Under My Skin. Doris Lessing
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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