Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

  ‘That was a really bad bash, and I felt so peculiar. I rang the doc – you know, with petrol rationing you didn’t use the car unless you had to – and I told him how I felt and he said, “No, that’s not concussion, you don’t sound concussed to me.” But I felt so…I don’t know how to tell you. Do you remember malaria?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, one minute you’re shivering and shaking and the next you’ve never felt so clear and on top of everything. But, no, it wasn’t that, and I had no temperature or anything. I wasn’t ill. I felt I must be mad, everything was so bright and clear, and it took me days to understand. Then I did, quite suddenly. This was what I was like before the Repulse. That blow on the head had sent me back to normal. I was suddenly my real self, you see. I was suddenly myself. I had to face the fact that I’d spent years of my life, getting on for forty, not myself at all. It was as if I was behind a glass wall. Oh, I don’t think I can explain it…’

  ‘You’re doing pretty well, Harry. Go on.’

  ‘That means Monica [his wife] never knew me as myself, not my real self, when everything is sharp and clear. And my children – it’s so hard to come to terms with, Tigs. There was something about the Repulse thing that sent me off centre…Well, could you tell all those years how I was?’

  ‘We haven’t been seeing much of each other, have we?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  And to reply to what he was asking, I had thought that my brother was rather slow, but had put that down to his being so deaf. And now he said it himself.

  ‘I thought perhaps it was that I had been so deaf – I didn’t have a real hearing-aid. But it wasn’t that. I might have been deaf but I could see everything. I had my senses. But everything was dulled. Muffled. Like being under water and hearing sounds coming from a distance. You see, Tigs, it’s most of my life: I simply haven’t been here at all.’

  Getting-off-the-Farm

  In the middle of the war my parents moved into town – to Salisbury, now Harare. It was impossible to nurse my father any longer on the farm. But the old house, leaking so badly a storm was marked by rain pattering on the linoleum, and where the four winds blew, and sometimes inside as well as outside, had suited him better than the bungalow, which he hated.

  The diabetes was very bad. They had not refined the treatment then, the doctors, and looking at his illness from its beginning to its end, the constant theme was the restriction of food, and his diet was so limited that my image of him is this haunted, gaunt man, sitting at the table with, beside him, little brass scales, where he measured an ounce of this, two ounces of that, half a scone, a little potato. Everything has changed: now the doctors are so clever and flexible, balancing insulin against the food, so that living with a diabetic, it is easy to forget that he is one. If my father’s doctors had had these levels of skill he would not have been so dreadfully ill.

  Fate, or my karma, or chance, has caused me to have to look after a diabetic, just as my mother did, and I can compare what happens now with then. How lucky we are in our medicines: diabetic sufferers have no idea how they would have been dealt with not so long ago.

  We are all conditioned, wired, evolved, to accept calamity as a blow, a suddenness. He fell off a horse; an arrow pierced his eye; she died in childbirth, of a burst appendix, of food-poisoning; there was a sniper, a suicide-bomber, a rock fall; or a fire, a flood, a car crash. But to imagine, let alone describe, a slow, long descent through illness is hard. If I say my mother nursed my father day and night for the last four years of his illness, a minute-by-minute vigilance, while his organs failed, one by one, and everything went, until he was begging to be given death, then it is hard to take in. And she had nursed him for the ten years before that.

  She didn’t have enough help. I and others would look after my father for an afternoon, an evening, so she could go out, but she really needed people who would say, ‘I’ll take over for the weekend so that you can…’ very probably just sleep. I didn’t know how to cope with that apparatus of syringes and test-tubes, and the batteries of pills, among which there was not one for his dreadful depression.

  It was such a bad time for everyone, the war and its aftermath, but particularly for my mother. We now know the war did have an end – 1939–45 – but while it dragged on, we didn’t know, and no one foresaw the awfulness of the after-war years. It is so hard to convey the unremittingness of it all, the deadening slog. While they were going on, my father’s last years, it was hard to feel, with my mother, what it was really like for her, but I would say that people who have had to do something of the same kind themselves will understand.

  His children, certainly, were no joy for my father. My brother nearly went down with the Repulse, but was saved, and then he had a long, hard war in the Mediterranean, where so much fighting went on. As for his daughter, I left a husband and two children and married a German, classed as an enemy alien. My parents were not anti-German, but there are stereotypes of German. One is the large, hearty, probably pipe-smoking, good-natured man, rather like Father Christmas, whom they would have liked. Another is the Prussian, aloof, correct, cold, ungiving. How could they have liked my second husband? And he was a Communist, a real one (and stayed one until he died). There were whole hinterlands here that luckily they knew nothing about: for instance, that Gottfried only married me, as enemy aliens married local girls when they could, to keep himself out of the internment camp. But it must have been obvious to them, particularly to my father, that Gottfried and I were not well suited. As it is put. Gottfried, hating everything about his life in Southern Rhodesia, was inveterately polite, and they were polite too. Now I cannot see how the behaviour of my father’s daughter could have been worse for him.

  But he and I understood each other very well. When I sat with him on those long afternoons and evenings, he would hold my hand and we were complicit in a rage of understanding. I think my father’s rage at the Trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents’ emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.

  My father dreamed a lot about the Trenches, and my mother said that sometimes she felt as if his old comrades were there in the room with him – with us.

  ‘They were such good chaps,’ my father would say, ‘such fine men. And they all died in Passchendaele. Every one of my company. And I would have died with them, but I got the shrapnel in my leg just before the battle. I must have told you – I’m sure I did. But those fine chaps, they would be alive now. They were just cannon fodder, that’s all.’

  Years later, in London, I visited the Imperial War Museum, where they have created a most uncomfortably realistic set of Trenches. Standing looking at them was a woman, and she was crying. I saw she was crying with rage so I went to stand by her. She gave me a glance and took in that I was at one with her. ‘It’s as if they were just rubbish,’ she said. ‘Like rubbish, to be shovelled into the Trenches. They weren’t worth anything, you see.’ Exactly.

  And my father talked more and more about cannon fodder. ‘If you had only known them,’ he said, holding my hand hard. ‘Such good men. I keep thinking of them.’ And my father, crying, an old man’s tears, his eyes wide and childlike – an old man’s eyes (but he not yet sixty) – and he was murmuring the names of those fine chaps, his men, who died in the mud at Passchendaele, while the wireless, which was never turned off, told us news from the battlefronts in Europe and in the Pacific.

  ‘I think of them, yes, I do, there’s never a day I don’t think of them, oh, such fine young chaps…’

  My mother might come in and sit on the old basket armchair, brought from the farm – her chair. She was utterly worn out. I could see she wanted to get a few minutes’ nap, perhaps, and she rested her hand on her cheek, the hand where the rings were loose on her fingers.

  ‘I must have told you,’ my father said, seeing
her sitting there, ‘yes, I’m sure I did. If the shrapnel hadn’t got me I would have died with them, and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if I had.

  ‘The thing is,’ said my father, rousing himself, ‘I keep thinking, it could all have been done better. Done differently, don’t you see? Emily? Emily?’

  ‘Let her sleep,’ I begged. ‘She’s so tired.’

  ‘Emily?’ he shouted, in a panic.

  ‘Here I am,’ said my mother, returning.

  In the District there were other soldiers from the Great War, the war to end all war. One woman had lost a husband and three sons to the Trenches; she had one son left, too young for the war. She would say, dignified with her sorrow, that when she looked at this youngest son, she saw all her other dead soldiers. When those survivors of the First World War met, they would talk in a way that has fallen out of fashion. ‘The armament-makers,’ they would say, ‘they made the war happen. Krupps made our war.’ The German small-mine worker down the hill, my father’s friend, who had bits of shrapnel in him too, from the German Trenches, talked about the armament-makers, Krupps and the profiteers.

  How strange that the words – and the idea – have dropped out of our minds. The ‘military industrial complex’ does not have the same ring, does not remind us, or make us think. When a war starts up in Africa, a pointless war, apparently, for the sake of a few acres of scrub, my parents, that generation, would have said, ‘It’s the armament-makers at it again. It’s the profiteers.’ And what has been achieved at the end of it? A few hundred dead, but millions of pounds, spent on weapons, safely lodged in somebody’s pockets.

  Grocz’s pictures were of the profiteers and armament-makers, who did well out of that war.

  Profiteers and armament-makers – gone from our speech and, so it seems, from our minds.

  At the funeral I was too angry to listen or watch. My eyes were shut, and I was praying, if curses can be called a prayer.

  My mother was exhausted and she did not quickly get over it

  And so, that was that.

  Servant Problems

  All over the world, from every village, every little shanty, people stream to the towns. This was true in old Southern Rhodesia, and it is true in Zimbabwe. It seems everyone agrees with Lenin and his ‘the idiocy of village life’. Oh, lovely towns, full of excitements and opportunities. But people are not always welcome in towns. In Salisbury, for instance, or in any Southern Rhodesian town, the blacks were only allowed to stay if they had a job. This was the same policy as the infamous ‘apartheid’ of South Africa. ‘If you are useful to the whites, then stay. Otherwise, back you go to your rural huts.’ And what did they find in towns? In Salisbury, every white house had, as well as a lavatory like a sentry box, emptied by the sanitary carts once a week, servants’ quarters, or ‘kias’ (short for what? I don’t know), a low, small brick room or two, just off the sanitary lane. They were supposed to house the ‘boys’ working for that house but always held many more. So what did they find in the way of excitements and general blessings in, let’s say, Salisbury?

  I think there were films, and I certainly remember that there were dance-halls. What they found there at the back of the white man’s house, in the brick rooms, was each other. The company was noisy, funny, full of laughter and gossip. I once wrote a story called ‘A Home for the Highland Cattle’, after spending hours watching from back windows the dramas of the ‘boys’ lives, where a woodpile, shrubs, a cooking fire were props for a neverending drama. At least until the Second World War most houses might have as many as five servants. The cookboy had enough to do, but the houseboy might finish cleaning the rooms by mid-morning. There might be two houseboys, and a gardener, hardly overworked, and a ‘piccanin’ for odd jobs. They were paid a minimum wage, were fed rations, and the white family’s cast-offs were worn often in ways not envisaged by the makers. I do not remember any ambitious servants. Once, a lively and clever young man, our general servant, was begged by us – Gottfried Lessing and me – to go to night classes to learn book-keeping, anything, paid for by us, of course: he refused, saying he liked dancing too much.

  All day, every day, men from their villages went from house to house begging for work. If they found a position, the joys of the towns were theirs. Otherwise out you go, and the police were always after them.

  In the war, when Salisbury was crammed, was over-full, Gottfried Lessing and I found a place to live – temporary, like everything in those days. It was a very large room, with a passage on two sides, leading nowhere. Into these spaces went a wardrobe and chest of drawers and a marble slab that held hot plates, a kettle and a sink. There was a bathroom. The arrival of the baby made little work. He was a good baby, as they say, and I did know that there could be other kinds of babe, because my first, John, was far from good. But this one slept, and was amiable. To wash his nappies took half an hour, and they dried out in the sun in a couple of hours. I and Gottfried decided that we didn’t need a servant. What for? He would be more trouble than a convenience.

  Now, in the avenues where the houses were, men begging for work came round all day, to be dealt with by the cook and the ‘boys’ who saw them as competitors and didn’t want them. But the word went around at once that there was this missus in such-and-such a house and she needed a ‘boy’. Several times a day there was a knock on the door and the pleading, ‘I want work, missus’; ‘Please give me work, missus’; even, ‘You can teach me to cook, I learn well.’ And so on. I wrote out a large notice and tacked it to my outer door: ‘Do Not Ask for Work Here. There Is No Work.’

  My mother was appalled. She had plenty of time for me now my father had gone. ‘What will the neighbours say?’ There were eight rooms like ours in this block, and there was a ‘boy’ for each. These servants had to find accommodation in the ‘location’, which meant them coming in every morning and leaving in the evening in time to beat the curfew at eight o’clock.

  What did they find to do? They loitered about the streets or found some friendly house where they did not mind them hanging around at the back.

  ‘Mother, tell me, just what is this man going to find to do? Just look, take a look. I suppose he could push the baby out for a walk.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, that would be very wrong. It would be asking for trouble.’

  ‘What trouble?’ I said.

  ‘Then I’ll just clean up a bit for you.’

  ‘No. Stop it. No.’

  She desisted.

  ‘Then I’ll just take off Gottfried’s shirts and get them washed.’

  ‘No. There are laundries. Leave them. No.’

  Next her servant arrived to beg me to employ his brother, a relative. He badly wanted to live in Salisbury, could not find work, but if I employed him…

  ‘For one thing it would mean his coming in every morning and going back every evening. And you are at least three miles out.’

  The plan was for this man to live with him, in my mother’s servants’ quarters.

  ‘It would be all right. He can walk. Or you can buy him a bicycle, and he can ride, only half an hour.’

  ‘I don’t need a servant. Can’t you see?’

  ‘Yes, you do. He will clean it nice-nice, he’s a good boy, missus.’

  ‘No.’

  To ride in and out was not a startling idea. A man I knew well, an old Rhodesian, expected his servant to ride in five miles every morning to be there to get morning tea ready by six a.m.

  ‘Just give him a chit to say he’s working for you,’ said my mother, who wanted to please her servant, Abraham, Benjamin or Moses.

  ‘That would be breaking the law. Don’t you care about that?’

  ‘I sometimes think you deliberately do all you can to make things difficult for me,’ said my mother.

  By this time I was working part-time with a Mr. Lamb. A Lord Milner had created a famous team of young men, called Milner’s Kindergarten, to staff parts of the British Empire that might want clever, honest and highly trai
ned young men. My Mr. Lamb had been one. Now he was one of the shorthand writers for Hansard, and for parliamentary committees. Why had he come to be a shorthand writer after such a brilliant start? I never asked him. Now I would give a lot to know, but unfortunately, young, you omit to ask other people questions that only they can answer.

  It was a pleasure to work for him. He was so clever, dry, ironical, and full of quips and quotations from his classical education.

  But my mother went to see him to tell him that I was wrongheaded, and he ought to know whom he was employing.

  Mr. Lamb said to me, ‘Your mother has been to see me, to say you are a danger and a threat to public order.’

  I was angry, but what was the use of that?

  ‘She says you are a Communist – but one of the advantages of living in a goldfish bowl is that we all know about each other.’

  ‘Well, I hardly keep it secret, Mr. Lamb.’

  ‘Precisely so. But it will probably infuriate you to know that we regard your current politics as an infantile disorder.’*

  He twinkled triumph, and I had to laugh.

  I tackled my mother. And when had that ever been of any use?

  ‘Mother do you realize you could have lost me that job? And I earn more with him working odd hours than I did working in the office.’

  Now she crumpled. She was suddenly flustered, guilty, and even panicked.

  This complexity of emotions happens when a person has been mentally furious, full of rage at someone, attacking – mentally – some criminal or malicious enemy. But she was faced with just her daughter, an annoying, born-to-thwart-her girl whom it was her mission to save.