Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

If my father always enjoyed tender and, of course, platonic friendships (now you have to spell out what would have been taken for granted then), my mother also had admirers who knew she was fitting her remarkable capacities into too small a space. One of them was a George Laws, who was a brother of Miss Laws, a teacher in Sinoia and some sort of a cousin of my father’s. Mr Laws owned a timber concession in the government land between the rivers. It was he who made my mother a fitment that enabled her to read while she was ill, a bed rest, piano stool, couches and chairs of slatted wood, and ‘occasional’ tables so heavy they could scarcely be moved even when not buried under books, newspapers, magazines.

Then my mother got out of bed. She had to. She said her weight of hair was giving her headaches, and she cut it all off and appeared with a nude shorn nape. A ‘shingle’. My brother wept. I wept. We sat in the pillows and billows of her brown hair and wrapped it around us and bawled while she sat and ironically watched us. She said Right! That’s that!, and she wrapped her hair up in paper and threw it into the rubbish pit.

Correspondence courses still arrived by every post, but she wondered what she was paying money for when she could do better herself. She taught us geography by sloshing water into our sand pit and making continents, isthmuses, estuaries, islands. Being taught to see land masses and oceans like this repeats that stage of human knowledge when the world was flat. Then she ordered a little globe from Salisbury which arrived on the train, and with it we entered the mind of Copernicus. She sat my father in his folding chair on the sharp slope down outside the house, summoned the cook and the piccanin from the kitchen. My father was the sun. The two servants were the heavy planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Stones stood for Pluto, for Mars. I was Mercury and my brother Venus, running around my father, while she was the earth, moving slowly. ‘You have to imagine the stars are moving at different rates, everything moving, all the time.’ And then she abolished this system of cosmic order with an impatient wave of her hand. My father was now the earth, and my brother and I by turns the moon. ‘Of course you have to imagine that …’

We interminably chanted the multiplication tables. We learned English trees and flowers from little books. One was French Without Tears. The inspectors came out from Salisbury to check on the farmers’ children, and said yes, we were doing well. Yes, we were in advance of our ages. But we had to go to school. It was the law. Besides, children have to learn to be social beings.

For a time, my mother wondered about starting a little school there, on the farm. There were children of various ages on the near farms. But if this would be easy now, with good roads, then the question was, how to get those children every day, two, three, four, five, seven miles, to school and back again? Besides, this woman who had a genius for teaching small children was not qualified. And that was that.

I WAS NOW IN THE ROOM the third along from the front, which would be mine until I left the farm for good. It was a large, square, high-thatched room, whitewashed, full of light. From my bed I saw the sun spring up behind the chrome mountain and pass rapidly up out of sight, I saw the moon rise, soar up and away. I used to prop the door open with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me – it was only a few paces away down the steep slope. I fought with my mother to have this door open. ‘Snakes,’ she cried, ‘scorpions … mosquitoes … I won’t have it!’ But I kept the door open knowing I was safe inside the mosquito net. Besides, we took all that quinine for the months of the rainy season. Snakes did come into the house, and more than once my mother had to shoot one. The fact is, I was brought up in one of the most heavily snake-infested areas in the world. They were all poisonous, some deadly. For years I was in the bush with bare legs and often bare feet, and I was never bitten. Clearly they fear us more than we fear them. Impossible not to remember the threat of snakes dinned into us always. Remember to watch where you tread, never put your hand on a branch without looking, never climb a tree carelessly, puff adders like to lie out on hot paths and roads and they move slowly … remember, remember, remember. But my fear was for insects, so many, so varied, so large and black and horned or slim and jittery and invasive, spiders hanging in front of your face on webs spun in the night, lurking in your veldschoen, watching you from holes in the earth when you squatted to pee. It is a testament to the irrationality of humankind that when I look back at that time I think of those lethal but beautiful snakes with admiration and even affection, whereas the memory of harmless insects makes me shiver.

But I was under the mosquito net, so that was all right.

In the mornings I woke because the light had come, and the sunlight a warmth on my face. I checked the net for spiders and beetles, then jumped up and tied it into its daytime knot. I flung myself down on my back, and lay spread out, the sheet kicked off, sniffing all the delightful smells in that room. First, my own body, its different parts, each with its own chummy odour. The thatch was damply fragrant or straw-dry, according to whether it had rained. The creosote the rafters were painted with was tar-strong, like soap. The linoleum, already wearing into holes, released oily odours, but faint, like the oilcloth on the washstand. The enamel pail under the washstand might have pee in it, but I learned to sneak out with the pail and pour it down the hill into the earth, where it bubbled up yellow, sank, and dried almost at once. The toothpaste was clean and strong. My shoes – veldschoen – smelled of hide, like karosses. But I refused ever to have a kaross on my bed, for a kaross was too close to the beast it came from, and anyway, the rough reek of kaross made me think of Mrs Scott and I never, ever, wanted to think of that place again.

I heard the ‘boy’ take tea into my parents, knew they were getting up, slid into my clothes before I could be fussed into them. I wore little cotton knickers, a cotton dress, sometimes made out of an embroidered flour sack, and a liberty bodice. The Army—Navy catalogue regulated our lives, as it did those of middle-class children anywhere in the colonies. Well brought-up children wore liberty bodices with their tabs for suspenders and stockings in cold weather. Worn without stockings they wriggled up and left red marks on your stomach. There was a day when I said no, I was not going to wear one, not ever again. And in winning the battle for me I won it for my brother too. He was still wearing the tight binders that were supposed to prevent chills on the liver, while I had long ago refused to wear one. We were meant to wear cotton hats, lined with red aertex, with red aertex pieces hanging down our backs to keep the sun off our spines. But no, no, no, I would not. ‘No one wears a hat!’ I shouted – and it was true, the farmers and their wives did not cover their heads though the women might wear a hat for visiting. My mother’s pleas went for nothing: you will get deathly chills without your binders, bad posture without your liberty bodice, sunstroke without hats that have red linings. About the hats, it seems my mother and the Army—Navy Stores were right all the time. Recently (1992) I was at a skin specialist’s in London, and he said most of his income comes from white sun-worshippers in Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

I dressed myself as I had done since I was able to, whereas my little brother, now getting on for six, was still being dressed. He was supposed to be delicate, and often got bronchitis and was in bed with a towel over his head enclosing a basin of hot water that emitted the fumes of wintergreen, and friar’s balsam. Not for another two years would he refuse to be called Baby, refuse to be delicate.