Under My Skin

You would think all this must have left me with obsessive cleanliness, tidiness, need for order. No. I am untidy, tolerate disorder, but am obsessive in small useful ways, like keeping a diary.

The vividest early memory was – not the actual birth of my brother – but my introduction to the baby. I was two and a half years old. The enormous room, lamplit, the ceiling shadowed and far above; the enormous bed, level with my head, on which my father lay, for he was ill again: these days they would be making jokes about couvade. Women were supposed to stay in bed for at least a month after childbirth, preferably six weeks, all the time bound tightly from waist to knee with rigid linen – hard to believe that my energetic mother would submit to this, and she was standing by an enormous cot that was all ebullient white flounces of dotted white muslin. The cot was well above my head, and she was bending past it and saying persuasively, ‘It is your baby, Doris, and you must love it.’ From the depths of the white flounces she lifted a bundle of baby and this was held close to me so that, if I were stupid, I could believe I held it. The baby I do not remember. I was in a flame of rage and resentment. It was not my baby. It was their baby. But I can hear now that persuasive lying voice, on and on and on, and it would go on until I gave in. The power of that rebellious flame, strong even now, tells me it was by no means the first time I was told, lyingly, what I must feel. For it was not my baby. Obviously it was not. Probably Truby King or even Montessori had prescribed that the older dispossessed child must be tricked into love, thus cleverly outwitting jealousy. I hated my mother for it. I hated her absolutely. But I was helpless. Love the baby I did. I loved that baby, and then the infant, and then the little boy with a most passionate protective love. This is not only an authentic memory, every detail present after all this time, but deduction too. By this event and others of the same kind my emotional life was for ever determined.

All you need is love. Love is all you need. A child should be governed by love, as my mother so often said, explaining her methods to us. She had not known love as a child, and was making sure we would not be similarly deprived. The trouble is, love is a word that has to be filled with an experience of love. What I remember is hard bundling hands, impatient arms and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me.

The fact was, my early childhood made me one of the walking wounded for years. A dramatic remark, and pretty distasteful, really, but used with an exact intention although it makes me easy victim to the current obsessionalists who see evidences of ‘abuse’ everywhere. They mean, usually, sexual abuse. If you say, I wasn’t abused, they at once put on that knowing-better smile used by certain kinds of analyst. But these hysterical mass movements surge past, die, change into something else, perhaps even into an examination not of sexual handling or using of children (which I think are not as common as some people want to believe), rather into the emotional hurts which are common, are the human condition, part of everyone’s infancy. I think that some psychological pressures, and even well-meant ones, are as damaging as physical hurt. However that may be, all my life I have understood, felt at home with, sometimes lived with, people who had bad childhoods (I nearly wrote, conventionally bad childhoods). They were adopted and then neglected, spent time in care or in orphanages, were bargaining counters in savage power games between parents, were sent too young to cruel or cold schools – now we might be getting somewhere, but that was a late hurt, not an original one. All these people had put themselves together after panic flight from home, or a collapse. For years my friends were nearly all people who had created their own families. Then, it was not all that common, but now it is. The world is so full of war, civil war, famines, epidemics, that waifs and strays are bred, it seems, by the million. They create for themselves a family. In every one of them is a place, large or small, that is an emotional wasteland.

Yet my mother was conscientious, hardworking, always doing the best as she saw it. She was a good sort, a good sport. She never hit or even slapped a child. She talked about love often. The tenderness she had never been taught came out in worrying and fussing and – in the case of my brother – making him ‘delicate’ so she could nurse him; in my case, actually making me sick for a time.

My father was affectionate but he was not tender. Neither parent liked displays of emotion. If my mother’s daughter had been like her, of the same substance, everything would have gone well. But it was her misfortune to have an over-sensitive, always observant and judging, battling, impressionable, hungry-for-love child. With not one, but several, skins too few.

The Tehran nursery was English, Edwardian, and could have been in London. An enormous room, square, high, filled like a lumber room with heavy furniture. In the wall burns a fierce and exuberant fire, held safe from the room and from curious children by a brass fireguard like a gate. On the brass rails are folded ironed clothes and nappies, airing. A wooden folding stand holds wads and pads and swaddles of clothes, more and more bibs, nappies, vests, binders, woollies, robes, dresses, socks, caps, jackets, shawls. All that side of the room is screened by a wall of these clothes, and behind them in the wall itself are cupboards packed with piles of jackets and dresses and petticoats in wool and in lawn, in nun’s veiling and in silk, in cotton and in flannel. Hundreds of them, dozens of everything. This wardrobe is needed for two tiny children, who are sitting on chamber pots low down among the vast chairs and a high chair like scaffolding. The air in that room is all smells. The scorch of newly ironed cloth, vaseline, Elliman’s Embrocation, cod-liver oil, almond oil, camphorated oil, Pears soap, the nostril-expanding tang from the copper jug and basin on the washstand, the airless smell of flames, paraffin from the little stove that heats bottles and milk, the smell of the contents of the two pots that are only partially kept confined by the small bottoms. Heavy curtains hold dust, behind them muslin curtains with their smell of soap, and the wood smells of furniture polish. The curtains have blue and pink Bo-peeps and lambs, but otherwise everything, but everything, is white. A suffocation of smelly whiteness.

First the tiny girl and then the baby, who always did what she did, lift a bottom off the pot and the women in the room exclaim and coo, Harry is a good little baba, Doris is a good little baba.

So rewarding was this continuous daily and nightly approval, that Doris actually arrived at a formal Legation dinner party holding out a pot and announcing, ‘Doddis is a good little baba.’ I would not have paid this memory much respect if, decades later, this same Doris, having finished a novel which was to arrive at the publisher’s next day, had not dreamed she walked into the publisher’s office – Jonathan Cape, as it happened – holding out a pot that contained a manuscript. Doris had been a good little girl. She was full of the glow of achievement, of having proved herself worthy of loving affection.

I offer this as my contribution to understanding the far from simple relations between publishers and authors. (I think it is necessary for the sake of the uninstructed to insist that this dream, so say experts, is the best of auguries.)

There were two women in the nursery. My mother was enormous, solid, a vibrating column of efficiency and ruthless energy, and part of my attention was always on her, for I was afraid she would carelessly knock me over, tread on me. She was taller and larger than the other woman, whom an adult would judge as small. This was Marta, a Syrian, a cross old woman, the nurse. She spoke only French. This pleased my mother, bent on getting her children properly educated. Has this left me with a natural disposition for French, though I have never done more than read it, and use it on the restaurant, taxi, it-is-a-fine-day, where do you live, level? It could be said, yes, for any other language I attempt to learn, no matter how much effort I put in, is screened from me by French. The first word that comes is French, and has to be batted out of my brain. Often baby words, nursery talk.

Just as I now wonder about Emily Flower, who did not deserve even a photograph, and about Caroline May Batley, whose son disliked her and whose husband married again the year she died, I would like to know more about Marta, forced to be a nursemaid in the English family. ‘Old Marta.’ But she doesn’t look so old in the photographs. What war, calamity, famine, personal misfortune forced her to work in the strict English nursery where her sufferings and loneliness goaded her tongue and made her hands hard and unkind? At least, with me. ‘Bébé is my child, madame. Doris is not my child. Doris is your child. But Bébé is mine.’ So she said. Often. And very often was I reminded of it, all through my childhood, with the relish that always accompanied such information. Now I see this pleasure in authenticating my inadequacies not only as insensitivity, which it was, but also as another expression of my mother’s natural theatricality. She might have been an actress, but I am sure that did not occur to her. If it was shameful for a nice girl to be a nurse, how much worse to go on the stage? John William would have died from the disgrace of it. Yet it was born in her. Years after the Tehran nursery, she would bring to life Marta, an irritable scolding old woman. ‘I had to stop her slapping and pinching you. She never slapped Baby. She loved him too much for that. “Méchante, tu es méchante!”’ she snapped at me, in Marta’s voice. And I knew how she experienced her father, for she became the cold angry man, his mouth full of self-righteous platitudes, and the frightened little girl standing stiffly in front of him, looking bravely up into the face of Authority.

She did not weep when her father was harsh: she stood up to him by being everything he demanded of her, and more. I on the other hand fought Marta for my rights in that nursery, and unloved children are not ‘nice’, not ‘gentille’. Who did love the child? Her father. The smell of maleness, tobacco, sweat, the smell of father, enveloped her in safety.

When I wrote Memoirs of a Survivor I called it, ‘An Attempt at an Autobiography’, but no one was interested. Foreign publishers simply left it off the title page, and soon no one remembered to put it on reprints in English. People seemed embarrassed. They did not understand it, they said. For thousands upon thousands of years, we – humankind – have told ourselves tales and stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly. But after three centuries of the Realistic Novel, in many people this part of the brain has atrophied.

To me nothing seems more simple than the plan of this novel. A middle-aged person – the sex does not matter – observes a young self grow up. A general worsening of conditions goes on, as has happened in my lifetime. Waves of violence sweep past – represented by gangs of young and anarchic people – go by, and vanish. These are the wars and movements like Hitler, Mussolini, Communism, white supremacy, systems of brutal ideas that seem for a time unassailable, then collapse. Meanwhile behind a wall, other things go on. The dissolving wall is an ancient symbol, perhaps the oldest. When you make up a story, and you need a symbol or analogy, it is always best to choose the oldest and most familiar. This is because it is already there, in the human mind, is an archetype, leads easily in from the daytime world to the other one. Behind my wall two different kinds of memory were being played, like serial dreams. There are the general, if you like, communal, dreams, shared by many, like the house you know well, but then find in it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you did not know were there, or the dream of gardens beneath gardens, or the visits to landscapes never known in life. The other kind was of personal memories, personal dreams. For years I had wondered if I could write a book, a personal history, but told through dreams, for I remember dreams well, and sometimes have kept notes of them. Graham Greene has tried something of the kind. This idea of a dream autobiography became the world behind the wall in Memoirs of a Survivor. I used the nursery in Tehran, and the characters of my parents, both exaggerated and enlarged, because this is appropriate for the world of dreams. I used that aspect of my mother which she herself described as ‘I have sacrificed myself for my children.’ Women in those days felt no inhibitions about saying this: most are too psychologically sophisticated now. She was the frustrated complaining woman I first met as my mother, but who has often appeared in my life, sometimes as a friend. She talks all the time about what a burden her children are to her, how they take it out of her, how much she is unfulfilled and unappreciated, how no one but a mother knows how much she has to give of herself to ungrateful children who soak up her precious talents and juices like so many avid sponges.

The point is, this kind of talk goes on in front of the children, as if they were not present, and cannot hear how she tells the world what a burden her children are, what a disappointment, how they drain her life from her. There is no need to look for memories of ‘abuse’, cruelty and the rest. I remember very well – though how old I was I do not know – leaning against my father’s knee, the real one, not the metal-and-wood knee, while my mother chatted on and on in her social voice to some visitor about her children, how they brought her low and sapped her, how all her own talents were withering unused, how the little girl in particular (she was so difficult, so naughty!) made her life a total misery. And I was a cold flame of hatred for her, I could have killed her there and then. Then this was succeeded by a weariness, a bitterness. How could she talk about me as if I were not there? And about my little brother whom I so adored, as a burden? Hypocrisy – for she adored him, and said so. How could she diminish and demean and betray me like this? And to a mere visitor … I knew my father did not like her doing it: I could feel what he felt coming into me from him. He was suffering, because of this great lump of solid, heavy insensitivity, his wife, who did not seem to know what she was doing.

And yet, what was she doing? No more than other women did. Than women so often do. Everywhere, you can hear them at it on trains and on buses, on the streets, in shops, tugging their kids along by the hand or pushing them roughly in their pushchairs; they complain and they nag, while their children, assumed to be without ears, are told how they destroy her, how she does not want them and – for what else can she mean as she talks like this? – what a mistake she has made in having them at all.

I do not believe that even robust and insensitive children remain unaffected by this assault on their very existence.

But I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by those robust and efficient hands.

And my father, always suffering and shrinking because of the unawareness of his wife? Was a skin scrubbed off him by the efficient Caroline May? And what about all those other melancholy long-headed semi-poets of his family? Or is there such a thing as a gene for the condition, being born with a skin too few?

All I know is that I remember, sharp and clear and immediate, nothing invented or made up about it, how my father sat and watched the events and people around him with a slow, relishing, sardonic smile. (This same smile being the equivalent of the novelist’s contemplation of the world.) And when the cross old nurse Marta and the great bustling woman who was my mother made me want to crawl off somewhere to hide, or made me hate them so much I would have killed them if I could, then it was with my father I took refuge.

And yet. In that house in Tehran – not in the overcrammed nursery, but down in the drawing room, equally crammed and crowded with furniture but at least not white, white, deadly white – every night took place a ritual. We, the small children, were led down by the nurse for the bedtime game. We had pillowfights, were chased, caught, thrown up in the air – and tickled. This goes on now in many middle-class families, considered salutary, character building. I see now the inflamed, excited face of my mother, as her pillow flailed against mine, or my little brother’s. I hear the excited cries from myself and my brother and my mother as the air filled with feathers and my head began to ache. And then the moment when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell – he never did go in for washing much, and – don’t forget – this was before easy dry-cleaning, and people’s clothes smelled, they smelled horrible. By now my head is aching badly, the knocking headache of over-excitement. His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate. Then tears. But we were being taught how to be good sports. For being a good sport was necessary for the middle-class life. To put up with ‘ragging’ and with being hurt, with being defeated in games, being ‘tickled’ until you wept, was a necessary preparation.

It does not have to be like this, for you may watch a very little child being gently chased and tickled in a real game, not an exercise in disguised bullying. But I did not stop having nightmares about those great hands torturing my ribs until I was seven or eight. These nightmares are as clear in my mind now as they were then, though the emotion has long gone away. I became an expert on nightmares and how to outwit them when I was a small child, and that nightmare of being helpless and ‘tickled’ was the worst.

Yet my father was my ally, my support, my comforter. I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by ‘games’, by ‘tickling’. No, I am not one of them. In all my life I have never been hit, slapped, or in any way at all physically maltreated by a man, and I am saying this because at this particular time it is hard even to pick up a popular paper without reading about women being physically bullied by men. There are worse kinds of bullying.

And now here is a deduced memory. In the big room where the bedtime rituals took place were heavy red velvet curtains. That they were heavy I know because of the memory of velvet dragging on my skin, my limbs, and I clung to folds that filled my small arms. That they were red I believe because when I was doing apprentice pieces in my twenties, several Poe-like stories appeared where red velvet curtains concealed threat. In one over-worked piece there was a man in a wheelchair who drove a child back and back across a room to a wall that was all red velvet, and when she took one step too far back through them, on the other side was no wall, only empty space. There are any number of childhood ‘games’ that could account for this one. The story was called ‘Fear and Red Velvet’.

I have been writing of the tactile and sensuous subjective experience of a child, smelly, noisy, the rumble of a mother’s stomach as she reads to you, the bubbling dottle in Daddy’s pipe, the pounding of blood in your ears – all the din and stink and smother of life which a child soon learns to shut out, if she is not to be overwhelmed by it. But all that – and the battle for survival – went on side by side with what was being provided intelligently and competently by my mother, the daughter of John William, who had taught her what a good parent must provide for a child. For if my mother was an over-disciplined little girl frightened ever to defy her father – until she did, when she went to be a nurse – then she was also taken as a matter of course to Mafeking Night, and the celebrations at the end of the Boer War, and to all the Exhibitions, and to line the route when foreign kings and queens came on State Visits, and for trips on the new railways. She was taught to admire Darwin and Brunei, and to be proud of Britain’s role as the great exemplar of progress. She was taught to take herself off to museums and to use libraries.

And in Tehran, she made sure her children experienced what they should. I was held high through the same velvet curtains to see the night sky. ‘Moon, moon’ – lisped attractively, for my mother as she reported this became a winsome little girl. ‘Starth, starth’ – she said I said. When my father, with no histrionic talent at all, tried to say a child’s ‘moon’, but with a French ‘u’, for was it not also a lune? – then he failed. When it snowed – for it certainly snows heavily there, in Tehran, and I can see any time I want to the sheets of sparkling white over shrubs and walls – my mother built snowmen, with eyes of coal and noses of carrots, and cats of snow with green stone eyes. She was good at it, and made them well, and taught us how to say nose, and eyes, and paws and whiskers in French. She took us to mild slopes of snow, which I saw like the foothills of Everest, and pushed us off into snowdrifts while we clutched at teatrays, explaining that snow is water, which can also be ice and rain and hail. At holidays we were taken to the mountains, to Gulahek, whose name means a place of roses, and there in my mind now are the roses, red and white, pink and yellow, smelling of pleasure. And we were taken on picnics and to the Legation children’s fancy dress parties. All these events were presented to us as our heritage, and our due, and, too, our responsibility. This was snow, those were stars, and here on this rocky face near the road was where Khosrhu on horseback had been carved thousands of years ago – and the thousands of years, as she said it, became yesterday, appropriated as our heritage. When we went to parties at the Legation her voice told us this was where we belonged, these were nice people, and we were nice people too. But my father did not like Mrs Nelligan, the senior lady of the British community. If my mother’s voice had an orchestra of tones telling us what we must admire, then so did my father’s, contradicting hers, for he never liked people because of their degrees of ‘niceness’, and if I did not then understand this, I knew very well he criticized her for liking others because of their position in society, not because they were likeable. To write about all this now, the terrible snobbery of the time, is to invite, ‘Well what of it? That was then, it was that time …’ But if the vocabulary of snobbery has changed, its structure has not, and the same mechanisms operate now, while people laugh (mindlessly, I think) about the old days.

The truth is, she did very well for us, my brother and me, in that country where she enjoyed the best years of her life, for she might have been frustrated in all that side of her nature which would have made her a brilliantly efficient matron of a big hospital, but there was never a woman who enjoyed parties and good times more than she did, enjoyed being popular and a hostess and a good sort, the mother of two pretty, well-behaved, well-brought-up, clean children.

She told us over and over again, for it was so important to her, long after, in Africa, how she had dressed up for a fancy dress ball at the Legation as a cockney flower girl (and did she know that she was for that evening her own poor mother Emily?) and while she was dancing with some young man on the Legation staff, he stopped in the middle of the dance floor and said, scarlet with shame, ‘Good Lord, you aren’t Maude Tayler, are you? You are so pretty I didn’t recognize you.’ And of course slunk away, because of his gaffe. For my mother was supposed to be plain, a plain Jane, all her life. I think it was the need to make sure she didn’t become vain and flighty, like Emily. As a child, listening to the reminiscence (again and again), my heart hurt for her, and it went on hurting, as the story went on being told, for years – all her life – while her eyes glistened with real tears as she remembered the young man who thought she was so pretty.

There are memories that have about them something of the wonderful, the marvellous. A man, a gardener – Persian – stands over stone water channels, that come under the brick wall into the garden, bringing water from the snow-mountains, and he is pretending to be angry because I am jumping in and out of the delicious water, which splashes him too. I am sent by my parents into the kitchen to tell the servants that dinner may be served, and that is Tehran because I have my brother by the hand, and I look up, up, up at these tall dignified men and see that their faces are grave under their turbans, but their eyes smile.

And the most important, the one that has about it charm, magic, is also the most nebulous, and perhaps I dreamed it. I have lost my toy sheep, a bit of wood on wheels that has real sheepskin wrapped around. I am crying, and wander off and see a flock of sheep and the shepherd, a tall brown man in his brown robes, looking down at me. The dust is swirling around him and the sheep, and a sunset reddens the dust. That is all. In my Tales from the Bible for Children was a drawing of the Good Shepherd, but that could not have in it the dust, nor the smell of sheep and dust. The memory is charged with meaning, comes back and back, and I never know why.

Soon the tastes, textures, smells, of Persia faded because of the immediacy of the colours and smells and sounds of Africa, and it was only in the late 1980s that I went to Pakistan and there met a self still immersed in that early world. The voice of the man who chanted, or sang – what is the word for the most haunting of sounds, the Call to Prayer? … the slant of hot sun on a whitewashed wall where reddish dust lived in the grain of the white … and the smells, the smells, a compound of sunheated dust, urine, spices, petrol, animal dung … and the sounds and voices of the bazaar and its colour, explosions of colour … and the sad bray of donkeys who, according to the ideas of Islam, are shameful because they cry only for food and sex, but I think they cry from loneliness, and prefer Chesterton’s celebration of donkeys.

A cock crowing, a donkey braying, dust on a whitewashed wall – and there is Persia, and now, where I live in London, just down the hill a cock sometimes crows and at once I hardly know where I am.

Far away from England, in Persia, my parents were not as cut off from their family as they soon would be in Africa, for at least two relatives came to visit: one was Harry Lott, a cousin of my father’s. It is strange that of this man he talked of so often, for so many years, I can say nothing, for I don’t remember him. Uncle Harry Lott was the family’s good friend: he sent presents and wrote letters, and that went on when we were in Africa, too, until he died. ‘Oh he did love you kids, he couldn’t get enough of you,’ says Daddy, adding characteristically, ‘God knows why.’ And now I watch some little child in the arms of a loving friend, and know this will affect the child for always, like a little secret store of goodness, or one of those pills with a delayed reaction, releasing elixirs into the bloodstream all day – or for all of a life. But the child may remember nothing about it, not a thing. I find it a pretty uncomfortable experience, watching small children and what moulds and influences them, and they become adolescents, and you know exactly why they do this or that, while they often do not. And then they are young adults, still set in patterns of behaviour whose origins you know. Or, after a separation you meet this child grown or half-grown, and you find yourself searching in eyes that are unconscious of what you are looking for, or examine the way arms go around a friend, stiffly or warmly, or how a hand rests tenderly on the head of a dog.

The other visitor was Aunt Betty Cleverly, whose great love had been killed in the war – like all the women of her age in Europe then. She was a cousin of my father’s, a big untidy woman with a buck-toothed smile. She, too, loved us, and for years and years my brother and I were told of it, but what I remember is being in her bed in the early morning, and on the bedside table the early morning tea tray, she in a long-sleeved, very pink woollen nightgown, her long hair filling the bed and tangling me in soap-smelling brown silk, while she is soaking Marie biscuits in strong tea, giving me fragments to taste, and laughing while I shudder at the bitter taste, and she gives me a new clean biscuit and cries, ‘Don’t tell Mummy, I’m spoiling your appetite for breakfast.’ Then she sings ‘Lead Kindly Light’ and ‘Rock of Ages’ in a strong throaty voice, conducting herself with a teaspoon. Off she goes to China, for she is a missionary, and her letters to my parents report on the ways of the heathen who were being brought under control by Christianity, and on the London Missionary Society, and on parish matters back home in England.

When my father was due his leave at Home, after nearly five years of the Imperial Bank of Persia, first as branch manager in Kermanshah, and then as Assistant Manager in Tehran, he was expecting to return to Persia, and my parents’ minds were full of anxieties about how to educate their children. To leave the older child, me, behind in England, aged five, would have been usual for the time, but my mother knew from Kipling’s ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ what horrors of bullying and neglect small children could suffer because of ill-chosen parental substitutes. My father did not want to return to Persia. The social life bored him. He never had enjoyed working in a bank. The Persians were corrupt and when he said so no one seemed to think it mattered.