Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

‘Mother, that was a very wicked thing to do.’

  ‘Oh, no, but he really did have to know. It was my duty…’

  If I met someone new, made a friend, even an acquaintance, she somehow got to know, and either made a friend of this person herself, or went to see them to say things about me, which, of course, were repeated back to me – and there was nothing I could do.

  ‘Mother, that wasn’t very nice, was it?’

  ‘But you are such a foolish, wrong-headed girl, somebody has to…’ Now I think this funny; then I felt as if I was caught in a spider’s web.

  And so the long, sad story went on. I always in flight from her, she always in pursuit.

  I used to write down tales of mother-and-daughter enmities, and I had quite a collection.

  These tales, summarized as a sentence, were dramatic enough. Expanded to a paragraph, they were elements of the absurd, of farce. Fleshed out to a page, what always became plain was a pitiful, improbable quality, as if this were a tale about freaks.

  I shall write down here, just one, the simplest of these exemplary stories.

  A mother and daughter did not ‘get on’. Why did the girl not leave home? She stuck around, railing at her mother, but making use of any advantages, such as babysitting or handouts. Then her mother had a heart-attack, was helpless. The girl said to her, ‘Very well, you’ve got me where you want me. I’ll look after you but I shall never, ever say a word to you again.’ And that was what happened. The mother lasted twenty years, and the daughter refused ever to say a syllable.

  This is a quite mild story compared to some in my collection.

  And then the war did end, it did, though sometimes we felt it would go on for ever. Had not wars done this in the past? And then it ended with those two bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but at the time many of us could not see that these bombs were worse than what had already happened. Had we not already flattened the major cities of Japan? Which of course served it right for bombing Pearl Harbor. No, we were pleased the war had ended, it had actually ended…but then there was a post-war period and things did not seem much better. News was coming in of all kinds of horrors kept from us while the war went on. The concentration camps, for one. No, we did not at once ‘take it in’. This news was too horrifying to ‘take in’, just like that: we needed time.

  Our men had returned from fighting Rommel, those who did. There seemed more refugees every day, and soon they were from Stalin too, not only Hitler. Salisbury was crammed with the RAF wanting to go home. Some had been there for four, five years. The fliers and the bombers had been flown home, but the thousands of men who maintained the planes and the camps had to wait for the boats. The fitters and the turners and the riveters and engineers, the men who administered the camps, wanted just one thing: home, even if it was dark, cold, rationed.

  In the room where there was a baby, much dandled and loved by young men who dreamed of family life, whose own lives had been on hold, I cooked for anything up to ten or more RAF most nights, bacon and eggs, sausages and baked beans, anything that my two hotplates could provide. They knew they were not going to be given plates of bacon and eggs at home when they did get there. Oh, when? They longed for the news that the troopships were at last available for them, but they certainly did not look forward to the actual journey. Every one of those young men said nothing could ever be worse than the voyage on the troopship out, from England to the ports of southern Africa – hell, they said it was – but it would be on those same ships they would go home: troopships that would not have been improved by their wartime experience.

  I cooked. They ate. We were alike in just one thing: we were waiting for our real lives to begin. Now I would say we were like people recovering from an illness: we were numbed, stunned, because we hadn’t really ‘taken in’ the years of war. For that matter I don’t think the world has, even now, ‘taken in’ the war. In denial, are we? Yes. They may put on war films as often as they like, usually about the Nazis, but the whole world was at war, and whole areas of the conflict have hardly been looked at.

  Meanwhile my mother was also feeding people: the RAF mostly.

  My brother was back from the war, pretty deaf but whole, and still a bachelor. He met the RAF around and about the town and took them home to my mother’s house where he was temporarily lodging. When I went to visit my mother in those days, her house was full of young men sitting about on the verandas, talking about what they would do when they did at last get home. She fed them, with the aid of her cookboy – the one who had wanted his brother to come and work for me. He was now living here, pretending to be invisible, illegal, but happy in town and not back in his village where nothing ever happened.

  Those long afternoons that went on…and on…and on. To keep themselves awake after those vast meals, they sang, and soon my mother was at the piano, brought from the farm, still playable, though hardly pristine after years of rainy seasons when the keys swelled, the strings sagged, and the piano-tuner would say, ‘I’m really sorry, but this is the best I can do.’

  They sang the First World War songs, and if they did not know the words, my mother certainly did. ‘Oh, oh, oh, what a lovely war’ was a favourite because of the energetic tune, and so was ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’; and it often seemed the old piano would fly apart. The Second World War tunes, ‘Well, I’m going to hang out my washing on the Siegfried Line’, and ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler?’ – both with jolly tunes, and, very popular, ‘Lili Marlene’, German, which would lead to the current hits, of which one of the most popular, demanded by the young men again and again, was ‘I’m gonna buy a Paper Doll that I can call my own, A doll the other fellows cannot steal…When I come home at night she will be waiting, She’ll be the truest doll in all the world…’

  Those young men had had girls when they left England, but they didn’t have them now. Nor did they have girls here, in Africa. There were too many men, hundreds of thousands, in the various camps. They were forbidden to have relations with black women; and, anyway, there weren’t enough of them either. No, those boys would have been lucky to have a paper doll, in those years. And they sang, over and over again, ‘When I come home at night she will be waiting, She’ll be the truest doll in all the world…’

  As the afternoon neared its end, ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…’ If you were a short way from the house looking out over the rise that soon would be carrying a new suburb, this song was unbearably sad, on and on, and then again, ‘We’ll meet again…we’ll meet again…’

  Quite soon my brother and I would pile our old cars with the young men and take them to town to catch their buses back to the camps, but meanwhile, even if it was the afternoon, they demanded to end with ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’.

  Full daylight still, the street-lights not yet on, but,

  Goodnight, Sweetheart,

  Goodnight, Sweetheart,

  Till we meet tomorrow,

  Goodnight, Sweetheart,

  Sleep will banish sorrow,

  Tears and parting

  May make us forlorn,

  But with the dawn,

  A new day is born,

  So I’ll say

  Goodnight, Sweetheart…

  By the time they left my mother might have been playing popular songs for hours – Emily McVeagh, who had once been told by her music teachers that she could have a career as a concert pianist if she wanted.

  ‘She’s a good sort,’ said the RAF lads. ‘She’s a real sport, your mother.’

  Those years before we all left Rhodesia, as ships became available, no, they were not a good time. You long for a war to end, and then it ends, and…Sometimes, when life gets tough, I tell myself, ‘If you could survive those years after the war, in Rhodesia, then you can survive anything.’ I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have much good to say about them. For one thing, both her children said to her, ‘No, no, you will not run my life for me.’

  ‘Anyone might think you wer
e accusing me of being an interfering mother,’ she cried, defiant, but humorous, because of the absurdity of it. There was even a roguish little twinkle, that begged me, my brother, to admit she was in the right, that what we had said was only a little fit of naughtiness. For a moment Emily McVeagh stood there, or perhaps even John McVeagh: I’m sure roguish twinkles were what he would go in for if unfairly accused.

  I look back sometimes and see myself sitting on the steps of that house, listening to the thump-thump-thump of the jolly tunes, the wail of the sad ones, ‘There is a long, long trail a-winding…’ and what I was thinking was, No, no, this is not possible.

  The wireless is on, as always, telling us the news.

  There are millions of refugees stumbling along bomb cratered roads, starving, thirsty; there are thousands without homes; there is no harvest, no seeds to plant; in the ruins of Europe’s great cities children are playing.

  It could not be possible because every one of us had been brought up with ‘Wash your hands before you sit down at table’; ‘No, don’t do that, or you’ll tear your dress’; ‘Please – you must say please and thank you’; ‘A good little boy’; ‘A bad little girl’; ‘Be nice, Emma, Chantal, Hans, Dick, Ivan, Ingrid – you must be kind’, all that, but still the bombs fell and…some of these children brought up to expect law and order had heard bombs falling for four, five years. ‘I simply cannot believe this isn’t some awful dream.’ So everyone, but everyone, was thinking, as we went through the war, the enormities of it, the weight of it, the horror of it, the grotesque nastiness of it all, This can’t be happening, it can’t…

  Along the veranda one of the young men is playing with my mother’s little white dog, while still humming to the tunes, ‘I’m gonna get a paper doll…’ He is bouncing a ball against a pillar and the dog is trying to catch it.

  This young man, whose name I have forgotten, had had his own dog at home, but it had had to be put down: it was old, and its little stomach could not deal with the wartime food for animals. ‘My mum did give him a little bit of her rations, but he was used to the best, my little dog was. His name was Patch, he had a black patch on an ear…’ He bounced the ball hard, and the little dog leaped. ‘It’s about time we left, isn’t it? Goodnight, sweetheart, We’ll meet again tomorrow…’ he sang to the dog.

  The RAF did at last get home, and they wrote letters, we wrote letters, and my mother sold the house, when my brother married, and for the short years before she died, at seventy-three, she spent her afternoons and evenings playing bridge with other widows. She was, they all said, a very good bridge-player.

  * Lenin once famously rebuked an inadequate young comrade, who planned extreme measures, saying that they were suffering from ‘leftwing infantile disorders’.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to the photographer Francesco Guidicini

  who helped with some very old and sometimes

  dilapidated photographs.

  Also by Doris Lessing

  NOVELS

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  Memoirs of a Survivor

  Diary of a Good Neighbour

  If the Old Could…

  The Good Terrorist

  Love, Again

  Mara and Dann

  The Fifth Child

  Ben, in the World

  The Sweetest Dr.eam

  The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

  The Cleft

  ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series

  Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

  ‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  OPERAS

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

  SHORT STORIES

  Five

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  Winter in July

  The Black Madonna

  This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

  To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

  London Observed

  The Old Age of El Magnifico Particularly Cats

  Rufus the Survivor On Cats

  The Grandmothers

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  DRAMA

  Each His Own Wilderness

  Play with a Tiger

  The Singing Door

  GRAPHIC NOVEL

  Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

  non-fiction

  In Pursuit of the English

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  African Laughter

  Time Bites

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin: Volume 1

  Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 8JB

  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Doris Lessing 2008

  1

  The right of Doris Lessing to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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