Under My Skin

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.

I lay flat on my back looking up. The cool spaces under the thatch welcomed me. Yes, and there will be an end to it, just as there was yesterday, and the day before. A lost bee buzzed about, tumbled to the floor, buzzed loudly, and I had an excuse to get up again to let it out of the door, but I did not dare replace the stone, set the door ajar. On my back, arms stretched, I took possession of my cool body, that thudded, pulsed and trickled with sounds. I flexed my feet. I tested my fingers, one by one, all present, all correct, my friends, my friend, my body. I sniffed my fingers where smells of roast beef and carrots lingered. The golden syrup of the steamed pudding sent intense sweetness into my brain, and made my nostrils flare. My forearm smelled of sun. The minute golden hairs flattened as I blew on them, like wind on the long grasses along the ditches. Silence. The dead, full, contented silence of midday in the bush. A dove calls. Another answers. For a moment the world is full of doves, and down the hill wings break in a flutter of noise, and the black shape of a bird speeds across the square of my window. My stomach gurgles. I put down a forefinger to prod the gurgle but it has moved downwards towards … but I had already gained full possession of my bladder, and had learned to ignore the anxious queries it sent up: should you take me to the lavatory? My hands slid, like a doctor’s, down over my thighs to my knees. There was a spot there somewhere, if you prodded it, then just behind the shoulder there would be an answering tweak of sensation. The two places were linked. There were other twinned patches of flesh, or skin. I kept discovering new ones, then forgot where they were, rediscovered them. Just above the ankle … I lay on my back with my legs in the air and pushed my forefinger into the flesh all around the ankle bone – there it was, yes, and miles away, under my ribs, there was a reply, a sensation not far off pain; it would become pain if I continued to press, but I had already moved on, mapping my body and its secret consonances. Did I dare look at the watch? Surely the half hour must be nearly up? I had been lying there for ever. I sneaked a look – no, impossible! The hand must have got stuck, I snatched up the watch, shook it. No, it was alive, all right, and only three minutes had passed. A howl of protest, hushed at once; had she heard, would she come in? I shut my eyes, lying rigid, pretending to be asleep. But dangers lurked in the pretence, for one could easily drop off, and I was not sleepy. I lay listening with my whole body, my whole life … from the other bed I heard a sound like the disturbance of air when a small trapped moth flutters. My friend the cat was there. I jumped up and leaned over her, she was lying curled, and her grey silky fur moved with her breath; she was, like me, enclosed in her own time, in the time of her breath. I was convinced she understood the anguish of afternoon sleep, the half hour which never passed. I touched her little grey paw with my finger, and it tightened as I slid my finger inside it. The claws, like tiny slivers of moon, dug into my flesh and went loose. She made the little sound which meant, I am asleep, so I left her and flung myself down on the bed so hard the springs twanged.

But I could see her there, I had company, if I woke her she would come and join me, her soft weight on my shoulder. But that meant I would have to lie still … outside on the woodpile the houseboy was cutting wood, and the slow sound of the axe was like strokes of a clock. The doves were quiet, I could feel heaviness sit on my lids. I woke myself by drinking mouthfuls of the heavy sweet tepid water from the glass that had bubbles clinging inside it. Each bubble was a little world, and I picked up a straw that had fallen from the thatch and chased the silvery bubbles about inside the glass until they went out, one by one, like birthday candles.

The watchface said five minutes had passed. Misery seized me – dread. The eternities of Mrs Scott’s were described as ‘But it was only two terms, that’s all’, while my parents looked at me, as they so often did, with amusement and with incredulity. Ahead lay the convent and another exile from home … Eternity. My mother read us the New Testament from a child’s version. Eternity: time that never ended. Lying flat on my back, arms flung out, eyes fixed on the cool under the yellow grass that seemed so high above me, I thought of time that never ended. Never ending, never ending … I was holding my breath with concentration. It never ends, never … my brain seemed to rock, my head was full of slowed time, time that has no end. For seconds, for a flash, I seemed to reach it – yes, that’s it, I got it then … I was suddenly exhausted. Surely it must be time to get up? The watch said only ten minutes had gone past. Without meaning to, I let out a great yell of outrage, then slapped both palms over my mouth, but it was no good, my mother had heard and came bursting in. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ ‘The watch is wrong,’ I wept. ‘It’s not working.’

She stepped efficiently to the watch, and checked. She had just had time to lay out her Croxley writing pad and envelopes, and sit, letting herself slow down, to assemble scenes from this life of hers, find words that would convey its improbability to her friend, Daisy Lane, who was an examiner for nurses in London. ‘It’s completely wild out here,’ she might have decided to write. ‘We have to bring all the water up the hill in a scotchcart several times a week, and we have to use oil lamps! I wonder what you’d say if you saw this house! But of course, it is only temporary. We’re putting in tobacco this season, and you can make a pretty penny on that!’

She stood frowning at this difficult child, who was squatting on the bed, face streaked with tears, eyes imploring. The mother was uneasy. While the little boy, the good child, slept uncomplaining next door, this child looked as if she were being tortured. But it was with brisk humour she demanded. ‘Now what is all this nonsense?’ and pushed the child down with one hand while she flicked up the bedcover. ‘If you thrash about like that you’ll only get overheated.’

‘But I want to get up, can’t I get up?’

‘No, you can’t. You’ve not been there a quarter of an hour yet.’ And she marched out.

‘For ever … for ever …’ The child was walking with Jesus and his disciples along a dusty road, and it was not the track along the bottom of the hill, where dust lay in thick drifts, soft, red, and where the tracks of beetles or centipedes or buck slowly eroded as the breezes lifted the grains of sand away. It was a rocky yellowish road in – well, it was Palestine, since that was where Jesus was, but the rough dry road was from Persia. The smell in her nostrils now was not Africa, but that other place, where sunlight smelled old, full of stories from hundreds of years ago, Khosrhu and his armies marching across a rockface, but that was before Jesus, thousands of years ago, and then Jesus walked with men in striped headdresses along a dusty track where they stubbed their bare toes on big hot stones and Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life … what did he mean, what did they mean, hundreds of years ago … ? she would never grow up, never, why even to the end of the day and to bedtime was so long, long time, time was long, long … long time was not eternity, eternity was longer, it was unending, it never ended. From the bed next to hers, under its bundled mosquito net, came a small chattering sound. The cat was dreaming. Her teeth were making that funny sound. She was dreaming of chasing something? Like the dogs who would lie stretched out yelping and yapping with excitement as they chased a buck or a rabbit in a dream. Where was Lion? Where was Tiger? They were asleep in the shade under the verandah. Harry was asleep next door, the good baby. Daddy slept for a few minutes in his chair after lunch. The houseboy still sleepily measured time with his axe. And Mummy was writing to Aunt Daisy, who often wrote to me, from England, sending me presents, and often books about Jesus because she was my godmother. It was she who had sent me the stories about Jesus walking with the men in striped headdresses through the yellow dust … hundreds of years ago, hundreds.

Indignation had gone, a melancholy had seized her whole body. Sweat ran from her armpits. Her hair was damp. She felt her cheeks dragging with wet. She leapt up, but before she reached the other bed, controlled the impetuous movement, becoming as stealthy as a cat as she curled herself around the little grey cat, who let out her protesting sound, Let me sleep. But the child strokes and strokes, her cheek on the cat’s side, the cat purrs, noblesse oblige, the child’s face lifts and falls with the purr, the child’s eyes close, the cat’s purr stops, starts again, stops … outside two doves conduct their colloquy, Croo, croo, cr-croo, the axe thuds down, slow, slow, slow …

The woman writing to England sits with her pen suspended, smiling, for she is not here at all, she is dreaming of a winter’s evening in London, crowded noisy streets outside, and she is with her good friend Daisy Lane, the little, wry, brisk woman who had not married, for she was one of the girls whose men had been killed in the Trenches. She thinks guiltily that she has never enjoyed anything as much in her life, talking with her friend Daisy in front of a good fire, eating chocolate, or chestnuts roasted in the embers.

Good Lord, it is already three o’clock. The children must be woken or they’ll never sleep tonight. Not that Doris is likely to have slept, and she always gets so fretful and weepy, but perhaps she has dropped off. The woman felt surrounded by sleepers, safe in a time of her own, without anyone observing her. Her husband was lost to the world in his deckchair, snoring lightly, regularly. The dogs were stretched out. An assortment of cats, one curled up against the dog Tiger’s stomach, all asleep. In the bedroom little Harry, her heart’s consolation and delight, was asleep, like a baby, his fists curled near his head. Before gently waking him, she bent over him, adoring him. She loved the way he woke, whimpering a little, small and sweet in her arms, his face in her neck, nestling, as if with his whole body he was trying to get back inside her body. She took a long time waking him, gentling him into consciousness, then slid him into his little pants and shirt. ‘You go and wake Daddy,’ she told him. She went into the bedroom next door and stopped her hand at her mouth. Where was the child? Had she run away? She always said she would – a joke, of course. No, there she was, arms around the grey cat, fast asleep. ‘There,’ thought the mother, having the last word, ‘you were tired, I knew you were, all the time.’ She stood quietly there looking down at the little girl’s tear-dirtied face. She always felt guilty, seeing the child with this cat, because of the cat left behind in Tehran, but what could she have done? After all, they couldn’t have travelled for months and months with the cat, and anyway, it was such an ugly old thing. Never had there been such storms of tears as when the family left the cat, it was ridiculous, it was out of all proportion.

The mother did not touch the child but said briskly, in tones that sounded full of regret, a complex apology for what she was thinking, ‘Up you get now, you’ve been asleep a good half hour.’

The child opened her eyes and looked past her mother at the room as if she had no idea where she was. Then she felt the cat against her face, and smiled. She looked up at her mother and sat up, and with a shake of her head, clearing her face of the sweat-sticky hair, ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

‘Oh yes you were,’ said the mother triumphantly.

‘I wasn’t. I wasn’t.’

‘Wash your face. Then we’ll have tea.’

Tea was the family sitting in the hot shade under the verandah thatch, gingerbread, shortbread, little cakes, big cakes, scones, butter, jam. ‘You can’t have cake until you’ve eaten a scone.’ Discipline and self-restraint, this was called. The dogs lay with their noses pointing towards the food. The cats gathered around saucers full of milk. The little girl carefully carried through the house a saucer of milk to her special friend, the grey cat. She sat on the floor watching the cat lap, pink tongue curling around the mouthfuls of milk. The cat mewed, Thank you, and sat licking herself a little, to wake herself up. Then she stepped out to join the other cats, the dogs, the family.

Afternoons were full of events, chosen by my mother to educate or in some way to improve and uplift. There was a treehouse, platforms of planks in the musasa tree just behind the house. ‘Come up to our house, come up,’ we shouted at Daddy, as he manoeuvred his great clumsy leg so that he got himself on to the first platform. Then up came Mummy, and she told us about life in England, and her voice was sad, so sad that he rebuked her, ‘Don’t sound such a misery, old girl. England wasn’t all roses, you know.’ And then he might tell us of another England, the beggars, the out-of-work ex-soldiers selling matches, and the silly Bright Young Things dancing and jazzing; they didn’t care about the dead soldiers or the ones that couldn’t get work. Or told us of his good times before the war, when he went to the races or danced all night.

Or we would be taken to see the man who made the rimpis for the farm. On a flat place down near the new barns were trees where ox hides hung to dry in the shapes of oxen, without their bodies. Or new hide, just lifted off the carcass, was being cut into strips, and then dunked into petrol tins full of brine. Soon they were hauled out, hung over branches, and then a couple of little black boys pulled and worked the strips so they remained supple and could be used for the many purposes of the farm – tying the yokes of oxen around their necks, or tying yokes to the great central beam of the wagon or the cart, making beds and couches, or dried to be wound into great balls like small boulders and kept in a hut till they were wanted. Or the little boys would be rubbing fat and salt on to the insides of new hides, manipulating them, moving them, rubbing them so they would be soft and good for karosses or floor mats.

Or the place where bricks were made. The earth was taken from the towering termite-heaps. It was piled on a flat place, sand added, and then water poured on, and again small black boys stamped around in it, and we, the white children, stamped and danced too, our mother encouraging us, because small children should play with mud and water, Montessori said so. In fact I did not like it. These occasions were like many others, when I was playing a role to please her. I did not like the mud on my feet, and splashing on my legs, but I went on with it, together with my brother and the black children. Then the piles of mud were ready, like poo, as my brother and I giggled, but never telling our mother why. Then the brick boy came with his moulds and one man filled them with mud while another carried the moulds to turn them out in rows over straw. There the sun soon dried them. Then they were built into kilns, and fires lit in the holes like ovens inside them. Soon there they were, the piled-up bricks, red, or yellow, and there we children climbed and balanced, feeling the hot roughness of the bricks on our soles, and we jumped off, and climbed up, again and again, while my mother watched, pleased we were having this experience.

Aeons later, eternities later, the sun slid down the sky into the spectacular sunset we took for granted. But I remember standing there by myself, my whole heart and soul going out and up into those flaming skies, knowing that was where I belonged, in that splendour, which was so sad, so sorrowful, I was not here at all, or I wouldn’t be for long, I would get away from here soon. Soon – how, when a day took for ever and for ever? Round about then I wrote a ‘prose poem’ about a sunset, a paragraph long, and my mother sent it into the Rhodesia Herald. My first printed effort. The complex of feelings about this were the same as now: I was proud that there I was in print, uneasy that impulses so private and intimate had led to words that others would read, would take possession of. I was wriggling with pride and resentment mixed when mother said Mrs Larter had said how clever I was to have a piece in the paper. And she’s so young too. But I made a private oath that next time I was taken with a ‘prose poem’, it would remain my secret.

At sunset, the farm became loud with the lowings of the herd of oxen being hurried back from somewhere in the bush to the safety of the kraal. In the early days there were still leopards as near as Koodoo Hill, a couple of miles away. Until the family left the farm, there were leopards in the Ayreshire Hills. Sometimes a farmer would telephone to report that a leopard had taken a beast. And there were pythons, who liked calves. The oxen, though they were wild, unsubdued beasts and nothing like the comfortable tamed animals of England, had to be fenced at night. Besides, in the mornings the cows had to be milked. One cow was not enough – not of those thin, rangy Afrikander cattle. Five or six gave enough milk for our purposes. We were told of the wonderful beasts of England with udders that touched the ground and each one holding enough milk for several households. All that talk of abundant paradises … there are ways of listening to travellers’ tales that keep you safe from them. That England they talked about, all that green grass and spring flowers and cows as friendly as cats – what had all that to do with me?

Then the children had supper. Eggs and bread and butter and a pudding. ‘Eat up your food!’ ‘But I don’t want it.’ ‘Of course you must eat it up.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ ‘Of course you’re hungry.’

By the time I went to my first school I had been reading for – well, how long? – when I am dealing with time as elastic as dream-time? I do know that from the moment I shouted triumph because I was spelling c-i-g-a-r-e-t-t-e from the packet, it was no time before I was reading the easier bits in the books in the heavy bookcase. The classics. The classics of that time, all in dark red leather covers, with thin-as-skin pages, edged with gold. Scott. Stevenson. Kipling. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Dickens. Curled in the corner of the storehouse verandah, on a bed of slippery grain sacks that smelled sweet from the maize meal, and rank from the presence of cats, I raced through Plain Tales from the Hills, skipping a good half, The Jungle Book, Oliver Twist, skipping, always skipping, and having found my parents weeping with laughter over The Young Visiters, read it with the respect due to an author two years older than I was, brooding over words like mousetache. Mouse-ache? Where did the ‘t’ fit in and why did the mouse ache? To fit oneself to the mysterious order of the grown-up world was not an easy thing. ‘There is a green hill far away without a city wall.’ Why should the hymn need to specify the lack of that wall? Puzzles and enigmas, but above all, the delight of discoveries, the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of books which has never ever failed me. And not only grown-up books. Children’s books arrived from London, and children’s newspapers. If some enterprising publisher should now produce a magazine on the level of the Merry-Go-Round, with writers like Walter de la Mare, Laurence Binyon, Eleanor Farjeon, would it at once fail? ‘It’s television, you see …’ The Children’s Newspaper, with reports from Egypt and Mesopotamia of the archaeological discoveries from the tombs of Tut-an-Khamun and Nefertiti? But all this is on children’s television. Then, just like now, children were supposed to be protected from horrors and, just as now, we weren’t, for all the time, every day, those voices went on and on, about the Trenches, bombs, star-shells, shrapnel, shell holes, men drowning in shell holes and the mud that could swallow horses, let alone men. The wounded in the Royal Free, the men with their lungs full of gas, the death by drowning of my mother’s young doctor, barbed wire, No-man’s-land, the Angels of Mons, the field hospitals, the men shot for ‘cowardice’, on and on and on, my father’s voice, my mother’s, and, too, the voices of many of our visitors. What is the use of keeping the Children’s Newspaper and Merry-Go-Round sweet and sane, when the News tells the truth about what is going on and the grown-ups talk, talk, talk about what will always be the most important thing in their lives – war. Whenever a male visitor came, the talk would soon be of the Trenches. No, it is not violence or even pornography and sadism that is the difference between then and now, it is that children were not patronized, much more was expected of them. I do not remember my parents ever saying, ‘That is too difficult for you.’ No, only pleased congratulation that I was tackling The Talisman or whatever it was. You would have to contrast the Merry-Go-Round with the banal jokiness of a children’s programme on television to see how much lower we all stand now.

Before I reached the big school, the Convent, there were two intermediate schools. The first was Rumbavu Park, just outside Salisbury, owned by a family called Peach. I, just seven, and my brother, four, were taken there together and I was instructed to look after him. But if I adored my little brother, so did everyone else. He was always in the care of the big girls, nine or ten, who took him about with them like a doll. This was a gentle place, run by gentle folk – gentlefolk. I use this word because the matron, Mrs James, did – constantly. Like Russians of the intelligentsia who talk now of being gentlefolk, with contemptuous dismissal of their decades of revolution and egalitarianism – ‘my family are gentlefolk’ – Mrs James made this claim, it seemed in every sentence. Here was another member of the English middle class threatened by rough colonial manners but, unlike most of them, who mean only that they are superior in some ineffable and indefinable way, Mrs James meant what the Russians mean: they are the inheritors of literary, musical and artistic culture. She was a large swarthy gypsy-like woman, with straight black hair, like Augustus John’s Dorelia, an earth mother long before the word, and she was kind. When I wrote baby pieces about flowers and birds, she told me I was wonderful, and showed them around. She brushed my hair, and made me wash under my arms and between my legs for she was afflicted by a horror of natural processes, and she held me on her large lap and sighed and mourned the crudeness of the world and her sad fate, to be matron in a school. When my parents came to visit, Mrs James presented me and my brother to them as her achievements. Far from being unhappy there, I was full of the excitements and delights of discovery. The wonderful gardens spread all over a couple of hillsides – and still do. Terraces and fountains and pools and trees and flowers: it was a show place, and at weekends people drove out from Salisbury to admire it.

I was at school in Rumbavu Park for a term. It was an aeon. A forever. When sorting out the time-segments of those two years, I had to concede that it was only a term. I have to. Impossible, but so it was. If only I could have stayed there, but the Peaches went bust, hard luck not only for them but for the children at their school. Just before I left there was an incident that illustrates a theme of these memoirs which is: why is it we expect what we do? Sybil Thorndike was on tour in Southern Rhodesia, and playing Lady Macbeth. The older children were to be taken to see her. I would go if Mary Peach did not return in time from England, where she was on holiday. She came back that afternoon, so I could not go. She came to me, a big girl, twelve or so, to say nicely she was sorry I was going to be disappointed. I remember stammering that of course it was all right, while inside I was the embodiment of all the insulted and injured of the world. Why was it that Mary Peach, who was rich and had just come back from England where I could not go – for the theme of the absolute out-of-reachness of England was already established in my mind – had the right to see Sybil Thorndike? Unfairness … injustice … the bitterness of it. But what I would like to know is, where did the violence of that sense of injustice come from? I was seven years old. This was not only the child’s sense of injustice which we describe as ‘innate’: a child’s betrayal of justice is, must be, love betrayed, and what I was feeling was social injustice. I can think of nothing in my life more cruel than that disappointment, as if it were the sum of the world’s indifference. Surely it had to come from my parents, particularly from my father’s voice murmuring through my days and through my sleep, too, of the war, the betrayal of the soldiers, the wicked stupidities and corruption of government, just expectation and faith betrayed.