Under My Skin

I was clever, that was my attribute, clever little Tigger Tayler. School lessons were never difficult, exams pleasurable. But being clever was not something I was prepared to go along with, for from the start I was quietly sliding out, not knowing what I did. My cleverness was a continuation of my mother’s, like my musical talents, insisted on, held up to other people for admiration, boasted about to the farmers’ wives, used as a means to get bursaries and special privileges.

What was my own, where I belonged, was the world of books, but I had to fight for it as soon as I arrived at the Convent. The school library was several rooms full to the ceiling with books neatly covered in brown paper, the titles and authors written on their spines in ink. I felt as if I had walked into a treasure cave, but the library nuns did not believe a child of eight had read Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. They insisted I must have the permission of my parents to read such unsuitable books. My weekly letter home read, ‘I am very well. I hope you are very well. How are Lion and Tiger? Sister Perpetua says I must have your permission to read books. It is only four weeks and three days and seven hours to the holidays. Love to Harry.’ While waiting for permission, the library nuns urged on me improving literature, which filled two long shelves. The word ‘unwholesome’ is hardly adequate to describe the moral climate these novels came from. The plots were all the same. A pure young man or girl met, apparently by chance, a worldly person, usually a woman, well dressed, older, but whose every smile or glance promised enticing initiations. The neophyte was invited to a country house, full of cosmopolitan older people, who all had the same air of mystery. The bemused one found herself, himself, attending seances, table-turnings, and ambiguous services in ruined chapels and sylvan glades. And then – the choice! The left-hand path into Satanism, the right-hand path into tedious virtue, which was fit only for the stupid or the timid. I did not find anything like this mix of eroticism and black magic until the TV series Twin Peaks from the States a couple of years ago, but the convent novels had nothing in them of that grotesque wit.

These novels were not as compelling as the library nuns would have liked. I had never heard of seances or Satan. For the four years I was at the Convent I was being urged to read them. Now, when I ask Catholic friends, they know nothing of these books or anything like them. Perhaps some pious library at Home was pruning itself, and thought: ‘Pity to waste them. I’ve got it, they’ll do for those heathen natives in Africa!’

I was at the Convent for four years. Or for eternity. I used to wake up in the morning with the clang of the bell and not believe I would live through that interminable day until the night. And, after this endless day would be another. Then another. I was in the grip of a homesickness like an illness. It is an illness. When I was in my late sixties and succumbed to grief, I thought, My God, that’s what I went through as a child, and I’ve forgotten how very terrible it was. What did I long for? Home. I wanted to be home. I wanted my mother, my father and my little brother, who until he was eight was still at home. I wanted my dogs and my cat. I wanted to be near the birds and animals of the bush. I wanted … I yearned … I craved, for this anguish to be over. I did not believe it would ever end. I have exchanged recollections with men who were sent to schools in England aged seven, and some remember this weight of misery. There must be by now hundreds of memoirs, autobiographies, testifying to the misery of small children sent too young to school. It is a terrible thing to send small children to boarding school. We all know it. Yet people who remember very well how they suffered, sent from home aged seven or eight, do the same to their children. This says something pretty important about human nature. Or about the British.

I could not conceivably have lived through four years continuously in the grip of that pain, but whenever I take out my mental snapshots of the Convent, I am immersed in grief.

When I went home for the holidays, the end of them seemed so far away it was like a reprieve. Six weeks. Even four weeks. When every day was endless, then even a week was an ocean of time.

For two years my little brother was at home being taught by correspondence course and slowly he fought his way out of being Baby, or Roo, insisted on being called Harry, and took firm hold of his birthright, which was physical excellence. If my early memories of Baby are all of a cuddlesome complacency, on someone’s lap, usually mine, then later they are of him in energetic movement, flying down the hill on his scooter, then his bicycle, brakes off, or at the top of some fearsome tree, or hitting sixes over the roof of the house while he ran like a duiker. He was like all the other white boys of the District, a lean, tough, sunburned child, his knees always scarred, his shorts torn, and his eyes inflamed by the sun, for he was out in it from sunrise till sundown. My mother read us Peter Pan too often, and her voice broke when Peter returned, found the window shut and went flying off again. ‘Come on old girl,’ urged my father, ‘it’s not as bad as all that.’

But for her it was. Nothing she had wanted for herself was going to happen. All her energies were in her children, and particularly her darling little boy. But he – and quite suddenly – did not seem to be aware of her. Interesting, the different ways children rebel, preserve themselves. I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too. But my brother never fought. He would smile, quite politely, as my mother tried to make him eat this, wear that, think this or that, see the children on the other farms as common, or see ‘this second-rate country’ as a place he would not stay in. But, if he did as he liked, it was within the limits of what she chose. He went to Ruzawi, a prep school modelled on English lines, and later, into the Navy, though he did not want to. It was not until he married that he made a big choice for himself. Now I see it as an instinctive passive resistance.

I begged my mother to have another baby. She was a maternal woman all right, and it must have been painful, when that little girl’s pleadings reinforced suppressed instincts. ‘Please, Mummy, please, I’ll help to look after it.’ ‘But we can’t afford it,’ she said, over and over again. And then, already, and so early, ‘Besides, Daddy is not very strong.’ The strength of my yearning for that infant mingled with my homesickness; I am sure yearnings of this intensity are for some other good lost perhaps when we are born. But when I mourned that there would not be another baby, I learned how much ‘Baby’ had been my baby as much as my mother’s. After that, if there was a baby or a small child anywhere in the District, I adored it, could not be separated from it, begged to be allowed to bring it home. This passion became quite a joke in the District – a kindly one. ‘Your little girl, she’s a funny one for babies.’

In the paraffin box bookcase beside my mother’s bed, behind the Liberty cretonnes that were beginning to lose freshness, was a book about the process of giving birth, the manual on obstetrics from the Royal Free. I lay on my mother’s bed, studied the stages of the foetus’s growth, pored over the enlarging slopes of the stomach, and, in imagination, went into labour and gave birth. So strong was my identification that I almost believed that yes, there would be the baby, lying there on the bed. This fantasy was also erotic, but in flavour, not in physical fact. Who was the male? One of the little boys in the District with whom I was in love and with whom I was making a family.

The holidays were crammed with incidents and events. My mother made sure they would be. Not only did our instruction continue, stories from history, geography, exploration, but there were visits to and from the other farms. When the families arrived and the children were sent off to play, it was not play at all. We stalked animals and hid to watch them, watched birds, learned how to distinguish tracks in the dust of the roads, searched reefs for gold-bearing rocks. My brother was given his first airgun, and he shot every bird he saw. The guns divided the gang of children into boys and girls – the boys shooting, the girls playing family. But when I was alone with my brother, we went together into the bush. My mother’s genius for social life showed itself in picnics, either with other families or when we were on our own. The car was piled with food, and we went off to some clear place in the bush and made a fire and cooked sausages and eggs, and lay under the trees watching the moon rise, or naming stars. If there were other children we sang jolly songs, like ‘Campdown Races’ and sad ones, like ‘Shenandoah’. We sang American, not English songs.

Several times a day, through the holidays, I, or my brother, or both of us, would be summoned to learn something. My mother, or father, had found a skull or skeleton in the bush, or a lump of gold-bearing rock. She boiled the skulls and skeletons of birds and small animals until the flesh fell off so we could learn the structure of bones. She blew birds’ eggs, and dismantled birds’ nests. She cut open termite nests to show us their gardens, their nurseries, their roads, their galleries. She showed us cast snakes’ skins and the eggs of spiders and snakes. She pulled flowers and leaves apart, and made us draw their parts.

Meanwhile, all the time, it seemed day and night, talk of the war went on. Sometimes it seemed as if the house on the hill was full of men in uniforms, but they were dead, just as in all the houses of the District were photographs of dead soldiers. And, too, cripples from the war. There was Mr Livingstone with a wooden leg, like my father – but he did much less with it. Mr McAuley had a steel plate over his stomach, to keep his intestines in – so they said. In the Murrays’ house, a sad, stoical, woman mourned the death of a husband and four sons in the Trenches. There was one son still alive, to take the place of all of them. In the Shattocks’ house was the picture of a beautiful little boy who, when a boat was sunk by a torpedo in the war, was sucked into the funnel to drown. Sometimes, when the talk of the war began again – and again, I wriggled away, tried to get out of the room, and if my father caught me he would shout, ‘That’s right, it’s only the Great Unmentionable. It’s only the Great War, that’s all!’

There is a question: there has to be. Four years at the Convent, but also four years of holidays, weeks of holidays that seemed when they began as if they would never end. There were a hundred kinds of experiences, good times, picnics, family outings, the dogs, the cats, cuddling babies, or walking all day with my brother in the bush, sitting up at night to watch the stars. But the dark times, the miseries are stronger than the good times. Why is that? ‘Give me a child until it is seven,’ they say the Jesuits say. The talk of war was probably the first thing I ever heard. So perhaps if there had never been the Convent with its bloody and tortured people everywhere, its tortured but smiling saints, it would have been the same. Suppose the Convent had nothing but sunny pictures of woods and fields and kind faces, would then the talk of war have proved stronger? Or is there something inherent in our composition that disposes us to grief and memories of grief, so that days or even weeks of good times prove less inviting than pain? This question has a rather more than personal relevance.

I had not been at the Convent a year when I escaped into the sickroom. First, I was really ill, with something then generally called B. Coli. A kidney infection, with high temperatures. And thereafter I was always reporting to the sickroom, with vague symptoms, and being kept in bed. My mother saw this as a sign of being ‘delicate’. I knew I was homesick, but did not know that what took me to the sickroom was Sister Antonia, a kindly and affectionate woman, who mothered me and all her charges. These imaginary illnesses had a double face. First, being delicate removed me from my mother’s insistence that I should be clever, ‘Just like I was,’ and continually being shown off to neighbours who, I knew, would be derisive as soon as the telephone was silent, or our car had driven off. ‘Who does she think she is?’ But worse than the neighbours was the pressure of that ferocious energy of hers, insisting I must be clever, that if I got 70 in my maths exams it could be 100, that I would soon get a scholarship, and go to school in England. But illness also delivered me to her, helpless: doctors, illness, medicine. It is like looking back into something like the cold fogs that, sometimes, my father said, lay over No-man’s-land, or even clouds of poison gas. Illness permeated everything. Why was it doctors always did what my mother said? For one thing, she demanded the right to be considered a colleague. ‘I am a sister from the Royal Free in London.’ She knew as much and more than the nurses. I was always being taken to Doctor Huggins for tests and checkups, some of them involving catheters. Now I know I had cystitis, but the most minor inflammation was seen as a symptom of something serious. I used to scream at even the idea of a catheter, so they chloroformed me.

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