Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  Well, she did think of it, a great deal, and at times two streams of war horrors went on together, my mother’s ‘Oh, the poor boys’ like a descant to the Trenches.

  So there was this load of suffering deep inside my mother, as there was inside my father, and please don’t tell me that this kind of pain, borne for years, doesn’t take its dreadful toll.

  It took me years – and years – and years – to see it: my mother had no visible scars, no wounds, but she was as much a victim of the war as my poor father.

  Thinking about those years, it is easy to feel them now like parallel streams of experiences: the books, the talk of war, the reminiscences, then, the illnesses, physical and mental. Stronger than all of these, the bush, being in it. A pity one cannot say to a child, an adolescent, who feels as if she were as circumscribed as a girl living in suburbs far from any fun, ‘Just look at yourself. Well, look. You have at your fingers’ ends the world’s literature for children. You have the last war distilled into books, let alone running in the living talk of your parents. You listen to the BBC, and your parents talk about European politics. And when you walk out of your bedroom door you as likely as not encounter a porcupine out for its evening stroll, or a kudu, or any one of the big snakes. Look up and a hundred hawks are hanging there, above your head. How many children in the world…’ etc.

  Ten years after their arrival in Banket – that is, shortly before my father was diagnosed with diabetes, and the slow, then faster descent into serious illness and death had begun – affairs on the farm were bad. We were in the doldrums, idling in a backwater. Nothing went right, and already it was ‘But when we get back to England, then…’

  What was to blame?

  How attractive are the tidy conclusions of hindsight! How satisfying the of course of the back-looking perspective. Of course if you do this, then that will happen…

  Now it is so easy to see that nothing could go right.

  It was entirely their fault, but how could they have seen it? First, you have to be able to see yourselves in relation to circumstances, see the family and that house, wrapped in myth and the perspectives of ‘If only…’ or ‘If we had known…’

  My parents, on leave from Persia, were at the Empire Exhibition, and the Southern Rhodesian stall had great mealie cobs, and the invitation: ‘Get rich on maize.’ Do you mean to say those idiots believed a slogan on a stall at an exhibition? But many idiots did, and went out and grew maize and got rich. During the war, fortunes had been made growing maize, bought by governments to feed soldiers and animals.

  But the people who had done this were already switching to tobacco where they would do very well indeed.

  But my father wasn’t interested in getting rich. He wanted to make enough money to return to England and fulfil his dream to buy a farm in Essex or Suffolk or Norfolk and be an English farmer. But my mother was dreaming of something different. Farming in Rhodesia would be a continuation of her hectic life in Persia, all parties and fun. And nowhere more than here do I have difficulty in trying to match up with the mother I knew, always ill, long-suffering, dutiful, attending the needs of others like an Edwardian lady, with the ‘social butterfly’.

  The government of Southern Rhodesia invited ex-servicemen to come out, be given land and farm on loans from the Land Bank. The object of this was plainly stated and it never occurred then to anyone except, of course, the blacks who had been defeated in war, to question the sense of it: settling the whites from England was, specifically, to establish white civilization, and uplift the blacks. The Romans thought like this; so has every empire anywhere at any time. My parents believed in empire and its benefits.

  So what was to prevent them being exactly like all their neighbours and getting rich on tobacco?

  It was themselves, their nature.

  First, the farm was too small to achieve anything in the way of serious profit. It was a mixed farm, able to grow something of this and something of that, sunflowers, peanuts, cotton, a bit of maize, a bit of tobacco. Why did they choose that farm rather than any of the other vast expanses of bush? It was the hill on which the house was built, giving views for miles.

  When they arrived in the colony the rainy season was soon to start: October, very hot indeed.

  The family arrived in Salisbury, and were accommodated at a farm just outside in ‘a guesthouse’. The place was Lilfordia, belonged to a man, Boss Lilford, who was later Ian Smith’s friend, and loathed by the blacks. What could my parents have imagined as ‘a guesthouse’? Some pretty cottage in Suffolk? There were ten or so large mud huts, grass-roofed, scattered on sandyish pink soil, fenced by poinsettias and hibiscus. Since these two knew nothing whatsoever about Africa, there had to be a government man to advise them.

  Imagine the scene. In one of the mud huts, on a chair made of paraffin boxes with, if the maker aimed high, a seat of plaited rush – the kind of furniture she was making within a few weeks – there my mother sat. My father had already had interviews with the Land Bank, the Department of Agriculture.

  My mother was wearing one of her Liberty dresses.

  ‘When buying clothes remember the weather may be inclement. Cotton or linen will be best, with a woollen coat for the nights, which can get cold.’

  The government man’s father might have come up with the Pioneer Column thirty-five years before. He himself might have been an ex-serviceman, like my father. He might have come from South Africa: so many Rhodesians had escaped ‘the troubles’ on the Rand, always strikes, fighting, rioting.

  It was his job to introduce Mrs. Tayler to the problems of farming. He was unlikely to be or have been a farmer himself.

  ‘Now, Mrs. Tayler, what kind of a farm are you looking for?’

  This young man had no idea of what he was up against.

  First of all, what was my mother wanting? To live among ‘nice people’, people of our kind, ‘our class of people’ – all phrases used freely then, without embarrassment. In other words, middle-class people, who would share her tastes in music, and whose children would be provided with the books children must have. Did she use the words ‘people of our sort’ to this colonial? She was capable of it. If so, he must have been more than offended. ‘You see, Mrs. Tayler, this colony doesn’t go in for that kind of thing,’ he might have said, or implied. ‘You’ll just have to take your chances.’

  Now this was my mother’s chief and dearest demand for her life in Southern Rhodesia. If it could not be like Kenya, about which she knew nothing, well, then, ‘our kind of people’ were always, surely, everywhere?

  Middle class, music loving, caring about literature and politics – which meant Tory. And art.

  Did she actually say these things? Surely not. Art? She had brought with her an enormous book of the Impressionists, which was to give me so many hours of pleasure. She would surely have to doubt that this youth could have heard of the Impressionists.

  ‘My husband would want to ride about the farm,’ she must have said.

  Was it this government man from Salisbury who actually settled them – remember the kopje on which the house would be built? They needed advice, so much, but I don’t think they got it.

  Horses did not do well on our side of the District, where the earth was mostly heavy, some of it the heavy red and black soils famous for their productivity. Horses in that District were on the other side, on sand veld. No one had horses near us, but there were two donkeys for a while, and my father rode one. For a while.

  The requisition for ‘the nice people’ failed at once. The neighbours, all solidly working-class Scots, were not within my mother’s definition of ‘our kind’ and found her snobbish, definitely not one of them.

  There were half a dozen people in the District who came to the music evenings. They were nice people, but they were also war victims. Two had wooden legs, one a wooden arm; one was a war widow.

  And there was the question of the actual land not being enough. And there wasn’t water – no river. For years the
farm managed with three inadequate wells.

  There was no way my parents could have returned to England when they did understand the farm’s unsuitability.

  My father had his war pension; the thousand pounds that was his capital had been swallowed buying equipment for the farm.

  What would they do in England? The slump that would soon begin would answer that. My mother was getting on towards fifty when my father was struck by diabetes.

  Ten years on from the start on the farm, the emotional balances had changed in the family.

  First, my brother. My mother was convinced that I would be a boy, and didn’t even have a name for a girl. My brother, when he was born, was her heart’s delight, and of course I knew it.

  ‘He is my baby.’ Fair enough, when he was little, but she called him Baby and went on, Baby Harry, Baby, Baby, until he, aged seven, said to her, ‘You must not call me Baby.’

  ‘But you are my baby,’ she wailed humorously, being in the right, but my father stepped in.

  ‘You must stop,’ he commanded. ‘It’s not fair to him.’

  My brother stuck it out. She insisted on Baby, so he would not hear her, would not respond, and there was my father, so seldom adamant in matters of the family, but angry and adamant now.

  My mother had lost her baby. My father had not yet succumbed to illness, but here was her daughter, and now began the struggle with me.

  So much has been written about mothers and daughters, and some of it by me. That nothing has ever much changed is illustrated by the old saying, ‘She married to get away from her mother.’ Martha Quest was, I think, the first no-holds-barred account of a mother-and-daughter battle. It was cruel, that book. Would I do it now? But what I was doing was part of the trying to get free. I would say Martha Quest was my first novel, being autobiographical and direct. My first novel, The Grass is Singing was the first of my real novels.

  I saw this recently. A woman, an actress, had a daughter and then a boy. The girl had never seen her mother otherwise than as a housewife, and pregnant, or nursing, overweight – her mother, her possession, her mother. The actress, returning to work in a play where she was a glamorous lead, took the little girl to see her on the first night. The mother was proud of returning to what she felt was her real self, smart, attractive, well dressed. The little girl sat in the front row with her father, silent and tight-faced. At the end of the play, asked by a well-meaning friend, ‘Didn’t you feel proud to see your mother up there on the stage, looking so wonderful?’, she burst out, a dam of emotion at last allowed its head, ‘Her? Oh, she wasn’t anything, she wasn’t much, she isn’t anything really.’

  There you have the elemental rivalry, all out in the open, no concealment.

  I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start, which it is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I was afraid of them and of her, but more of her unconscious strengths.

  I was six when I ran away for the first time. Running away in the middle of the bush is not like some escape in a big city or a village. I ran in the middle of the night down the track to the bigger track to the station. There were animals in the bush, leopards in the kopjes, and snakes. I was crying and noisy with fury. I had no money. I knew that when – if – I got to the station, they would not allow me on to a train. I was afraid and went meekly back home and into bed without anyone knowing. I did it again. This was a cry for help, like cutting one’s wrists or taking an overdose. My mother’s way of dealing with it was to ring up neighbours and, with fond laughter, tell them of my exploits. ‘She got as far as the Matthews turn-off. What a silly child.’

  It would never have occurred to her to think that she might be at fault. And this brings me to a really vast subject, not, I think, much acknowledged. There has been a change, an enormous one, in medicine, drugs, but a greater one in popular consciousness of ordinary psychology. The words ‘a cry for help’ are part of ordinary knowledge in parent-child interaction. I am sure they had ‘problem children’ always, even problem parents, but not understood in the way of ordinary advice in newspapers, or how any run-of-the-mill parent is judged.

  Running away, the furious criticism implied in it, was made bland by her laughing at it.

  I told her, not much older, that she was not my mother, who was in fact the Persian gardener (I remember him as a kindly and, above all, just presence). I knew, of course, that the gardener, being male, could not be my mother, but necessity somehow overruled this disability. And that brings me to the wonderful way children both know and do not know the facts, can believe in a fairy tale with one part of their minds and know it is not true with the other. It is a great, nourishing, saving ability, and if a child doesn’t achieve this capacity it may be in trouble.

  I told my mother I hated her. Many children do, and no harm comes of it. My mother could not come to harm because she was, by now, only a mother. That was all Fate had allowed her to be.

  The hating and not hating are again parts of mental double dealing: when I was sent away to board I was in miseries of homesickness. If I was not sick for my mother, then what? It was the farm, the dogs, my father, later my brother when he was there, and the weeks stretched themselves out as weeks did then, and I savoured every minute of the holidays, and yet I was in continual fights with my mother.

  So all that went on – ‘Only family life’, as some people would say – while I dreamed of getting out, getting away, getting out from under.

  And then I was thirteen and something very good happened, the best. I got measles, and with ten or so other girls was put into an empty house, without supervision, with medicines, meals brought in from the hospital and a nurse dropping in every day or so to look us over.

  In those days quarantine for measles took six weeks. They put us on our honour not to go near any unauthorized person.

  Towards the end of the time some girls fretted, but if you are covered with a rash and feeling low there is little inducement to be seen by anyone. A couple of girls put on bathing costumes, lay around on the lawns and practised a haughty indifference to the boys who sometimes leaned along the fences, jeering. But all around the garden were big notices: ‘Quarantine for Measles, Keep Out’. That was such a good time. Perfect isolation, peace, no pressures. I understood how I could be, how life might be. Letters came in. My mother wrote every day, saying she was arranging tutoring for this, lessons in that. Her letters made me wild with anger. Then she arrived at the perimeter fence, and gesticulated: she was leaving food parcels. We were stuffing ourselves with the good food they sent in, and did not need cake and sweets.

  As usual, when I actually saw my mother, a lonely, unhappy, ill-looking woman, and her pleading eyes, I was wild with pity for her, and I wished, oh, wished, she would not come into town, send food, write letters. We were supposed to be doing homework; exercises of all kinds arrived regularly. I don’t remember us doing any. We sat about, tried on each other’s clothes – do not imagine the clever clothes there are now; none of us had much, a dress, a blouse, slacks. We talked, we did nothing, we dreamed. Of all the lucky things that have happened to me in my life, this dose of measles counts as one of the best. But it ended, and back in school I got pink-eye, an affliction causing infinite witty teasing, but it was no joke. I thought I was going blind. And then it was the holidays and I left school for ever, not knowing I had, or why, only that I had reached the end.

  Back on the farm things could not have been worse: to balance the perfect bliss of the long freedom of quarantine. I said my eyes were damaged and I could not read, but I read as much as ever.

  My father had just been diagnosed with diabetes and was very ill. In those early days of diabetes they did not know how to treat it. My mother was ill all the time. She had ‘neuralgia’, ‘sick headaches’, ‘a heart’. Both had cupboards full of patent medicines. I succumbed with a variety of dubious ailments, and could have spent my life as they did, absorbed by my health, but there was an
other lucky thing. A charity sent the children of settlers for holidays, and I was rescued from the miseries of that house and was in a wonderful mountainous place, in the house of an old woman, Granny Fisher, eighty years old, who could walk any of her paying guests off their feet. Illness was forgotten.

  When I had to return to the farm it was only a question of when I would leave it.

  Now I watch the struggles of adolescents with such feeling: their efforts to be themselves are often pathetic, foolish and misguided; they often know as little of what they are doing as I did, but they have to try, struggle, get free.

  I had to get free. My battles with my mother were titanic. What were they about? Everything, nothing, but she was going frantic as I escaped her.

  You won’t let me live through you, you won’t let me be you, you are killing me.

  And I: No, I won’t. Let me go. No, I won’t – do whatever it was she had planned for me.

  During those few months she had decided I was to be a great pianist (as she could have been) but I had no talent; a great singer – but I had no voice; a great artist…

  I would go along with some flight of fancy, and then common sense struck home again and I would brutally point out: But I have no talent.

  Was I telling her she had no talent? What was I saying? Only, ‘No, I won’t.’