Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing Page A

Soviet Union because the year before he had gone to Lourdes and thought this would be a nice contrast, and as piquant an experience. But he was deceptive, played the role of philistine, a pipe-smoking tweedy Englishman, phlegmatic and silent. In fact, he was a romantic soul. Arnold Kettle was on this delegation because Naomi had invited him and because the Party had agreed to it. I had written a well-reviewed novel and short stories.
    When we met at the airport, five of us looked with suspicion, or with wariness, at Arnold Kettle, but almost at once his calm and good sense made him the mentor of the group. This often happened: communists, seen as demons, seemed disproportionately sane when actually met.
    Our opinions about the Soviet Union could hardly have been more diverse, but we were made one partly because of the hysterical attentions of the newspapers, which caused us to close ranks, and partly because of Arnold’s insistence that we should present a united front, regardless of our differences. This had to be the party line, from King Street and—presumably—the Soviet Union. It surprised the ‘right wing’—Naomi and Douglas—and upset A. E. Coppard, because he wanted only to embrace communism publicly and for ever on behalf of the whole British nation. The point was, he was quite unpolitical, had not been, as it were, inoculated against politics, and his first introduction to it had overthrown him. Richard Mason was unpolitical by nature and intention. So Arnold and I found ourselves holding the centre ground, which certainly suited my temperament and, of course, my sense of importance. I think now that if we had quarrelled publicly, in front of the Russians, we would at least have presented a fairer picture of British attitudes towards communism, but with every hour together we found ourselves feeling more and more British, and patriots. This united front was matched as soon as we met the Russians, for they were all old-fashioned nationalists. This sounds a simple statement, to be met now by: Well, of course! But nationalism of this sort had nothing to do with the purities of Utopian Communism, which planned the mutual love of all mankind. To listen to our hosts talking like Colonel Blimp made me remember, most uncomfortably, the hours we had spent in the group in Southern Rhodesia, trying to make sense of the twists and turns in the ‘Party Line’. Masterpieces of dialectic, they were, and particularly from Gottfried, manipulating Marxist verities. If the Russians had known how local communists, all over the world, wove their airy structures of explanation of why the Russian comrades were doing this and that improbable thing, they would have laughed their heads off. How right I had been to say—and Gottfried too—that no real Communist party anywhere would recognise our idealistic vapourings. But to encounter this crude, simplistic nationalism here was not what I had expected, and yet why not? The Russians, or rather Stalin, had never made any secret of it. These mental discomforts I discussed with Arnold, for the others would not have understood us. We concluded that the war had been so terrible for the Russians that of course they had to retreat to nationalism. Russians had to be forgiven everything because of that war. They had lost more people in the siege of Leningrad than the British and Americans combined had lost in the whole war. This was why Czech Jack kept saying to me, ‘You people here simply don’t understand.’ [‘The Soviet Union’ and ‘Russia’ were interchangeable in those days, improbable though that sounds now.]
    I have to say that these memories of that trip are not shared—for instance, with Naomi, as I discovered when twenty-five years or so later I found we were not remembering the same things: it was not a question of remembering the same things differently but as if we had been on two different trips. This