Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

When I went into my parents’ bedroom my father was putting on his wooden leg with its heavy leather straps, its bucket for his stump; my mother, in her flowered silk wrapper from Harrods, was dressing Baby. The Liberty curtains were still fresh. The whitewash glittered. The thatch above was yellow and smelled new. Years ahead was the gentle squalor that house at last subsided into.

We had breakfast in the room that overlooked the bush that stretched to the Ayreshire Hills. Mother in her fresh cotton dress, father in his farm khaki, the two healthy little children. The breakfast was the full English breakfast, porridge, bacon, eggs, sausages, fried bread, fried tomatoes, toast, butter, marmalade, tea. Also pawpaw in its season, and oranges.

That we should eat enough was my mother’s chief worry. Now I cannot believe how much we all ate. And when a bit of white egg slime or a burnt bit of toast was left my father demanded with anguish that we should think of the starving children in India. If children were starving in Africa, or hungry or malnourished down in the farm compound visible from the windows, then that it seemed was not our responsibility.

But one of the difficulties of this record is how to convey the contradictions of white attitudes. My mother agonized over the bad diet of the farm labourers, tried to get them to eat vegetables from our garden, lectured them on vitamins. They would not eat cabbage, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes – now eaten by all the black people. They pulled relishes from the bush, leaves of this and that, and they brewed beer once a week, known to be full of goodness. But an ox was killed for them only once a month. Mostly, they ate the mealiemeal of that time, unrefined, yellow, wonderful stuff like polenta, and peanuts and beans. In fact, that diet was one that would be applauded by nutritionists now, but was regarded as bad then, because of its lack of meat. There is a sharp little memory from then, and there were similar incidents throughout my childhood. My brother, or I, doing what we had seen others do, called the houseboy to bring us our shoes – which were in the same room. My father went into a shouting, raging temper – most unusual for him. He said how dare my mother allow the children to be ruined, how dare she let us call a grown-up man ‘Boy’. Did she not care that we would get soft and spoiled being waited on? He wouldn’t have it. He wouldn’t allow it. Usually my father didn’t lay down the law. But over this he did. Throughout my childhood he remonstrated with my mother, more in sorrow than in anger, about the folly of expecting a man just out of a hut in the bush to understand the importance of laying a place at table with silver in its exact order, or how to arrange brushes and mirrors on a dressing table. For very early my mother’s voice had risen into the high desperation of the white missus, whose idea of herself, her family, depended on middle-class standards at Home. ‘For God’s sake, old thing,’ he would urge, his voice softening as he saw the distress on her angry face. ‘Can’t you see? It’s simply ridiculous.’ ‘Well, it’s their job, isn’t it?’

After breakfast, I might go back into my room to read. Or go with my mother to learn – well, something or other. For if her wonderful lessons stopped when we went to school, she never ever lost an opportunity for instruction, and now I am grateful and wish I could tell her so.

My brother always went down on the lands with my father, and I often did too. My father sat himself on a log or a big stone, and watched the gang of ‘boys’ hoeing a field, or wrenching the maize cobs off the plants, or pulling up peanuts, or cutting down the great flat sunflower heads full of shiny black seeds. Most wore rags of some kind, many loincloths, or perhaps a ragged singlet and shorts that might easily be laced across a rent with pink under-bark torn from a musasa tree. As they hoed, they conversed, laughing and making jokes, and sometimes sang, if threshing peanuts from their shells with big sticks, or smashing the sunflower heads to release showers of seeds. When the bossboy, Old Smoke, came to sit with my father, his two attendant young men always standing respectfully behind him, the two men might talk half a morning. For when they had finished with the mombies, the probabilities of the rain, the need for a new cow kraal, or a new ditch to carry water from the compound, or the deficiencies of the Dutch farm assistant – but he only lasted a short time, because the Africans hated him so much – then they philosophized. At the African pace, slow talk, with long pauses, punctuated by ‘Yes …’, and from Smoke … ‘Ja …’ Then another slow exchange, and ‘Ja …’ from Old Smoke. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ from my father. Smoke might sit on a log or on his haunches, with one forearm over his knees for balance – when my brother and I tried it was no good, our limbs had already set into European stiffness. My father sat with his wooden leg out in front of him, his old hat over his eyes for the glare. They talked about Life and about Death and, often, about the Big Boss Pezulu (the Big Boss above, or God) and His probable intentions.

Meanwhile my brother and I were watching birds, chameleons, lizards, ants, making little houses of grass, or racing up and down antheaps where often we startled a buck lying up through the hot hours under a bush.

Hours went by. Years … A bottle full of tepid sweetened tea would be produced with cake, biscuits, scones. Old Smoke would share this with us. More hours passed – years. Then the sound of the gong from the house. Men who had been at work since six or seven in the morning had an hour off, twelve till one. The gong was a ploughshare hit with a big bolt from the wagon. Then we drove up to the house where my mother had been working all morning, sewing mostly, clothes for her husband, her children, herself – she was always smart. Or she had cooked. She made jams, bottled fruits, invented crystallized fruit from the flesh of the gourds that fed cattle, filled rows of petrol tins with the sweet yeasty gingery water that would make dozens of bottles of ginger beer. And, like all the farmers’ wives, she invented recipes from mealies, which were not called sweetcorn then. Because we were all poor, or at least frugal, saving money when we could, the women were proud of what they could do with what they grew. Not till I went to Argentina, which grows the same crops as Southern Africa – pumpkins and maize, beans and potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions – did I find anything like the same inventiveness. We ate the green mealies cut off the cobs and cooked in cheese sauces, or in fritters and milk puddings or in soups with potatoes and pumpkin. The maize meal was made into cakes and pancakes, as well as different kinds of porridge, or added to bread. There were a dozen ways of cooking pumpkin. Young peanuts found their way into stews, peanut butter made all kinds of sauces and breads. We ate … how we did eat. Lunch was a big affair, meat, always meat, for this was before anybody but a real crank gave up meat. We ate roast beef and potatoes, or steak and kidney pies, or stews, or shepherd’s pie, and potatoes and half a dozen vegetables from the garden down the hill near the well. Then heavy puddings, and cheese.

Then, it was time to lie down.

‘But I’m not sleepy, Mummy, Mummy, I’m not sleepy.’

It was no good. In this climate, or on this altitude – and either might be cited as evidence against me – little children must lie down in the afternoons. I begged, I pleaded, even wept, not to be forced to lie down while my mother’s voice got increasingly incredulous. ‘What nonsense! What’s the fuss about?’ She did not know I was facing eternities: she looked forward to a few minutes snatched from the responsibilities of child-rearing, to write a letter Home. The orange curtains were drawn across the green gauze of the window, and the stone that propped the door put aside. ‘Look, here is the watch,’ and she arranged it on the candlestick by my bed. I had learned to tell the time because of the agonies of afternoon naps. My dress was pulled up over my head. She stood holding the coverlet back. I slid in. She turned away, her mind already on her letter. Now I was glad she had forgotten me. She shut the door into their bedroom where my little brother was already asleep. At once I nipped out of bed and pulled the curtains back again for I hated that stuffy ruddy gloom.