Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

My mother decided she had a bad heart. All her life she knew she had a bad heart and might die at any moment. In the end she died at the respectable age of seventy-three, of a stroke. Even as a small girl I understood the psychological advantages of a bad heart, and believed she was inventing it to get sympathy. I believed too that my father was not convinced by this heart.

Now I understand why she went to bed. In that year she underwent that inner reconstruction which most of us have to do at least once in a life. You relinquish what you had believed you must have to live at all. Her bed was put into the front room, because of the windows and the view to the hills, under the stern gaze of her father, John William, and his cold dutiful wife. All around her were the signs and symbols of the respectable life she had believed was her right, her future, silver tea trays, English watercolours, Persian rugs, the classics in their red leather editions, the Liberty curtains. But she was living in what amounted to a mud hut, and all she could see from her high bed was the African bush, the farm ‘compound’ on its subsidiary hill.

The doctor came often from Sinoia. They did not know as much then about anxiety as they do now. He prescribed bed rest. Doctor Huggins, her real doctor in Salisbury, when she appealed to him in letters, said, Why ask him when she had already had a doctor telling her what to do? Doctor Huggins – later Lord Malvern – was a testy character who did not believe in the need for a bedside manner, as a doctor or a politician: he was shortly to become Prime Minister.

Several times a day she summoned me and Harry to the bedside where she said dramatically, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy.’ It is this memory that tells me how badly she had inwardly collapsed. ‘Poor mummy’ was simply not her style. As for me I was consumed with flames of rage. My little brother embraced her whenever he was asked to. I embraced her warmly, but then resented and repudiated the emotion. Soon I refused to go to the bedside when called there by the cook. ‘Mummy’s ill,’ my father directed me, and I snapped, ‘No, she isn’t,’ for the conflict was unbearable.

Meanwhile our education went on and I can only admire the self-discipline this must have needed. Standing by her bed, or sitting on it (’Don’t tire your mother. Don’t lean on her. Don’t …’), we learned our multiplication tables and did baby sums, but the reading lessons were already much too easy. She told us stories and she read to us.

Then Mrs Mitchell arrived, with her son, to ‘help’ my mother. Harry was still sleeping in my parents’ room. I shared a room with Mrs Mitchell. Her son was in the room at the end of the house.

I experienced her as cruel and her son as a bully. She drank. When she left – soon, after only a few weeks – caches of empty bottles were found under bushes, in cupboards. She always smelled of spirits. What was she really like? If she was being nursemaid and housekeeper for a sick woman, and had a boy, school age, she must have been desperate. Widowed? Deserted? In flight from a brutal husband? This was before the Slump, when women whose husbands were out of work took any jobs they could find.

All my childhood we were told how poor we were, how hard-up, how deprived of what was our right. I believed it. Then, at school, I met children from really poor families. There was a stratum of people, white, in old Southern Rhodesia, who lived just above hunger level, always in debt, in flight from debtors, with drink and brutality waiting to swallow them up. Recently a book was published called Toe-rags by Daphne Anderson, the story of a girl who survived a childhood at this level of poverty. Often it was the black servants who cared for her. She was exactly my age, and compared to hers my life was gentle and privileged. This book is not likely – yet – to be read by black people in Zimbabwe, where it is necessary still to believe that every white person is, and was, rich. White people have proved reluctant to read it, because they don’t like to think the whites in British Southern Rhodesia ever lived so low and so fearfully. The grandiose myths of White Supremacy are made to look sad and sick by this book, even though the beautiful author married well, as we say, when she was in her twenties, and lived happily ever after. I hope Toe-rags will soon find a place on the reading lists of history courses in Zimbabwe.

Mrs Mitchell came from this frightful level of poverty. She could not have shared my bedroom for more than a term, perhaps even a school holiday. It was an endless misery, endless fear. I lay in the stuffy dark under the mosquito net. She was under the other mosquito net. I heard the sounds that meant she was drinking. I heard the bottle slide down between the edge of the bed and the net, and thump on the matting. She snored. She thrashed about in her bed. Next door the boy shouted in his sleep. Once she quarrelled so loudly with the boy my mother appeared in the doorway, a candle in her hand, and her hair flowing about her to stop the two yelling at each other, and saw the candle sloping in Mrs Mitchell’s hand, the candle grease spattering, the flame lengthening and dipping and smoking an inch or two from the mosquito net.

Both Mrs Mitchell and her son shouted and screamed at the black servants. When my father remonstrated she shouted at him that he understood nothing about the country: perhaps it was the first time I heard all the white clichés: You don’t understand our problems. They only understand the stick. They are nothing but savages. They are just down from the trees. You have to keep them in their place. (Just like Dr Truby King’s infants.)

I was afraid to go anywhere near Mrs Mitchell’s son. He was perhaps twelve but seemed to me as powerful as a grown-up. He tormented and teased the black child who was piccanin for the household. He chased and teased and tormented the dogs and cats. His catapult he used not only on birds, but to aim stones at the bare feet of any black person who came near.

Nothing I can do, no cajolements or enticements of memory, can bring back more than this: no incident or event bad enough to explain my dread of that woman. And probably there was no actual cruelty or blow, but only the foul angry voice, and the high scolding vituperation of the black-hater.

I cannot even begin to imagine what that year was like for my father. His wife was bedridden, and if she had ‘a heart’ there was no reason why she should ever get up. They had so little money, yet whenever she was worse the doctor would arrive from Sinoia. Two little children, one still not six, the other four. They needed tender care, but what they were getting was Mrs Mitchell and her bully of a son. My father was still trying to get lands stumped, bush cleared, fields made. He had to be down all day on the lands, for until there were fields there would be no crops. Meanwhile the debt to the Land Bank grew.

For some months he had an assistant, a Dutchman with many children. The story The Second Hut was written from memories of that year.

It was as early as that when we, the children, began to go with him down to the lands. The horse had died: that part of the District was not good for horses – they got diseases. It was on the sand veld at the other side of the District that horses thrived and people went in for racing. We bought two donkeys and my father rode one. We were put on the other. Later we got a car, an Overland, already third- or fourth-hand. We, the children, the two dogs, Lion and Tiger, cheerful mongrels, bottles of cold tea and packets of store biscuits went down to the land with our father, and played in the bush while my mother was in bed, being tended by Mrs Mitchell.

She left. Then came someone who was not paid, but helping out of kindness, Mrs Taylor, a Danish woman. Since she had a life of her own she did not move in, but might stay a few days, leave and come back, and soon we forgot the nightmare of Mrs Mitchell. She was a large, calm, good-looking woman, and my father liked her very much. My father liked women. Women liked him. He had a gentle, courtly, considerate way with him, and the undertones of regret and wistfulness were not anything a child could understand. All I knew was that throughout my growing up there was always this woman – the wife of a neighbour, or a visitor to the District – with whom he might sit and talk in this particular way, as if the time they were in, the two of them, was in another range of being altogether, something larger and tenderer than quotidian life, and where they shared, too, a rakish and amused recognition, never to be put into words. Mrs Taylor was not around for long – she was on the move somewhere. People were always moving about the country, farm to farm, from either to the town, or off ‘up north’ – meaning Nyasaland or Northern Rhodesia – or back to England, because they found the life disappointing. ‘Not everyone can take the life, you know.’ Women most especially often could not take the life.