Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  She was demented at that time, poor woman. Her husband was ill. Her precious son, ‘Baby’, had run away from her long ago, and I was saying, No, no, no, no.

  She was a very talented woman in many different ways. I have never met anyone as efficient as she was, such an organizer. All her talents, her energy were narrowed down to one graceless, angry girl who had only one idea, which was to leave her.

  And so I did. I was what is now called an au pair for two years, but she never left me alone, wrote interminable letters to whomever I was working for, telling them how to treat me.

  Only one good thing happened to me in that time: I had been reading, rereading, had been sunk in a slow dream of the books of my childhood, but I suddenly realized I had not read anything serious or grown-up except war books for years. So now I began ordering books from England for myself, embarked on the great and glorious discovery of literature, an adventure that has gone on through my life. But I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books, reading – all that has been my life. No, she would not understand now the books I read, because they had played no part in her life. H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Maeterlinck were where she stopped, with the memoirs of generals and of the battle fronts everywhere.

  She would finger the books I had ordered from London and was suspicious. Everything I did seemed a snub and an affront to her, and so it was, whether I intended it or not.

  Writers and poets have all claimed that the impact of the great Russian writers changed them. This was true of all Europe. I don’t remember why I knew enough to order Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and the rest, but I had the news from somewhere and I read and was amazed. No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians. I think the perennial cry, ‘The novel is dead,’ is because none of us has written anything as good as War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky. Quite simply, they represent the peak and glory of literature. There have been a thousand learned articles explaining the reasons for this, but for me the fact of it is enough.

  I was ordering books mentioned in other books; I had no guide. And slowly through the thirties and then the war years, when parcels of books had to dodge the U-boats, I ordered books from England, and the arrivals of the parcels were the high points of my life. From the Russians, then, to the French, with Stendhal my great love, and Balzac, and Zola.

  The American writers were almost as much of a thrill as the Russians. Theodore Dr.eiser – but it seems no one reads him these days, yet he has written some great novels – Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, but him with less admiration, The Great Gatsby, but I think Scott Fitzgerald wrote only one great novel; Faulkner, but he came later, and then the English writers, but I had already read most of them by then. Hardy has ever been a favourite, George Meredith – also out of fashion – Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and the mad, wonderful Tristram Shandy. What have I left out? The poets, but I had been given them early. And far from last on my list was Proust, an improbable passion, and I read and reread The Remembrance of Things Past, knowing it was an antidote to what I actually lived in – Rhodesia at war, the last throbs of the British Empire – though no one would have believed that possible then.

  Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, but not all of these were easily got. For instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was an expurgated edition. Periodicals produced with great difficulty in paper-rationed England were New Writing and New Writing and Daylight.

  I have, of course, left out a lot, but this list represents what people were reading then, if they read at all. And here it is, for what it is worth, but I feel it will already be seen as a survivor from a quaintly old-fashioned past.

  My mother’s letters to me were dreadful. Only a mad woman could have written them. That I was embarking on the career of a prostitute was only one of her accusations. Even then I knew she was ill, and I would tear up the letters as they arrived. It was probably the menopause. These days she would not have suffered as she did. I keep coming back to the same thing: now, the clever medicine we have would have seen her through.

  That I was saving myself by escaping from her I did know, but had no idea of just how powerful is the need to take over a child’s life and live it. And back we must go to her confrontations with her father.

  John McVeagh was the ideal father. He gave his children everything that an Edwardian father should. They were taken to see every public event, like the visit of the Emperor of the Germans to London, the parades, royal birthdays, tattoos, the Relief of Mafeking. My mother’s memory was like an almanac of official occasions. She went to a good school. She had everything in the way of concerts and theatre, she played hockey and tennis, and was brilliant at the piano. But there was a point when this idolized girl stood up and said, ‘No, I won’t.’ Why did she have to? John McVeagh, unusually for his time, wanted his clever daughter to go to university. It had to be the girl, and not the boy, who wasn’t good enough. His ambitions therefore were focused on her, the one who passed examinations and was always at the top of the class. But she said, ‘No,’ to him and went off to be a nurse, which made him say, apparently without any consciousness of the absurdity of it: ‘Never darken my doors again,’ and ‘I shall no longer consider you my daughter.’

  Now, there is something inexplicable here. The Royal Free Hospital was training women doctors: why did she not decide to be a doctor? Her father would surely have been pleased – but I have answered the question. Precisely: her father would have been pleased. So, no, she would be a nurse and ‘wipe the bottoms of the poor’.

  But why? I cannot remember her saying anything that could elucidate. She didn’t like her stepmother but she never said much about her, except that she was cold and a disciplinarian. How extraordinary, then, that Emily McVeagh stood up to her father and said, ‘No.’ But the real question surely has to be, Why did that fat papa of a man, that burgher, have to see his clever daughter as his continuation, his justification?

  How strange that she never explained it, or perhaps did not see it as needing explanation.

  There was this obedient little girl, obeying her father in everything, afraid of disappointing him, standing in front of him as rigid as a ruler, arms down by her sides, waiting for praise or blame (and she acted this scene for me so I could see her, and the stern, powerful father). And all that went on and went on, while she did better and better and won applause for everything, was told she could have a career as a concert pianist if she wanted, was clever Emily McVeagh, and then – finish – she said, ‘No, no, no, No.’

  John McVeagh’s first wife, Emily Flower, had died, and left him with three little children, one a disappointing boy, and his second wife was probably not an armful of fun. But there was his clever girl, who triumphed over everything. So, suppose she had gone to university, done very well, emerged with honours and applause. Studying what? Something he had chosen for her. Is that what he was dreaming of to make his own life end in achievement? But we shall never know. What influences did Emily McVeagh have that caused her to choose nursing of all things? ‘But nurses are not of our class, Emily’ – choosing nursing to fulfil herself.

  And now her daughter was saying, ‘No,’ tearing up her letters, was running from her as fast as she could, a flight culminating in that ancient resort of girls beset by their mothers, ‘Well, of course I got married to get away from my mother.’

  A Women’s Group, Informal, Casual

  Now fast forward to the war years, and the problems of young women, fifteen or so of us. Then they were to be distinguished by their politics, all socialist or Communist, and that was how they saw themselves. On meeting anyone they would at once say, ‘I am a member of the Party’; ‘I joined when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union’; or ‘I left the Party when Stalin attacked Finland’; or ‘on the Hitler–Stalin Pact’; ‘I am a Marxist Communist’; or ‘I know Marxists cannot be Zionists, but I am a Marxist Zionist.’

  What has to strike one is that they were all so well-rea
d – compared with now, remarkably so. Nowadays, minds rotted by TV or the Internet, it is not rare to read a reviewer saying, apparently with pride, that he, she, cannot read War and Peace because it is long; or Ulysses, because it is difficult. Then it would not occur to readers to confess incapacity. When it was agreed that there was a prob-lem we shared, it was natural for us to approach it from literature. I cannot remember any other time when there were women-only meetings, but this was because men simply would not understand.

  Each of us had a mother, and not merely on that level where a girl may roll her eyes and say, ‘It’s my mother, you know.’ It was a serious business, and we began, saying that to judge by literature, plays, memoirs, there had recently been dominating bullying fathers, whose sons and daughters were afraid of them. Where had they gone? In their places were neurotic mothers, driving their daughters mad. One mother, apparently fixated on 1920s flappers, wore short skirts, dangling necklaces, a foot-long amber cigarette holder, and she was at her daughter’s every morning by breakfast and there she stayed until night. The daughter was married and the way the mother dealt with the unfortunate reality was to ignore the husband, saying, ‘You only married him to annoy me, anyway.’ She was an extreme.

  Some girls had come out to the colony, as the custom then was, to get a husband, but the war had blown the Rhodesians up north to fight Rommel and survive or not. The colony was now full of the RAF, the English, but to marry one of them meant, as they saw it, a bit of a defeat. Their mothers’ letters from England pleaded with them to get a husband. Two mothers had followed their daughters out to Salisbury, both apparently believing that this move in itself meant the daughters should live with them and support them. My mother – but enough.

  ‘Marry to get away from my mother?’ What a joke. When she visited me, she would move the furniture, throw out any clothes that displeased her, nag the servants and give orders to the cook. ‘And why didn’t you ever say no to her?’ demanded the therapist to whom I was driven, years later.

  ‘It would have been like hitting a child,’ was what I said, but if I said something like, ‘Mother, you really must accept the fact some time that I am grown-up now,’ she would reply, ‘But you are so hopeless, you have no idea at all.’ My husband laughed. I could not appeal to my father, who was too ill.

  So, how did these pathetic demented women come about? Well, we knew. How intelligent were our discussions, illustrated by a hundred examples from novels, but I cannot remember if our ever-so-clever analyses changed anything. We knew what the trouble was. These were women who should have been working, should have worked, should have interests in their lives apart from us, their hag-ridden daughters.

  And when not long ago in England there was a pronouncement that women should not work, should be at home, caring for their children, I wondered how many women, like me, wanted to cry out: ‘Stop! You’re mad. You don’t know what you’re doing. Do you really want to create another generation of women who cannot let their children go? Is that what you want?’

  All our mothers, looked at for their potential, were capable women, one or two extraordinarily so, and they should have been lawyers, doctors, Members of Parliament, running businesses.

  All, every one, bemoaned their lot like this: ‘I should have been a singer…an actress…a great artist…a dress designer…a model…but I got married. I was too young to know what I was doing. Children finish you – they put an end to anything you could have been.’

  And now there are women, more and more, who decide not to have children, and what a great thing that is.

  If you want to imagine a fate worse than death – yes, that’s not going too far – take a woman, without maternal instincts, let’s say in the nineteenth century, or in any past century when there was no birth control. She would have to get married, and then have children, because there was nothing else for her. A woman who should never have had children had a brood, and no escape, unless she was tough-minded enough to choose to be a spinster.

  This was the kind of thing our women’s group discussed. We were very far from modern feminists: our discussions did not do much to change our mothers, if they did help us to put up with them.

  I look back at the mothers of my generation and shudder and think, Oh, my God, never, never let it happen again…and I look back at my mother and know that what she really was, the real Emily, died in the breakdown she had soon after she landed on the farm. For a long time I knew I had never known my father, as he really was, before the war, but it took me years to see that I had not known my mother, as she really was, either. The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books. That is how I want to remember her.

  At various times in that long decline away from everything she knew herself to be, my mother accepted that her fate was to be a mother and ‘That was that!’ Then her incomparable driving energy would focus again on me – my brother had escaped her – and make plans for my instruction. And don’t imagine I’m not grateful. Of course I could – and did – enquire loudly that if she intended me to go to ‘a good school’ in England, then why did she make me learn farm matters?

  My going to school in England was part of what I and my brother called ‘getting-off-the-farm’, not scornfully, although we knew it was moonshine, but with no comprehension of her, or my father, for we had not been trapped: no slimy tentacle had come up from the depths to grab our ankles and drag us down, down. ‘Getting-off-the-farm’ did not depend for them on selling a good crop of maize or tobacco, but on winning the Irish sweepstake, or finding gold.

  Thus I would be told I must look after a sitting hen ‘from start to finish’, or be responsible for the orphan calf, or ‘take total charge’ of feeding the chickens for a week. ‘You have to know how things really are,’ my mother would insist, eyes flashing. ‘On the warpath,’ my father said. And so, I do, and I thank her for it.

  My Black Calf

  Our pretty cow is Daisy Moo.

  I love our friendly cow.

  She tries with all her heart

  To give us milk and yellow cream

  To eat with apple tart.

  I think few in the world would recognize this friendly cow.

  ‘A herd of cows’ – and we see them up to their middles in sweet English grass and clover, contented.

  The milking herd on our farm in Africa was six or seven lean, drought-racked creatures: you needed half a dozen to provide enough milk for the house; in England one would be more than enough.

  But there aren’t contented clover-eating cows now that we treat them so cruelly, lock them up and feed them what we will. They never saunter through rich grass, never breathe real fresh air, and their udders hold gallons of milk, an unnatural thing, which keeps them on the verge of collapsing from illness. These cows would envy the lot of our haggard, bony beasts: their existence would seem paradise to them.

  A small boy tended the house cows, keeping an eye open for a leopard or dogs, and in the worst time when milk was so short, my mother asked him if he was giving milk to his family, though of course he did and would until the rains came and brought the grass.

  Our cows were sharp-horned, wild-eyed survivors, and if I came on them when walking I kept my distance.

  No tame house pets, no friendly cows, and their cream was just enough to keep the family in butter, nothing like the rich cream my parents would remember: ‘Now, in England…’

  A heifer would be driven across to a neighbour who had a bull, which must not be imagined as the kind that gets ribbons at fairs, and returned sanctified for motherhood. A cow worn out with her hard life would be sent to the butcher after she had had perhaps two or three calves.

  One day two calves, one black, the other black and white, were driven up to the house. The mother had died in calving and it was decided that we, the house on the hill, would raise them. To my father it was sentimental nonsense; my mother said it would be good for us, ‘us’being my brother and me, but he did not play his part. The
black calf, a male, was mine and I must look after it.

  Little milk came up in the pails in that cold dry season, but some was splashed into a basin, and I introduced my fingers into the calf ’s mouth. The suction and pull on my fingers seemed then, and still does, like a cry from the very heart of hungry need – Let me live. I must live. If I were in a world stripped by war or famine, so that nothing was left, and I thought of that frantic sucking, I would have to believe that life must triumph. The calf sucked so hard my fingers were white, and my mother said, ‘Good God, he’ll have the blood out of them.’ She was reproving the calf. Give me, give me, give me…

  Soon there was no milk left and the calf was butting at my legs desperate to bring down the milk from his dead mother.

  We sent a man on a bicycle to the store and he brought back containers of powder, and these, being converted into milk, were offered to the calf, and soon he had outgrown my fingers and his whole muzzle was in the bowl. He drank and he drank and his backside and his sister’s were streaked with diarrhoea, and my father said, ‘You’ll kill those calves.’ But the calves adjusted and they drank their reconstituted milk and it was never enough, at least for my calf, named Demi. They were named after the twins in Louisa M. Alcott’s stories, Demi and Daisy.

  How Daisy got on I do not remember, so absorbed was I with this imp of a little calf, who stood under a bush with her, waiting for my appearance, which meant milk.

  He was such a handsome little calf, glossy, supple, black and shiny, and his hindquarters and tail wriggled and frisked with delight at the milk and he was so pretty, such a delight…

  He was as beautiful as the black silk gloves that…Yes, it might seem absurd, this raw little farm girl, talking about black silk gloves, but they existed. In the house, under the thatch, pushed against the mud walls, was a ‘Wanted on Voyage’ cabin trunk and in it were evening dresses and shawls, but on a tray at the top were fans, scarves, little sequined bags and gloves, some of white kid, and there were the black silk ones, with minute jet buttons to the elbow. No occasion, excursion, party I had ever experienced would have proved a setting for those gloves, which I marvelled over and worshipped as evidence that the world was not contained in our bush landscape in the middle of Africa, that other perspectives existed. Those gloves, lying in my rough little hands, limp, shining, as fragile as the shed skin of a snake…they were, well, of the same order as the shiny black elegance of the little calf. What did they have in common? It was that they were a gift, unexpected, like the heavy opulence of the lilies that bloom for one day after the rains fall, carpeting the veld with flowers that look as if they come from a rainforest, not drought-bitten Africa.