. I said I had read the verbatim records a long time ago; and I always did think they sounded unconvincing. She said that I wasn’t to worry; a really sound working-class attitude would develop with time.
    With this she left me. I remember that, for one reason and another, I was rather depressed.
    I was just settling down to work again when the telephone rang. It was Cousin Jessie, to say she could not come to my flat as arranged, because she was buying a dress to be photographed in. Could I meet her outside the dress shop in twenty minutes? I therefore abandoned work for the afternoon and took a taxi.
    On the way the taxi man and I discussed the cost of living, the conduct of the government, and discovered we had everything in common. Then he began telling me about his only daughter, aged eighteen, who wanted to marry his best friend, aged forty-five. He did not hold with this; had said so; and thereby lost daughter and friend at one blow. What made it worse was that he had just read an article on psychology in the woman’s magazine his wife took, from which he had suddenly gathered that his daughter was father-fixated. ‘I felt real bad when I read that,’ he said. ‘It’s a terrible thing to come on suddenlike, a thing like that.’ He drew up smartly outside the dress shop and I got out.
    ‘I don’t see why you should take it to heart,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we weren’t all father-fixated.’
    ‘That’s not the way to talk,’ he said, holding out his hand for the fare. He was a small, bitter-looking man, with a head like a lemon or like a peanut, and his small blue eyes were brooding and bitter. ‘My old woman’s been saying to me for years that I favoured our Hazel too much. What gets me is, she might have been in the right of it.’
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘look at it this way. It’s better to love a child too much than too little.’
    ‘Love?’ he said. ‘Love, is it? Precious little love or anything elsethese days if you ask me, and Hazel left home three months ago with my mate George and not so much as a postcard to say where or how.’
    ‘Life’s pretty difficult for everyone,’ I said, ‘what with one thing and another.’
    ‘You can say that,’ he said.
    This conversation might have gone on for some time, but I saw my cousin Jessie standing on the pavement watching us. I said goodbye to the taxi man and turned, with some apprehension, to face her.
    ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘I saw you arguing with him. It’s the only thing to do. They’re getting so damned insolent these days. My principle is, tip them sixpence regardless of the distance, and if they argue, let them have it. Only yesterday I had one shouting at my back all down the street because I gave him sixpence. But we’ve got to stand up to them.’
    My cousin Jessie is a tall girl, broad-shouldered, aged about twenty-five. But she looks eighteen. She has light brown hair which she wears falling loose around her face, which is round and young and sharp-chinned. Her wide, light blue eyes are virginal and fierce. She is altogether like the daughter of a Viking, particularly when battling with bus conductors, taxi men, and porters. She and my Aunt Emma carry on permanent guerrilla warfare with the lower