Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

He was very ill, not only because of his amputated leg, but because he was suffering from what was then called shell shock. He was in fact depressed, the real depression which was like – so he said – being inside a cold, dark room with no way out, and where no one could come in to help him. The ‘nice doctor man’ he was sent to said he had to stick it out, there was nothing medicine could do for him, but the anguish would pass. The ‘horrible things’ that my father’s mind was assailed by were not as uncommon as he seemed to think: horrible things were in everybody’s mind, but the war had made them worse, that was all. But my father remembered and spoke often about the soldiers who, ‘shell-shocked’ or unable to get themselves out of their mud holes to face the enemy, might be shot for cowardice. ‘It could have been me,’ he might say, all his life. ‘It was just luck it wasn’t.’

So there he was, in my mother’s ward in the old Royal Free Hospital in East London. He saw her unhappiness when her great love was drowned, he knew she had been offered the matronship of St George’s, a famous teaching hospital, an honour, for usually this job was offered to older women. But they decided to get married, and there was no conflict in it for him, though there was for her, because later she said so. He said, often, that he owed her his sanity, owed her everything, for without her devoted nursing he would not have come through that year of illness. Marriages for affection were best, he might add. As for her, she enjoyed her efficiency and her success, and knew she would make a wonderful matron of a great teaching hospital. But she wanted children, to make up to them what she had suffered as a child. So she put it.

My father was not the only soldier never, ever, to forgive his country for what he saw as promises made but betrayed: for these soldiers were many, in Britain, in France and in Germany, Old Soldiers who kept that bitterness till they died. They were an idealistic and innocent lot, those men: they actually believed it was a war to end war. And my father had been given a white feather in London by women he described as dreadful harridans – and that was when he already had his wooden leg under his trouser leg, and his ‘shell shock’ making him wonder if it was worth staying alive. He never forgot that white feather, speaking of it as yet another symptom of the world’s ineradicable and inevitable and hopeless insanity.

He had to leave England, for he could not bear England now, and he got his bank to send him out to the Imperial Bank of Persia, to Kermanshah. Now I use the name Imperial Bank of … to watch the reaction, which is incredulity, and then a laugh, for so much of that time now seems as delightfully absurd as – well, as something or other we now take for granted will seem to our children.

My mother was having a breakdown, I think because of the difficulties of that choice, marriage or the career where she was doing so well. And because of her lost love, whom she never forgot. And because she had worked so very hard during the war, and because of the many men she had watched die and because … it was 1919, the year when 29 million people died of the flu epidemic which for some reason gets left out of the histories of that time. Ten million were killed in the Great War, mostly in the Trenches, a statistic we remember now on the 11th November of every year, but 29 million people died of the flu, sometimes called the Spanish Lady.

My father was still in breakdown, though the worst of the depression he had suffered from was over. They had been advised by the doctors not to have a child yet. They joked my mother must have got pregnant on the first night. In those days people actually often did wait until the first night of marriage. But there is another thing. In 1919 my mother was thirty-five and in those days it was considered late to have a first baby. And as a nurse she must have been aware of the dangers of waiting. Perhaps a part of my mother’s mind she did not know about was making sure she got pregnant then.

And so they arrived, the two of them, both ill, in the great stone house on a plateau surrounded by snowtopped mountains, in that ancient trading town, Kermanshah – which was much damaged, parts of it bombed into dust, during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.

And there I was born on the 22nd October 1919. My mother had a bad time. It was a forceps birth. My face was scarred purple for days. Do I believe this difficult birth scarred me – that is to say, my nature? Who knows. I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important. How could it not be? Unless you believe that every little human being’s mind is quite separate from every other, separate from the common human mind. An unlikely thing, surely.

That war does not become less important to me as time passes, on the contrary. In 1990, the year I began to write this book, I was in the south of France, in that hilly country behind the Riviera, visiting the delicious little towns and villages which began centuries ago as hill forts, and in every town or village is a war memorial. On one face is a list of the twelve or twenty young men killed in World War One, and this in tiny villages that even now have only half a hundred inhabitants. Usually every one of the young men of a village was killed. All over Europe, in every city, town, and village is a war memorial, with the names of the dead of World War One. On another face of the shaft or obelisk are the two or three names of the dead of World War Two. By 1918, all the healthy young men of Europe, dead. In 1990 I was in Edinburgh where in a cold, grey castle are kept the lines of books recording the names of the young men from Scotland killed between 1914 and 1918. Hundreds of thousands of names. And then in Glasgow – the same. Then, Liverpool. Records of that slaughter, the First World War. Unlived lives. Unborn children. How thoroughly we have all forgotten the damage that war did Europe, but we are still living with it. Perhaps if ‘The Flower of Europe’ (as they used to be called) had not been killed, and those children and grandchildren had been born, we would not now in Europe be living with such second-rateness, such muddle and incompetence?

Not long ago, in a cinema in Kilburn, they showed Oh What a Lovely War!, that satire on the silliness of World War One. As we came out of the dark into the street, an old woman stood alert and alive at the exit, and she looked hard into every face, impressing herself on every one of us. That film ends with two females stumbling, wandering through acres, miles, of gravestones, war graves, women who never found men to marry and have children with. This old woman, there was no doubt, was one of them, and she wanted us to know it. That film expressed her: she was telling us so.

There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war – my mother was one.

During that trip through the villages of France, then in Scotland and towns in England, were revived in me the raging emotions of my childhood, a protest, an anguish: my parents’. I felt, too, incredulity, but that was a later emotion: how could it have happened? The American Civil War, less than half a century before, had shown what the newly invented weapons could do in the way of slaughter, but we had learned nothing from that war. That is the worst of the legacies from the First World War: the thought that if we are a race that cannot learn, what will become of us? With people as stupid as we are, what can we hope for? But the strongest emotion on that trip was the old darkness of dread and of anguish – my father’s emotion, a very potent draught, no homeopathic dose, but the full dose of adult pain. I wonder now how many of the children brought up in families crippled by war had the same poison running in their veins from before they could even speak.