Under My Skin. Doris Lessing
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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