Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

What matched his idea of himself, and where he had felt perfectly at home, was the great stone house in Kermanshah, with the snow-covered mountains all around. But he had lost that for ever. He did not like his brother’s wife, Dolly, found her silly and suburban. He disliked his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret, and thought my mother’s brother a bore. Six months of relatives, hell on earth, in snobby, self-important, provincial, parish pump, ignorant, little England. And then back to Tehran again, and its busy snobbish social life, the picnics and the Legation parties and the musical evenings where his wife played, while some young man sang ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. ‘Why can’t people sit at home and be quiet?’ he demanded, like the philosophers. But my mother merely smiled, for she knew she was in the right. The trouble was, his eccentricity was infecting her daughter.

      ‘No I don’t want to, I won’t,’ I weep, being forced into a Bo-peep costume. ‘I don’t want to be Bo-peep. Why can’t I be a rabbit like Harry?’ My mother laughs at me because of the ridiculousness, and the trouble is, I can feel my face wanting to laugh too. I change ground. ‘I don’t want to go to the party. I don’t like parties.’ ‘Nonsense. Of course you like parties. Of course you want to be Bo-peep.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t.’ ‘Don’t be silly. Tell her she’s being silly, Michael.’ ‘Why should she go if she doesn’t want to?’ says Daddy, testy, irritable – difficult. ‘I don’t want to go either. Parties! Who thought of them first? Whoever it was should be hanged, drawn and quartered. The devil, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ ‘Oh Michael …’ ‘No, I tell you, I’ve only got to think of a party and I want to upchuck. And that’s what these kids are going to do. Well, don’t they? They get overexcited, they eat too much, sick all over the place.’ ‘Oh rubbish, Michael, you like parties really.’

      No hatred on earth is as violent as the helpless rage of a little child. And there was Gerald Nelligan, confronting his mother and shouting, ‘No I don’t want to, I won’t dress up, why should I?’ He was two years older than me, a big boy, but he flung himself down in the flailing white-faced yelling rage you see trapped children use every day. But they will be saying later, ‘I had a wonderfully happy childhood.’ Nature knows what it is doing, prescribing amnesia for early childhood.

      And now, the cat: I wrote about this cat in Particularly Cats, but I know it needs more emphasis. ‘You found that dirty cat in the gutter and brought it into the drawing room, and it was bigger than you were,’ said my mother, being the child and the cat together. ‘And you insisted on having it in your bed. We washed it in permanganate …’ An essential prop of the British Empire, permanganate of potash. ‘And old Marta came storming in and said, “Why is that dirty cat allowed here?”’ But I was allowed the cat, and how much I loved it does not need much in the way of deduction. For years the death of a cat plunged me into grief so terrible I had to regard myself as rather mad. Did I feel anything as bad when my mother died, my father died? I did not. That old cat, rescued from slow death on the streets of Tehran, was my friend, and when we left Persia, what happened to it? They told me soothing lies, but I did not believe them, for I wept inconsolably. ‘You were inconsolable,’ says my mother.

      I was getting on for being an old woman when I experienced grief which, on a scale of one to ten – ten being the real, frightful sodden depression that immobilizes, and which I have not myself experienced – was at nine. On this scale, grief for a dying cat is at four or five, while grief for parents and brother is at two. Clearly, the pulverizing pain over the cat is ‘referred pain’ as the doctors call it, when you have pain in one organ, but really another is the cause. Surely one has to ask, but why? And, at force nine, I was pulverized with a grief I did not know the origin of, and still don’t.

      But the question surely must be, why, of so many memories from that early time, there are so few that are jolly, pleasant, happy, even comfortable? That hungry, angry little heart simply refused to be appeased? Is there a clue in the business with the photographer? I was three and a half. There survives a photograph of a thoughtful little girl, a credit to everyone concerned, but as it happens I remember what I was feeling. There had been a long nag and fuss, and worry and trouble about the dress, of brown velvet, and it was hot and itchy. My stockings had been hard to get on, were twisted and wrinkled, and had to be hitched up with elastic. My new shoes were uncomfortable. My hair had been brushed, and done again and again. There was a padded stool I was supposed to sit on but it was hard to climb on to and then stay on, for it was slippery. I had also been put on a very large solid carved wooden chair, but then they said it was not right for me. They? – my mother and the photographer, a professional, whose studio was full of Japanese screens showing sunsets and lake scenes and flying storks, of chairs and tables and cushions and stuffed animals to set the scene for children. But I insisted on my own teddy, scruffy, but my friend. I felt low and nervous and guilty, because I was causing so much trouble: as usual it was as if my mother had tied, but too fast and awkwardly, a large clumsy parcel – me – and I did not fit in anywhere, and might suddenly come untied and fall apart and let her down. I felt weary. This small sad weariness is the base or background for all my memories. Everything was too much, that was the point, too high, or too heavy, or too difficult, or too loud or bright, and I could never manage it all, though they expected me to.

       4

      WHEN MY MOTHER DECIDED to travel to England via Moscow, across Russia, because she did not want to expose her little children to the heat of the Red Sea, she did not know what she was doing – as she often said herself. ‘If I’d only known!’ She did know we would be the first foreign family to travel in an ordinary way since the Revolution. It was 1924. That it would be difficult, of course she knew, but difficulties are made to be overcome. The journey turned out to be horrendous, told and told again, the vividest chapter in the family chronicle. What I was told and what I remember are not the same, and the most dramatic moment of all is nowhere in my memory. At the Russian frontier, it turned out we did not have the right stamps in our passports, and my mother had to browbeat a bemused official into letting us in. Both my mother and my father loved this incident: she because she had achieved the impossible, he because of his relish for farce. ‘Good Lord, no one would dare to put that on the stage,’ he would say, recalling the calm, in-the-right, overriding British matron, and the ragged and hungry official who had probably never seen a foreign family with well-dressed and well-fed children.

      The most dangerous part was at the beginning, when the family found itself on an oil tanker across the Caspian, which had been used as a troop carrier, and the cabin, ‘not exactly everyone’s idea of a cruise cabin’, was full of lice. And, probably, of typhus, then raging everywhere.

      The parents sat up all night to keep the sleeping children inside the circles of lamplight, but one arm, mine, fell into the shadow and was bitten by bugs, and swelled up, red and enormous. The cabin was usually shared by members of the crew, and was small. For me it was a vast, cavernous, shadowy place, full of menace because of my parents’ fear, but above all, the smell, a cold stuffy metallic stink which is the smell of lice. From the Caspian to Moscow took several days, and the tale went like this: ‘There was no food on the train, and Mummy got off at the stations to buy from the peasant women, but they only had hard-boiled eggs and a little bread. The samovar in the corridor most of the time didn’t have water. And we were afraid to drink unboiled water. There was typhoid and typhus, and filthy diseases everywhere. And every station was swarming with beggars and homeless children, oh it was horrible, and then Mummy was left behind at a station because the train just started without warning and we thought we would never see her again. But she caught us up two days later. She made the station master stop the next train, and she got on to it and caught us up. All this without a word of Russian, mind you.’

      What I remember is something different, parallel, but like a jerky stop-and-start film.

      The seats in the compartment, which was like a little room, were ragged, and they smelled of sickness and sweat and of mice, in spite of the Keating’s Insect Powder my mother sprinkled everywhere. Mice scurried under the seats and ran between our feet looking for crumbs. The lamps on the wall