Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

folk – gentlefolk. I use this word because the matron, Mrs James, did – constantly. Like Russians of the intelligentsia who talk now of being gentlefolk, with contemptuous dismissal of their decades of revolution and egalitarianism – ‘my family are gentlefolk’ – Mrs James made this claim, it seemed in every sentence. Here was another member of the English middle class threatened by rough colonial manners but, unlike most of them, who mean only that they are superior in some ineffable and indefinable way, Mrs James meant what the Russians mean: they are the inheritors of literary, musical and artistic culture. She was a large swarthy gypsy-like woman, with straight black hair, like Augustus John’s Dorelia, an earth mother long before the word, and she was kind. When I wrote baby pieces about flowers and birds, she told me I was wonderful, and showed them around. She brushed my hair, and made me wash under my arms and between my legs for she was afflicted by a horror of natural processes, and she held me on her large lap and sighed and mourned the crudeness of the world and her sad fate, to be matron in a school. When my parents came to visit, Mrs James presented me and my brother to them as her achievements. Far from being unhappy there, I was full of the excitements and delights of discovery. The wonderful gardens spread all over a couple of hillsides – and still do. Terraces and fountains and pools and trees and flowers: it was a show place, and at weekends people drove out from Salisbury to admire it.

      I was at school in Rumbavu Park for a term. It was an aeon. A forever. When sorting out the time-segments of those two years, I had to concede that it was only a term. I have to. Impossible, but so it was. If only I could have stayed there, but the Peaches went bust, hard luck not only for them but for the children at their school. Just before I left there was an incident that illustrates a theme of these memoirs which is: why is it we expect what we do? Sybil Thorndike was on tour in Southern Rhodesia, and playing Lady Macbeth. The older children were to be taken to see her. I would go if Mary Peach did not return in time from England, where she was on holiday. She came back that afternoon, so I could not go. She came to me, a big girl, twelve or so, to say nicely she was sorry I was going to be disappointed. I remember stammering that of course it was all right, while inside I was the embodiment of all the insulted and injured of the world. Why was it that Mary Peach, who was rich and had just come back from England where I could not go – for the theme of the absolute out-of-reachness of England was already established in my mind – had the right to see Sybil Thorndike? Unfairness … injustice … the bitterness of it. But what I would like to know is, where did the violence of that sense of injustice come from? I was seven years old. This was not only the child’s sense of injustice which we describe as ‘innate’: a child’s betrayal of justice is, must be, love betrayed, and what I was feeling was social injustice. I can think of nothing in my life more cruel than that disappointment, as if it were the sum of the world’s indifference. Surely it had to come from my parents, particularly from my father’s voice murmuring through my days and through my sleep, too, of the war, the betrayal of the soldiers, the wicked stupidities and corruption of government, just expectation and faith betrayed.

      My mother decided we should go to board with a Mrs Scott who took in the children of farmers so they might attend school in Avondale, a suburb of Salisbury, then on the very edge of the town. I was put in the class for my age, but at once put up, I think, two. In that class I discovered the pleasures of achievement, for the reading pieces were at first too difficult for me, and I was not able to skip as I liked. One, in particular, an abridged grown-up story of a man sucked into a sea whirlpool, nearly drowned, but then cast up by the sea, had words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘vortex’, ‘inundate’ and ‘regurgitate’. I stared at them, oppressed by failure, but was saved by context – and in no time this difficult story was mine. Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability? But if the classroom was all pleasure Mrs Scott’s was all cold misery. Very far from gentleness was Mrs Scott. There was a Mr Scott, employed by the Mr Laws who had the timber concession. My mother had sent her two little children to the lumber camp to stay a few days in the bush with Biddy, for she never missed the opportunity to give them useful experience. We were in a tent, for the first time, surrounded by majestic trees full of cicadas, being felled one after the other, and destined to burn in tobacco barns and mine furnaces.

      Already a social being, ready to please one set of people with agreeable information about others, I said to Mrs Scott that Mr Scott, her husband, had said goodnight to Biddy when she had on only a petticoat. The voice I used was my parents’ – worldly and disapproving. I had no idea what I was saying. If Mr Scott had his arms about Biddy, his whiskers, scented with Pears soap, pressed against her ear, then this was only a sign of a general loving kindness I yearned for. Mrs Scott at once hated the messenger who had brought bad news, and made a loud and noisy scene with her husband.

      I hated her. She was a large ugly woman smelling of stale sweat. He was large and smelly. There was no way of getting away from them day or night. Their bed was on the verandah just outside where my bed stood under a window. I did not like getting into my bed. The cover was a kaross, a fur blanket, made of wild cat skin. Everyone had karosses, which were cheap, costing only the price of a bullet, and the labour of the man who cured the skins in salt and wind. A kaross always smelled a little, especially in the rainy season. The kaross on my bed was badly cured and smelled stuffy. I lay in bed trying to keep my face in the air from outside, while outside Mrs Scott wept and said he didn’t love her, and he soothed and reassured and said he did, it was only the word of a child. At this point I ought to be able to record listening to the sounds of sex and a resulting trauma, but no, it was the injustice of it, for I had described what I had seen. Mrs Scott never spoke to me in anything but a cold and sarcastic voice. There were other children, but I remember only her daughter Nancy, who bullied me in minor ways. Then she told her mother that at school I used to go round the backs of the lavatory blocks and look up at the shitty backsides. Such a crime had never occurred to me. Mrs Scott was not allowed to hit me – my mother did not hold with it – but she slapped and hit her own daughter, just as Mr Scott did. I was afraid she would hit me, for she did not believe me when I said it was untrue. She told my parents who came hastening, if that is the word for their dawdling progress, into town. Had I done this thing? No, I had not. Remember, it was wicked to lie. ‘A lie is much worse than being naughty.’ They believed me. My little brother giggled. Funny that I remember so little of my adored little brother except ‘standing up’ for him against unkind Nancy.

      January to June 1927. My seventh year. I was homesick and miserable. But compared with what goes on in schools now, and the ugliness of the bullying, physical and verbal, Mrs Scott’s unkindness and Nancy’s malice were nothing. I listen to young friends’ accounts of what goes on in well-reputed schools and cannot believe it. Not that children are cruel – for most are monsters, unchecked. No, that teachers seem unable to stop it. Perhaps they are not unable, but even like the idea? After all, Prince Charles reports that in the elite school, Gordonstoun, his head was held in the lavatory bowl while the flush was pulled. If that is what is prescribed for the highest in the land, lesser mortals need not expect better. We are a barbarous people.

      For a long time, driving past that house, long since demolished, with its big garden, I felt ill and turned my head away not to see it. Avondale School, where I did so well, is still there, unchanged.

      Among the reading matter provided by my mother was a series of improving tales for children about saints, like Elizabeth of Hungary, who earned from heaven chaplets of roses to shame her husband when he criticized her charities. An intense hunger for goodness took me over, and in the patch of empty ground behind Mrs Scott’s, I built a cathedral of sunflower stalks. The pleasure of it, the accomplishment, planning the building while the tales of saintly women rising above all persecution saturated my whole being. I was handling the light dry stalks, three times my height, while in imagination I was creating a great church that God himself would congratulate me for, listening for voices which surely I would hear if I tried hard enough, all assuring me of fellowship with the saints. But Mrs Scott did not see the point of these stalks, dragged out of their piles where they were stacked for burning. If you fill children’s heads with saintly tales they will build cathedrals and expect chaplets of roses and chanting choirs. This is as powerful a memory as any.

      Why was I left at Mrs Scott’s for two terms? Probably that child’s taboo against telling tales out of school was already operating. Besides, all the time, there was