Under My Skin

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‘Besides’ – said this dinner companion – who seemed perfectly whole and present, despite his insufficient hold on his past, ‘the little blobs of colour move all the time, because the sun is moving outside.’

True. Move they do. You forget. You remember. As I brooded over the material for this book, faces and places emerged from the dark. ‘Good Lord! So there you are! Haven’t thought about you for years!’ Not only the perspective but what you are looking at changes.

When you write about anything – in a novel, an article – you learn a lot you did not know before. I learned a good deal writing this. Again and again I have had to say, ‘That was the reason was it? Why didn’t I think of that before?’ Or even, ‘Wait … it wasn’t like that.’ Memory is a careless and lazy organ, not only a self-flattering one. And not always self-flattering. More than once I have said: ‘No, I wasn’t as bad as I’ve been thinking,’ as well as discovering that I was worse.

And then – and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all – we make up our pasts. You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No, I do not think this is only the fault of story-tellers. A parent says, ‘We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, don’t you remember? – look, here is the photo.’ And at once the child builds from the words and the photograph a memory, which becomes hers. But there are moments, incidents, real memory, I do trust. This is partly because I spent a good part of my childhood ‘fixing’ moments in my mind. Clearly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs. Pressure had been put on me to admit that what I knew was true was not so. I am deducing this. Why else my preoccupation that went on for years: this is the truth, this is what happened, hold on to it, don’t let them talk you out of it.

Why an autobiography at all? Self-defence: biographies are being written. It is a jumpy business, as if you were walking along a flat and often tedious road in an agreeable half-dark but you know a searchlight may be switched on at any minute. Yes, indeed there are good biographers, nearly all of them in Britain now, for we are enjoying a golden age of biography. What is better than a really good biography? Not many novels.

In the year just finished, 1992, I heard of five American biographers writing about me. One I had never met or even heard of. Another, I was told by a friend in Zimbabwe, is ‘collecting material’ for a biography. From whom? Long dead people? A woman I met twice, once when she asked me carefully casual questions, has just informed me she has written a book about me which she is about to get published. Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly autobiographical material in novels and from two short monographs about my parents. Probably interviews, too, and these are always full of misinformation. It is an astonishing fact that you may spend a couple of hours with an interviewer, who is recording every word you say, but the article or interview always has several major errors of fact. But less and less do facts matter, partly because writers are like pegs to hang people’s fantasies on. If writers do care that what is written about them should somewhere connect with the truth, does that mean we are childish? Perhaps it does, and certainly I feel every year more of an anachronism. Returning to Paris after a year’s interval, I was interviewed by a young woman who had done me before. I said her previous article had been a tissue of invention, and she replied, ‘But if you have to get an article in to a deadline, and you didn’t have enough material, wouldn’t you make it up?’ Clearly she would not have believed me if I had said no. And that brings me straight to the heart of the problem. Young people brought up in today’s literary climate cannot believe how things were. You get sceptical looks if you say something like this: ‘Once serious publishers tried to find serious biographers for their serious authors.’ Now everyone takes it for granted that all they are concerned about is to publish as many biographies as possible, no matter how second-rate, because biographies sell well. Writers may protest as much as they like: but our lives do not belong to us.

If you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better. One – what else? – my relations with my mother, but what interests me now is not the narrowly personal aspect. I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable? Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic, certainly, but was not able to be kind. Every day you may watch, hear of, some young person, usually a girl, giving parents, often a mother, such a bad time that it could be called cruelty. Later they will say, ‘I am afraid I was difficult when I was an adolescent.’ A quite extraordinary degree of malice and vindictiveness goes into the combat. Judging from histories and novels from the past, things were not always like this. So what has happened, why now? Why has it become a right to be unpleasant?

I have a woman friend who in the Second World War went to New York with her young child, having no support in Britain, her home. She earned her living precariously as a model for artists, and sometimes modelling clothes. She lived in a small town outside New York. She was poor, isolated, and being twenty years old, yearned for some fun. Once, just once, exactly once, she left the little boy with a friend, spent the evening in New York, and did not get home until dawn. I used to listen to this boy, now adolescent, accuse her most bitterly, ‘You left me alone night after night and went off to enjoy yourself.’ A small boy, the son of parents who did not approve of smacking, had his fingers smacked once when he persisted in putting them through the paper covering jam pots. This became, ‘And you used to hit me when I was small.’ These petty recollections are to the point.

For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then cold and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises, was I matching what actually happened? And this is the second area of my preoccupation, which has to be linked with the first.

Why is it I have lived my whole life with people who are automatically against authority, ‘agin the government’, who take it for granted that all authority is bad, ascribe doubtful or venal motives to government, the Establishment, the ruling class, the local town council, the headmaster or mistress? So deep-rooted is this set of mind that it is only when you begin to climb out of it you see how much of your life has been determined by it. This week I was with a group of people of mixed ages, all on the left (or who had been once), and someone happened to mention that the government was doing something – quite a good thing, but that isn’t the point – and at once every face put on a look of derision. Automatic. Push-button. This look is like a sneer or a jeer, a Well, what can one expect? It can only come out of some belief, one so deep it is well out of sight, that a promise of some kind has been made and then betrayed. Perhaps it was the French Revolution? Or the American Revolution, which made the pursuit of happiness a right with the implication that happiness is to be had as easily as taking cakes off a supermarket counter? Millions of people in our time behave as if they have been made a promise – by whom? when? – that life must get freer, more honest, more comfortable, always better. Has advertising only set our minds more firmly in this expectant mode? Yet nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Above all, history tells us nothing stays the same for long. We expect gold at the foot of always renewable rainbows. I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expeditions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.

I have just read of a historian who claims that the distrust, even contempt, of government and authority is precisely because of the First World War, because of the stupidity and incompetence of its generals, because of the slaughter of Europe’s young men.

When journalists or historians come to ask about something in the past the hardest moment is when I see on their faces the look that means, But how could you have believed this, or done that? Facts are easy. It is the atmospheres that made them possible that are elusive. ‘You see, we believed …’ (You must have been pretty stupid then!) ‘No, you don’t understand, it was such a fevered time …’ (Fever you call it, do you!) ‘I know it’s hard to understand, without being immersed in the poisonous air of then.’

A subsidiary question, not without general relevance: how to account for the fact that all my life I’ve been the child who says the Emperor is naked, while my brother never, not once, doubted or criticized authority?

Mind you, a talent for seeing the Emperor’s nakedness can mean his other qualities are not noticed.

I am trying to write this book honestly. But were I to write it aged eighty-five, how different would it be?

3 (#ulink_3e1233e9-1582-541f-9df1-b85c8042293d)

A TINY THING AMONG TRAMPLING, knocking careless giants who smell, who lean down towards you with great ugly hairy faces, showing big dirty teeth. A foot you keep an eye on, while trying to watch all the other dangers as well, is almost as big as you are. The hands they use to grip you can squeeze the breath half out of you. The rooms you run about in, the furniture you move among, windows, doors, are vast, nothing is your size, but one day you will grow tall enough to reach the handle of the door, or the knob on a cupboard. These are the real childhood memories and any that have you level with grown-ups are later inventions. An intense physicality, that is the truth of childhood.

My first memory is before I was two, and it is of an enormous dangerous horse towering up, up, and on it my father still higher, his head and shoulders somewhere in the sky. There he sits with his wooden leg always there under his trousers, a big hard slippery hidden thing. I am trying not to cry, while being lifted up in tight squeezing hands, and put in front of my father’s body, told to grip the front of the saddle, a hard jutting edge I must stretch my fingers to hold. I am inside the heat of horse, the smell of horse, the smell of my father, all hot pungent smells. When the horse moves it is a jerking jolting motion and I lean back my head and shoulders into my father’s stomach and feel there the hard straps of the wooden-leg harness. My stomach is reeling because of the swoop up from the ground now so far below me. Now, that is a real memory, violent, smelly – physical.

‘Daddy used to put you in front of him on the horse when he rode to the Bank, and Marta waited at the gate to bring you back. You absolutely loved it.’ And perhaps I did, perhaps it was only the first ride, which I did not love, that has stayed in my memory. The gate is in a photograph, a graceful arch, and I have added it to the real memory. Of being lifted down into the hands of Marta, whom I disliked, there is nothing in my mind. Those rides had to be in Kermanshah, and I was two and a half when we left.

Sharp steep stone steps, like boulders on a mountainside; they are in a photograph, too, but the memory is of dangerous descent, threatened by sharp edges.

Another memory, a real one, not what was told me, or what is in the photograph album. A swimming bath, a large tank, full of great naked pallid people shouting and laughing and splashing me with hard slaps of cold water. The naked bodies were my mother, rowdy and noisy, enjoying herself, my father holding on to the edge of the tank, because that pitiful shrunken stump of a leg with its shrapnel scars, waving or jerking about in the water, made it hard for him to swim. And others, for the tank seems crowded with people. They are not naked, for they wear the serious swimming costumes of the time, but if adults are always dressed in the daytime, and then wear long-sleeved clothes in bed, when in bathing costumes they seem all pale flesh and unpleasant revelation. Loose bulging breasts. Whiskers of hair under arms, matting or streaming water like sweat. Sometimes snot on a face that is grinning and shouting with pleasure. Snot running into the water that already has dying or rotting leaves in it, as well as the broken reflections of clouds, down here, not up there in the sky. Small children are always trying to keep things in their proper places, their world is always coming apart, things in it move about, deceive, lie. ‘We used to swim every afternoon in the summer. And we had swimming parties at the weekend. Oh they were such fun. You always loved it when we had parties.’ Thus spoke my mother, mourning the best years of her life, in Persia. ‘We used to lift you in with us, but you screamed and had to be put back on the side. The water was so cold! It was mountain water. It came running down from the mountains in stone channels. You simply had to shout as you jumped in! There were beds of asters all around the tank. The Persian gardeners were wonderful, they grew everything.’ And so you imagine jumping in, all jolly and laughing, and being lifted out, you see the asters, in paintbox colours, and hear the scolding Persian gardeners, who would not let you pick the asters, mother said so. But the real memory, the authentic one, was of enormous pale bodies, like milk puddings, sloshing about in out-of-control water that smelled cold, the flailing large pale arms, the hard breath-stopping slap of water on your face. ‘Go on, be a sport, brave girls don’t cry about a silly little thing like that.’

Two memories, concocted ones, or induced, but probably true enough. In the 1960s, when we were experimenting with drugs, I tried one absolutely not to be recommended. You eat morning glory seeds, previously soaked in hot water to an acid jellyish state, but you have to eat a lot, in my case sixty or more. I felt sick, and as for the revelations I was doing as well using my novelist’s mind. I had been thinking, why had so little remained in me of that big stone house, with its big high stone rooms? I was born there. I learned to walk there. And imagined that I lay in a cot with bars, like a prison cell for size, and heard large feet clanging on stone. I knew the floors were stone and that there were few rugs, that the windows were large and showed mountains, that the house was cold in winter. The cot was bound to be something of the sort, and a small child hears every sound with new ears, nothing shut off, as adults shut off sound.

The other invited memory was useful, and has been ever since. I took mescalin – just once. Two friends monitored the dosage and then sat with me. They were concerned that I would jump out of a window or something of the kind, because someone they knew had done that a short time before. What I learned then was how strong in me was the personality I call the Hostess, for I was presenting my experience to them, chatting away, increasingly scatty, but in control, but all that was a protection for what went on within. This Hostess personality, bright, helpful, attentive, receptive to what is expected, is very strong indeed. It is a protection, a shield, for the private self. How useful it has been, is now, when being interviewed, photographed, a public person for public use. But behind all that friendly helpfulness was something else, the observer, and it is here I retreat to, take refuge, when I think that my life will be public property and there is nothing I can do about it. You will never get access here, you can’t, this is the ultimate and inviolable privacy. They call it loneliness, that here is this place unsharable with anyone at all, ever, but it is all we have to fall back on. Me, I, this feeling of me. The observer, never to be touched, tasted, felt, seen, by anyone else.

That day, chatting away, telling them this is happening, that is happening, I was protecting an experience I had induced. I was being born. In the 1960s this kind of ‘religious’ experience was common. I was giving myself ‘a good birth’ – in the jargon of the time. The actual birth was not only a bad one, but made worse by how it was reported to me, so the storyteller invented a birth as the sun rose with light and warmth coming fast into the enormous lamplit room. Why not? I was born early in the morning. Then I invented a chorus of pleasure that I was a girl, for my mother had been sure I was a boy and had a boy’s name ready. In this ‘game’ my girl’s name had been planned for months, instead of given me by the doctor. My father – well, where was he, in reality? He was ill because of his imaginative participation in the birth and had gone to sleep after being informed I was safely born.

Probably this ‘good’ birth was therapeutic, but it was the revelation of the different personalities at work in me I valued and value now. One had to be authentic and not invented, because it was unexpected. Before my eyes, through the whole experience that is, for hours, ran a picture show of beautiful and smart clothes, fashionable clothes, as if a fashion designer inside me was being given her head. They were not on me, but on fashion models: I have never worn this kind of garment. The other person, or personality, was a sobbing child. I wept, and wept, much to the concern of my companions, but I knew it was not important, my weeping. I do not cry enough; that has always been true, and to weep without constraint was a bonus and a bliss. I could easily have cradled that poor baby and comforted her, if I had not been so fascinated by the parallel picture gallery of wonderful clothes, and by the gracious protective chat of the hostess.

That weeping child … now she’s a real enemy. She transmogrifies into a thousand self-pitying impostors, grabbing and sucking, and when I cut off a long clutching tentacle, at once another appears, just where I don’t expect it.

An intensity of the senses accompanies drug-taking, a reminder of how small children experience tastes, textures, smells. While the drug was wearing off they took me out to a meal and I remembered how food tasted in childhood. The omelette exploded on my tongue into a hundred nuances of butter and egg and herb. Already, half-way through my life – I was in my forties – I had lost so much of my capacity for taste. We all fear old age because we are going to lose pleasure, be sans taste. But you lose it all slowly and unnoticed as you live. A small child does not taste anything like the same omelette an adult does. Heat suffocates and burns, pricking the skin, making small limbs wriggle and shrink. Cold attacks like freezing water. Smells expand the nose in delight, shrivel it in disgust. Noises, sounds, fill the inner ear, clamouring, insisting, threatening, listen to me. Children and grown-ups do not live in the same sensory world.

I do not actually remember, I was only told, that the climate in Kermanshah was all extremes. It was very hot. It was very cold. It was nearly always very dry. ‘The air was so dry the servants threw out the household slops on to the ground behind the house and by lunchtime it was just dust.’ ‘In Kermanshah the washing was hung out in the early morning and it was bone dry by ten.’

There were three adults in that house, not counting the Persian servants. One was a friend, an American, working in oil. For years I wondered why the American male voice seduced and cajoled, soothed, promised more than any reasonable woman could believe in. At last I saw the obvious explanation and with what reluctance had to accept – again – that our lives are governed by voices, caresses, threats we cannot remember.

A fourth absolutely valid hallmarked memory is of the journey from Kermanshah to Tehran, by car. There were not many cars then, in Persia. We drove through mountains on roads made for caravans, horses, mules, donkeys. It was an open car. I looked over the side, gripping rough canvas, down, down over cliffs to valleys that were all rock, and in particular one a rocky abyss with a village like one of my toys perched beside it. I would recognize that valley now, because terror imprinted it on me for ever. The car ground along the edge of the track that wound around the mountain, wheels on the edge of a void. Then a rocky corner blocked the car. The grown-ups got out with difficulty because my mother was very pregnant, and my father had to manoeuvre his clumsy wooden leg. I was handed over the canvas hood at the back of the car, and I stood behind the screen of my father’s legs, one of my arms around a real warm human leg, the other around the hard wood of the dead leg, and I peered down through the legs. Meanwhile the driver (who?) ground the car forward, one wheel on the collapsing outer edge of the track. He was driving, it seemed, into blue air … the terror of it, watching the car, would it go over, roll down that mountain? Just above us balanced an eagle large enough to snatch a child, looking down at me. ‘Daddy, Daddy, look at the big bird,’ but the bird did not swoop off with me, and the car did not go over the edge, for the next thing was, we were in the Edwardian nursery in Tehran, where my brother was soon born.

My mother planned to use the loving coercions of Montessori for our upbringing, but meantime it was the harsh disciplines of one Doctor Truby King that ruled the nurseries both in Kermanshah and in Tehran. He was a New Zealander, whose book was law for innumerable parents, and whose influence can still be heard in the voices of older nurses and nannies. ‘You must have discipline – that’s the important thing.’ Truby King was the continuation of the cold and harsh discipline of my mother’s childhood and my father’s childhood. I am sure my mother never saw this: she was only doing what all good parents did. Even to read that guide to excellence in family relations is painful.

Take feeding. The infant was supposed to be fed every two hours, and then every three hours, day and night, and the consummation and crown of this clockwork provisioning was to achieve a four-hourly, or three-hourly, pattern of four or six feeds a day, while between them the baby must be left to howl and scream, otherwise the baby will call the tune, the baby will rule the roast, the baby’s character will be ruined for life, the baby will become spoiled, soft, self-indulgent, and above all, the baby will ‘get on top’ of the mother. The baby must never be picked up between feeds. The baby must learn what’s what and who is boss right from the start, and this essential instruction must be imparted while the infant is lying alone in a cot, in its own room, never in the parents’ bedroom. He, she, must learn its place, understand its position in the universe – alone.

In my case, as my mother cheerfully told me, again and again, I was starved for the first ten months of my life since, because she could not feed me, being too run-down after the war, she fed me cows’ milk, diluted to English standards, and cows’ milk in Persia had only half the goodness of cows’ milk in England. ‘You just screamed and screamed all day and all night.’

Well, perhaps, but in the photographs I do not seem to be a mere rack of bones. I look quite plump and cheerful. Why did my mother need to tell her little daughter, so often, and with such enjoyment, that she had been starved by her mother all through her infancy? I think her sense of the dramatic might have contributed here. It used to drive me wild with irritation – and my father too – that everything, always, was presented to the world as a drama. I did not mind that she acted out everything, but that she seemed unaware she was doing it. But have it her way: if I was a permanently hungry baby, it did not seem to do me much harm.

Now, toilet training, that key to character building. Believe it or not, it was recommended the infant must be held over the pot from birth, at regular times every day. ‘You were clean by the time you were a month old!’ Do I believe this? I do not, but the triumph in her voice spoke of victories over much more than an infant’s bowels. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. (The Koran has something on these lines too.) A small baby has no control over its functions. But if you ‘hold out’ an infant, with encouraging words, using the cold edge of the pot firmly, as a reminder, pouring water from a jug held high enough to make a tinkling sound into a basin, all the while gently rubbing the stomach, then the infant is likely to oblige. Just imagine it, from one end of the British Empire to the other, wherever the map of the world was coloured pink, British matrons or their nurses were ‘holding out’ tiny infants.

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.

Meanwhile absence from England had not made his heart grow fonder. Nor did it, ever. Until he died he would see England – England, not Britain, or at least it was not Britain he apostrophized – as a country that had betrayed its promises to its people, as cynical, as corrupt. It was full of complacent crooks who had got rich out of the war and of stupid women who gave white feathers to men in civvies, half-dead from the Trenches, and then spat at them. And the people had no idea of what the Trenches had been like. And he would sing, all his life, his voice stiff with anger,

And when they ask us …And they’re certainly going to ask us …We’re going to tell them …

But they didn’t ask, they never did, for the war had become the Great Unmentionable. Yet now he had to face six months’ leave in the place. He would have to spend time with his brother Harry, whom he had always disliked, and who patronized him, for he was the successful one, a manager of the branch of the Westminster Bank, with a yacht and a smart car and a house my father hated, for it was the essence of smart suburbia. What matched his idea of himself, and where he had felt perfectly at home, was the great stone house in Kermanshah, with the snow-covered mountains all around. But he had lost that for ever. He did not like his brother’s wife, Dolly, found her silly and suburban. He disliked his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret, and thought my mother’s brother a bore. Six months of relatives, hell on earth, in snobby, self-important, provincial, parish pump, ignorant, little England. And then back to Tehran again, and its busy snobbish social life, the picnics and the Legation parties and the musical evenings where his wife played, while some young man sang ‘The Road to Mandalay’ and ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’. ‘Why can’t people sit at home and be quiet?’ he demanded, like the philosophers. But my mother merely smiled, for she knew she was in the right. The trouble was, his eccentricity was infecting her daughter.

‘No I don’t want to, I won’t,’ I weep, being forced into a Bo-peep costume. ‘I don’t want to be Bo-peep. Why can’t I be a rabbit like Harry?’ My mother laughs at me because of the ridiculousness, and the trouble is, I can feel my face wanting to laugh too. I change ground. ‘I don’t want to go to the party. I don’t like parties.’ ‘Nonsense. Of course you like parties. Of course you want to be Bo-peep.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t.’ ‘Don’t be silly. Tell her she’s being silly, Michael.’ ‘Why should she go if she doesn’t want to?’ says Daddy, testy, irritable – difficult. ‘I don’t want to go either. Parties! Who thought of them first? Whoever it was should be hanged, drawn and quartered. The devil, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ ‘Oh Michael …’ ‘No, I tell you, I’ve only got to think of a party and I want to upchuck. And that’s what these kids are going to do. Well, don’t they? They get overexcited, they eat too much, sick all over the place.’ ‘Oh rubbish, Michael, you like parties really.’

No hatred on earth is as violent as the helpless rage of a little child. And there was Gerald Nelligan, confronting his mother and shouting, ‘No I don’t want to, I won’t dress up, why should I?’ He was two years older than me, a big boy, but he flung himself down in the flailing white-faced yelling rage you see trapped children use every day. But they will be saying later, ‘I had a wonderfully happy childhood.’ Nature knows what it is doing, prescribing amnesia for early childhood.

And now, the cat: I wrote about this cat in Particularly Cats, but I know it needs more emphasis. ‘You found that dirty cat in the gutter and brought it into the drawing room, and it was bigger than you were,’ said my mother, being the child and the cat together. ‘And you insisted on having it in your bed. We washed it in permanganate …’ An essential prop of the British Empire, permanganate of potash. ‘And old Marta came storming in and said, “Why is that dirty cat allowed here?”’ But I was allowed the cat, and how much I loved it does not need much in the way of deduction. For years the death of a cat plunged me into grief so terrible I had to regard myself as rather mad. Did I feel anything as bad when my mother died, my father died? I did not. That old cat, rescued from slow death on the streets of Tehran, was my friend, and when we left Persia, what happened to it? They told me soothing lies, but I did not believe them, for I wept inconsolably. ‘You were inconsolable,’ says my mother.

I was getting on for being an old woman when I experienced grief which, on a scale of one to ten – ten being the real, frightful sodden depression that immobilizes, and which I have not myself experienced – was at nine. On this scale, grief for a dying cat is at four or five, while grief for parents and brother is at two. Clearly, the pulverizing pain over the cat is ‘referred pain’ as the doctors call it, when you have pain in one organ, but really another is the cause. Surely one has to ask, but why? And, at force nine, I was pulverized with a grief I did not know the origin of, and still don’t.

But the question surely must be, why, of so many memories from that early time, there are so few that are jolly, pleasant, happy, even comfortable? That hungry, angry little heart simply refused to be appeased? Is there a clue in the business with the photographer? I was three and a half. There survives a photograph of a thoughtful little girl, a credit to everyone concerned, but as it happens I remember what I was feeling. There had been a long nag and fuss, and worry and trouble about the dress, of brown velvet, and it was hot and itchy. My stockings had been hard to get on, were twisted and wrinkled, and had to be hitched up with elastic. My new shoes were uncomfortable. My hair had been brushed, and done again and again. There was a padded stool I was supposed to sit on but it was hard to climb on to and then stay on, for it was slippery. I had also been put on a very large solid carved wooden chair, but then they said it was not right for me. They? – my mother and the photographer, a professional, whose studio was full of Japanese screens showing sunsets and lake scenes and flying storks, of chairs and tables and cushions and stuffed animals to set the scene for children. But I insisted on my own teddy, scruffy, but my friend. I felt low and nervous and guilty, because I was causing so much trouble: as usual it was as if my mother had tied, but too fast and awkwardly, a large clumsy parcel – me – and I did not fit in anywhere, and might suddenly come untied and fall apart and let her down. I felt weary. This small sad weariness is the base or background for all my memories. Everything was too much, that was the point, too high, or too heavy, or too difficult, or too loud or bright, and I could never manage it all, though they expected me to.

4 (#ulink_40d703cf-5ce1-5d39-860f-8e91cc6ddd79)

WHEN MY MOTHER DECIDED to travel to England via Moscow, across Russia, because she did not want to expose her little children to the heat of the Red Sea, she did not know what she was doing – as she often said herself. ‘If I’d only known!’ She did know we would be the first foreign family to travel in an ordinary way since the Revolution. It was 1924. That it would be difficult, of course she knew, but difficulties are made to be overcome. The journey turned out to be horrendous, told and told again, the vividest chapter in the family chronicle. What I was told and what I remember are not the same, and the most dramatic moment of all is nowhere in my memory. At the Russian frontier, it turned out we did not have the right stamps in our passports, and my mother had to browbeat a bemused official into letting us in. Both my mother and my father loved this incident: she because she had achieved the impossible, he because of his relish for farce. ‘Good Lord, no one would dare to put that on the stage,’ he would say, recalling the calm, in-the-right, overriding British matron, and the ragged and hungry official who had probably never seen a foreign family with well-dressed and well-fed children.

The most dangerous part was at the beginning, when the family found itself on an oil tanker across the Caspian, which had been used as a troop carrier, and the cabin, ‘not exactly everyone’s idea of a cruise cabin’, was full of lice. And, probably, of typhus, then raging everywhere.

The parents sat up all night to keep the sleeping children inside the circles of lamplight, but one arm, mine, fell into the shadow and was bitten by bugs, and swelled up, red and enormous. The cabin was usually shared by members of the crew, and was small. For me it was a vast, cavernous, shadowy place, full of menace because of my parents’ fear, but above all, the smell, a cold stuffy metallic stink which is the smell of lice. From the Caspian to Moscow took several days, and the tale went like this: ‘There was no food on the train, and Mummy got off at the stations to buy from the peasant women, but they only had hard-boiled eggs and a little bread. The samovar in the corridor most of the time didn’t have water. And we were afraid to drink unboiled water. There was typhoid and typhus, and filthy diseases everywhere. And every station was swarming with beggars and homeless children, oh it was horrible, and then Mummy was left behind at a station because the train just started without warning and we thought we would never see her again. But she caught us up two days later. She made the station master stop the next train, and she got on to it and caught us up. All this without a word of Russian, mind you.’

What I remember is something different, parallel, but like a jerky stop-and-start film.

The seats in the compartment, which was like a little room, were ragged, and they smelled of sickness and sweat and of mice, in spite of the Keating’s Insect Powder my mother sprinkled everywhere. Mice scurried under the seats and ran between our feet looking for crumbs. The lamps on the wall were broken, but luckily my mother had thought of candles. At night I woke to see long pale dangerous flames swaying against the black panes where cracks let in air, warm in the south, cold in the north. I held my face in it, because of the smell. It was April. My father had flu, and lay on an upper bunk, away from the two noisy children and our demands. My mother was frightened: the great Flu Epidemic was over, but the threat of it would be heard in people’s voices for years yet. There were little bloody dots and spatters on the seats, and that meant lice had been here. Years later I had to sit myself down and work out why the words flu and typhus made me afraid. Flu was easy, but typhus? It was from that journey. For years the word ‘Russia’ meant station platforms, for the train stopped all the time, at sidings as well as big towns, on the long journey from Baku to Moscow.

The train groaned and rattled and screamed and strained to a stop among crowds of people, and what frightening people, for they were nothing like the Persians. They were in rags, some seemed like bundles of rags, and with their feet tied in rags. Children with sharp hungry faces jumped up at the train windows and peered in, or held up their hands, begging. Then soldiers jumped down from the train and pushed back the people, holding their guns like sticks to hit them with, and the crowds fell back before the soldiers, but then swarmed forward again. Some people lay on the platforms, with their heads on bundles and watched the train, but not expecting anything from it. My parents talked about them, and their voices were low and anxious and there were words I did not know, so I kept saying, what does that mean, what does that mean? The Great War. The Revolution. The Civil War. Famine. The Bolsheviks. But why, Mummy, but why, Daddy? Because we had been told that the besprizorniki – the gangs of children without families – attacked trains when they stopped at stations, as soon as my mother got out to buy food, the compartment door was locked and the windows pushed up. The locks on the door were unsafe and suitcases were pushed against it. This meant my father had to come down from his high shelf. He wore his dark heavy dressing gown, bought for warmth in the Trenches, but under it he kept on all his gear and tackle for the wooden leg, so he could put it on quickly. Meanwhile the pale scarred stump sometimes poked out from the dressing gown, because, he joked, it had a life of its own, for it did not know it was only part of a leg, and in moments of need, as when he leaned forward to open the compartment door to let in my mother – triumphant, holding up her purchases, a couple of eggs, a bit of bread – it tried to behave like a leg, instinctively reaching out to take weight. The two little children fearfully watched our mother out there among those frightening crowds, as she held out money to the peasant women for the hard eggs, the half-loaves of the dark sour stuff that was called bread. The story said we were hungry because there was not enough food, but I don’t remember feeling hungry. Only the fear and the anguish, looking at those swarms of people, so strange, so unlike us, and at the ragged children who had no parents and no one to look after them. When the train jerked forward, the soldiers jumped on to it, clutching what they had managed to buy from the women, and then turned to keep their guns pointed at the children who ran after the train.

The story says we were read to, we played with plasticine, we drew pictures with chalks, we counted telegraph wires and played ‘I-Spy’ out of the windows, but what is in my mind is the train rattling into yet another station – surely it was the same one? – the ragged people, the ragged children. And again my mother was out there, among them all. And then, when the train was pulling out, she did not appear in the corridor outside the compartment, holding up what she had bought to show us. She had been left behind. My sick father held himself upright in the corner and kept saying it was all right, she would come soon, nothing to worry about, don’t cry. But he was worried and we knew it. That was when I first understood the helplessness of my father, his dependence on her. He could not jump down out of the train with his wooden leg and push through the crowds looking for food. ‘You had to share an egg between you and there were some raisins we brought with us, but that was all.’ She would have to reappear, she would have to, and she did, but two days later. Meanwhile our train had been slowing, groaning and screeching, again and again, into stations, into sidings, into the crowds, the besprizomiki, the soldiers with guns. I don’t remember crying and being frightened, all that has gone, but not the rough feel of the dressing gown on my cheek as I sat on my father’s good knee and saw the hungry faces at the window, peering in. But I was safe in his arms.

A small girl sits on the train seat with her teddy and the tiny cardboard suitcase that has teddy’s clothes in it. She takes the teddy’s clothes off, folds them just so, takes another set of clothes from the case, dresses the teddy, tells it to be good and sit quietly, takes this set of clothes off the teddy, folds them, takes a third set of trousers and jacket out, puts the taken-off clothes back in the case, folded perfectly, dresses the teddy. Over and over again, ordering the world, keeping control of events. There, you’re a good teddy, nice and clean.

From Moscow comes the most powerful of all my early memories. I am in a hotel corridor, outside a door whose handle is high above my head. The ceiling is very far away up there, and the great tall shiny doors go all along the corridor, and behind every door is a frightening strangeness, strange people, who appear suddenly out of a doorway or walk fast past all the shut doors, and disappear, or arrive at the turn of the corridor and then vanish into a door. I bang my fists against our door, and cry and scream. No one comes. No one comes for what seems like for ever, but that cannot have been so, the door must have soon opened, but the nightmare is of being shut out, locked out, and the implacable tall shiny door. This shut door is in a thousand tales, legends, myths, the door to which you do not have the key, the door which is the way to – but that is the point, I suppose. Probably it is in our genes, I wouldn’t be surprised, this shut door, and it is in my memory for ever, while I reach up, like Alice, trying to touch the handle.

And now we are in England. One might ask why none of the ‘nice’ memories, like snapshots, of pretty England, hollyhocks, cottage gardens, a thatched cottage, rocky seaside pools, are as powerful as the memories of dismal England – ganglia of black wet railway lines, rain streaming down cold windows, dead pale fish on slabs held right out into the street, the bleeding carcases on their great steel hooks in the butchers’ shops. I met my step-grandmother, so they say, and there is a photograph of me on her knee, but not even a deduced truth emerges. I met my father’s father, whose wife Caroline May died that year, and who was about to marry his thirty-seven-year-old bride: probably like all those women, she had lost her love in the Trenches, and marrying an old man was the only chance she had of a husband.

All kinds of visitings and little trips went on, but children are taken around like parcels. A Miss Steele helped with the children, and it is she who provides the sharpest memory of that six months. A room in a hotel. Again it is crammed with furniture, enormous, difficult to make one’s way around and through. Two large beds, one mine, and a large cot. The flame on the wall, which is gas, is dangerous, and must be watched, like a candle, although it cannot be overturned like a candle, and it makes a striated light in the room, full of air that seems greyish brown. Dark rain streams down dirty panes. It is cold. The damp woollen bundle that is my little brother snuffles drearily in his cot. Miss Steele has ordered us not to watch her while she is dressing. Miss Steele is so tall she seems to reach the ceiling, and she has floods of dark hair about her shoulders, over her front, and down her back. She has on bright pink stays, and pale flesh bulges out showing through the hair, and below it around her thighs. I see my little brother’s bright curious eyes, then he squeezes them shut, pretending to be asleep, then they gleam again. Miss Steele lifts her arms to slip a white camisole over her bushes of hair. Under her arms are silky black beards. I feel sick with curiosity and disgust. There is a smell of dirt and the unwashed smell of Miss Steele, sour and metallic, the smell of wet wool from my brother, and my own dry and warm smell that rises in waves when I lift the grimy blankets and take a sniff. The smells of England, the smells of wet, dirty, dark and graceless England, the smells of the English. I was sickening for Persia and the clean dry sunlight, but did not know what was wrong with me, for small children are so immersed in what surrounds them, their attention demanded all the time by keeping themselves upright and doing the right thing, they have not yet learned that particular nostalgia for place. Or so I think it must be. Or perhaps I was sickening for my lost love, the old cat. Long afterwards, I stood in Granada in Spain and saw the circling snow-topped mountains, and smelled the clean sunny air, and Kermanshah came back, in a rush: this was what it had been like.

But the question surely has at least to be put: why not remember just as intensely the jolly picnics in the hayfield, or the salubrious sandcastles, or the kindly arms of Aunt Betty and Uncle Harry Lott?

A sharp, indeed lurid, little memory is different from all the other English memories. A newspaper comic strip, about the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfski must have been among the very first attempts at anti-Communist propaganda. Wilfski, a bewhiskered villain like a cockroach, was based on Trotsky. He always had a bomb in his hand, threatening to blow something or somebody up. He was designed to inspire fear, horror, and that is what he did.

When we left England for Africa, my father’s father, the widower, stood in his thick tweedy clothes in a dark hall with a grandfather clock ticking just behind him, and he wept, and on his long white beard was a string of snot. This was what the child had to see, for the first years of children are devoted to subduing and ordering the physical, snot, shit, pee, a prison they struggle to get out of, and will not enter again until they are old. The old man wept, his heart was broken, he had not seen his son and his son’s wife for five years, and he had only just met his grandchildren, but now they were off to Africa where the missionaries his church raised funds for converted savages who might even be cannibals. They talked airily of returning in another five years. He wept and wept, and his granddaughter felt sick at the sight of him and would not let herself be kissed. And perhaps he wept, too, because the family did not approve of him marrying Marian Wolfe, ‘a girl half his age’.

The last weeks before leaving England were a rush of buying the things my mother needed for the life she thought she was going to lead. She was guided by leaflets and information from the Empire Exhibition, at whose instigation they were going to Southern Rhodesia, where they would be rich in five years growing maize. For my father, this was a chance to become what he had always wanted to be, ever since his country childhood with the farmers’ sons around Colchester. And there had been farmers in his family. But he had never had the capital to farm. Clearly, the more Exhibitions a nation has, the better. That Empire Exhibition of 1924, which lured my father out to Africa – how often have I come on it in memoirs, novels, diaries. It changed my parents’ lives and set the course of mine and my brother’s. Like wars and famines and earthquakes, Exhibitions shape futures.

Apart from shopping at Harrods, Liberty’s and the Army & Navy Stores, they both had all their teeth out. The dentist and the doctor said so. Teeth were the cause of innumerable ills and woes, they were of no use to anyone, and besides, there would not be any good dentists in Southern Rhodesia. (Untrue.) This savage self-mutilation was common at that time. ‘We continue to burn candles in churches and consult doctors’ – Proust.

The family stood on the deck of the German ship and watched the chalky shores of England recede. My mother wept. The desolation of separation was settling on my heart, but it cannot have been England I wept for, since I hated it. My father’s eyes were wet, but he put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Now come on, old thing!’ And turned her away from the disappearing cliffs to go inside.

There was also on deck, apart from my little brother, Biddy O’Halloran, who was to be our governess. What I know about her is mostly what I was told. She was twenty-one. She was Irish. She was ‘fast’, a ‘flapper’, a Bright Young Thing. She was definitely no better than she ought to be. Why? She had shingled hair, used make-up and smoked, and was too interested in men. Much later my mother was remorseful, because she had given Biddy a hard time. This was when she, too, smoked, cut her hair, and used some lipstick. ‘And I wonder what ever happened to her’ – for Biddy clearly found the experience so appalling she never wrote to us. Later she married an Honourable and was in society newspapers.

But she was just one of the many people who had already appeared in my life and disappeared. Acquaintances, lovers, friends, intimates – off they go. Goodbye. Till next time. A bientôt. Poka. Tot siens. Arrivederci. Hasta la vista. Auf wiedersehen. Do svidania. The way we live now.

It was a long voyage, weeks and weeks. A slow boat. Why a German boat? Perhaps my father was putting into practice his feeling of comradeship with the German soldiers who had been sold down the river by their government, just like the English tommies, and the French poilus.