Under My Skin
Under My Skin
Doris Lessing
The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.The first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. it charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.
DORIS LESSING
Under My Skin
Volume One of
My Autobiography, to 1949
Table of Contents
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I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart you’re really a part of me,
I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve tried so not to give in …
COLE PORTER
The individual, and groupings of people, have to learn that they cannot reform society in reality, nor deal with others as reasonable people, unless the individual has learned to locate and allow for the various patterns of coercive institutions, formal and also informal, which rule him. No matter what his reason says, he will always relapse into obedience to the coercive agency while its pattern is within him.
IDRIES SHAH, Caravan of Dreams
No matter where one looks on the face of the earth, wherever there are people, they can be observed syncing when music is played. There is popular misconception about music. Because there is a beat to music, the generally accepted belief is that the rhythm originates in the music, not that music is a highly specialized release of rhythms already in the individual. Otherwise how can one explain the close fit between ethnicity and music?
Rhythm patterns may turn out to be one of the most basic personality traits that differentiates one individual from another.
… when people converse … their brain waves even lock into a single unified sequence. When we talk to each other our central nervous systems mesh like two gears in a transmission.
The power of rhythmic message within the group is as strong as anything I know. It is … a hidden force, like gravity, that holds groups together.
I can remember being quite overwhelmed when I first made cinematographic recordings of groups of people in public. Not only were small groups in sync, but there were times when it seemed that all were part of a larger rhythm.
EDWARD T. HALL, The Dance of Life
1 (#ulink_876d9b71-7219-50ea-9c97-2451e3898f1d)
‘SHE WAS VERY PRETTY but all she cared about was horses and dancing.’
This refrain tinkled through my mother’s tales of her childhood, and it was years before it occurred to me, ‘Wait a minute, that’s her mother she’s talking about.’ She never used any other words than those, and they could not have been her words, since she did not remember her mother. No, this was what she had heard from the servants, for she unconsciously put on a kitchen face, with a condemning look about her mouth, and she always gave a disapproving sniff. That little sniff evoked for me a downstairs world as exotic as the people in it would have found tales of cannibals and the heathen. Servants and nursemaids brought the little children up, after the frivolous Emily McVeagh died, in childbed, of peritonitis, with her third, when her first, my mother, was still only three. There is not even a photograph of Emily. She is Nobody. She is nothing at all. John William McVeagh would not talk about his first wife. What can she have done? – I asked myself. After all, to be light-minded is not a crime. At last it came to me. Emily Flower was common, that must have been it.
Then a researcher was invited to throw light into those distant places and she came up with a mass of material that would do very well as a basis for one of those Victorian novels, by Trollope perhaps, where the chapter about Emily Flower, called ‘What Can Have Been Her Fault?’, could only be a short one, if the saddest.
‘The information on the Flower family was got through birth, marriage and death certificates, parish records, census records, apprentice records, barge owners’ records, lightermen and watermen records, local history and wills,’ says the researcher, evoking Dickens’ England in a sentence.
There was a Henry Flower who in 1827 was described as Manner, and in the 1851 census as a Victualler. He was born in Somerset and his wife Eleanor was born in Limehouse. Their son, George James Flower, delinquent Emily’s father, was apprenticed to a John Flower, presumably a relative. The Flower family were barge owners, and on Emily’s birth certificate her father was described as lighterman.
The Flower clan lived in and around Flower Terrace, now demolished, and George James and his wife Eliza Miller lived at Number 3 Flower Terrace. This was in Poplar, near what is now Canary Wharf. There were four children. Eliza was widowed, aged thirty-five, and the closeness and mutual helpfulness of the clan is shown by how, although women did not do this then, the lightermen and watermen allowed her to be a barge owner and take apprentices. She made her son Edward an apprentice and he later became lighterman and barge owner in her place. Her children did well, and she ended in a pleasant house, with an annuity. Emily was the youngest child and she married John William McVeagh in 1883.
My mother described the house she was brought up in as tall, narrow, cold, dark, depressing, and her father as a disciplinarian, strict, frightening, always ready with moral exhortations.
The well-off working class had a good life in late Victorian times, with jaunts to the races, all kinds of parties and celebrations. They most heartily ate and drank. Nothing dreary or cold about Flower Terrace and its companion streets, full of relatives and friends. Emily came from this warm clan life into the doubtless ardent arms of John William McVeagh – he must have been very much in love to marry her – but she was expected to match herself to his ambitions, to the frightful snobberies of a man fighting to leave the working class behind. I imagine her running back home when she could to her common family, for dances, good times and going to the races. She must have lived in her husband’s house under a cold drizzle of disapproval, from which, or so I see it, she died, aged thirty-two.
My mother never mentioned her grandfather, John William’s father, and that meant John William did not talk about him any more than he did about Emily.
‘The information for this family,’ says the researcher, ‘comes from births, deaths and marriages, the clerical directory, the Public Record Office, army records and books on the Charge of the Light Brigade, census reports, wills and local directories. John McVeagh’s date of birth and place of birth conflict in the records. Army records of birth and occupation are frequently incorrect as men enlisting, for reasons of their own, gave wrong information, and it would have been difficult to check up in the pre-1837 registration time. In any case, recruiting stations were not particular in the army of the nineteenth century.’
John McVeagh was born in Portugal, and his father was a soldier. He was in the 4th Light Dragoons, and was a Hospital Sergeant Major when he left the army in 1861. He was in the Crimea and East Turkey and in the Charge of the Light Brigade – he really was, for soldiers made that claim who had no right to it. But why did they want to have been part of such carnage? John McVeagh’s conduct as a soldier was exemplary. When his horse was shot under him in the Charge he continued to tend the wounded though wounded himself. He received various medals. Here is an entry for March 1st 1862, the United Service Gazette:
4th (Queen’s) Hussars – Cahir. On Friday the 21st ult. Serjt-Major J. McVeagh late of this regiment, now Yeoman Warder of the Tower, was presented by the officers of his late corps with a purse containing 20 guineas, a silver snuff box beautifully engraved, showing his former services. Few men have been more honoured for their good conduct than Serjt-Major McVeagh on leaving his regiment, then at the Curragh, a few months back, to take his new appointment after 24 years service. The non-commissioned officers and privates presented him with a splendid tea service with the following inscription: ‘To Hospital Serjt-Major John McVeagh, as a token of respect for his general kindness.’ During the Crimean War he was at all times with his regiment in the field, attending both sick and wounded, and for such distinguished conduct received a medal, with an annuity of £20, besides a Turkish and a Crimean one with 4 clasps.
His wife was Martha Snewin, and her father was a bootmaker. She was born in Kent. She travelled all around the country with her husband when he was an army recruiter. That is all we know about her. He saw to it the children had a good education. Their daughter Martha, who looked after him when his wife died, was left well provided-for, but she is one of the invisible women of history.
My grandfather John William was the youngest son. First he was a clerk in the Meteorological Office, and by 1881 he was a bank clerk. Then he became a bank manager, in the Barking Road, but he died in Blackheath. He bettered himself, house by house, as he moved, and this son of a common soldier married his second wife, Emily’s successor, in St George’s, Hanover Square. This stepmother was not, as I imagined – because of her elegant beaked face – Jewish, but was the daughter of a dissenting cleric, who later became a priest in the Anglican church. She came from a middle-class family. Her name was Maria Martyn. My mother described her, with dislike, as a typical stepmother, cold, dutiful and correct, unable to be loving or even affectionate with the three children. They preferred life downstairs with the servants for as long as it was allowed, but my mother and her brother John became snobbishly, not to say obsessively middle-class, while the third child, Muriel, married back into the working class. Although my mother kept tenuous contact with her, the father would have nothing to do with her. It was her mother coming out in her, the servants said.
So he was disappointed in both his daughters. When my mother decided to be a nurse, instead of going to university – John William was ambitious for her – she was similarly cut off from his approval. Until, that is, she did well, but it was too late, the bonds had snapped. Never, ever, did my mother speak of her father with affection. Respect, yes, and gratitude that he did well by her, for he made sure they were given everything proper for middle-class children. She went to a good school, and was taught music, where she did so well the examiners told her she could have a career as a concert pianist.
The chapter heading for my mother in this saga would be a sad one, and the older I get, the more sorrowful her life seems. She did not love her parents. My father did not love his. It took me years to take in that fact, perhaps because it was always a joke when he said he left home the moment he could and went off as far as possible from them, as a bank clerk in Luton.
My paternal great-grandfather, a James Tayler, appears in the 1851 census as a farmer with 130 acres, employing five men, at East Bergholt. He went in for melancholy and philosophical verse, which is perhaps why he was not successful. He married a Matilda Cornish. The Tayler family worked in various capacities in banks, were civil servants, minor literary figures, often farmers, all over Suffolk and Norfolk. During the migrations of the nineteenth century they went off to Australia and to Canada, where many live still. But my grandfather Alfred decided not to be a farmer. He was a bank clerk in Colchester. His wife was Caroline May Batley.
This was the woman my father disliked so much – his mother.
The picture he presented of his father, Alfred Tayler, was of a dreaming unambitious man who spent his spare time playing the organ in the village church, driving his ambitious wife mad with frustration. But by the time I heard this my father was also a dreaming unambitious man who drove his poor wife mad with frustration. And the fact was, my grandfather Alfred ended up as manager of the London County Westminster Bank, Huntingdon, but whether he went on playing the organ in the local church I do not know. When Caroline May died he at once married again, in the very same year, a woman much younger than he was, Marian Wolfe, thirty-seven to his seventy-four. She, too, was the daughter of a minister of religion.
Ministers of religion and bank managers, there they are, in the records on both sides of the family.
Caroline May Batley, my father’s mother, is almost as much of a shadow as poor Emily. The only pleasant thing my father remembered about her was that she cooked the delicious, if solid, food described by Mrs Beeton. The tale he told, and retold, and with relish shared by my mother, was how his mother came to the Royal Free Hospital to confront the newly engaged pair, both of them rather ill, to tell him that if he married that battleaxe Sister McVeagh he would always regret it. But I daresay Caroline May would have something to say for herself, if asked. It is probable she was related to Constable the painter. I like to think so.
My mother’s childhood and girlhood were spent doing well in everything, because she had to please her stern father. She excelled in school, she played hockey and tennis and lacrosse well, she bicycled, she went to the theatre and music hall and musical evenings. Her energy was phenomenal. And she read all kinds of advanced books, and was determined her children would not have the cold and arid upbringing she did. She studied Montessori and Ruskin, and H. G. Wells, particularly Joan and Peter, with its ridicule of how children were deformed by upbringing. She told me all her contemporaries read Joan and Peter and were determined to do better. Strange how once influential books disappear. Kipling’s ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ made her cry because of her own childhood.
Then she became a nurse, and had to live on the pay, which was so little she was often hungry and could not buy herself gloves and handkerchiefs or a nice blouse. The World War started, the first one, and my badly wounded father arrived in the ward where she was Sister McVeagh. He was there for over a year, and during that time her heart was well and truly broken, for the young doctor she loved and who loved her was drowned in a ship sunk by a torpedo.
While my mother was being an exemplary Victorian and then Edwardian girl, the pattern of a modern young woman, my father was enjoying a country childhood, for he spent every minute out of school (which he hated, unlike my mother, for she loved school where she did so well) with the farmers’ children around Colchester. His parents beat him – spare the rod, spoil the child – and until he died he would talk with horror about the Sundays, when there were two church services and Sunday school. He dreaded Sundays all week, and would not go near a church for years. Butler’s The Way of All Flesh – that was what his childhood was like, he said, but luckily he could always escape into the fields. He wanted to be a farmer, always, but the moment he left school put distance between himself and his parents, went into the bank, which he hated, but worked hard there, for people did work harder then than now, and above all, played hard. He loved every kind of sport, played cricket and billiards for his county, rode, and danced, walked miles to and from a dance in another village or town. If when my mother talked about her youth it sounded like Ann Veronica or the New Women of Shaw, my father’s reminiscences were like D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, or The White Peacock, young people in emotional and self-conscious literary friendships, improving themselves by talk and shared books. He used to say that from the moment he got away from his parents and was independent he had a wonderful time, he enjoyed every minute of it, no one could have had a better life than he had for ten years. He was twenty-eight when the war began. He was lucky twice, he said, once when he was sent out of the Trenches because of a bad appendix, thus missing the Battle of the Somme when all his company was killed, and then, having a shell land on his leg a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, when, again, no one was left of his company.
He was very ill, not only because of his amputated leg, but because he was suffering from what was then called shell shock. He was in fact depressed, the real depression which was like – so he said – being inside a cold, dark room with no way out, and where no one could come in to help him. The ‘nice doctor man’ he was sent to said he had to stick it out, there was nothing medicine could do for him, but the anguish would pass. The ‘horrible things’ that my father’s mind was assailed by were not as uncommon as he seemed to think: horrible things were in everybody’s mind, but the war had made them worse, that was all. But my father remembered and spoke often about the soldiers who, ‘shell-shocked’ or unable to get themselves out of their mud holes to face the enemy, might be shot for cowardice. ‘It could have been me,’ he might say, all his life. ‘It was just luck it wasn’t.’
So there he was, in my mother’s ward in the old Royal Free Hospital in East London. He saw her unhappiness when her great love was drowned, he knew she had been offered the matronship of St George’s, a famous teaching hospital, an honour, for usually this job was offered to older women. But they decided to get married, and there was no conflict in it for him, though there was for her, because later she said so. He said, often, that he owed her his sanity, owed her everything, for without her devoted nursing he would not have come through that year of illness. Marriages for affection were best, he might add. As for her, she enjoyed her efficiency and her success, and knew she would make a wonderful matron of a great teaching hospital. But she wanted children, to make up to them what she had suffered as a child. So she put it.
My father was not the only soldier never, ever, to forgive his country for what he saw as promises made but betrayed: for these soldiers were many, in Britain, in France and in Germany, Old Soldiers who kept that bitterness till they died. They were an idealistic and innocent lot, those men: they actually believed it was a war to end war. And my father had been given a white feather in London by women he described as dreadful harridans – and that was when he already had his wooden leg under his trouser leg, and his ‘shell shock’ making him wonder if it was worth staying alive. He never forgot that white feather, speaking of it as yet another symptom of the world’s ineradicable and inevitable and hopeless insanity.
He had to leave England, for he could not bear England now, and he got his bank to send him out to the Imperial Bank of Persia, to Kermanshah. Now I use the name Imperial Bank of … to watch the reaction, which is incredulity, and then a laugh, for so much of that time now seems as delightfully absurd as – well, as something or other we now take for granted will seem to our children.
My mother was having a breakdown, I think because of the difficulties of that choice, marriage or the career where she was doing so well. And because of her lost love, whom she never forgot. And because she had worked so very hard during the war, and because of the many men she had watched die and because … it was 1919, the year when 29 million people died of the flu epidemic which for some reason gets left out of the histories of that time. Ten million were killed in the Great War, mostly in the Trenches, a statistic we remember now on the 11th November of every year, but 29 million people died of the flu, sometimes called the Spanish Lady.
My father was still in breakdown, though the worst of the depression he had suffered from was over. They had been advised by the doctors not to have a child yet. They joked my mother must have got pregnant on the first night. In those days people actually often did wait until the first night of marriage. But there is another thing. In 1919 my mother was thirty-five and in those days it was considered late to have a first baby. And as a nurse she must have been aware of the dangers of waiting. Perhaps a part of my mother’s mind she did not know about was making sure she got pregnant then.
And so they arrived, the two of them, both ill, in the great stone house on a plateau surrounded by snowtopped mountains, in that ancient trading town, Kermanshah – which was much damaged, parts of it bombed into dust, during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.
And there I was born on the 22nd October 1919. My mother had a bad time. It was a forceps birth. My face was scarred purple for days. Do I believe this difficult birth scarred me – that is to say, my nature? Who knows. I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important. How could it not be? Unless you believe that every little human being’s mind is quite separate from every other, separate from the common human mind. An unlikely thing, surely.
That war does not become less important to me as time passes, on the contrary. In 1990, the year I began to write this book, I was in the south of France, in that hilly country behind the Riviera, visiting the delicious little towns and villages which began centuries ago as hill forts, and in every town or village is a war memorial. On one face is a list of the twelve or twenty young men killed in World War One, and this in tiny villages that even now have only half a hundred inhabitants. Usually every one of the young men of a village was killed. All over Europe, in every city, town, and village is a war memorial, with the names of the dead of World War One. On another face of the shaft or obelisk are the two or three names of the dead of World War Two. By 1918, all the healthy young men of Europe, dead. In 1990 I was in Edinburgh where in a cold, grey castle are kept the lines of books recording the names of the young men from Scotland killed between 1914 and 1918. Hundreds of thousands of names. And then in Glasgow – the same. Then, Liverpool. Records of that slaughter, the First World War. Unlived lives. Unborn children. How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, and those children and grandchildren had been born, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?
Not long ago, in a cinema in Kilburn, they showed Oh What a Lovely War!, that satire on the silliness of World War One. As we came out of the dark into the street, an old woman stood alert and alive at the exit, and she looked hard into every face, impressing herself on every one of us. That film ends with two females stumbling, wandering through acres, miles, of gravestones, war graves, women who never found men to marry and have children with. This old woman, there was no doubt, was one of them, and she wanted us to know it. That film expressed her: she was telling us so.
There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war – my mother was one.
During that trip through the villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish: my parents’. I felt, too, incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? The American Civil War, less than half a century before, had shown what the newly invented weapons could do in the way of slaughter, but we had learned nothing from that war. That is the worst of the legacies from the First World War: the thought that if we are a race that cannot learn, what will become of us? With people as stupid as we are, what can we hope for? But the strongest emotion on that trip was the old darkness of dread and of anguish – my father’s emotion, a very potent draught, no homeopathic dose, but the full dose of adult pain. I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak.
We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.
A war does not end with the Armistice. In 1919, all over a Europe filled with graves, hung miasmas and miseries, and over the whole world too, because of the flu and its nearly thirty million deaths.
I used to joke that it was the war that had given birth to me, as a defence when weary with the talk about the war that went on – and on – and on. But it was no joke. I used to feel there was something like a dark grey cloud, like poison gas, over my early childhood. Later I found people who had the same experience. Perhaps it was from that war that I first felt the struggling panicky need to escape, with a nervous aversion to where I have just stood, as if something there might blow up or drag me down by the heel.
2 (#ulink_ae909ff0-a570-50f3-8a7e-2f9401df5698)
YOU CANNOT SIT DOWN to write about yourself without rhetorical questions of the most tedious kind demanding attention. Our old friend, the Truth, is first. The truth … how much of it to tell, how little? It seems it is agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler, and obloquy lies in wait either way.
Telling the truth about yourself is one thing, if you can, but what about the other people? I may easily write about my life until the year I left Southern Rhodesia in 1949, because there are few people left who can be hurt by what I say; I have had to leave out, or change – mostly a name or two – very little. So Volume One is being written without snags and blocks of conscience. But Volume Two, that is, from the time I reached London, will be a different matter, even if I follow the example of Simone de Beauvoir who said that about some things she had no intention of telling the truth. (Then why bother? – the reader must be expected to ask.) I have known not a few of the famous, and even one or two of the great, but I do not believe it is the duty of friends, lovers, comrades, to tell all. The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. And why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
I read history with conditional respect. I have been involved in a small way with big events, and know how quickly accounts of them become like a cracked mirror. I read some biographies with admiration for people who have chosen to keep their mouths shut. It is, I have observed, a rule that people who have been on the periphery of events or a life are those who rush forward to claim first place: the people who do know often say nothing or little. Some of the most noisy, not to say noisome, scandals or affairs of our time, that have had a searchlight on them for years, are reflected wrongly in the public mind because the actual participants keep their counsel, and watch, ironically, from the shadows. And there is another thing, much harder to see. People who have been real movers and exciters get left out of histories, and it is because memory itself decides to reject them. These instigators are flamboyant, unscrupulous, hysterical, or even mad, certainly abrasive; but the real point is that they are apparently of a different substance from the smooth, reasonable and sane people who have been inspired by them, and who do not like to remember temporary submersions in lunacy. Often, reading histories, there are events which stick out, do not make enough sense, and one may deduce the existence of some lunatic, male or female, who was equipped with the fiery stuff of inspiration – but was quickly forgotten, since always and at all times the past gets tidied up and made safer. ‘A rough beast’ is usually the real begetter of events. There would have been no ‘communist party’ in Southern Rhodesia without such an inspirational character.
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Telling the truth or not telling it, and how much, is a lesser problem than the one of shifting perspectives, for you see your life differently at different stages, like climbing a mountain while the landscape changes with every turn in the path. Had I written this when I was thirty, it would have been a pretty combative document. In my forties, a wail of despair and guilt: oh my God, how could I have done this or that? Now I look back at that child, that girl, that young woman, with a more and more detached curiosity. Old people may be observed peering into their pasts, Why? – they are asking themselves. How did that happen? I try to see my past selves as someone else might, and then put myself back inside one of them, and am at once submerged in a hot struggle of emotion, justified by thoughts and ideas I now judge wrong.
Besides, the landscape itself is a tricky thing. As you start to write at once the question begins to insist: Why do you remember this and not that? Why do you remember in every detail a whole week, month, more, of a long ago year, but then complete dark, a blank? How do you know that what you remember is more important than what you don’t?
Suppose there is no landscape at all? This can happen. I sat next to a man at dinner who said he could never write an autobiography because he didn’t remember anything. What, nothing? Only a little scene here and there. Like, so he said, those small washes and blobs of colour that stained-glass windows lay on the dark of a stone floor in a cathedral. It is hard for me to imagine such a darkening of the past. Once even to try would have plunged me into frightful insecurity, as if memory were Self, Identity – and I am sure that isn’t so. Now I can imagine myself arriving in some country with the past wiped clean out of my mind: I would do all right. It is after all only what we did when we were born, without memories, or so it seems to the adult: then we have to create our lives, create memory.
‘Besides’ – said this dinner companion – who seemed perfectly whole and present, despite his insufficient hold on his past, ‘the little blobs of colour move all the time, because the sun is moving outside.’
True. Move they do. You forget. You remember. As I brooded over the material for this book, faces and places emerged from the dark. ‘Good Lord! So there you are! Haven’t thought about you for years!’ Not only the perspective but what you are looking at changes.
When you write about anything – in a novel, an article – you learn a lot you did not know before. I learned a good deal writing this. Again and again I have had to say, ‘That was the reason was it? Why didn’t I think of that before?’ Or even, ‘Wait … it wasn’t like that.’ Memory is a careless and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one. And not always self-flattering. More than once I have said: ‘No, I wasn’t as bad as I’ve been thinking,’ as well as discovering that I was worse.
And then – and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all – we make up our pasts. You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I do not think this is only the fault of story-tellers. A parent says, ‘We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, don’t you remember? – look, here is the photo.’ And at once the child builds from the words and the photograph a memory, which becomes hers. But there are moments, incidents, real memory, I do trust. This is partly because I spent a good part of my childhood ‘fixing’ moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs. Pressure had been put on me to admit that what I knew was true was not so. I am deducing this. Why else my preoccupation that went on for years: this is the truth, this is what happened, hold on to it, don’t let them talk you out of it.
Why an autobiography at all? Self-defence: biographies are being written. It is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and often tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may be switched on at any minute. Yes, indeed there are good biographers, nearly all of them in Britain now, for we are enjoying a golden age of biography. What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels.
In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers writing about me. One I had never met or even heard of. Another, I was told by a friend in Zimbabwe, is ‘collecting material’ for a biography. From whom? Long dead people? A woman I met twice, once when she asked me carefully casual questions, has just informed me she has written a book about me which she is about to get published. Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably interviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation. It is an astonishing fact that you may spend a couple of hours with an interviewer, who is recording every word you say, but the article or interview always has several major errors of fact. But less and less do facts matter, partly because writers are like pegs to hang people’s fantasies on. If writers do care that what is written about them should somewhere connect with the truth, does that mean we are childish? Perhaps it does, and certainly I feel every year more of an anachronism. Returning to Paris after a year’s interval, I was interviewed by a young woman who had done me before. I said her previous article had been a tissue of invention, and she replied, ‘But if you have to get an article in to a deadline, and you didn’t have enough material, wouldn’t you make it up?’ Clearly she would not have believed me if I had said no. And that brings me straight to the heart of the problem. Young people brought up in today’s literary climate cannot believe how things were. You get sceptical looks if you say something like this: ‘Once serious publishers tried to find serious biographers for their serious authors.’ Now everyone takes it for granted that all they are concerned about is to publish as many biographies as possible, no matter how second-rate, because biographies sell well. Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us.
If you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better. One – what else? – my relations with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able to be kind. Every day you may watch, hear of, some young person, usually a girl, giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called cruelty. Later they will say, ‘I am afraid I was difficult when I was an adolescent.’ A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness goes into the combat. Judging from histories and novels from the past, things were not always like this. So what has happened, why now? Why has it become a right to be unpleasant?
I have a woman friend who in the Second World War went to New York with her young child, having no support in Britain, her home. She earned her living precariously as a model for artists, and sometimes modelling clothes. She lived in a small town outside New York. She was poor, isolated, and being twenty years old, yearned for some fun. Once, just once, exactly once, she left the little boy with a friend, spent the evening in New York, and did not get home until dawn. I used to listen to this boy, now adolescent, accuse her most bitterly, ‘You left me alone night after night and went off to enjoy yourself.’ A small boy, the son of parents who did not approve of smacking, had his fingers smacked once when he persisted in putting them through the paper covering jam pots. This became, ‘And you used to hit me when I was small.’ These petty recollections are to the point.
For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then cold and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises, was I matching what actually happened? And this is the second area of my preoccupation, which has to be linked with the first.
Why is it I have lived my whole life with people who are automatically against authority, ‘agin the government’, who take it for granted that all authority is bad, ascribe doubtful or venal motives to government, the Establishment, the ruling class, the local town council, the headmaster or mistress? So deep-rooted is this set of mind that it is only when you begin to climb out of it you see how much of your life has been determined by it. This week I was with a group of people of mixed ages, all on the left (or who had been once), and someone happened to mention that the government was doing something – quite a good thing, but that isn’t the point – and at once every face put on a look of derision. Automatic. Push-button. This look is like a sneer or a jeer, a Well, what can one expect? It can only come out of some belief, one so deep it is well out of sight, that a promise of some kind has been made and then betrayed. Perhaps it was the French Revolution? Or the American Revolution, which made the pursuit of happiness a right with the implication that happiness is to be had as easily as taking cakes off a supermarket counter? Millions of people in our time behave as if they have been made a promise – by whom? when? – that life must get freer, more honest, more comfortable, always better. Has advertising only set our minds more firmly in this expectant mode? Yet nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Above all, history tells us nothing stays the same for long. We expect gold at the foot of always renewable rainbows. I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expeditions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.
I have just read of a historian who claims that the distrust, even contempt, of government and authority is precisely because of the First World War, because of the stupidity and incompetence of its generals, because of the slaughter of Europe’s young men.
When journalists or historians come to ask about something in the past the hardest moment is when I see on their faces the look that means, But how could you have believed this, or done that? Facts are easy. It is the atmospheres that made them possible that are elusive. ‘You see, we believed …’ (You must have been pretty stupid then!) ‘No, you don’t understand, it was such a fevered time …’ (Fever you call it, do you!) ‘I know it’s hard to understand, without being immersed in the poisonous air of then.’
A subsidiary question, not without general relevance: how to account for the fact that all my life I’ve been the child who says the Emperor is naked, while my brother never, not once, doubted or criticized authority?
Mind you, a talent for seeing the Emperor’s nakedness can mean his other qualities are not noticed.
I am trying to write this book honestly. But were I to write it aged eighty-five, how different would it be?
3 (#ulink_3e1233e9-1582-541f-9df1-b85c8042293d)
A TINY THING AMONG TRAMPLING, knocking careless giants who smell, who lean down towards you with great ugly hairy faces, showing big dirty teeth. A foot you keep an eye on, while trying to watch all the other dangers as well, is almost as big as you are. The hands they use to grip you can squeeze the breath half out of you. The rooms you run about in, the furniture you move among, windows, doors, are vast, nothing is your size, but one day you will grow tall enough to reach the handle of the door, or the knob on a cupboard. These are the real childhood memories and any that have you level with grown-ups are later inventions. An intense physicality, that is the truth of childhood.
My first memory is before I was two, and it is of an enormous dangerous horse towering up, up, and on it my father still higher, his head and shoulders somewhere in the sky. There he sits with his wooden leg always there under his trousers, a big hard slippery hidden thing. I am trying not to cry, while being lifted up in tight squeezing hands, and put in front of my father’s body, told to grip the front of the saddle, a hard jutting edge I must stretch my fingers to hold. I am inside the heat of horse, the smell of horse, the smell of my father, all hot pungent smells. When the horse moves it is a jerking jolting motion and I lean back my head and shoulders into my father’s stomach and feel there the hard straps of the wooden-leg harness. My stomach is reeling because of the swoop up from the ground now so far below me. Now, that is a real memory, violent, smelly – physical.
‘Daddy used to put you in front of him on the horse when he rode to the Bank, and Marta waited at the gate to bring you back. You absolutely loved it.’ And perhaps I did, perhaps it was only the first ride, which I did not love, that has stayed in my memory. The gate is in a photograph, a graceful arch, and I have added it to the real memory. Of being lifted down into the hands of Marta, whom I disliked, there is nothing in my mind. Those rides had to be in Kermanshah, and I was two and a half when we left.
Sharp steep stone steps, like boulders on a mountainside; they are in a photograph, too, but the memory is of dangerous descent, threatened by sharp edges.
Another memory, a real one, not what was told me, or what is in the photograph album. A swimming bath, a large tank, full of great naked pallid people shouting and laughing and splashing me with hard slaps of cold water. The naked bodies were my mother, rowdy and noisy, enjoying herself, my father holding on to the edge of the tank, because that pitiful shrunken stump of a leg with its shrapnel scars, waving or jerking about in the water, made it hard for him to swim. And others, for the tank seems crowded with people. They are not naked, for they wear the serious swimming costumes of the time, but if adults are always dressed in the daytime, and then wear long-sleeved clothes in bed, when in bathing costumes they seem all pale flesh and unpleasant revelation. Loose bulging breasts. Whiskers of hair under arms, matting or streaming water like sweat. Sometimes snot on a face that is grinning and shouting with pleasure. Snot running into the water that already has dying or rotting leaves in it, as well as the broken reflections of clouds, down here, not up there in the sky. Small children are always trying to keep things in their proper places, their world is always coming apart, things in it move about, deceive, lie. ‘We used to swim every afternoon in the summer. And we had swimming parties at the weekend. Oh they were such fun. You always loved it when we had parties.’ Thus spoke my mother, mourning the best years of her life, in Persia. ‘We used to lift you in with us, but you screamed and had to be put back on the side. The water was so cold! It was mountain water. It came running down from the mountains in stone channels. You simply had to shout as you jumped in! There were beds of asters all around the tank. The Persian gardeners were wonderful, they grew everything.’ And so you imagine jumping in, all jolly and laughing, and being lifted out, you see the asters, in paintbox colours, and hear the scolding Persian gardeners, who would not let you pick the asters, mother said so. But the real memory, the authentic one, was of enormous pale bodies, like milk puddings, sloshing about in out-of-control water that smelled cold, the flailing large pale arms, the hard breath-stopping slap of water on your face. ‘Go on, be a sport, brave girls don’t cry about a silly little thing like that.’
Two memories, concocted ones, or induced, but probably true enough. In the 1960s, when we were experimenting with drugs, I tried one absolutely not to be recommended. You eat morning glory seeds, previously soaked in hot water to an acid jellyish state, but you have to eat a lot, in my case sixty or more. I felt sick, and as for the revelations I was doing as well using my novelist’s mind. I had been thinking, why had so little remained in me of that big stone house, with its big high stone rooms? I was born there. I learned to walk there. And imagined that I lay in a cot with bars, like a prison cell for size, and heard large feet clanging on stone. I knew the floors were stone and that there were few rugs, that the windows were large and showed mountains, that the house was cold in winter. The cot was bound to be something of the sort, and a small child hears every sound with new ears, nothing shut off, as adults shut off sound.
The other invited memory was useful, and has been ever since. I took mescalin – just once. Two friends monitored the dosage and then sat with me. They were concerned that I would jump out of a window or something of the kind, because someone they knew had done that a short time before. What I learned then was how strong in me was the personality I call the Hostess, for I was presenting my experience to them, chatting away, increasingly scatty, but in control, but all that was a protection for what went on within. This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now, when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer, and it is here I retreat to, take refuge, when I think that my life will be public property and there is nothing I can do about it. You will never get access here, you can’t, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy. They call it loneliness, that here is this place unsharable with anyone at all, ever, but it is all we have to fall back on. Me, I, this feeling of me. The observer, never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.
That day, chatting away, telling them this is happening, that is happening, I was protecting an experience I had induced. I was being born. In the 1960s this kind of ‘religious’ experience was common. I was giving myself ‘a good birth’ – in the jargon of the time. The actual birth was not only a bad one, but made worse by how it was reported to me, so the storyteller invented a birth as the sun rose with light and warmth coming fast into the enormous lamplit room. Why not? I was born early in the morning. Then I invented a chorus of pleasure that I was a girl, for my mother had been sure I was a boy and had a boy’s name ready. In this ‘game’ my girl’s name had been planned for months, instead of given me by the doctor. My father – well, where was he, in reality? He was ill because of his imaginative participation in the birth and had gone to sleep after being informed I was safely born.
Probably this ‘good’ birth was therapeutic, but it was the revelation of the different personalities at work in me I valued and value now. One had to be authentic and not invented, because it was unexpected. Before my eyes, through the whole experience that is, for hours, ran a picture show of beautiful and smart clothes, fashionable clothes, as if a fashion designer inside me was being given her head. They were not on me, but on fashion models: I have never worn this kind of garment. The other person, or personality, was a sobbing child. I wept, and wept, much to the concern of my companions, but I knew it was not important, my weeping. I do not cry enough; that has always been true, and to weep without constraint was a bonus and a bliss. I could easily have cradled that poor baby and comforted her, if I had not been so fascinated by the parallel picture gallery of wonderful clothes, and by the gracious protective chat of the hostess.
That weeping child … now she’s a real enemy. She transmogrifies into a thousand self-pitying impostors, grabbing and sucking, and when I cut off a long clutching tentacle, at once another appears, just where I don’t expect it.
An intensity of the senses accompanies drug-taking, a reminder of how small children experience tastes, textures, smells. While the drug was wearing off they took me out to a meal and I remembered how food tasted in childhood. The omelette exploded on my tongue into a hundred nuances of butter and egg and herb. Already, half-way through my life – I was in my forties – I had lost so much of my capacity for taste. We all fear old age because we are going to lose pleasure, be sans taste. But you lose it all slowly and unnoticed as you live. A small child does not taste anything like the same omelette an adult does. Heat suffocates and burns, pricking the skin, making small limbs wriggle and shrink. Cold attacks like freezing water. Smells expand the nose in delight, shrivel it in disgust. Noises, sounds, fill the inner ear, clamouring, insisting, threatening, listen to me. Children and grown-ups do not live in the same sensory world.
I do not actually remember, I was only told, that the climate in Kermanshah was all extremes. It was very hot. It was very cold. It was nearly always very dry. ‘The air was so dry the servants threw out the household slops on to the ground behind the house and by lunchtime it was just dust.’ ‘In Kermanshah the washing was hung out in the early morning and it was bone dry by ten.’
There were three adults in that house, not counting the Persian servants. One was a friend, an American, working in oil. For years I wondered why the American male voice seduced and cajoled, soothed, promised more than any reasonable woman could believe in. At last I saw the obvious explanation and with what reluctance had to accept – again – that our lives are governed by voices, caresses, threats we cannot remember.
A fourth absolutely valid hallmarked memory is of the journey from Kermanshah to Tehran, by car. There were not many cars then, in Persia. We drove through mountains on roads made for caravans, horses, mules, donkeys. It was an open car. I looked over the side, gripping rough canvas, down, down over cliffs to valleys that were all rock, and in particular one a rocky abyss with a village like one of my toys perched beside it. I would recognize that valley now, because terror imprinted it on me for ever. The car ground along the edge of the track that wound around the mountain, wheels on the edge of a void. Then a rocky corner blocked the car. The grown-ups got out with difficulty because my mother was very pregnant, and my father had to manoeuvre his clumsy wooden leg. I was handed over the canvas hood at the back of the car, and I stood behind the screen of my father’s legs, one of my arms around a real warm human leg, the other around the hard wood of the dead leg, and I peered down through the legs. Meanwhile the driver (who?) ground the car forward, one wheel on the collapsing outer edge of the track. He was driving, it seemed, into blue air … the terror of it, watching the car, would it go over, roll down that mountain? Just above us balanced an eagle large enough to snatch a child, looking down at me. ‘Daddy, Daddy, look at the big bird,’ but the bird did not swoop off with me, and the car did not go over the edge, for the next thing was, we were in the Edwardian nursery in Tehran, where my brother was soon born.
My mother planned to use the loving coercions of Montessori for our upbringing, but meantime it was the harsh disciplines of one Doctor Truby King that ruled the nurseries both in Kermanshah and in Tehran. He was a New Zealander, whose book was law for innumerable parents, and whose influence can still be heard in the voices of older nurses and nannies. ‘You must have discipline – that’s the important thing.’ Truby King was the continuation of the cold and harsh discipline of my mother’s childhood and my father’s childhood. I am sure my mother never saw this: she was only doing what all good parents did. Even to read that guide to excellence in family relations is painful.
Take feeding. The infant was supposed to be fed every two hours, and then every three hours, day and night, and the consummation and crown of this clockwork provisioning was to achieve a four-hourly, or three-hourly, pattern of four or six feeds a day, while between them the baby must be left to howl and scream, otherwise the baby will call the tune, the baby will rule the roast, the baby’s character will be ruined for life, the baby will become spoiled, soft, self-indulgent, and above all, the baby will ‘get on top’ of the mother. The baby must never be picked up between feeds. The baby must learn what’s what and who is boss right from the start, and this essential instruction must be imparted while the infant is lying alone in a cot, in its own room, never in the parents’ bedroom. He, she, must learn its place, understand its position in the universe – alone.
In my case, as my mother cheerfully told me, again and again, I was starved for the first ten months of my life since, because she could not feed me, being too run-down after the war, she fed me cows’ milk, diluted to English standards, and cows’ milk in Persia had only half the goodness of cows’ milk in England. ‘You just screamed and screamed all day and all night.’
Well, perhaps, but in the photographs I do not seem to be a mere rack of bones. I look quite plump and cheerful. Why did my mother need to tell her little daughter, so often, and with such enjoyment, that she had been starved by her mother all through her infancy? I think her sense of the dramatic might have contributed here. It used to drive me wild with irritation – and my father too – that everything, always, was presented to the world as a drama. I did not mind that she acted out everything, but that she seemed unaware she was doing it. But have it her way: if I was a permanently hungry baby, it did not seem to do me much harm.
Now, toilet training, that key to character building. Believe it or not, it was recommended the infant must be held over the pot from birth, at regular times every day. ‘You were clean by the time you were a month old!’ Do I believe this? I do not, but the triumph in her voice spoke of victories over much more than an infant’s bowels. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. (The Koran has something on these lines too.) A small baby has no control over its functions. But if you ‘hold out’ an infant, with encouraging words, using the cold edge of the pot firmly, as a reminder, pouring water from a jug held high enough to make a tinkling sound into a basin, all the while gently rubbing the stomach, then the infant is likely to oblige. Just imagine it, from one end of the British Empire to the other, wherever the map of the world was coloured pink, British matrons or their nurses were ‘holding out’ tiny infants.
You would think all this must have left me with obsessive cleanliness, tidiness, need for order. No. I am untidy, tolerate disorder, but am obsessive in small useful ways, like keeping a diary.
The vividest early memory was – not the actual birth of my brother – but my introduction to the baby. I was two and a half years old. The enormous room, lamplit, the ceiling shadowed and far above; the enormous bed, level with my head, on which my father lay, for he was ill again: these days they would be making jokes about couvade. Women were supposed to stay in bed for at least a month after childbirth, preferably six weeks, all the time bound tightly from waist to knee with rigid linen – hard to believe that my energetic mother would submit to this, and she was standing by an enormous cot that was all ebullient white flounces of dotted white muslin. The cot was well above my head, and she was bending past it and saying persuasively, ‘It is your baby, Doris, and you must love it.’ From the depths of the white flounces she lifted a bundle of baby and this was held close to me so that, if I were stupid, I could believe I held it. The baby I do not remember. I was in a flame of rage and resentment. It was not my baby. It was their baby. But I can hear now that persuasive lying voice, on and on and on, and it would go on until I gave in. The power of that rebellious flame, strong even now, tells me it was by no means the first time I was told, lyingly, what I must feel. For it was not my baby. Obviously it was not. Probably Truby King or even Montessori had prescribed that the older dispossessed child must be tricked into love, thus cleverly outwitting jealousy. I hated my mother for it. I hated her absolutely. But I was helpless. Love the baby I did. I loved that baby, and then the infant, and then the little boy with a most passionate protective love. This is not only an authentic memory, every detail present after all this time, but deduction too. By this event and others of the same kind my emotional life was for ever determined.
All you need is love. Love is all you need. A child should be governed by love, as my mother so often said, explaining her methods to us. She had not known love as a child, and was making sure we would not be similarly deprived. The trouble is, love is a word that has to be filled with an experience of love. What I remember is hard bundling hands, impatient arms and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me.
The fact was, my early childhood made me one of the walking wounded for years. A dramatic remark, and pretty distasteful, really, but used with an exact intention although it makes me easy victim to the current obsessionalists who see evidences of ‘abuse’ everywhere. They mean, usually, sexual abuse. If you say, I wasn’t abused, they at once put on that knowing-better smile used by certain kinds of analyst. But these hysterical mass movements surge past, die, change into something else, perhaps even into an examination not of sexual handling or using of children (which I think are not as common as some people want to believe), rather into the emotional hurts which are common, are the human condition, part of everyone’s infancy. I think that some psychological pressures, and even well-meant ones, are as damaging as physical hurt. However that may be, all my life I have understood, felt at home with, sometimes lived with, people who had bad childhoods (I nearly wrote, conventionally bad childhoods). They were adopted and then neglected, spent time in care or in orphanages, were bargaining counters in savage power games between parents, were sent too young to cruel or cold schools – now we might be getting somewhere, but that was a late hurt, not an original one. All these people had put themselves together after panic flight from home, or a collapse. For years my friends were nearly all people who had created their own families. Then, it was not all that common, but now it is. The world is so full of war, civil war, famines, epidemics, that waifs and strays are bred, it seems, by the million. They create for themselves a family. In every one of them is a place, large or small, that is an emotional wasteland.
Yet my mother was conscientious, hardworking, always doing the best as she saw it. She was a good sort, a good sport. She never hit or even slapped a child. She talked about love often. The tenderness she had never been taught came out in worrying and fussing and – in the case of my brother – making him ‘delicate’ so she could nurse him; in my case, actually making me sick for a time.
My father was affectionate but he was not tender. Neither parent liked displays of emotion. If my mother’s daughter had been like her, of the same substance, everything would have gone well. But it was her misfortune to have an over-sensitive, always observant and judging, battling, impressionable, hungry-for-love child. With not one, but several, skins too few.
The Tehran nursery was English, Edwardian, and could have been in London. An enormous room, square, high, filled like a lumber room with heavy furniture. In the wall burns a fierce and exuberant fire, held safe from the room and from curious children by a brass fireguard like a gate. On the brass rails are folded ironed clothes and nappies, airing. A wooden folding stand holds wads and pads and swaddles of clothes, more and more bibs, nappies, vests, binders, woollies, robes, dresses, socks, caps, jackets, shawls. All that side of the room is screened by a wall of these clothes, and behind them in the wall itself are cupboards packed with piles of jackets and dresses and petticoats in wool and in lawn, in nun’s veiling and in silk, in cotton and in flannel. Hundreds of them, dozens of everything. This wardrobe is needed for two tiny children, who are sitting on chamber pots low down among the vast chairs and a high chair like scaffolding. The air in that room is all smells. The scorch of newly ironed cloth, vaseline, Elliman’s Embrocation, cod-liver oil, almond oil, camphorated oil, Pears soap, the nostril-expanding tang from the copper jug and basin on the washstand, the airless smell of flames, paraffin from the little stove that heats bottles and milk, the smell of the contents of the two pots that are only partially kept confined by the small bottoms. Heavy curtains hold dust, behind them muslin curtains with their smell of soap, and the wood smells of furniture polish. The curtains have blue and pink Bo-peeps and lambs, but otherwise everything, but everything, is white. A suffocation of smelly whiteness.
First the tiny girl and then the baby, who always did what she did, lift a bottom off the pot and the women in the room exclaim and coo, Harry is a good little baba, Doris is a good little baba.
So rewarding was this continuous daily and nightly approval, that Doris actually arrived at a formal Legation dinner party holding out a pot and announcing, ‘Doddis is a good little baba.’ I would not have paid this memory much respect if, decades later, this same Doris, having finished a novel which was to arrive at the publisher’s next day, had not dreamed she walked into the publisher’s office – Jonathan Cape, as it happened – holding out a pot that contained a manuscript. Doris had been a good little girl. She was full of the glow of achievement, of having proved herself worthy of loving affection.
I offer this as my contribution to understanding the far from simple relations between publishers and authors. (I think it is necessary for the sake of the uninstructed to insist that this dream, so say experts, is the best of auguries.)
There were two women in the nursery. My mother was enormous, solid, a vibrating column of efficiency and ruthless energy, and part of my attention was always on her, for I was afraid she would carelessly knock me over, tread on me. She was taller and larger than the other woman, whom an adult would judge as small. This was Marta, a Syrian, a cross old woman, the nurse. She spoke only French. This pleased my mother, bent on getting her children properly educated. Has this left me with a natural disposition for French, though I have never done more than read it, and use it on the restaurant, taxi, it-is-a-fine-day, where do you live, level? It could be said, yes, for any other language I attempt to learn, no matter how much effort I put in, is screened from me by French. The first word that comes is French, and has to be batted out of my brain. Often baby words, nursery talk.
Just as I now wonder about Emily Flower, who did not deserve even a photograph, and about Caroline May Batley, whose son disliked her and whose husband married again the year she died, I would like to know more about Marta, forced to be a nursemaid in the English family. ‘Old Marta.’ But she doesn’t look so old in the photographs. What war, calamity, famine, personal misfortune forced her to work in the strict English nursery where her sufferings and loneliness goaded her tongue and made her hands hard and unkind? At least, with me. ‘Bébé is my child, madame. Doris is not my child. Doris is your child. But Bébé is mine.’ So she said. Often. And very often was I reminded of it, all through my childhood, with the relish that always accompanied such information. Now I see this pleasure in authenticating my inadequacies not only as insensitivity, which it was, but also as another expression of my mother’s natural theatricality. She might have been an actress, but I am sure that did not occur to her. If it was shameful for a nice girl to be a nurse, how much worse to go on the stage? John William would have died from the disgrace of it. Yet it was born in her. Years after the Tehran nursery, she would bring to life Marta, an irritable scolding old woman. ‘I had to stop her slapping and pinching you. She never slapped Baby. She loved him too much for that. “Méchante, tu es méchante!”’ she snapped at me, in Marta’s voice. And I knew how she experienced her father, for she became the cold angry man, his mouth full of self-righteous platitudes, and the frightened little girl standing stiffly in front of him, looking bravely up into the face of Authority.
She did not weep when her father was harsh: she stood up to him by being everything he demanded of her, and more. I on the other hand fought Marta for my rights in that nursery, and unloved children are not ‘nice’, not ‘gentille’. Who did love the child? Her father. The smell of maleness, tobacco, sweat, the smell of father, enveloped her in safety.
When I wrote Memoirs of a Survivor I called it, ‘An Attempt at an Autobiography’, but no one was interested. Foreign publishers simply left it off the title page, and soon no one remembered to put it on reprints in English. People seemed embarrassed. They did not understand it, they said. For thousands upon thousands of years, we – humankind – have told ourselves tales and stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly. But after three centuries of the Realistic Novel, in many people this part of the brain has atrophied.
To me nothing seems more simple than the plan of this novel. A middle-aged person – the sex does not matter – observes a young self grow up. A general worsening of conditions goes on, as has happened in my lifetime. Waves of violence sweep past – represented by gangs of young and anarchic people – go by, and vanish. These are the wars and movements like Hitler, Mussolini, Communism, white supremacy, systems of brutal ideas that seem for a time unassailable, then collapse. Meanwhile behind a wall, other things go on. The dissolving wall is an ancient symbol, perhaps the oldest. When you make up a story, and you need a symbol or analogy, it is always best to choose the oldest and most familiar. This is because it is already there, in the human mind, is an archetype, leads easily in from the daytime world to the other one. Behind my wall two different kinds of memory were being played, like serial dreams. There are the general, if you like, communal, dreams, shared by many, like the house you know well, but then find in it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you did not know were there, or the dream of gardens beneath gardens, or the visits to landscapes never known in life. The other kind was of personal memories, personal dreams. For years I had wondered if I could write a book, a personal history, but told through dreams, for I remember dreams well, and sometimes have kept notes of them. Graham Greene has tried something of the kind. This idea of a dream autobiography became the world behind the wall in Memoirs of a Survivor. I used the nursery in Tehran, and the characters of my parents, both exaggerated and enlarged, because this is appropriate for the world of dreams. I used that aspect of my mother which she herself described as ‘I have sacrificed myself for my children.’ Women in those days felt no inhibitions about saying this: most are too psychologically sophisticated now. She was the frustrated complaining woman I first met as my mother, but who has often appeared in my life, sometimes as a friend. She talks all the time about what a burden her children are to her, how they take it out of her, how much she is unfulfilled and unappreciated, how no one but a mother knows how much she has to give of herself to ungrateful children who soak up her precious talents and juices like so many avid sponges.
The point is, this kind of talk goes on in front of the children, as if they were not present, and cannot hear how she tells the world what a burden her children are, what a disappointment, how they drain her life from her. There is no need to look for memories of ‘abuse’, cruelty and the rest. I remember very well – though how old I was I do not know – leaning against my father’s knee, the real one, not the metal-and-wood knee, while my mother chatted on and on in her social voice to some visitor about her children, how they brought her low and sapped her, how all her own talents were withering unused, how the little girl in particular (she was so difficult, so naughty!) made her life a total misery. And I was a cold flame of hatred for her, I could have killed her there and then. Then this was succeeded by a weariness, a bitterness. How could she talk about me as if I were not there? And about my little brother whom I so adored, as a burden? Hypocrisy – for she adored him, and said so. How could she diminish and demean and betray me like this? And to a mere visitor … I knew my father did not like her doing it: I could feel what he felt coming into me from him. He was suffering, because of this great lump of solid, heavy insensitivity, his wife, who did not seem to know what she was doing.
And yet, what was she doing? No more than other women did. Than women so often do. Everywhere, you can hear them at it on trains and on buses, on the streets, in shops, tugging their kids along by the hand or pushing them roughly in their pushchairs; they complain and they nag, while their children, assumed to be without ears, are told how they destroy her, how she does not want them and – for what else can she mean as she talks like this? – what a mistake she has made in having them at all.
I do not believe that even robust and insensitive children remain unaffected by this assault on their very existence.
But I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by those robust and efficient hands.
And my father, always suffering and shrinking because of the unawareness of his wife? Was a skin scrubbed off him by the efficient Caroline May? And what about all those other melancholy long-headed semi-poets of his family? Or is there such a thing as a gene for the condition, being born with a skin too few?
All I know is that I remember, sharp and clear and immediate, nothing invented or made up about it, how my father sat and watched the events and people around him with a slow, relishing, sardonic smile. (This same smile being the equivalent of the novelist’s contemplation of the world.) And when the cross old nurse Marta and the great bustling woman who was my mother made me want to crawl off somewhere to hide, or made me hate them so much I would have killed them if I could, then it was with my father I took refuge.
And yet. In that house in Tehran – not in the overcrammed nursery, but down in the drawing room, equally crammed and crowded with furniture but at least not white, white, deadly white – every night took place a ritual. We, the small children, were led down by the nurse for the bedtime game. We had pillowfights, were chased, caught, thrown up in the air – and tickled. This goes on now in many middle-class families, considered salutary, character building. I see now the inflamed, excited face of my mother, as her pillow flailed against mine, or my little brother’s. I hear the excited cries from myself and my brother and my mother as the air filled with feathers and my head began to ache. And then the moment when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell – he never did go in for washing much, and – don’t forget – this was before easy dry-cleaning, and people’s clothes smelled, they smelled horrible. By now my head is aching badly, the knocking headache of over-excitement. His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate. Then tears. But we were being taught how to be good sports. For being a good sport was necessary for the middle-class life. To put up with ‘ragging’ and with being hurt, with being defeated in games, being ‘tickled’ until you wept, was a necessary preparation.
It does not have to be like this, for you may watch a very little child being gently chased and tickled in a real game, not an exercise in disguised bullying. But I did not stop having nightmares about those great hands torturing my ribs until I was seven or eight. These nightmares are as clear in my mind now as they were then, though the emotion has long gone away. I became an expert on nightmares and how to outwit them when I was a small child, and that nightmare of being helpless and ‘tickled’ was the worst.
Yet my father was my ally, my support, my comforter. I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by ‘games’, by ‘tickling’. No, I am not one of them. In all my life I have never been hit, slapped, or in any way at all physically maltreated by a man, and I am saying this because at this particular time it is hard even to pick up a popular paper without reading about women being physically bullied by men. There are worse kinds of bullying.
And now here is a deduced memory. In the big room where the bedtime rituals took place were heavy red velvet curtains. That they were heavy I know because of the memory of velvet dragging on my skin, my limbs, and I clung to folds that filled my small arms. That they were red I believe because when I was doing apprentice pieces in my twenties, several Poe-like stories appeared where red velvet curtains concealed threat. In one over-worked piece there was a man in a wheelchair who drove a child back and back across a room to a wall that was all red velvet, and when she took one step too far back through them, on the other side was no wall, only empty space. There are any number of childhood ‘games’ that could account for this one. The story was called ‘Fear and Red Velvet’.
I have been writing of the tactile and sensuous subjective experience of a child, smelly, noisy, the rumble of a mother’s stomach as she reads to you, the bubbling dottle in Daddy’s pipe, the pounding of blood in your ears – all the din and stink and smother of life which a child soon learns to shut out, if she is not to be overwhelmed by it. But all that – and the battle for survival – went on side by side with what was being provided intelligently and competently by my mother, the daughter of John William, who had taught her what a good parent must provide for a child. For if my mother was an over-disciplined little girl frightened ever to defy her father – until she did, when she went to be a nurse – then she was also taken as a matter of course to Mafeking Night, and the celebrations at the end of the Boer War, and to all the Exhibitions, and to line the route when foreign kings and queens came on State Visits, and for trips on the new railways. She was taught to admire Darwin and Brunei, and to be proud of Britain’s role as the great exemplar of progress. She was taught to take herself off to museums and to use libraries.
And in Tehran, she made sure her children experienced what they should. I was held high through the same velvet curtains to see the night sky. ‘Moon, moon’ – lisped attractively, for my mother as she reported this became a winsome little girl. ‘Starth, starth’ – she said I said. When my father, with no histrionic talent at all, tried to say a child’s ‘moon’, but with a French ‘u’, for was it not also a lune? – then he failed. When it snowed – for it certainly snows heavily there, in Tehran, and I can see any time I want to the sheets of sparkling white over shrubs and walls – my mother built snowmen, with eyes of coal and noses of carrots, and cats of snow with green stone eyes. She was good at it, and made them well, and taught us how to say nose, and eyes, and paws and whiskers in French. She took us to mild slopes of snow, which I saw like the foothills of Everest, and pushed us off into snowdrifts while we clutched at teatrays, explaining that snow is water, which can also be ice and rain and hail. At holidays we were taken to the mountains, to Gulahek, whose name means a place of roses, and there in my mind now are the roses, red and white, pink and yellow, smelling of pleasure. And we were taken on picnics and to the Legation children’s fancy dress parties. All these events were presented to us as our heritage, and our due, and, too, our responsibility. This was snow, those were stars, and here on this rocky face near the road was where Khosrhu on horseback had been carved thousands of years ago – and the thousands of years, as she said it, became yesterday, appropriated as our heritage. When we went to parties at the Legation her voice told us this was where we belonged, these were nice people, and we were nice people too. But my father did not like Mrs Nelligan, the senior lady of the British community. If my mother’s voice had an orchestra of tones telling us what we must admire, then so did my father’s, contradicting hers, for he never liked people because of their degrees of ‘niceness’, and if I did not then understand this, I knew very well he criticized her for liking others because of their position in society, not because they were likeable. To write about all this now, the terrible snobbery of the time, is to invite, ‘Well what of it? That was then, it was that time …’ But if the vocabulary of snobbery has changed, its structure has not, and the same mechanisms operate now, while people laugh (mindlessly, I think) about the old days.
The truth is, she did very well for us, my brother and me, in that country where she enjoyed the best years of her life, for she might have been frustrated in all that side of her nature which would have made her a brilliantly efficient matron of a big hospital, but there was never a woman who enjoyed parties and good times more than she did, enjoyed being popular and a hostess and a good sort, the mother of two pretty, well-behaved, well-brought-up, clean children.
She told us over and over again, for it was so important to her, long after, in Africa, how she had dressed up for a fancy dress ball at the Legation as a cockney flower girl (and did she know that she was for that evening her own poor mother Emily?) and while she was dancing with some young man on the Legation staff, he stopped in the middle of the dance floor and said, scarlet with shame, ‘Good Lord, you aren’t Maude Tayler, are you? You are so pretty I didn’t recognize you.’ And of course slunk away, because of his gaffe. For my mother was supposed to be plain, a plain Jane, all her life. I think it was the need to make sure she didn’t become vain and flighty, like Emily. As a child, listening to the reminiscence (again and again), my heart hurt for her, and it went on hurting, as the story went on being told, for years – all her life – while her eyes glistened with real tears as she remembered the young man who thought she was so pretty.
There are memories that have about them something of the wonderful, the marvellous. A man, a gardener – Persian – stands over stone water channels, that come under the brick wall into the garden, bringing water from the snow-mountains, and he is pretending to be angry because I am jumping in and out of the delicious water, which splashes him too. I am sent by my parents into the kitchen to tell the servants that dinner may be served, and that is Tehran because I have my brother by the hand, and I look up, up, up at these tall dignified men and see that their faces are grave under their turbans, but their eyes smile.
And the most important, the one that has about it charm, magic, is also the most nebulous, and perhaps I dreamed it. I have lost my toy sheep, a bit of wood on wheels that has real sheepskin wrapped around. I am crying, and wander off and see a flock of sheep and the shepherd, a tall brown man in his brown robes, looking down at me. The dust is swirling around him and the sheep, and a sunset reddens the dust. That is all. In my Tales from the Bible for Children was a drawing of the Good Shepherd, but that could not have in it the dust, nor the smell of sheep and dust. The memory is charged with meaning, comes back and back, and I never know why.
Soon the tastes, textures, smells, of Persia faded because of the immediacy of the colours and smells and sounds of Africa, and it was only in the late 1980s that I went to Pakistan and there met a self still immersed in that early world. The voice of the man who chanted, or sang – what is the word for the most haunting of sounds, the Call to Prayer? … the slant of hot sun on a whitewashed wall where reddish dust lived in the grain of the white … and the smells, the smells, a compound of sunheated dust, urine, spices, petrol, animal dung … and the sounds and voices of the bazaar and its colour, explosions of colour … and the sad bray of donkeys who, according to the ideas of Islam, are shameful because they cry only for food and sex, but I think they cry from loneliness, and prefer Chesterton’s celebration of donkeys.
A cock crowing, a donkey braying, dust on a whitewashed wall – and there is Persia, and now, where I live in London, just down the hill a cock sometimes crows and at once I hardly know where I am.
Far away from England, in Persia, my parents were not as cut off from their family as they soon would be in Africa, for at least two relatives came to visit: one was Harry Lott, a cousin of my father’s. It is strange that of this man he talked of so often, for so many years, I can say nothing, for I don’t remember him. Uncle Harry Lott was the family’s good friend: he sent presents and wrote letters, and that went on when we were in Africa, too, until he died. ‘Oh he did love you kids, he couldn’t get enough of you,’ says Daddy, adding characteristically, ‘God knows why.’ And now I watch some little child in the arms of a loving friend, and know this will affect the child for always, like a little secret store of goodness, or one of those pills with a delayed reaction, releasing elixirs into the bloodstream all day – or for all of a life. But the child may remember nothing about it, not a thing. I find it a pretty uncomfortable experience, watching small children and what moulds and influences them, and they become adolescents, and you know exactly why they do this or that, while they often do not. And then they are young adults, still set in patterns of behaviour whose origins you know. Or, after a separation you meet this child grown or half-grown, and you find yourself searching in eyes that are unconscious of what you are looking for, or examine the way arms go around a friend, stiffly or warmly, or how a hand rests tenderly on the head of a dog.
The other visitor was Aunt Betty Cleverly, whose great love had been killed in the war – like all the women of her age in Europe then. She was a cousin of my father’s, a big untidy woman with a buck-toothed smile. She, too, loved us, and for years and years my brother and I were told of it, but what I remember is being in her bed in the early morning, and on the bedside table the early morning tea tray, she in a long-sleeved, very pink woollen nightgown, her long hair filling the bed and tangling me in soap-smelling brown silk, while she is soaking Marie biscuits in strong tea, giving me fragments to taste, and laughing while I shudder at the bitter taste, and she gives me a new clean biscuit and cries, ‘Don’t tell Mummy, I’m spoiling your appetite for breakfast.’ Then she sings ‘Lead Kindly Light’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ in a strong throaty voice, conducting herself with a teaspoon. Off she goes to China, for she is a missionary, and her letters to my parents report on the ways of the heathen who were being brought under control by Christianity, and on the London Missionary Society, and on parish matters back home in England.
When my father was due his leave at Home, after nearly five years of the Imperial Bank of Persia, first as branch manager in Kermanshah, and then as Assistant Manager in Tehran, he was expecting to return to Persia, and my parents’ minds were full of anxieties about how to educate their children. To leave the older child, me, behind in England, aged five, would have been usual for the time, but my mother knew from Kipling’s ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ what horrors of bullying and neglect small children could suffer because of ill-chosen parental substitutes. My father did not want to return to Persia. The social life bored him. He never had enjoyed working in a bank. The Persians were corrupt and when he said so no one seemed to think it mattered.
Meanwhile absence from England had not made his heart grow fonder. Nor did it, ever. Until he died he would see England – England, not Britain, or at least it was not Britain he apostrophized – as a country that had betrayed its promises to its people, as cynical, as corrupt. It was full of complacent crooks who had got rich out of the war and of stupid women who gave white feathers to men in civvies, half-dead from the Trenches, and then spat at them. And the people had no idea of what the Trenches had been like. And he would sing, all his life, his voice stiff with anger,
And when they ask us …And they’re certainly going to ask us …We’re going to tell them …
But they didn’t ask, they never did, for the war had become the Great Unmentionable. Yet now he had to face six months’ leave in the place. He would have to spend time with his brother Harry, whom he had always disliked, and who patronized him, for he was the successful one, a manager of the branch of the Westminster Bank, with a yacht and a smart car and a house my father hated, for it was the essence of smart suburbia. What matched his idea of himself, and where he had felt perfectly at home, was the great stone house in Kermanshah, with the snow-covered mountains all around. But he had lost that for ever. He did not like his brother’s wife, Dolly, found her silly and suburban. He disliked his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret, and thought my mother’s brother a bore. Six months of relatives, hell on earth, in snobby, self-important, provincial, parish pump, ignorant, little England. And then back to Tehran again, and its busy snobbish social life, the picnics and the Legation parties and the musical evenings where his wife played, while some young man sang ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. ‘Why can’t people sit at home and be quiet?’ he demanded, like the philosophers. But my mother merely smiled, for she knew she was in the right. The trouble was, his eccentricity was infecting her daughter.
‘No I don’t want to, I won’t,’ I weep, being forced into a Bo-peep costume. ‘I don’t want to be Bo-peep. Why can’t I be a rabbit like Harry?’ My mother laughs at me because of the ridiculousness, and the trouble is, I can feel my face wanting to laugh too. I change ground. ‘I don’t want to go to the party. I don’t like parties.’ ‘Nonsense. Of course you like parties. Of course you want to be Bo-peep.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t.’ ‘Don’t be silly. Tell her she’s being silly, Michael.’ ‘Why should she go if she doesn’t want to?’ says Daddy, testy, irritable – difficult. ‘I don’t want to go either. Parties! Who thought of them first? Whoever it was should be hanged, drawn and quartered. The devil, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ ‘Oh Michael …’ ‘No, I tell you, I’ve only got to think of a party and I want to upchuck. And that’s what these kids are going to do. Well, don’t they? They get overexcited, they eat too much, sick all over the place.’ ‘Oh rubbish, Michael, you like parties really.’
No hatred on earth is as violent as the helpless rage of a little child. And there was Gerald Nelligan, confronting his mother and shouting, ‘No I don’t want to, I won’t dress up, why should I?’ He was two years older than me, a big boy, but he flung himself down in the flailing white-faced yelling rage you see trapped children use every day. But they will be saying later, ‘I had a wonderfully happy childhood.’ Nature knows what it is doing, prescribing amnesia for early childhood.
And now, the cat: I wrote about this cat in Particularly Cats, but I know it needs more emphasis. ‘You found that dirty cat in the gutter and brought it into the drawing room, and it was bigger than you were,’ said my mother, being the child and the cat together. ‘And you insisted on having it in your bed. We washed it in permanganate …’ An essential prop of the British Empire, permanganate of potash. ‘And old Marta came storming in and said, “Why is that dirty cat allowed here?”’ But I was allowed the cat, and how much I loved it does not need much in the way of deduction. For years the death of a cat plunged me into grief so terrible I had to regard myself as rather mad. Did I feel anything as bad when my mother died, my father died? I did not. That old cat, rescued from slow death on the streets of Tehran, was my friend, and when we left Persia, what happened to it? They told me soothing lies, but I did not believe them, for I wept inconsolably. ‘You were inconsolable,’ says my mother.
I was getting on for being an old woman when I experienced grief which, on a scale of one to ten – ten being the real, frightful sodden depression that immobilizes, and which I have not myself experienced – was at nine. On this scale, grief for a dying cat is at four or five, while grief for parents and brother is at two. Clearly, the pulverizing pain over the cat is ‘referred pain’ as the doctors call it, when you have pain in one organ, but really another is the cause. Surely one has to ask, but why? And, at force nine, I was pulverized with a grief I did not know the origin of, and still don’t.
But the question surely must be, why, of so many memories from that early time, there are so few that are jolly, pleasant, happy, even comfortable? That hungry, angry little heart simply refused to be appeased? Is there a clue in the business with the photographer? I was three and a half. There survives a photograph of a thoughtful little girl, a credit to everyone concerned, but as it happens I remember what I was feeling. There had been a long nag and fuss, and worry and trouble about the dress, of brown velvet, and it was hot and itchy. My stockings had been hard to get on, were twisted and wrinkled, and had to be hitched up with elastic. My new shoes were uncomfortable. My hair had been brushed, and done again and again. There was a padded stool I was supposed to sit on but it was hard to climb on to and then stay on, for it was slippery. I had also been put on a very large solid carved wooden chair, but then they said it was not right for me. They? – my mother and the photographer, a professional, whose studio was full of Japanese screens showing sunsets and lake scenes and flying storks, of chairs and tables and cushions and stuffed animals to set the scene for children. But I insisted on my own teddy, scruffy, but my friend. I felt low and nervous and guilty, because I was causing so much trouble: as usual it was as if my mother had tied, but too fast and awkwardly, a large clumsy parcel – me – and I did not fit in anywhere, and might suddenly come untied and fall apart and let her down. I felt weary. This small sad weariness is the base or background for all my memories. Everything was too much, that was the point, too high, or too heavy, or too difficult, or too loud or bright, and I could never manage it all, though they expected me to.
4 (#ulink_40d703cf-5ce1-5d39-860f-8e91cc6ddd79)
WHEN MY MOTHER DECIDED to travel to England via Moscow, across Russia, because she did not want to expose her little children to the heat of the Red Sea, she did not know what she was doing – as she often said herself. ‘If I’d only known!’ She did know we would be the first foreign family to travel in an ordinary way since the Revolution. It was 1924. That it would be difficult, of course she knew, but difficulties are made to be overcome. The journey turned out to be horrendous, told and told again, the vividest chapter in the family chronicle. What I was told and what I remember are not the same, and the most dramatic moment of all is nowhere in my memory. At the Russian frontier, it turned out we did not have the right stamps in our passports, and my mother had to browbeat a bemused official into letting us in. Both my mother and my father loved this incident: she because she had achieved the impossible, he because of his relish for farce. ‘Good Lord, no one would dare to put that on the stage,’ he would say, recalling the calm, in-the-right, overriding British matron, and the ragged and hungry official who had probably never seen a foreign family with well-dressed and well-fed children.
The most dangerous part was at the beginning, when the family found itself on an oil tanker across the Caspian, which had been used as a troop carrier, and the cabin, ‘not exactly everyone’s idea of a cruise cabin’, was full of lice. And, probably, of typhus, then raging everywhere.
The parents sat up all night to keep the sleeping children inside the circles of lamplight, but one arm, mine, fell into the shadow and was bitten by bugs, and swelled up, red and enormous. The cabin was usually shared by members of the crew, and was small. For me it was a vast, cavernous, shadowy place, full of menace because of my parents’ fear, but above all, the smell, a cold stuffy metallic stink which is the smell of lice. From the Caspian to Moscow took several days, and the tale went like this: ‘There was no food on the train, and Mummy got off at the stations to buy from the peasant women, but they only had hard-boiled eggs and a little bread. The samovar in the corridor most of the time didn’t have water. And we were afraid to drink unboiled water. There was typhoid and typhus, and filthy diseases everywhere. And every station was swarming with beggars and homeless children, oh it was horrible, and then Mummy was left behind at a station because the train just started without warning and we thought we would never see her again. But she caught us up two days later. She made the station master stop the next train, and she got on to it and caught us up. All this without a word of Russian, mind you.’
What I remember is something different, parallel, but like a jerky stop-and-start film.
The seats in the compartment, which was like a little room, were ragged, and they smelled of sickness and sweat and of mice, in spite of the Keating’s Insect Powder my mother sprinkled everywhere. Mice scurried under the seats and ran between our feet looking for crumbs. The lamps on the wall were broken, but luckily my mother had thought of candles. At night I woke to see long pale dangerous flames swaying against the black panes where cracks let in air, warm in the south, cold in the north. I held my face in it, because of the smell. It was April. My father had flu, and lay on an upper bunk, away from the two noisy children and our demands. My mother was frightened: the great Flu Epidemic was over, but the threat of it would be heard in people’s voices for years yet. There were little bloody dots and spatters on the seats, and that meant lice had been here. Years later I had to sit myself down and work out why the words flu and typhus made me afraid. Flu was easy, but typhus? It was from that journey. For years the word ‘Russia’ meant station platforms, for the train stopped all the time, at sidings as well as big towns, on the long journey from Baku to Moscow.
The train groaned and rattled and screamed and strained to a stop among crowds of people, and what frightening people, for they were nothing like the Persians. They were in rags, some seemed like bundles of rags, and with their feet tied in rags. Children with sharp hungry faces jumped up at the train windows and peered in, or held up their hands, begging. Then soldiers jumped down from the train and pushed back the people, holding their guns like sticks to hit them with, and the crowds fell back before the soldiers, but then swarmed forward again. Some people lay on the platforms, with their heads on bundles and watched the train, but not expecting anything from it. My parents talked about them, and their voices were low and anxious and there were words I did not know, so I kept saying, what does that mean, what does that mean? The Great War. The Revolution. The Civil War. Famine. The Bolsheviks. But why, Mummy, but why, Daddy? Because we had been told that the besprizorniki – the gangs of children without families – attacked trains when they stopped at stations, as soon as my mother got out to buy food, the compartment door was locked and the windows pushed up. The locks on the door were unsafe and suitcases were pushed against it. This meant my father had to come down from his high shelf. He wore his dark heavy dressing gown, bought for warmth in the Trenches, but under it he kept on all his gear and tackle for the wooden leg, so he could put it on quickly. Meanwhile the pale scarred stump sometimes poked out from the dressing gown, because, he joked, it had a life of its own, for it did not know it was only part of a leg, and in moments of need, as when he leaned forward to open the compartment door to let in my mother – triumphant, holding up her purchases, a couple of eggs, a bit of bread – it tried to behave like a leg, instinctively reaching out to take weight. The two little children fearfully watched our mother out there among those frightening crowds, as she held out money to the peasant women for the hard eggs, the half-loaves of the dark sour stuff that was called bread. The story said we were hungry because there was not enough food, but I don’t remember feeling hungry. Only the fear and the anguish, looking at those swarms of people, so strange, so unlike us, and at the ragged children who had no parents and no one to look after them. When the train jerked forward, the soldiers jumped on to it, clutching what they had managed to buy from the women, and then turned to keep their guns pointed at the children who ran after the train.
The story says we were read to, we played with plasticine, we drew pictures with chalks, we counted telegraph wires and played ‘I-Spy’ out of the windows, but what is in my mind is the train rattling into yet another station – surely it was the same one? – the ragged people, the ragged children. And again my mother was out there, among them all. And then, when the train was pulling out, she did not appear in the corridor outside the compartment, holding up what she had bought to show us. She had been left behind. My sick father held himself upright in the corner and kept saying it was all right, she would come soon, nothing to worry about, don’t cry. But he was worried and we knew it. That was when I first understood the helplessness of my father, his dependence on her. He could not jump down out of the train with his wooden leg and push through the crowds looking for food. ‘You had to share an egg between you and there were some raisins we brought with us, but that was all.’ She would have to reappear, she would have to, and she did, but two days later. Meanwhile our train had been slowing, groaning and screeching, again and again, into stations, into sidings, into the crowds, the besprizomiki, the soldiers with guns. I don’t remember crying and being frightened, all that has gone, but not the rough feel of the dressing gown on my cheek as I sat on my father’s good knee and saw the hungry faces at the window, peering in. But I was safe in his arms.
A small girl sits on the train seat with her teddy and the tiny cardboard suitcase that has teddy’s clothes in it. She takes the teddy’s clothes off, folds them just so, takes another set of clothes from the case, dresses the teddy, tells it to be good and sit quietly, takes this set of clothes off the teddy, folds them, takes a third set of trousers and jacket out, puts the taken-off clothes back in the case, folded perfectly, dresses the teddy. Over and over again, ordering the world, keeping control of events. There, you’re a good teddy, nice and clean.
From Moscow comes the most powerful of all my early memories. I am in a hotel corridor, outside a door whose handle is high above my head. The ceiling is very far away up there, and the great tall shiny doors go all along the corridor, and behind every door is a frightening strangeness, strange people, who appear suddenly out of a doorway or walk fast past all the shut doors, and disappear, or arrive at the turn of the corridor and then vanish into a door. I bang my fists against our door, and cry and scream. No one comes. No one comes for what seems like for ever, but that cannot have been so, the door must have soon opened, but the nightmare is of being shut out, locked out, and the implacable tall shiny door. This shut door is in a thousand tales, legends, myths, the door to which you do not have the key, the door which is the way to – but that is the point, I suppose. Probably it is in our genes, I wouldn’t be surprised, this shut door, and it is in my memory for ever, while I reach up, like Alice, trying to touch the handle.
And now we are in England. One might ask why none of the ‘nice’ memories, like snapshots, of pretty England, hollyhocks, cottage gardens, a thatched cottage, rocky seaside pools, are as powerful as the memories of dismal England – ganglia of black wet railway lines, rain streaming down cold windows, dead pale fish on slabs held right out into the street, the bleeding carcases on their great steel hooks in the butchers’ shops. I met my step-grandmother, so they say, and there is a photograph of me on her knee, but not even a deduced truth emerges. I met my father’s father, whose wife Caroline May died that year, and who was about to marry his thirty-seven-year-old bride: probably like all those women, she had lost her love in the Trenches, and marrying an old man was the only chance she had of a husband.
All kinds of visitings and little trips went on, but children are taken around like parcels. A Miss Steele helped with the children, and it is she who provides the sharpest memory of that six months. A room in a hotel. Again it is crammed with furniture, enormous, difficult to make one’s way around and through. Two large beds, one mine, and a large cot. The flame on the wall, which is gas, is dangerous, and must be watched, like a candle, although it cannot be overturned like a candle, and it makes a striated light in the room, full of air that seems greyish brown. Dark rain streams down dirty panes. It is cold. The damp woollen bundle that is my little brother snuffles drearily in his cot. Miss Steele has ordered us not to watch her while she is dressing. Miss Steele is so tall she seems to reach the ceiling, and she has floods of dark hair about her shoulders, over her front, and down her back. She has on bright pink stays, and pale flesh bulges out showing through the hair, and below it around her thighs. I see my little brother’s bright curious eyes, then he squeezes them shut, pretending to be asleep, then they gleam again. Miss Steele lifts her arms to slip a white camisole over her bushes of hair. Under her arms are silky black beards. I feel sick with curiosity and disgust. There is a smell of dirt and the unwashed smell of Miss Steele, sour and metallic, the smell of wet wool from my brother, and my own dry and warm smell that rises in waves when I lift the grimy blankets and take a sniff. The smells of England, the smells of wet, dirty, dark and graceless England, the smells of the English. I was sickening for Persia and the clean dry sunlight, but did not know what was wrong with me, for small children are so immersed in what surrounds them, their attention demanded all the time by keeping themselves upright and doing the right thing, they have not yet learned that particular nostalgia for place. Or so I think it must be. Or perhaps I was sickening for my lost love, the old cat. Long afterwards, I stood in Granada in Spain and saw the circling snow-topped mountains, and smelled the clean sunny air, and Kermanshah came back, in a rush: this was what it had been like.
But the question surely has at least to be put: why not remember just as intensely the jolly picnics in the hayfield, or the salubrious sandcastles, or the kindly arms of Aunt Betty and Uncle Harry Lott?
A sharp, indeed lurid, little memory is different from all the other English memories. A newspaper comic strip, about the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfski must have been among the very first attempts at anti-Communist propaganda. Wilfski, a bewhiskered villain like a cockroach, was based on Trotsky. He always had a bomb in his hand, threatening to blow something or somebody up. He was designed to inspire fear, horror, and that is what he did.
When we left England for Africa, my father’s father, the widower, stood in his thick tweedy clothes in a dark hall with a grandfather clock ticking just behind him, and he wept, and on his long white beard was a string of snot. This was what the child had to see, for the first years of children are devoted to subduing and ordering the physical, snot, shit, pee, a prison they struggle to get out of, and will not enter again until they are old. The old man wept, his heart was broken, he had not seen his son and his son’s wife for five years, and he had only just met his grandchildren, but now they were off to Africa where the missionaries his church raised funds for converted savages who might even be cannibals. They talked airily of returning in another five years. He wept and wept, and his granddaughter felt sick at the sight of him and would not let herself be kissed. And perhaps he wept, too, because the family did not approve of him marrying Marian Wolfe, ‘a girl half his age’.
The last weeks before leaving England were a rush of buying the things my mother needed for the life she thought she was going to lead. She was guided by leaflets and information from the Empire Exhibition, at whose instigation they were going to Southern Rhodesia, where they would be rich in five years growing maize. For my father, this was a chance to become what he had always wanted to be, ever since his country childhood with the farmers’ sons around Colchester. And there had been farmers in his family. But he had never had the capital to farm. Clearly, the more Exhibitions a nation has, the better. That Empire Exhibition of 1924, which lured my father out to Africa – how often have I come on it in memoirs, novels, diaries. It changed my parents’ lives and set the course of mine and my brother’s. Like wars and famines and earthquakes, Exhibitions shape futures.
Apart from shopping at Harrods, Liberty’s and the Army & Navy Stores, they both had all their teeth out. The dentist and the doctor said so. Teeth were the cause of innumerable ills and woes, they were of no use to anyone, and besides, there would not be any good dentists in Southern Rhodesia. (Untrue.) This savage self-mutilation was common at that time. ‘We continue to burn candles in churches and consult doctors’ – Proust.
The family stood on the deck of the German ship and watched the chalky shores of England recede. My mother wept. The desolation of separation was settling on my heart, but it cannot have been England I wept for, since I hated it. My father’s eyes were wet, but he put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Now come on, old thing!’ And turned her away from the disappearing cliffs to go inside.
There was also on deck, apart from my little brother, Biddy O’Halloran, who was to be our governess. What I know about her is mostly what I was told. She was twenty-one. She was Irish. She was ‘fast’, a ‘flapper’, a Bright Young Thing. She was definitely no better than she ought to be. Why? She had shingled hair, used make-up and smoked, and was too interested in men. Much later my mother was remorseful, because she had given Biddy a hard time. This was when she, too, smoked, cut her hair, and used some lipstick. ‘And I wonder what ever happened to her’ – for Biddy clearly found the experience so appalling she never wrote to us. Later she married an Honourable and was in society newspapers.
But she was just one of the many people who had already appeared in my life and disappeared. Acquaintances, lovers, friends, intimates – off they go. Goodbye. Till next time. A bientôt. Poka. Tot siens. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista. Auf wiedersehen. Do svidania. The way we live now.
It was a long voyage, weeks and weeks. A slow boat. Why a German boat? Perhaps my father was putting into practice his feeling of comradeship with the German soldiers who had been sold down the river by their government, just like the English tommies, and the French poilus.
My father was sick nearly all the way to Cape Town, and then Beira. My mother loved every second. This must have been the last time in her life she enjoyed herself in the way of deck games or bridge, dressing up and dancing and concerts – very much her way, her style.
On this boat I disgraced myself. I was miserable. First there was the Captain, my mother’s chum, for she was up on deck with him when everyone else was in their bunks being sick in a Force 9 gale, and this established them in a teasing good-fellows’ friendship. Joking, joshing, baiting, pulling each other’s legs. ‘Ribbing.’ (Does this word come from the torture of tickling, great hands squeezing small ribs?) It was a most hearty jollity, and he was full of practical jokes. When I was dressed up in my party dress, he invited me to sit on a cushion where he had placed an egg, swearing it wouldn’t break. Since it was obvious it would break, I did not want to sit. My mother said I must be a good sport. I sat on the egg and it sploshed under me and spoiled my dress and the Captain roared and rolled about. I was not only angry but felt betrayed. My father was disturbed, but to be a good sport, he must have felt, was the main thing. When we crossed the Line, I was thrown in, though I could not swim, and was fished out by a sailor. This kind of thing went on, and I was permanently angry and had nightmares. I think my mother was having such a good time that her normal obsessive care for her offspring was taking a holiday, for she was not one to take nightmares lightly – if she had been told of them. Besides, was not Biddy there to look after us?
It occurs to me that when my mother became such friends with the German captain two tributaries of a river met. The joshing, ribbing, teasing and ragging came from the English public schools she so much admired, and they were originally inspired by the Prussian elite schools where cruelty was practised on children. The Captain was hardly likely to have been a member of the Prussian elite but then, these examples of good living filter down. And was my mother cruel? Absolutely not. But we can all do whatever it is that is the done thing. Well, nearly all.
In the evenings she put on her beautiful evening dresses and went up to dinner at the Captain’s table, to the parties, the dances, the treasure hunts. So did Biddy O’Halloran. We children were shut in the cabin and told to be good. My brother, as ever obedient, slept. I wanted to be where the fun was. But my mother said the evenings were for grown-ups and I would not enjoy it. But I knew I would enjoy it, and she knew I would enjoy it. I hated her. It was no good, the door was locked. I climbed up on to the dressing table and found nail scissors and cut holes in an evening dress. Small hands, the nail scissors were small, and it was hard manipulating them in the thick slippery material. I could not have done much damage, but it is the thought that counts. I was weeping and howling with rage. No, I certainly was not punished. But I was held on her knee through one of those scenes, her voice low, throbbing with reproach, intimate, while she talked about behaving well and about love – hers – and being good for the sake of being good.
And yet, while all these betrayals and injustices went on, the business of education went on too, for this was, after all, my mother’s main business. Tiny children were held up in their parents’ arms and instructed to watch flying fish, porpoises, the colours of sunsets, the trajectories of other ships whose funnels trailed smoke smudges across fair skies, the birds sitting on the rigging and on the rails, seagulls flying low after the ship to catch the scraps flung out to them by sailors, the phosphorescence on the waves at night, moonlight, and lifeboat drill – this last being far from an academic exercise, since her great love the young doctor had drowned for lack of a lifeboat. And, as a special favour from the Captain, we were taken down, down, through the world of bright corridors. And then, suddenly, we were in another world of oily metal stairways and big black pipes running and bending on steel walls. My brother and I clutched each other and stood looking down from what seemed a tiny platform, only part of a walkway into the bottom of the ship, where dirty half-naked men shovelled coal into the mouths of furnaces, one, two, three, four – more, we could not count them, and the flames reared up and flung red light on to naked sweaty torsos. These men looked up and saw two small clean children, the privileged, peering down at them with horror on their faces, and behind them the parents in their good clean clothes, and the Captain himself in this part of the ship where they did not expect to see him. And they swung their bodies hard in the rhythm of the work, while arcs of black coal reached from them to the flames, and then they looked up, and their white teeth showed in grimed faces. It was like the besprizorniki on the Russian railway platforms, it was the other world, where people had holes in their clothes and bones showed on their faces. I was afraid, looking down at the men who shovelled coal while the sweat poured off them, just as I had been looking out of the dirty cracked train windows.
In Walvis Bay I met death for the first time, on the beach, a sea ebbing from sands where tiny fish lay dying in a sea-puddle. They wriggled and writhed and gasped, and then I saw that drifts of dead little fish lay all over the sands. ‘Are they dead?’ I asked, wanting confirmation, wanting the word to fit what I saw: my father and mother understood the gravity of the moment, and my father said, ‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ and my mother said, ‘Well, never mind.’ A howlingly beautiful sunset filled the sky and I understood: this is how things are and there is nothing to be done about it.
Somewhere in the Cape, ostriches ran high-stepping across scrubby sands with blue mountains far behind them. Distance. The empty distances of Africa. But the family went on in the ship around the coast to Beira, of which nothing remains in my mind, not the railway journey up to Salisbury, nor Salisbury itself, which was then a little town you could stroll across in twenty minutes, nor the twenty miles’ journey to Lilfordia, where we were to lodge while the farm was chosen.
Why ostriches, and not the ox wagons that still used the Salisbury streets, built wide so that the wagons could turn in them? Why the train in Russia but not the train Beira-to-Salisbury, surely equally exotic? Why remember this and not that? If I had decided to remember only the unpleasant, then why the ostriches, which were pure delight?
Lilfordia was the home of the Lilford family, later to be famous in the Bush War (the War of Liberation), because of Boss Lilford and his services to the white cause. Then it consisted of many rondaavels, solid and well-built thatched brick huts, scattered among shrubs which, we were at once warned, should not be approached incautiously, because of snakes. From the grown-ups’ voices – the Lilfords’ – it was clear these were no more of a danger than knocking a candle or a lamp over when playing too roughly, only something to look out for.
My father left us there and went off to look for a farm, I think, on a horse. This was when the white government was selling land to ex-servicemen for practically nothing, and when the Land Bank supported struggling white farmers on long-term loans. He would start farming on a loan. My parents had £1,000 and my father would have a pension because of his cut-off leg. He was also entitled to free repairs to his wooden leg, and, too, a spare one. This was well before the miracle legs of now, which can dance, climb, jump – do everything a normal leg does.
He chose the district of Lomagundi because it was a maize-growing area. It was in the north-east of Southern Rhodesia, very wild and with few people in it, and it stretched all the way up to the Zambesi escarpment. Banket, a large part of Lomagundi, not only grew good maize but had its name because it was full of quartz reefs similar to the rock formations called ‘banket’ on the Rand down south. So there were gold mines too. He and my mother must have realized by now that the enticements of the Empire Exhibition had little to do with reality. Fortunes had been made out of maize during the war, but were not being made now. But maize was what he wanted to grow. And that area was still being ‘opened up for settlement’. It would not have occurred to them that the land belonged to the blacks. Civilization was being brought to savages, was how they saw it, because the British Empire was a boon and a benefit to the whole world. I do not think it can be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity. There was another reason why my parents’ view of themselves was similar to that of the English settlers on the eastern coast of America: they were colonizing an almost empty land. When the whites arrived in Southern Rhodesia thirty-four years before, there were, it is now believed, a quarter of a million black people in that land, roughly the size of Spain. When my parents arrived in 1924 there were half a million.
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My father was away some time and returned with the news that he had found a farm, or rather land that would be a farm – unstumped bush, quite undeveloped, nothing on it at all, not a house or a well or a road. My mother went off with him to look at it. They were driven by someone from the Land Department. Meanwhile we children were left with Biddy O’Halloran at Lilfordia. There it was that I reached the summit of childish wickedness. The hut where my brother and I were lodged also held Biddy. What must it have been like to share air and space with two little children, both of whom spent so much time on the pot? – for toilet training remained a sovereign prescription for good character. In the hut were two low beds, made after the fashion of the time. Into the hard mud floor were inserted short forked sticks. Into these forks were laid poles. On this square framework were laced strips of ox-hide. The lattices supported mattresses. There was a large metal cot for Harry. It goes without saying that Biddy liked my brother, sweet, obedient, delightful, the ideal little child; I would have preferred him too. There were two Lilford girls, to me big girls, ten or eleven, sunburned, bare-limbed, bare-footed, athletic and lean, unlike any children I had seen. They included little Harry in their games, but not me. I thought them sharp and sly and cruel. Their accent made them hard to understand. I was afraid of them. I longed to be included in their games. ‘Just now,’ they said. ‘Just now.’ Meaning perhaps – sometime – never. The sharp pain of exclusion.
Now I began to steal, ridiculous things like pots of rouge, ribbons, scissors, and money too. I lied about everything. There were storms of miserable hot rage, like being burned alive by hatred. When my parents came back and asked, But why scissors? I said I wanted to kill Biddy. They knew what I needed was a regular nursery routine, an ordered life, but how and when? Before that could happen, there must be a home, and it wasn’t built yet. We set off in an ox wagon on the road north. The road was then a track, and it was January, the rainy season, so the track was mud. The wagon was drawn by sixteen trek oxen. Into it went three adults and two children, and necessities, but the trunks of smart clothes, curtain materials from Liberty’s, heavy table silver, Persian carpets, a copper jug and basin, books, pictures and the piano, would come on later, by train. We were five days and nights in the wagon, because of swollen rivers and the bad road, but there is only one memory, not of unhappiness and anger, but the beginnings of a different landscape; a hurricane lamp swings, swings, at the open back of the wagon, the dark bush on either side of the road, the starry sky. It was a covered wagon, like the ones in American films, like those used by the Afrikaners in South Africa on their treks away from the British, north, to freedom.
We were again lodged with strangers, settler-fashion, paying our way, this time at a small gold mine, a couple of miles from the hill where the house would be built. It was managed by people called Whitehead, and owned by Lonrho. Nearly everything was, then. Lonrho was the successor to the British South Africa Company, which had helped Rhodes annex Southern Rhodesia, and for a long time it was referred to as ‘The Company’, and certainly not with affection. Again, there were many rondaavels, and a shack that was the central house. Beyond pale mine dumps stood up the grasshopper-like mine machinery. Beyond that was the mine store and then the compound of crowding thatched huts. Pawpaw trees, guava trees, plantains, marigolds, cosmos, cannas, moonflowers and poinsettias: these were the plants that then marked white occupancy.
Before farming could begin, at least a hundred acres of trees must be cleared, and the tree stumps dragged or burned out of the soil. Farm machinery and cattle must be bought. The house must be built, and the kraals for the cattle and sheds for the machinery.
The farm was a thousand-odd acres of bush, but there was some arrangement that enabled my father to use adjacent, non-allocated government land for grazing, and this land in our time was not settled, so ‘our’ land went on indefinitely to the Ayreshire Hills. There was no one at all living on that land, black or white.
Only one incident remains from that time that went on for months, later to be described by my parents, looking at each other with the awed, incredulous faces that accompany such moments of recognition, ‘God, that was an awful time, awful, awful!’ How did we live through it? – is the unspoken message that goes with the words. The small children, my brother and I and two others, were being settled for the night in a rondaavel on beds that had mosquito nets tucked tight down around us. An older girl came in with a candle, and set it down on an up-ended petrol box, so the flame was not more than a few inches from a net. My mother came in to check for the night, saw the candle, and shot across the room, clutching at her heart with one hand while she reached for the candle. She said in a voice hushed by urgency. ‘What are you doing? What can you be thinking of?’ It was true. If I had thrust a leg or an arm out the net would have reached the candle, and the hut would have gone up in flames – it was thatch on pole and mud walls. My mother stood there, the candlestick shaking in her hand, the flame trembling, candle grease scattering. Meanwhile the culprit wept, only now imagining possibilities. ‘Why?’ my mother went on in a low appalled voice. ‘How could anyone in their senses do such a thing?’ I have never forgotten her incredulity. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
My parents did not understand the Whiteheads, found them shifty and unsatisfactory, though soon they would become familiar with people who farmed, went broke, mined, succeeded, part-succeeded or went broke, farmed again, owned mine-stores – did anything that came to hand. Inside this same hand-to-mouth, hit-and-run pattern some people made fortunes. Others died of drink. The Whiteheads were not in any sense educated. They knew nothing but this settlers’ life. My mother disliked them, and they must have found her more than a trial. As for my father, he was doing the books for the mine, and would for a couple of years after he was on his own. Already we were worried about money. There was an unpleasantness about the books. Mr Whitehead was either careless or dishonest, and he blamed my father. I have described this, humorously, in In Pursuit of the English, but for my parents it was the chief horror of ‘God, that was an awful time.’ There was nothing funny in the living of it.
My father rode over every day to supervise the beginning of the farm, for already there was a ‘bossboy’, Old Smoke, from Nyasaland, who had brought his relatives with him, and a good part of each morning was spent in long, meditative consultations between the two men, who usually sat at either end of a fallen log, watching the labourers at work. Both men smoked, my father his pipe, and Old Smoke dagga, or pot. That was why he was called Old Smoke. My mother usually walked over for at least part of the day, and took us with her, so we could watch the cutting of the trees, the stumping of the lands, the new cattle in their kraals, the digging of the wells. Two wells were dug, according to the findings of the water diviners – everyone used diviners then for wells and, later, for boreholes. Above all, we watched the building of the house. The grass for the thatch of the house was still green in the vleis, but the pole and mud walls of the house could go up, and they did. This process I described in Going Home, the making of a house from what grew in the bush, and no house could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one. In London you live in houses where other people have lived, and others again will live there when you have moved or died. A house put together from the plants and earth of the bush is rather like a coat or dress, soon to be discarded, for it probably will have returned to the bush, from fire, insects, or heavy rains, long before you die. The minute the grass was ready, the roof went on, for the priority was to get away from the Whiteheads.
My parents had chosen a site which the neighbours all warned would give them trouble, on top of a hill, which meant dragging everything up and down the steep slopes by oxen. It was the beauty of the place, that was why my father chose it, and then my mother approved it. From the front of the house you looked north to the Ayreshire Hills, over minor ridges, vleis and two rivers, the Muneni and the Mukwadzi. To the east, a wide sweep of land ended with the Umvukves, or the Great Dyke, where crystalline blues, pinks, purples, mauves, changed with the light all day. The sun went down over the long low ranges of the Huniyani Mountains. In the rainy season it was extravagantly, lushly beautiful, mostly virgin bush, but even where it had been cut for mine furnaces the bush had grown up fresh and new. Everywhere among the trees the soil was broken by ridges and reefs of quartz, for this was a gold district, and on every reef of protruding rock you could see the marks of a prospector’s hammer that had exposed a crust of fool’s gold – pyrites – or the little glitter of mica.
Weeks before the house was finished, when it was still a skeleton of poles stuck in the ground, then poles covered with a skin of mud, then a roughly thatched house, with holes that would be windows, my parents were sitting on petrol boxes in front of it (where soon they would be in deck chairs), and they watched the mountains, or the sunset, or cloud shadows, or rain marching around and across the landscape. I sat on my father’s good leg and watched too.
When the house was done, perched on the top of the hill, the bush was cleared not more than thirty yards in front, and on either side. At the back where the garage and store huts were, trees had been cut for a hundred yards or so. The real bush, the living, working, animal-and-bird-full bush, remained for twenty years, not much affected by us in our house, and right until my parents left it in the middle of the Second World War, you might startle a duiker or a wild cat or a porcupine only a few yards down from the cleared space. Two rough tracks led down from the house to the fields in front, and a steep path through thick trees and bush to the well. Down the hill in front of the house was a big mawonga tree, its pale trunk scarred by lightning, an old tree full of bees and honey. What impresses me now is not how much effect our occupancy had on the landscape of the farm, but how little. Below the hill on one side was the big field, the hundred acres, and there were smaller fields here and there. Cattle kraals, tobacco barns – and the house on the hill. The farm labourers’ village on a lower hill merged into the bush, as our house did.
5 (#ulink_754f91b7-a318-51ed-a25b-e7c1331fea49)
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL was not different from most first houses built by settlers who, when they arrived in the colony, were nearly always poor. Usually they were brick and corrugated-iron shacks, one room, or two. The most attractive houses of those early days were like the Africans’. An African family had a group of huts, each hut for a different purpose, and early settler houses were often half a dozen thatched huts, or brick or pole-and-mud, sometimes joined together by pergolas covered with golden shower or bougainvillea. The floors were of brick or red cement, more often of stamped dung and mud. The African huts had no windows, but the white huts always did, sometimes French windows, gauzed in, so it seemed like an aviary. The floors had on them reed mats or animal skins. The first beds could be strips of ox hide on poles. The furniture stores were miles away in Salisbury, and wagons brought the furniture out; even when they were brought by train, the tables and chairs would have to be trekked from the station to farms over bad roads. Farm sales, as farmers went bankrupt, which they so often did, recycled furniture among the farms. Furniture was often improvised from bush timber by any black man who showed he had an eye for it, and sometimes from petrol or paraffin boxes. In those days petrol and paraffin came in four-gallon tins, two in a box. A settee could be made from them. Sideboards, writing tables, dressing tables, were made with two or four boxes on their ends, with a board across, and boxes set horizontally on them. These exercises in spare living were civilized by curtains made from flour sacks. The flour came to the farms in thick white sacks which, when washed, went soft and silky and took dye well. Or curtains were of embroidered hessian.
If you were really hard-up, all that had to be bought was a Carron Dover wood-burning stove. Every farmhouse had one – or nearly every farmhouse: a just-arrived young settler might live for a season in a mud hut, and his kitchen was an open fire under a corrugated-iron roof.
The houses outgrew themselves, were demolished, to be replaced by the solid brick, ceilinged houses that announced success, or remained as the core of a spreading farmhouse, full of rooms.
The talent for invention, for improvisation, was never lost. Even in a house owned by ‘a cheque book farmer’ (I heard the old envious phrase in 1988 about a black farmer, by one who did not yet have a cheque book), there might be hessian curtains or hangings embroidered red and orange and black with wools, or appliquéd in the geometric patterns fashionable at the time because of ‘the jazz age’. Or the white flour sack curtains, dyed. I have seen a farmhouse full of antiques – real ones from England and Scotland – with bedrooms where at the windows hung glazed chintz, the beds valanced in chintz, but with a fire screen of embroidered hessian, and bookcases filling whole walls made of painted petrol boxes.
Our house was different from these first houses only in its shape, built long, sliced across for rooms. A photograph of Mother Patrick’s and her nurses’ hospital in the early 1890s – the Dominican nuns were the first women in the Colony – is almost identical with that of our house, before it sprouted verandahs and porches and then another room joined to the house by a pergola. Inside it was better furnished than most: for instance, the living room where the dining table, made from bush timber, was set so we could look over to the hills as we ate. The pale grey mud of the walls had been left unwhitewashed, because it looked so nice with the Liberty curtains. The chairs, a settee, bookcases had been bought from a farm sale. The writing table was of stained petrol boxes, and John William McVeagh and his second wife, the daughter of the dissenting minister, looked through mosquito gauze at the verandah and the rows of petrol and paraffin tins painted green that held pelargoniums. The next room, my parents’, had proper beds and mattresses, the curtains were Liberty’s, the rugs were from Persia, the copper washbasin and jug stood on a petrol box washstand. Next door, at first my brother’s and my room, then mine, there were reed mats on the floor, the bedspreads were of flour sacks dyed orange, the washstand and dressing table of petrol boxes, painted black. The little room at the very end had reed mats, and a petrol box wash table and dressing table. It was in this room that Biddy O’Halloran lived for a year. She embroidered the white flour sack curtains all over in glowing silks that were still fresh twenty years later.
Nor was there anything remarkable about the oil lamps that had to be refilled every morning, for those early farms did not have electricity. Nor the water cart under its shed of thatch, with its two casks side by side whose taps were never allowed to drip, for even a cup of water was costed in terms of the energy of the oxen who three or four times a week pulled the heavy barrels up the hill. Nor the lavatory, twenty yards down the hill, a packing case with a hole in it over a twenty-foot hole, standing in its little hut, with a thatch screen in front of the open door. And not the food safe, either, double walls of chicken wire filled with charcoal where water trickled slowly from containers on the top, dripping all day and all night, the food kept cool because the safe was set to catch any wind that blew. When a farmhouse took a step forward into electricity, running water, or an indoor lavatory, neighbours were invited over to inspect the triumph, which was felt to represent and fulfil all of us.
My mother must have realized almost at once that nothing was going to happen as she had expected.
Not long ago I was sent the unpublished memoirs of a young English woman, with small children, who found herself in the bush of old Rhodesia, without a house, for it was still to be built, no fields ready – nothing. And particularly no money. She too had to make do and contrive, face snakes and wild animals and bush fires, learn to cook bread in antheaps or cakes in petrol tins over open fires. She hated every second, feared and loathed the black people, could not cope with anything at all. Reading this, I had to compare her with my mother, who would be incapable of placing a vegetable garden where a rising river might flood it, who never ran from a snake or got hysterics over a bad storm. Another manuscript, this time from Kenya, was the same: wails of misery and self-pity, and what seemed like an almost deliberate incompetence in everything. The two memoirs reminded me of what was worst for my mother. Hard to believe that the first thought in the minds of the two memoir writers, with everything they were being tested by wildness and hardship, was this: were they still middle-class people, ‘nice people’? But so it was. Similarly, my mother was unhappy because her immediate neighbours were not from the English middle class. How was it that my father, who, after all, must have at least noticed her preferences, chose a district where all the ‘nice people’ were miles away, on the other side of the District? Is it conceivable he really never understood how important it was to her? Or, perhaps, finding the land was all he had strength for, and then he had to make a farm from nothing, and start a kind of farming he had not imagined. He had always wanted to be a farmer, but in his mind were the patterns of English farming he had seen all around him as a boy.
Both of them believed, and for years, that a change of luck would bring them success. She might not have seen at once that her crippled husband would not be able to dominate the bush, and that they would never make the fortunes promised by the Exhibition, but she did see that the life of dinner parties, musical evenings, tea parties, picnics was gone. That meant she felt checked in a deep part of her. Going to Persia she had taken all the necessities for a middle-class life. Coming to Africa, she had clothes for making calls and for ‘entertaining’, visiting cards, gloves, scarves, hats and feather fans. Her evening dresses were much more elegant than anything likely to be worn even to Government House then. She probably thought that was where she would be invited. She might have defied her father to be that common thing, a nurse, but she never had any intention of giving up the family’s status as middle-class. Her children would fulfil her ambitions and do even better. So in that first year, when she took a good look at her circumstances and her neighbours, she only postponed her ambitions. The farm would shortly be successful, and then she could go home to England, put her children into good schools, and real life would begin.
Meanwhile, she could not have made more efficient, ingenious, energetic use of what she found around her in the bush, on the farm.
And now I come to the difficulty of reconciling child time and adult time. There was a stage of my life – I was already in England, and trying hard to make sense of my life through a strict use of memory – when I understood that a whole tract of time had disappeared. There was a gulf, a black hole. Years and years of it – so it seemed. And yet the record of outward events is clear. In January 1925, the family was in Lilfordia. Between January and June 1927, I was at Mrs Scott’s. Yet I had already been at school for a whole term at Rumbavu Park. All these hazy, interminable memories had to be fitted into one year and nine months. Impossible. I simply gave up. But later had to come back, and back … and was forced to concede that between my stamping around in the mud and water that would make the plaster of our house, and my going to school, was – less than two years. And even now I feel incredulous, it can’t be so. But it was so. Between January 1925 and September 1926, the following things happened.
All of us, the whole family, had malaria twice, badly. The new lands of the farm were stumped, the farm furnished with its necessities, the house built, and we moved into it. Biddy O’Halloran left, good riddance on both sides. My mother had a breakdown and was in bed for months. Mrs Mitchell and her cruel twelve-year-old son came and then left. I learned to read and triumphantly entered the world of information through print on cigarette packets, grocery packaging, the big words on top of newspapers, the Army—Navy catalogue, words written under pictures … and then, books themselves. My brother and I did lessons from the correspondence courses organized for farmers’ children by the government.
That was the pattern of events, and it has little to do with what I remember, the chronicle in child time.
Biddy O’Halloran is leaning on my father’s shooting stick, and we are in the big field, below the hill, grasshoppers and butterflies everywhere. She has had her appendix out, and she is telling my little brother that if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut a grasshopper will jump down into his appendix and claw its way out through his stomach. He is crying with terror. ‘Of course it’s not true,’ cries my mother later, at bedtime, while my brother sobs. But years later my brother told me he had an irrational fear of grasshoppers; I was able to tell him why. ‘Do you mean to say that’s all it was?’ he demanded, trying to laugh, but shocked that what had so influenced him and for so long had been so insignificant.
Biddy O’Halloran had fair skin, and in the ‘vee’ of her cotton dress it was flushed a gentle red. A child’s close stare revealed it was a mottle of scarlet and cream. Two small children gravely discuss how red jelly and cream got under Biddy’s skin. ‘It was poured into a hole and then it spread.’ We made excuses to get close, were rebuked for staring, came away to tell each other there wasn’t a hole. So she must have spread the jelly on, and it got through the skin. ‘Mummy, how did the red jelly and cream get under Biddy’s skin?’ ‘What red jelly? What nonsense!’ The mystery was discussed gravely, scientifically, as we sat together under the eaves of the thatch, the cats and dogs in attendance. ‘But perhaps it isn’t jelly, it’s blood from the roast beef!’ ‘But what are the white bits then?’
Or long, thoughtful stares at an adult’s fingernails, where there is a pale blob in the pink of a nail. ‘Mummy, why didn’t God finish your nail?’ ‘What do you mean, finish?’ Look, there is a hole.’ ‘What hole? That isn’t a hole!’ The hairs on an adult’s forearm, each golden stalk in its little pit of brown skin. The smells. Biddy had a sour smell, sharp and hurtful to the nose, when she splashed on cologne. My mother’s smell was vigorous and salty. My father’s male and stale and smoky.
We watched from the edge of the bush my mother showing Biddy how to put bloody rags into a petrol tin to soak, under the thatch of the house at the back. The look of dramatic secrecy on my mother’s face, her lowered dramatic voice. The deliberately languid, irritated movements of Biddy. We knew the ‘boys’ were not supposed to see the contents of this tin. We crept up to the tin when the women had gone and speculated: Biddy had cut her finger or her foot – that must be it. But why didn’t mummy want the boys to know? We were always cutting ourselves, or had bruises, and sometimes the ‘boys’ washed the blood off for us. Why then …?
The adult world, with its disorder, its lack of sense, its mysteries, two small children trying to get things into their right place, call them by their right names …
I lie on my bed, reading Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys. One of the monkey brothers eats an orange, which he thinks is conveniently divided into segments for pulling apart and eating. I cannot make sense of this. The orange segments I am eating as I read are too big for my mouth. Yet I am bigger than the little monkeys we see racing about in the trees just down the hill, and which sometimes come into the house and investigate the rafters before running back into the trees. Did the monkey in the book mean those tiny globules of orange juice, each in its little bag, which I burst on my tongue, flooding my palate with scent and taste? But surely that couldn’t be it: globules aren’t segments. I lie and wonder, read, and think … The Royal Monkeys must be much larger than the little bush babies we know. When they pull the orange skins apart their fur prevents them feeling the showers of sharp juice that come out. The spray lives in the pores of the orange skin. When a visitor comes who has rough-pored skin on her face and neck, I stare secretly at the pores where water is standing. If pulled apart, would that skin send out a spray of …? ‘What is that child staring at?’ ‘Doris, why are you staring? It’s rude.’ I turn away, run off, sit under a bush down the hill, pull a leaf off a bush, look at the veins on the leaf and the pores between them. I pull the leaf apart but there is no strong-smelling spray on my face and hands. On the bush is a chameleon. I watch it creep with its slow rocking motion up a branch. And then suddenly … I rush screaming up the hill to my mother, sitting in her chair, beside my father, looking out over the bush. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ ‘Mummy, Mummy …’ ‘But what is wrong?’ ‘The chameleon,’ I weep, hysterical, terrified, ‘The chameleon …’ ‘What chameleon?’ ‘It was sick and all its insides came out.’ I run back down the hill. Behind me come my mother and my little brother. The chameleon is sitting quietly a little further up the branch, its eyes swivelling about.
I am in shock, it is like a dream. I saw the chameleon’s insides come out and … it happens again, and I scream. ‘Shhh …’ says my mother, holding me tight. ‘It’s all right. It is catching flies, can’t you see?’ I am shuddering with disgust and fear – but with curiosity too. I stand safe inside her firm grasp. ‘Wait,’ she says. The club-like tongue of the chameleon darts out, a thick fleshy root, and disappears back inside the chameleon. ‘Do you see?’ says my mother. ‘It’s just its way of feeding itself.’ I collapse into sobs, and she carries me back up the hill. But I have acquired adult vision; when I see a chameleon, part of my knowledge of it will be that it darts out its enormous thick tongue, but I won’t really see it, not really, ever again, not as I saw it the first time.
In 1992 I was standing, a couple of weeks after the first rains, in Banket, near a mafuti tree, a big one. The mafuti is a serious tree, its fronded leaves dark green, its trunk thick and safe. There is nothing frivolous about this tree. But growing at its root was an excrescence, like a sea creature, coral sheaths where protruded the tender and brilliant claws of new leaves, and these were like green velvet. You would never think they had anything in common with the sober leaves above them. And suddenly I remembered how I rushed up to the house, screaming that a monster was attacking the tree, it was a beetle the size of a cat.
I wake in the night. All round me, above me, is a rustling, creeping noise. I start up on my elbow, peer up through the white of the mosquito net. My heart is beating, but the rustling is louder. The square of the window lightens, once, twice. Wait, is that a car coming up the hill, the headlights … ? No, my parents’ room is dark, they are in bed, too late for a car. It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain.
Or it is just after we have been put to bed, and from the end of the house come the sounds of grown-up voices, and my mother playing her piano. I and my little brother talk in low voices, knowing we should be asleep. I continue my mother’s bedtime stories, of the animals in the bush, the mice in the storeroom. Then I try to frighten him with the dragon from St George and the Dragon. I frighten myself. The dragon is spread all over the thatch, fills the sky, claws spread out, fire rushing from its mouth. I know perfectly well there is no dragon, yet I am frightened. Similarly, when I have convinced myself there are wicked fairies in the corners of the room, I know I have invented them. When at last I start yelling for my mother to come, and she does, she says, soothingly, that there is no dragon, no fairies behind the curtains, I feel impatient, because that is not the point. I need to be scolded for preventing my little brother from sleeping, for ‘making things up’. Similarly, by myself at the very bottom of the hill, just where the lands start, I stand by an old gnarled and knotted tree, like the ones in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and imagine fairies so strongly I am not far off seeing them. When I populate the antheap with its curtains of Christmas fern and its spider lilies with fairies and goblins, what I create is an intense listening silence, and I know if I turn my head fast enough, when they don’t expect it, I’ll see them. Which does not mean I actually believe they are there. Just as I believe and do not believe in the tooth fairy. My disbelief in Father Christmas does not stop me from expecting reindeer and explaining to my brother they will come in through the window, since there is no chimney. Long earnest discussions in the hushed voices that go with the turned-low lamp and the shadows in the room, about reindeer and how fast they would have to fly from England to get here in time for Christmas, and if the reindeer would have to descend at intervals to feed, and what would they think of trees and grass, since what they like to eat is moss. When my brother tells my mother I believe reindeer will arrive for Christmas and they will eat musasa and mafuti leaves, it can be seen from her frown that she is working out how to balance reality and useful and necessary fantasy, and I at once hurriedly say that of course I don’t believe in Christmas reindeer.
My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.
Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm ‘compound’ on its subsidiary hill.
The doctor came often from Sinoia. They did not know as much then about anxiety as they do now. He prescribed bed rest. Doctor Huggins, her real doctor in Salisbury, when she appealed to him in letters, said, Why ask him when she had already had a doctor telling her what to do? Doctor Huggins – later Lord Malvern – was a testy character who did not believe in the need for a bedside manner, as a doctor or a politician: he was shortly to become Prime Minister.
Several times a day she summoned me and Harry to the bedside where she said dramatically, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy.’ It is this memory that tells me how badly she had inwardly collapsed. ‘Poor mummy’ was simply not her style. As for me I was consumed with flames of rage. My little brother embraced her whenever he was asked to. I embraced her warmly, but then resented and repudiated the emotion. Soon I refused to go to the bedside when called there by the cook. ‘Mummy’s ill,’ my father directed me, and I snapped, ‘No, she isn’t,’ for the conflict was unbearable.
Meanwhile our education went on and I can only admire the self-discipline this must have needed. Standing by her bed, or sitting on it (’Don’t tire your mother. Don’t lean on her. Don’t …’), we learned our multiplication tables and did baby sums, but the reading lessons were already much too easy. She told us stories and she read to us.
Then Mrs Mitchell arrived, with her son, to ‘help’ my mother. Harry was still sleeping in my parents’ room. I shared a room with Mrs Mitchell. Her son was in the room at the end of the house.
I experienced her as cruel and her son as a bully. She drank. When she left – soon, after only a few weeks – caches of empty bottles were found under bushes, in cupboards. She always smelled of spirits. What was she really like? If she was being nursemaid and housekeeper for a sick woman, and had a boy, school age, she must have been desperate. Widowed? Deserted? In flight from a brutal husband? This was before the Slump, when women whose husbands were out of work took any jobs they could find.
All my childhood we were told how poor we were, how hard-up, how deprived of what was our right. I believed it. Then, at school, I met children from really poor families. There was a stratum of people, white, in old Southern Rhodesia, who lived just above hunger level, always in debt, in flight from debtors, with drink and brutality waiting to swallow them up. Recently a book was published called Toe-rags by Daphne Anderson, the story of a girl who survived a childhood at this level of poverty. Often it was the black servants who cared for her. She was exactly my age, and compared to hers my life was gentle and privileged. This book is not likely – yet – to be read by black people in Zimbabwe, where it is necessary still to believe that every white person is, and was, rich. White people have proved reluctant to read it, because they don’t like to think the whites in British Southern Rhodesia ever lived so low and so fearfully. The grandiose myths of White Supremacy are made to look sad and sick by this book, even though the beautiful author married well, as we say, when she was in her twenties, and lived happily ever after. I hope Toe-rags will soon find a place on the reading lists of history courses in Zimbabwe.
Mrs Mitchell came from this frightful level of poverty. She could not have shared my bedroom for more than a term, perhaps even a school holiday. It was an endless misery, endless fear. I lay in the stuffy dark under the mosquito net. She was under the other mosquito net. I heard the sounds that meant she was drinking. I heard the bottle slide down between the edge of the bed and the net, and thump on the matting. She snored. She thrashed about in her bed. Next door the boy shouted in his sleep. Once she quarrelled so loudly with the boy my mother appeared in the doorway, a candle in her hand, and her hair flowing about her to stop the two yelling at each other, and saw the candle sloping in Mrs Mitchell’s hand, the candle grease spattering, the flame lengthening and dipping and smoking an inch or two from the mosquito net.
Both Mrs Mitchell and her son shouted and screamed at the black servants. When my father remonstrated she shouted at him that he understood nothing about the country: perhaps it was the first time I heard all the white clichés: You don’t understand our problems. They only understand the stick. They are nothing but savages. They are just down from the trees. You have to keep them in their place. (Just like Dr Truby King’s infants.)
I was afraid to go anywhere near Mrs Mitchell’s son. He was perhaps twelve but seemed to me as powerful as a grown-up. He tormented and teased the black child who was piccanin for the household. He chased and teased and tormented the dogs and cats. His catapult he used not only on birds, but to aim stones at the bare feet of any black person who came near.
Nothing I can do, no cajolements or enticements of memory, can bring back more than this: no incident or event bad enough to explain my dread of that woman. And probably there was no actual cruelty or blow, but only the foul angry voice, and the high scolding vituperation of the black-hater.
I cannot even begin to imagine what that year was like for my father. His wife was bedridden, and if she had ‘a heart’ there was no reason why she should ever get up. They had so little money, yet whenever she was worse the doctor would arrive from Sinoia. Two little children, one still not six, the other four. They needed tender care, but what they were getting was Mrs Mitchell and her bully of a son. My father was still trying to get lands stumped, bush cleared, fields made. He had to be down all day on the lands, for until there were fields there would be no crops. Meanwhile the debt to the Land Bank grew.
For some months he had an assistant, a Dutchman with many children. The story The Second Hut was written from memories of that year.
It was as early as that when we, the children, began to go with him down to the lands. The horse had died: that part of the District was not good for horses – they got diseases. It was on the sand veld at the other side of the District that horses thrived and people went in for racing. We bought two donkeys and my father rode one. We were put on the other. Later we got a car, an Overland, already third- or fourth-hand. We, the children, the two dogs, Lion and Tiger, cheerful mongrels, bottles of cold tea and packets of store biscuits went down to the land with our father, and played in the bush while my mother was in bed, being tended by Mrs Mitchell.
She left. Then came someone who was not paid, but helping out of kindness, Mrs Taylor, a Danish woman. Since she had a life of her own she did not move in, but might stay a few days, leave and come back, and soon we forgot the nightmare of Mrs Mitchell. She was a large, calm, good-looking woman, and my father liked her very much. My father liked women. Women liked him. He had a gentle, courtly, considerate way with him, and the undertones of regret and wistfulness were not anything a child could understand. All I knew was that throughout my growing up there was always this woman – the wife of a neighbour, or a visitor to the District – with whom he might sit and talk in this particular way, as if the time they were in, the two of them, was in another range of being altogether, something larger and tenderer than quotidian life, and where they shared, too, a rakish and amused recognition, never to be put into words. Mrs Taylor was not around for long – she was on the move somewhere. People were always moving about the country, farm to farm, from either to the town, or off ‘up north’ – meaning Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia – or back to England, because they found the life disappointing. ‘Not everyone can take the life, you know.’ Women most especially often could not take the life.
If my father always enjoyed tender and, of course, platonic friendships (now you have to spell out what would have been taken for granted then), my mother also had admirers who knew she was fitting her remarkable capacities into too small a space. One of them was a George Laws, who was a brother of Miss Laws, a teacher in Sinoia and some sort of a cousin of my father’s. Mr Laws owned a timber concession in the government land between the rivers. It was he who made my mother a fitment that enabled her to read while she was ill, a bed rest, piano stool, couches and chairs of slatted wood, and ‘occasional’ tables so heavy they could scarcely be moved even when not buried under books, newspapers, magazines.
Then my mother got out of bed. She had to. She said her weight of hair was giving her headaches, and she cut it all off and appeared with a nude shorn nape. A ‘shingle’. My brother wept. I wept. We sat in the pillows and billows of her brown hair and wrapped it around us and bawled while she sat and ironically watched us. She said Right! That’s that!, and she wrapped her hair up in paper and threw it into the rubbish pit.
Correspondence courses still arrived by every post, but she wondered what she was paying money for when she could do better herself. She taught us geography by sloshing water into our sand pit and making continents, isthmuses, estuaries, islands. Being taught to see land masses and oceans like this repeats that stage of human knowledge when the world was flat. Then she ordered a little globe from Salisbury which arrived on the train, and with it we entered the mind of Copernicus. She sat my father in his folding chair on the sharp slope down outside the house, summoned the cook and the piccanin from the kitchen. My father was the sun. The two servants were the heavy planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Stones stood for Pluto, for Mars. I was Mercury and my brother Venus, running around my father, while she was the earth, moving slowly. ‘You have to imagine the stars are moving at different rates, everything moving, all the time.’ And then she abolished this system of cosmic order with an impatient wave of her hand. My father was now the earth, and my brother and I by turns the moon. ‘Of course you have to imagine that …’
We interminably chanted the multiplication tables. We learned English trees and flowers from little books. One was French Without Tears. The inspectors came out from Salisbury to check on the farmers’ children, and said yes, we were doing well. Yes, we were in advance of our ages. But we had to go to school. It was the law. Besides, children have to learn to be social beings.
For a time, my mother wondered about starting a little school there, on the farm. There were children of various ages on the near farms. But if this would be easy now, with good roads, then the question was, how to get those children every day, two, three, four, five, seven miles, to school and back again? Besides, this woman who had a genius for teaching small children was not qualified. And that was that.
6 (#ulink_ce24d70f-3733-562a-be90-16c1895a82cc)
I WAS NOW IN THE ROOM the third along from the front, which would be mine until I left the farm for good. It was a large, square, high-thatched room, whitewashed, full of light. From my bed I saw the sun spring up behind the chrome mountain and pass rapidly up out of sight, I saw the moon rise, soar up and away. I used to prop the door open with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me – it was only a few paces away down the steep slope. I fought with my mother to have this door open. ‘Snakes,’ she cried, ‘scorpions … mosquitoes … I won’t have it!’ But I kept the door open knowing I was safe inside the mosquito net. Besides, we took all that quinine for the months of the rainy season. Snakes did come into the house, and more than once my mother had to shoot one. The fact is, I was brought up in one of the most heavily snake-infested areas in the world. They were all poisonous, some deadly. For years I was in the bush with bare legs and often bare feet, and I was never bitten. Clearly they fear us more than we fear them. Impossible not to remember the threat of snakes dinned into us always. Remember to watch where you tread, never put your hand on a branch without looking, never climb a tree carelessly, puff adders like to lie out on hot paths and roads and they move slowly … remember, remember, remember. But my fear was for insects, so many, so varied, so large and black and horned or slim and jittery and invasive, spiders hanging in front of your face on webs spun in the night, lurking in your veldschoen, watching you from holes in the earth when you squatted to pee. It is a testament to the irrationality of humankind that when I look back at that time I think of those lethal but beautiful snakes with admiration and even affection, whereas the memory of harmless insects makes me shiver.
But I was under the mosquito net, so that was all right.
In the mornings I woke because the light had come, and the sunlight a warmth on my face. I checked the net for spiders and beetles, then jumped up and tied it into its daytime knot. I flung myself down on my back, and lay spread out, the sheet kicked off, sniffing all the delightful smells in that room. First, my own body, its different parts, each with its own chummy odour. The thatch was damply fragrant or straw-dry, according to whether it had rained. The creosote the rafters were painted with was tar-strong, like soap. The linoleum, already wearing into holes, released oily odours, but faint, like the oilcloth on the washstand. The enamel pail under the washstand might have pee in it, but I learned to sneak out with the pail and pour it down the hill into the earth, where it bubbled up yellow, sank, and dried almost at once. The toothpaste was clean and strong. My shoes – veldschoen – smelled of hide, like karosses. But I refused ever to have a kaross on my bed, for a kaross was too close to the beast it came from, and anyway, the rough reek of kaross made me think of Mrs Scott and I never, ever, wanted to think of that place again.
I heard the ‘boy’ take tea into my parents, knew they were getting up, slid into my clothes before I could be fussed into them. I wore little cotton knickers, a cotton dress, sometimes made out of an embroidered flour sack, and a liberty bodice. The Army—Navy catalogue regulated our lives, as it did those of middle-class children anywhere in the colonies. Well brought-up children wore liberty bodices with their tabs for suspenders and stockings in cold weather. Worn without stockings they wriggled up and left red marks on your stomach. There was a day when I said no, I was not going to wear one, not ever again. And in winning the battle for me I won it for my brother too. He was still wearing the tight binders that were supposed to prevent chills on the liver, while I had long ago refused to wear one. We were meant to wear cotton hats, lined with red aertex, with red aertex pieces hanging down our backs to keep the sun off our spines. But no, no, no, I would not. ‘No one wears a hat!’ I shouted – and it was true, the farmers and their wives did not cover their heads though the women might wear a hat for visiting. My mother’s pleas went for nothing: you will get deathly chills without your binders, bad posture without your liberty bodice, sunstroke without hats that have red linings. About the hats, it seems my mother and the Army—Navy Stores were right all the time. Recently (1992) I was at a skin specialist’s in London, and he said most of his income comes from white sun-worshippers in Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe.
I dressed myself as I had done since I was able to, whereas my little brother, now getting on for six, was still being dressed. He was supposed to be delicate, and often got bronchitis and was in bed with a towel over his head enclosing a basin of hot water that emitted the fumes of wintergreen, and friar’s balsam. Not for another two years would he refuse to be called Baby, refuse to be delicate.
When I went into my parents’ bedroom my father was putting on his wooden leg with its heavy leather straps, its bucket for his stump; my mother, in her flowered silk wrapper from Harrods, was dressing Baby. The Liberty curtains were still fresh. The whitewash glittered. The thatch above was yellow and smelled new. Years ahead was the gentle squalor that house at last subsided into.
We had breakfast in the room that overlooked the bush that stretched to the Ayreshire Hills. Mother in her fresh cotton dress, father in his farm khaki, the two healthy little children. The breakfast was the full English breakfast, porridge, bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, toast, butter, marmalade, tea. Also pawpaw in its season, and oranges.
That we should eat enough was my mother’s chief worry. Now I cannot believe how much we all ate. And when a bit of white egg slime or a burnt bit of toast was left my father demanded with anguish that we should think of the starving children in India. If children were starving in Africa, or hungry or malnourished down in the farm compound visible from the windows, then that it seemed was not our responsibility.
But one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes. My mother agonized over the bad diet of the farm labourers, tried to get them to eat vegetables from our garden, lectured them on vitamins. They would not eat cabbage, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes – now eaten by all the black people. They pulled relishes from the bush, leaves of this and that, and they brewed beer once a week, known to be full of goodness. But an ox was killed for them only once a month. Mostly, they ate the mealiemeal of that time, unrefined, yellow, wonderful stuff like polenta, and peanuts and beans. In fact, that diet was one that would be applauded by nutritionists now, but was regarded as bad then, because of its lack of meat. There is a sharp little memory from then, and there were similar incidents throughout my childhood. My brother, or I, doing what we had seen others do, called the houseboy to bring us our shoes – which were in the same room. My father went into a shouting, raging temper – most unusual for him. He said how dare my mother allow the children to be ruined, how dare she let us call a grown-up man ‘Boy’. Did she not care that we would get soft and spoiled being waited on? He wouldn’t have it. He wouldn’t allow it. Usually my father didn’t lay down the law. But over this he did. Throughout my childhood he remonstrated with my mother, more in sorrow than in anger, about the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order, or how to arrange brushes and mirrors on a dressing table. For very early my mother’s voice had risen into the high desperation of the white missus, whose idea of herself, her family, depended on middle-class standards at Home. ‘For God’s sake, old thing,’ he would urge, his voice softening as he saw the distress on her angry face. ‘Can’t you see? It’s simply ridiculous.’ ‘Well, it’s their job, isn’t it?’
After breakfast, I might go back into my room to read. Or go with my mother to learn – well, something or other. For if her wonderful lessons stopped when we went to school, she never ever lost an opportunity for instruction, and now I am grateful and wish I could tell her so.
My brother always went down on the lands with my father, and I often did too. My father sat himself on a log or a big stone, and watched the gang of ‘boys’ hoeing a field, or wrenching the maize cobs off the plants, or pulling up peanuts, or cutting down the great flat sunflower heads full of shiny black seeds. Most wore rags of some kind, many loincloths, or perhaps a ragged singlet and shorts that might easily be laced across a rent with pink under-bark torn from a musasa tree. As they hoed, they conversed, laughing and making jokes, and sometimes sang, if threshing peanuts from their shells with big sticks, or smashing the sunflower heads to release showers of seeds. When the bossboy, Old Smoke, came to sit with my father, his two attendant young men always standing respectfully behind him, the two men might talk half a morning. For when they had finished with the mombies, the probabilities of the rain, the need for a new cow kraal, or a new ditch to carry water from the compound, or the deficiencies of the Dutch farm assistant – but he only lasted a short time, because the Africans hated him so much – then they philosophized. At the African pace, slow talk, with long pauses, punctuated by ‘Yes …’, and from Smoke … ‘Ja …’ Then another slow exchange, and ‘Ja …’ from Old Smoke. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ from my father. Smoke might sit on a log or on his haunches, with one forearm over his knees for balance – when my brother and I tried it was no good, our limbs had already set into European stiffness. My father sat with his wooden leg out in front of him, his old hat over his eyes for the glare. They talked about Life and about Death and, often, about the Big Boss Pezulu (the Big Boss above, or God) and His probable intentions.
Meanwhile my brother and I were watching birds, chameleons, lizards, ants, making little houses of grass, or racing up and down antheaps where often we startled a buck lying up through the hot hours under a bush.
Hours went by. Years … A bottle full of tepid sweetened tea would be produced with cake, biscuits, scones. Old Smoke would share this with us. More hours passed – years. Then the sound of the gong from the house. Men who had been at work since six or seven in the morning had an hour off, twelve till one. The gong was a ploughshare hit with a big bolt from the wagon. Then we drove up to the house where my mother had been working all morning, sewing mostly, clothes for her husband, her children, herself – she was always smart. Or she had cooked. She made jams, bottled fruits, invented crystallized fruit from the flesh of the gourds that fed cattle, filled rows of petrol tins with the sweet yeasty gingery water that would make dozens of bottles of ginger beer. And, like all the farmers’ wives, she invented recipes from mealies, which were not called sweetcorn then. Because we were all poor, or at least frugal, saving money when we could, the women were proud of what they could do with what they grew. Not till I went to Argentina, which grows the same crops as Southern Africa – pumpkins and maize, beans and potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions – did I find anything like the same inventiveness. We ate the green mealies cut off the cobs and cooked in cheese sauces, or in fritters and milk puddings or in soups with potatoes and pumpkin. The maize meal was made into cakes and pancakes, as well as different kinds of porridge, or added to bread. There were a dozen ways of cooking pumpkin. Young peanuts found their way into stews, peanut butter made all kinds of sauces and breads. We ate … how we did eat. Lunch was a big affair, meat, always meat, for this was before anybody but a real crank gave up meat. We ate roast beef and potatoes, or steak and kidney pies, or stews, or shepherd’s pie, and potatoes and half a dozen vegetables from the garden down the hill near the well. Then heavy puddings, and cheese.
Then, it was time to lie down.
‘But I’m not sleepy, Mummy, Mummy, I’m not sleepy.’
It was no good. In this climate, or on this altitude – and either might be cited as evidence against me – little children must lie down in the afternoons. I begged, I pleaded, even wept, not to be forced to lie down while my mother’s voice got increasingly incredulous. ‘What nonsense! What’s the fuss about?’ She did not know I was facing eternities: she looked forward to a few minutes snatched from the responsibilities of child-rearing, to write a letter Home. The orange curtains were drawn across the green gauze of the window, and the stone that propped the door put aside. ‘Look, here is the watch,’ and she arranged it on the candlestick by my bed. I had learned to tell the time because of the agonies of afternoon naps. My dress was pulled up over my head. She stood holding the coverlet back. I slid in. She turned away, her mind already on her letter. Now I was glad she had forgotten me. She shut the door into their bedroom where my little brother was already asleep. At once I nipped out of bed and pulled the curtains back again for I hated that stuffy ruddy gloom.
I lay flat on my back looking up. The cool spaces under the thatch welcomed me. Yes, and there will be an end to it, just as there was yesterday, and the day before. A lost bee buzzed about, tumbled to the floor, buzzed loudly, and I had an excuse to get up again to let it out of the door, but I did not dare replace the stone, set the door ajar. On my back, arms stretched, I took possession of my cool body, that thudded, pulsed and trickled with sounds. I flexed my feet. I tested my fingers, one by one, all present, all correct, my friends, my friend, my body. I sniffed my fingers where smells of roast beef and carrots lingered. The golden syrup of the steamed pudding sent intense sweetness into my brain, and made my nostrils flare. My forearm smelled of sun. The minute golden hairs flattened as I blew on them, like wind on the long grasses along the ditches. Silence. The dead, full, contented silence of midday in the bush. A dove calls. Another answers. For a moment the world is full of doves, and down the hill wings break in a flutter of noise, and the black shape of a bird speeds across the square of my window. My stomach gurgles. I put down a forefinger to prod the gurgle but it has moved downwards towards … but I had already gained full possession of my bladder, and had learned to ignore the anxious queries it sent up: should you take me to the lavatory? My hands slid, like a doctor’s, down over my thighs to my knees. There was a spot there somewhere, if you prodded it, then just behind the shoulder there would be an answering tweak of sensation. The two places were linked. There were other twinned patches of flesh, or skin. I kept discovering new ones, then forgot where they were, rediscovered them. Just above the ankle … I lay on my back with my legs in the air and pushed my forefinger into the flesh all around the ankle bone – there it was, yes, and miles away, under my ribs, there was a reply, a sensation not far off pain; it would become pain if I continued to press, but I had already moved on, mapping my body and its secret consonances. Did I dare look at the watch? Surely the half hour must be nearly up? I had been lying there for ever. I sneaked a look – no, impossible! The hand must have got stuck, I snatched up the watch, shook it. No, it was alive, all right, and only three minutes had passed. A howl of protest, hushed at once; had she heard, would she come in? I shut my eyes, lying rigid, pretending to be asleep. But dangers lurked in the pretence, for one could easily drop off, and I was not sleepy. I lay listening with my whole body, my whole life … from the other bed I heard a sound like the disturbance of air when a small trapped moth flutters. My friend the cat was there. I jumped up and leaned over her, she was lying curled, and her grey silky fur moved with her breath; she was, like me, enclosed in her own time, in the time of her breath. I was convinced she understood the anguish of afternoon sleep, the half hour which never passed. I touched her little grey paw with my finger, and it tightened as I slid my finger inside it. The claws, like tiny slivers of moon, dug into my flesh and went loose. She made the little sound which meant, I am asleep, so I left her and flung myself down on the bed so hard the springs twanged.
But I could see her there, I had company, if I woke her she would come and join me, her soft weight on my shoulder. But that meant I would have to lie still … outside on the woodpile the houseboy was cutting wood, and the slow sound of the axe was like strokes of a clock. The doves were quiet, I could feel heaviness sit on my lids. I woke myself by drinking mouthfuls of the heavy sweet tepid water from the glass that had bubbles clinging inside it. Each bubble was a little world, and I picked up a straw that had fallen from the thatch and chased the silvery bubbles about inside the glass until they went out, one by one, like birthday candles.
The watchface said five minutes had passed. Misery seized me – dread. The eternities of Mrs Scott’s were described as ‘But it was only two terms, that’s all’, while my parents looked at me, as they so often did, with amusement and with incredulity. Ahead lay the convent and another exile from home … Eternity. My mother read us the New Testament from a child’s version. Eternity: time that never ended. Lying flat on my back, arms flung out, eyes fixed on the cool under the yellow grass that seemed so high above me, I thought of time that never ended. Never ending, never ending … I was holding my breath with concentration. It never ends, never … my brain seemed to rock, my head was full of slowed time, time that has no end. For seconds, for a flash, I seemed to reach it – yes, that’s it, I got it then … I was suddenly exhausted. Surely it must be time to get up? The watch said only ten minutes had gone past. Without meaning to, I let out a great yell of outrage, then slapped both palms over my mouth, but it was no good, my mother had heard and came bursting in. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ‘The watch is wrong,’ I wept. ‘It’s not working.’
She stepped efficiently to the watch, and checked. She had just had time to lay out her Croxley writing pad and envelopes, and sit, letting herself slow down, to assemble scenes from this life of hers, find words that would convey its improbability to her friend, Daisy Lane, who was an examiner for nurses in London. ‘It’s completely wild out here,’ she might have decided to write. ‘We have to bring all the water up the hill in a scotchcart several times a week, and we have to use oil lamps! I wonder what you’d say if you saw this house! But of course, it is only temporary. We’re putting in tobacco this season, and you can make a pretty penny on that!’
She stood frowning at this difficult child, who was squatting on the bed, face streaked with tears, eyes imploring. The mother was uneasy. While the little boy, the good child, slept uncomplaining next door, this child looked as if she were being tortured. But it was with brisk humour she demanded. ‘Now what is all this nonsense?’ and pushed the child down with one hand while she flicked up the bedcover. ‘If you thrash about like that you’ll only get overheated.’
‘But I want to get up, can’t I get up?’
‘No, you can’t. You’ve not been there a quarter of an hour yet.’ And she marched out.
‘For ever … for ever …’ The child was walking with Jesus and his disciples along a dusty road, and it was not the track along the bottom of the hill, where dust lay in thick drifts, soft, red, and where the tracks of beetles or centipedes or buck slowly eroded as the breezes lifted the grains of sand away. It was a rocky yellowish road in – well, it was Palestine, since that was where Jesus was, but the rough dry road was from Persia. The smell in her nostrils now was not Africa, but that other place, where sunlight smelled old, full of stories from hundreds of years ago, Khosrhu and his armies marching across a rockface, but that was before Jesus, thousands of years ago, and then Jesus walked with men in striped headdresses along a dusty track where they stubbed their bare toes on big hot stones and Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life … what did he mean, what did they mean, hundreds of years ago … ? she would never grow up, never, why even to the end of the day and to bedtime was so long, long time, time was long, long … long time was not eternity, eternity was longer, it was unending, it never ended. From the bed next to hers, under its bundled mosquito net, came a small chattering sound. The cat was dreaming. Her teeth were making that funny sound. She was dreaming of chasing something? Like the dogs who would lie stretched out yelping and yapping with excitement as they chased a buck or a rabbit in a dream. Where was Lion? Where was Tiger? They were asleep in the shade under the verandah. Harry was asleep next door, the good baby. Daddy slept for a few minutes in his chair after lunch. The houseboy still sleepily measured time with his axe. And Mummy was writing to Aunt Daisy, who often wrote to me, from England, sending me presents, and often books about Jesus because she was my godmother. It was she who had sent me the stories about Jesus walking with the men in striped headdresses through the yellow dust … hundreds of years ago, hundreds.
Indignation had gone, a melancholy had seized her whole body. Sweat ran from her armpits. Her hair was damp. She felt her cheeks dragging with wet. She leapt up, but before she reached the other bed, controlled the impetuous movement, becoming as stealthy as a cat as she curled herself around the little grey cat, who let out her protesting sound, Let me sleep. But the child strokes and strokes, her cheek on the cat’s side, the cat purrs, noblesse oblige, the child’s face lifts and falls with the purr, the child’s eyes close, the cat’s purr stops, starts again, stops … outside two doves conduct their colloquy, Croo, croo, cr-croo, the axe thuds down, slow, slow, slow …
The woman writing to England sits with her pen suspended, smiling, for she is not here at all, she is dreaming of a winter’s evening in London, crowded noisy streets outside, and she is with her good friend Daisy Lane, the little, wry, brisk woman who had not married, for she was one of the girls whose men had been killed in the Trenches. She thinks guiltily that she has never enjoyed anything as much in her life, talking with her friend Daisy in front of a good fire, eating chocolate, or chestnuts roasted in the embers.
Good Lord, it is already three o’clock. The children must be woken or they’ll never sleep tonight. Not that Doris is likely to have slept, and she always gets so fretful and weepy, but perhaps she has dropped off. The woman felt surrounded by sleepers, safe in a time of her own, without anyone observing her. Her husband was lost to the world in his deckchair, snoring lightly, regularly. The dogs were stretched out. An assortment of cats, one curled up against the dog Tiger’s stomach, all asleep. In the bedroom little Harry, her heart’s consolation and delight, was asleep, like a baby, his fists curled near his head. Before gently waking him, she bent over him, adoring him. She loved the way he woke, whimpering a little, small and sweet in her arms, his face in her neck, nestling, as if with his whole body he was trying to get back inside her body. She took a long time waking him, gentling him into consciousness, then slid him into his little pants and shirt. ‘You go and wake Daddy,’ she told him. She went into the bedroom next door and stopped her hand at her mouth. Where was the child? Had she run away? She always said she would – a joke, of course. No, there she was, arms around the grey cat, fast asleep. ‘There,’ thought the mother, having the last word, ‘you were tired, I knew you were, all the time.’ She stood quietly there looking down at the little girl’s tear-dirtied face. She always felt guilty, seeing the child with this cat, because of the cat left behind in Tehran, but what could she have done? After all, they couldn’t have travelled for months and months with the cat, and anyway, it was such an ugly old thing. Never had there been such storms of tears as when the family left the cat, it was ridiculous, it was out of all proportion.
The mother did not touch the child but said briskly, in tones that sounded full of regret, a complex apology for what she was thinking, ‘Up you get now, you’ve been asleep a good half hour.’
The child opened her eyes and looked past her mother at the room as if she had no idea where she was. Then she felt the cat against her face, and smiled. She looked up at her mother and sat up, and with a shake of her head, clearing her face of the sweat-sticky hair, ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
‘Oh yes you were,’ said the mother triumphantly.
‘I wasn’t. I wasn’t.’
‘Wash your face. Then we’ll have tea.’
Tea was the family sitting in the hot shade under the verandah thatch, gingerbread, shortbread, little cakes, big cakes, scones, butter, jam. ‘You can’t have cake until you’ve eaten a scone.’ Discipline and self-restraint, this was called. The dogs lay with their noses pointing towards the food. The cats gathered around saucers full of milk. The little girl carefully carried through the house a saucer of milk to her special friend, the grey cat. She sat on the floor watching the cat lap, pink tongue curling around the mouthfuls of milk. The cat mewed, Thank you, and sat licking herself a little, to wake herself up. Then she stepped out to join the other cats, the dogs, the family.
Afternoons were full of events, chosen by my mother to educate or in some way to improve and uplift. There was a treehouse, platforms of planks in the musasa tree just behind the house. ‘Come up to our house, come up,’ we shouted at Daddy, as he manoeuvred his great clumsy leg so that he got himself on to the first platform. Then up came Mummy, and she told us about life in England, and her voice was sad, so sad that he rebuked her, ‘Don’t sound such a misery, old girl. England wasn’t all roses, you know.’ And then he might tell us of another England, the beggars, the out-of-work ex-soldiers selling matches, and the silly Bright Young Things dancing and jazzing; they didn’t care about the dead soldiers or the ones that couldn’t get work. Or told us of his good times before the war, when he went to the races or danced all night.
Or we would be taken to see the man who made the rimpis for the farm. On a flat place down near the new barns were trees where ox hides hung to dry in the shapes of oxen, without their bodies. Or new hide, just lifted off the carcass, was being cut into strips, and then dunked into petrol tins full of brine. Soon they were hauled out, hung over branches, and then a couple of little black boys pulled and worked the strips so they remained supple and could be used for the many purposes of the farm – tying the yokes of oxen around their necks, or tying yokes to the great central beam of the wagon or the cart, making beds and couches, or dried to be wound into great balls like small boulders and kept in a hut till they were wanted. Or the little boys would be rubbing fat and salt on to the insides of new hides, manipulating them, moving them, rubbing them so they would be soft and good for karosses or floor mats.
Or the place where bricks were made. The earth was taken from the towering termite-heaps. It was piled on a flat place, sand added, and then water poured on, and again small black boys stamped around in it, and we, the white children, stamped and danced too, our mother encouraging us, because small children should play with mud and water, Montessori said so. In fact I did not like it. These occasions were like many others, when I was playing a role to please her. I did not like the mud on my feet, and splashing on my legs, but I went on with it, together with my brother and the black children. Then the piles of mud were ready, like poo, as my brother and I giggled, but never telling our mother why. Then the brick boy came with his moulds and one man filled them with mud while another carried the moulds to turn them out in rows over straw. There the sun soon dried them. Then they were built into kilns, and fires lit in the holes like ovens inside them. Soon there they were, the piled-up bricks, red, or yellow, and there we children climbed and balanced, feeling the hot roughness of the bricks on our soles, and we jumped off, and climbed up, again and again, while my mother watched, pleased we were having this experience.
Aeons later, eternities later, the sun slid down the sky into the spectacular sunset we took for granted. But I remember standing there by myself, my whole heart and soul going out and up into those flaming skies, knowing that was where I belonged, in that splendour, which was so sad, so sorrowful, I was not here at all, or I wouldn’t be for long, I would get away from here soon. Soon – how, when a day took for ever and for ever? Round about then I wrote a ‘prose poem’ about a sunset, a paragraph long, and my mother sent it into the Rhodesia Herald. My first printed effort. The complex of feelings about this were the same as now: I was proud that there I was in print, uneasy that impulses so private and intimate had led to words that others would read, would take possession of. I was wriggling with pride and resentment mixed when mother said Mrs Larter had said how clever I was to have a piece in the paper. And she’s so young too. But I made a private oath that next time I was taken with a ‘prose poem’, it would remain my secret.
At sunset, the farm became loud with the lowings of the herd of oxen being hurried back from somewhere in the bush to the safety of the kraal. In the early days there were still leopards as near as Koodoo Hill, a couple of miles away. Until the family left the farm, there were leopards in the Ayreshire Hills. Sometimes a farmer would telephone to report that a leopard had taken a beast. And there were pythons, who liked calves. The oxen, though they were wild, unsubdued beasts and nothing like the comfortable tamed animals of England, had to be fenced at night. Besides, in the mornings the cows had to be milked. One cow was not enough – not of those thin, rangy Afrikander cattle. Five or six gave enough milk for our purposes. We were told of the wonderful beasts of England with udders that touched the ground and each one holding enough milk for several households. All that talk of abundant paradises … there are ways of listening to travellers’ tales that keep you safe from them. That England they talked about, all that green grass and spring flowers and cows as friendly as cats – what had all that to do with me?
Then the children had supper. Eggs and bread and butter and a pudding. ‘Eat up your food!’ ‘But I don’t want it.’ ‘Of course you must eat it up.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ ‘Of course you’re hungry.’
By the time I went to my first school I had been reading for – well, how long? – when I am dealing with time as elastic as dream-time? I do know that from the moment I shouted triumph because I was spelling c-i-g-a-r-e-t-t-e from the packet, it was no time before I was reading the easier bits in the books in the heavy bookcase. The classics. The classics of that time, all in dark red leather covers, with thin-as-skin pages, edged with gold. Scott. Stevenson. Kipling. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Dickens. Curled in the corner of the storehouse verandah, on a bed of slippery grain sacks that smelled sweet from the maize meal, and rank from the presence of cats, I raced through Plain Tales from the Hills, skipping a good half, The Jungle Book, Oliver Twist, skipping, always skipping, and having found my parents weeping with laughter over The Young Visiters, read it with the respect due to an author two years older than I was, brooding over words like mousetache. Mouse-ache? Where did the ‘t’ fit in and why did the mouse ache? To fit oneself to the mysterious order of the grown-up world was not an easy thing. ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall.’ Why should the hymn need to specify the lack of that wall? Puzzles and enigmas, but above all, the delight of discoveries, the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of books which has never ever failed me. And not only grown-up books. Children’s books arrived from London, and children’s newspapers. If some enterprising publisher should now produce a magazine on the level of the Merry-Go-Round, with writers like Walter de la Mare, Laurence Binyon, Eleanor Farjeon, would it at once fail? ‘It’s television, you see …’ The Children’s Newspaper, with reports from Egypt and Mesopotamia of the archaeological discoveries from the tombs of Tut-an-Khamun and Nefertiti? But all this is on children’s television. Then, just like now, children were supposed to be protected from horrors and, just as now, we weren’t, for all the time, every day, those voices went on and on, about the Trenches, bombs, star-shells, shrapnel, shell holes, men drowning in shell holes and the mud that could swallow horses, let alone men. The wounded in the Royal Free, the men with their lungs full of gas, the death by drowning of my mother’s young doctor, barbed wire, No-man’s-land, the Angels of Mons, the field hospitals, the men shot for ‘cowardice’, on and on and on, my father’s voice, my mother’s, and, too, the voices of many of our visitors. What is the use of keeping the Children’s Newspaper and Merry-Go-Round sweet and sane, when the News tells the truth about what is going on and the grown-ups talk, talk, talk about what will always be the most important thing in their lives – war. Whenever a male visitor came, the talk would soon be of the Trenches. No, it is not violence or even pornography and sadism that is the difference between then and now, it is that children were not patronized, much more was expected of them. I do not remember my parents ever saying, ‘That is too difficult for you.’ No, only pleased congratulation that I was tackling The Talisman or whatever it was. You would have to contrast the Merry-Go-Round with the banal jokiness of a children’s programme on television to see how much lower we all stand now.
Before I reached the big school, the Convent, there were two intermediate schools. The first was Rumbavu Park, just outside Salisbury, owned by a family called Peach. I, just seven, and my brother, four, were taken there together and I was instructed to look after him. But if I adored my little brother, so did everyone else. He was always in the care of the big girls, nine or ten, who took him about with them like a doll. This was a gentle place, run by gentle folk – gentlefolk. I use this word because the matron, Mrs James, did – constantly. Like Russians of the intelligentsia who talk now of being gentlefolk, with contemptuous dismissal of their decades of revolution and egalitarianism – ‘my family are gentlefolk’ – Mrs James made this claim, it seemed in every sentence. Here was another member of the English middle class threatened by rough colonial manners but, unlike most of them, who mean only that they are superior in some ineffable and indefinable way, Mrs James meant what the Russians mean: they are the inheritors of literary, musical and artistic culture. She was a large swarthy gypsy-like woman, with straight black hair, like Augustus John’s Dorelia, an earth mother long before the word, and she was kind. When I wrote baby pieces about flowers and birds, she told me I was wonderful, and showed them around. She brushed my hair, and made me wash under my arms and between my legs for she was afflicted by a horror of natural processes, and she held me on her large lap and sighed and mourned the crudeness of the world and her sad fate, to be matron in a school. When my parents came to visit, Mrs James presented me and my brother to them as her achievements. Far from being unhappy there, I was full of the excitements and delights of discovery. The wonderful gardens spread all over a couple of hillsides – and still do. Terraces and fountains and pools and trees and flowers: it was a show place, and at weekends people drove out from Salisbury to admire it.
I was at school in Rumbavu Park for a term. It was an aeon. A forever. When sorting out the time-segments of those two years, I had to concede that it was only a term. I have to. Impossible, but so it was. If only I could have stayed there, but the Peaches went bust, hard luck not only for them but for the children at their school. Just before I left there was an incident that illustrates a theme of these memoirs which is: why is it we expect what we do? Sybil Thorndike was on tour in Southern Rhodesia, and playing Lady Macbeth. The older children were to be taken to see her. I would go if Mary Peach did not return in time from England, where she was on holiday. She came back that afternoon, so I could not go. She came to me, a big girl, twelve or so, to say nicely she was sorry I was going to be disappointed. I remember stammering that of course it was all right, while inside I was the embodiment of all the insulted and injured of the world. Why was it that Mary Peach, who was rich and had just come back from England where I could not go – for the theme of the absolute out-of-reachness of England was already established in my mind – had the right to see Sybil Thorndike? Unfairness … injustice … the bitterness of it. But what I would like to know is, where did the violence of that sense of injustice come from? I was seven years old. This was not only the child’s sense of injustice which we describe as ‘innate’: a child’s betrayal of justice is, must be, love betrayed, and what I was feeling was social injustice. I can think of nothing in my life more cruel than that disappointment, as if it were the sum of the world’s indifference. Surely it had to come from my parents, particularly from my father’s voice murmuring through my days and through my sleep, too, of the war, the betrayal of the soldiers, the wicked stupidities and corruption of government, just expectation and faith betrayed.
My mother decided we should go to board with a Mrs Scott who took in the children of farmers so they might attend school in Avondale, a suburb of Salisbury, then on the very edge of the town. I was put in the class for my age, but at once put up, I think, two. In that class I discovered the pleasures of achievement, for the reading pieces were at first too difficult for me, and I was not able to skip as I liked. One, in particular, an abridged grown-up story of a man sucked into a sea whirlpool, nearly drowned, but then cast up by the sea, had words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘vortex’, ‘inundate’ and ‘regurgitate’. I stared at them, oppressed by failure, but was saved by context – and in no time this difficult story was mine. Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability? But if the classroom was all pleasure Mrs Scott’s was all cold misery. Very far from gentleness was Mrs Scott. There was a Mr Scott, employed by the Mr Laws who had the timber concession. My mother had sent her two little children to the lumber camp to stay a few days in the bush with Biddy, for she never missed the opportunity to give them useful experience. We were in a tent, for the first time, surrounded by majestic trees full of cicadas, being felled one after the other, and destined to burn in tobacco barns and mine furnaces.
Already a social being, ready to please one set of people with agreeable information about others, I said to Mrs Scott that Mr Scott, her husband, had said goodnight to Biddy when she had on only a petticoat. The voice I used was my parents’ – worldly and disapproving. I had no idea what I was saying. If Mr Scott had his arms about Biddy, his whiskers, scented with Pears soap, pressed against her ear, then this was only a sign of a general loving kindness I yearned for. Mrs Scott at once hated the messenger who had brought bad news, and made a loud and noisy scene with her husband.
I hated her. She was a large ugly woman smelling of stale sweat. He was large and smelly. There was no way of getting away from them day or night. Their bed was on the verandah just outside where my bed stood under a window. I did not like getting into my bed. The cover was a kaross, a fur blanket, made of wild cat skin. Everyone had karosses, which were cheap, costing only the price of a bullet, and the labour of the man who cured the skins in salt and wind. A kaross always smelled a little, especially in the rainy season. The kaross on my bed was badly cured and smelled stuffy. I lay in bed trying to keep my face in the air from outside, while outside Mrs Scott wept and said he didn’t love her, and he soothed and reassured and said he did, it was only the word of a child. At this point I ought to be able to record listening to the sounds of sex and a resulting trauma, but no, it was the injustice of it, for I had described what I had seen. Mrs Scott never spoke to me in anything but a cold and sarcastic voice. There were other children, but I remember only her daughter Nancy, who bullied me in minor ways. Then she told her mother that at school I used to go round the backs of the lavatory blocks and look up at the shitty backsides. Such a crime had never occurred to me. Mrs Scott was not allowed to hit me – my mother did not hold with it – but she slapped and hit her own daughter, just as Mr Scott did. I was afraid she would hit me, for she did not believe me when I said it was untrue. She told my parents who came hastening, if that is the word for their dawdling progress, into town. Had I done this thing? No, I had not. Remember, it was wicked to lie. ‘A lie is much worse than being naughty.’ They believed me. My little brother giggled. Funny that I remember so little of my adored little brother except ‘standing up’ for him against unkind Nancy.
January to June 1927. My seventh year. I was homesick and miserable. But compared with what goes on in schools now, and the ugliness of the bullying, physical and verbal, Mrs Scott’s unkindness and Nancy’s malice were nothing. I listen to young friends’ accounts of what goes on in well-reputed schools and cannot believe it. Not that children are cruel – for most are monsters, unchecked. No, that teachers seem unable to stop it. Perhaps they are not unable, but even like the idea? After all, Prince Charles reports that in the elite school, Gordonstoun, his head was held in the lavatory bowl while the flush was pulled. If that is what is prescribed for the highest in the land, lesser mortals need not expect better. We are a barbarous people.
For a long time, driving past that house, long since demolished, with its big garden, I felt ill and turned my head away not to see it. Avondale School, where I did so well, is still there, unchanged.
Among the reading matter provided by my mother was a series of improving tales for children about saints, like Elizabeth of Hungary, who earned from heaven chaplets of roses to shame her husband when he criticized her charities. An intense hunger for goodness took me over, and in the patch of empty ground behind Mrs Scott’s, I built a cathedral of sunflower stalks. The pleasure of it, the accomplishment, planning the building while the tales of saintly women rising above all persecution saturated my whole being. I was handling the light dry stalks, three times my height, while in imagination I was creating a great church that God himself would congratulate me for, listening for voices which surely I would hear if I tried hard enough, all assuring me of fellowship with the saints. But Mrs Scott did not see the point of these stalks, dragged out of their piles where they were stacked for burning. If you fill children’s heads with saintly tales they will build cathedrals and expect chaplets of roses and chanting choirs. This is as powerful a memory as any.
Why was I left at Mrs Scott’s for two terms? Probably that child’s taboo against telling tales out of school was already operating. Besides, all the time, there was the pressure of We are so poor, We are having such a bad time – meaning, We can’t help it. I read ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, and identified with Kipling as a small boy, just as my mother had done before me, but my mother didn’t embrace me weeping, Oh my little child, my poor little child – as I raised my arm to ward off a blow. There were no blows, only cold sarcastic verbal bullying. And I was already reading Stalky and Co., full of information about school brutality. Literature provides more complex news about the world than It isn’t fair, but this lives in a different part of the brain.
I had begun, in short, to colour in the map of the world with the hues and tints of literature. Which does two things (at least). One is to refine your knowledge of your fellow human beings. The other is to tell you about societies, countries, classes, ways of living. A bad book cannot tell you about people – only about the author. A bad book does not know much about love, hate, death or so on. But a bad book can tell you a good deal about a certain time or place – about history. Facts. Mores. Customs. A good book does both.
But bad books were still in the future. Meanwhile, then and for three or four years, what came to the farm from London was an astonishing variety and number of books. They had to be written for, and the order took a month or so to get there. The books had to come by sea, three weeks, then a train to Salisbury from the coast, and another train to Banket, and then they had to be fetched from the station.
Here are some of what I remember. John Bunyan. Bible Tales for Children. English History for Children. The Crusades – with Saladin presented like an English gentleman. The battles of Crécy, Agincourt, Waterloo, the Crimea, biographies of Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Brunel, Cecil Rhodes. Children’s novels like John Halifax, Gentleman; Robinson Crusoe; The Swiss Family Robinson; Lobo, the Wolf (from America, Ernest Seton Thompson). Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Christopher Robin, Black Beauty, Stevenson’s Verses for Children, Jock of the Bushveld, Florence Nightingale, and – not least – Biffel, a Trek Ox, the story of a beast that died in the rinderpest epidemic of, I think, 1896, unforgettable by any child who reads it at the right time. The Secret Garden. The Forest Lovers. A whole range of little tales, purporting to be the lives of children in Iceland, India, France, Germany – everywhere – jolly little tales, jolly little lives, the equivalent of the readers that went, ‘John and Betty had such fun playing with Spot’ – but I suppose the information that in Norway they ski and in Switzerland they yodel is not unuseful.
It was mid-year of 1927 when I returned finally from Mrs Scott’s, for I was due to go to the Convent, for which I was already being primed by warnings that they – the RCs – would try to ‘get me’ and I must be on my guard. The Convent, which always had more Protestant than Catholic pupils, was used to assuring anxious parents that the souls of their offspring were safe with them. The Convent, like convents in Britain, was supposed to be more genteel than the High School. I am always meeting women now who were sent to convents for the same reason. That the convent in Salisbury had this reputation was because of false comparisons with Home. I had been given a bursary. Into the third year on the farm it was evident things were going badly and not likely soon to get better. My father was building tobacco barns, because maize was no longer where fortunes were being made. And was he, with his wooden leg, his limited mobility, planning to get up several times during the night to check the temperatures in a barn a good mile away?
We could not have afforded unaided my uniform for the convent, piled on chairs and beds everywhere through the house. Pleated tunics in heavy brown serge and alpaca, with light orange cotton blouses, springy brown girdles that surely could never stay knotted, white panama hats with brown and orange ribbons, the brown blazer, piles of heavy brown knickers, and many vests and brown socks. Even to look at this stuff was oppressive, but luckily it was still the beginning of the holidays and time stretched endlessly ahead.
Just about then the family became characters in A. A. Milne, just as if we had never left England. My father was Eeyore, my brother Roo, my mother – what else? – Kanga. I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia, for nothing would stop friends and comrades using it. Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size. I was Tigger Tayler, Tigger Wisdom, then Tigger Lessing, the last fitting me even less than the others. Also Comrade Tigger. This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess. There was a lot of energy in ‘Tigger’ – that healthy bouncy beast. But it was not Tigger that went off to the Convent, but a frightened and miserable little girl.
Mother Patrick came riding into the colony with her five Sisters just a year after the Pioneer Column in 1890 and they at once set up their hospital and became, but really, sisters of Mercy, because contemporary accounts speak of them like this. It was Mother Patrick who established the Dominican convent and she was, when I got there, a revered figure, spoken of in awed tones, like the other pioneer sisters. Sister Constantia and Sister Bonaventura were, I think, still alive, as silently influential as the statues everywhere of the Virgin. They had been lively and adventurous young women, and the administrative nuns that came after them were a different kind.
The Convent was a central mass with projecting wings, embedded in granite chips. When adults walk over stone chips, the pebbles are not very comfortable underfoot, but for a small child it is like toiling over the big sharp stones on a beach, each a hazard. The staircase to the small girls’ dormitory was steep, every step at thigh-level. The little ones clambered up on hands and knees; going down meant jumping from step to step for the handrail was high above our heads. The day I found myself actually able to step down, the day I ran across the gravel, were markers on the road to being grown-up. This dormitory (which was over the gym), the refectory, the classrooms, the sickroom, were what the pupils knew of the Convent: most of the building was out of bounds to the children, and seemed a ghost story place of vast shadowy rooms full of nuns in their black and white robes floating like shadows. The nuns slept in dormitories too, but we knew white curtains separated their beds, making tight box-like cubicles. The ‘little ones’ dorm’ was a long high-ceilinged room, and in it were three rows of beds, lined up head to foot, twenty-four beds. There were rows of high windows on either side. This large room, or rather, hall, was in daylight well lit and fresh, but at night a different place. A small table that projected into the room, making it necessary always to walk around it, held an assortment of holy objects, small statues like icing-sugar figures on cakes; and above it was a large picture where a man from whose head shot rays like those from behind a storm cloud pointed authoritatively to his swollen heart dripping blood. On the wall facing this altar was a tall picture of a man on whose head was clamped an enormous wreath of Christ-thorn, like that which grew on the kopje, with black spikes an inch or two inches long, and blood ran down his face from the spikes. Other pictures showed a man full of arrows that stuck out like porcupine quills, each in a bloody wound, and a woman holding a plate on which were two pink blancmanges in red jam sauce, but these turned out to be her cut-off breasts. In another a woman stood smiling while being burned to death by flames that curled around her like long witches’ fingers.
When I recently drove through the countryside near Munich I kept coming upon horrific statues of tortured Christ. They were beside or in a pretty stream, or in a wood, a field, a garden. They reminded me of the pictures provided for the instruction of us children in the convent, all relish in blood and torture. The nuns in this convent were nearly all from South Germany, which was Hitler’s country. Stalin the sadist came from a seminary. I was reminded of these feasts of blood when I was in Peshawar at the time when Shiah Muslims celebrate the murder of Hassan and Hussain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandchildren, more than 1,500 years ago. Young men ran or staggered in hordes through the streets lacerating themselves with heavy chains or whips, eyes blank or shocked with pain, till they fell, to be gathered up in ambulances that were patrolling the streets for just this purpose. Forgive me for the banality of this reflection, but there is something very wrong with the human race.
The youngest children in the great torture room were five or six, and the oldest were ten and eleven.
When we were in our rows of beds, the light was turned off, but the red light that burned always in front of the Sacred Heart and its bloody gouts lit the room with red. The nun in charge of us little ones came to stand in the doorway, the light behind her. In heavy German accents she said, ‘You little children believe you are safe in your beds, you think that do you? Well you think wrong, you think the holy God cannot see you when you lie under the sheet. But you must think again. God knows what you are thinking, God knows the evil in your hearts. You are wicked children, disobedient to God and to the good Sisters who look after you for the glory of God. If you die tonight you will go to hell, and there you will burn in the flames of hell, yes I tell you so, and you must believe me. And the worms will eat you and there will never be an end, it will never ever end.’ She would go on like this for a good ten minutes or so. Then, having cursed us to hell and back, she shut the door and left us to it.
Storms of sobs, and soft shrieks of terror. The older girls crept to the beds of the little ones, to comfort them. ‘It’s only Catholic,’ they would say, ‘we don’t believe all that.’ For most of us were Protestants. The Catholic little girls were protected by rosaries, holy pictures and bottles of holy water under their pillows.
When my parents warned me that the Catholics would try to ‘get’ me they had not foreseen anything like this, I knew that. I knew they would be appalled. This armoured me, and besides, one may believe and not believe at the same time. I do not know for how many years these horrific sermons went on: the impression the first term made on me was so strong I have forgotten the rest. I remember only lying in bed to watch the blood dripping from the big heart like a lump of fresh steak, making myself see that it moved, believing that I could actually see the blood trickling, while I knew perfectly well it didn’t. The tiny children – I was already, at eight, in the middle range – used to cry out in their sleep. Sometimes one would go wandering around among the beds in her sleep, and an older child gently led her back to her own bed. One sleepwalking little girl persistently tried to get into the bed parallel to hers, because there was a kindly older child in it, who quietly made the swap when the small one was asleep at last, the nuns never knowing. In the morning there were dirty stains of urine in many beds. The nuns scolded and punished: for the Catholic girls the repetition of Hail Marys, for us, admonishment and threats.
The nun whose talent was for hellfire and the undying worm used a ruler on our palms when we were naughty. There were a thousand petty rules, and I have forgotten them, but remember the secret scorn they endangered: we protected ourselves by despising these dormitory nuns, making fun of their accents, telling each other if they weren’t stupid they would be teaching nuns. Most of the rules were to do with washing. Not that we should wash, but that we should not. Cleanliness for these women was an invitation to the devil. We were told to wash our hands only to the wrists, keeping sleeves rolled down. Only our faces, with a washcloth soaped thick: if our eyes stung, we must offer the pain to God. We might bathe only once a week. The nuns told us that good children would agree to wear the wooden board that stood always against the bathroom wall, when we bathed. The board had a hole in it for the head, and was designed to rest on the sides of the bath, making it impossible to see our bodies. But no one would. We were allowed to change our underclothes once a week. We smelled. All our letters were read by the nuns and when I told my mother about the bath rules, the nun said I was disloyal and wicked and made me write the letter again. But at half term I ‘told’ on the nuns, and my mother was furious, protested – and thereafter we were all allowed to bathe twice a week and change our underclothes twice. We continued to smell. We had to put on smelly knickers and dirty socks. ‘Vanity’ said Sister Amelia, or Brünnhilde or whoever. ‘All is vanity. You should not think about your body.’
There went on the usual school mythology about the slaps administered to our palms with rulers. We giggled, as is prescribed, advised each other how to soap our palms, recounted tales about a former pupil who was beaten till her hand fell off, and now she had an artificial hand. All this was as it always is, at this type of school. But if the rulers left hot red marks on palms, that was all, the nuns were not allowed to hit us anywhere else. It could all have been much worse. And I don’t remember bullying, on the contrary, the older children were tender with the little ones, remembering their own misery.
The atmosphere in the Convent, in short, can only be described as unwholesome, a favourite word of mother’s. How much did she know about all this? If it was within the code to ‘tell’ about the lack of baths, why not about the viciously slashing rulers, why not about those hellfire sermons? When ‘Tigger’ reported on them, she made a joke about it all. And certainly my mother knew about the sadistic pictures in the room we slept in, for she inspected the Convent thoroughly. But after all, she herself had had a strict, punishing upbringing.
The nuns never made any attempt to ‘get’ the Protestant girls. They did not need to. The atmosphere of magic and mystery was enough. Antonia White’s Frost in May describes the allurements of the forbidden, though her convent was on a somewhat higher social level. Most of us at some time wanted to be Catholics, simply to be like the Catholic girls, who dipped their fingers into the holy water stoups beside every door, who crossed themselves and curtsied as they passed statues of Christ or the Virgin, who carried holy pictures in their pockets and rosaries wound around their wrists. They were always going off to special events in the cathedral. Bells rang from the cathedral a block away, several times a day, for Angelus, and for Mass. Bells tinkled from the nuns’ chapel. The Virgin, a pleasant and beneficent figure, was often carried about the grounds on litters draped with coloured paper. Above all, there was the mystery of the part of the convent we were not allowed into. We believed there were hundreds of nuns, but perhaps there were not more than fifty. Most of them we never met. They worked in the kitchens, cooked our food and theirs, kept the convent and its grounds clean – there were no black servants. Some were taken out every day in lorries to the vegetable gardens. They all got up very early in the morning, four o’clock, some earlier. If you woke at night you could hear the sweet high chanting voices from the chapel. There were often funerals. If we begged hard enough the Protestant girls were allowed to go in the lorries to the cemetery with the Catholics, where we stared in a romantic trance at the coffin, violin shaped, bright white and pink, like a cake, with messages in gold script, Sister Harmonia, Bride of Christ, RIP. She was very young to die, said the other sisters. Knowing that eighteen, twenty, was thought young shocked us with our small sum of years, for it was hard to believe we would ever be as old as this dead woman.
Now I think these girls died of broken hearts. Nearly all were poor peasant girls from Germany. The Convent in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, was an extension of the economic conditions in Europe. Germany had not recovered from the First World War and reparations. As had always happened in the poor families of Europe, one or two girls in a family became nuns, to save their families the burden of feeding them. They found themselves thousands of miles from home, in this exotic country, doing hard physical work, as they had all their lives, but in the heat, and with no prospect of seeing their families again. Their only consolation can have been that their loneliness and exile made things easier at home. Once, when I was in the sickroom, a nun came to sit on my bed (against the rules) while the Angelus rang its call to prayer and the sky flamed red, and she wept, and crossed herself, crossed herself and wept, saying she longed for her mother. Then up she jumped, asked the Holy Virgin to forgive her, told me to forget what she had said, and ran out. She was eighteen.
Our speculations about the nuns’ secret lives were innocent. Now children of five or six would probably talk knowledgeably about lesbianism. Their bathing arrangements part consoled us for ours. They took baths once a week, wearing a white shroud, and kept the board around their necks. They never saw themselves in a mirror. Their heads were shaved. They seldom changed their undergarments. We knew what they wore, for we could see acres of white garments on the washing lines. There were layers of vests and knickers and petticoats under the heavy white serge robes we could see, that had over them the black robe, the crimped wimple, and the two veils, white and black. The nuns smelled horrible.
The nuns who taught us were educated women. One at least was a Nazi – so says Muriel Spark who writes about the same convent in her autobiography. Sister Margaret taught music, was kind to the little girl whose mother kept insisting she was a musical prodigy. She knew my mother could have had a career in music, listened gently to her tales about thwarted ambition, and for four years taught me scales and apprentice pieces, told me about great musicians and the obstacles they overcame. She never even hinted I had no particular talent. There was a Sister Patrick who, the nuns said, was a real lady, from Ireland, but she had given all that up for the love of God. She was a tall thin woman, with a fine elegant face, and she was dry and witty and sometimes unkind. She might quote from French or Latin and then say, ‘But you will not have heard of him I suppose,’ and sigh.
I was clever, that was my attribute, clever little Tigger Tayler. School lessons were never difficult, exams pleasurable. But being clever was not something I was prepared to go along with, for from the start I was quietly sliding out, not knowing what I did. My cleverness was a continuation of my mother’s, like my musical talents, insisted on, held up to other people for admiration, boasted about to the farmers’ wives, used as a means to get bursaries and special privileges.
What was my own, where I belonged, was the world of books, but I had to fight for it as soon as I arrived at the Convent. The school library was several rooms full to the ceiling with books neatly covered in brown paper, the titles and authors written on their spines in ink. I felt as if I had walked into a treasure cave, but the library nuns did not believe a child of eight had read Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. They insisted I must have the permission of my parents to read such unsuitable books. My weekly letter home read, ‘I am very well. I hope you are very well. How are Lion and Tiger? Sister Perpetua says I must have your permission to read books. It is only four weeks and three days and seven hours to the holidays. Love to Harry.’ While waiting for permission, the library nuns urged on me improving literature, which filled two long shelves. The word ‘unwholesome’ is hardly adequate to describe the moral climate these novels came from. The plots were all the same. A pure young man or girl met, apparently by chance, a worldly person, usually a woman, well dressed, older, but whose every smile or glance promised enticing initiations. The neophyte was invited to a country house, full of cosmopolitan older people, who all had the same air of mystery. The bemused one found herself, himself, attending seances, table-turnings, and ambiguous services in ruined chapels and sylvan glades. And then – the choice! The left-hand path into Satanism, the right-hand path into tedious virtue, which was fit only for the stupid or the timid. I did not find anything like this mix of eroticism and black magic until the TV series Twin Peaks from the States a couple of years ago, but the convent novels had nothing in them of that grotesque wit.
These novels were not as compelling as the library nuns would have liked. I had never heard of seances or Satan. For the four years I was at the Convent I was being urged to read them. Now, when I ask Catholic friends, they know nothing of these books or anything like them. Perhaps some pious library at Home was pruning itself, and thought: ‘Pity to waste them. I’ve got it, they’ll do for those heathen natives in Africa!’
I was at the Convent for four years. Or for eternity. I used to wake up in the morning with the clang of the bell and not believe I would live through that interminable day until the night. And, after this endless day would be another. Then another. I was in the grip of a homesickness like an illness. It is an illness. When I was in my late sixties and succumbed to grief, I thought, My God, that’s what I went through as a child, and I’ve forgotten how very terrible it was. What did I long for? Home. I wanted to be home. I wanted my mother, my father and my little brother, who until he was eight was still at home. I wanted my dogs and my cat. I wanted to be near the birds and animals of the bush. I wanted … I yearned … I craved, for this anguish to be over. I did not believe it would ever end. I have exchanged recollections with men who were sent to schools in England aged seven, and some remember this weight of misery. There must be by now hundreds of memoirs, autobiographies, testifying to the misery of small children sent too young to school. It is a terrible thing to send small children to boarding school. We all know it. Yet people who remember very well how they suffered, sent from home aged seven or eight, do the same to their children. This says something pretty important about human nature. Or about the British.
I could not conceivably have lived through four years continuously in the grip of that pain, but whenever I take out my mental snapshots of the Convent, I am immersed in grief.
When I went home for the holidays, the end of them seemed so far away it was like a reprieve. Six weeks. Even four weeks. When every day was endless, then even a week was an ocean of time.
For two years my little brother was at home being taught by correspondence course and slowly he fought his way out of being Baby, or Roo, insisted on being called Harry, and took firm hold of his birthright, which was physical excellence. If my early memories of Baby are all of a cuddlesome complacency, on someone’s lap, usually mine, then later they are of him in energetic movement, flying down the hill on his scooter, then his bicycle, brakes off, or at the top of some fearsome tree, or hitting sixes over the roof of the house while he ran like a duiker. He was like all the other white boys of the District, a lean, tough, sunburned child, his knees always scarred, his shorts torn, and his eyes inflamed by the sun, for he was out in it from sunrise till sundown. My mother read us Peter Pan too often, and her voice broke when Peter returned, found the window shut and went flying off again. ‘Come on old girl,’ urged my father, ‘it’s not as bad as all that.’
But for her it was. Nothing she had wanted for herself was going to happen. All her energies were in her children, and particularly her darling little boy. But he – and quite suddenly – did not seem to be aware of her. Interesting, the different ways children rebel, preserve themselves. I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too. But my brother never fought. He would smile, quite politely, as my mother tried to make him eat this, wear that, think this or that, see the children on the other farms as common, or see ‘this second-rate country’ as a place he would not stay in. But, if he did as he liked, it was within the limits of what she chose. He went to Ruzawi, a prep school modelled on English lines, and later, into the Navy, though he did not want to. It was not until he married that he made a big choice for himself. Now I see it as an instinctive passive resistance.
I begged my mother to have another baby. She was a maternal woman all right, and it must have been painful, when that little girl’s pleadings reinforced suppressed instincts. ‘Please, Mummy, please, I’ll help to look after it.’ ‘But we can’t afford it,’ she said, over and over again. And then, already, and so early, ‘Besides, Daddy is not very strong.’ The strength of my yearning for that infant mingled with my homesickness; I am sure yearnings of this intensity are for some other good lost perhaps when we are born. But when I mourned that there would not be another baby, I learned how much ‘Baby’ had been my baby as much as my mother’s. After that, if there was a baby or a small child anywhere in the District, I adored it, could not be separated from it, begged to be allowed to bring it home. This passion became quite a joke in the District – a kindly one. ‘Your little girl, she’s a funny one for babies.’
In the paraffin box bookcase beside my mother’s bed, behind the Liberty cretonnes that were beginning to lose freshness, was a book about the process of giving birth, the manual on obstetrics from the Royal Free. I lay on my mother’s bed, studied the stages of the foetus’s growth, pored over the enlarging slopes of the stomach, and, in imagination, went into labour and gave birth. So strong was my identification that I almost believed that yes, there would be the baby, lying there on the bed. This fantasy was also erotic, but in flavour, not in physical fact. Who was the male? One of the little boys in the District with whom I was in love and with whom I was making a family.
The holidays were crammed with incidents and events. My mother made sure they would be. Not only did our instruction continue, stories from history, geography, exploration, but there were visits to and from the other farms. When the families arrived and the children were sent off to play, it was not play at all. We stalked animals and hid to watch them, watched birds, learned how to distinguish tracks in the dust of the roads, searched reefs for gold-bearing rocks. My brother was given his first airgun, and he shot every bird he saw. The guns divided the gang of children into boys and girls – the boys shooting, the girls playing family. But when I was alone with my brother, we went together into the bush. My mother’s genius for social life showed itself in picnics, either with other families or when we were on our own. The car was piled with food, and we went off to some clear place in the bush and made a fire and cooked sausages and eggs, and lay under the trees watching the moon rise, or naming stars. If there were other children we sang jolly songs, like ‘Campdown Races’ and sad ones, like ‘Shenandoah’. We sang American, not English songs.
Several times a day, through the holidays, I, or my brother, or both of us, would be summoned to learn something. My mother, or father, had found a skull or skeleton in the bush, or a lump of gold-bearing rock. She boiled the skulls and skeletons of birds and small animals until the flesh fell off so we could learn the structure of bones. She blew birds’ eggs, and dismantled birds’ nests. She cut open termite nests to show us their gardens, their nurseries, their roads, their galleries. She showed us cast snakes’ skins and the eggs of spiders and snakes. She pulled flowers and leaves apart, and made us draw their parts.
Meanwhile, all the time, it seemed day and night, talk of the war went on. Sometimes it seemed as if the house on the hill was full of men in uniforms, but they were dead, just as in all the houses of the District were photographs of dead soldiers. And, too, cripples from the war. There was Mr Livingstone with a wooden leg, like my father – but he did much less with it. Mr McAuley had a steel plate over his stomach, to keep his intestines in – so they said. In the Murrays’ house, a sad, stoical, woman mourned the death of a husband and four sons in the Trenches. There was one son still alive, to take the place of all of them. In the Shattocks’ house was the picture of a beautiful little boy who, when a boat was sunk by a torpedo in the war, was sucked into the funnel to drown. Sometimes, when the talk of the war began again – and again, I wriggled away, tried to get out of the room, and if my father caught me he would shout, ‘That’s right, it’s only the Great Unmentionable. It’s only the Great War, that’s all!’
There is a question: there has to be. Four years at the Convent, but also four years of holidays, weeks of holidays that seemed when they began as if they would never end. There were a hundred kinds of experiences, good times, picnics, family outings, the dogs, the cats, cuddling babies, or walking all day with my brother in the bush, sitting up at night to watch the stars. But the dark times, the miseries are stronger than the good times. Why is that? ‘Give me a child until it is seven,’ they say the Jesuits say. The talk of war was probably the first thing I ever heard. So perhaps if there had never been the Convent with its bloody and tortured people everywhere, its tortured but smiling saints, it would have been the same. Suppose the Convent had nothing but sunny pictures of woods and fields and kind faces, would then the talk of war have proved stronger? Or is there something inherent in our composition that disposes us to grief and memories of grief, so that days or even weeks of good times prove less inviting than pain? This question has a rather more than personal relevance.
I had not been at the Convent a year when I escaped into the sickroom. First, I was really ill, with something then generally called B. Coli. A kidney infection, with high temperatures. And thereafter I was always reporting to the sickroom, with vague symptoms, and being kept in bed. My mother saw this as a sign of being ‘delicate’. I knew I was homesick, but did not know that what took me to the sickroom was Sister Antonia, a kindly and affectionate woman, who mothered me and all her charges. These imaginary illnesses had a double face. First, being delicate removed me from my mother’s insistence that I should be clever, ‘Just like I was,’ and continually being shown off to neighbours who, I knew, would be derisive as soon as the telephone was silent, or our car had driven off. ‘Who does she think she is?’ But worse than the neighbours was the pressure of that ferocious energy of hers, insisting I must be clever, that if I got 70 in my maths exams it could be 100, that I would soon get a scholarship, and go to school in England. But illness also delivered me to her, helpless: doctors, illness, medicine. It is like looking back into something like the cold fogs that, sometimes, my father said, lay over No-man’s-land, or even clouds of poison gas. Illness permeated everything. Why was it doctors always did what my mother said? For one thing, she demanded the right to be considered a colleague. ‘I am a sister from the Royal Free in London.’ She knew as much and more than the nurses. I was always being taken to Doctor Huggins for tests and checkups, some of them involving catheters. Now I know I had cystitis, but the most minor inflammation was seen as a symptom of something serious. I used to scream at even the idea of a catheter, so they chloroformed me.
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Doris Lessing
The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.The first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. it charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.
DORIS LESSING
Under My Skin
Volume One of
My Autobiography, to 1949
Table of Contents
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I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart you’re really a part of me,
I’ve got you under my skin.
I’ve tried so not to give in …
COLE PORTER
The individual, and groupings of people, have to learn that they cannot reform society in reality, nor deal with others as reasonable people, unless the individual has learned to locate and allow for the various patterns of coercive institutions, formal and also informal, which rule him. No matter what his reason says, he will always relapse into obedience to the coercive agency while its pattern is within him.
IDRIES SHAH, Caravan of Dreams
No matter where one looks on the face of the earth, wherever there are people, they can be observed syncing when music is played. There is popular misconception about music. Because there is a beat to music, the generally accepted belief is that the rhythm originates in the music, not that music is a highly specialized release of rhythms already in the individual. Otherwise how can one explain the close fit between ethnicity and music?
Rhythm patterns may turn out to be one of the most basic personality traits that differentiates one individual from another.
… when people converse … their brain waves even lock into a single unified sequence. When we talk to each other our central nervous systems mesh like two gears in a transmission.
The power of rhythmic message within the group is as strong as anything I know. It is … a hidden force, like gravity, that holds groups together.
I can remember being quite overwhelmed when I first made cinematographic recordings of groups of people in public. Not only were small groups in sync, but there were times when it seemed that all were part of a larger rhythm.
EDWARD T. HALL, The Dance of Life
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‘SHE WAS VERY PRETTY but all she cared about was horses and dancing.’
This refrain tinkled through my mother’s tales of her childhood, and it was years before it occurred to me, ‘Wait a minute, that’s her mother she’s talking about.’ She never used any other words than those, and they could not have been her words, since she did not remember her mother. No, this was what she had heard from the servants, for she unconsciously put on a kitchen face, with a condemning look about her mouth, and she always gave a disapproving sniff. That little sniff evoked for me a downstairs world as exotic as the people in it would have found tales of cannibals and the heathen. Servants and nursemaids brought the little children up, after the frivolous Emily McVeagh died, in childbed, of peritonitis, with her third, when her first, my mother, was still only three. There is not even a photograph of Emily. She is Nobody. She is nothing at all. John William McVeagh would not talk about his first wife. What can she have done? – I asked myself. After all, to be light-minded is not a crime. At last it came to me. Emily Flower was common, that must have been it.
Then a researcher was invited to throw light into those distant places and she came up with a mass of material that would do very well as a basis for one of those Victorian novels, by Trollope perhaps, where the chapter about Emily Flower, called ‘What Can Have Been Her Fault?’, could only be a short one, if the saddest.
‘The information on the Flower family was got through birth, marriage and death certificates, parish records, census records, apprentice records, barge owners’ records, lightermen and watermen records, local history and wills,’ says the researcher, evoking Dickens’ England in a sentence.
There was a Henry Flower who in 1827 was described as Manner, and in the 1851 census as a Victualler. He was born in Somerset and his wife Eleanor was born in Limehouse. Their son, George James Flower, delinquent Emily’s father, was apprenticed to a John Flower, presumably a relative. The Flower family were barge owners, and on Emily’s birth certificate her father was described as lighterman.
The Flower clan lived in and around Flower Terrace, now demolished, and George James and his wife Eliza Miller lived at Number 3 Flower Terrace. This was in Poplar, near what is now Canary Wharf. There were four children. Eliza was widowed, aged thirty-five, and the closeness and mutual helpfulness of the clan is shown by how, although women did not do this then, the lightermen and watermen allowed her to be a barge owner and take apprentices. She made her son Edward an apprentice and he later became lighterman and barge owner in her place. Her children did well, and she ended in a pleasant house, with an annuity. Emily was the youngest child and she married John William McVeagh in 1883.
My mother described the house she was brought up in as tall, narrow, cold, dark, depressing, and her father as a disciplinarian, strict, frightening, always ready with moral exhortations.
The well-off working class had a good life in late Victorian times, with jaunts to the races, all kinds of parties and celebrations. They most heartily ate and drank. Nothing dreary or cold about Flower Terrace and its companion streets, full of relatives and friends. Emily came from this warm clan life into the doubtless ardent arms of John William McVeagh – he must have been very much in love to marry her – but she was expected to match herself to his ambitions, to the frightful snobberies of a man fighting to leave the working class behind. I imagine her running back home when she could to her common family, for dances, good times and going to the races. She must have lived in her husband’s house under a cold drizzle of disapproval, from which, or so I see it, she died, aged thirty-two.
My mother never mentioned her grandfather, John William’s father, and that meant John William did not talk about him any more than he did about Emily.
‘The information for this family,’ says the researcher, ‘comes from births, deaths and marriages, the clerical directory, the Public Record Office, army records and books on the Charge of the Light Brigade, census reports, wills and local directories. John McVeagh’s date of birth and place of birth conflict in the records. Army records of birth and occupation are frequently incorrect as men enlisting, for reasons of their own, gave wrong information, and it would have been difficult to check up in the pre-1837 registration time. In any case, recruiting stations were not particular in the army of the nineteenth century.’
John McVeagh was born in Portugal, and his father was a soldier. He was in the 4th Light Dragoons, and was a Hospital Sergeant Major when he left the army in 1861. He was in the Crimea and East Turkey and in the Charge of the Light Brigade – he really was, for soldiers made that claim who had no right to it. But why did they want to have been part of such carnage? John McVeagh’s conduct as a soldier was exemplary. When his horse was shot under him in the Charge he continued to tend the wounded though wounded himself. He received various medals. Here is an entry for March 1st 1862, the United Service Gazette:
4th (Queen’s) Hussars – Cahir. On Friday the 21st ult. Serjt-Major J. McVeagh late of this regiment, now Yeoman Warder of the Tower, was presented by the officers of his late corps with a purse containing 20 guineas, a silver snuff box beautifully engraved, showing his former services. Few men have been more honoured for their good conduct than Serjt-Major McVeagh on leaving his regiment, then at the Curragh, a few months back, to take his new appointment after 24 years service. The non-commissioned officers and privates presented him with a splendid tea service with the following inscription: ‘To Hospital Serjt-Major John McVeagh, as a token of respect for his general kindness.’ During the Crimean War he was at all times with his regiment in the field, attending both sick and wounded, and for such distinguished conduct received a medal, with an annuity of £20, besides a Turkish and a Crimean one with 4 clasps.
His wife was Martha Snewin, and her father was a bootmaker. She was born in Kent. She travelled all around the country with her husband when he was an army recruiter. That is all we know about her. He saw to it the children had a good education. Their daughter Martha, who looked after him when his wife died, was left well provided-for, but she is one of the invisible women of history.
My grandfather John William was the youngest son. First he was a clerk in the Meteorological Office, and by 1881 he was a bank clerk. Then he became a bank manager, in the Barking Road, but he died in Blackheath. He bettered himself, house by house, as he moved, and this son of a common soldier married his second wife, Emily’s successor, in St George’s, Hanover Square. This stepmother was not, as I imagined – because of her elegant beaked face – Jewish, but was the daughter of a dissenting cleric, who later became a priest in the Anglican church. She came from a middle-class family. Her name was Maria Martyn. My mother described her, with dislike, as a typical stepmother, cold, dutiful and correct, unable to be loving or even affectionate with the three children. They preferred life downstairs with the servants for as long as it was allowed, but my mother and her brother John became snobbishly, not to say obsessively middle-class, while the third child, Muriel, married back into the working class. Although my mother kept tenuous contact with her, the father would have nothing to do with her. It was her mother coming out in her, the servants said.
So he was disappointed in both his daughters. When my mother decided to be a nurse, instead of going to university – John William was ambitious for her – she was similarly cut off from his approval. Until, that is, she did well, but it was too late, the bonds had snapped. Never, ever, did my mother speak of her father with affection. Respect, yes, and gratitude that he did well by her, for he made sure they were given everything proper for middle-class children. She went to a good school, and was taught music, where she did so well the examiners told her she could have a career as a concert pianist.
The chapter heading for my mother in this saga would be a sad one, and the older I get, the more sorrowful her life seems. She did not love her parents. My father did not love his. It took me years to take in that fact, perhaps because it was always a joke when he said he left home the moment he could and went off as far as possible from them, as a bank clerk in Luton.
My paternal great-grandfather, a James Tayler, appears in the 1851 census as a farmer with 130 acres, employing five men, at East Bergholt. He went in for melancholy and philosophical verse, which is perhaps why he was not successful. He married a Matilda Cornish. The Tayler family worked in various capacities in banks, were civil servants, minor literary figures, often farmers, all over Suffolk and Norfolk. During the migrations of the nineteenth century they went off to Australia and to Canada, where many live still. But my grandfather Alfred decided not to be a farmer. He was a bank clerk in Colchester. His wife was Caroline May Batley.
This was the woman my father disliked so much – his mother.
The picture he presented of his father, Alfred Tayler, was of a dreaming unambitious man who spent his spare time playing the organ in the village church, driving his ambitious wife mad with frustration. But by the time I heard this my father was also a dreaming unambitious man who drove his poor wife mad with frustration. And the fact was, my grandfather Alfred ended up as manager of the London County Westminster Bank, Huntingdon, but whether he went on playing the organ in the local church I do not know. When Caroline May died he at once married again, in the very same year, a woman much younger than he was, Marian Wolfe, thirty-seven to his seventy-four. She, too, was the daughter of a minister of religion.
Ministers of religion and bank managers, there they are, in the records on both sides of the family.
Caroline May Batley, my father’s mother, is almost as much of a shadow as poor Emily. The only pleasant thing my father remembered about her was that she cooked the delicious, if solid, food described by Mrs Beeton. The tale he told, and retold, and with relish shared by my mother, was how his mother came to the Royal Free Hospital to confront the newly engaged pair, both of them rather ill, to tell him that if he married that battleaxe Sister McVeagh he would always regret it. But I daresay Caroline May would have something to say for herself, if asked. It is probable she was related to Constable the painter. I like to think so.
My mother’s childhood and girlhood were spent doing well in everything, because she had to please her stern father. She excelled in school, she played hockey and tennis and lacrosse well, she bicycled, she went to the theatre and music hall and musical evenings. Her energy was phenomenal. And she read all kinds of advanced books, and was determined her children would not have the cold and arid upbringing she did. She studied Montessori and Ruskin, and H. G. Wells, particularly Joan and Peter, with its ridicule of how children were deformed by upbringing. She told me all her contemporaries read Joan and Peter and were determined to do better. Strange how once influential books disappear. Kipling’s ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ made her cry because of her own childhood.
Then she became a nurse, and had to live on the pay, which was so little she was often hungry and could not buy herself gloves and handkerchiefs or a nice blouse. The World War started, the first one, and my badly wounded father arrived in the ward where she was Sister McVeagh. He was there for over a year, and during that time her heart was well and truly broken, for the young doctor she loved and who loved her was drowned in a ship sunk by a torpedo.
While my mother was being an exemplary Victorian and then Edwardian girl, the pattern of a modern young woman, my father was enjoying a country childhood, for he spent every minute out of school (which he hated, unlike my mother, for she loved school where she did so well) with the farmers’ children around Colchester. His parents beat him – spare the rod, spoil the child – and until he died he would talk with horror about the Sundays, when there were two church services and Sunday school. He dreaded Sundays all week, and would not go near a church for years. Butler’s The Way of All Flesh – that was what his childhood was like, he said, but luckily he could always escape into the fields. He wanted to be a farmer, always, but the moment he left school put distance between himself and his parents, went into the bank, which he hated, but worked hard there, for people did work harder then than now, and above all, played hard. He loved every kind of sport, played cricket and billiards for his county, rode, and danced, walked miles to and from a dance in another village or town. If when my mother talked about her youth it sounded like Ann Veronica or the New Women of Shaw, my father’s reminiscences were like D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, or The White Peacock, young people in emotional and self-conscious literary friendships, improving themselves by talk and shared books. He used to say that from the moment he got away from his parents and was independent he had a wonderful time, he enjoyed every minute of it, no one could have had a better life than he had for ten years. He was twenty-eight when the war began. He was lucky twice, he said, once when he was sent out of the Trenches because of a bad appendix, thus missing the Battle of the Somme when all his company was killed, and then, having a shell land on his leg a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, when, again, no one was left of his company.
He was very ill, not only because of his amputated leg, but because he was suffering from what was then called shell shock. He was in fact depressed, the real depression which was like – so he said – being inside a cold, dark room with no way out, and where no one could come in to help him. The ‘nice doctor man’ he was sent to said he had to stick it out, there was nothing medicine could do for him, but the anguish would pass. The ‘horrible things’ that my father’s mind was assailed by were not as uncommon as he seemed to think: horrible things were in everybody’s mind, but the war had made them worse, that was all. But my father remembered and spoke often about the soldiers who, ‘shell-shocked’ or unable to get themselves out of their mud holes to face the enemy, might be shot for cowardice. ‘It could have been me,’ he might say, all his life. ‘It was just luck it wasn’t.’
So there he was, in my mother’s ward in the old Royal Free Hospital in East London. He saw her unhappiness when her great love was drowned, he knew she had been offered the matronship of St George’s, a famous teaching hospital, an honour, for usually this job was offered to older women. But they decided to get married, and there was no conflict in it for him, though there was for her, because later she said so. He said, often, that he owed her his sanity, owed her everything, for without her devoted nursing he would not have come through that year of illness. Marriages for affection were best, he might add. As for her, she enjoyed her efficiency and her success, and knew she would make a wonderful matron of a great teaching hospital. But she wanted children, to make up to them what she had suffered as a child. So she put it.
My father was not the only soldier never, ever, to forgive his country for what he saw as promises made but betrayed: for these soldiers were many, in Britain, in France and in Germany, Old Soldiers who kept that bitterness till they died. They were an idealistic and innocent lot, those men: they actually believed it was a war to end war. And my father had been given a white feather in London by women he described as dreadful harridans – and that was when he already had his wooden leg under his trouser leg, and his ‘shell shock’ making him wonder if it was worth staying alive. He never forgot that white feather, speaking of it as yet another symptom of the world’s ineradicable and inevitable and hopeless insanity.
He had to leave England, for he could not bear England now, and he got his bank to send him out to the Imperial Bank of Persia, to Kermanshah. Now I use the name Imperial Bank of … to watch the reaction, which is incredulity, and then a laugh, for so much of that time now seems as delightfully absurd as – well, as something or other we now take for granted will seem to our children.
My mother was having a breakdown, I think because of the difficulties of that choice, marriage or the career where she was doing so well. And because of her lost love, whom she never forgot. And because she had worked so very hard during the war, and because of the many men she had watched die and because … it was 1919, the year when 29 million people died of the flu epidemic which for some reason gets left out of the histories of that time. Ten million were killed in the Great War, mostly in the Trenches, a statistic we remember now on the 11th November of every year, but 29 million people died of the flu, sometimes called the Spanish Lady.
My father was still in breakdown, though the worst of the depression he had suffered from was over. They had been advised by the doctors not to have a child yet. They joked my mother must have got pregnant on the first night. In those days people actually often did wait until the first night of marriage. But there is another thing. In 1919 my mother was thirty-five and in those days it was considered late to have a first baby. And as a nurse she must have been aware of the dangers of waiting. Perhaps a part of my mother’s mind she did not know about was making sure she got pregnant then.
And so they arrived, the two of them, both ill, in the great stone house on a plateau surrounded by snowtopped mountains, in that ancient trading town, Kermanshah – which was much damaged, parts of it bombed into dust, during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.
And there I was born on the 22nd October 1919. My mother had a bad time. It was a forceps birth. My face was scarred purple for days. Do I believe this difficult birth scarred me – that is to say, my nature? Who knows. I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important. How could it not be? Unless you believe that every little human being’s mind is quite separate from every other, separate from the common human mind. An unlikely thing, surely.
That war does not become less important to me as time passes, on the contrary. In 1990, the year I began to write this book, I was in the south of France, in that hilly country behind the Riviera, visiting the delicious little towns and villages which began centuries ago as hill forts, and in every town or village is a war memorial. On one face is a list of the twelve or twenty young men killed in World War One, and this in tiny villages that even now have only half a hundred inhabitants. Usually every one of the young men of a village was killed. All over Europe, in every city, town, and village is a war memorial, with the names of the dead of World War One. On another face of the shaft or obelisk are the two or three names of the dead of World War Two. By 1918, all the healthy young men of Europe, dead. In 1990 I was in Edinburgh where in a cold, grey castle are kept the lines of books recording the names of the young men from Scotland killed between 1914 and 1918. Hundreds of thousands of names. And then in Glasgow – the same. Then, Liverpool. Records of that slaughter, the First World War. Unlived lives. Unborn children. How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, and those children and grandchildren had been born, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?
Not long ago, in a cinema in Kilburn, they showed Oh What a Lovely War!, that satire on the silliness of World War One. As we came out of the dark into the street, an old woman stood alert and alive at the exit, and she looked hard into every face, impressing herself on every one of us. That film ends with two females stumbling, wandering through acres, miles, of gravestones, war graves, women who never found men to marry and have children with. This old woman, there was no doubt, was one of them, and she wanted us to know it. That film expressed her: she was telling us so.
There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war – my mother was one.
During that trip through the villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish: my parents’. I felt, too, incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? The American Civil War, less than half a century before, had shown what the newly invented weapons could do in the way of slaughter, but we had learned nothing from that war. That is the worst of the legacies from the First World War: the thought that if we are a race that cannot learn, what will become of us? With people as stupid as we are, what can we hope for? But the strongest emotion on that trip was the old darkness of dread and of anguish – my father’s emotion, a very potent draught, no homeopathic dose, but the full dose of adult pain. I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak.
We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.
A war does not end with the Armistice. In 1919, all over a Europe filled with graves, hung miasmas and miseries, and over the whole world too, because of the flu and its nearly thirty million deaths.
I used to joke that it was the war that had given birth to me, as a defence when weary with the talk about the war that went on – and on – and on. But it was no joke. I used to feel there was something like a dark grey cloud, like poison gas, over my early childhood. Later I found people who had the same experience. Perhaps it was from that war that I first felt the struggling panicky need to escape, with a nervous aversion to where I have just stood, as if something there might blow up or drag me down by the heel.
2 (#ulink_ae909ff0-a570-50f3-8a7e-2f9401df5698)
YOU CANNOT SIT DOWN to write about yourself without rhetorical questions of the most tedious kind demanding attention. Our old friend, the Truth, is first. The truth … how much of it to tell, how little? It seems it is agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler, and obloquy lies in wait either way.
Telling the truth about yourself is one thing, if you can, but what about the other people? I may easily write about my life until the year I left Southern Rhodesia in 1949, because there are few people left who can be hurt by what I say; I have had to leave out, or change – mostly a name or two – very little. So Volume One is being written without snags and blocks of conscience. But Volume Two, that is, from the time I reached London, will be a different matter, even if I follow the example of Simone de Beauvoir who said that about some things she had no intention of telling the truth. (Then why bother? – the reader must be expected to ask.) I have known not a few of the famous, and even one or two of the great, but I do not believe it is the duty of friends, lovers, comrades, to tell all. The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. And why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
I read history with conditional respect. I have been involved in a small way with big events, and know how quickly accounts of them become like a cracked mirror. I read some biographies with admiration for people who have chosen to keep their mouths shut. It is, I have observed, a rule that people who have been on the periphery of events or a life are those who rush forward to claim first place: the people who do know often say nothing or little. Some of the most noisy, not to say noisome, scandals or affairs of our time, that have had a searchlight on them for years, are reflected wrongly in the public mind because the actual participants keep their counsel, and watch, ironically, from the shadows. And there is another thing, much harder to see. People who have been real movers and exciters get left out of histories, and it is because memory itself decides to reject them. These instigators are flamboyant, unscrupulous, hysterical, or even mad, certainly abrasive; but the real point is that they are apparently of a different substance from the smooth, reasonable and sane people who have been inspired by them, and who do not like to remember temporary submersions in lunacy. Often, reading histories, there are events which stick out, do not make enough sense, and one may deduce the existence of some lunatic, male or female, who was equipped with the fiery stuff of inspiration – but was quickly forgotten, since always and at all times the past gets tidied up and made safer. ‘A rough beast’ is usually the real begetter of events. There would have been no ‘communist party’ in Southern Rhodesia without such an inspirational character.
Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
Telling the truth or not telling it, and how much, is a lesser problem than the one of shifting perspectives, for you see your life differently at different stages, like climbing a mountain while the landscape changes with every turn in the path. Had I written this when I was thirty, it would have been a pretty combative document. In my forties, a wail of despair and guilt: oh my God, how could I have done this or that? Now I look back at that child, that girl, that young woman, with a more and more detached curiosity. Old people may be observed peering into their pasts, Why? – they are asking themselves. How did that happen? I try to see my past selves as someone else might, and then put myself back inside one of them, and am at once submerged in a hot struggle of emotion, justified by thoughts and ideas I now judge wrong.
Besides, the landscape itself is a tricky thing. As you start to write at once the question begins to insist: Why do you remember this and not that? Why do you remember in every detail a whole week, month, more, of a long ago year, but then complete dark, a blank? How do you know that what you remember is more important than what you don’t?
Suppose there is no landscape at all? This can happen. I sat next to a man at dinner who said he could never write an autobiography because he didn’t remember anything. What, nothing? Only a little scene here and there. Like, so he said, those small washes and blobs of colour that stained-glass windows lay on the dark of a stone floor in a cathedral. It is hard for me to imagine such a darkening of the past. Once even to try would have plunged me into frightful insecurity, as if memory were Self, Identity – and I am sure that isn’t so. Now I can imagine myself arriving in some country with the past wiped clean out of my mind: I would do all right. It is after all only what we did when we were born, without memories, or so it seems to the adult: then we have to create our lives, create memory.
‘Besides’ – said this dinner companion – who seemed perfectly whole and present, despite his insufficient hold on his past, ‘the little blobs of colour move all the time, because the sun is moving outside.’
True. Move they do. You forget. You remember. As I brooded over the material for this book, faces and places emerged from the dark. ‘Good Lord! So there you are! Haven’t thought about you for years!’ Not only the perspective but what you are looking at changes.
When you write about anything – in a novel, an article – you learn a lot you did not know before. I learned a good deal writing this. Again and again I have had to say, ‘That was the reason was it? Why didn’t I think of that before?’ Or even, ‘Wait … it wasn’t like that.’ Memory is a careless and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one. And not always self-flattering. More than once I have said: ‘No, I wasn’t as bad as I’ve been thinking,’ as well as discovering that I was worse.
And then – and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all – we make up our pasts. You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I do not think this is only the fault of story-tellers. A parent says, ‘We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, don’t you remember? – look, here is the photo.’ And at once the child builds from the words and the photograph a memory, which becomes hers. But there are moments, incidents, real memory, I do trust. This is partly because I spent a good part of my childhood ‘fixing’ moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs. Pressure had been put on me to admit that what I knew was true was not so. I am deducing this. Why else my preoccupation that went on for years: this is the truth, this is what happened, hold on to it, don’t let them talk you out of it.
Why an autobiography at all? Self-defence: biographies are being written. It is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and often tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may be switched on at any minute. Yes, indeed there are good biographers, nearly all of them in Britain now, for we are enjoying a golden age of biography. What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels.
In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers writing about me. One I had never met or even heard of. Another, I was told by a friend in Zimbabwe, is ‘collecting material’ for a biography. From whom? Long dead people? A woman I met twice, once when she asked me carefully casual questions, has just informed me she has written a book about me which she is about to get published. Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably interviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation. It is an astonishing fact that you may spend a couple of hours with an interviewer, who is recording every word you say, but the article or interview always has several major errors of fact. But less and less do facts matter, partly because writers are like pegs to hang people’s fantasies on. If writers do care that what is written about them should somewhere connect with the truth, does that mean we are childish? Perhaps it does, and certainly I feel every year more of an anachronism. Returning to Paris after a year’s interval, I was interviewed by a young woman who had done me before. I said her previous article had been a tissue of invention, and she replied, ‘But if you have to get an article in to a deadline, and you didn’t have enough material, wouldn’t you make it up?’ Clearly she would not have believed me if I had said no. And that brings me straight to the heart of the problem. Young people brought up in today’s literary climate cannot believe how things were. You get sceptical looks if you say something like this: ‘Once serious publishers tried to find serious biographers for their serious authors.’ Now everyone takes it for granted that all they are concerned about is to publish as many biographies as possible, no matter how second-rate, because biographies sell well. Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us.
If you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better. One – what else? – my relations with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able to be kind. Every day you may watch, hear of, some young person, usually a girl, giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called cruelty. Later they will say, ‘I am afraid I was difficult when I was an adolescent.’ A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness goes into the combat. Judging from histories and novels from the past, things were not always like this. So what has happened, why now? Why has it become a right to be unpleasant?
I have a woman friend who in the Second World War went to New York with her young child, having no support in Britain, her home. She earned her living precariously as a model for artists, and sometimes modelling clothes. She lived in a small town outside New York. She was poor, isolated, and being twenty years old, yearned for some fun. Once, just once, exactly once, she left the little boy with a friend, spent the evening in New York, and did not get home until dawn. I used to listen to this boy, now adolescent, accuse her most bitterly, ‘You left me alone night after night and went off to enjoy yourself.’ A small boy, the son of parents who did not approve of smacking, had his fingers smacked once when he persisted in putting them through the paper covering jam pots. This became, ‘And you used to hit me when I was small.’ These petty recollections are to the point.
For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then cold and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises, was I matching what actually happened? And this is the second area of my preoccupation, which has to be linked with the first.
Why is it I have lived my whole life with people who are automatically against authority, ‘agin the government’, who take it for granted that all authority is bad, ascribe doubtful or venal motives to government, the Establishment, the ruling class, the local town council, the headmaster or mistress? So deep-rooted is this set of mind that it is only when you begin to climb out of it you see how much of your life has been determined by it. This week I was with a group of people of mixed ages, all on the left (or who had been once), and someone happened to mention that the government was doing something – quite a good thing, but that isn’t the point – and at once every face put on a look of derision. Automatic. Push-button. This look is like a sneer or a jeer, a Well, what can one expect? It can only come out of some belief, one so deep it is well out of sight, that a promise of some kind has been made and then betrayed. Perhaps it was the French Revolution? Or the American Revolution, which made the pursuit of happiness a right with the implication that happiness is to be had as easily as taking cakes off a supermarket counter? Millions of people in our time behave as if they have been made a promise – by whom? when? – that life must get freer, more honest, more comfortable, always better. Has advertising only set our minds more firmly in this expectant mode? Yet nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Above all, history tells us nothing stays the same for long. We expect gold at the foot of always renewable rainbows. I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expeditions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.
I have just read of a historian who claims that the distrust, even contempt, of government and authority is precisely because of the First World War, because of the stupidity and incompetence of its generals, because of the slaughter of Europe’s young men.
When journalists or historians come to ask about something in the past the hardest moment is when I see on their faces the look that means, But how could you have believed this, or done that? Facts are easy. It is the atmospheres that made them possible that are elusive. ‘You see, we believed …’ (You must have been pretty stupid then!) ‘No, you don’t understand, it was such a fevered time …’ (Fever you call it, do you!) ‘I know it’s hard to understand, without being immersed in the poisonous air of then.’
A subsidiary question, not without general relevance: how to account for the fact that all my life I’ve been the child who says the Emperor is naked, while my brother never, not once, doubted or criticized authority?
Mind you, a talent for seeing the Emperor’s nakedness can mean his other qualities are not noticed.
I am trying to write this book honestly. But were I to write it aged eighty-five, how different would it be?
3 (#ulink_3e1233e9-1582-541f-9df1-b85c8042293d)
A TINY THING AMONG TRAMPLING, knocking careless giants who smell, who lean down towards you with great ugly hairy faces, showing big dirty teeth. A foot you keep an eye on, while trying to watch all the other dangers as well, is almost as big as you are. The hands they use to grip you can squeeze the breath half out of you. The rooms you run about in, the furniture you move among, windows, doors, are vast, nothing is your size, but one day you will grow tall enough to reach the handle of the door, or the knob on a cupboard. These are the real childhood memories and any that have you level with grown-ups are later inventions. An intense physicality, that is the truth of childhood.
My first memory is before I was two, and it is of an enormous dangerous horse towering up, up, and on it my father still higher, his head and shoulders somewhere in the sky. There he sits with his wooden leg always there under his trousers, a big hard slippery hidden thing. I am trying not to cry, while being lifted up in tight squeezing hands, and put in front of my father’s body, told to grip the front of the saddle, a hard jutting edge I must stretch my fingers to hold. I am inside the heat of horse, the smell of horse, the smell of my father, all hot pungent smells. When the horse moves it is a jerking jolting motion and I lean back my head and shoulders into my father’s stomach and feel there the hard straps of the wooden-leg harness. My stomach is reeling because of the swoop up from the ground now so far below me. Now, that is a real memory, violent, smelly – physical.
‘Daddy used to put you in front of him on the horse when he rode to the Bank, and Marta waited at the gate to bring you back. You absolutely loved it.’ And perhaps I did, perhaps it was only the first ride, which I did not love, that has stayed in my memory. The gate is in a photograph, a graceful arch, and I have added it to the real memory. Of being lifted down into the hands of Marta, whom I disliked, there is nothing in my mind. Those rides had to be in Kermanshah, and I was two and a half when we left.
Sharp steep stone steps, like boulders on a mountainside; they are in a photograph, too, but the memory is of dangerous descent, threatened by sharp edges.
Another memory, a real one, not what was told me, or what is in the photograph album. A swimming bath, a large tank, full of great naked pallid people shouting and laughing and splashing me with hard slaps of cold water. The naked bodies were my mother, rowdy and noisy, enjoying herself, my father holding on to the edge of the tank, because that pitiful shrunken stump of a leg with its shrapnel scars, waving or jerking about in the water, made it hard for him to swim. And others, for the tank seems crowded with people. They are not naked, for they wear the serious swimming costumes of the time, but if adults are always dressed in the daytime, and then wear long-sleeved clothes in bed, when in bathing costumes they seem all pale flesh and unpleasant revelation. Loose bulging breasts. Whiskers of hair under arms, matting or streaming water like sweat. Sometimes snot on a face that is grinning and shouting with pleasure. Snot running into the water that already has dying or rotting leaves in it, as well as the broken reflections of clouds, down here, not up there in the sky. Small children are always trying to keep things in their proper places, their world is always coming apart, things in it move about, deceive, lie. ‘We used to swim every afternoon in the summer. And we had swimming parties at the weekend. Oh they were such fun. You always loved it when we had parties.’ Thus spoke my mother, mourning the best years of her life, in Persia. ‘We used to lift you in with us, but you screamed and had to be put back on the side. The water was so cold! It was mountain water. It came running down from the mountains in stone channels. You simply had to shout as you jumped in! There were beds of asters all around the tank. The Persian gardeners were wonderful, they grew everything.’ And so you imagine jumping in, all jolly and laughing, and being lifted out, you see the asters, in paintbox colours, and hear the scolding Persian gardeners, who would not let you pick the asters, mother said so. But the real memory, the authentic one, was of enormous pale bodies, like milk puddings, sloshing about in out-of-control water that smelled cold, the flailing large pale arms, the hard breath-stopping slap of water on your face. ‘Go on, be a sport, brave girls don’t cry about a silly little thing like that.’
Two memories, concocted ones, or induced, but probably true enough. In the 1960s, when we were experimenting with drugs, I tried one absolutely not to be recommended. You eat morning glory seeds, previously soaked in hot water to an acid jellyish state, but you have to eat a lot, in my case sixty or more. I felt sick, and as for the revelations I was doing as well using my novelist’s mind. I had been thinking, why had so little remained in me of that big stone house, with its big high stone rooms? I was born there. I learned to walk there. And imagined that I lay in a cot with bars, like a prison cell for size, and heard large feet clanging on stone. I knew the floors were stone and that there were few rugs, that the windows were large and showed mountains, that the house was cold in winter. The cot was bound to be something of the sort, and a small child hears every sound with new ears, nothing shut off, as adults shut off sound.
The other invited memory was useful, and has been ever since. I took mescalin – just once. Two friends monitored the dosage and then sat with me. They were concerned that I would jump out of a window or something of the kind, because someone they knew had done that a short time before. What I learned then was how strong in me was the personality I call the Hostess, for I was presenting my experience to them, chatting away, increasingly scatty, but in control, but all that was a protection for what went on within. This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now, when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer, and it is here I retreat to, take refuge, when I think that my life will be public property and there is nothing I can do about it. You will never get access here, you can’t, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy. They call it loneliness, that here is this place unsharable with anyone at all, ever, but it is all we have to fall back on. Me, I, this feeling of me. The observer, never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.
That day, chatting away, telling them this is happening, that is happening, I was protecting an experience I had induced. I was being born. In the 1960s this kind of ‘religious’ experience was common. I was giving myself ‘a good birth’ – in the jargon of the time. The actual birth was not only a bad one, but made worse by how it was reported to me, so the storyteller invented a birth as the sun rose with light and warmth coming fast into the enormous lamplit room. Why not? I was born early in the morning. Then I invented a chorus of pleasure that I was a girl, for my mother had been sure I was a boy and had a boy’s name ready. In this ‘game’ my girl’s name had been planned for months, instead of given me by the doctor. My father – well, where was he, in reality? He was ill because of his imaginative participation in the birth and had gone to sleep after being informed I was safely born.
Probably this ‘good’ birth was therapeutic, but it was the revelation of the different personalities at work in me I valued and value now. One had to be authentic and not invented, because it was unexpected. Before my eyes, through the whole experience that is, for hours, ran a picture show of beautiful and smart clothes, fashionable clothes, as if a fashion designer inside me was being given her head. They were not on me, but on fashion models: I have never worn this kind of garment. The other person, or personality, was a sobbing child. I wept, and wept, much to the concern of my companions, but I knew it was not important, my weeping. I do not cry enough; that has always been true, and to weep without constraint was a bonus and a bliss. I could easily have cradled that poor baby and comforted her, if I had not been so fascinated by the parallel picture gallery of wonderful clothes, and by the gracious protective chat of the hostess.
That weeping child … now she’s a real enemy. She transmogrifies into a thousand self-pitying impostors, grabbing and sucking, and when I cut off a long clutching tentacle, at once another appears, just where I don’t expect it.
An intensity of the senses accompanies drug-taking, a reminder of how small children experience tastes, textures, smells. While the drug was wearing off they took me out to a meal and I remembered how food tasted in childhood. The omelette exploded on my tongue into a hundred nuances of butter and egg and herb. Already, half-way through my life – I was in my forties – I had lost so much of my capacity for taste. We all fear old age because we are going to lose pleasure, be sans taste. But you lose it all slowly and unnoticed as you live. A small child does not taste anything like the same omelette an adult does. Heat suffocates and burns, pricking the skin, making small limbs wriggle and shrink. Cold attacks like freezing water. Smells expand the nose in delight, shrivel it in disgust. Noises, sounds, fill the inner ear, clamouring, insisting, threatening, listen to me. Children and grown-ups do not live in the same sensory world.
I do not actually remember, I was only told, that the climate in Kermanshah was all extremes. It was very hot. It was very cold. It was nearly always very dry. ‘The air was so dry the servants threw out the household slops on to the ground behind the house and by lunchtime it was just dust.’ ‘In Kermanshah the washing was hung out in the early morning and it was bone dry by ten.’
There were three adults in that house, not counting the Persian servants. One was a friend, an American, working in oil. For years I wondered why the American male voice seduced and cajoled, soothed, promised more than any reasonable woman could believe in. At last I saw the obvious explanation and with what reluctance had to accept – again – that our lives are governed by voices, caresses, threats we cannot remember.
A fourth absolutely valid hallmarked memory is of the journey from Kermanshah to Tehran, by car. There were not many cars then, in Persia. We drove through mountains on roads made for caravans, horses, mules, donkeys. It was an open car. I looked over the side, gripping rough canvas, down, down over cliffs to valleys that were all rock, and in particular one a rocky abyss with a village like one of my toys perched beside it. I would recognize that valley now, because terror imprinted it on me for ever. The car ground along the edge of the track that wound around the mountain, wheels on the edge of a void. Then a rocky corner blocked the car. The grown-ups got out with difficulty because my mother was very pregnant, and my father had to manoeuvre his clumsy wooden leg. I was handed over the canvas hood at the back of the car, and I stood behind the screen of my father’s legs, one of my arms around a real warm human leg, the other around the hard wood of the dead leg, and I peered down through the legs. Meanwhile the driver (who?) ground the car forward, one wheel on the collapsing outer edge of the track. He was driving, it seemed, into blue air … the terror of it, watching the car, would it go over, roll down that mountain? Just above us balanced an eagle large enough to snatch a child, looking down at me. ‘Daddy, Daddy, look at the big bird,’ but the bird did not swoop off with me, and the car did not go over the edge, for the next thing was, we were in the Edwardian nursery in Tehran, where my brother was soon born.
My mother planned to use the loving coercions of Montessori for our upbringing, but meantime it was the harsh disciplines of one Doctor Truby King that ruled the nurseries both in Kermanshah and in Tehran. He was a New Zealander, whose book was law for innumerable parents, and whose influence can still be heard in the voices of older nurses and nannies. ‘You must have discipline – that’s the important thing.’ Truby King was the continuation of the cold and harsh discipline of my mother’s childhood and my father’s childhood. I am sure my mother never saw this: she was only doing what all good parents did. Even to read that guide to excellence in family relations is painful.
Take feeding. The infant was supposed to be fed every two hours, and then every three hours, day and night, and the consummation and crown of this clockwork provisioning was to achieve a four-hourly, or three-hourly, pattern of four or six feeds a day, while between them the baby must be left to howl and scream, otherwise the baby will call the tune, the baby will rule the roast, the baby’s character will be ruined for life, the baby will become spoiled, soft, self-indulgent, and above all, the baby will ‘get on top’ of the mother. The baby must never be picked up between feeds. The baby must learn what’s what and who is boss right from the start, and this essential instruction must be imparted while the infant is lying alone in a cot, in its own room, never in the parents’ bedroom. He, she, must learn its place, understand its position in the universe – alone.
In my case, as my mother cheerfully told me, again and again, I was starved for the first ten months of my life since, because she could not feed me, being too run-down after the war, she fed me cows’ milk, diluted to English standards, and cows’ milk in Persia had only half the goodness of cows’ milk in England. ‘You just screamed and screamed all day and all night.’
Well, perhaps, but in the photographs I do not seem to be a mere rack of bones. I look quite plump and cheerful. Why did my mother need to tell her little daughter, so often, and with such enjoyment, that she had been starved by her mother all through her infancy? I think her sense of the dramatic might have contributed here. It used to drive me wild with irritation – and my father too – that everything, always, was presented to the world as a drama. I did not mind that she acted out everything, but that she seemed unaware she was doing it. But have it her way: if I was a permanently hungry baby, it did not seem to do me much harm.
Now, toilet training, that key to character building. Believe it or not, it was recommended the infant must be held over the pot from birth, at regular times every day. ‘You were clean by the time you were a month old!’ Do I believe this? I do not, but the triumph in her voice spoke of victories over much more than an infant’s bowels. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. (The Koran has something on these lines too.) A small baby has no control over its functions. But if you ‘hold out’ an infant, with encouraging words, using the cold edge of the pot firmly, as a reminder, pouring water from a jug held high enough to make a tinkling sound into a basin, all the while gently rubbing the stomach, then the infant is likely to oblige. Just imagine it, from one end of the British Empire to the other, wherever the map of the world was coloured pink, British matrons or their nurses were ‘holding out’ tiny infants.
You would think all this must have left me with obsessive cleanliness, tidiness, need for order. No. I am untidy, tolerate disorder, but am obsessive in small useful ways, like keeping a diary.
The vividest early memory was – not the actual birth of my brother – but my introduction to the baby. I was two and a half years old. The enormous room, lamplit, the ceiling shadowed and far above; the enormous bed, level with my head, on which my father lay, for he was ill again: these days they would be making jokes about couvade. Women were supposed to stay in bed for at least a month after childbirth, preferably six weeks, all the time bound tightly from waist to knee with rigid linen – hard to believe that my energetic mother would submit to this, and she was standing by an enormous cot that was all ebullient white flounces of dotted white muslin. The cot was well above my head, and she was bending past it and saying persuasively, ‘It is your baby, Doris, and you must love it.’ From the depths of the white flounces she lifted a bundle of baby and this was held close to me so that, if I were stupid, I could believe I held it. The baby I do not remember. I was in a flame of rage and resentment. It was not my baby. It was their baby. But I can hear now that persuasive lying voice, on and on and on, and it would go on until I gave in. The power of that rebellious flame, strong even now, tells me it was by no means the first time I was told, lyingly, what I must feel. For it was not my baby. Obviously it was not. Probably Truby King or even Montessori had prescribed that the older dispossessed child must be tricked into love, thus cleverly outwitting jealousy. I hated my mother for it. I hated her absolutely. But I was helpless. Love the baby I did. I loved that baby, and then the infant, and then the little boy with a most passionate protective love. This is not only an authentic memory, every detail present after all this time, but deduction too. By this event and others of the same kind my emotional life was for ever determined.
All you need is love. Love is all you need. A child should be governed by love, as my mother so often said, explaining her methods to us. She had not known love as a child, and was making sure we would not be similarly deprived. The trouble is, love is a word that has to be filled with an experience of love. What I remember is hard bundling hands, impatient arms and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me.
The fact was, my early childhood made me one of the walking wounded for years. A dramatic remark, and pretty distasteful, really, but used with an exact intention although it makes me easy victim to the current obsessionalists who see evidences of ‘abuse’ everywhere. They mean, usually, sexual abuse. If you say, I wasn’t abused, they at once put on that knowing-better smile used by certain kinds of analyst. But these hysterical mass movements surge past, die, change into something else, perhaps even into an examination not of sexual handling or using of children (which I think are not as common as some people want to believe), rather into the emotional hurts which are common, are the human condition, part of everyone’s infancy. I think that some psychological pressures, and even well-meant ones, are as damaging as physical hurt. However that may be, all my life I have understood, felt at home with, sometimes lived with, people who had bad childhoods (I nearly wrote, conventionally bad childhoods). They were adopted and then neglected, spent time in care or in orphanages, were bargaining counters in savage power games between parents, were sent too young to cruel or cold schools – now we might be getting somewhere, but that was a late hurt, not an original one. All these people had put themselves together after panic flight from home, or a collapse. For years my friends were nearly all people who had created their own families. Then, it was not all that common, but now it is. The world is so full of war, civil war, famines, epidemics, that waifs and strays are bred, it seems, by the million. They create for themselves a family. In every one of them is a place, large or small, that is an emotional wasteland.
Yet my mother was conscientious, hardworking, always doing the best as she saw it. She was a good sort, a good sport. She never hit or even slapped a child. She talked about love often. The tenderness she had never been taught came out in worrying and fussing and – in the case of my brother – making him ‘delicate’ so she could nurse him; in my case, actually making me sick for a time.
My father was affectionate but he was not tender. Neither parent liked displays of emotion. If my mother’s daughter had been like her, of the same substance, everything would have gone well. But it was her misfortune to have an over-sensitive, always observant and judging, battling, impressionable, hungry-for-love child. With not one, but several, skins too few.
The Tehran nursery was English, Edwardian, and could have been in London. An enormous room, square, high, filled like a lumber room with heavy furniture. In the wall burns a fierce and exuberant fire, held safe from the room and from curious children by a brass fireguard like a gate. On the brass rails are folded ironed clothes and nappies, airing. A wooden folding stand holds wads and pads and swaddles of clothes, more and more bibs, nappies, vests, binders, woollies, robes, dresses, socks, caps, jackets, shawls. All that side of the room is screened by a wall of these clothes, and behind them in the wall itself are cupboards packed with piles of jackets and dresses and petticoats in wool and in lawn, in nun’s veiling and in silk, in cotton and in flannel. Hundreds of them, dozens of everything. This wardrobe is needed for two tiny children, who are sitting on chamber pots low down among the vast chairs and a high chair like scaffolding. The air in that room is all smells. The scorch of newly ironed cloth, vaseline, Elliman’s Embrocation, cod-liver oil, almond oil, camphorated oil, Pears soap, the nostril-expanding tang from the copper jug and basin on the washstand, the airless smell of flames, paraffin from the little stove that heats bottles and milk, the smell of the contents of the two pots that are only partially kept confined by the small bottoms. Heavy curtains hold dust, behind them muslin curtains with their smell of soap, and the wood smells of furniture polish. The curtains have blue and pink Bo-peeps and lambs, but otherwise everything, but everything, is white. A suffocation of smelly whiteness.
First the tiny girl and then the baby, who always did what she did, lift a bottom off the pot and the women in the room exclaim and coo, Harry is a good little baba, Doris is a good little baba.
So rewarding was this continuous daily and nightly approval, that Doris actually arrived at a formal Legation dinner party holding out a pot and announcing, ‘Doddis is a good little baba.’ I would not have paid this memory much respect if, decades later, this same Doris, having finished a novel which was to arrive at the publisher’s next day, had not dreamed she walked into the publisher’s office – Jonathan Cape, as it happened – holding out a pot that contained a manuscript. Doris had been a good little girl. She was full of the glow of achievement, of having proved herself worthy of loving affection.
I offer this as my contribution to understanding the far from simple relations between publishers and authors. (I think it is necessary for the sake of the uninstructed to insist that this dream, so say experts, is the best of auguries.)
There were two women in the nursery. My mother was enormous, solid, a vibrating column of efficiency and ruthless energy, and part of my attention was always on her, for I was afraid she would carelessly knock me over, tread on me. She was taller and larger than the other woman, whom an adult would judge as small. This was Marta, a Syrian, a cross old woman, the nurse. She spoke only French. This pleased my mother, bent on getting her children properly educated. Has this left me with a natural disposition for French, though I have never done more than read it, and use it on the restaurant, taxi, it-is-a-fine-day, where do you live, level? It could be said, yes, for any other language I attempt to learn, no matter how much effort I put in, is screened from me by French. The first word that comes is French, and has to be batted out of my brain. Often baby words, nursery talk.
Just as I now wonder about Emily Flower, who did not deserve even a photograph, and about Caroline May Batley, whose son disliked her and whose husband married again the year she died, I would like to know more about Marta, forced to be a nursemaid in the English family. ‘Old Marta.’ But she doesn’t look so old in the photographs. What war, calamity, famine, personal misfortune forced her to work in the strict English nursery where her sufferings and loneliness goaded her tongue and made her hands hard and unkind? At least, with me. ‘Bébé is my child, madame. Doris is not my child. Doris is your child. But Bébé is mine.’ So she said. Often. And very often was I reminded of it, all through my childhood, with the relish that always accompanied such information. Now I see this pleasure in authenticating my inadequacies not only as insensitivity, which it was, but also as another expression of my mother’s natural theatricality. She might have been an actress, but I am sure that did not occur to her. If it was shameful for a nice girl to be a nurse, how much worse to go on the stage? John William would have died from the disgrace of it. Yet it was born in her. Years after the Tehran nursery, she would bring to life Marta, an irritable scolding old woman. ‘I had to stop her slapping and pinching you. She never slapped Baby. She loved him too much for that. “Méchante, tu es méchante!”’ she snapped at me, in Marta’s voice. And I knew how she experienced her father, for she became the cold angry man, his mouth full of self-righteous platitudes, and the frightened little girl standing stiffly in front of him, looking bravely up into the face of Authority.
She did not weep when her father was harsh: she stood up to him by being everything he demanded of her, and more. I on the other hand fought Marta for my rights in that nursery, and unloved children are not ‘nice’, not ‘gentille’. Who did love the child? Her father. The smell of maleness, tobacco, sweat, the smell of father, enveloped her in safety.
When I wrote Memoirs of a Survivor I called it, ‘An Attempt at an Autobiography’, but no one was interested. Foreign publishers simply left it off the title page, and soon no one remembered to put it on reprints in English. People seemed embarrassed. They did not understand it, they said. For thousands upon thousands of years, we – humankind – have told ourselves tales and stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly. But after three centuries of the Realistic Novel, in many people this part of the brain has atrophied.
To me nothing seems more simple than the plan of this novel. A middle-aged person – the sex does not matter – observes a young self grow up. A general worsening of conditions goes on, as has happened in my lifetime. Waves of violence sweep past – represented by gangs of young and anarchic people – go by, and vanish. These are the wars and movements like Hitler, Mussolini, Communism, white supremacy, systems of brutal ideas that seem for a time unassailable, then collapse. Meanwhile behind a wall, other things go on. The dissolving wall is an ancient symbol, perhaps the oldest. When you make up a story, and you need a symbol or analogy, it is always best to choose the oldest and most familiar. This is because it is already there, in the human mind, is an archetype, leads easily in from the daytime world to the other one. Behind my wall two different kinds of memory were being played, like serial dreams. There are the general, if you like, communal, dreams, shared by many, like the house you know well, but then find in it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you did not know were there, or the dream of gardens beneath gardens, or the visits to landscapes never known in life. The other kind was of personal memories, personal dreams. For years I had wondered if I could write a book, a personal history, but told through dreams, for I remember dreams well, and sometimes have kept notes of them. Graham Greene has tried something of the kind. This idea of a dream autobiography became the world behind the wall in Memoirs of a Survivor. I used the nursery in Tehran, and the characters of my parents, both exaggerated and enlarged, because this is appropriate for the world of dreams. I used that aspect of my mother which she herself described as ‘I have sacrificed myself for my children.’ Women in those days felt no inhibitions about saying this: most are too psychologically sophisticated now. She was the frustrated complaining woman I first met as my mother, but who has often appeared in my life, sometimes as a friend. She talks all the time about what a burden her children are to her, how they take it out of her, how much she is unfulfilled and unappreciated, how no one but a mother knows how much she has to give of herself to ungrateful children who soak up her precious talents and juices like so many avid sponges.
The point is, this kind of talk goes on in front of the children, as if they were not present, and cannot hear how she tells the world what a burden her children are, what a disappointment, how they drain her life from her. There is no need to look for memories of ‘abuse’, cruelty and the rest. I remember very well – though how old I was I do not know – leaning against my father’s knee, the real one, not the metal-and-wood knee, while my mother chatted on and on in her social voice to some visitor about her children, how they brought her low and sapped her, how all her own talents were withering unused, how the little girl in particular (she was so difficult, so naughty!) made her life a total misery. And I was a cold flame of hatred for her, I could have killed her there and then. Then this was succeeded by a weariness, a bitterness. How could she talk about me as if I were not there? And about my little brother whom I so adored, as a burden? Hypocrisy – for she adored him, and said so. How could she diminish and demean and betray me like this? And to a mere visitor … I knew my father did not like her doing it: I could feel what he felt coming into me from him. He was suffering, because of this great lump of solid, heavy insensitivity, his wife, who did not seem to know what she was doing.
And yet, what was she doing? No more than other women did. Than women so often do. Everywhere, you can hear them at it on trains and on buses, on the streets, in shops, tugging their kids along by the hand or pushing them roughly in their pushchairs; they complain and they nag, while their children, assumed to be without ears, are told how they destroy her, how she does not want them and – for what else can she mean as she talks like this? – what a mistake she has made in having them at all.
I do not believe that even robust and insensitive children remain unaffected by this assault on their very existence.
But I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by those robust and efficient hands.
And my father, always suffering and shrinking because of the unawareness of his wife? Was a skin scrubbed off him by the efficient Caroline May? And what about all those other melancholy long-headed semi-poets of his family? Or is there such a thing as a gene for the condition, being born with a skin too few?
All I know is that I remember, sharp and clear and immediate, nothing invented or made up about it, how my father sat and watched the events and people around him with a slow, relishing, sardonic smile. (This same smile being the equivalent of the novelist’s contemplation of the world.) And when the cross old nurse Marta and the great bustling woman who was my mother made me want to crawl off somewhere to hide, or made me hate them so much I would have killed them if I could, then it was with my father I took refuge.
And yet. In that house in Tehran – not in the overcrammed nursery, but down in the drawing room, equally crammed and crowded with furniture but at least not white, white, deadly white – every night took place a ritual. We, the small children, were led down by the nurse for the bedtime game. We had pillowfights, were chased, caught, thrown up in the air – and tickled. This goes on now in many middle-class families, considered salutary, character building. I see now the inflamed, excited face of my mother, as her pillow flailed against mine, or my little brother’s. I hear the excited cries from myself and my brother and my mother as the air filled with feathers and my head began to ache. And then the moment when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell – he never did go in for washing much, and – don’t forget – this was before easy dry-cleaning, and people’s clothes smelled, they smelled horrible. By now my head is aching badly, the knocking headache of over-excitement. His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate. Then tears. But we were being taught how to be good sports. For being a good sport was necessary for the middle-class life. To put up with ‘ragging’ and with being hurt, with being defeated in games, being ‘tickled’ until you wept, was a necessary preparation.
It does not have to be like this, for you may watch a very little child being gently chased and tickled in a real game, not an exercise in disguised bullying. But I did not stop having nightmares about those great hands torturing my ribs until I was seven or eight. These nightmares are as clear in my mind now as they were then, though the emotion has long gone away. I became an expert on nightmares and how to outwit them when I was a small child, and that nightmare of being helpless and ‘tickled’ was the worst.
Yet my father was my ally, my support, my comforter. I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by ‘games’, by ‘tickling’. No, I am not one of them. In all my life I have never been hit, slapped, or in any way at all physically maltreated by a man, and I am saying this because at this particular time it is hard even to pick up a popular paper without reading about women being physically bullied by men. There are worse kinds of bullying.
And now here is a deduced memory. In the big room where the bedtime rituals took place were heavy red velvet curtains. That they were heavy I know because of the memory of velvet dragging on my skin, my limbs, and I clung to folds that filled my small arms. That they were red I believe because when I was doing apprentice pieces in my twenties, several Poe-like stories appeared where red velvet curtains concealed threat. In one over-worked piece there was a man in a wheelchair who drove a child back and back across a room to a wall that was all red velvet, and when she took one step too far back through them, on the other side was no wall, only empty space. There are any number of childhood ‘games’ that could account for this one. The story was called ‘Fear and Red Velvet’.
I have been writing of the tactile and sensuous subjective experience of a child, smelly, noisy, the rumble of a mother’s stomach as she reads to you, the bubbling dottle in Daddy’s pipe, the pounding of blood in your ears – all the din and stink and smother of life which a child soon learns to shut out, if she is not to be overwhelmed by it. But all that – and the battle for survival – went on side by side with what was being provided intelligently and competently by my mother, the daughter of John William, who had taught her what a good parent must provide for a child. For if my mother was an over-disciplined little girl frightened ever to defy her father – until she did, when she went to be a nurse – then she was also taken as a matter of course to Mafeking Night, and the celebrations at the end of the Boer War, and to all the Exhibitions, and to line the route when foreign kings and queens came on State Visits, and for trips on the new railways. She was taught to admire Darwin and Brunei, and to be proud of Britain’s role as the great exemplar of progress. She was taught to take herself off to museums and to use libraries.
And in Tehran, she made sure her children experienced what they should. I was held high through the same velvet curtains to see the night sky. ‘Moon, moon’ – lisped attractively, for my mother as she reported this became a winsome little girl. ‘Starth, starth’ – she said I said. When my father, with no histrionic talent at all, tried to say a child’s ‘moon’, but with a French ‘u’, for was it not also a lune? – then he failed. When it snowed – for it certainly snows heavily there, in Tehran, and I can see any time I want to the sheets of sparkling white over shrubs and walls – my mother built snowmen, with eyes of coal and noses of carrots, and cats of snow with green stone eyes. She was good at it, and made them well, and taught us how to say nose, and eyes, and paws and whiskers in French. She took us to mild slopes of snow, which I saw like the foothills of Everest, and pushed us off into snowdrifts while we clutched at teatrays, explaining that snow is water, which can also be ice and rain and hail. At holidays we were taken to the mountains, to Gulahek, whose name means a place of roses, and there in my mind now are the roses, red and white, pink and yellow, smelling of pleasure. And we were taken on picnics and to the Legation children’s fancy dress parties. All these events were presented to us as our heritage, and our due, and, too, our responsibility. This was snow, those were stars, and here on this rocky face near the road was where Khosrhu on horseback had been carved thousands of years ago – and the thousands of years, as she said it, became yesterday, appropriated as our heritage. When we went to parties at the Legation her voice told us this was where we belonged, these were nice people, and we were nice people too. But my father did not like Mrs Nelligan, the senior lady of the British community. If my mother’s voice had an orchestra of tones telling us what we must admire, then so did my father’s, contradicting hers, for he never liked people because of their degrees of ‘niceness’, and if I did not then understand this, I knew very well he criticized her for liking others because of their position in society, not because they were likeable. To write about all this now, the terrible snobbery of the time, is to invite, ‘Well what of it? That was then, it was that time …’ But if the vocabulary of snobbery has changed, its structure has not, and the same mechanisms operate now, while people laugh (mindlessly, I think) about the old days.
The truth is, she did very well for us, my brother and me, in that country where she enjoyed the best years of her life, for she might have been frustrated in all that side of her nature which would have made her a brilliantly efficient matron of a big hospital, but there was never a woman who enjoyed parties and good times more than she did, enjoyed being popular and a hostess and a good sort, the mother of two pretty, well-behaved, well-brought-up, clean children.
She told us over and over again, for it was so important to her, long after, in Africa, how she had dressed up for a fancy dress ball at the Legation as a cockney flower girl (and did she know that she was for that evening her own poor mother Emily?) and while she was dancing with some young man on the Legation staff, he stopped in the middle of the dance floor and said, scarlet with shame, ‘Good Lord, you aren’t Maude Tayler, are you? You are so pretty I didn’t recognize you.’ And of course slunk away, because of his gaffe. For my mother was supposed to be plain, a plain Jane, all her life. I think it was the need to make sure she didn’t become vain and flighty, like Emily. As a child, listening to the reminiscence (again and again), my heart hurt for her, and it went on hurting, as the story went on being told, for years – all her life – while her eyes glistened with real tears as she remembered the young man who thought she was so pretty.
There are memories that have about them something of the wonderful, the marvellous. A man, a gardener – Persian – stands over stone water channels, that come under the brick wall into the garden, bringing water from the snow-mountains, and he is pretending to be angry because I am jumping in and out of the delicious water, which splashes him too. I am sent by my parents into the kitchen to tell the servants that dinner may be served, and that is Tehran because I have my brother by the hand, and I look up, up, up at these tall dignified men and see that their faces are grave under their turbans, but their eyes smile.
And the most important, the one that has about it charm, magic, is also the most nebulous, and perhaps I dreamed it. I have lost my toy sheep, a bit of wood on wheels that has real sheepskin wrapped around. I am crying, and wander off and see a flock of sheep and the shepherd, a tall brown man in his brown robes, looking down at me. The dust is swirling around him and the sheep, and a sunset reddens the dust. That is all. In my Tales from the Bible for Children was a drawing of the Good Shepherd, but that could not have in it the dust, nor the smell of sheep and dust. The memory is charged with meaning, comes back and back, and I never know why.
Soon the tastes, textures, smells, of Persia faded because of the immediacy of the colours and smells and sounds of Africa, and it was only in the late 1980s that I went to Pakistan and there met a self still immersed in that early world. The voice of the man who chanted, or sang – what is the word for the most haunting of sounds, the Call to Prayer? … the slant of hot sun on a whitewashed wall where reddish dust lived in the grain of the white … and the smells, the smells, a compound of sunheated dust, urine, spices, petrol, animal dung … and the sounds and voices of the bazaar and its colour, explosions of colour … and the sad bray of donkeys who, according to the ideas of Islam, are shameful because they cry only for food and sex, but I think they cry from loneliness, and prefer Chesterton’s celebration of donkeys.
A cock crowing, a donkey braying, dust on a whitewashed wall – and there is Persia, and now, where I live in London, just down the hill a cock sometimes crows and at once I hardly know where I am.
Far away from England, in Persia, my parents were not as cut off from their family as they soon would be in Africa, for at least two relatives came to visit: one was Harry Lott, a cousin of my father’s. It is strange that of this man he talked of so often, for so many years, I can say nothing, for I don’t remember him. Uncle Harry Lott was the family’s good friend: he sent presents and wrote letters, and that went on when we were in Africa, too, until he died. ‘Oh he did love you kids, he couldn’t get enough of you,’ says Daddy, adding characteristically, ‘God knows why.’ And now I watch some little child in the arms of a loving friend, and know this will affect the child for always, like a little secret store of goodness, or one of those pills with a delayed reaction, releasing elixirs into the bloodstream all day – or for all of a life. But the child may remember nothing about it, not a thing. I find it a pretty uncomfortable experience, watching small children and what moulds and influences them, and they become adolescents, and you know exactly why they do this or that, while they often do not. And then they are young adults, still set in patterns of behaviour whose origins you know. Or, after a separation you meet this child grown or half-grown, and you find yourself searching in eyes that are unconscious of what you are looking for, or examine the way arms go around a friend, stiffly or warmly, or how a hand rests tenderly on the head of a dog.
The other visitor was Aunt Betty Cleverly, whose great love had been killed in the war – like all the women of her age in Europe then. She was a cousin of my father’s, a big untidy woman with a buck-toothed smile. She, too, loved us, and for years and years my brother and I were told of it, but what I remember is being in her bed in the early morning, and on the bedside table the early morning tea tray, she in a long-sleeved, very pink woollen nightgown, her long hair filling the bed and tangling me in soap-smelling brown silk, while she is soaking Marie biscuits in strong tea, giving me fragments to taste, and laughing while I shudder at the bitter taste, and she gives me a new clean biscuit and cries, ‘Don’t tell Mummy, I’m spoiling your appetite for breakfast.’ Then she sings ‘Lead Kindly Light’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ in a strong throaty voice, conducting herself with a teaspoon. Off she goes to China, for she is a missionary, and her letters to my parents report on the ways of the heathen who were being brought under control by Christianity, and on the London Missionary Society, and on parish matters back home in England.
When my father was due his leave at Home, after nearly five years of the Imperial Bank of Persia, first as branch manager in Kermanshah, and then as Assistant Manager in Tehran, he was expecting to return to Persia, and my parents’ minds were full of anxieties about how to educate their children. To leave the older child, me, behind in England, aged five, would have been usual for the time, but my mother knew from Kipling’s ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ what horrors of bullying and neglect small children could suffer because of ill-chosen parental substitutes. My father did not want to return to Persia. The social life bored him. He never had enjoyed working in a bank. The Persians were corrupt and when he said so no one seemed to think it mattered.
Meanwhile absence from England had not made his heart grow fonder. Nor did it, ever. Until he died he would see England – England, not Britain, or at least it was not Britain he apostrophized – as a country that had betrayed its promises to its people, as cynical, as corrupt. It was full of complacent crooks who had got rich out of the war and of stupid women who gave white feathers to men in civvies, half-dead from the Trenches, and then spat at them. And the people had no idea of what the Trenches had been like. And he would sing, all his life, his voice stiff with anger,
And when they ask us …And they’re certainly going to ask us …We’re going to tell them …
But they didn’t ask, they never did, for the war had become the Great Unmentionable. Yet now he had to face six months’ leave in the place. He would have to spend time with his brother Harry, whom he had always disliked, and who patronized him, for he was the successful one, a manager of the branch of the Westminster Bank, with a yacht and a smart car and a house my father hated, for it was the essence of smart suburbia. What matched his idea of himself, and where he had felt perfectly at home, was the great stone house in Kermanshah, with the snow-covered mountains all around. But he had lost that for ever. He did not like his brother’s wife, Dolly, found her silly and suburban. He disliked his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret, and thought my mother’s brother a bore. Six months of relatives, hell on earth, in snobby, self-important, provincial, parish pump, ignorant, little England. And then back to Tehran again, and its busy snobbish social life, the picnics and the Legation parties and the musical evenings where his wife played, while some young man sang ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. ‘Why can’t people sit at home and be quiet?’ he demanded, like the philosophers. But my mother merely smiled, for she knew she was in the right. The trouble was, his eccentricity was infecting her daughter.
‘No I don’t want to, I won’t,’ I weep, being forced into a Bo-peep costume. ‘I don’t want to be Bo-peep. Why can’t I be a rabbit like Harry?’ My mother laughs at me because of the ridiculousness, and the trouble is, I can feel my face wanting to laugh too. I change ground. ‘I don’t want to go to the party. I don’t like parties.’ ‘Nonsense. Of course you like parties. Of course you want to be Bo-peep.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t.’ ‘Don’t be silly. Tell her she’s being silly, Michael.’ ‘Why should she go if she doesn’t want to?’ says Daddy, testy, irritable – difficult. ‘I don’t want to go either. Parties! Who thought of them first? Whoever it was should be hanged, drawn and quartered. The devil, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ ‘Oh Michael …’ ‘No, I tell you, I’ve only got to think of a party and I want to upchuck. And that’s what these kids are going to do. Well, don’t they? They get overexcited, they eat too much, sick all over the place.’ ‘Oh rubbish, Michael, you like parties really.’
No hatred on earth is as violent as the helpless rage of a little child. And there was Gerald Nelligan, confronting his mother and shouting, ‘No I don’t want to, I won’t dress up, why should I?’ He was two years older than me, a big boy, but he flung himself down in the flailing white-faced yelling rage you see trapped children use every day. But they will be saying later, ‘I had a wonderfully happy childhood.’ Nature knows what it is doing, prescribing amnesia for early childhood.
And now, the cat: I wrote about this cat in Particularly Cats, but I know it needs more emphasis. ‘You found that dirty cat in the gutter and brought it into the drawing room, and it was bigger than you were,’ said my mother, being the child and the cat together. ‘And you insisted on having it in your bed. We washed it in permanganate …’ An essential prop of the British Empire, permanganate of potash. ‘And old Marta came storming in and said, “Why is that dirty cat allowed here?”’ But I was allowed the cat, and how much I loved it does not need much in the way of deduction. For years the death of a cat plunged me into grief so terrible I had to regard myself as rather mad. Did I feel anything as bad when my mother died, my father died? I did not. That old cat, rescued from slow death on the streets of Tehran, was my friend, and when we left Persia, what happened to it? They told me soothing lies, but I did not believe them, for I wept inconsolably. ‘You were inconsolable,’ says my mother.
I was getting on for being an old woman when I experienced grief which, on a scale of one to ten – ten being the real, frightful sodden depression that immobilizes, and which I have not myself experienced – was at nine. On this scale, grief for a dying cat is at four or five, while grief for parents and brother is at two. Clearly, the pulverizing pain over the cat is ‘referred pain’ as the doctors call it, when you have pain in one organ, but really another is the cause. Surely one has to ask, but why? And, at force nine, I was pulverized with a grief I did not know the origin of, and still don’t.
But the question surely must be, why, of so many memories from that early time, there are so few that are jolly, pleasant, happy, even comfortable? That hungry, angry little heart simply refused to be appeased? Is there a clue in the business with the photographer? I was three and a half. There survives a photograph of a thoughtful little girl, a credit to everyone concerned, but as it happens I remember what I was feeling. There had been a long nag and fuss, and worry and trouble about the dress, of brown velvet, and it was hot and itchy. My stockings had been hard to get on, were twisted and wrinkled, and had to be hitched up with elastic. My new shoes were uncomfortable. My hair had been brushed, and done again and again. There was a padded stool I was supposed to sit on but it was hard to climb on to and then stay on, for it was slippery. I had also been put on a very large solid carved wooden chair, but then they said it was not right for me. They? – my mother and the photographer, a professional, whose studio was full of Japanese screens showing sunsets and lake scenes and flying storks, of chairs and tables and cushions and stuffed animals to set the scene for children. But I insisted on my own teddy, scruffy, but my friend. I felt low and nervous and guilty, because I was causing so much trouble: as usual it was as if my mother had tied, but too fast and awkwardly, a large clumsy parcel – me – and I did not fit in anywhere, and might suddenly come untied and fall apart and let her down. I felt weary. This small sad weariness is the base or background for all my memories. Everything was too much, that was the point, too high, or too heavy, or too difficult, or too loud or bright, and I could never manage it all, though they expected me to.
4 (#ulink_40d703cf-5ce1-5d39-860f-8e91cc6ddd79)
WHEN MY MOTHER DECIDED to travel to England via Moscow, across Russia, because she did not want to expose her little children to the heat of the Red Sea, she did not know what she was doing – as she often said herself. ‘If I’d only known!’ She did know we would be the first foreign family to travel in an ordinary way since the Revolution. It was 1924. That it would be difficult, of course she knew, but difficulties are made to be overcome. The journey turned out to be horrendous, told and told again, the vividest chapter in the family chronicle. What I was told and what I remember are not the same, and the most dramatic moment of all is nowhere in my memory. At the Russian frontier, it turned out we did not have the right stamps in our passports, and my mother had to browbeat a bemused official into letting us in. Both my mother and my father loved this incident: she because she had achieved the impossible, he because of his relish for farce. ‘Good Lord, no one would dare to put that on the stage,’ he would say, recalling the calm, in-the-right, overriding British matron, and the ragged and hungry official who had probably never seen a foreign family with well-dressed and well-fed children.
The most dangerous part was at the beginning, when the family found itself on an oil tanker across the Caspian, which had been used as a troop carrier, and the cabin, ‘not exactly everyone’s idea of a cruise cabin’, was full of lice. And, probably, of typhus, then raging everywhere.
The parents sat up all night to keep the sleeping children inside the circles of lamplight, but one arm, mine, fell into the shadow and was bitten by bugs, and swelled up, red and enormous. The cabin was usually shared by members of the crew, and was small. For me it was a vast, cavernous, shadowy place, full of menace because of my parents’ fear, but above all, the smell, a cold stuffy metallic stink which is the smell of lice. From the Caspian to Moscow took several days, and the tale went like this: ‘There was no food on the train, and Mummy got off at the stations to buy from the peasant women, but they only had hard-boiled eggs and a little bread. The samovar in the corridor most of the time didn’t have water. And we were afraid to drink unboiled water. There was typhoid and typhus, and filthy diseases everywhere. And every station was swarming with beggars and homeless children, oh it was horrible, and then Mummy was left behind at a station because the train just started without warning and we thought we would never see her again. But she caught us up two days later. She made the station master stop the next train, and she got on to it and caught us up. All this without a word of Russian, mind you.’
What I remember is something different, parallel, but like a jerky stop-and-start film.
The seats in the compartment, which was like a little room, were ragged, and they smelled of sickness and sweat and of mice, in spite of the Keating’s Insect Powder my mother sprinkled everywhere. Mice scurried under the seats and ran between our feet looking for crumbs. The lamps on the wall were broken, but luckily my mother had thought of candles. At night I woke to see long pale dangerous flames swaying against the black panes where cracks let in air, warm in the south, cold in the north. I held my face in it, because of the smell. It was April. My father had flu, and lay on an upper bunk, away from the two noisy children and our demands. My mother was frightened: the great Flu Epidemic was over, but the threat of it would be heard in people’s voices for years yet. There were little bloody dots and spatters on the seats, and that meant lice had been here. Years later I had to sit myself down and work out why the words flu and typhus made me afraid. Flu was easy, but typhus? It was from that journey. For years the word ‘Russia’ meant station platforms, for the train stopped all the time, at sidings as well as big towns, on the long journey from Baku to Moscow.
The train groaned and rattled and screamed and strained to a stop among crowds of people, and what frightening people, for they were nothing like the Persians. They were in rags, some seemed like bundles of rags, and with their feet tied in rags. Children with sharp hungry faces jumped up at the train windows and peered in, or held up their hands, begging. Then soldiers jumped down from the train and pushed back the people, holding their guns like sticks to hit them with, and the crowds fell back before the soldiers, but then swarmed forward again. Some people lay on the platforms, with their heads on bundles and watched the train, but not expecting anything from it. My parents talked about them, and their voices were low and anxious and there were words I did not know, so I kept saying, what does that mean, what does that mean? The Great War. The Revolution. The Civil War. Famine. The Bolsheviks. But why, Mummy, but why, Daddy? Because we had been told that the besprizorniki – the gangs of children without families – attacked trains when they stopped at stations, as soon as my mother got out to buy food, the compartment door was locked and the windows pushed up. The locks on the door were unsafe and suitcases were pushed against it. This meant my father had to come down from his high shelf. He wore his dark heavy dressing gown, bought for warmth in the Trenches, but under it he kept on all his gear and tackle for the wooden leg, so he could put it on quickly. Meanwhile the pale scarred stump sometimes poked out from the dressing gown, because, he joked, it had a life of its own, for it did not know it was only part of a leg, and in moments of need, as when he leaned forward to open the compartment door to let in my mother – triumphant, holding up her purchases, a couple of eggs, a bit of bread – it tried to behave like a leg, instinctively reaching out to take weight. The two little children fearfully watched our mother out there among those frightening crowds, as she held out money to the peasant women for the hard eggs, the half-loaves of the dark sour stuff that was called bread. The story said we were hungry because there was not enough food, but I don’t remember feeling hungry. Only the fear and the anguish, looking at those swarms of people, so strange, so unlike us, and at the ragged children who had no parents and no one to look after them. When the train jerked forward, the soldiers jumped on to it, clutching what they had managed to buy from the women, and then turned to keep their guns pointed at the children who ran after the train.
The story says we were read to, we played with plasticine, we drew pictures with chalks, we counted telegraph wires and played ‘I-Spy’ out of the windows, but what is in my mind is the train rattling into yet another station – surely it was the same one? – the ragged people, the ragged children. And again my mother was out there, among them all. And then, when the train was pulling out, she did not appear in the corridor outside the compartment, holding up what she had bought to show us. She had been left behind. My sick father held himself upright in the corner and kept saying it was all right, she would come soon, nothing to worry about, don’t cry. But he was worried and we knew it. That was when I first understood the helplessness of my father, his dependence on her. He could not jump down out of the train with his wooden leg and push through the crowds looking for food. ‘You had to share an egg between you and there were some raisins we brought with us, but that was all.’ She would have to reappear, she would have to, and she did, but two days later. Meanwhile our train had been slowing, groaning and screeching, again and again, into stations, into sidings, into the crowds, the besprizomiki, the soldiers with guns. I don’t remember crying and being frightened, all that has gone, but not the rough feel of the dressing gown on my cheek as I sat on my father’s good knee and saw the hungry faces at the window, peering in. But I was safe in his arms.
A small girl sits on the train seat with her teddy and the tiny cardboard suitcase that has teddy’s clothes in it. She takes the teddy’s clothes off, folds them just so, takes another set of clothes from the case, dresses the teddy, tells it to be good and sit quietly, takes this set of clothes off the teddy, folds them, takes a third set of trousers and jacket out, puts the taken-off clothes back in the case, folded perfectly, dresses the teddy. Over and over again, ordering the world, keeping control of events. There, you’re a good teddy, nice and clean.
From Moscow comes the most powerful of all my early memories. I am in a hotel corridor, outside a door whose handle is high above my head. The ceiling is very far away up there, and the great tall shiny doors go all along the corridor, and behind every door is a frightening strangeness, strange people, who appear suddenly out of a doorway or walk fast past all the shut doors, and disappear, or arrive at the turn of the corridor and then vanish into a door. I bang my fists against our door, and cry and scream. No one comes. No one comes for what seems like for ever, but that cannot have been so, the door must have soon opened, but the nightmare is of being shut out, locked out, and the implacable tall shiny door. This shut door is in a thousand tales, legends, myths, the door to which you do not have the key, the door which is the way to – but that is the point, I suppose. Probably it is in our genes, I wouldn’t be surprised, this shut door, and it is in my memory for ever, while I reach up, like Alice, trying to touch the handle.
And now we are in England. One might ask why none of the ‘nice’ memories, like snapshots, of pretty England, hollyhocks, cottage gardens, a thatched cottage, rocky seaside pools, are as powerful as the memories of dismal England – ganglia of black wet railway lines, rain streaming down cold windows, dead pale fish on slabs held right out into the street, the bleeding carcases on their great steel hooks in the butchers’ shops. I met my step-grandmother, so they say, and there is a photograph of me on her knee, but not even a deduced truth emerges. I met my father’s father, whose wife Caroline May died that year, and who was about to marry his thirty-seven-year-old bride: probably like all those women, she had lost her love in the Trenches, and marrying an old man was the only chance she had of a husband.
All kinds of visitings and little trips went on, but children are taken around like parcels. A Miss Steele helped with the children, and it is she who provides the sharpest memory of that six months. A room in a hotel. Again it is crammed with furniture, enormous, difficult to make one’s way around and through. Two large beds, one mine, and a large cot. The flame on the wall, which is gas, is dangerous, and must be watched, like a candle, although it cannot be overturned like a candle, and it makes a striated light in the room, full of air that seems greyish brown. Dark rain streams down dirty panes. It is cold. The damp woollen bundle that is my little brother snuffles drearily in his cot. Miss Steele has ordered us not to watch her while she is dressing. Miss Steele is so tall she seems to reach the ceiling, and she has floods of dark hair about her shoulders, over her front, and down her back. She has on bright pink stays, and pale flesh bulges out showing through the hair, and below it around her thighs. I see my little brother’s bright curious eyes, then he squeezes them shut, pretending to be asleep, then they gleam again. Miss Steele lifts her arms to slip a white camisole over her bushes of hair. Under her arms are silky black beards. I feel sick with curiosity and disgust. There is a smell of dirt and the unwashed smell of Miss Steele, sour and metallic, the smell of wet wool from my brother, and my own dry and warm smell that rises in waves when I lift the grimy blankets and take a sniff. The smells of England, the smells of wet, dirty, dark and graceless England, the smells of the English. I was sickening for Persia and the clean dry sunlight, but did not know what was wrong with me, for small children are so immersed in what surrounds them, their attention demanded all the time by keeping themselves upright and doing the right thing, they have not yet learned that particular nostalgia for place. Or so I think it must be. Or perhaps I was sickening for my lost love, the old cat. Long afterwards, I stood in Granada in Spain and saw the circling snow-topped mountains, and smelled the clean sunny air, and Kermanshah came back, in a rush: this was what it had been like.
But the question surely has at least to be put: why not remember just as intensely the jolly picnics in the hayfield, or the salubrious sandcastles, or the kindly arms of Aunt Betty and Uncle Harry Lott?
A sharp, indeed lurid, little memory is different from all the other English memories. A newspaper comic strip, about the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfski must have been among the very first attempts at anti-Communist propaganda. Wilfski, a bewhiskered villain like a cockroach, was based on Trotsky. He always had a bomb in his hand, threatening to blow something or somebody up. He was designed to inspire fear, horror, and that is what he did.
When we left England for Africa, my father’s father, the widower, stood in his thick tweedy clothes in a dark hall with a grandfather clock ticking just behind him, and he wept, and on his long white beard was a string of snot. This was what the child had to see, for the first years of children are devoted to subduing and ordering the physical, snot, shit, pee, a prison they struggle to get out of, and will not enter again until they are old. The old man wept, his heart was broken, he had not seen his son and his son’s wife for five years, and he had only just met his grandchildren, but now they were off to Africa where the missionaries his church raised funds for converted savages who might even be cannibals. They talked airily of returning in another five years. He wept and wept, and his granddaughter felt sick at the sight of him and would not let herself be kissed. And perhaps he wept, too, because the family did not approve of him marrying Marian Wolfe, ‘a girl half his age’.
The last weeks before leaving England were a rush of buying the things my mother needed for the life she thought she was going to lead. She was guided by leaflets and information from the Empire Exhibition, at whose instigation they were going to Southern Rhodesia, where they would be rich in five years growing maize. For my father, this was a chance to become what he had always wanted to be, ever since his country childhood with the farmers’ sons around Colchester. And there had been farmers in his family. But he had never had the capital to farm. Clearly, the more Exhibitions a nation has, the better. That Empire Exhibition of 1924, which lured my father out to Africa – how often have I come on it in memoirs, novels, diaries. It changed my parents’ lives and set the course of mine and my brother’s. Like wars and famines and earthquakes, Exhibitions shape futures.
Apart from shopping at Harrods, Liberty’s and the Army & Navy Stores, they both had all their teeth out. The dentist and the doctor said so. Teeth were the cause of innumerable ills and woes, they were of no use to anyone, and besides, there would not be any good dentists in Southern Rhodesia. (Untrue.) This savage self-mutilation was common at that time. ‘We continue to burn candles in churches and consult doctors’ – Proust.
The family stood on the deck of the German ship and watched the chalky shores of England recede. My mother wept. The desolation of separation was settling on my heart, but it cannot have been England I wept for, since I hated it. My father’s eyes were wet, but he put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Now come on, old thing!’ And turned her away from the disappearing cliffs to go inside.
There was also on deck, apart from my little brother, Biddy O’Halloran, who was to be our governess. What I know about her is mostly what I was told. She was twenty-one. She was Irish. She was ‘fast’, a ‘flapper’, a Bright Young Thing. She was definitely no better than she ought to be. Why? She had shingled hair, used make-up and smoked, and was too interested in men. Much later my mother was remorseful, because she had given Biddy a hard time. This was when she, too, smoked, cut her hair, and used some lipstick. ‘And I wonder what ever happened to her’ – for Biddy clearly found the experience so appalling she never wrote to us. Later she married an Honourable and was in society newspapers.
But she was just one of the many people who had already appeared in my life and disappeared. Acquaintances, lovers, friends, intimates – off they go. Goodbye. Till next time. A bientôt. Poka. Tot siens. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista. Auf wiedersehen. Do svidania. The way we live now.
It was a long voyage, weeks and weeks. A slow boat. Why a German boat? Perhaps my father was putting into practice his feeling of comradeship with the German soldiers who had been sold down the river by their government, just like the English tommies, and the French poilus.
My father was sick nearly all the way to Cape Town, and then Beira. My mother loved every second. This must have been the last time in her life she enjoyed herself in the way of deck games or bridge, dressing up and dancing and concerts – very much her way, her style.
On this boat I disgraced myself. I was miserable. First there was the Captain, my mother’s chum, for she was up on deck with him when everyone else was in their bunks being sick in a Force 9 gale, and this established them in a teasing good-fellows’ friendship. Joking, joshing, baiting, pulling each other’s legs. ‘Ribbing.’ (Does this word come from the torture of tickling, great hands squeezing small ribs?) It was a most hearty jollity, and he was full of practical jokes. When I was dressed up in my party dress, he invited me to sit on a cushion where he had placed an egg, swearing it wouldn’t break. Since it was obvious it would break, I did not want to sit. My mother said I must be a good sport. I sat on the egg and it sploshed under me and spoiled my dress and the Captain roared and rolled about. I was not only angry but felt betrayed. My father was disturbed, but to be a good sport, he must have felt, was the main thing. When we crossed the Line, I was thrown in, though I could not swim, and was fished out by a sailor. This kind of thing went on, and I was permanently angry and had nightmares. I think my mother was having such a good time that her normal obsessive care for her offspring was taking a holiday, for she was not one to take nightmares lightly – if she had been told of them. Besides, was not Biddy there to look after us?
It occurs to me that when my mother became such friends with the German captain two tributaries of a river met. The joshing, ribbing, teasing and ragging came from the English public schools she so much admired, and they were originally inspired by the Prussian elite schools where cruelty was practised on children. The Captain was hardly likely to have been a member of the Prussian elite but then, these examples of good living filter down. And was my mother cruel? Absolutely not. But we can all do whatever it is that is the done thing. Well, nearly all.
In the evenings she put on her beautiful evening dresses and went up to dinner at the Captain’s table, to the parties, the dances, the treasure hunts. So did Biddy O’Halloran. We children were shut in the cabin and told to be good. My brother, as ever obedient, slept. I wanted to be where the fun was. But my mother said the evenings were for grown-ups and I would not enjoy it. But I knew I would enjoy it, and she knew I would enjoy it. I hated her. It was no good, the door was locked. I climbed up on to the dressing table and found nail scissors and cut holes in an evening dress. Small hands, the nail scissors were small, and it was hard manipulating them in the thick slippery material. I could not have done much damage, but it is the thought that counts. I was weeping and howling with rage. No, I certainly was not punished. But I was held on her knee through one of those scenes, her voice low, throbbing with reproach, intimate, while she talked about behaving well and about love – hers – and being good for the sake of being good.
And yet, while all these betrayals and injustices went on, the business of education went on too, for this was, after all, my mother’s main business. Tiny children were held up in their parents’ arms and instructed to watch flying fish, porpoises, the colours of sunsets, the trajectories of other ships whose funnels trailed smoke smudges across fair skies, the birds sitting on the rigging and on the rails, seagulls flying low after the ship to catch the scraps flung out to them by sailors, the phosphorescence on the waves at night, moonlight, and lifeboat drill – this last being far from an academic exercise, since her great love the young doctor had drowned for lack of a lifeboat. And, as a special favour from the Captain, we were taken down, down, through the world of bright corridors. And then, suddenly, we were in another world of oily metal stairways and big black pipes running and bending on steel walls. My brother and I clutched each other and stood looking down from what seemed a tiny platform, only part of a walkway into the bottom of the ship, where dirty half-naked men shovelled coal into the mouths of furnaces, one, two, three, four – more, we could not count them, and the flames reared up and flung red light on to naked sweaty torsos. These men looked up and saw two small clean children, the privileged, peering down at them with horror on their faces, and behind them the parents in their good clean clothes, and the Captain himself in this part of the ship where they did not expect to see him. And they swung their bodies hard in the rhythm of the work, while arcs of black coal reached from them to the flames, and then they looked up, and their white teeth showed in grimed faces. It was like the besprizorniki on the Russian railway platforms, it was the other world, where people had holes in their clothes and bones showed on their faces. I was afraid, looking down at the men who shovelled coal while the sweat poured off them, just as I had been looking out of the dirty cracked train windows.
In Walvis Bay I met death for the first time, on the beach, a sea ebbing from sands where tiny fish lay dying in a sea-puddle. They wriggled and writhed and gasped, and then I saw that drifts of dead little fish lay all over the sands. ‘Are they dead?’ I asked, wanting confirmation, wanting the word to fit what I saw: my father and mother understood the gravity of the moment, and my father said, ‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ and my mother said, ‘Well, never mind.’ A howlingly beautiful sunset filled the sky and I understood: this is how things are and there is nothing to be done about it.
Somewhere in the Cape, ostriches ran high-stepping across scrubby sands with blue mountains far behind them. Distance. The empty distances of Africa. But the family went on in the ship around the coast to Beira, of which nothing remains in my mind, not the railway journey up to Salisbury, nor Salisbury itself, which was then a little town you could stroll across in twenty minutes, nor the twenty miles’ journey to Lilfordia, where we were to lodge while the farm was chosen.
Why ostriches, and not the ox wagons that still used the Salisbury streets, built wide so that the wagons could turn in them? Why the train in Russia but not the train Beira-to-Salisbury, surely equally exotic? Why remember this and not that? If I had decided to remember only the unpleasant, then why the ostriches, which were pure delight?
Lilfordia was the home of the Lilford family, later to be famous in the Bush War (the War of Liberation), because of Boss Lilford and his services to the white cause. Then it consisted of many rondaavels, solid and well-built thatched brick huts, scattered among shrubs which, we were at once warned, should not be approached incautiously, because of snakes. From the grown-ups’ voices – the Lilfords’ – it was clear these were no more of a danger than knocking a candle or a lamp over when playing too roughly, only something to look out for.
My father left us there and went off to look for a farm, I think, on a horse. This was when the white government was selling land to ex-servicemen for practically nothing, and when the Land Bank supported struggling white farmers on long-term loans. He would start farming on a loan. My parents had £1,000 and my father would have a pension because of his cut-off leg. He was also entitled to free repairs to his wooden leg, and, too, a spare one. This was well before the miracle legs of now, which can dance, climb, jump – do everything a normal leg does.
He chose the district of Lomagundi because it was a maize-growing area. It was in the north-east of Southern Rhodesia, very wild and with few people in it, and it stretched all the way up to the Zambesi escarpment. Banket, a large part of Lomagundi, not only grew good maize but had its name because it was full of quartz reefs similar to the rock formations called ‘banket’ on the Rand down south. So there were gold mines too. He and my mother must have realized by now that the enticements of the Empire Exhibition had little to do with reality. Fortunes had been made out of maize during the war, but were not being made now. But maize was what he wanted to grow. And that area was still being ‘opened up for settlement’. It would not have occurred to them that the land belonged to the blacks. Civilization was being brought to savages, was how they saw it, because the British Empire was a boon and a benefit to the whole world. I do not think it can be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity. There was another reason why my parents’ view of themselves was similar to that of the English settlers on the eastern coast of America: they were colonizing an almost empty land. When the whites arrived in Southern Rhodesia thirty-four years before, there were, it is now believed, a quarter of a million black people in that land, roughly the size of Spain. When my parents arrived in 1924 there were half a million.
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My father was away some time and returned with the news that he had found a farm, or rather land that would be a farm – unstumped bush, quite undeveloped, nothing on it at all, not a house or a well or a road. My mother went off with him to look at it. They were driven by someone from the Land Department. Meanwhile we children were left with Biddy O’Halloran at Lilfordia. There it was that I reached the summit of childish wickedness. The hut where my brother and I were lodged also held Biddy. What must it have been like to share air and space with two little children, both of whom spent so much time on the pot? – for toilet training remained a sovereign prescription for good character. In the hut were two low beds, made after the fashion of the time. Into the hard mud floor were inserted short forked sticks. Into these forks were laid poles. On this square framework were laced strips of ox-hide. The lattices supported mattresses. There was a large metal cot for Harry. It goes without saying that Biddy liked my brother, sweet, obedient, delightful, the ideal little child; I would have preferred him too. There were two Lilford girls, to me big girls, ten or eleven, sunburned, bare-limbed, bare-footed, athletic and lean, unlike any children I had seen. They included little Harry in their games, but not me. I thought them sharp and sly and cruel. Their accent made them hard to understand. I was afraid of them. I longed to be included in their games. ‘Just now,’ they said. ‘Just now.’ Meaning perhaps – sometime – never. The sharp pain of exclusion.
Now I began to steal, ridiculous things like pots of rouge, ribbons, scissors, and money too. I lied about everything. There were storms of miserable hot rage, like being burned alive by hatred. When my parents came back and asked, But why scissors? I said I wanted to kill Biddy. They knew what I needed was a regular nursery routine, an ordered life, but how and when? Before that could happen, there must be a home, and it wasn’t built yet. We set off in an ox wagon on the road north. The road was then a track, and it was January, the rainy season, so the track was mud. The wagon was drawn by sixteen trek oxen. Into it went three adults and two children, and necessities, but the trunks of smart clothes, curtain materials from Liberty’s, heavy table silver, Persian carpets, a copper jug and basin, books, pictures and the piano, would come on later, by train. We were five days and nights in the wagon, because of swollen rivers and the bad road, but there is only one memory, not of unhappiness and anger, but the beginnings of a different landscape; a hurricane lamp swings, swings, at the open back of the wagon, the dark bush on either side of the road, the starry sky. It was a covered wagon, like the ones in American films, like those used by the Afrikaners in South Africa on their treks away from the British, north, to freedom.
We were again lodged with strangers, settler-fashion, paying our way, this time at a small gold mine, a couple of miles from the hill where the house would be built. It was managed by people called Whitehead, and owned by Lonrho. Nearly everything was, then. Lonrho was the successor to the British South Africa Company, which had helped Rhodes annex Southern Rhodesia, and for a long time it was referred to as ‘The Company’, and certainly not with affection. Again, there were many rondaavels, and a shack that was the central house. Beyond pale mine dumps stood up the grasshopper-like mine machinery. Beyond that was the mine store and then the compound of crowding thatched huts. Pawpaw trees, guava trees, plantains, marigolds, cosmos, cannas, moonflowers and poinsettias: these were the plants that then marked white occupancy.
Before farming could begin, at least a hundred acres of trees must be cleared, and the tree stumps dragged or burned out of the soil. Farm machinery and cattle must be bought. The house must be built, and the kraals for the cattle and sheds for the machinery.
The farm was a thousand-odd acres of bush, but there was some arrangement that enabled my father to use adjacent, non-allocated government land for grazing, and this land in our time was not settled, so ‘our’ land went on indefinitely to the Ayreshire Hills. There was no one at all living on that land, black or white.
Only one incident remains from that time that went on for months, later to be described by my parents, looking at each other with the awed, incredulous faces that accompany such moments of recognition, ‘God, that was an awful time, awful, awful!’ How did we live through it? – is the unspoken message that goes with the words. The small children, my brother and I and two others, were being settled for the night in a rondaavel on beds that had mosquito nets tucked tight down around us. An older girl came in with a candle, and set it down on an up-ended petrol box, so the flame was not more than a few inches from a net. My mother came in to check for the night, saw the candle, and shot across the room, clutching at her heart with one hand while she reached for the candle. She said in a voice hushed by urgency. ‘What are you doing? What can you be thinking of?’ It was true. If I had thrust a leg or an arm out the net would have reached the candle, and the hut would have gone up in flames – it was thatch on pole and mud walls. My mother stood there, the candlestick shaking in her hand, the flame trembling, candle grease scattering. Meanwhile the culprit wept, only now imagining possibilities. ‘Why?’ my mother went on in a low appalled voice. ‘How could anyone in their senses do such a thing?’ I have never forgotten her incredulity. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
My parents did not understand the Whiteheads, found them shifty and unsatisfactory, though soon they would become familiar with people who farmed, went broke, mined, succeeded, part-succeeded or went broke, farmed again, owned mine-stores – did anything that came to hand. Inside this same hand-to-mouth, hit-and-run pattern some people made fortunes. Others died of drink. The Whiteheads were not in any sense educated. They knew nothing but this settlers’ life. My mother disliked them, and they must have found her more than a trial. As for my father, he was doing the books for the mine, and would for a couple of years after he was on his own. Already we were worried about money. There was an unpleasantness about the books. Mr Whitehead was either careless or dishonest, and he blamed my father. I have described this, humorously, in In Pursuit of the English, but for my parents it was the chief horror of ‘God, that was an awful time.’ There was nothing funny in the living of it.
My father rode over every day to supervise the beginning of the farm, for already there was a ‘bossboy’, Old Smoke, from Nyasaland, who had brought his relatives with him, and a good part of each morning was spent in long, meditative consultations between the two men, who usually sat at either end of a fallen log, watching the labourers at work. Both men smoked, my father his pipe, and Old Smoke dagga, or pot. That was why he was called Old Smoke. My mother usually walked over for at least part of the day, and took us with her, so we could watch the cutting of the trees, the stumping of the lands, the new cattle in their kraals, the digging of the wells. Two wells were dug, according to the findings of the water diviners – everyone used diviners then for wells and, later, for boreholes. Above all, we watched the building of the house. The grass for the thatch of the house was still green in the vleis, but the pole and mud walls of the house could go up, and they did. This process I described in Going Home, the making of a house from what grew in the bush, and no house could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one. In London you live in houses where other people have lived, and others again will live there when you have moved or died. A house put together from the plants and earth of the bush is rather like a coat or dress, soon to be discarded, for it probably will have returned to the bush, from fire, insects, or heavy rains, long before you die. The minute the grass was ready, the roof went on, for the priority was to get away from the Whiteheads.
My parents had chosen a site which the neighbours all warned would give them trouble, on top of a hill, which meant dragging everything up and down the steep slopes by oxen. It was the beauty of the place, that was why my father chose it, and then my mother approved it. From the front of the house you looked north to the Ayreshire Hills, over minor ridges, vleis and two rivers, the Muneni and the Mukwadzi. To the east, a wide sweep of land ended with the Umvukves, or the Great Dyke, where crystalline blues, pinks, purples, mauves, changed with the light all day. The sun went down over the long low ranges of the Huniyani Mountains. In the rainy season it was extravagantly, lushly beautiful, mostly virgin bush, but even where it had been cut for mine furnaces the bush had grown up fresh and new. Everywhere among the trees the soil was broken by ridges and reefs of quartz, for this was a gold district, and on every reef of protruding rock you could see the marks of a prospector’s hammer that had exposed a crust of fool’s gold – pyrites – or the little glitter of mica.
Weeks before the house was finished, when it was still a skeleton of poles stuck in the ground, then poles covered with a skin of mud, then a roughly thatched house, with holes that would be windows, my parents were sitting on petrol boxes in front of it (where soon they would be in deck chairs), and they watched the mountains, or the sunset, or cloud shadows, or rain marching around and across the landscape. I sat on my father’s good leg and watched too.
When the house was done, perched on the top of the hill, the bush was cleared not more than thirty yards in front, and on either side. At the back where the garage and store huts were, trees had been cut for a hundred yards or so. The real bush, the living, working, animal-and-bird-full bush, remained for twenty years, not much affected by us in our house, and right until my parents left it in the middle of the Second World War, you might startle a duiker or a wild cat or a porcupine only a few yards down from the cleared space. Two rough tracks led down from the house to the fields in front, and a steep path through thick trees and bush to the well. Down the hill in front of the house was a big mawonga tree, its pale trunk scarred by lightning, an old tree full of bees and honey. What impresses me now is not how much effect our occupancy had on the landscape of the farm, but how little. Below the hill on one side was the big field, the hundred acres, and there were smaller fields here and there. Cattle kraals, tobacco barns – and the house on the hill. The farm labourers’ village on a lower hill merged into the bush, as our house did.
5 (#ulink_754f91b7-a318-51ed-a25b-e7c1331fea49)
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL was not different from most first houses built by settlers who, when they arrived in the colony, were nearly always poor. Usually they were brick and corrugated-iron shacks, one room, or two. The most attractive houses of those early days were like the Africans’. An African family had a group of huts, each hut for a different purpose, and early settler houses were often half a dozen thatched huts, or brick or pole-and-mud, sometimes joined together by pergolas covered with golden shower or bougainvillea. The floors were of brick or red cement, more often of stamped dung and mud. The African huts had no windows, but the white huts always did, sometimes French windows, gauzed in, so it seemed like an aviary. The floors had on them reed mats or animal skins. The first beds could be strips of ox hide on poles. The furniture stores were miles away in Salisbury, and wagons brought the furniture out; even when they were brought by train, the tables and chairs would have to be trekked from the station to farms over bad roads. Farm sales, as farmers went bankrupt, which they so often did, recycled furniture among the farms. Furniture was often improvised from bush timber by any black man who showed he had an eye for it, and sometimes from petrol or paraffin boxes. In those days petrol and paraffin came in four-gallon tins, two in a box. A settee could be made from them. Sideboards, writing tables, dressing tables, were made with two or four boxes on their ends, with a board across, and boxes set horizontally on them. These exercises in spare living were civilized by curtains made from flour sacks. The flour came to the farms in thick white sacks which, when washed, went soft and silky and took dye well. Or curtains were of embroidered hessian.
If you were really hard-up, all that had to be bought was a Carron Dover wood-burning stove. Every farmhouse had one – or nearly every farmhouse: a just-arrived young settler might live for a season in a mud hut, and his kitchen was an open fire under a corrugated-iron roof.
The houses outgrew themselves, were demolished, to be replaced by the solid brick, ceilinged houses that announced success, or remained as the core of a spreading farmhouse, full of rooms.
The talent for invention, for improvisation, was never lost. Even in a house owned by ‘a cheque book farmer’ (I heard the old envious phrase in 1988 about a black farmer, by one who did not yet have a cheque book), there might be hessian curtains or hangings embroidered red and orange and black with wools, or appliquéd in the geometric patterns fashionable at the time because of ‘the jazz age’. Or the white flour sack curtains, dyed. I have seen a farmhouse full of antiques – real ones from England and Scotland – with bedrooms where at the windows hung glazed chintz, the beds valanced in chintz, but with a fire screen of embroidered hessian, and bookcases filling whole walls made of painted petrol boxes.
Our house was different from these first houses only in its shape, built long, sliced across for rooms. A photograph of Mother Patrick’s and her nurses’ hospital in the early 1890s – the Dominican nuns were the first women in the Colony – is almost identical with that of our house, before it sprouted verandahs and porches and then another room joined to the house by a pergola. Inside it was better furnished than most: for instance, the living room where the dining table, made from bush timber, was set so we could look over to the hills as we ate. The pale grey mud of the walls had been left unwhitewashed, because it looked so nice with the Liberty curtains. The chairs, a settee, bookcases had been bought from a farm sale. The writing table was of stained petrol boxes, and John William McVeagh and his second wife, the daughter of the dissenting minister, looked through mosquito gauze at the verandah and the rows of petrol and paraffin tins painted green that held pelargoniums. The next room, my parents’, had proper beds and mattresses, the curtains were Liberty’s, the rugs were from Persia, the copper washbasin and jug stood on a petrol box washstand. Next door, at first my brother’s and my room, then mine, there were reed mats on the floor, the bedspreads were of flour sacks dyed orange, the washstand and dressing table of petrol boxes, painted black. The little room at the very end had reed mats, and a petrol box wash table and dressing table. It was in this room that Biddy O’Halloran lived for a year. She embroidered the white flour sack curtains all over in glowing silks that were still fresh twenty years later.
Nor was there anything remarkable about the oil lamps that had to be refilled every morning, for those early farms did not have electricity. Nor the water cart under its shed of thatch, with its two casks side by side whose taps were never allowed to drip, for even a cup of water was costed in terms of the energy of the oxen who three or four times a week pulled the heavy barrels up the hill. Nor the lavatory, twenty yards down the hill, a packing case with a hole in it over a twenty-foot hole, standing in its little hut, with a thatch screen in front of the open door. And not the food safe, either, double walls of chicken wire filled with charcoal where water trickled slowly from containers on the top, dripping all day and all night, the food kept cool because the safe was set to catch any wind that blew. When a farmhouse took a step forward into electricity, running water, or an indoor lavatory, neighbours were invited over to inspect the triumph, which was felt to represent and fulfil all of us.
My mother must have realized almost at once that nothing was going to happen as she had expected.
Not long ago I was sent the unpublished memoirs of a young English woman, with small children, who found herself in the bush of old Rhodesia, without a house, for it was still to be built, no fields ready – nothing. And particularly no money. She too had to make do and contrive, face snakes and wild animals and bush fires, learn to cook bread in antheaps or cakes in petrol tins over open fires. She hated every second, feared and loathed the black people, could not cope with anything at all. Reading this, I had to compare her with my mother, who would be incapable of placing a vegetable garden where a rising river might flood it, who never ran from a snake or got hysterics over a bad storm. Another manuscript, this time from Kenya, was the same: wails of misery and self-pity, and what seemed like an almost deliberate incompetence in everything. The two memoirs reminded me of what was worst for my mother. Hard to believe that the first thought in the minds of the two memoir writers, with everything they were being tested by wildness and hardship, was this: were they still middle-class people, ‘nice people’? But so it was. Similarly, my mother was unhappy because her immediate neighbours were not from the English middle class. How was it that my father, who, after all, must have at least noticed her preferences, chose a district where all the ‘nice people’ were miles away, on the other side of the District? Is it conceivable he really never understood how important it was to her? Or, perhaps, finding the land was all he had strength for, and then he had to make a farm from nothing, and start a kind of farming he had not imagined. He had always wanted to be a farmer, but in his mind were the patterns of English farming he had seen all around him as a boy.
Both of them believed, and for years, that a change of luck would bring them success. She might not have seen at once that her crippled husband would not be able to dominate the bush, and that they would never make the fortunes promised by the Exhibition, but she did see that the life of dinner parties, musical evenings, tea parties, picnics was gone. That meant she felt checked in a deep part of her. Going to Persia she had taken all the necessities for a middle-class life. Coming to Africa, she had clothes for making calls and for ‘entertaining’, visiting cards, gloves, scarves, hats and feather fans. Her evening dresses were much more elegant than anything likely to be worn even to Government House then. She probably thought that was where she would be invited. She might have defied her father to be that common thing, a nurse, but she never had any intention of giving up the family’s status as middle-class. Her children would fulfil her ambitions and do even better. So in that first year, when she took a good look at her circumstances and her neighbours, she only postponed her ambitions. The farm would shortly be successful, and then she could go home to England, put her children into good schools, and real life would begin.
Meanwhile, she could not have made more efficient, ingenious, energetic use of what she found around her in the bush, on the farm.
And now I come to the difficulty of reconciling child time and adult time. There was a stage of my life – I was already in England, and trying hard to make sense of my life through a strict use of memory – when I understood that a whole tract of time had disappeared. There was a gulf, a black hole. Years and years of it – so it seemed. And yet the record of outward events is clear. In January 1925, the family was in Lilfordia. Between January and June 1927, I was at Mrs Scott’s. Yet I had already been at school for a whole term at Rumbavu Park. All these hazy, interminable memories had to be fitted into one year and nine months. Impossible. I simply gave up. But later had to come back, and back … and was forced to concede that between my stamping around in the mud and water that would make the plaster of our house, and my going to school, was – less than two years. And even now I feel incredulous, it can’t be so. But it was so. Between January 1925 and September 1926, the following things happened.
All of us, the whole family, had malaria twice, badly. The new lands of the farm were stumped, the farm furnished with its necessities, the house built, and we moved into it. Biddy O’Halloran left, good riddance on both sides. My mother had a breakdown and was in bed for months. Mrs Mitchell and her cruel twelve-year-old son came and then left. I learned to read and triumphantly entered the world of information through print on cigarette packets, grocery packaging, the big words on top of newspapers, the Army—Navy catalogue, words written under pictures … and then, books themselves. My brother and I did lessons from the correspondence courses organized for farmers’ children by the government.
That was the pattern of events, and it has little to do with what I remember, the chronicle in child time.
Biddy O’Halloran is leaning on my father’s shooting stick, and we are in the big field, below the hill, grasshoppers and butterflies everywhere. She has had her appendix out, and she is telling my little brother that if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut a grasshopper will jump down into his appendix and claw its way out through his stomach. He is crying with terror. ‘Of course it’s not true,’ cries my mother later, at bedtime, while my brother sobs. But years later my brother told me he had an irrational fear of grasshoppers; I was able to tell him why. ‘Do you mean to say that’s all it was?’ he demanded, trying to laugh, but shocked that what had so influenced him and for so long had been so insignificant.
Biddy O’Halloran had fair skin, and in the ‘vee’ of her cotton dress it was flushed a gentle red. A child’s close stare revealed it was a mottle of scarlet and cream. Two small children gravely discuss how red jelly and cream got under Biddy’s skin. ‘It was poured into a hole and then it spread.’ We made excuses to get close, were rebuked for staring, came away to tell each other there wasn’t a hole. So she must have spread the jelly on, and it got through the skin. ‘Mummy, how did the red jelly and cream get under Biddy’s skin?’ ‘What red jelly? What nonsense!’ The mystery was discussed gravely, scientifically, as we sat together under the eaves of the thatch, the cats and dogs in attendance. ‘But perhaps it isn’t jelly, it’s blood from the roast beef!’ ‘But what are the white bits then?’
Or long, thoughtful stares at an adult’s fingernails, where there is a pale blob in the pink of a nail. ‘Mummy, why didn’t God finish your nail?’ ‘What do you mean, finish?’ Look, there is a hole.’ ‘What hole? That isn’t a hole!’ The hairs on an adult’s forearm, each golden stalk in its little pit of brown skin. The smells. Biddy had a sour smell, sharp and hurtful to the nose, when she splashed on cologne. My mother’s smell was vigorous and salty. My father’s male and stale and smoky.
We watched from the edge of the bush my mother showing Biddy how to put bloody rags into a petrol tin to soak, under the thatch of the house at the back. The look of dramatic secrecy on my mother’s face, her lowered dramatic voice. The deliberately languid, irritated movements of Biddy. We knew the ‘boys’ were not supposed to see the contents of this tin. We crept up to the tin when the women had gone and speculated: Biddy had cut her finger or her foot – that must be it. But why didn’t mummy want the boys to know? We were always cutting ourselves, or had bruises, and sometimes the ‘boys’ washed the blood off for us. Why then …?
The adult world, with its disorder, its lack of sense, its mysteries, two small children trying to get things into their right place, call them by their right names …
I lie on my bed, reading Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys. One of the monkey brothers eats an orange, which he thinks is conveniently divided into segments for pulling apart and eating. I cannot make sense of this. The orange segments I am eating as I read are too big for my mouth. Yet I am bigger than the little monkeys we see racing about in the trees just down the hill, and which sometimes come into the house and investigate the rafters before running back into the trees. Did the monkey in the book mean those tiny globules of orange juice, each in its little bag, which I burst on my tongue, flooding my palate with scent and taste? But surely that couldn’t be it: globules aren’t segments. I lie and wonder, read, and think … The Royal Monkeys must be much larger than the little bush babies we know. When they pull the orange skins apart their fur prevents them feeling the showers of sharp juice that come out. The spray lives in the pores of the orange skin. When a visitor comes who has rough-pored skin on her face and neck, I stare secretly at the pores where water is standing. If pulled apart, would that skin send out a spray of …? ‘What is that child staring at?’ ‘Doris, why are you staring? It’s rude.’ I turn away, run off, sit under a bush down the hill, pull a leaf off a bush, look at the veins on the leaf and the pores between them. I pull the leaf apart but there is no strong-smelling spray on my face and hands. On the bush is a chameleon. I watch it creep with its slow rocking motion up a branch. And then suddenly … I rush screaming up the hill to my mother, sitting in her chair, beside my father, looking out over the bush. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ ‘Mummy, Mummy …’ ‘But what is wrong?’ ‘The chameleon,’ I weep, hysterical, terrified, ‘The chameleon …’ ‘What chameleon?’ ‘It was sick and all its insides came out.’ I run back down the hill. Behind me come my mother and my little brother. The chameleon is sitting quietly a little further up the branch, its eyes swivelling about.
I am in shock, it is like a dream. I saw the chameleon’s insides come out and … it happens again, and I scream. ‘Shhh …’ says my mother, holding me tight. ‘It’s all right. It is catching flies, can’t you see?’ I am shuddering with disgust and fear – but with curiosity too. I stand safe inside her firm grasp. ‘Wait,’ she says. The club-like tongue of the chameleon darts out, a thick fleshy root, and disappears back inside the chameleon. ‘Do you see?’ says my mother. ‘It’s just its way of feeding itself.’ I collapse into sobs, and she carries me back up the hill. But I have acquired adult vision; when I see a chameleon, part of my knowledge of it will be that it darts out its enormous thick tongue, but I won’t really see it, not really, ever again, not as I saw it the first time.
In 1992 I was standing, a couple of weeks after the first rains, in Banket, near a mafuti tree, a big one. The mafuti is a serious tree, its fronded leaves dark green, its trunk thick and safe. There is nothing frivolous about this tree. But growing at its root was an excrescence, like a sea creature, coral sheaths where protruded the tender and brilliant claws of new leaves, and these were like green velvet. You would never think they had anything in common with the sober leaves above them. And suddenly I remembered how I rushed up to the house, screaming that a monster was attacking the tree, it was a beetle the size of a cat.
I wake in the night. All round me, above me, is a rustling, creeping noise. I start up on my elbow, peer up through the white of the mosquito net. My heart is beating, but the rustling is louder. The square of the window lightens, once, twice. Wait, is that a car coming up the hill, the headlights … ? No, my parents’ room is dark, they are in bed, too late for a car. It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain. Because I understand, everything falls into its proper place about me, the thatch of the roof soaking up its wet from the sky, the frogs sounding as loud as if they are down the hill, but they are a couple of miles off, the soft fall of the rain on the earth and the leaves, and the lightning, still far away. And then, confirming the order of the night, there is a sudden bang of thunder. I lie back, content, under the net, listening, and slowly sink back into a sleep full of the sounds of rain.
Or it is just after we have been put to bed, and from the end of the house come the sounds of grown-up voices, and my mother playing her piano. I and my little brother talk in low voices, knowing we should be asleep. I continue my mother’s bedtime stories, of the animals in the bush, the mice in the storeroom. Then I try to frighten him with the dragon from St George and the Dragon. I frighten myself. The dragon is spread all over the thatch, fills the sky, claws spread out, fire rushing from its mouth. I know perfectly well there is no dragon, yet I am frightened. Similarly, when I have convinced myself there are wicked fairies in the corners of the room, I know I have invented them. When at last I start yelling for my mother to come, and she does, she says, soothingly, that there is no dragon, no fairies behind the curtains, I feel impatient, because that is not the point. I need to be scolded for preventing my little brother from sleeping, for ‘making things up’. Similarly, by myself at the very bottom of the hill, just where the lands start, I stand by an old gnarled and knotted tree, like the ones in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and imagine fairies so strongly I am not far off seeing them. When I populate the antheap with its curtains of Christmas fern and its spider lilies with fairies and goblins, what I create is an intense listening silence, and I know if I turn my head fast enough, when they don’t expect it, I’ll see them. Which does not mean I actually believe they are there. Just as I believe and do not believe in the tooth fairy. My disbelief in Father Christmas does not stop me from expecting reindeer and explaining to my brother they will come in through the window, since there is no chimney. Long earnest discussions in the hushed voices that go with the turned-low lamp and the shadows in the room, about reindeer and how fast they would have to fly from England to get here in time for Christmas, and if the reindeer would have to descend at intervals to feed, and what would they think of trees and grass, since what they like to eat is moss. When my brother tells my mother I believe reindeer will arrive for Christmas and they will eat musasa and mafuti leaves, it can be seen from her frown that she is working out how to balance reality and useful and necessary fantasy, and I at once hurriedly say that of course I don’t believe in Christmas reindeer.
My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.
Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm ‘compound’ on its subsidiary hill.
The doctor came often from Sinoia. They did not know as much then about anxiety as they do now. He prescribed bed rest. Doctor Huggins, her real doctor in Salisbury, when she appealed to him in letters, said, Why ask him when she had already had a doctor telling her what to do? Doctor Huggins – later Lord Malvern – was a testy character who did not believe in the need for a bedside manner, as a doctor or a politician: he was shortly to become Prime Minister.
Several times a day she summoned me and Harry to the bedside where she said dramatically, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy.’ It is this memory that tells me how badly she had inwardly collapsed. ‘Poor mummy’ was simply not her style. As for me I was consumed with flames of rage. My little brother embraced her whenever he was asked to. I embraced her warmly, but then resented and repudiated the emotion. Soon I refused to go to the bedside when called there by the cook. ‘Mummy’s ill,’ my father directed me, and I snapped, ‘No, she isn’t,’ for the conflict was unbearable.
Meanwhile our education went on and I can only admire the self-discipline this must have needed. Standing by her bed, or sitting on it (’Don’t tire your mother. Don’t lean on her. Don’t …’), we learned our multiplication tables and did baby sums, but the reading lessons were already much too easy. She told us stories and she read to us.
Then Mrs Mitchell arrived, with her son, to ‘help’ my mother. Harry was still sleeping in my parents’ room. I shared a room with Mrs Mitchell. Her son was in the room at the end of the house.
I experienced her as cruel and her son as a bully. She drank. When she left – soon, after only a few weeks – caches of empty bottles were found under bushes, in cupboards. She always smelled of spirits. What was she really like? If she was being nursemaid and housekeeper for a sick woman, and had a boy, school age, she must have been desperate. Widowed? Deserted? In flight from a brutal husband? This was before the Slump, when women whose husbands were out of work took any jobs they could find.
All my childhood we were told how poor we were, how hard-up, how deprived of what was our right. I believed it. Then, at school, I met children from really poor families. There was a stratum of people, white, in old Southern Rhodesia, who lived just above hunger level, always in debt, in flight from debtors, with drink and brutality waiting to swallow them up. Recently a book was published called Toe-rags by Daphne Anderson, the story of a girl who survived a childhood at this level of poverty. Often it was the black servants who cared for her. She was exactly my age, and compared to hers my life was gentle and privileged. This book is not likely – yet – to be read by black people in Zimbabwe, where it is necessary still to believe that every white person is, and was, rich. White people have proved reluctant to read it, because they don’t like to think the whites in British Southern Rhodesia ever lived so low and so fearfully. The grandiose myths of White Supremacy are made to look sad and sick by this book, even though the beautiful author married well, as we say, when she was in her twenties, and lived happily ever after. I hope Toe-rags will soon find a place on the reading lists of history courses in Zimbabwe.
Mrs Mitchell came from this frightful level of poverty. She could not have shared my bedroom for more than a term, perhaps even a school holiday. It was an endless misery, endless fear. I lay in the stuffy dark under the mosquito net. She was under the other mosquito net. I heard the sounds that meant she was drinking. I heard the bottle slide down between the edge of the bed and the net, and thump on the matting. She snored. She thrashed about in her bed. Next door the boy shouted in his sleep. Once she quarrelled so loudly with the boy my mother appeared in the doorway, a candle in her hand, and her hair flowing about her to stop the two yelling at each other, and saw the candle sloping in Mrs Mitchell’s hand, the candle grease spattering, the flame lengthening and dipping and smoking an inch or two from the mosquito net.
Both Mrs Mitchell and her son shouted and screamed at the black servants. When my father remonstrated she shouted at him that he understood nothing about the country: perhaps it was the first time I heard all the white clichés: You don’t understand our problems. They only understand the stick. They are nothing but savages. They are just down from the trees. You have to keep them in their place. (Just like Dr Truby King’s infants.)
I was afraid to go anywhere near Mrs Mitchell’s son. He was perhaps twelve but seemed to me as powerful as a grown-up. He tormented and teased the black child who was piccanin for the household. He chased and teased and tormented the dogs and cats. His catapult he used not only on birds, but to aim stones at the bare feet of any black person who came near.
Nothing I can do, no cajolements or enticements of memory, can bring back more than this: no incident or event bad enough to explain my dread of that woman. And probably there was no actual cruelty or blow, but only the foul angry voice, and the high scolding vituperation of the black-hater.
I cannot even begin to imagine what that year was like for my father. His wife was bedridden, and if she had ‘a heart’ there was no reason why she should ever get up. They had so little money, yet whenever she was worse the doctor would arrive from Sinoia. Two little children, one still not six, the other four. They needed tender care, but what they were getting was Mrs Mitchell and her bully of a son. My father was still trying to get lands stumped, bush cleared, fields made. He had to be down all day on the lands, for until there were fields there would be no crops. Meanwhile the debt to the Land Bank grew.
For some months he had an assistant, a Dutchman with many children. The story The Second Hut was written from memories of that year.
It was as early as that when we, the children, began to go with him down to the lands. The horse had died: that part of the District was not good for horses – they got diseases. It was on the sand veld at the other side of the District that horses thrived and people went in for racing. We bought two donkeys and my father rode one. We were put on the other. Later we got a car, an Overland, already third- or fourth-hand. We, the children, the two dogs, Lion and Tiger, cheerful mongrels, bottles of cold tea and packets of store biscuits went down to the land with our father, and played in the bush while my mother was in bed, being tended by Mrs Mitchell.
She left. Then came someone who was not paid, but helping out of kindness, Mrs Taylor, a Danish woman. Since she had a life of her own she did not move in, but might stay a few days, leave and come back, and soon we forgot the nightmare of Mrs Mitchell. She was a large, calm, good-looking woman, and my father liked her very much. My father liked women. Women liked him. He had a gentle, courtly, considerate way with him, and the undertones of regret and wistfulness were not anything a child could understand. All I knew was that throughout my growing up there was always this woman – the wife of a neighbour, or a visitor to the District – with whom he might sit and talk in this particular way, as if the time they were in, the two of them, was in another range of being altogether, something larger and tenderer than quotidian life, and where they shared, too, a rakish and amused recognition, never to be put into words. Mrs Taylor was not around for long – she was on the move somewhere. People were always moving about the country, farm to farm, from either to the town, or off ‘up north’ – meaning Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia – or back to England, because they found the life disappointing. ‘Not everyone can take the life, you know.’ Women most especially often could not take the life.
If my father always enjoyed tender and, of course, platonic friendships (now you have to spell out what would have been taken for granted then), my mother also had admirers who knew she was fitting her remarkable capacities into too small a space. One of them was a George Laws, who was a brother of Miss Laws, a teacher in Sinoia and some sort of a cousin of my father’s. Mr Laws owned a timber concession in the government land between the rivers. It was he who made my mother a fitment that enabled her to read while she was ill, a bed rest, piano stool, couches and chairs of slatted wood, and ‘occasional’ tables so heavy they could scarcely be moved even when not buried under books, newspapers, magazines.
Then my mother got out of bed. She had to. She said her weight of hair was giving her headaches, and she cut it all off and appeared with a nude shorn nape. A ‘shingle’. My brother wept. I wept. We sat in the pillows and billows of her brown hair and wrapped it around us and bawled while she sat and ironically watched us. She said Right! That’s that!, and she wrapped her hair up in paper and threw it into the rubbish pit.
Correspondence courses still arrived by every post, but she wondered what she was paying money for when she could do better herself. She taught us geography by sloshing water into our sand pit and making continents, isthmuses, estuaries, islands. Being taught to see land masses and oceans like this repeats that stage of human knowledge when the world was flat. Then she ordered a little globe from Salisbury which arrived on the train, and with it we entered the mind of Copernicus. She sat my father in his folding chair on the sharp slope down outside the house, summoned the cook and the piccanin from the kitchen. My father was the sun. The two servants were the heavy planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Stones stood for Pluto, for Mars. I was Mercury and my brother Venus, running around my father, while she was the earth, moving slowly. ‘You have to imagine the stars are moving at different rates, everything moving, all the time.’ And then she abolished this system of cosmic order with an impatient wave of her hand. My father was now the earth, and my brother and I by turns the moon. ‘Of course you have to imagine that …’
We interminably chanted the multiplication tables. We learned English trees and flowers from little books. One was French Without Tears. The inspectors came out from Salisbury to check on the farmers’ children, and said yes, we were doing well. Yes, we were in advance of our ages. But we had to go to school. It was the law. Besides, children have to learn to be social beings.
For a time, my mother wondered about starting a little school there, on the farm. There were children of various ages on the near farms. But if this would be easy now, with good roads, then the question was, how to get those children every day, two, three, four, five, seven miles, to school and back again? Besides, this woman who had a genius for teaching small children was not qualified. And that was that.
6 (#ulink_ce24d70f-3733-562a-be90-16c1895a82cc)
I WAS NOW IN THE ROOM the third along from the front, which would be mine until I left the farm for good. It was a large, square, high-thatched room, whitewashed, full of light. From my bed I saw the sun spring up behind the chrome mountain and pass rapidly up out of sight, I saw the moon rise, soar up and away. I used to prop the door open with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me – it was only a few paces away down the steep slope. I fought with my mother to have this door open. ‘Snakes,’ she cried, ‘scorpions … mosquitoes … I won’t have it!’ But I kept the door open knowing I was safe inside the mosquito net. Besides, we took all that quinine for the months of the rainy season. Snakes did come into the house, and more than once my mother had to shoot one. The fact is, I was brought up in one of the most heavily snake-infested areas in the world. They were all poisonous, some deadly. For years I was in the bush with bare legs and often bare feet, and I was never bitten. Clearly they fear us more than we fear them. Impossible not to remember the threat of snakes dinned into us always. Remember to watch where you tread, never put your hand on a branch without looking, never climb a tree carelessly, puff adders like to lie out on hot paths and roads and they move slowly … remember, remember, remember. But my fear was for insects, so many, so varied, so large and black and horned or slim and jittery and invasive, spiders hanging in front of your face on webs spun in the night, lurking in your veldschoen, watching you from holes in the earth when you squatted to pee. It is a testament to the irrationality of humankind that when I look back at that time I think of those lethal but beautiful snakes with admiration and even affection, whereas the memory of harmless insects makes me shiver.
But I was under the mosquito net, so that was all right.
In the mornings I woke because the light had come, and the sunlight a warmth on my face. I checked the net for spiders and beetles, then jumped up and tied it into its daytime knot. I flung myself down on my back, and lay spread out, the sheet kicked off, sniffing all the delightful smells in that room. First, my own body, its different parts, each with its own chummy odour. The thatch was damply fragrant or straw-dry, according to whether it had rained. The creosote the rafters were painted with was tar-strong, like soap. The linoleum, already wearing into holes, released oily odours, but faint, like the oilcloth on the washstand. The enamel pail under the washstand might have pee in it, but I learned to sneak out with the pail and pour it down the hill into the earth, where it bubbled up yellow, sank, and dried almost at once. The toothpaste was clean and strong. My shoes – veldschoen – smelled of hide, like karosses. But I refused ever to have a kaross on my bed, for a kaross was too close to the beast it came from, and anyway, the rough reek of kaross made me think of Mrs Scott and I never, ever, wanted to think of that place again.
I heard the ‘boy’ take tea into my parents, knew they were getting up, slid into my clothes before I could be fussed into them. I wore little cotton knickers, a cotton dress, sometimes made out of an embroidered flour sack, and a liberty bodice. The Army—Navy catalogue regulated our lives, as it did those of middle-class children anywhere in the colonies. Well brought-up children wore liberty bodices with their tabs for suspenders and stockings in cold weather. Worn without stockings they wriggled up and left red marks on your stomach. There was a day when I said no, I was not going to wear one, not ever again. And in winning the battle for me I won it for my brother too. He was still wearing the tight binders that were supposed to prevent chills on the liver, while I had long ago refused to wear one. We were meant to wear cotton hats, lined with red aertex, with red aertex pieces hanging down our backs to keep the sun off our spines. But no, no, no, I would not. ‘No one wears a hat!’ I shouted – and it was true, the farmers and their wives did not cover their heads though the women might wear a hat for visiting. My mother’s pleas went for nothing: you will get deathly chills without your binders, bad posture without your liberty bodice, sunstroke without hats that have red linings. About the hats, it seems my mother and the Army—Navy Stores were right all the time. Recently (1992) I was at a skin specialist’s in London, and he said most of his income comes from white sun-worshippers in Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe.
I dressed myself as I had done since I was able to, whereas my little brother, now getting on for six, was still being dressed. He was supposed to be delicate, and often got bronchitis and was in bed with a towel over his head enclosing a basin of hot water that emitted the fumes of wintergreen, and friar’s balsam. Not for another two years would he refuse to be called Baby, refuse to be delicate.
When I went into my parents’ bedroom my father was putting on his wooden leg with its heavy leather straps, its bucket for his stump; my mother, in her flowered silk wrapper from Harrods, was dressing Baby. The Liberty curtains were still fresh. The whitewash glittered. The thatch above was yellow and smelled new. Years ahead was the gentle squalor that house at last subsided into.
We had breakfast in the room that overlooked the bush that stretched to the Ayreshire Hills. Mother in her fresh cotton dress, father in his farm khaki, the two healthy little children. The breakfast was the full English breakfast, porridge, bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, toast, butter, marmalade, tea. Also pawpaw in its season, and oranges.
That we should eat enough was my mother’s chief worry. Now I cannot believe how much we all ate. And when a bit of white egg slime or a burnt bit of toast was left my father demanded with anguish that we should think of the starving children in India. If children were starving in Africa, or hungry or malnourished down in the farm compound visible from the windows, then that it seemed was not our responsibility.
But one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes. My mother agonized over the bad diet of the farm labourers, tried to get them to eat vegetables from our garden, lectured them on vitamins. They would not eat cabbage, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes – now eaten by all the black people. They pulled relishes from the bush, leaves of this and that, and they brewed beer once a week, known to be full of goodness. But an ox was killed for them only once a month. Mostly, they ate the mealiemeal of that time, unrefined, yellow, wonderful stuff like polenta, and peanuts and beans. In fact, that diet was one that would be applauded by nutritionists now, but was regarded as bad then, because of its lack of meat. There is a sharp little memory from then, and there were similar incidents throughout my childhood. My brother, or I, doing what we had seen others do, called the houseboy to bring us our shoes – which were in the same room. My father went into a shouting, raging temper – most unusual for him. He said how dare my mother allow the children to be ruined, how dare she let us call a grown-up man ‘Boy’. Did she not care that we would get soft and spoiled being waited on? He wouldn’t have it. He wouldn’t allow it. Usually my father didn’t lay down the law. But over this he did. Throughout my childhood he remonstrated with my mother, more in sorrow than in anger, about the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order, or how to arrange brushes and mirrors on a dressing table. For very early my mother’s voice had risen into the high desperation of the white missus, whose idea of herself, her family, depended on middle-class standards at Home. ‘For God’s sake, old thing,’ he would urge, his voice softening as he saw the distress on her angry face. ‘Can’t you see? It’s simply ridiculous.’ ‘Well, it’s their job, isn’t it?’
After breakfast, I might go back into my room to read. Or go with my mother to learn – well, something or other. For if her wonderful lessons stopped when we went to school, she never ever lost an opportunity for instruction, and now I am grateful and wish I could tell her so.
My brother always went down on the lands with my father, and I often did too. My father sat himself on a log or a big stone, and watched the gang of ‘boys’ hoeing a field, or wrenching the maize cobs off the plants, or pulling up peanuts, or cutting down the great flat sunflower heads full of shiny black seeds. Most wore rags of some kind, many loincloths, or perhaps a ragged singlet and shorts that might easily be laced across a rent with pink under-bark torn from a musasa tree. As they hoed, they conversed, laughing and making jokes, and sometimes sang, if threshing peanuts from their shells with big sticks, or smashing the sunflower heads to release showers of seeds. When the bossboy, Old Smoke, came to sit with my father, his two attendant young men always standing respectfully behind him, the two men might talk half a morning. For when they had finished with the mombies, the probabilities of the rain, the need for a new cow kraal, or a new ditch to carry water from the compound, or the deficiencies of the Dutch farm assistant – but he only lasted a short time, because the Africans hated him so much – then they philosophized. At the African pace, slow talk, with long pauses, punctuated by ‘Yes …’, and from Smoke … ‘Ja …’ Then another slow exchange, and ‘Ja …’ from Old Smoke. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ from my father. Smoke might sit on a log or on his haunches, with one forearm over his knees for balance – when my brother and I tried it was no good, our limbs had already set into European stiffness. My father sat with his wooden leg out in front of him, his old hat over his eyes for the glare. They talked about Life and about Death and, often, about the Big Boss Pezulu (the Big Boss above, or God) and His probable intentions.
Meanwhile my brother and I were watching birds, chameleons, lizards, ants, making little houses of grass, or racing up and down antheaps where often we startled a buck lying up through the hot hours under a bush.
Hours went by. Years … A bottle full of tepid sweetened tea would be produced with cake, biscuits, scones. Old Smoke would share this with us. More hours passed – years. Then the sound of the gong from the house. Men who had been at work since six or seven in the morning had an hour off, twelve till one. The gong was a ploughshare hit with a big bolt from the wagon. Then we drove up to the house where my mother had been working all morning, sewing mostly, clothes for her husband, her children, herself – she was always smart. Or she had cooked. She made jams, bottled fruits, invented crystallized fruit from the flesh of the gourds that fed cattle, filled rows of petrol tins with the sweet yeasty gingery water that would make dozens of bottles of ginger beer. And, like all the farmers’ wives, she invented recipes from mealies, which were not called sweetcorn then. Because we were all poor, or at least frugal, saving money when we could, the women were proud of what they could do with what they grew. Not till I went to Argentina, which grows the same crops as Southern Africa – pumpkins and maize, beans and potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions – did I find anything like the same inventiveness. We ate the green mealies cut off the cobs and cooked in cheese sauces, or in fritters and milk puddings or in soups with potatoes and pumpkin. The maize meal was made into cakes and pancakes, as well as different kinds of porridge, or added to bread. There were a dozen ways of cooking pumpkin. Young peanuts found their way into stews, peanut butter made all kinds of sauces and breads. We ate … how we did eat. Lunch was a big affair, meat, always meat, for this was before anybody but a real crank gave up meat. We ate roast beef and potatoes, or steak and kidney pies, or stews, or shepherd’s pie, and potatoes and half a dozen vegetables from the garden down the hill near the well. Then heavy puddings, and cheese.
Then, it was time to lie down.
‘But I’m not sleepy, Mummy, Mummy, I’m not sleepy.’
It was no good. In this climate, or on this altitude – and either might be cited as evidence against me – little children must lie down in the afternoons. I begged, I pleaded, even wept, not to be forced to lie down while my mother’s voice got increasingly incredulous. ‘What nonsense! What’s the fuss about?’ She did not know I was facing eternities: she looked forward to a few minutes snatched from the responsibilities of child-rearing, to write a letter Home. The orange curtains were drawn across the green gauze of the window, and the stone that propped the door put aside. ‘Look, here is the watch,’ and she arranged it on the candlestick by my bed. I had learned to tell the time because of the agonies of afternoon naps. My dress was pulled up over my head. She stood holding the coverlet back. I slid in. She turned away, her mind already on her letter. Now I was glad she had forgotten me. She shut the door into their bedroom where my little brother was already asleep. At once I nipped out of bed and pulled the curtains back again for I hated that stuffy ruddy gloom.
I lay flat on my back looking up. The cool spaces under the thatch welcomed me. Yes, and there will be an end to it, just as there was yesterday, and the day before. A lost bee buzzed about, tumbled to the floor, buzzed loudly, and I had an excuse to get up again to let it out of the door, but I did not dare replace the stone, set the door ajar. On my back, arms stretched, I took possession of my cool body, that thudded, pulsed and trickled with sounds. I flexed my feet. I tested my fingers, one by one, all present, all correct, my friends, my friend, my body. I sniffed my fingers where smells of roast beef and carrots lingered. The golden syrup of the steamed pudding sent intense sweetness into my brain, and made my nostrils flare. My forearm smelled of sun. The minute golden hairs flattened as I blew on them, like wind on the long grasses along the ditches. Silence. The dead, full, contented silence of midday in the bush. A dove calls. Another answers. For a moment the world is full of doves, and down the hill wings break in a flutter of noise, and the black shape of a bird speeds across the square of my window. My stomach gurgles. I put down a forefinger to prod the gurgle but it has moved downwards towards … but I had already gained full possession of my bladder, and had learned to ignore the anxious queries it sent up: should you take me to the lavatory? My hands slid, like a doctor’s, down over my thighs to my knees. There was a spot there somewhere, if you prodded it, then just behind the shoulder there would be an answering tweak of sensation. The two places were linked. There were other twinned patches of flesh, or skin. I kept discovering new ones, then forgot where they were, rediscovered them. Just above the ankle … I lay on my back with my legs in the air and pushed my forefinger into the flesh all around the ankle bone – there it was, yes, and miles away, under my ribs, there was a reply, a sensation not far off pain; it would become pain if I continued to press, but I had already moved on, mapping my body and its secret consonances. Did I dare look at the watch? Surely the half hour must be nearly up? I had been lying there for ever. I sneaked a look – no, impossible! The hand must have got stuck, I snatched up the watch, shook it. No, it was alive, all right, and only three minutes had passed. A howl of protest, hushed at once; had she heard, would she come in? I shut my eyes, lying rigid, pretending to be asleep. But dangers lurked in the pretence, for one could easily drop off, and I was not sleepy. I lay listening with my whole body, my whole life … from the other bed I heard a sound like the disturbance of air when a small trapped moth flutters. My friend the cat was there. I jumped up and leaned over her, she was lying curled, and her grey silky fur moved with her breath; she was, like me, enclosed in her own time, in the time of her breath. I was convinced she understood the anguish of afternoon sleep, the half hour which never passed. I touched her little grey paw with my finger, and it tightened as I slid my finger inside it. The claws, like tiny slivers of moon, dug into my flesh and went loose. She made the little sound which meant, I am asleep, so I left her and flung myself down on the bed so hard the springs twanged.
But I could see her there, I had company, if I woke her she would come and join me, her soft weight on my shoulder. But that meant I would have to lie still … outside on the woodpile the houseboy was cutting wood, and the slow sound of the axe was like strokes of a clock. The doves were quiet, I could feel heaviness sit on my lids. I woke myself by drinking mouthfuls of the heavy sweet tepid water from the glass that had bubbles clinging inside it. Each bubble was a little world, and I picked up a straw that had fallen from the thatch and chased the silvery bubbles about inside the glass until they went out, one by one, like birthday candles.
The watchface said five minutes had passed. Misery seized me – dread. The eternities of Mrs Scott’s were described as ‘But it was only two terms, that’s all’, while my parents looked at me, as they so often did, with amusement and with incredulity. Ahead lay the convent and another exile from home … Eternity. My mother read us the New Testament from a child’s version. Eternity: time that never ended. Lying flat on my back, arms flung out, eyes fixed on the cool under the yellow grass that seemed so high above me, I thought of time that never ended. Never ending, never ending … I was holding my breath with concentration. It never ends, never … my brain seemed to rock, my head was full of slowed time, time that has no end. For seconds, for a flash, I seemed to reach it – yes, that’s it, I got it then … I was suddenly exhausted. Surely it must be time to get up? The watch said only ten minutes had gone past. Without meaning to, I let out a great yell of outrage, then slapped both palms over my mouth, but it was no good, my mother had heard and came bursting in. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ‘The watch is wrong,’ I wept. ‘It’s not working.’
She stepped efficiently to the watch, and checked. She had just had time to lay out her Croxley writing pad and envelopes, and sit, letting herself slow down, to assemble scenes from this life of hers, find words that would convey its improbability to her friend, Daisy Lane, who was an examiner for nurses in London. ‘It’s completely wild out here,’ she might have decided to write. ‘We have to bring all the water up the hill in a scotchcart several times a week, and we have to use oil lamps! I wonder what you’d say if you saw this house! But of course, it is only temporary. We’re putting in tobacco this season, and you can make a pretty penny on that!’
She stood frowning at this difficult child, who was squatting on the bed, face streaked with tears, eyes imploring. The mother was uneasy. While the little boy, the good child, slept uncomplaining next door, this child looked as if she were being tortured. But it was with brisk humour she demanded. ‘Now what is all this nonsense?’ and pushed the child down with one hand while she flicked up the bedcover. ‘If you thrash about like that you’ll only get overheated.’
‘But I want to get up, can’t I get up?’
‘No, you can’t. You’ve not been there a quarter of an hour yet.’ And she marched out.
‘For ever … for ever …’ The child was walking with Jesus and his disciples along a dusty road, and it was not the track along the bottom of the hill, where dust lay in thick drifts, soft, red, and where the tracks of beetles or centipedes or buck slowly eroded as the breezes lifted the grains of sand away. It was a rocky yellowish road in – well, it was Palestine, since that was where Jesus was, but the rough dry road was from Persia. The smell in her nostrils now was not Africa, but that other place, where sunlight smelled old, full of stories from hundreds of years ago, Khosrhu and his armies marching across a rockface, but that was before Jesus, thousands of years ago, and then Jesus walked with men in striped headdresses along a dusty track where they stubbed their bare toes on big hot stones and Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life … what did he mean, what did they mean, hundreds of years ago … ? she would never grow up, never, why even to the end of the day and to bedtime was so long, long time, time was long, long … long time was not eternity, eternity was longer, it was unending, it never ended. From the bed next to hers, under its bundled mosquito net, came a small chattering sound. The cat was dreaming. Her teeth were making that funny sound. She was dreaming of chasing something? Like the dogs who would lie stretched out yelping and yapping with excitement as they chased a buck or a rabbit in a dream. Where was Lion? Where was Tiger? They were asleep in the shade under the verandah. Harry was asleep next door, the good baby. Daddy slept for a few minutes in his chair after lunch. The houseboy still sleepily measured time with his axe. And Mummy was writing to Aunt Daisy, who often wrote to me, from England, sending me presents, and often books about Jesus because she was my godmother. It was she who had sent me the stories about Jesus walking with the men in striped headdresses through the yellow dust … hundreds of years ago, hundreds.
Indignation had gone, a melancholy had seized her whole body. Sweat ran from her armpits. Her hair was damp. She felt her cheeks dragging with wet. She leapt up, but before she reached the other bed, controlled the impetuous movement, becoming as stealthy as a cat as she curled herself around the little grey cat, who let out her protesting sound, Let me sleep. But the child strokes and strokes, her cheek on the cat’s side, the cat purrs, noblesse oblige, the child’s face lifts and falls with the purr, the child’s eyes close, the cat’s purr stops, starts again, stops … outside two doves conduct their colloquy, Croo, croo, cr-croo, the axe thuds down, slow, slow, slow …
The woman writing to England sits with her pen suspended, smiling, for she is not here at all, she is dreaming of a winter’s evening in London, crowded noisy streets outside, and she is with her good friend Daisy Lane, the little, wry, brisk woman who had not married, for she was one of the girls whose men had been killed in the Trenches. She thinks guiltily that she has never enjoyed anything as much in her life, talking with her friend Daisy in front of a good fire, eating chocolate, or chestnuts roasted in the embers.
Good Lord, it is already three o’clock. The children must be woken or they’ll never sleep tonight. Not that Doris is likely to have slept, and she always gets so fretful and weepy, but perhaps she has dropped off. The woman felt surrounded by sleepers, safe in a time of her own, without anyone observing her. Her husband was lost to the world in his deckchair, snoring lightly, regularly. The dogs were stretched out. An assortment of cats, one curled up against the dog Tiger’s stomach, all asleep. In the bedroom little Harry, her heart’s consolation and delight, was asleep, like a baby, his fists curled near his head. Before gently waking him, she bent over him, adoring him. She loved the way he woke, whimpering a little, small and sweet in her arms, his face in her neck, nestling, as if with his whole body he was trying to get back inside her body. She took a long time waking him, gentling him into consciousness, then slid him into his little pants and shirt. ‘You go and wake Daddy,’ she told him. She went into the bedroom next door and stopped her hand at her mouth. Where was the child? Had she run away? She always said she would – a joke, of course. No, there she was, arms around the grey cat, fast asleep. ‘There,’ thought the mother, having the last word, ‘you were tired, I knew you were, all the time.’ She stood quietly there looking down at the little girl’s tear-dirtied face. She always felt guilty, seeing the child with this cat, because of the cat left behind in Tehran, but what could she have done? After all, they couldn’t have travelled for months and months with the cat, and anyway, it was such an ugly old thing. Never had there been such storms of tears as when the family left the cat, it was ridiculous, it was out of all proportion.
The mother did not touch the child but said briskly, in tones that sounded full of regret, a complex apology for what she was thinking, ‘Up you get now, you’ve been asleep a good half hour.’
The child opened her eyes and looked past her mother at the room as if she had no idea where she was. Then she felt the cat against her face, and smiled. She looked up at her mother and sat up, and with a shake of her head, clearing her face of the sweat-sticky hair, ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
‘Oh yes you were,’ said the mother triumphantly.
‘I wasn’t. I wasn’t.’
‘Wash your face. Then we’ll have tea.’
Tea was the family sitting in the hot shade under the verandah thatch, gingerbread, shortbread, little cakes, big cakes, scones, butter, jam. ‘You can’t have cake until you’ve eaten a scone.’ Discipline and self-restraint, this was called. The dogs lay with their noses pointing towards the food. The cats gathered around saucers full of milk. The little girl carefully carried through the house a saucer of milk to her special friend, the grey cat. She sat on the floor watching the cat lap, pink tongue curling around the mouthfuls of milk. The cat mewed, Thank you, and sat licking herself a little, to wake herself up. Then she stepped out to join the other cats, the dogs, the family.
Afternoons were full of events, chosen by my mother to educate or in some way to improve and uplift. There was a treehouse, platforms of planks in the musasa tree just behind the house. ‘Come up to our house, come up,’ we shouted at Daddy, as he manoeuvred his great clumsy leg so that he got himself on to the first platform. Then up came Mummy, and she told us about life in England, and her voice was sad, so sad that he rebuked her, ‘Don’t sound such a misery, old girl. England wasn’t all roses, you know.’ And then he might tell us of another England, the beggars, the out-of-work ex-soldiers selling matches, and the silly Bright Young Things dancing and jazzing; they didn’t care about the dead soldiers or the ones that couldn’t get work. Or told us of his good times before the war, when he went to the races or danced all night.
Or we would be taken to see the man who made the rimpis for the farm. On a flat place down near the new barns were trees where ox hides hung to dry in the shapes of oxen, without their bodies. Or new hide, just lifted off the carcass, was being cut into strips, and then dunked into petrol tins full of brine. Soon they were hauled out, hung over branches, and then a couple of little black boys pulled and worked the strips so they remained supple and could be used for the many purposes of the farm – tying the yokes of oxen around their necks, or tying yokes to the great central beam of the wagon or the cart, making beds and couches, or dried to be wound into great balls like small boulders and kept in a hut till they were wanted. Or the little boys would be rubbing fat and salt on to the insides of new hides, manipulating them, moving them, rubbing them so they would be soft and good for karosses or floor mats.
Or the place where bricks were made. The earth was taken from the towering termite-heaps. It was piled on a flat place, sand added, and then water poured on, and again small black boys stamped around in it, and we, the white children, stamped and danced too, our mother encouraging us, because small children should play with mud and water, Montessori said so. In fact I did not like it. These occasions were like many others, when I was playing a role to please her. I did not like the mud on my feet, and splashing on my legs, but I went on with it, together with my brother and the black children. Then the piles of mud were ready, like poo, as my brother and I giggled, but never telling our mother why. Then the brick boy came with his moulds and one man filled them with mud while another carried the moulds to turn them out in rows over straw. There the sun soon dried them. Then they were built into kilns, and fires lit in the holes like ovens inside them. Soon there they were, the piled-up bricks, red, or yellow, and there we children climbed and balanced, feeling the hot roughness of the bricks on our soles, and we jumped off, and climbed up, again and again, while my mother watched, pleased we were having this experience.
Aeons later, eternities later, the sun slid down the sky into the spectacular sunset we took for granted. But I remember standing there by myself, my whole heart and soul going out and up into those flaming skies, knowing that was where I belonged, in that splendour, which was so sad, so sorrowful, I was not here at all, or I wouldn’t be for long, I would get away from here soon. Soon – how, when a day took for ever and for ever? Round about then I wrote a ‘prose poem’ about a sunset, a paragraph long, and my mother sent it into the Rhodesia Herald. My first printed effort. The complex of feelings about this were the same as now: I was proud that there I was in print, uneasy that impulses so private and intimate had led to words that others would read, would take possession of. I was wriggling with pride and resentment mixed when mother said Mrs Larter had said how clever I was to have a piece in the paper. And she’s so young too. But I made a private oath that next time I was taken with a ‘prose poem’, it would remain my secret.
At sunset, the farm became loud with the lowings of the herd of oxen being hurried back from somewhere in the bush to the safety of the kraal. In the early days there were still leopards as near as Koodoo Hill, a couple of miles away. Until the family left the farm, there were leopards in the Ayreshire Hills. Sometimes a farmer would telephone to report that a leopard had taken a beast. And there were pythons, who liked calves. The oxen, though they were wild, unsubdued beasts and nothing like the comfortable tamed animals of England, had to be fenced at night. Besides, in the mornings the cows had to be milked. One cow was not enough – not of those thin, rangy Afrikander cattle. Five or six gave enough milk for our purposes. We were told of the wonderful beasts of England with udders that touched the ground and each one holding enough milk for several households. All that talk of abundant paradises … there are ways of listening to travellers’ tales that keep you safe from them. That England they talked about, all that green grass and spring flowers and cows as friendly as cats – what had all that to do with me?
Then the children had supper. Eggs and bread and butter and a pudding. ‘Eat up your food!’ ‘But I don’t want it.’ ‘Of course you must eat it up.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ ‘Of course you’re hungry.’
By the time I went to my first school I had been reading for – well, how long? – when I am dealing with time as elastic as dream-time? I do know that from the moment I shouted triumph because I was spelling c-i-g-a-r-e-t-t-e from the packet, it was no time before I was reading the easier bits in the books in the heavy bookcase. The classics. The classics of that time, all in dark red leather covers, with thin-as-skin pages, edged with gold. Scott. Stevenson. Kipling. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Dickens. Curled in the corner of the storehouse verandah, on a bed of slippery grain sacks that smelled sweet from the maize meal, and rank from the presence of cats, I raced through Plain Tales from the Hills, skipping a good half, The Jungle Book, Oliver Twist, skipping, always skipping, and having found my parents weeping with laughter over The Young Visiters, read it with the respect due to an author two years older than I was, brooding over words like mousetache. Mouse-ache? Where did the ‘t’ fit in and why did the mouse ache? To fit oneself to the mysterious order of the grown-up world was not an easy thing. ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall.’ Why should the hymn need to specify the lack of that wall? Puzzles and enigmas, but above all, the delight of discoveries, the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of books which has never ever failed me. And not only grown-up books. Children’s books arrived from London, and children’s newspapers. If some enterprising publisher should now produce a magazine on the level of the Merry-Go-Round, with writers like Walter de la Mare, Laurence Binyon, Eleanor Farjeon, would it at once fail? ‘It’s television, you see …’ The Children’s Newspaper, with reports from Egypt and Mesopotamia of the archaeological discoveries from the tombs of Tut-an-Khamun and Nefertiti? But all this is on children’s television. Then, just like now, children were supposed to be protected from horrors and, just as now, we weren’t, for all the time, every day, those voices went on and on, about the Trenches, bombs, star-shells, shrapnel, shell holes, men drowning in shell holes and the mud that could swallow horses, let alone men. The wounded in the Royal Free, the men with their lungs full of gas, the death by drowning of my mother’s young doctor, barbed wire, No-man’s-land, the Angels of Mons, the field hospitals, the men shot for ‘cowardice’, on and on and on, my father’s voice, my mother’s, and, too, the voices of many of our visitors. What is the use of keeping the Children’s Newspaper and Merry-Go-Round sweet and sane, when the News tells the truth about what is going on and the grown-ups talk, talk, talk about what will always be the most important thing in their lives – war. Whenever a male visitor came, the talk would soon be of the Trenches. No, it is not violence or even pornography and sadism that is the difference between then and now, it is that children were not patronized, much more was expected of them. I do not remember my parents ever saying, ‘That is too difficult for you.’ No, only pleased congratulation that I was tackling The Talisman or whatever it was. You would have to contrast the Merry-Go-Round with the banal jokiness of a children’s programme on television to see how much lower we all stand now.
Before I reached the big school, the Convent, there were two intermediate schools. The first was Rumbavu Park, just outside Salisbury, owned by a family called Peach. I, just seven, and my brother, four, were taken there together and I was instructed to look after him. But if I adored my little brother, so did everyone else. He was always in the care of the big girls, nine or ten, who took him about with them like a doll. This was a gentle place, run by gentle folk – gentlefolk. I use this word because the matron, Mrs James, did – constantly. Like Russians of the intelligentsia who talk now of being gentlefolk, with contemptuous dismissal of their decades of revolution and egalitarianism – ‘my family are gentlefolk’ – Mrs James made this claim, it seemed in every sentence. Here was another member of the English middle class threatened by rough colonial manners but, unlike most of them, who mean only that they are superior in some ineffable and indefinable way, Mrs James meant what the Russians mean: they are the inheritors of literary, musical and artistic culture. She was a large swarthy gypsy-like woman, with straight black hair, like Augustus John’s Dorelia, an earth mother long before the word, and she was kind. When I wrote baby pieces about flowers and birds, she told me I was wonderful, and showed them around. She brushed my hair, and made me wash under my arms and between my legs for she was afflicted by a horror of natural processes, and she held me on her large lap and sighed and mourned the crudeness of the world and her sad fate, to be matron in a school. When my parents came to visit, Mrs James presented me and my brother to them as her achievements. Far from being unhappy there, I was full of the excitements and delights of discovery. The wonderful gardens spread all over a couple of hillsides – and still do. Terraces and fountains and pools and trees and flowers: it was a show place, and at weekends people drove out from Salisbury to admire it.
I was at school in Rumbavu Park for a term. It was an aeon. A forever. When sorting out the time-segments of those two years, I had to concede that it was only a term. I have to. Impossible, but so it was. If only I could have stayed there, but the Peaches went bust, hard luck not only for them but for the children at their school. Just before I left there was an incident that illustrates a theme of these memoirs which is: why is it we expect what we do? Sybil Thorndike was on tour in Southern Rhodesia, and playing Lady Macbeth. The older children were to be taken to see her. I would go if Mary Peach did not return in time from England, where she was on holiday. She came back that afternoon, so I could not go. She came to me, a big girl, twelve or so, to say nicely she was sorry I was going to be disappointed. I remember stammering that of course it was all right, while inside I was the embodiment of all the insulted and injured of the world. Why was it that Mary Peach, who was rich and had just come back from England where I could not go – for the theme of the absolute out-of-reachness of England was already established in my mind – had the right to see Sybil Thorndike? Unfairness … injustice … the bitterness of it. But what I would like to know is, where did the violence of that sense of injustice come from? I was seven years old. This was not only the child’s sense of injustice which we describe as ‘innate’: a child’s betrayal of justice is, must be, love betrayed, and what I was feeling was social injustice. I can think of nothing in my life more cruel than that disappointment, as if it were the sum of the world’s indifference. Surely it had to come from my parents, particularly from my father’s voice murmuring through my days and through my sleep, too, of the war, the betrayal of the soldiers, the wicked stupidities and corruption of government, just expectation and faith betrayed.
My mother decided we should go to board with a Mrs Scott who took in the children of farmers so they might attend school in Avondale, a suburb of Salisbury, then on the very edge of the town. I was put in the class for my age, but at once put up, I think, two. In that class I discovered the pleasures of achievement, for the reading pieces were at first too difficult for me, and I was not able to skip as I liked. One, in particular, an abridged grown-up story of a man sucked into a sea whirlpool, nearly drowned, but then cast up by the sea, had words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘vortex’, ‘inundate’ and ‘regurgitate’. I stared at them, oppressed by failure, but was saved by context – and in no time this difficult story was mine. Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability? But if the classroom was all pleasure Mrs Scott’s was all cold misery. Very far from gentleness was Mrs Scott. There was a Mr Scott, employed by the Mr Laws who had the timber concession. My mother had sent her two little children to the lumber camp to stay a few days in the bush with Biddy, for she never missed the opportunity to give them useful experience. We were in a tent, for the first time, surrounded by majestic trees full of cicadas, being felled one after the other, and destined to burn in tobacco barns and mine furnaces.
Already a social being, ready to please one set of people with agreeable information about others, I said to Mrs Scott that Mr Scott, her husband, had said goodnight to Biddy when she had on only a petticoat. The voice I used was my parents’ – worldly and disapproving. I had no idea what I was saying. If Mr Scott had his arms about Biddy, his whiskers, scented with Pears soap, pressed against her ear, then this was only a sign of a general loving kindness I yearned for. Mrs Scott at once hated the messenger who had brought bad news, and made a loud and noisy scene with her husband.
I hated her. She was a large ugly woman smelling of stale sweat. He was large and smelly. There was no way of getting away from them day or night. Their bed was on the verandah just outside where my bed stood under a window. I did not like getting into my bed. The cover was a kaross, a fur blanket, made of wild cat skin. Everyone had karosses, which were cheap, costing only the price of a bullet, and the labour of the man who cured the skins in salt and wind. A kaross always smelled a little, especially in the rainy season. The kaross on my bed was badly cured and smelled stuffy. I lay in bed trying to keep my face in the air from outside, while outside Mrs Scott wept and said he didn’t love her, and he soothed and reassured and said he did, it was only the word of a child. At this point I ought to be able to record listening to the sounds of sex and a resulting trauma, but no, it was the injustice of it, for I had described what I had seen. Mrs Scott never spoke to me in anything but a cold and sarcastic voice. There were other children, but I remember only her daughter Nancy, who bullied me in minor ways. Then she told her mother that at school I used to go round the backs of the lavatory blocks and look up at the shitty backsides. Such a crime had never occurred to me. Mrs Scott was not allowed to hit me – my mother did not hold with it – but she slapped and hit her own daughter, just as Mr Scott did. I was afraid she would hit me, for she did not believe me when I said it was untrue. She told my parents who came hastening, if that is the word for their dawdling progress, into town. Had I done this thing? No, I had not. Remember, it was wicked to lie. ‘A lie is much worse than being naughty.’ They believed me. My little brother giggled. Funny that I remember so little of my adored little brother except ‘standing up’ for him against unkind Nancy.
January to June 1927. My seventh year. I was homesick and miserable. But compared with what goes on in schools now, and the ugliness of the bullying, physical and verbal, Mrs Scott’s unkindness and Nancy’s malice were nothing. I listen to young friends’ accounts of what goes on in well-reputed schools and cannot believe it. Not that children are cruel – for most are monsters, unchecked. No, that teachers seem unable to stop it. Perhaps they are not unable, but even like the idea? After all, Prince Charles reports that in the elite school, Gordonstoun, his head was held in the lavatory bowl while the flush was pulled. If that is what is prescribed for the highest in the land, lesser mortals need not expect better. We are a barbarous people.
For a long time, driving past that house, long since demolished, with its big garden, I felt ill and turned my head away not to see it. Avondale School, where I did so well, is still there, unchanged.
Among the reading matter provided by my mother was a series of improving tales for children about saints, like Elizabeth of Hungary, who earned from heaven chaplets of roses to shame her husband when he criticized her charities. An intense hunger for goodness took me over, and in the patch of empty ground behind Mrs Scott’s, I built a cathedral of sunflower stalks. The pleasure of it, the accomplishment, planning the building while the tales of saintly women rising above all persecution saturated my whole being. I was handling the light dry stalks, three times my height, while in imagination I was creating a great church that God himself would congratulate me for, listening for voices which surely I would hear if I tried hard enough, all assuring me of fellowship with the saints. But Mrs Scott did not see the point of these stalks, dragged out of their piles where they were stacked for burning. If you fill children’s heads with saintly tales they will build cathedrals and expect chaplets of roses and chanting choirs. This is as powerful a memory as any.
Why was I left at Mrs Scott’s for two terms? Probably that child’s taboo against telling tales out of school was already operating. Besides, all the time, there was the pressure of We are so poor, We are having such a bad time – meaning, We can’t help it. I read ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, and identified with Kipling as a small boy, just as my mother had done before me, but my mother didn’t embrace me weeping, Oh my little child, my poor little child – as I raised my arm to ward off a blow. There were no blows, only cold sarcastic verbal bullying. And I was already reading Stalky and Co., full of information about school brutality. Literature provides more complex news about the world than It isn’t fair, but this lives in a different part of the brain.
I had begun, in short, to colour in the map of the world with the hues and tints of literature. Which does two things (at least). One is to refine your knowledge of your fellow human beings. The other is to tell you about societies, countries, classes, ways of living. A bad book cannot tell you about people – only about the author. A bad book does not know much about love, hate, death or so on. But a bad book can tell you a good deal about a certain time or place – about history. Facts. Mores. Customs. A good book does both.
But bad books were still in the future. Meanwhile, then and for three or four years, what came to the farm from London was an astonishing variety and number of books. They had to be written for, and the order took a month or so to get there. The books had to come by sea, three weeks, then a train to Salisbury from the coast, and another train to Banket, and then they had to be fetched from the station.
Here are some of what I remember. John Bunyan. Bible Tales for Children. English History for Children. The Crusades – with Saladin presented like an English gentleman. The battles of Crécy, Agincourt, Waterloo, the Crimea, biographies of Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Brunel, Cecil Rhodes. Children’s novels like John Halifax, Gentleman; Robinson Crusoe; The Swiss Family Robinson; Lobo, the Wolf (from America, Ernest Seton Thompson). Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Christopher Robin, Black Beauty, Stevenson’s Verses for Children, Jock of the Bushveld, Florence Nightingale, and – not least – Biffel, a Trek Ox, the story of a beast that died in the rinderpest epidemic of, I think, 1896, unforgettable by any child who reads it at the right time. The Secret Garden. The Forest Lovers. A whole range of little tales, purporting to be the lives of children in Iceland, India, France, Germany – everywhere – jolly little tales, jolly little lives, the equivalent of the readers that went, ‘John and Betty had such fun playing with Spot’ – but I suppose the information that in Norway they ski and in Switzerland they yodel is not unuseful.
It was mid-year of 1927 when I returned finally from Mrs Scott’s, for I was due to go to the Convent, for which I was already being primed by warnings that they – the RCs – would try to ‘get me’ and I must be on my guard. The Convent, which always had more Protestant than Catholic pupils, was used to assuring anxious parents that the souls of their offspring were safe with them. The Convent, like convents in Britain, was supposed to be more genteel than the High School. I am always meeting women now who were sent to convents for the same reason. That the convent in Salisbury had this reputation was because of false comparisons with Home. I had been given a bursary. Into the third year on the farm it was evident things were going badly and not likely soon to get better. My father was building tobacco barns, because maize was no longer where fortunes were being made. And was he, with his wooden leg, his limited mobility, planning to get up several times during the night to check the temperatures in a barn a good mile away?
We could not have afforded unaided my uniform for the convent, piled on chairs and beds everywhere through the house. Pleated tunics in heavy brown serge and alpaca, with light orange cotton blouses, springy brown girdles that surely could never stay knotted, white panama hats with brown and orange ribbons, the brown blazer, piles of heavy brown knickers, and many vests and brown socks. Even to look at this stuff was oppressive, but luckily it was still the beginning of the holidays and time stretched endlessly ahead.
Just about then the family became characters in A. A. Milne, just as if we had never left England. My father was Eeyore, my brother Roo, my mother – what else? – Kanga. I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia, for nothing would stop friends and comrades using it. Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size. I was Tigger Tayler, Tigger Wisdom, then Tigger Lessing, the last fitting me even less than the others. Also Comrade Tigger. This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess. There was a lot of energy in ‘Tigger’ – that healthy bouncy beast. But it was not Tigger that went off to the Convent, but a frightened and miserable little girl.
Mother Patrick came riding into the colony with her five Sisters just a year after the Pioneer Column in 1890 and they at once set up their hospital and became, but really, sisters of Mercy, because contemporary accounts speak of them like this. It was Mother Patrick who established the Dominican convent and she was, when I got there, a revered figure, spoken of in awed tones, like the other pioneer sisters. Sister Constantia and Sister Bonaventura were, I think, still alive, as silently influential as the statues everywhere of the Virgin. They had been lively and adventurous young women, and the administrative nuns that came after them were a different kind.
The Convent was a central mass with projecting wings, embedded in granite chips. When adults walk over stone chips, the pebbles are not very comfortable underfoot, but for a small child it is like toiling over the big sharp stones on a beach, each a hazard. The staircase to the small girls’ dormitory was steep, every step at thigh-level. The little ones clambered up on hands and knees; going down meant jumping from step to step for the handrail was high above our heads. The day I found myself actually able to step down, the day I ran across the gravel, were markers on the road to being grown-up. This dormitory (which was over the gym), the refectory, the classrooms, the sickroom, were what the pupils knew of the Convent: most of the building was out of bounds to the children, and seemed a ghost story place of vast shadowy rooms full of nuns in their black and white robes floating like shadows. The nuns slept in dormitories too, but we knew white curtains separated their beds, making tight box-like cubicles. The ‘little ones’ dorm’ was a long high-ceilinged room, and in it were three rows of beds, lined up head to foot, twenty-four beds. There were rows of high windows on either side. This large room, or rather, hall, was in daylight well lit and fresh, but at night a different place. A small table that projected into the room, making it necessary always to walk around it, held an assortment of holy objects, small statues like icing-sugar figures on cakes; and above it was a large picture where a man from whose head shot rays like those from behind a storm cloud pointed authoritatively to his swollen heart dripping blood. On the wall facing this altar was a tall picture of a man on whose head was clamped an enormous wreath of Christ-thorn, like that which grew on the kopje, with black spikes an inch or two inches long, and blood ran down his face from the spikes. Other pictures showed a man full of arrows that stuck out like porcupine quills, each in a bloody wound, and a woman holding a plate on which were two pink blancmanges in red jam sauce, but these turned out to be her cut-off breasts. In another a woman stood smiling while being burned to death by flames that curled around her like long witches’ fingers.
When I recently drove through the countryside near Munich I kept coming upon horrific statues of tortured Christ. They were beside or in a pretty stream, or in a wood, a field, a garden. They reminded me of the pictures provided for the instruction of us children in the convent, all relish in blood and torture. The nuns in this convent were nearly all from South Germany, which was Hitler’s country. Stalin the sadist came from a seminary. I was reminded of these feasts of blood when I was in Peshawar at the time when Shiah Muslims celebrate the murder of Hassan and Hussain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandchildren, more than 1,500 years ago. Young men ran or staggered in hordes through the streets lacerating themselves with heavy chains or whips, eyes blank or shocked with pain, till they fell, to be gathered up in ambulances that were patrolling the streets for just this purpose. Forgive me for the banality of this reflection, but there is something very wrong with the human race.
The youngest children in the great torture room were five or six, and the oldest were ten and eleven.
When we were in our rows of beds, the light was turned off, but the red light that burned always in front of the Sacred Heart and its bloody gouts lit the room with red. The nun in charge of us little ones came to stand in the doorway, the light behind her. In heavy German accents she said, ‘You little children believe you are safe in your beds, you think that do you? Well you think wrong, you think the holy God cannot see you when you lie under the sheet. But you must think again. God knows what you are thinking, God knows the evil in your hearts. You are wicked children, disobedient to God and to the good Sisters who look after you for the glory of God. If you die tonight you will go to hell, and there you will burn in the flames of hell, yes I tell you so, and you must believe me. And the worms will eat you and there will never be an end, it will never ever end.’ She would go on like this for a good ten minutes or so. Then, having cursed us to hell and back, she shut the door and left us to it.
Storms of sobs, and soft shrieks of terror. The older girls crept to the beds of the little ones, to comfort them. ‘It’s only Catholic,’ they would say, ‘we don’t believe all that.’ For most of us were Protestants. The Catholic little girls were protected by rosaries, holy pictures and bottles of holy water under their pillows.
When my parents warned me that the Catholics would try to ‘get’ me they had not foreseen anything like this, I knew that. I knew they would be appalled. This armoured me, and besides, one may believe and not believe at the same time. I do not know for how many years these horrific sermons went on: the impression the first term made on me was so strong I have forgotten the rest. I remember only lying in bed to watch the blood dripping from the big heart like a lump of fresh steak, making myself see that it moved, believing that I could actually see the blood trickling, while I knew perfectly well it didn’t. The tiny children – I was already, at eight, in the middle range – used to cry out in their sleep. Sometimes one would go wandering around among the beds in her sleep, and an older child gently led her back to her own bed. One sleepwalking little girl persistently tried to get into the bed parallel to hers, because there was a kindly older child in it, who quietly made the swap when the small one was asleep at last, the nuns never knowing. In the morning there were dirty stains of urine in many beds. The nuns scolded and punished: for the Catholic girls the repetition of Hail Marys, for us, admonishment and threats.
The nun whose talent was for hellfire and the undying worm used a ruler on our palms when we were naughty. There were a thousand petty rules, and I have forgotten them, but remember the secret scorn they endangered: we protected ourselves by despising these dormitory nuns, making fun of their accents, telling each other if they weren’t stupid they would be teaching nuns. Most of the rules were to do with washing. Not that we should wash, but that we should not. Cleanliness for these women was an invitation to the devil. We were told to wash our hands only to the wrists, keeping sleeves rolled down. Only our faces, with a washcloth soaped thick: if our eyes stung, we must offer the pain to God. We might bathe only once a week. The nuns told us that good children would agree to wear the wooden board that stood always against the bathroom wall, when we bathed. The board had a hole in it for the head, and was designed to rest on the sides of the bath, making it impossible to see our bodies. But no one would. We were allowed to change our underclothes once a week. We smelled. All our letters were read by the nuns and when I told my mother about the bath rules, the nun said I was disloyal and wicked and made me write the letter again. But at half term I ‘told’ on the nuns, and my mother was furious, protested – and thereafter we were all allowed to bathe twice a week and change our underclothes twice. We continued to smell. We had to put on smelly knickers and dirty socks. ‘Vanity’ said Sister Amelia, or Brünnhilde or whoever. ‘All is vanity. You should not think about your body.’
There went on the usual school mythology about the slaps administered to our palms with rulers. We giggled, as is prescribed, advised each other how to soap our palms, recounted tales about a former pupil who was beaten till her hand fell off, and now she had an artificial hand. All this was as it always is, at this type of school. But if the rulers left hot red marks on palms, that was all, the nuns were not allowed to hit us anywhere else. It could all have been much worse. And I don’t remember bullying, on the contrary, the older children were tender with the little ones, remembering their own misery.
The atmosphere in the Convent, in short, can only be described as unwholesome, a favourite word of mother’s. How much did she know about all this? If it was within the code to ‘tell’ about the lack of baths, why not about the viciously slashing rulers, why not about those hellfire sermons? When ‘Tigger’ reported on them, she made a joke about it all. And certainly my mother knew about the sadistic pictures in the room we slept in, for she inspected the Convent thoroughly. But after all, she herself had had a strict, punishing upbringing.
The nuns never made any attempt to ‘get’ the Protestant girls. They did not need to. The atmosphere of magic and mystery was enough. Antonia White’s Frost in May describes the allurements of the forbidden, though her convent was on a somewhat higher social level. Most of us at some time wanted to be Catholics, simply to be like the Catholic girls, who dipped their fingers into the holy water stoups beside every door, who crossed themselves and curtsied as they passed statues of Christ or the Virgin, who carried holy pictures in their pockets and rosaries wound around their wrists. They were always going off to special events in the cathedral. Bells rang from the cathedral a block away, several times a day, for Angelus, and for Mass. Bells tinkled from the nuns’ chapel. The Virgin, a pleasant and beneficent figure, was often carried about the grounds on litters draped with coloured paper. Above all, there was the mystery of the part of the convent we were not allowed into. We believed there were hundreds of nuns, but perhaps there were not more than fifty. Most of them we never met. They worked in the kitchens, cooked our food and theirs, kept the convent and its grounds clean – there were no black servants. Some were taken out every day in lorries to the vegetable gardens. They all got up very early in the morning, four o’clock, some earlier. If you woke at night you could hear the sweet high chanting voices from the chapel. There were often funerals. If we begged hard enough the Protestant girls were allowed to go in the lorries to the cemetery with the Catholics, where we stared in a romantic trance at the coffin, violin shaped, bright white and pink, like a cake, with messages in gold script, Sister Harmonia, Bride of Christ, RIP. She was very young to die, said the other sisters. Knowing that eighteen, twenty, was thought young shocked us with our small sum of years, for it was hard to believe we would ever be as old as this dead woman.
Now I think these girls died of broken hearts. Nearly all were poor peasant girls from Germany. The Convent in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, was an extension of the economic conditions in Europe. Germany had not recovered from the First World War and reparations. As had always happened in the poor families of Europe, one or two girls in a family became nuns, to save their families the burden of feeding them. They found themselves thousands of miles from home, in this exotic country, doing hard physical work, as they had all their lives, but in the heat, and with no prospect of seeing their families again. Their only consolation can have been that their loneliness and exile made things easier at home. Once, when I was in the sickroom, a nun came to sit on my bed (against the rules) while the Angelus rang its call to prayer and the sky flamed red, and she wept, and crossed herself, crossed herself and wept, saying she longed for her mother. Then up she jumped, asked the Holy Virgin to forgive her, told me to forget what she had said, and ran out. She was eighteen.
Our speculations about the nuns’ secret lives were innocent. Now children of five or six would probably talk knowledgeably about lesbianism. Their bathing arrangements part consoled us for ours. They took baths once a week, wearing a white shroud, and kept the board around their necks. They never saw themselves in a mirror. Their heads were shaved. They seldom changed their undergarments. We knew what they wore, for we could see acres of white garments on the washing lines. There were layers of vests and knickers and petticoats under the heavy white serge robes we could see, that had over them the black robe, the crimped wimple, and the two veils, white and black. The nuns smelled horrible.
The nuns who taught us were educated women. One at least was a Nazi – so says Muriel Spark who writes about the same convent in her autobiography. Sister Margaret taught music, was kind to the little girl whose mother kept insisting she was a musical prodigy. She knew my mother could have had a career in music, listened gently to her tales about thwarted ambition, and for four years taught me scales and apprentice pieces, told me about great musicians and the obstacles they overcame. She never even hinted I had no particular talent. There was a Sister Patrick who, the nuns said, was a real lady, from Ireland, but she had given all that up for the love of God. She was a tall thin woman, with a fine elegant face, and she was dry and witty and sometimes unkind. She might quote from French or Latin and then say, ‘But you will not have heard of him I suppose,’ and sigh.
I was clever, that was my attribute, clever little Tigger Tayler. School lessons were never difficult, exams pleasurable. But being clever was not something I was prepared to go along with, for from the start I was quietly sliding out, not knowing what I did. My cleverness was a continuation of my mother’s, like my musical talents, insisted on, held up to other people for admiration, boasted about to the farmers’ wives, used as a means to get bursaries and special privileges.
What was my own, where I belonged, was the world of books, but I had to fight for it as soon as I arrived at the Convent. The school library was several rooms full to the ceiling with books neatly covered in brown paper, the titles and authors written on their spines in ink. I felt as if I had walked into a treasure cave, but the library nuns did not believe a child of eight had read Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. They insisted I must have the permission of my parents to read such unsuitable books. My weekly letter home read, ‘I am very well. I hope you are very well. How are Lion and Tiger? Sister Perpetua says I must have your permission to read books. It is only four weeks and three days and seven hours to the holidays. Love to Harry.’ While waiting for permission, the library nuns urged on me improving literature, which filled two long shelves. The word ‘unwholesome’ is hardly adequate to describe the moral climate these novels came from. The plots were all the same. A pure young man or girl met, apparently by chance, a worldly person, usually a woman, well dressed, older, but whose every smile or glance promised enticing initiations. The neophyte was invited to a country house, full of cosmopolitan older people, who all had the same air of mystery. The bemused one found herself, himself, attending seances, table-turnings, and ambiguous services in ruined chapels and sylvan glades. And then – the choice! The left-hand path into Satanism, the right-hand path into tedious virtue, which was fit only for the stupid or the timid. I did not find anything like this mix of eroticism and black magic until the TV series Twin Peaks from the States a couple of years ago, but the convent novels had nothing in them of that grotesque wit.
These novels were not as compelling as the library nuns would have liked. I had never heard of seances or Satan. For the four years I was at the Convent I was being urged to read them. Now, when I ask Catholic friends, they know nothing of these books or anything like them. Perhaps some pious library at Home was pruning itself, and thought: ‘Pity to waste them. I’ve got it, they’ll do for those heathen natives in Africa!’
I was at the Convent for four years. Or for eternity. I used to wake up in the morning with the clang of the bell and not believe I would live through that interminable day until the night. And, after this endless day would be another. Then another. I was in the grip of a homesickness like an illness. It is an illness. When I was in my late sixties and succumbed to grief, I thought, My God, that’s what I went through as a child, and I’ve forgotten how very terrible it was. What did I long for? Home. I wanted to be home. I wanted my mother, my father and my little brother, who until he was eight was still at home. I wanted my dogs and my cat. I wanted to be near the birds and animals of the bush. I wanted … I yearned … I craved, for this anguish to be over. I did not believe it would ever end. I have exchanged recollections with men who were sent to schools in England aged seven, and some remember this weight of misery. There must be by now hundreds of memoirs, autobiographies, testifying to the misery of small children sent too young to school. It is a terrible thing to send small children to boarding school. We all know it. Yet people who remember very well how they suffered, sent from home aged seven or eight, do the same to their children. This says something pretty important about human nature. Or about the British.
I could not conceivably have lived through four years continuously in the grip of that pain, but whenever I take out my mental snapshots of the Convent, I am immersed in grief.
When I went home for the holidays, the end of them seemed so far away it was like a reprieve. Six weeks. Even four weeks. When every day was endless, then even a week was an ocean of time.
For two years my little brother was at home being taught by correspondence course and slowly he fought his way out of being Baby, or Roo, insisted on being called Harry, and took firm hold of his birthright, which was physical excellence. If my early memories of Baby are all of a cuddlesome complacency, on someone’s lap, usually mine, then later they are of him in energetic movement, flying down the hill on his scooter, then his bicycle, brakes off, or at the top of some fearsome tree, or hitting sixes over the roof of the house while he ran like a duiker. He was like all the other white boys of the District, a lean, tough, sunburned child, his knees always scarred, his shorts torn, and his eyes inflamed by the sun, for he was out in it from sunrise till sundown. My mother read us Peter Pan too often, and her voice broke when Peter returned, found the window shut and went flying off again. ‘Come on old girl,’ urged my father, ‘it’s not as bad as all that.’
But for her it was. Nothing she had wanted for herself was going to happen. All her energies were in her children, and particularly her darling little boy. But he – and quite suddenly – did not seem to be aware of her. Interesting, the different ways children rebel, preserve themselves. I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too. But my brother never fought. He would smile, quite politely, as my mother tried to make him eat this, wear that, think this or that, see the children on the other farms as common, or see ‘this second-rate country’ as a place he would not stay in. But, if he did as he liked, it was within the limits of what she chose. He went to Ruzawi, a prep school modelled on English lines, and later, into the Navy, though he did not want to. It was not until he married that he made a big choice for himself. Now I see it as an instinctive passive resistance.
I begged my mother to have another baby. She was a maternal woman all right, and it must have been painful, when that little girl’s pleadings reinforced suppressed instincts. ‘Please, Mummy, please, I’ll help to look after it.’ ‘But we can’t afford it,’ she said, over and over again. And then, already, and so early, ‘Besides, Daddy is not very strong.’ The strength of my yearning for that infant mingled with my homesickness; I am sure yearnings of this intensity are for some other good lost perhaps when we are born. But when I mourned that there would not be another baby, I learned how much ‘Baby’ had been my baby as much as my mother’s. After that, if there was a baby or a small child anywhere in the District, I adored it, could not be separated from it, begged to be allowed to bring it home. This passion became quite a joke in the District – a kindly one. ‘Your little girl, she’s a funny one for babies.’
In the paraffin box bookcase beside my mother’s bed, behind the Liberty cretonnes that were beginning to lose freshness, was a book about the process of giving birth, the manual on obstetrics from the Royal Free. I lay on my mother’s bed, studied the stages of the foetus’s growth, pored over the enlarging slopes of the stomach, and, in imagination, went into labour and gave birth. So strong was my identification that I almost believed that yes, there would be the baby, lying there on the bed. This fantasy was also erotic, but in flavour, not in physical fact. Who was the male? One of the little boys in the District with whom I was in love and with whom I was making a family.
The holidays were crammed with incidents and events. My mother made sure they would be. Not only did our instruction continue, stories from history, geography, exploration, but there were visits to and from the other farms. When the families arrived and the children were sent off to play, it was not play at all. We stalked animals and hid to watch them, watched birds, learned how to distinguish tracks in the dust of the roads, searched reefs for gold-bearing rocks. My brother was given his first airgun, and he shot every bird he saw. The guns divided the gang of children into boys and girls – the boys shooting, the girls playing family. But when I was alone with my brother, we went together into the bush. My mother’s genius for social life showed itself in picnics, either with other families or when we were on our own. The car was piled with food, and we went off to some clear place in the bush and made a fire and cooked sausages and eggs, and lay under the trees watching the moon rise, or naming stars. If there were other children we sang jolly songs, like ‘Campdown Races’ and sad ones, like ‘Shenandoah’. We sang American, not English songs.
Several times a day, through the holidays, I, or my brother, or both of us, would be summoned to learn something. My mother, or father, had found a skull or skeleton in the bush, or a lump of gold-bearing rock. She boiled the skulls and skeletons of birds and small animals until the flesh fell off so we could learn the structure of bones. She blew birds’ eggs, and dismantled birds’ nests. She cut open termite nests to show us their gardens, their nurseries, their roads, their galleries. She showed us cast snakes’ skins and the eggs of spiders and snakes. She pulled flowers and leaves apart, and made us draw their parts.
Meanwhile, all the time, it seemed day and night, talk of the war went on. Sometimes it seemed as if the house on the hill was full of men in uniforms, but they were dead, just as in all the houses of the District were photographs of dead soldiers. And, too, cripples from the war. There was Mr Livingstone with a wooden leg, like my father – but he did much less with it. Mr McAuley had a steel plate over his stomach, to keep his intestines in – so they said. In the Murrays’ house, a sad, stoical, woman mourned the death of a husband and four sons in the Trenches. There was one son still alive, to take the place of all of them. In the Shattocks’ house was the picture of a beautiful little boy who, when a boat was sunk by a torpedo in the war, was sucked into the funnel to drown. Sometimes, when the talk of the war began again – and again, I wriggled away, tried to get out of the room, and if my father caught me he would shout, ‘That’s right, it’s only the Great Unmentionable. It’s only the Great War, that’s all!’
There is a question: there has to be. Four years at the Convent, but also four years of holidays, weeks of holidays that seemed when they began as if they would never end. There were a hundred kinds of experiences, good times, picnics, family outings, the dogs, the cats, cuddling babies, or walking all day with my brother in the bush, sitting up at night to watch the stars. But the dark times, the miseries are stronger than the good times. Why is that? ‘Give me a child until it is seven,’ they say the Jesuits say. The talk of war was probably the first thing I ever heard. So perhaps if there had never been the Convent with its bloody and tortured people everywhere, its tortured but smiling saints, it would have been the same. Suppose the Convent had nothing but sunny pictures of woods and fields and kind faces, would then the talk of war have proved stronger? Or is there something inherent in our composition that disposes us to grief and memories of grief, so that days or even weeks of good times prove less inviting than pain? This question has a rather more than personal relevance.
I had not been at the Convent a year when I escaped into the sickroom. First, I was really ill, with something then generally called B. Coli. A kidney infection, with high temperatures. And thereafter I was always reporting to the sickroom, with vague symptoms, and being kept in bed. My mother saw this as a sign of being ‘delicate’. I knew I was homesick, but did not know that what took me to the sickroom was Sister Antonia, a kindly and affectionate woman, who mothered me and all her charges. These imaginary illnesses had a double face. First, being delicate removed me from my mother’s insistence that I should be clever, ‘Just like I was,’ and continually being shown off to neighbours who, I knew, would be derisive as soon as the telephone was silent, or our car had driven off. ‘Who does she think she is?’ But worse than the neighbours was the pressure of that ferocious energy of hers, insisting I must be clever, that if I got 70 in my maths exams it could be 100, that I would soon get a scholarship, and go to school in England. But illness also delivered me to her, helpless: doctors, illness, medicine. It is like looking back into something like the cold fogs that, sometimes, my father said, lay over No-man’s-land, or even clouds of poison gas. Illness permeated everything. Why was it doctors always did what my mother said? For one thing, she demanded the right to be considered a colleague. ‘I am a sister from the Royal Free in London.’ She knew as much and more than the nurses. I was always being taken to Doctor Huggins for tests and checkups, some of them involving catheters. Now I know I had cystitis, but the most minor inflammation was seen as a symptom of something serious. I used to scream at even the idea of a catheter, so they chloroformed me.
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Дорис Лессинг
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.The first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. it charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.