Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

is your size, but one day you will grow tall enough to reach the handle of the door, or the knob on a cupboard. These are the real childhood memories and any that have you level with grown-ups are later inventions. An intense physicality, that is the truth of childhood.

      My first memory is before I was two, and it is of an enormous dangerous horse towering up, up, and on it my father still higher, his head and shoulders somewhere in the sky. There he sits with his wooden leg always there under his trousers, a big hard slippery hidden thing. I am trying not to cry, while being lifted up in tight squeezing hands, and put in front of my father’s body, told to grip the front of the saddle, a hard jutting edge I must stretch my fingers to hold. I am inside the heat of horse, the smell of horse, the smell of my father, all hot pungent smells. When the horse moves it is a jerking jolting motion and I lean back my head and shoulders into my father’s stomach and feel there the hard straps of the wooden-leg harness. My stomach is reeling because of the swoop up from the ground now so far below me. Now, that is a real memory, violent, smelly – physical.

      ‘Daddy used to put you in front of him on the horse when he rode to the Bank, and Marta waited at the gate to bring you back. You absolutely loved it.’ And perhaps I did, perhaps it was only the first ride, which I did not love, that has stayed in my memory. The gate is in a photograph, a graceful arch, and I have added it to the real memory. Of being lifted down into the hands of Marta, whom I disliked, there is nothing in my mind. Those rides had to be in Kermanshah, and I was two and a half when we left.

      Sharp steep stone steps, like boulders on a mountainside; they are in a photograph, too, but the memory is of dangerous descent, threatened by sharp edges.

      Another memory, a real one, not what was told me, or what is in the photograph album. A swimming bath, a large tank, full of great naked pallid people shouting and laughing and splashing me with hard slaps of cold water. The naked bodies were my mother, rowdy and noisy, enjoying herself, my father holding on to the edge of the tank, because that pitiful shrunken stump of a leg with its shrapnel scars, waving or jerking about in the water, made it hard for him to swim. And others, for the tank seems crowded with people. They are not naked, for they wear the serious swimming costumes of the time, but if adults are always dressed in the daytime, and then wear long-sleeved clothes in bed, when in bathing costumes they seem all pale flesh and unpleasant revelation. Loose bulging breasts. Whiskers of hair under arms, matting or streaming water like sweat. Sometimes snot on a face that is grinning and shouting with pleasure. Snot running into the water that already has dying or rotting leaves in it, as well as the broken reflections of clouds, down here, not up there in the sky. Small children are always trying to keep things in their proper places, their world is always coming apart, things in it move about, deceive, lie. ‘We used to swim every afternoon in the summer. And we had swimming parties at the weekend. Oh they were such fun. You always loved it when we had parties.’ Thus spoke my mother, mourning the best years of her life, in Persia. ‘We used to lift you in with us, but you screamed and had to be put back on the side. The water was so cold! It was mountain water. It came running down from the mountains in stone channels. You simply had to shout as you jumped in! There were beds of asters all around the tank. The Persian gardeners were wonderful, they grew everything.’ And so you imagine jumping in, all jolly and laughing, and being lifted out, you see the asters, in paintbox colours, and hear the scolding Persian gardeners, who would not let you pick the asters, mother said so. But the real memory, the authentic one, was of enormous pale bodies, like milk puddings, sloshing about in out-of-control water that smelled cold, the flailing large pale arms, the hard breath-stopping slap of water on your face. ‘Go on, be a sport, brave girls don’t cry about a silly little thing like that.’

      Two memories, concocted ones, or induced, but probably true enough. In the 1960s, when we were experimenting with drugs, I tried one absolutely not to be recommended. You eat morning glory seeds, previously soaked in hot water to an acid jellyish state, but you have to eat a lot, in my case sixty or more. I felt sick, and as for the revelations I was doing as well using my novelist’s mind. I had been thinking, why had so little remained in me of that big stone house, with its big high stone rooms? I was born there. I learned to walk there. And imagined that I lay in a cot with bars, like a prison cell for size, and heard large feet clanging on stone. I knew the floors were stone and that there were few rugs, that the windows were large and showed mountains, that the house was cold in winter. The cot was bound to be something of the sort, and a small child hears every sound with new ears, nothing shut off, as adults shut off sound.

      The other invited memory was useful, and has been ever since. I took mescalin – just once. Two friends monitored the dosage and then sat with me. They were concerned that I would jump out of a window or something of the kind, because someone they knew had done that a short time before. What I learned then was how strong in me was the personality I call the Hostess, for I was presenting my experience to them, chatting away, increasingly scatty, but in control, but all that was a protection for what went on within. This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now, when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer, and it is here I retreat to, take refuge, when I think that my life will be public property and there is nothing I can do about it. You will never get access here, you can’t, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy. They call it loneliness, that here is this place unsharable with anyone at all, ever, but it is all we have to fall back on. Me, I, this feeling of me. The observer, never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.

      That day, chatting away, telling them this is happening, that is happening, I was protecting an experience I had induced. I was being born. In the 1960s this kind of ‘religious’ experience was common. I was giving myself ‘a good birth’ – in the jargon of the time. The actual birth was not only a bad one, but made worse by how it was reported to me, so the storyteller invented a birth as the sun rose with light and warmth coming fast into the enormous lamplit room. Why not? I was born early in the morning. Then I invented a chorus of pleasure that I was a girl, for my mother had been sure I was a boy and had a boy’s name ready. In this ‘game’ my girl’s name had been planned for months, instead of given me by the doctor. My father – well, where was he, in reality? He was ill because of his imaginative participation in the birth and had gone to sleep after being informed I was safely born.

      Probably this ‘good’ birth was therapeutic, but it was the revelation of the different personalities at work in me I valued and value now. One had to be authentic and not invented, because it was unexpected. Before my eyes, through the whole experience that is, for hours, ran a picture show of beautiful and smart clothes, fashionable clothes, as if a fashion designer inside me was being given her head. They were not on me, but on fashion models: I have never worn this kind of garment. The other person, or personality, was a sobbing child. I wept, and wept, much to the concern of my companions, but I knew it was not important, my weeping. I do not cry enough; that has always been true, and to weep without constraint was a bonus and a bliss. I could easily have cradled that poor baby and comforted her, if I had not been so fascinated by the parallel picture gallery of wonderful clothes, and by the gracious protective chat of the hostess.

      That weeping child … now she’s a real enemy. She transmogrifies into a thousand self-pitying impostors, grabbing and sucking, and when I cut off a long clutching tentacle, at once another appears, just where I don’t expect it.

      An intensity of the senses accompanies drug-taking, a reminder of how small children experience tastes, textures, smells. While the drug was wearing off they took me out to a meal and I remembered how food tasted in childhood. The omelette exploded on my tongue into a hundred nuances of butter and egg and herb. Already, half-way through my life – I was in my forties – I had lost so much of my capacity for taste. We all fear old age because we are going to lose pleasure, be sans taste. But you lose it all slowly and unnoticed as you live. A small child does not taste anything like the same omelette an adult does. Heat suffocates and burns, pricking the skin, making small limbs wriggle and shrink. Cold attacks like freezing water. Smells expand the nose in delight, shrivel it in disgust. Noises, sounds, fill the inner ear, clamouring, insisting, threatening, listen to me. Children and grown-ups