Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

grey cat. She sat on the floor watching the cat lap, pink tongue curling around the mouthfuls of milk. The cat mewed, Thank you, and sat licking herself a little, to wake herself up. Then she stepped out to join the other cats, the dogs, the family.

      Afternoons were full of events, chosen by my mother to educate or in some way to improve and uplift. There was a treehouse, platforms of planks in the musasa tree just behind the house. ‘Come up to our house, come up,’ we shouted at Daddy, as he manoeuvred his great clumsy leg so that he got himself on to the first platform. Then up came Mummy, and she told us about life in England, and her voice was sad, so sad that he rebuked her, ‘Don’t sound such a misery, old girl. England wasn’t all roses, you know.’ And then he might tell us of another England, the beggars, the out-of-work ex-soldiers selling matches, and the silly Bright Young Things dancing and jazzing; they didn’t care about the dead soldiers or the ones that couldn’t get work. Or told us of his good times before the war, when he went to the races or danced all night.

      Or we would be taken to see the man who made the rimpis for the farm. On a flat place down near the new barns were trees where ox hides hung to dry in the shapes of oxen, without their bodies. Or new hide, just lifted off the carcass, was being cut into strips, and then dunked into petrol tins full of brine. Soon they were hauled out, hung over branches, and then a couple of little black boys pulled and worked the strips so they remained supple and could be used for the many purposes of the farm – tying the yokes of oxen around their necks, or tying yokes to the great central beam of the wagon or the cart, making beds and couches, or dried to be wound into great balls like small boulders and kept in a hut till they were wanted. Or the little boys would be rubbing fat and salt on to the insides of new hides, manipulating them, moving them, rubbing them so they would be soft and good for karosses or floor mats.

      Or the place where bricks were made. The earth was taken from the towering termite-heaps. It was piled on a flat place, sand added, and then water poured on, and again small black boys stamped around in it, and we, the white children, stamped and danced too, our mother encouraging us, because small children should play with mud and water, Montessori said so. In fact I did not like it. These occasions were like many others, when I was playing a role to please her. I did not like the mud on my feet, and splashing on my legs, but I went on with it, together with my brother and the black children. Then the piles of mud were ready, like poo, as my brother and I giggled, but never telling our mother why. Then the brick boy came with his moulds and one man filled them with mud while another carried the moulds to turn them out in rows over straw. There the sun soon dried them. Then they were built into kilns, and fires lit in the holes like ovens inside them. Soon there they were, the piled-up bricks, red, or yellow, and there we children climbed and balanced, feeling the hot roughness of the bricks on our soles, and we jumped off, and climbed up, again and again, while my mother watched, pleased we were having this experience.

      Aeons later, eternities later, the sun slid down the sky into the spectacular sunset we took for granted. But I remember standing there by myself, my whole heart and soul going out and up into those flaming skies, knowing that was where I belonged, in that splendour, which was so sad, so sorrowful, I was not here at all, or I wouldn’t be for long, I would get away from here soon. Soon – how, when a day took for ever and for ever? Round about then I wrote a ‘prose poem’ about a sunset, a paragraph long, and my mother sent it into the Rhodesia Herald. My first printed effort. The complex of feelings about this were the same as now: I was proud that there I was in print, uneasy that impulses so private and intimate had led to words that others would read, would take possession of. I was wriggling with pride and resentment mixed when mother said Mrs Larter had said how clever I was to have a piece in the paper. And she’s so young too. But I made a private oath that next time I was taken with a ‘prose poem’, it would remain my secret.

      At sunset, the farm became loud with the lowings of the herd of oxen being hurried back from somewhere in the bush to the safety of the kraal. In the early days there were still leopards as near as Koodoo Hill, a couple of miles away. Until the family left the farm, there were leopards in the Ayreshire Hills. Sometimes a farmer would telephone to report that a leopard had taken a beast. And there were pythons, who liked calves. The oxen, though they were wild, unsubdued beasts and nothing like the comfortable tamed animals of England, had to be fenced at night. Besides, in the mornings the cows had to be milked. One cow was not enough – not of those thin, rangy Afrikander cattle. Five or six gave enough milk for our purposes. We were told of the wonderful beasts of England with udders that touched the ground and each one holding enough milk for several households. All that talk of abundant paradises … there are ways of listening to travellers’ tales that keep you safe from them. That England they talked about, all that green grass and spring flowers and cows as friendly as cats – what had all that to do with me?

      Then the children had supper. Eggs and bread and butter and a pudding. ‘Eat up your food!’ ‘But I don’t want it.’ ‘Of course you must eat it up.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ ‘Of course you’re hungry.’

      By the time I went to my first school I had been reading for – well, how long? – when I am dealing with time as elastic as dream-time? I do know that from the moment I shouted triumph because I was spelling c-i-g-a-r-e-t-t-e from the packet, it was no time before I was reading the easier bits in the books in the heavy bookcase. The classics. The classics of that time, all in dark red leather covers, with thin-as-skin pages, edged with gold. Scott. Stevenson. Kipling. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Dickens. Curled in the corner of the storehouse verandah, on a bed of slippery grain sacks that smelled sweet from the maize meal, and rank from the presence of cats, I raced through Plain Tales from the Hills, skipping a good half, The Jungle Book, Oliver Twist, skipping, always skipping, and having found my parents weeping with laughter over The Young Visiters, read it with the respect due to an author two years older than I was, brooding over words like mousetache. Mouse-ache? Where did the ‘t’ fit in and why did the mouse ache? To fit oneself to the mysterious order of the grown-up world was not an easy thing. ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall.’ Why should the hymn need to specify the lack of that wall? Puzzles and enigmas, but above all, the delight of discoveries, the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of books which has never ever failed me. And not only grown-up books. Children’s books arrived from London, and children’s newspapers. If some enterprising publisher should now produce a magazine on the level of the Merry-Go-Round, with writers like Walter de la Mare, Laurence Binyon, Eleanor Farjeon, would it at once fail? ‘It’s television, you see …’ The Children’s Newspaper, with reports from Egypt and Mesopotamia of the archaeological discoveries from the tombs of Tut-an-Khamun and Nefertiti? But all this is on children’s television. Then, just like now, children were supposed to be protected from horrors and, just as now, we weren’t, for all the time, every day, those voices went on and on, about the Trenches, bombs, star-shells, shrapnel, shell holes, men drowning in shell holes and the mud that could swallow horses, let alone men. The wounded in the Royal Free, the men with their lungs full of gas, the death by drowning of my mother’s young doctor, barbed wire, No-man’s-land, the Angels of Mons, the field hospitals, the men shot for ‘cowardice’, on and on and on, my father’s voice, my mother’s, and, too, the voices of many of our visitors. What is the use of keeping the Children’s Newspaper and Merry-Go-Round sweet and sane, when the News tells the truth about what is going on and the grown-ups talk, talk, talk about what will always be the most important thing in their lives – war. Whenever a male visitor came, the talk would soon be of the Trenches. No, it is not violence or even pornography and sadism that is the difference between then and now, it is that children were not patronized, much more was expected of them. I do not remember my parents ever saying, ‘That is too difficult for you.’ No, only pleased congratulation that I was tackling The Talisman or whatever it was. You would have to contrast the Merry-Go-Round with the banal jokiness of a children’s programme on television to see how much lower we all stand now.

      Before I reached the big school, the Convent, there were two intermediate schools. The first was Rumbavu Park, just outside Salisbury, owned by a family called Peach. I, just seven, and my brother, four, were taken there together and I was instructed to look after him. But if I adored my little brother, so did everyone else. He was always in the care of the big girls,