by Jenny Diski
Then it was all settled, although my father was adamant that I had to be punished for being expelled by not being allowed to go back to school. I’d had the two letters from Doris, and I replied thanking her for giving me such a wonderful opportunity (I did say that it was like a fairy story) and promising not to be any trouble, but warning her to ignore my father’s accusations. He would, I was sure, tell her that I was wicked and worst of all a smoker, which I was but I’d stop if she wanted me to. It was this letter, Doris told me later, as did some friends of hers she spoke to at the time, that convinced her she was doing the right thing. It was intelligent (that again), humorous and well written. She was sure after reading it that having me in the house would work out, though I don’t think it was clear in her mind any more than mine how long that was to be for.
So sometime in late February or March 1963, my mother and I took the train from Brighton to Victoria and then the Underground to Mornington Crescent (yes, really) and the ten-minute walk from the station to the street where Doris had bought her first house. It was opposite a concrete-and-glass boys’ secondary modern school, and the houses on the other side were in the very early stages of gentrification. Most of them were quite dingy from the outside, council-owned houses rented to low-income families. Doris was one of the first to buy quite cheaply into the potential of the Georgian three-storeyed terraced houses, with their long, elegant windows and steps up to the front door. Black, I think. I knocked on the door, wearing an awful mustard-yellow woollen coat with a brown velvet collar and kind of pleated below a dropped waistline, which my mother thought was very grown-up and respectable, and which I would never wear again.
Doris answered the door with a small kitten in her arms.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘She can be your cat. Some friends of mine got her, but they have no idea how to look after a cat. They were feeding her on lobster soup. She’s called Grey Cat. Come in.’ She was polite and I thought rather shy. She was in fact nervous at this first encounter with my mother, who Dr Watt had warned her was ‘a very difficult lady’. It was lunchtime, and she had made soup for us, rather than for Grey Cat. It was a recipe she made often, with Campbell’s chicken soup and an added tin of sweetcorn. My mother and I sat on the bench Doris had had built along one side of her kitchen table, while she sat on the other side on a chair, with access to the stove. I thought she hadn’t finished doing up the house, and I was rather downhearted at the untidy state of the kitchen, the surfaces covered with glass jars and tins waiting for shelving that never got round to being built, the uncurtained window, and especially the bare floorboards which, being a lower-middle-class child of East End Jews, I thought were waiting for lino or tiles to be laid over them, rather than being fashionable bare boards waiting only for a final sanding. It didn’t seem at all the sort of respectable place my mother would approve of, and I heard my mother in me deploring it and the owner who allowed it to be seen by visitors in its slovenly state. But very soon, along with my discarded coat, the chaotic kitchen seemed to be a proof of my entry into another kind of living altogether and one that I thought I might get the hang of if I paid attention.
I liked the soup, but have no recollection of the conversation. Doris said that my mother had done all the talking. She complained about my father’s treatment of her, my treatment of her and the awful life she had come from in her miserable childhood and was now plunged back into. The shame of living on the dole in one room and the added shame of having an ungrateful daughter who behaved so badly she was put in a mental hospital, and now was going to be taken in by a stranger, who, she warned Doris, shouldn’t herself be taken in by me. ‘I’m the one who should be given a new home and looked after,’ Doris told me my weeping mother had said. I don’t remember, but it sounded like her. I imagine I was suffering my usual excruciating embarrassment when my mother had a meltdown in public. Doris said later that she’d felt sorry for the poor woman who was so disappointed by life, but she could only take on one of us, and that one was me. After a couple of hours, Doris eased my mother, still complaining about me, still crying about my father and her dreadful life, out of the house, and then, since it was term time and Peter was away at St Christopher’s, Doris and I were left alone to figure out how we were to get on with each other.
A few years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the toing and froing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story.
‘Why didn’t you just do what you were told?’ he asked.
I was lost for words. Although he sounded baffled rather than challenging, he was the sort of age a headmaster or my parents might have been when I was a teenage girl, and his question, and the tone of voice in which he asked it, might have come from their exasperation with me back then. The story so far had included quite a lot of me implicitly not doing as I was told, but there were also many times when no one told me what to do, and I had to make it up as I went along (nothing came with instructions). From the vantage point of children who did what they were told, in much the same way that soldiers followed orders, it was probably hard to imagine the outlawed wasteland where no one had any idea what they should do either before they did it or once they’d done it, or the badlands where a child might know as well or better than an adult what needed to be done. The question ‘Why didn’t you do what you were told?’ had the charm for me of Little Women or The Secret Garden, or the novels of Noel Streatfeild, where even when things went awry there was always a neat and tidy family solution to set the whatevertheyarecalleds back on their path of contentment. I was confounded by the question he put to what was left of the insolent child inside me. Doing what I was told simply didn’t have a place in my story of myself. It was perfectly clear that no one had any idea what to do, so they couldn’t very well tell me. And that to do as I was told would have been to listen to people who were completely out of their depth, without a clue what to do except wait until catastrophe knocked at the door: bailiffs inquiring after unpaid bills; mother taken to mental hospital; the headmaster telling my parents I’d been expelled, and each of them telling him it wouldn’t be convenient to have me back. No one very much did tell me what to do because they didn’t know what they themselves ought to do for the best. And none of these dramatic moments, not even the things my mother dreaded, such as the neighbours finding out, turned out to be the end of the world, not even the end of my world, but were just a passage of chaos through which my life proceeded. It was erratic but still it went on. It was however also true, as the question suggested, that I was in general contrary-minded and had been for as long as I could remember. I almost certainly would not have done what I was told to do. My parents’ track record in dealing with the world didn’t encourage confidence. It seemed there was always another way through the drama, either by making a move or keeping very still and waiting to see what happened next.
After I was expelled from St Christopher’s and on the loose in Letchworth for the weekend, I took the train to Banbury, to where my father and stepmother had moved from London just the week before. They hadn’t bothered to let me know until the school stamped me ‘return to sender’. I suppose they planned to tell me before school broke up, but my school holiday started unexpectedly early that summer. It also finished early, and even more unexpectedly, when on the Sunday evening a few hours after my arrival, my father told me that the next six years were going to be quite different from anything I’d assumed. Camden Council had given me a chance by sending me to a fee-paying progressive school, but instead of taking it, I’d chucked it away. He wouldn’t allow me to go back to school at all, to do my O- and A-levels and then proceed to university. Instead the following morning I was to start earning my living in a job just like everyone else. He had arranged one for me. ‘I’ve done some bad things in my time, my
girl’ – that’s how he spoke: he believed it gave him a classiness that a boy born in Petticoat Lane could never hope for. He was also inclined to pronounce ‘off’ as ‘orff’ and ‘cloth’ as ‘clawth’. ‘I’ve done some bad things in my time, my girl, you only have to ask your mother, but I was never expelled from school.’ During the recent war and after, my father had busied himself wheeling and dealing in the black market. He’d cooked at least one set of accounting books that had him in prison before I was old enough to remember, and somehow or other gone bankrupt more than once. Between the time when the black market came to an end and the moment he finally gave up his loftier aspirations and settled for Pam, the reliably adoring, tight-lipped, puritanical divorcee with a decent hairdressing business, whom I was told to call my stepmother (an inaccurate title since my mother refused to give my father a divorce), he made his living by lizarding around the bars of the fancier hotels to meet divorced or widowed women, and relieved them of various sums after charming the otherwise rational birds off their lonely trees. The daughter of a woman in Denmark had tracked him down and came banging on our door a few weeks after my father had left. She left much more quietly, having listened to my mother’s tale of woe, and gave me ten shillings to buy a geometry set for school. So I did wonder that getting expelled from school stood so high in his comparative catalogue of ‘bad things’ he and I had done.
At the beginning of that term, the one I didn’t get to the end of, I’d decided to operate on the bad side, join the midnight parties, hang out in town in a coffee bar of ill-repute (all the more dangerous with their glass cups and saucers containing frothy cappuccinos), and fall in love with a reporter for the local paper – a god to me. Now I had reached badness’s logical conclusion: my schooldays at an end and a lifetime of getting up and going to work every morning. I was surprised, even shocked at this outcome, but life had been lurching around and about, my parents and I dancing an inelegant quadrille in which I ended up do-si-doing with him, with her, in this institution or that, and godknowswhere next. I’d arrived at the final destination, the actual godknowswhere I’d been warned I’d end up if I carried on the way I did. In my case, it turned out to be Banbury, above a hairdressing salon with a stylist called Rolf who put his middle-aged clientele’s hair in firm rollers, and brushed it out and backcombed it into a warm fairy bun, and me off to work every morning in the High Street until I married or died, fitting feet into shoes in a supplicant position, kneeling, head bent, appropriate for one wishing to do penance. It wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it, the godknowswhere I’d ended up in, but it certainly didn’t hold out much promise of the bohemian writer’s life I’d been hoping for. I’d arrived at where I’d end up much sooner than I’d expected, having had a swipe at far-less-badness than I’d assumed would be the entry fee. I’d been to a few midnight parties in the woods on the outskirts of Letchworth, the garden city of no one’s dreams, drinking cheap cider and homemade spirits. I’d raided the chemistry lab and discovered that sniffing ether caused a most desirable oblivion. I’d been felt up by a few boys who probably didn’t know my name, and had to face an angry policewoman who’d been called out when I was found not to be in my bed in the dorm or anywhere else anyone looked during a half-term when most pupils had gone home. She wanted the name of the man who had ‘violated’ me; since I was underage she’d make sure he went to prison. I didn’t tell them that I’d been at the far corner of the school playing field with my beloved boyfriend, the reporter, fumbling but failing to achieve penetration even though he was on the trajectory of my dreams. Starting with reporting on a local paper, then national ones, and then leaving a salaried life behind to write the remarkable prose and poetry I hoped I could produce. But although I’d opted into the wild beatnik side, aped them, read all the required disenchanted books, talked the melancholy talk, wore big sweaters, black-and-white eye make-up and tight jeans, I never felt very much that I was part of the group. I was never comfortable, though it strikes me now that such alienation was the very key to the desired house of mirthlessness. So, after my embarrassingly short career as a bad girl, I was where I was, where women were notable for riding cock-horses and having no clothes on (or perhaps that was some other fine lady), and very little suggested that a bohemian life might be there for the having. I had some hope of a café that was disapproved of by the grown-ups, but events overtook me. I hadn’t really understood how much my desired life depended on going to university. I sensed, at any rate, that a shoe shop in Banbury would not provide the soil in which a writer would blossom.
Doing as I was told, I began work as a trainee, paid £3 a week, £2 of which I was to give to Pam for my room and keep. Freeman, Hardy and Willis was a dreary, respectable high-street shoe store at which I imagined only someone without any interest in what happened below their ankles would shop. Someone like my stepmother, whose plain, Protestant hard-working life made me shiver for fear at its lack of any perceivable pleasure. I was at ground zero, the down escalator to the floor that lacked even a shard of light, the deepest dungeon with the blackest, thickest bars keeping in anyone with the slightest hope of something else, or even an insane fantasy that there existed floors above, through which one might glimpse a something more. I didn’t take to it. My glamorous Jewish father (foreign, exotic) kept Pam (English, dutiful) adoring and fearful at the possibility of his loss, while his feet were firmly in the slippers she brought for him to wear while reading the Telegraph. Living in sin with my father was the single misstep Pam had taken in her blemish-free life. It seemed that being adored, and looked after, at this point in his life, was what my father wanted most, while all the desirable women, the well-heeled women, the beautiful strangers faded; none of them had lasted and I imagine that by fifty he just didn’t have the energy left for the chase and the subterfuge. He saw that less glamorous women might offer the reliable devotion he now needed. He settled for Pam and all the excitement that she wouldn’t bring him, the three square meals he could eat, the slippers she slipped on his feet every evening, as supplicant as I was in the shoe shop, and the incurious space and silence she offered while watching the television that allowed him hours of daydreaming about his lost opportunities and how easily they might have come off and brought him a life where daydreaming wasn’t necessary.
Once when I visited him when I was living at Doris’s, he picked up a paperback on the table beside his chair and waved it at me. It was My Wicked, Wicked Ways, the autobiography of Errol Flynn. ‘There’s nothing he’s done that I haven’t done in my time,’ he told me. ‘I had all that. Had money, beautiful women. I could have been Errol Flynn . . .’ His words faded away as the reality of the patterned moquette he was sitting on reminded him of where he actually was and that patterned moquette was as good as he was going to get. On the other hand you could see that the heaven and hell of living in sin was as outlandish as Pam could imagine; leading a life that belonged on the left bank of the Seine tightened the muscles of her face and clamped her lips so fiercely that they quivered as if permanently on the verge of crying. But she had Jimmy and that was what mattered to her. Pam and I conducted mutual warfare from the moment we set eyes on each other.
I got on well with my fellow salesperson. She was ten years older than me, in her mid-twenties, and during the coffee breaks in the staffroom she told me about her life, the most remarkable aspect of it being that even after five years of marriage, her husband had never seen her naked. How was that possible? I gawped. ‘Well, you keep the light off when we. . .you know.’ And get dressed and undressed in the bathroom with the door locked. It was normal. Just as it was normal to be incapable of using words to describe the activity. ‘When we. . .you know’ was about as close as she got to ‘fuck’ or ‘sex’ or ‘intercourse’, and she was hopeless at describing the details of the general activity. This was annoying for me because I was so ignorant that I needed some specialised words to know what it was my friend was trying to explain, although I think now that there wasn’t anything p
articular in her relationship to describe. I could say nothing about what was normal, since no one apart from my parents had seen me naked in my life, and one of the things I fretted about in my future was the idea that if I was ever to have sex, which I realised was a requirement for a bohemian, how would I bear seeing someone seeing me without clothes? I had very little experience of sex, beyond fumbling in the long grass next to St Christopher’s playing field, with all my outer clothes on. But even I found it hard to imagine an existence that required so much worry and attention to avoidance behaviour. A life behind locked bathroom doors, hurried changes of clothes, deliberately turning off lights when desire, if that was the word, struck. Separate beds, she’d said, and a life of taking great care to avoid the eye of the beloved. Not very beloved, at least in the way she spoke of her marital relationship. They ‘did it’, got it ‘over with’, and then led what my fellow sales-friend considered to be a proper married life; ‘putting up with’ and ‘looking forward to’, the latter mostly in relation to modern furniture, which had to be saved for. They went out occasionally with other couples, to the films or bowling. The marriage seemed unexceptional apart from the not seeing each other naked, and knowing as little as I did about grown-up living, perhaps that was how everyone lived. Her husband also popped in and out of the bathroom, with his pyjamas or his work suit, depending on the time of day. ‘So you haven’t seen him naked, either?’ She screwed up the lower half of her face. ‘Eww, no, thank you!’
All I really knew about marriage was what I saw when my parents were together. They went around our very small flat in all stages of dress and undress, in and out of the bath, with no concern about being seen naked. At weekends, I’d get into their bed and my mother would get up to make breakfast. She slept in the nude but put on a dressing gown on her way to the kitchen. When my father got up, he dressed in front of me at the foot of the bed. He turned his back to me, but bending down to get into his underpants and to fasten his sock suspenders, I was daily presented with a view of his balls and cock hanging, clamped beneath his buttocks, or sometimes, if he took a wider stance, swaying a little as he moved to button this, tie up that. I thought them unsightly, wrinkled and shrivelled, and his careless presentation of them to me was embarrassing, not because they were sexual parts, but because their ugliness was so at odds with his suave, polished exterior once he was ready to leave the flat. I didn’t want to know that he had them under his trousers and white shorts, even though I couldn’t see what else there was to be done with them other than hiding them from view. Odd that they were so present, but I’m unable to recall a single conversation between us about them and what they were for.
