Under My Skin

The story says we were read to, we played with plasticine, we drew pictures with chalks, we counted telegraph wires and played ‘I-Spy’ out of the windows, but what is in my mind is the train rattling into yet another station – surely it was the same one? – the ragged people, the ragged children. And again my mother was out there, among them all. And then, when the train was pulling out, she did not appear in the corridor outside the compartment, holding up what she had bought to show us. She had been left behind. My sick father held himself upright in the corner and kept saying it was all right, she would come soon, nothing to worry about, don’t cry. But he was worried and we knew it. That was when I first understood the helplessness of my father, his dependence on her. He could not jump down out of the train with his wooden leg and push through the crowds looking for food. ‘You had to share an egg between you and there were some raisins we brought with us, but that was all.’ She would have to reappear, she would have to, and she did, but two days later. Meanwhile our train had been slowing, groaning and screeching, again and again, into stations, into sidings, into the crowds, the besprizomiki, the soldiers with guns. I don’t remember crying and being frightened, all that has gone, but not the rough feel of the dressing gown on my cheek as I sat on my father’s good knee and saw the hungry faces at the window, peering in. But I was safe in his arms.

A small girl sits on the train seat with her teddy and the tiny cardboard suitcase that has teddy’s clothes in it. She takes the teddy’s clothes off, folds them just so, takes another set of clothes from the case, dresses the teddy, tells it to be good and sit quietly, takes this set of clothes off the teddy, folds them, takes a third set of trousers and jacket out, puts the taken-off clothes back in the case, folded perfectly, dresses the teddy. Over and over again, ordering the world, keeping control of events. There, you’re a good teddy, nice and clean.

From Moscow comes the most powerful of all my early memories. I am in a hotel corridor, outside a door whose handle is high above my head. The ceiling is very far away up there, and the great tall shiny doors go all along the corridor, and behind every door is a frightening strangeness, strange people, who appear suddenly out of a doorway or walk fast past all the shut doors, and disappear, or arrive at the turn of the corridor and then vanish into a door. I bang my fists against our door, and cry and scream. No one comes. No one comes for what seems like for ever, but that cannot have been so, the door must have soon opened, but the nightmare is of being shut out, locked out, and the implacable tall shiny door. This shut door is in a thousand tales, legends, myths, the door to which you do not have the key, the door which is the way to – but that is the point, I suppose. Probably it is in our genes, I wouldn’t be surprised, this shut door, and it is in my memory for ever, while I reach up, like Alice, trying to touch the handle.

And now we are in England. One might ask why none of the ‘nice’ memories, like snapshots, of pretty England, hollyhocks, cottage gardens, a thatched cottage, rocky seaside pools, are as powerful as the memories of dismal England – ganglia of black wet railway lines, rain streaming down cold windows, dead pale fish on slabs held right out into the street, the bleeding carcases on their great steel hooks in the butchers’ shops. I met my step-grandmother, so they say, and there is a photograph of me on her knee, but not even a deduced truth emerges. I met my father’s father, whose wife Caroline May died that year, and who was about to marry his thirty-seven-year-old bride: probably like all those women, she had lost her love in the Trenches, and marrying an old man was the only chance she had of a husband.

All kinds of visitings and little trips went on, but children are taken around like parcels. A Miss Steele helped with the children, and it is she who provides the sharpest memory of that six months. A room in a hotel. Again it is crammed with furniture, enormous, difficult to make one’s way around and through. Two large beds, one mine, and a large cot. The flame on the wall, which is gas, is dangerous, and must be watched, like a candle, although it cannot be overturned like a candle, and it makes a striated light in the room, full of air that seems greyish brown. Dark rain streams down dirty panes. It is cold. The damp woollen bundle that is my little brother snuffles drearily in his cot. Miss Steele has ordered us not to watch her while she is dressing. Miss Steele is so tall she seems to reach the ceiling, and she has floods of dark hair about her shoulders, over her front, and down her back. She has on bright pink stays, and pale flesh bulges out showing through the hair, and below it around her thighs. I see my little brother’s bright curious eyes, then he squeezes them shut, pretending to be asleep, then they gleam again. Miss Steele lifts her arms to slip a white camisole over her bushes of hair. Under her arms are silky black beards. I feel sick with curiosity and disgust. There is a smell of dirt and the unwashed smell of Miss Steele, sour and metallic, the smell of wet wool from my brother, and my own dry and warm smell that rises in waves when I lift the grimy blankets and take a sniff. The smells of England, the smells of wet, dirty, dark and graceless England, the smells of the English. I was sickening for Persia and the clean dry sunlight, but did not know what was wrong with me, for small children are so immersed in what surrounds them, their attention demanded all the time by keeping themselves upright and doing the right thing, they have not yet learned that particular nostalgia for place. Or so I think it must be. Or perhaps I was sickening for my lost love, the old cat. Long afterwards, I stood in Granada in Spain and saw the circling snow-topped mountains, and smelled the clean sunny air, and Kermanshah came back, in a rush: this was what it had been like.

But the question surely has at least to be put: why not remember just as intensely the jolly picnics in the hayfield, or the salubrious sandcastles, or the kindly arms of Aunt Betty and Uncle Harry Lott?

A sharp, indeed lurid, little memory is different from all the other English memories. A newspaper comic strip, about the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfski must have been among the very first attempts at anti-Communist propaganda. Wilfski, a bewhiskered villain like a cockroach, was based on Trotsky. He always had a bomb in his hand, threatening to blow something or somebody up. He was designed to inspire fear, horror, and that is what he did.

When we left England for Africa, my father’s father, the widower, stood in his thick tweedy clothes in a dark hall with a grandfather clock ticking just behind him, and he wept, and on his long white beard was a string of snot. This was what the child had to see, for the first years of children are devoted to subduing and ordering the physical, snot, shit, pee, a prison they struggle to get out of, and will not enter again until they are old. The old man wept, his heart was broken, he had not seen his son and his son’s wife for five years, and he had only just met his grandchildren, but now they were off to Africa where the missionaries his church raised funds for converted savages who might even be cannibals. They talked airily of returning in another five years. He wept and wept, and his granddaughter felt sick at the sight of him and would not let herself be kissed. And perhaps he wept, too, because the family did not approve of him marrying Marian Wolfe, ‘a girl half his age’.

The last weeks before leaving England were a rush of buying the things my mother needed for the life she thought she was going to lead. She was guided by leaflets and information from the Empire Exhibition, at whose instigation they were going to Southern Rhodesia, where they would be rich in five years growing maize. For my father, this was a chance to become what he had always wanted to be, ever since his country childhood with the farmers’ sons around Colchester. And there had been farmers in his family. But he had never had the capital to farm. Clearly, the more Exhibitions a nation has, the better. That Empire Exhibition of 1924, which lured my father out to Africa – how often have I come on it in memoirs, novels, diaries. It changed my parents’ lives and set the course of mine and my brother’s. Like wars and famines and earthquakes, Exhibitions shape futures.

Apart from shopping at Harrods, Liberty’s and the Army & Navy Stores, they both had all their teeth out. The dentist and the doctor said so. Teeth were the cause of innumerable ills and woes, they were of no use to anyone, and besides, there would not be any good dentists in Southern Rhodesia. (Untrue.) This savage self-mutilation was common at that time. ‘We continue to burn candles in churches and consult doctors’ – Proust.

The family stood on the deck of the German ship and watched the chalky shores of England recede. My mother wept. The desolation of separation was settling on my heart, but it cannot have been England I wept for, since I hated it. My father’s eyes were wet, but he put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Now come on, old thing!’ And turned her away from the disappearing cliffs to go inside.

There was also on deck, apart from my little brother, Biddy O’Halloran, who was to be our governess. What I know about her is mostly what I was told. She was twenty-one. She was Irish. She was ‘fast’, a ‘flapper’, a Bright Young Thing. She was definitely no better than she ought to be. Why? She had shingled hair, used make-up and smoked, and was too interested in men. Much later my mother was remorseful, because she had given Biddy a hard time. This was when she, too, smoked, cut her hair, and used some lipstick. ‘And I wonder what ever happened to her’ – for Biddy clearly found the experience so appalling she never wrote to us. Later she married an Honourable and was in society newspapers.

But she was just one of the many people who had already appeared in my life and disappeared. Acquaintances, lovers, friends, intimates – off they go. Goodbye. Till next time. A bientôt. Poka. Tot siens. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista. Auf wiedersehen. Do svidania. The way we live now.

It was a long voyage, weeks and weeks. A slow boat. Why a German boat? Perhaps my father was putting into practice his feeling of comradeship with the German soldiers who had been sold down the river by their government, just like the English tommies, and the French poilus.

My father was sick nearly all the way to Cape Town, and then Beira. My mother loved every second. This must have been the last time in her life she enjoyed herself in the way of deck games or bridge, dressing up and dancing and concerts – very much her way, her style.

On this boat I disgraced myself. I was miserable. First there was the Captain, my mother’s chum, for she was up on deck with him when everyone else was in their bunks being sick in a Force 9 gale, and this established them in a teasing good-fellows’ friendship. Joking, joshing, baiting, pulling each other’s legs. ‘Ribbing.’ (Does this word come from the torture of tickling, great hands squeezing small ribs?) It was a most hearty jollity, and he was full of practical jokes. When I was dressed up in my party dress, he invited me to sit on a cushion where he had placed an egg, swearing it wouldn’t break. Since it was obvious it would break, I did not want to sit. My mother said I must be a good sport. I sat on the egg and it sploshed under me and spoiled my dress and the Captain roared and rolled about. I was not only angry but felt betrayed. My father was disturbed, but to be a good sport, he must have felt, was the main thing. When we crossed the Line, I was thrown in, though I could not swim, and was fished out by a sailor. This kind of thing went on, and I was permanently angry and had nightmares. I think my mother was having such a good time that her normal obsessive care for her offspring was taking a holiday, for she was not one to take nightmares lightly – if she had been told of them. Besides, was not Biddy there to look after us?

It occurs to me that when my mother became such friends with the German captain two tributaries of a river met. The joshing, ribbing, teasing and ragging came from the English public schools she so much admired, and they were originally inspired by the Prussian elite schools where cruelty was practised on children. The Captain was hardly likely to have been a member of the Prussian elite but then, these examples of good living filter down. And was my mother cruel? Absolutely not. But we can all do whatever it is that is the done thing. Well, nearly all.

In the evenings she put on her beautiful evening dresses and went up to dinner at the Captain’s table, to the parties, the dances, the treasure hunts. So did Biddy O’Halloran. We children were shut in the cabin and told to be good. My brother, as ever obedient, slept. I wanted to be where the fun was. But my mother said the evenings were for grown-ups and I would not enjoy it. But I knew I would enjoy it, and she knew I would enjoy it. I hated her. It was no good, the door was locked. I climbed up on to the dressing table and found nail scissors and cut holes in an evening dress. Small hands, the nail scissors were small, and it was hard manipulating them in the thick slippery material. I could not have done much damage, but it is the thought that counts. I was weeping and howling with rage. No, I certainly was not punished. But I was held on her knee through one of those scenes, her voice low, throbbing with reproach, intimate, while she talked about behaving well and about love – hers – and being good for the sake of being good.

And yet, while all these betrayals and injustices went on, the business of education went on too, for this was, after all, my mother’s main business. Tiny children were held up in their parents’ arms and instructed to watch flying fish, porpoises, the colours of sunsets, the trajectories of other ships whose funnels trailed smoke smudges across fair skies, the birds sitting on the rigging and on the rails, seagulls flying low after the ship to catch the scraps flung out to them by sailors, the phosphorescence on the waves at night, moonlight, and lifeboat drill – this last being far from an academic exercise, since her great love the young doctor had drowned for lack of a lifeboat. And, as a special favour from the Captain, we were taken down, down, through the world of bright corridors. And then, suddenly, we were in another world of oily metal stairways and big black pipes running and bending on steel walls. My brother and I clutched each other and stood looking down from what seemed a tiny platform, only part of a walkway into the bottom of the ship, where dirty half-naked men shovelled coal into the mouths of furnaces, one, two, three, four – more, we could not count them, and the flames reared up and flung red light on to naked sweaty torsos. These men looked up and saw two small clean children, the privileged, peering down at them with horror on their faces, and behind them the parents in their good clean clothes, and the Captain himself in this part of the ship where they did not expect to see him. And they swung their bodies hard in the rhythm of the work, while arcs of black coal reached from them to the flames, and then they looked up, and their white teeth showed in grimed faces. It was like the besprizorniki on the Russian railway platforms, it was the other world, where people had holes in their clothes and bones showed on their faces. I was afraid, looking down at the men who shovelled coal while the sweat poured off them, just as I had been looking out of the dirty cracked train windows.

In Walvis Bay I met death for the first time, on the beach, a sea ebbing from sands where tiny fish lay dying in a sea-puddle. They wriggled and writhed and gasped, and then I saw that drifts of dead little fish lay all over the sands. ‘Are they dead?’ I asked, wanting confirmation, wanting the word to fit what I saw: my father and mother understood the gravity of the moment, and my father said, ‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ and my mother said, ‘Well, never mind.’ A howlingly beautiful sunset filled the sky and I understood: this is how things are and there is nothing to be done about it.

Somewhere in the Cape, ostriches ran high-stepping across scrubby sands with blue mountains far behind them. Distance. The empty distances of Africa. But the family went on in the ship around the coast to Beira, of which nothing remains in my mind, not the railway journey up to Salisbury, nor Salisbury itself, which was then a little town you could stroll across in twenty minutes, nor the twenty miles’ journey to Lilfordia, where we were to lodge while the farm was chosen.

Why ostriches, and not the ox wagons that still used the Salisbury streets, built wide so that the wagons could turn in them? Why the train in Russia but not the train Beira-to-Salisbury, surely equally exotic? Why remember this and not that? If I had decided to remember only the unpleasant, then why the ostriches, which were pure delight?

Lilfordia was the home of the Lilford family, later to be famous in the Bush War (the War of Liberation), because of Boss Lilford and his services to the white cause. Then it consisted of many rondaavels, solid and well-built thatched brick huts, scattered among shrubs which, we were at once warned, should not be approached incautiously, because of snakes. From the grown-ups’ voices – the Lilfords’ – it was clear these were no more of a danger than knocking a candle or a lamp over when playing too roughly, only something to look out for.

My father left us there and went off to look for a farm, I think, on a horse. This was when the white government was selling land to ex-servicemen for practically nothing, and when the Land Bank supported struggling white farmers on long-term loans. He would start farming on a loan. My parents had £1,000 and my father would have a pension because of his cut-off leg. He was also entitled to free repairs to his wooden leg, and, too, a spare one. This was well before the miracle legs of now, which can dance, climb, jump – do everything a normal leg does.

He chose the district of Lomagundi because it was a maize-growing area. It was in the north-east of Southern Rhodesia, very wild and with few people in it, and it stretched all the way up to the Zambesi escarpment. Banket, a large part of Lomagundi, not only grew good maize but had its name because it was full of quartz reefs similar to the rock formations called ‘banket’ on the Rand down south. So there were gold mines too. He and my mother must have realized by now that the enticements of the Empire Exhibition had little to do with reality. Fortunes had been made out of maize during the war, but were not being made now. But maize was what he wanted to grow. And that area was still being ‘opened up for settlement’. It would not have occurred to them that the land belonged to the blacks. Civilization was being brought to savages, was how they saw it, because the British Empire was a boon and a benefit to the whole world. I do not think it can be said too often that it is a mistake to exclaim over past wrong-thinking before at least wondering how our present thinking will seem to posterity. There was another reason why my parents’ view of themselves was similar to that of the English settlers on the eastern coast of America: they were colonizing an almost empty land. When the whites arrived in Southern Rhodesia thirty-four years before, there were, it is now believed, a quarter of a million black people in that land, roughly the size of Spain. When my parents arrived in 1924 there were half a million.*

My father was away some time and returned with the news that he had found a farm, or rather land that would be a farm – unstumped bush, quite undeveloped, nothing on it at all, not a house or a well or a road. My mother went off with him to look at it. They were driven by someone from the Land Department. Meanwhile we children were left with Biddy O’Halloran at Lilfordia. There it was that I reached the summit of childish wickedness. The hut where my brother and I were lodged also held Biddy. What must it have been like to share air and space with two little children, both of whom spent so much time on the pot? – for toilet training remained a sovereign prescription for good character. In the hut were two low beds, made after the fashion of the time. Into the hard mud floor were inserted short forked sticks. Into these forks were laid poles. On this square framework were laced strips of ox-hide. The lattices supported mattresses. There was a large metal cot for Harry. It goes without saying that Biddy liked my brother, sweet, obedient, delightful, the ideal little child; I would have preferred him too. There were two Lilford girls, to me big girls, ten or eleven, sunburned, bare-limbed, bare-footed, athletic and lean, unlike any children I had seen. They included little Harry in their games, but not me. I thought them sharp and sly and cruel. Their accent made them hard to understand. I was afraid of them. I longed to be included in their games. ‘Just now,’ they said. ‘Just now.’ Meaning perhaps – sometime – never. The sharp pain of exclusion.

Now I began to steal, ridiculous things like pots of rouge, ribbons, scissors, and money too. I lied about everything. There were storms of miserable hot rage, like being burned alive by hatred. When my parents came back and asked, But why scissors? I said I wanted to kill Biddy. They knew what I needed was a regular nursery routine, an ordered life, but how and when? Before that could happen, there must be a home, and it wasn’t built yet. We set off in an ox wagon on the road north. The road was then a track, and it was January, the rainy season, so the track was mud. The wagon was drawn by sixteen trek oxen. Into it went three adults and two children, and necessities, but the trunks of smart clothes, curtain materials from Liberty’s, heavy table silver, Persian carpets, a copper jug and basin, books, pictures and the piano, would come on later, by train. We were five days and nights in the wagon, because of swollen rivers and the bad road, but there is only one memory, not of unhappiness and anger, but the beginnings of a different landscape; a hurricane lamp swings, swings, at the open back of the wagon, the dark bush on either side of the road, the starry sky. It was a covered wagon, like the ones in American films, like those used by the Afrikaners in South Africa on their treks away from the British, north, to freedom.

We were again lodged with strangers, settler-fashion, paying our way, this time at a small gold mine, a couple of miles from the hill where the house would be built. It was managed by people called Whitehead, and owned by Lonrho. Nearly everything was, then. Lonrho was the successor to the British South Africa Company, which had helped Rhodes annex Southern Rhodesia, and for a long time it was referred to as ‘The Company’, and certainly not with affection. Again, there were many rondaavels, and a shack that was the central house. Beyond pale mine dumps stood up the grasshopper-like mine machinery. Beyond that was the mine store and then the compound of crowding thatched huts. Pawpaw trees, guava trees, plantains, marigolds, cosmos, cannas, moonflowers and poinsettias: these were the plants that then marked white occupancy.

Before farming could begin, at least a hundred acres of trees must be cleared, and the tree stumps dragged or burned out of the soil. Farm machinery and cattle must be bought. The house must be built, and the kraals for the cattle and sheds for the machinery.

The farm was a thousand-odd acres of bush, but there was some arrangement that enabled my father to use adjacent, non-allocated government land for grazing, and this land in our time was not settled, so ‘our’ land went on indefinitely to the Ayreshire Hills. There was no one at all living on that land, black or white.

Only one incident remains from that time that went on for months, later to be described by my parents, looking at each other with the awed, incredulous faces that accompany such moments of recognition, ‘God, that was an awful time, awful, awful!’ How did we live through it? – is the unspoken message that goes with the words. The small children, my brother and I and two others, were being settled for the night in a rondaavel on beds that had mosquito nets tucked tight down around us. An older girl came in with a candle, and set it down on an up-ended petrol box, so the flame was not more than a few inches from a net. My mother came in to check for the night, saw the candle, and shot across the room, clutching at her heart with one hand while she reached for the candle. She said in a voice hushed by urgency. ‘What are you doing? What can you be thinking of?’ It was true. If I had thrust a leg or an arm out the net would have reached the candle, and the hut would have gone up in flames – it was thatch on pole and mud walls. My mother stood there, the candlestick shaking in her hand, the flame trembling, candle grease scattering. Meanwhile the culprit wept, only now imagining possibilities. ‘Why?’ my mother went on in a low appalled voice. ‘How could anyone in their senses do such a thing?’ I have never forgotten her incredulity. Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.