Under My Skin

My mother decided we should go to board with a Mrs Scott who took in the children of farmers so they might attend school in Avondale, a suburb of Salisbury, then on the very edge of the town. I was put in the class for my age, but at once put up, I think, two. In that class I discovered the pleasures of achievement, for the reading pieces were at first too difficult for me, and I was not able to skip as I liked. One, in particular, an abridged grown-up story of a man sucked into a sea whirlpool, nearly drowned, but then cast up by the sea, had words like ‘maelstrom’ and ‘vortex’, ‘inundate’ and ‘regurgitate’. I stared at them, oppressed by failure, but was saved by context – and in no time this difficult story was mine. Is there any delight as great as the child’s discovering ability? But if the classroom was all pleasure Mrs Scott’s was all cold misery. Very far from gentleness was Mrs Scott. There was a Mr Scott, employed by the Mr Laws who had the timber concession. My mother had sent her two little children to the lumber camp to stay a few days in the bush with Biddy, for she never missed the opportunity to give them useful experience. We were in a tent, for the first time, surrounded by majestic trees full of cicadas, being felled one after the other, and destined to burn in tobacco barns and mine furnaces.

Already a social being, ready to please one set of people with agreeable information about others, I said to Mrs Scott that Mr Scott, her husband, had said goodnight to Biddy when she had on only a petticoat. The voice I used was my parents’ – worldly and disapproving. I had no idea what I was saying. If Mr Scott had his arms about Biddy, his whiskers, scented with Pears soap, pressed against her ear, then this was only a sign of a general loving kindness I yearned for. Mrs Scott at once hated the messenger who had brought bad news, and made a loud and noisy scene with her husband.

I hated her. She was a large ugly woman smelling of stale sweat. He was large and smelly. There was no way of getting away from them day or night. Their bed was on the verandah just outside where my bed stood under a window. I did not like getting into my bed. The cover was a kaross, a fur blanket, made of wild cat skin. Everyone had karosses, which were cheap, costing only the price of a bullet, and the labour of the man who cured the skins in salt and wind. A kaross always smelled a little, especially in the rainy season. The kaross on my bed was badly cured and smelled stuffy. I lay in bed trying to keep my face in the air from outside, while outside Mrs Scott wept and said he didn’t love her, and he soothed and reassured and said he did, it was only the word of a child. At this point I ought to be able to record listening to the sounds of sex and a resulting trauma, but no, it was the injustice of it, for I had described what I had seen. Mrs Scott never spoke to me in anything but a cold and sarcastic voice. There were other children, but I remember only her daughter Nancy, who bullied me in minor ways. Then she told her mother that at school I used to go round the backs of the lavatory blocks and look up at the shitty backsides. Such a crime had never occurred to me. Mrs Scott was not allowed to hit me – my mother did not hold with it – but she slapped and hit her own daughter, just as Mr Scott did. I was afraid she would hit me, for she did not believe me when I said it was untrue. She told my parents who came hastening, if that is the word for their dawdling progress, into town. Had I done this thing? No, I had not. Remember, it was wicked to lie. ‘A lie is much worse than being naughty.’ They believed me. My little brother giggled. Funny that I remember so little of my adored little brother except ‘standing up’ for him against unkind Nancy.

January to June 1927. My seventh year. I was homesick and miserable. But compared with what goes on in schools now, and the ugliness of the bullying, physical and verbal, Mrs Scott’s unkindness and Nancy’s malice were nothing. I listen to young friends’ accounts of what goes on in well-reputed schools and cannot believe it. Not that children are cruel – for most are monsters, unchecked. No, that teachers seem unable to stop it. Perhaps they are not unable, but even like the idea? After all, Prince Charles reports that in the elite school, Gordonstoun, his head was held in the lavatory bowl while the flush was pulled. If that is what is prescribed for the highest in the land, lesser mortals need not expect better. We are a barbarous people.

For a long time, driving past that house, long since demolished, with its big garden, I felt ill and turned my head away not to see it. Avondale School, where I did so well, is still there, unchanged.

Among the reading matter provided by my mother was a series of improving tales for children about saints, like Elizabeth of Hungary, who earned from heaven chaplets of roses to shame her husband when he criticized her charities. An intense hunger for goodness took me over, and in the patch of empty ground behind Mrs Scott’s, I built a cathedral of sunflower stalks. The pleasure of it, the accomplishment, planning the building while the tales of saintly women rising above all persecution saturated my whole being. I was handling the light dry stalks, three times my height, while in imagination I was creating a great church that God himself would congratulate me for, listening for voices which surely I would hear if I tried hard enough, all assuring me of fellowship with the saints. But Mrs Scott did not see the point of these stalks, dragged out of their piles where they were stacked for burning. If you fill children’s heads with saintly tales they will build cathedrals and expect chaplets of roses and chanting choirs. This is as powerful a memory as any.

Why was I left at Mrs Scott’s for two terms? Probably that child’s taboo against telling tales out of school was already operating. Besides, all the time, there was the pressure of We are so poor, We are having such a bad time – meaning, We can’t help it. I read ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, and identified with Kipling as a small boy, just as my mother had done before me, but my mother didn’t embrace me weeping, Oh my little child, my poor little child – as I raised my arm to ward off a blow. There were no blows, only cold sarcastic verbal bullying. And I was already reading Stalky and Co., full of information about school brutality. Literature provides more complex news about the world than It isn’t fair, but this lives in a different part of the brain.

I had begun, in short, to colour in the map of the world with the hues and tints of literature. Which does two things (at least). One is to refine your knowledge of your fellow human beings. The other is to tell you about societies, countries, classes, ways of living. A bad book cannot tell you about people – only about the author. A bad book does not know much about love, hate, death or so on. But a bad book can tell you a good deal about a certain time or place – about history. Facts. Mores. Customs. A good book does both.

But bad books were still in the future. Meanwhile, then and for three or four years, what came to the farm from London was an astonishing variety and number of books. They had to be written for, and the order took a month or so to get there. The books had to come by sea, three weeks, then a train to Salisbury from the coast, and another train to Banket, and then they had to be fetched from the station.

Here are some of what I remember. John Bunyan. Bible Tales for Children. English History for Children. The Crusades – with Saladin presented like an English gentleman. The battles of Crécy, Agincourt, Waterloo, the Crimea, biographies of Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Brunel, Cecil Rhodes. Children’s novels like John Halifax, Gentleman; Robinson Crusoe; The Swiss Family Robinson; Lobo, the Wolf (from America, Ernest Seton Thompson). Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Christopher Robin, Black Beauty, Stevenson’s Verses for Children, Jock of the Bushveld, Florence Nightingale, and – not least – Biffel, a Trek Ox, the story of a beast that died in the rinderpest epidemic of, I think, 1896, unforgettable by any child who reads it at the right time. The Secret Garden. The Forest Lovers. A whole range of little tales, purporting to be the lives of children in Iceland, India, France, Germany – everywhere – jolly little tales, jolly little lives, the equivalent of the readers that went, ‘John and Betty had such fun playing with Spot’ – but I suppose the information that in Norway they ski and in Switzerland they yodel is not unuseful.

It was mid-year of 1927 when I returned finally from Mrs Scott’s, for I was due to go to the Convent, for which I was already being primed by warnings that they – the RCs – would try to ‘get me’ and I must be on my guard. The Convent, which always had more Protestant than Catholic pupils, was used to assuring anxious parents that the souls of their offspring were safe with them. The Convent, like convents in Britain, was supposed to be more genteel than the High School. I am always meeting women now who were sent to convents for the same reason. That the convent in Salisbury had this reputation was because of false comparisons with Home. I had been given a bursary. Into the third year on the farm it was evident things were going badly and not likely soon to get better. My father was building tobacco barns, because maize was no longer where fortunes were being made. And was he, with his wooden leg, his limited mobility, planning to get up several times during the night to check the temperatures in a barn a good mile away?

We could not have afforded unaided my uniform for the convent, piled on chairs and beds everywhere through the house. Pleated tunics in heavy brown serge and alpaca, with light orange cotton blouses, springy brown girdles that surely could never stay knotted, white panama hats with brown and orange ribbons, the brown blazer, piles of heavy brown knickers, and many vests and brown socks. Even to look at this stuff was oppressive, but luckily it was still the beginning of the holidays and time stretched endlessly ahead.

Just about then the family became characters in A. A. Milne, just as if we had never left England. My father was Eeyore, my brother Roo, my mother – what else? – Kanga. I was the fat and bouncy Tigger. I remained Tigger until I left Rhodesia, for nothing would stop friends and comrades using it. Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size. I was Tigger Tayler, Tigger Wisdom, then Tigger Lessing, the last fitting me even less than the others. Also Comrade Tigger. This personality was expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that it was a protection for the person I really was, ‘Tigger’ was an aspect of the Hostess. There was a lot of energy in ‘Tigger’ – that healthy bouncy beast. But it was not Tigger that went off to the Convent, but a frightened and miserable little girl.

Mother Patrick came riding into the colony with her five Sisters just a year after the Pioneer Column in 1890 and they at once set up their hospital and became, but really, sisters of Mercy, because contemporary accounts speak of them like this. It was Mother Patrick who established the Dominican convent and she was, when I got there, a revered figure, spoken of in awed tones, like the other pioneer sisters. Sister Constantia and Sister Bonaventura were, I think, still alive, as silently influential as the statues everywhere of the Virgin. They had been lively and adventurous young women, and the administrative nuns that came after them were a different kind.

The Convent was a central mass with projecting wings, embedded in granite chips. When adults walk over stone chips, the pebbles are not very comfortable underfoot, but for a small child it is like toiling over the big sharp stones on a beach, each a hazard. The staircase to the small girls’ dormitory was steep, every step at thigh-level. The little ones clambered up on hands and knees; going down meant jumping from step to step for the handrail was high above our heads. The day I found myself actually able to step down, the day I ran across the gravel, were markers on the road to being grown-up. This dormitory (which was over the gym), the refectory, the classrooms, the sickroom, were what the pupils knew of the Convent: most of the building was out of bounds to the children, and seemed a ghost story place of vast shadowy rooms full of nuns in their black and white robes floating like shadows. The nuns slept in dormitories too, but we knew white curtains separated their beds, making tight box-like cubicles. The ‘little ones’ dorm’ was a long high-ceilinged room, and in it were three rows of beds, lined up head to foot, twenty-four beds. There were rows of high windows on either side. This large room, or rather, hall, was in daylight well lit and fresh, but at night a different place. A small table that projected into the room, making it necessary always to walk around it, held an assortment of holy objects, small statues like icing-sugar figures on cakes; and above it was a large picture where a man from whose head shot rays like those from behind a storm cloud pointed authoritatively to his swollen heart dripping blood. On the wall facing this altar was a tall picture of a man on whose head was clamped an enormous wreath of Christ-thorn, like that which grew on the kopje, with black spikes an inch or two inches long, and blood ran down his face from the spikes. Other pictures showed a man full of arrows that stuck out like porcupine quills, each in a bloody wound, and a woman holding a plate on which were two pink blancmanges in red jam sauce, but these turned out to be her cut-off breasts. In another a woman stood smiling while being burned to death by flames that curled around her like long witches’ fingers.

When I recently drove through the countryside near Munich I kept coming upon horrific statues of tortured Christ. They were beside or in a pretty stream, or in a wood, a field, a garden. They reminded me of the pictures provided for the instruction of us children in the convent, all relish in blood and torture. The nuns in this convent were nearly all from South Germany, which was Hitler’s country. Stalin the sadist came from a seminary. I was reminded of these feasts of blood when I was in Peshawar at the time when Shiah Muslims celebrate the murder of Hassan and Hussain, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandchildren, more than 1,500 years ago. Young men ran or staggered in hordes through the streets lacerating themselves with heavy chains or whips, eyes blank or shocked with pain, till they fell, to be gathered up in ambulances that were patrolling the streets for just this purpose. Forgive me for the banality of this reflection, but there is something very wrong with the human race.

The youngest children in the great torture room were five or six, and the oldest were ten and eleven.

When we were in our rows of beds, the light was turned off, but the red light that burned always in front of the Sacred Heart and its bloody gouts lit the room with red. The nun in charge of us little ones came to stand in the doorway, the light behind her. In heavy German accents she said, ‘You little children believe you are safe in your beds, you think that do you? Well you think wrong, you think the holy God cannot see you when you lie under the sheet. But you must think again. God knows what you are thinking, God knows the evil in your hearts. You are wicked children, disobedient to God and to the good Sisters who look after you for the glory of God. If you die tonight you will go to hell, and there you will burn in the flames of hell, yes I tell you so, and you must believe me. And the worms will eat you and there will never be an end, it will never ever end.’ She would go on like this for a good ten minutes or so. Then, having cursed us to hell and back, she shut the door and left us to it.

Storms of sobs, and soft shrieks of terror. The older girls crept to the beds of the little ones, to comfort them. ‘It’s only Catholic,’ they would say, ‘we don’t believe all that.’ For most of us were Protestants. The Catholic little girls were protected by rosaries, holy pictures and bottles of holy water under their pillows.

When my parents warned me that the Catholics would try to ‘get’ me they had not foreseen anything like this, I knew that. I knew they would be appalled. This armoured me, and besides, one may believe and not believe at the same time. I do not know for how many years these horrific sermons went on: the impression the first term made on me was so strong I have forgotten the rest. I remember only lying in bed to watch the blood dripping from the big heart like a lump of fresh steak, making myself see that it moved, believing that I could actually see the blood trickling, while I knew perfectly well it didn’t. The tiny children – I was already, at eight, in the middle range – used to cry out in their sleep. Sometimes one would go wandering around among the beds in her sleep, and an older child gently led her back to her own bed. One sleepwalking little girl persistently tried to get into the bed parallel to hers, because there was a kindly older child in it, who quietly made the swap when the small one was asleep at last, the nuns never knowing. In the morning there were dirty stains of urine in many beds. The nuns scolded and punished: for the Catholic girls the repetition of Hail Marys, for us, admonishment and threats.

The nun whose talent was for hellfire and the undying worm used a ruler on our palms when we were naughty. There were a thousand petty rules, and I have forgotten them, but remember the secret scorn they endangered: we protected ourselves by despising these dormitory nuns, making fun of their accents, telling each other if they weren’t stupid they would be teaching nuns. Most of the rules were to do with washing. Not that we should wash, but that we should not. Cleanliness for these women was an invitation to the devil. We were told to wash our hands only to the wrists, keeping sleeves rolled down. Only our faces, with a washcloth soaped thick: if our eyes stung, we must offer the pain to God. We might bathe only once a week. The nuns told us that good children would agree to wear the wooden board that stood always against the bathroom wall, when we bathed. The board had a hole in it for the head, and was designed to rest on the sides of the bath, making it impossible to see our bodies. But no one would. We were allowed to change our underclothes once a week. We smelled. All our letters were read by the nuns and when I told my mother about the bath rules, the nun said I was disloyal and wicked and made me write the letter again. But at half term I ‘told’ on the nuns, and my mother was furious, protested – and thereafter we were all allowed to bathe twice a week and change our underclothes twice. We continued to smell. We had to put on smelly knickers and dirty socks. ‘Vanity’ said Sister Amelia, or Brünnhilde or whoever. ‘All is vanity. You should not think about your body.’

There went on the usual school mythology about the slaps administered to our palms with rulers. We giggled, as is prescribed, advised each other how to soap our palms, recounted tales about a former pupil who was beaten till her hand fell off, and now she had an artificial hand. All this was as it always is, at this type of school. But if the rulers left hot red marks on palms, that was all, the nuns were not allowed to hit us anywhere else. It could all have been much worse. And I don’t remember bullying, on the contrary, the older children were tender with the little ones, remembering their own misery.

The atmosphere in the Convent, in short, can only be described as unwholesome, a favourite word of mother’s. How much did she know about all this? If it was within the code to ‘tell’ about the lack of baths, why not about the viciously slashing rulers, why not about those hellfire sermons? When ‘Tigger’ reported on them, she made a joke about it all. And certainly my mother knew about the sadistic pictures in the room we slept in, for she inspected the Convent thoroughly. But after all, she herself had had a strict, punishing upbringing.

The nuns never made any attempt to ‘get’ the Protestant girls. They did not need to. The atmosphere of magic and mystery was enough. Antonia White’s Frost in May describes the allurements of the forbidden, though her convent was on a somewhat higher social level. Most of us at some time wanted to be Catholics, simply to be like the Catholic girls, who dipped their fingers into the holy water stoups beside every door, who crossed themselves and curtsied as they passed statues of Christ or the Virgin, who carried holy pictures in their pockets and rosaries wound around their wrists. They were always going off to special events in the cathedral. Bells rang from the cathedral a block away, several times a day, for Angelus, and for Mass. Bells tinkled from the nuns’ chapel. The Virgin, a pleasant and beneficent figure, was often carried about the grounds on litters draped with coloured paper. Above all, there was the mystery of the part of the convent we were not allowed into. We believed there were hundreds of nuns, but perhaps there were not more than fifty. Most of them we never met. They worked in the kitchens, cooked our food and theirs, kept the convent and its grounds clean – there were no black servants. Some were taken out every day in lorries to the vegetable gardens. They all got up very early in the morning, four o’clock, some earlier. If you woke at night you could hear the sweet high chanting voices from the chapel. There were often funerals. If we begged hard enough the Protestant girls were allowed to go in the lorries to the cemetery with the Catholics, where we stared in a romantic trance at the coffin, violin shaped, bright white and pink, like a cake, with messages in gold script, Sister Harmonia, Bride of Christ, RIP. She was very young to die, said the other sisters. Knowing that eighteen, twenty, was thought young shocked us with our small sum of years, for it was hard to believe we would ever be as old as this dead woman.

Now I think these girls died of broken hearts. Nearly all were poor peasant girls from Germany. The Convent in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, was an extension of the economic conditions in Europe. Germany had not recovered from the First World War and reparations. As had always happened in the poor families of Europe, one or two girls in a family became nuns, to save their families the burden of feeding them. They found themselves thousands of miles from home, in this exotic country, doing hard physical work, as they had all their lives, but in the heat, and with no prospect of seeing their families again. Their only consolation can have been that their loneliness and exile made things easier at home. Once, when I was in the sickroom, a nun came to sit on my bed (against the rules) while the Angelus rang its call to prayer and the sky flamed red, and she wept, and crossed herself, crossed herself and wept, saying she longed for her mother. Then up she jumped, asked the Holy Virgin to forgive her, told me to forget what she had said, and ran out. She was eighteen.

Our speculations about the nuns’ secret lives were innocent. Now children of five or six would probably talk knowledgeably about lesbianism. Their bathing arrangements part consoled us for ours. They took baths once a week, wearing a white shroud, and kept the board around their necks. They never saw themselves in a mirror. Their heads were shaved. They seldom changed their undergarments. We knew what they wore, for we could see acres of white garments on the washing lines. There were layers of vests and knickers and petticoats under the heavy white serge robes we could see, that had over them the black robe, the crimped wimple, and the two veils, white and black. The nuns smelled horrible.

The nuns who taught us were educated women. One at least was a Nazi – so says Muriel Spark who writes about the same convent in her autobiography. Sister Margaret taught music, was kind to the little girl whose mother kept insisting she was a musical prodigy. She knew my mother could have had a career in music, listened gently to her tales about thwarted ambition, and for four years taught me scales and apprentice pieces, told me about great musicians and the obstacles they overcame. She never even hinted I had no particular talent. There was a Sister Patrick who, the nuns said, was a real lady, from Ireland, but she had given all that up for the love of God. She was a tall thin woman, with a fine elegant face, and she was dry and witty and sometimes unkind. She might quote from French or Latin and then say, ‘But you will not have heard of him I suppose,’ and sigh.