Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  Now I look back and know that she had a bad breakdown, of everything she had been and was. That woman whimpering in her sickbed, ‘Pity me, pity’, it was not her.

  But I have got ahead of myself, or beside myself. It is because of the impossibility of making sense of Time in its boundaries. Known boundaries and that is the point. I was having my fifth birthday on a German ship in the Atlantic, and when I was seven, was sent to the convent. Two years and perhaps a bit more. Into that time have to be fitted the following. The family went by slow train to Salisbury, where the children were left in a guesthouse, ‘Lilfordia’, while my parents went to look for a farm. Not in a nice, speedy car, but in a pony and trap. The farm found, we children and the trunks followed in a covered wagon, of the kind we see in films.

  There being no house on our farm, the family were lodging with the Whiteheads, small-mine owners, while the house was being built and the lands marked out from the bush. Well, it need not take long to throw up mud walls and a thatched roof. And malaria – twice, for all of us. And now I have to fit in Biddy O’Halloran, who was supposed to be aiding my mother with her two little children. An au pair, she would be now. For both parents this girl was trouble and annoyance. The watching Fates must have been getting a good laugh out of the situation. Biddy was a modern girl, an entity much defended, or attacked, in those days. She smoked, had her hair in a shingle and wore lipstick, which my mother was doing herself very soon, but meanwhile she thought Biddy shameless. The trouble was that my parents were in Persia in the feverish post-war years. They missed the jazz, the Charleston, girls cutting off their hair with the élan with which girls burned their bras later. Dr.esses were at knee-length – or mini-length. Girls swore and drank, demanded the freedom to be like men.

  Biddy O’Halloran appalled my father, too. Young men kept turning up, because of the new girl in the district. Many wanted wives, wanted them badly. No one could make a success of farming if he had no wife. My father hit one youth who asked for Biddy. ‘I think you must mean Miss O’Halloran?’ he demanded. ‘But I am in loco parentis. I am responsible for her.’ Were there darker currents here? Did my father ‘like’ Biddy – as we children would primly put it? Was my mother jealous of Biddy? Emily Tayler’s years in Persia had been all pleasure to the point that my father protested, ‘I had no idea I was marrying a social butterfly.’ In England, not much fun, but there was the boat. She and the captain got on famously. My father was sick in his berth. No one was ever better fitted for a sea voyage than my mother: she adored deck games and dances, and dressing up – all of it – and the German captain clearly admired her. The belle of the ball she must have been, with that trunk full of delicious frocks, but then there were the farm and impertinent Biddy, and everything went wrong, and very fast.

  I owe to Biddy a memory that is one of the most important I have.

  On the mine, the children – my brother, me and the Whiteheads – slept in a large hut. Four beds, each under a long white shroud, the mosquito net. The floor was mud with coconut matting. The roof was thatch.

  Biddy comes into the hut with a candle and she stands looking about, wondering where to set it down. Beside my bed a little night-table – a paraffin box painted. She sets down the candlestick on this, and the flame of the candle is half an inch from the mosquito net, which would flare up like a lit match, or a firework, if it caught. My mother enters just behind Biddy. She sees what Biddy has done. Slowly, so as not to set up a current of fast air that might encourage the flame to reach for the net, she comes over, gently lifts the candlestick and takes it to set down on a table far from danger. She is white, she is clutching her throat. When she sits, or collapses, into a chair, she is trembling. If that flame had caught the net – mine – it would have flared, and set off the other three. One may not imagine anything more attractive to fire than a mosquito net, an airy pillar of white cotton. If the nets had flared, so would the thatch over our heads, and the tempestuously burning hut would have set off the whole group of thatched huts.

  ‘What are you doing?’ my mother asks Biddy, and her voice is cracked and whispery. Her mind is full of roaring flames, screaming children, the hut falling on us, the screams from the other huts…

  What she is imagining is reaching me: I am already aware of and wary of fire. I begin to cry.

  ‘What is wrong?’ asks Biddy, quickly. She might just as well have twiddled a frond of her hair with a much-ringed finger, or sung a phrase or two of some winsome Irish folk tune. That there is something wrong my mother’s voice told her, not to mention my crying. ‘But nothing happened,’ she says pertly, at last. Nothing has.

  But in my mother’s imagination everything was happening. She sat staring at Biddy and it is this that will never leave my mind. She is uncomprehending, bewildered. Her lips are white. Between the clever, foresightful people of this world and the ones without imagination there is a gulf into which perhaps we will all fall one day. My mother can’t believe that Biddy – or anyone – could do what she did.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ says Biddy, and goes off to her hut. My mother sits quite still, then she puts her face into her hands, which are shaking, and she weeps, dry, helpless sobs. ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God.’

  Biddy was not exactly clever with children. She told my brother that if he didn’t keep his mouth shut grasshoppers would jump in and eat up his stomach. She told me a tree would grow out of me like Jack and the Beanstalk. My brother screamed and had nightmares. I didn’t believe in the tree but I early attained that admirable balance of small children. I was capable of believing and not believing at the same time. No tree – no, but what fun if there was…

  Biddy left and my mother took to her bed. Biddy, later in Ireland, married a younger son and was to be seen in society columns. It is around then that I put the drunken housekeeper and her pathetic son, who now it is so easy to see as the victim of a marital breakdown. My mother sent for the government correspondence course. Every week the lessons arrived by train. Then I was sent for a term to a kindly place full of pleasant people. It seemed years I was there. Then I was put into a family near to Avondale Junior School, but they were cruel and stupid people. Much time passed there. Then they sent me to the convent school. Only two years had passed, and even now I can’t make it all fit. So many people, events, dramas, the malaria, watching the house-building. I learned to read off a cigarette packet. ‘Look, I can read.’ And then I was at the convent. Children should not be sent away from home aged seven. It does them no good at all.

  But while I can remember vividly the difficult things, the drunk woman who shared my bedroom, my mother lying for ever in bed, I remember better a delight of my childhood that began about the time my mother got out of bed.

  She told us stories. ‘More…More, please go on…more, please.’ She made whole epics out of the mice in the storeroom, the rats, the cats, the dogs, the chickens in the fowl run. A central feature of these tales was the tower of eggs in the storeroom, coveted by the mice and by the rats, who most ingeniously knew how to roll eggs free to smash and become available to them.

  What a wonderful storyteller she was. She read to us too, and they were wonderful tales, but nothing would compare with her stories.

  It is 1924, and two little people stand on the quay, watching how their luggage is being swung, piece after piece, up and over the ship’s side. My mother was counting the pieces: she could never believe others were as efficient as herself. ‘Wanted on Voyage’. ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. They were about to sail off into the future, with as little understanding of the life they would lead as the first voyagers for Jamestown, or on the Mayflower later, on the east coast of America.

  In those trunks and cases was everything for their imagined life. My father’s had accoutrements and clothes for cricket: he had scarcely played in Persia, but now he was going to a British colony and cricket there must be. A trunk held riding things. Not for hunting in the English manner – foxes and stags – but what a gentleman who al
ways rode rather than walked would need. A long wooden case held his wooden legs. My mother’s imagined life held more variety. First, the trunk with the dozen or so dark-red leather volumes of music scores – Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, all of them – and, too, sheets of popular music, music hall songs and ballads sung when she was a girl around an Edwardian piano. A trunk, ‘Wanted on Voyage’, of evening frocks, scarves, gloves, hats, boas, bags, silvery stockings, brocaded shoes.

  This former nurse took her earlier life with her: catheters, enemas, douches, stethoscopes, measuring glasses. These were in the bottom half of a trunk that had on its top layer the Mason’s equipment about which my father was so blisteringly sarcastic. Why did he take these things to Africa?

  There was another box, or case, full of things for teaching children, crayons and chalks, and books. So this plenitude, the great heavenly provision, was there on the farm from the very start.

  Where may one start?

  A Child’s Garden of Verses, Stevenson.

  The House at Pooh Corner, all of A.A. Milne.

  Children’s annuals and collections. Readers of all kinds.

  These were what she took with her. On the farm she ordered from England books for us. This meant laying out on the dining-table the Croxley writing-paper, pens, ink, and she wrote carefully long lists of books. They were addressed to London bookstores, stamped, and the envelope was taken by the boy on his bicycle to the station where it was handed in at the post office. Banket station, like a score or more of the stations in Rhodesia, consisted of, most important, the post office, a grocery for whites, another for blacks, a butcher, a ‘hotel’ – a dining-room off a brick veranda, gauzed for flies, and in it half a dozen tables and a few chairs. There were two bedrooms. There was the station building too. A real bar, but for whites only. The authorities, mindful of what had happened to the peoples of America when alcohol struck them, would not allow the locals to drink anything but their own ‘kaffir beer’. Quite soon this would become a political issue.

  The letter was carried by train to Salisbury, taken to the post office there, and put on a train to Beira or to Cape Town. A ship took the precious letter to London, England. The letter was read, big brown-paper parcels were made up, tied with thick string, and they were on the ship to Cape Town and Beira. Then the reverse journey: the train to Salisbury and that post office, the train to Banket, where the parcels waited in the station office till the ‘boy’, or sometimes my mother, would come to collect them. And then the joy of those parcels, spread out on the dining-table, on the spare bed in my room. When I came from school for holidays the parcels would be waiting for me: my mother did not unpack them. My brother? He was never interested.

  There was a Children’s Newspaper, made in London, with items from the general news rewritten for children, poems, stories, by Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon, a wonderful periodical – hours of enjoyment with each issue. This was the time when they were excavating in Egypt and in Ur – Iraq. They made magazines out of the stories of the finds, and photographs of the treasures. My mother ordered these, and the rooms under the thatch were illuminated for days with the pictures of Tutankhamun and Nefertiti, and the hoard of his possessions, with the golden artefacts from Ur.

  Alice in Wonderland

  The Secret Garden

  The Wind in the Willows Struwwelpeter

  Children’s Tales from Homer

  Greek Myths for Children

  The Sagas for Children

  Black Beauty

  Biffel a Trex Ox – a South African story about an ox working through the rinderpest epidemic. Oh, th tears, the sorrow.

  Jock of the Bushveld

  Kim

  The Just So Stories

  The Jungle Tales

  The Scarlet Pimpernel

  Huckleberry Finn

  Peter Pan

  A Life of Rhodes

  A Life of Florence Nightingale

  A Life of Wilberforce

  Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys and his Poems

  Longfellow

  Beatrix Potter’s Tales

  Uncle Remus

  The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford

  Little Black Sambo but since this hero did not resemble in any way the black people I was surrounded by, not in face, or in how he spoke or how he dressed, I was an adult before I understood that the golliwog-like creature was meant to be human. Caricature should not be too far from its subject.

  There were children’s books from America, and some specifically for girls:

  Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne’s House of Dr.eams

  Eleanor Hodgman, the Pollyanna books Gene Stratton Porter, Girl of the Limberlost, Laddie, The Keeper

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did, and other Katy stories

  And the American writers who did not write specifically for children, of whom the best was Ernest Thompson Seton. He wrote about animals, and I had several by him, the best and most memorable being Lobo, A Wolf, but there were others about prairie dogs, a bear, a stag, a silver fox.

  Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, People of the Abyss, The Sea Wolf

  The Poems of Tennyson

  The Legend of Arthur and the Round Table

  Hans Christian Andersen Tales of the Brothers Grimm

  Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies

  Improbably, a wonderful book of fairy tales from Brazil, whose wildly romantic illustrations intoxicated me.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sleepy Hollow

  John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

  In the bookcase made of black-lacquered paraffin boxes, were all of Dickens, Kipling in his limp red-leather covers, all of Walter Scott, Ruskin; and novels popular in 1924: for instance, Forest Lovers – by Maurice Hewlett – and a now forgotten novel by H. G. Wells, Joan and Peter, which much influenced my parents’ generation, all about education.

  So this stream of books for children came pouring through our house and sometimes out again, for my mother complained, but was pleased about it, that people saw her as a kind of library. My father joined a book club in England for books about the Great War in Europe. Books by generals, the memoirs of, the lives of, the war years of…books of all kinds but very few – they came later – by women. A book related the adventures of a woman fighting in Russia who pretended to be a man, and got away with it till the war ended. A book about two women nursing the Serbian wounded. A book about VADs – Voluntary Aid Workers – in France.

  These war books continued a theme: that there are two kinds of old soldier, those who cannot stop talking about their war, and those who shut up and never say a word. If this last sounds improbable, I met a man in the United States whose business it was (and still is) to accompany soldiers from the Second World War back to the scenes of their trial. There he discovered an amazing thing. The wives of those men went with them, and it turned out they had never heard a word of what their men had been through: they heard it all, for the first time, actually standing with their men in the places where it had been.

  My father was of the first kind. Even as a child I knew his obsessive talking about the Trenches was a way of ridding himself of the horrors. So I had the full force of the Trenches, tanks, star-shells, shrapnel, howitzers – the lot – through my childhood, and felt as if the black cloud he talked about was there, pressing down on me. I remember crouching in the bush, my hands tight over my ears: ‘I won’t, I will not. Stop. I won’t listen.’ My mother’s voice? I could have listened, but it was all too much. The fate of parents who most terribly need their offspring to listen, to ‘take in’ something of their own substance, is often to be thwarted. My father’s need was, as it were, legitimate. The Trenches, yes, I had to accept that. But my mother also needed a listener, and to her needs I tried to be oblivious. Later, much later, did I see that my mother’s wartime ordeals were ravag-ing her from within just a
s my father’s Trenches were eating away at him.

  For the years of the war, my mother nursed the men wounded in the Trenches. The wounded who could be saved went to local dressing stations and then were put on trains to London or other British cities. After the great battles, all the London hospitals were on alert for the influx of men, who would arrive in ambulances, lorries, even carts, to be put along the corridors and in any space available. ‘We had no room, you see,’ she would mourn. ‘There was no space for them. We didn’t have enough beds. They were so young, you see, so dreadfully young, those poor boys. They were dying. They were sometimes dead when they arrived. We did what we could. We would make wards for them out of the corridors. But they died, you see, and often we could do nothing. That was the awful thing. Sometimes there was nothing we could do. The medicines held out, though once or twice it was a close call. I remember once we ran out of morphine and that was so terrible. It was so terrible, do you see…’

  And it went on, the awfulness, one year and into the next, and then another year. Sister McVeagh and her gallant band of nurses. ‘We were sometimes so tired you’d see a nurse keel over, asleep, as she was attending to a patient.’ And it all went on. She nursed her husband, Alfred Tayler, who nearly died, in the operation of taking his leg off, and it all went on, and on, and on. ‘That was it, do you see? It never seemed to end. And we’d finish doing our best after one battle, like Passchendaele, and then there was another battle and they came pouring in again. I can hear them call out now, ‘Nurse, Nurse.’ I can hear them. ‘Oh, the pain, Nurse, oh, Nurse, the pain.’ And my mother, who I maintain could have been an actress, made the sounds of the poor boys calling out for morphine painful, years and years later. ‘And the worst, you see, the worst was when they were calling for their mothers. They were just boys, that’s all. I remember one little lad, he was sixteen, he had pretended to be eighteen, but he was just…He died calling for his mother, and I…’ and Sister McVeagh, all those years later, wept, remembering how she had pretended to be his mother. ‘“Yes, I’m here,” I said. Oh, and when I think of it…’