And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
D.H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguous, all himself. One may write a life in five volumes, or in a sentence. How about this? Alfred Tayler, a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in the First World War, tried to live as if he were not incapacitated, illnesses defeated him, and at the end of a shortened life he was begging, ‘You put a sick old dog out of its misery, why not me?’
This sentence ignores impressive things. He would ride, in Kermanshah, Persia, to his work at the bank. I’ve seen him go down a rough mine shaft in a bucket, his wooden leg sticking out and banging against the rocky sides. He ran, or hobbled, in fathers’ races at my brother’s school. He climbed a difficult tree to a tree house made by my brother and me. He would go stomping through the bush, more than once taking a fall, or clamber over the great clods in a ploughed field. The contraption that enabled him to do all this was called by him ‘my wooden leg’, and it lived, in duplicate, leaning against a wall in the parental bedroom. Recently Burroughs and Wellcome had an exhibition of their products past and present in the British Museum and there in a glass case, a museum piece, I saw my father’s wooden leg. It consisted of a bucket shape in wood, into which the poor wasted stump was put, on a metal leg and foot, and heavy straps that held the device in place. The stump was fitted with stump socks, in knitted wool, up to ten of them, according to the weather and the condition of the stump. If the weather was hot, the socks were itchy and uncomfortable. When my father got diabetes and lost weight, he filled the well with layers of wool. The War Office supplied the wooden leg, and replacements when it wore out. On to the foot went ordinary socks and a shoe. The knee was flexible, in metal. This contraption in no way resembled the artificial legs of now, which are light and clever and can do everything.
That sentence resumé does not mention the diabetes, which, when they first found insulin, was managed with none of the subtlety they use now.
Reading what I wrote about my father, listening in my mind’s ear to things he said, one thing stands out. Medicine generally has evolved so that probably most people now would not recognize its clumsiness at the time my father was wounded. He said that his mind was full of horrors as he lay in hospital: ‘Dr.eadful things, horrible, awful. I would wake up screaming.’ My mother, nursing him, confirmed. ‘I was afraid to sleep.’ This sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder, long before the condition was described, but surely not the idea. ‘Shell shock’ has in its syllables the sense of trauma. The doctor, called by my father ‘that nice doctor chap’, suggested that my father was lucky to have avoided shell shock.
There are pills for it today, surely, and for what sounds to me like a major depression: ‘I was inside a dark cloud. It clung to me. You see, the men who were killed and wounded, the men in my company, oh, they were such fine chaps. I couldn’t stop thinking of them. There was such a weight on my heart. My heart felt like a big cold stone…’
People who have experienced grief will testify that it is felt in the heart, like a weight of cold pain.
But no mention was made of medicines. Bromide, was it? If so, it didn’t seem to do much for him.
If he had post-traumatic stress disorder or very bad depression these days, there would be miraculous pills, dulling it all.
And now, looking back at that life, it is evident to me that my father, during the dreadful slow end of it, was depressed. Now the grim and ghastly depressions of old people are common knowledge. He would be medicated out of the worst of it. But no one then suggested that my father was ill with bipolar or any other depression and needed serious medicines.
My father slept badly for all his life, what there was of it; he dreamed of his old comrades, and grieved for them. Yes, the pain of grief does soften and go, but at the breakfast table he might say to my mother, ‘I was dreaming of Tommy again,’ or Johnny or Bob. ‘There he was, telling me a joke about something.’ Quite right! Dead soldiers simply should not be angry ghosts displaying their wretched wounds. He was a great joker, obviously, Tommy or Johnny or Bob, and I think the Bairnsfather cartoons, much relished in our house, were responsible for that. Old Bill, the archetypical British Tommy, didn’t go in for grief or repining, whether up to his waist in dead water in a shell hole, or trying to hide from the shells under a bright moon. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on him,’ was the caption of one cartoon: a girl in England with her hair floating looks at the moon out of her bedroom window, and meanwhile her lover is cowering from it under shell-fire. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on…’ became a bit of a catchphrase for us, the children included.
Thus. It is bright moonlight, we stand on the hill and down there the great mealie field is rippling in the moonrays, just green, just not green. It is possible to see there are people too because parts of the field are gently agitated. ‘Thieves,’ says my father, pleased because of the predictability of it all. ‘What’s the sense,’ he enquires of the night, the universe, ‘to go stripping cobs under a bright moon?’
‘While the same dear old moon is looking down on us,’ says my mother.
Or, my brother off at boarding school, and she is mourning because of his absence: ‘The same dear old moon…’
‘Oh, come off it, old girl,’ says my father, bruised by the sentimentality she enjoys. She had never understood why her higher flights embarrassed him. We, the children, were appalled by them. But some kinds of sentimentality have in them an antidote. She was moved, her voice was rich with tears. She felt it, all right. But isn’t sentimentality intolerable because it is false feeling? My mother was capable of weeping because of Oates going out into the snow – ‘I may be some time’ – or the Last Post coming from the noisy radio that was so hard to keep steady on a wavelength. Yet when something terrible had to be done, like shooting an ill dog or drowning kittens, she did it, lips tight, face hard. She complained that my father had a cold heart.
When she was ill, shortly after reaching the farm, she was intolerably sentimental, and this leads me straight into the hardest part of what I am trying to understand.
Nothing that she ever told, or was said about her, or one could deduce of her in that amazing girlhood, so busy, so full of achievement, or of her nursing years, about which we had the best of witnesses, my father himself, or the years in Persia, so enjoyable and so social, nothing, anywhere, in all this matches up with what my mother became.
Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several.
As a child I was desperately sorry for my mother, even when I was planning to run away (how? in the bush? where to?). I was sorry for her because she was hardly silent about her sufferings. And that is where we begin with the question, when was Emily McVeagh ever self-pitying, complaining, sorry for herself? I don’t think it was in her. And yet it must have been, the self-pitying tears welled up when she was sick with ‘a heart-attack’ and took to her bed. Now let’s look at this superbly healthy, energetic woman, who has brought two little children, five and three, all the way from Tehran to London, by ship to Cape Town, to Beira, by train to Salisbury, who helped her invalid husband choose a farm in uncharted, unworked wilderness, got the house built, from materials she had never seen and knew nothing about, got the house furnished, as was the way with ‘the settlers’, making curtains from dyed flour sacks, cupboards and tables from paraffin boxes, making everything herself – and then she and her husband got malaria, twice. Is there a clue there perhaps? Very debilitating, is malaria. And then, in that house, made of mud and grass, matching it with what she thought she was coming to, stuck there, and she knew it, she took to her bed with a heart-attack.
This was a nurse. She had nursed for years in one of the world’s great hospitals. She had nursed the wounded of a world war, and now it is easy to see she was in a state of dreadful anxiety, she was full of panic, she could look ahead and see she was trapped, with no way out. A heart-attack. So she said. She lay on her bed while my father coped with clearing bush, buying machinery, employing labour – about which he knew nothing at all – looking after the two little children, with the aid of a drunken widow calling herself a housekeeper. It was not like her, my mother. This was simply not what she was. She called her little children to her, and she said, ‘Poor Mummy, poor, poor Mummy.’
To this day I can feel the outrage I felt then. I was outraged, in a rage, furious, and of course desperately sorry for her. Was she ill? She was, if not with a heart-attack. She was ill, all right. And not herself. That was the point. And what were we supposed to do? Kiss her? Give her a good hug? But she did not only demand our pity with tears to match hers. That was not all she did.
The man who ran a sawmill, four miles off, admired her, and had made her a contraption to swing into place over her bed so she could read. He was one of the people I remember who thought my mother a marvel. To this reading device she summoned us and gave us our first lessons. I don’t remember what they were. I was too hot and angry. ‘You must look after your little brother,’ said my mother, in a voice sick with sentiment. But looking after my little brother had been my burden, my task, my responsibility, my pride always. Why, suddenly, did she insist on it now?
She was in bed, so she would tell us later, for a year, but it was not as long. Was it the drunken housekeeper who made it essential for her to get out of bed? Or was it the drunken housekeeper’s out-of-control twelve-year-old son, who beat up cats and dogs and bullied us?
She got up, and what that must have cost her I cannot begin to imagine. She was saying goodbye to everything she had expected for her life in this colony, which must have been something like Happy Valley in Kenya. (But if she had experienced Happy Valley she would have been disgusted by it.) In the trunk behind the Liberty curtain lay the evening dresses, the gloves, the feathers, the hats. In a purse put away somewhere the visiting cards she had made especially for this life. But the piano stood in the living-room, whose windows were shaped like portholes, looking out over that bush, and she played. She played, well, everything – but I was brought up knowing that the right accompaniment to Chopin and Beethoven was the thudding of native drums.
Now I look back and know that she had a bad breakdown, of everything she had been and was. That woman whimpering in her sickbed, ‘Pity me, pity’, it was not her.
But I have got ahead of myself, or beside myself. It is because of the impossibility of making sense of Time in its boundaries. Known boundaries and that is the point. I was having my fifth birthday on a German ship in the Atlantic, and when I was seven, was sent to the convent. Two years and perhaps a bit more. Into that time have to be fitted the following. The family went by slow train to Salisbury, where the children were left in a guesthouse, ‘Lilfordia’, while my parents went to look for a farm. Not in a nice, speedy car, but in a pony and trap. The farm found, we children and the trunks followed in a covered wagon, of the kind we see in films.
There being no house on our farm, the family were lodging with the Whiteheads, small-mine owners, while the house was being built and the lands marked out from the bush. Well, it need not take long to throw up mud walls and a thatched roof. And malaria – twice, for all of us. And now I have to fit in Biddy O’Halloran, who was supposed to be aiding my mother with her two little children. An au pair, she would be now. For both parents this girl was trouble and annoyance. The watching Fates must have been getting a good laugh out of the situation. Biddy was a modern girl, an entity much defended, or attacked, in those days. She smoked, had her hair in a shingle and wore lipstick, which my mother was doing herself very soon, but meanwhile she thought Biddy shameless. The trouble was that my parents were in Persia in the feverish post-war years. They missed the jazz, the Charleston, girls cutting off their hair with the élan with which girls burned their bras later. Dr.esses were at knee-length – or mini-length. Girls swore and drank, demanded the freedom to be like men.
Biddy O’Halloran appalled my father, too. Young men kept turning up, because of the new girl in the district. Many wanted wives, wanted them badly. No one could make a success of farming if he had no wife. My father hit one youth who asked for Biddy. ‘I think you must mean Miss O’Halloran?’ he demanded. ‘But I am in loco parentis. I am responsible for her.’ Were there darker currents here? Did my father ‘like’ Biddy – as we children would primly put it? Was my mother jealous of Biddy? Emily Tayler’s years in Persia had been all pleasure to the point that my father protested, ‘I had no idea I was marrying a social butterfly.’ In England, not much fun, but there was the boat. She and the captain got on famously. My father was sick in his berth. No one was ever better fitted for a sea voyage than my mother: she adored deck games and dances, and dressing up – all of it – and the German captain clearly admired her. The belle of the ball she must have been, with that trunk full of delicious frocks, but then there were the farm and impertinent Biddy, and everything went wrong, and very fast.
I owe to Biddy a memory that is one of the most important I have.
On the mine, the children – my brother, me and the Whiteheads – slept in a large hut. Four beds, each under a long white shroud, the mosquito net. The floor was mud with coconut matting. The roof was thatch.
Biddy comes into the hut with a candle and she stands looking about, wondering where to set it down. Beside my bed a little night-table – a paraffin box painted. She sets down the candlestick on this, and the flame of the candle is half an inch from the mosquito net, which would flare up like a lit match, or a firework, if it caught. My mother enters just behind Biddy. She sees what Biddy has done. Slowly, so as not to set up a current of fast air that might encourage the flame to reach for the net, she comes over, gently lifts the candlestick and takes it to set down on a table far from danger. She is white, she is clutching her throat. When she sits, or collapses, into a chair, she is trembling. If that flame had caught the net – mine – it would have flared, and set off the other three. One may not imagine anything more attractive to fire than a mosquito net, an airy pillar of white cotton. If the nets had flared, so would the thatch over our heads, and the tempestuously burning hut would have set off the whole group of thatched huts.
‘What are you doing?’ my mother asks Biddy, and her voice is cracked and whispery. Her mind is full of roaring flames, screaming children, the hut falling on us, the screams from the other huts…
What she is imagining is reaching me: I am already aware of and wary of fire. I begin to cry.
‘What is wrong?’ asks Biddy, quickly. She might just as well have twiddled a frond of her hair with a much-ringed finger, or sung a phrase or two of some winsome Irish folk tune. That there is something wrong my mother’s voice told her, not to mention my crying. ‘But nothing happened,’ she says pertly, at last. Nothing has.
But in my mother’s imagination everything was happening. She sat staring at Biddy and it is this that will never leave my mind. She is uncomprehending, bewildered. Her lips are white. Between the clever, foresightful people of this world and the ones without imagination there is a gulf into which perhaps we will all fall one day. My mother can’t believe that Biddy – or anyone – could do what she did.
‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ says Biddy, and goes off to her hut. My mother sits quite still, then she puts her face into her hands, which are shaking, and she weeps, dry, helpless sobs. ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God.’
Biddy was not exactly clever with children. She told my brother that if he didn’t keep his mouth shut grasshoppers would jump in and eat up his stomach. She told me a tree would grow out of me like Jack and the Beanstalk. My brother screamed and had nightmares. I didn’t believe in the tree but I early attained that admirable balance of small children. I was capable of believing and not believing at the same time. No tree – no, but what fun if there was…
Biddy left and my mother took to her bed. Biddy, later in Ireland, married a younger son and was to be seen in society columns. It is around then that I put the drunken housekeeper and her pathetic son, who now it is so easy to see as the victim of a marital breakdown. My mother sent for the government correspondence course. Every week the lessons arrived by train. Then I was sent for a term to a kindly place full of pleasant people. It seemed years I was there. Then I was put into a family near to Avondale Junior School, but they were cruel and stupid people. Much time passed there. Then they sent me to the convent school. Only two years had passed, and even now I can’t make it all fit. So many people, events, dramas, the malaria, watching the house-building. I learned to read off a cigarette packet. ‘Look, I can read.’ And then I was at the convent. Children should not be sent away from home aged seven. It does them no good at all.
But while I can remember vividly the difficult things, the drunk woman who shared my bedroom, my mother lying for ever in bed, I remember better a delight of my childhood that began about the time my mother got out of bed.
She told us stories. ‘More…More, please go on…more, please.’ She made whole epics out of the mice in the storeroom, the rats, the cats, the dogs, the chickens in the fowl run. A central feature of these tales was the tower of eggs in the storeroom, coveted by the mice and by the rats, who most ingeniously knew how to roll eggs free to smash and become available to them.
What a wonderful storyteller she was. She read to us too, and they were wonderful tales, but nothing would compare with her stories.
It is 1924, and two little people stand on the quay, watching how their luggage is being swung, piece after piece, up and over the ship’s side. My mother was counting the pieces: she could never believe others were as efficient as herself. ‘Wanted on Voyage’. ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’. They were about to sail off into the future, with as little understanding of the life they would lead as the first voyagers for Jamestown, or on the Mayflower later, on the east coast of America.
In those trunks and cases was everything for their imagined life. My father’s had accoutrements and clothes for cricket: he had scarcely played in Persia, but now he was going to a British colony and cricket there must be. A trunk held riding things. Not for hunting in the English manner – foxes and stags – but what a gentleman who always rode rather than walked would need. A long wooden case held his wooden legs. My mother’s imagined life held more variety. First, the trunk with the dozen or so dark-red leather volumes of music scores – Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Grieg, all of them – and, too, sheets of popular music, music hall songs and ballads sung when she was a girl around an Edwardian piano. A trunk, ‘Wanted on Voyage’, of evening frocks, scarves, gloves, hats, boas, bags, silvery stockings, brocaded shoes.
This former nurse took her earlier life with her: catheters, enemas, douches, stethoscopes, measuring glasses. These were in the bottom half of a trunk that had on its top layer the Mason’s equipment about which my father was so blisteringly sarcastic. Why did he take these things to Africa?
There was another box, or case, full of things for teaching children, crayons and chalks, and books. So this plenitude, the great heavenly provision, was there on the farm from the very start.
Where may one start?
A Child’s Garden of Verses, Stevenson.
The House at Pooh Corner, all of A.A. Milne.
Children’s annuals and collections. Readers of all kinds.
These were what she took with her. On the farm she ordered from England books for us. This meant laying out on the dining-table the Croxley writing-paper, pens, ink, and she wrote carefully long lists of books. They were addressed to London bookstores, stamped, and the envelope was taken by the boy on his bicycle to the station where it was handed in at the post office. Banket station, like a score or more of the stations in Rhodesia, consisted of, most important, the post office, a grocery for whites, another for blacks, a butcher, a ‘hotel’ – a dining-room off a brick veranda, gauzed for flies, and in it half a dozen tables and a few chairs. There were two bedrooms. There was the station building too. A real bar, but for whites only. The authorities, mindful of what had happened to the peoples of America when alcohol struck them, would not allow the locals to drink anything but their own ‘kaffir beer’. Quite soon this would become a political issue.
The letter was carried by train to Salisbury, taken to the post office there, and put on a train to Beira or to Cape Town. A ship took the precious letter to London, England. The letter was read, big brown-paper parcels were made up, tied with thick string, and they were on the ship to Cape Town and Beira. Then the reverse journey: the train to Salisbury and that post office, the train to Banket, where the parcels waited in the station office till the ‘boy’, or sometimes my mother, would come to collect them. And then the joy of those parcels, spread out on the dining-table, on the spare bed in my room. When I came from school for holidays the parcels would be waiting for me: my mother did not unpack them. My brother? He was never interested.
There was a Children’s Newspaper, made in London, with items from the general news rewritten for children, poems, stories, by Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon, a wonderful periodical – hours of enjoyment with each issue. This was the time when they were excavating in Egypt and in Ur – Iraq. They made magazines out of the stories of the finds, and photographs of the treasures. My mother ordered these, and the rooms under the thatch were illuminated for days with the pictures of Tutankhamun and Nefertiti, and the hoard of his possessions, with the golden artefacts from Ur.
Alice in Wonderland
The Secret Garden
The Wind in the Willows Struwwelpeter
Children’s Tales from Homer
Greek Myths for Children
The Sagas for Children
Black Beauty
Biffel a Trex Ox – a South African story about an ox working through the rinderpest epidemic. Oh, th tears, the sorrow.
Jock of the Bushveld
Kim
The Just So Stories
The Jungle Tales
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Huckleberry Finn
Peter Pan
A Life of Rhodes
A Life of Florence Nightingale
A Life of Wilberforce
Walter de la Mare’s The Three Royal Monkeys and his Poems
Longfellow
Beatrix Potter’s Tales
Uncle Remus
The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford
Little Black Sambo but since this hero did not resemble in any way the black people I was surrounded by, not in face, or in how he spoke or how he dressed, I was an adult before I understood that the golliwog-like creature was meant to be human. Caricature should not be too far from its subject.
There were children’s books from America, and some specifically for girls:
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne’s House of Dr.eams
Eleanor Hodgman, the Pollyanna books Gene Stratton Porter, Girl of the Limberlost, Laddie, The Keeper
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did, and other Katy stories
And the American writers who did not write specifically for children, of whom the best was Ernest Thompson Seton. He wrote about animals, and I had several by him, the best and most memorable being Lobo, A Wolf, but there were others about prairie dogs, a bear, a stag, a silver fox.
Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, People of the Abyss, The Sea Wolf
The Poems of Tennyson
The Legend of Arthur and the Round Table
Hans Christian Andersen Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies
Improbably, a wonderful book of fairy tales from Brazil, whose wildly romantic illustrations intoxicated me.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sleepy Hollow
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
In the bookcase made of black-lacquered paraffin boxes, were all of Dickens, Kipling in his limp red-leather covers, all of Walter Scott, Ruskin; and novels popular in 1924: for instance, Forest Lovers – by Maurice Hewlett – and a now forgotten novel by H. G. Wells, Joan and Peter, which much influenced my parents’ generation, all about education.
So this stream of books for children came pouring through our house and sometimes out again, for my mother complained, but was pleased about it, that people saw her as a kind of library. My father joined a book club in England for books about the Great War in Europe. Books by generals, the memoirs of, the lives of, the war years of…books of all kinds but very few – they came later – by women. A book related the adventures of a woman fighting in Russia who pretended to be a man, and got away with it till the war ended. A book about two women nursing the Serbian wounded. A book about VADs – Voluntary Aid Workers – in France.
These war books continued a theme: that there are two kinds of old soldier, those who cannot stop talking about their war, and those who shut up and never say a word. If this last sounds improbable, I met a man in the United States whose business it was (and still is) to accompany soldiers from the Second World War back to the scenes of their trial. There he discovered an amazing thing. The wives of those men went with them, and it turned out they had never heard a word of what their men had been through: they heard it all, for the first time, actually standing with their men in the places where it had been.
My father was of the first kind. Even as a child I knew his obsessive talking about the Trenches was a way of ridding himself of the horrors. So I had the full force of the Trenches, tanks, star-shells, shrapnel, howitzers – the lot – through my childhood, and felt as if the black cloud he talked about was there, pressing down on me. I remember crouching in the bush, my hands tight over my ears: ‘I won’t, I will not. Stop. I won’t listen.’ My mother’s voice? I could have listened, but it was all too much. The fate of parents who most terribly need their offspring to listen, to ‘take in’ something of their own substance, is often to be thwarted. My father’s need was, as it were, legitimate. The Trenches, yes, I had to accept that. But my mother also needed a listener, and to her needs I tried to be oblivious. Later, much later, did I see that my mother’s wartime ordeals were ravag-ing her from within just as my father’s Trenches were eating away at him.
For the years of the war, my mother nursed the men wounded in the Trenches. The wounded who could be saved went to local dressing stations and then were put on trains to London or other British cities. After the great battles, all the London hospitals were on alert for the influx of men, who would arrive in ambulances, lorries, even carts, to be put along the corridors and in any space available. ‘We had no room, you see,’ she would mourn. ‘There was no space for them. We didn’t have enough beds. They were so young, you see, so dreadfully young, those poor boys. They were dying. They were sometimes dead when they arrived. We did what we could. We would make wards for them out of the corridors. But they died, you see, and often we could do nothing. That was the awful thing. Sometimes there was nothing we could do. The medicines held out, though once or twice it was a close call. I remember once we ran out of morphine and that was so terrible. It was so terrible, do you see…’
And it went on, the awfulness, one year and into the next, and then another year. Sister McVeagh and her gallant band of nurses. ‘We were sometimes so tired you’d see a nurse keel over, asleep, as she was attending to a patient.’ And it all went on. She nursed her husband, Alfred Tayler, who nearly died, in the operation of taking his leg off, and it all went on, and on, and on. ‘That was it, do you see? It never seemed to end. And we’d finish doing our best after one battle, like Passchendaele, and then there was another battle and they came pouring in again. I can hear them call out now, ‘Nurse, Nurse.’ I can hear them. ‘Oh, the pain, Nurse, oh, Nurse, the pain.’ And my mother, who I maintain could have been an actress, made the sounds of the poor boys calling out for morphine painful, years and years later. ‘And the worst, you see, the worst was when they were calling for their mothers. They were just boys, that’s all. I remember one little lad, he was sixteen, he had pretended to be eighteen, but he was just…He died calling for his mother, and I…’ and Sister McVeagh, all those years later, wept, remembering how she had pretended to be his mother. ‘“Yes, I’m here,” I said. Oh, and when I think of it…’
Well, she did think of it, a great deal, and at times two streams of war horrors went on together, my mother’s ‘Oh, the poor boys’ like a descant to the Trenches.
So there was this load of suffering deep inside my mother, as there was inside my father, and please don’t tell me that this kind of pain, borne for years, doesn’t take its dreadful toll.
It took me years – and years – and years – to see it: my mother had no visible scars, no wounds, but she was as much a victim of the war as my poor father.
Thinking about those years, it is easy to feel them now like parallel streams of experiences: the books, the talk of war, the reminiscences, then, the illnesses, physical and mental. Stronger than all of these, the bush, being in it. A pity one cannot say to a child, an adolescent, who feels as if she were as circumscribed as a girl living in suburbs far from any fun, ‘Just look at yourself. Well, look. You have at your fingers’ ends the world’s literature for children. You have the last war distilled into books, let alone running in the living talk of your parents. You listen to the BBC, and your parents talk about European politics. And when you walk out of your bedroom door you as likely as not encounter a porcupine out for its evening stroll, or a kudu, or any one of the big snakes. Look up and a hundred hawks are hanging there, above your head. How many children in the world…’ etc.
Ten years after their arrival in Banket – that is, shortly before my father was diagnosed with diabetes, and the slow, then faster descent into serious illness and death had begun – affairs on the farm were bad. We were in the doldrums, idling in a backwater. Nothing went right, and already it was ‘But when we get back to England, then…’
What was to blame?
How attractive are the tidy conclusions of hindsight! How satisfying the of course of the back-looking perspective. Of course if you do this, then that will happen…
Now it is so easy to see that nothing could go right.
It was entirely their fault, but how could they have seen it? First, you have to be able to see yourselves in relation to circumstances, see the family and that house, wrapped in myth and the perspectives of ‘If only…’ or ‘If we had known…’
My parents, on leave from Persia, were at the Empire Exhibition, and the Southern Rhodesian stall had great mealie cobs, and the invitation: ‘Get rich on maize.’ Do you mean to say those idiots believed a slogan on a stall at an exhibition? But many idiots did, and went out and grew maize and got rich. During the war, fortunes had been made growing maize, bought by governments to feed soldiers and animals.
But the people who had done this were already switching to tobacco where they would do very well indeed.
But my father wasn’t interested in getting rich. He wanted to make enough money to return to England and fulfil his dream to buy a farm in Essex or Suffolk or Norfolk and be an English farmer. But my mother was dreaming of something different. Farming in Rhodesia would be a continuation of her hectic life in Persia, all parties and fun. And nowhere more than here do I have difficulty in trying to match up with the mother I knew, always ill, long-suffering, dutiful, attending the needs of others like an Edwardian lady, with the ‘social butterfly’.
The government of Southern Rhodesia invited ex-servicemen to come out, be given land and farm on loans from the Land Bank. The object of this was plainly stated and it never occurred then to anyone except, of course, the blacks who had been defeated in war, to question the sense of it: settling the whites from England was, specifically, to establish white civilization, and uplift the blacks. The Romans thought like this; so has every empire anywhere at any time. My parents believed in empire and its benefits.
So what was to prevent them being exactly like all their neighbours and getting rich on tobacco?
It was themselves, their nature.
First, the farm was too small to achieve anything in the way of serious profit. It was a mixed farm, able to grow something of this and something of that, sunflowers, peanuts, cotton, a bit of maize, a bit of tobacco. Why did they choose that farm rather than any of the other vast expanses of bush? It was the hill on which the house was built, giving views for miles.
When they arrived in the colony the rainy season was soon to start: October, very hot indeed.
The family arrived in Salisbury, and were accommodated at a farm just outside in ‘a guesthouse’. The place was Lilfordia, belonged to a man, Boss Lilford, who was later Ian Smith’s friend, and loathed by the blacks. What could my parents have imagined as ‘a guesthouse’? Some pretty cottage in Suffolk? There were ten or so large mud huts, grass-roofed, scattered on sandyish pink soil, fenced by poinsettias and hibiscus. Since these two knew nothing whatsoever about Africa, there had to be a government man to advise them.
Imagine the scene. In one of the mud huts, on a chair made of paraffin boxes with, if the maker aimed high, a seat of plaited rush – the kind of furniture she was making within a few weeks – there my mother sat. My father had already had interviews with the Land Bank, the Department of Agriculture.
My mother was wearing one of her Liberty dresses.
‘When buying clothes remember the weather may be inclement. Cotton or linen will be best, with a woollen coat for the nights, which can get cold.’
The government man’s father might have come up with the Pioneer Column thirty-five years before. He himself might have been an ex-serviceman, like my father. He might have come from South Africa: so many Rhodesians had escaped ‘the troubles’ on the Rand, always strikes, fighting, rioting.
It was his job to introduce Mrs. Tayler to the problems of farming. He was unlikely to be or have been a farmer himself.
‘Now, Mrs. Tayler, what kind of a farm are you looking for?’
This young man had no idea of what he was up against.
First of all, what was my mother wanting? To live among ‘nice people’, people of our kind, ‘our class of people’ – all phrases used freely then, without embarrassment. In other words, middle-class people, who would share her tastes in music, and whose children would be provided with the books children must have. Did she use the words ‘people of our sort’ to this colonial? She was capable of it. If so, he must have been more than offended. ‘You see, Mrs. Tayler, this colony doesn’t go in for that kind of thing,’ he might have said, or implied. ‘You’ll just have to take your chances.’
Now this was my mother’s chief and dearest demand for her life in Southern Rhodesia. If it could not be like Kenya, about which she knew nothing, well, then, ‘our kind of people’ were always, surely, everywhere?
Middle class, music loving, caring about literature and politics – which meant Tory. And art.
Did she actually say these things? Surely not. Art? She had brought with her an enormous book of the Impressionists, which was to give me so many hours of pleasure. She would surely have to doubt that this youth could have heard of the Impressionists.
‘My husband would want to ride about the farm,’ she must have said.
Was it this government man from Salisbury who actually settled them – remember the kopje on which the house would be built? They needed advice, so much, but I don’t think they got it.
Horses did not do well on our side of the District, where the earth was mostly heavy, some of it the heavy red and black soils famous for their productivity. Horses in that District were on the other side, on sand veld. No one had horses near us, but there were two donkeys for a while, and my father rode one. For a while.
The requisition for ‘the nice people’ failed at once. The neighbours, all solidly working-class Scots, were not within my mother’s definition of ‘our kind’ and found her snobbish, definitely not one of them.
There were half a dozen people in the District who came to the music evenings. They were nice people, but they were also war victims. Two had wooden legs, one a wooden arm; one was a war widow.
And there was the question of the actual land not being enough. And there wasn’t water – no river. For years the farm managed with three inadequate wells.
There was no way my parents could have returned to England when they did understand the farm’s unsuitability.
My father had his war pension; the thousand pounds that was his capital had been swallowed buying equipment for the farm.
What would they do in England? The slump that would soon begin would answer that. My mother was getting on towards fifty when my father was struck by diabetes.
Ten years on from the start on the farm, the emotional balances had changed in the family.
First, my brother. My mother was convinced that I would be a boy, and didn’t even have a name for a girl. My brother, when he was born, was her heart’s delight, and of course I knew it.
‘He is my baby.’ Fair enough, when he was little, but she called him Baby and went on, Baby Harry, Baby, Baby, until he, aged seven, said to her, ‘You must not call me Baby.’
‘But you are my baby,’ she wailed humorously, being in the right, but my father stepped in.
‘You must stop,’ he commanded. ‘It’s not fair to him.’
My brother stuck it out. She insisted on Baby, so he would not hear her, would not respond, and there was my father, so seldom adamant in matters of the family, but angry and adamant now.
My mother had lost her baby. My father had not yet succumbed to illness, but here was her daughter, and now began the struggle with me.
So much has been written about mothers and daughters, and some of it by me. That nothing has ever much changed is illustrated by the old saying, ‘She married to get away from her mother.’ Martha Quest was, I think, the first no-holds-barred account of a mother-and-daughter battle. It was cruel, that book. Would I do it now? But what I was doing was part of the trying to get free. I would say Martha Quest was my first novel, being autobiographical and direct. My first novel, The Grass is Singing was the first of my real novels.
I saw this recently. A woman, an actress, had a daughter and then a boy. The girl had never seen her mother otherwise than as a housewife, and pregnant, or nursing, overweight – her mother, her possession, her mother. The actress, returning to work in a play where she was a glamorous lead, took the little girl to see her on the first night. The mother was proud of returning to what she felt was her real self, smart, attractive, well dressed. The little girl sat in the front row with her father, silent and tight-faced. At the end of the play, asked by a well-meaning friend, ‘Didn’t you feel proud to see your mother up there on the stage, looking so wonderful?’, she burst out, a dam of emotion at last allowed its head, ‘Her? Oh, she wasn’t anything, she wasn’t much, she isn’t anything really.’
There you have the elemental rivalry, all out in the open, no concealment.
I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start, which it is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I was afraid of them and of her, but more of her unconscious strengths.
I was six when I ran away for the first time. Running away in the middle of the bush is not like some escape in a big city or a village. I ran in the middle of the night down the track to the bigger track to the station. There were animals in the bush, leopards in the kopjes, and snakes. I was crying and noisy with fury. I had no money. I knew that when – if – I got to the station, they would not allow me on to a train. I was afraid and went meekly back home and into bed without anyone knowing. I did it again. This was a cry for help, like cutting one’s wrists or taking an overdose. My mother’s way of dealing with it was to ring up neighbours and, with fond laughter, tell them of my exploits. ‘She got as far as the Matthews turn-off. What a silly child.’
It would never have occurred to her to think that she might be at fault. And this brings me to a really vast subject, not, I think, much acknowledged. There has been a change, an enormous one, in medicine, drugs, but a greater one in popular consciousness of ordinary psychology. The words ‘a cry for help’ are part of ordinary knowledge in parent-child interaction. I am sure they had ‘problem children’ always, even problem parents, but not understood in the way of ordinary advice in newspapers, or how any run-of-the-mill parent is judged.
Running away, the furious criticism implied in it, was made bland by her laughing at it.
I told her, not much older, that she was not my mother, who was in fact the Persian gardener (I remember him as a kindly and, above all, just presence). I knew, of course, that the gardener, being male, could not be my mother, but necessity somehow overruled this disability. And that brings me to the wonderful way children both know and do not know the facts, can believe in a fairy tale with one part of their minds and know it is not true with the other. It is a great, nourishing, saving ability, and if a child doesn’t achieve this capacity it may be in trouble.
I told my mother I hated her. Many children do, and no harm comes of it. My mother could not come to harm because she was, by now, only a mother. That was all Fate had allowed her to be.
The hating and not hating are again parts of mental double dealing: when I was sent away to board I was in miseries of homesickness. If I was not sick for my mother, then what? It was the farm, the dogs, my father, later my brother when he was there, and the weeks stretched themselves out as weeks did then, and I savoured every minute of the holidays, and yet I was in continual fights with my mother.
So all that went on – ‘Only family life’, as some people would say – while I dreamed of getting out, getting away, getting out from under.
And then I was thirteen and something very good happened, the best. I got measles, and with ten or so other girls was put into an empty house, without supervision, with medicines, meals brought in from the hospital and a nurse dropping in every day or so to look us over.
In those days quarantine for measles took six weeks. They put us on our honour not to go near any unauthorized person.
Towards the end of the time some girls fretted, but if you are covered with a rash and feeling low there is little inducement to be seen by anyone. A couple of girls put on bathing costumes, lay around on the lawns and practised a haughty indifference to the boys who sometimes leaned along the fences, jeering. But all around the garden were big notices: ‘Quarantine for Measles, Keep Out’. That was such a good time. Perfect isolation, peace, no pressures. I understood how I could be, how life might be. Letters came in. My mother wrote every day, saying she was arranging tutoring for this, lessons in that. Her letters made me wild with anger. Then she arrived at the perimeter fence, and gesticulated: she was leaving food parcels. We were stuffing ourselves with the good food they sent in, and did not need cake and sweets.
As usual, when I actually saw my mother, a lonely, unhappy, ill-looking woman, and her pleading eyes, I was wild with pity for her, and I wished, oh, wished, she would not come into town, send food, write letters. We were supposed to be doing homework; exercises of all kinds arrived regularly. I don’t remember us doing any. We sat about, tried on each other’s clothes – do not imagine the clever clothes there are now; none of us had much, a dress, a blouse, slacks. We talked, we did nothing, we dreamed. Of all the lucky things that have happened to me in my life, this dose of measles counts as one of the best. But it ended, and back in school I got pink-eye, an affliction causing infinite witty teasing, but it was no joke. I thought I was going blind. And then it was the holidays and I left school for ever, not knowing I had, or why, only that I had reached the end.
Back on the farm things could not have been worse: to balance the perfect bliss of the long freedom of quarantine. I said my eyes were damaged and I could not read, but I read as much as ever.
My father had just been diagnosed with diabetes and was very ill. In those early days of diabetes they did not know how to treat it. My mother was ill all the time. She had ‘neuralgia’, ‘sick headaches’, ‘a heart’. Both had cupboards full of patent medicines. I succumbed with a variety of dubious ailments, and could have spent my life as they did, absorbed by my health, but there was another lucky thing. A charity sent the children of settlers for holidays, and I was rescued from the miseries of that house and was in a wonderful mountainous place, in the house of an old woman, Granny Fisher, eighty years old, who could walk any of her paying guests off their feet. Illness was forgotten.
When I had to return to the farm it was only a question of when I would leave it.
Now I watch the struggles of adolescents with such feeling: their efforts to be themselves are often pathetic, foolish and misguided; they often know as little of what they are doing as I did, but they have to try, struggle, get free.
I had to get free. My battles with my mother were titanic. What were they about? Everything, nothing, but she was going frantic as I escaped her.
You won’t let me live through you, you won’t let me be you, you are killing me.
And I: No, I won’t. Let me go. No, I won’t – do whatever it was she had planned for me.
During those few months she had decided I was to be a great pianist (as she could have been) but I had no talent; a great singer – but I had no voice; a great artist…
I would go along with some flight of fancy, and then common sense struck home again and I would brutally point out: But I have no talent.
Was I telling her she had no talent? What was I saying? Only, ‘No, I won’t.’
She was demented at that time, poor woman. Her husband was ill. Her precious son, ‘Baby’, had run away from her long ago, and I was saying, No, no, no, no.
She was a very talented woman in many different ways. I have never met anyone as efficient as she was, such an organizer. All her talents, her energy were narrowed down to one graceless, angry girl who had only one idea, which was to leave her.
And so I did. I was what is now called an au pair for two years, but she never left me alone, wrote interminable letters to whomever I was working for, telling them how to treat me.
Only one good thing happened to me in that time: I had been reading, rereading, had been sunk in a slow dream of the books of my childhood, but I suddenly realized I had not read anything serious or grown-up except war books for years. So now I began ordering books from England for myself, embarked on the great and glorious discovery of literature, an adventure that has gone on through my life. But I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books, reading – all that has been my life. No, she would not understand now the books I read, because they had played no part in her life. H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Maeterlinck were where she stopped, with the memoirs of generals and of the battle fronts everywhere.
She would finger the books I had ordered from London and was suspicious. Everything I did seemed a snub and an affront to her, and so it was, whether I intended it or not.
Writers and poets have all claimed that the impact of the great Russian writers changed them. This was true of all Europe. I don’t remember why I knew enough to order Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and the rest, but I had the news from somewhere and I read and was amazed. No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians. I think the perennial cry, ‘The novel is dead,’ is because none of us has written anything as good as War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky. Quite simply, they represent the peak and glory of literature. There have been a thousand learned articles explaining the reasons for this, but for me the fact of it is enough.
I was ordering books mentioned in other books; I had no guide. And slowly through the thirties and then the war years, when parcels of books had to dodge the U-boats, I ordered books from England, and the arrivals of the parcels were the high points of my life. From the Russians, then, to the French, with Stendhal my great love, and Balzac, and Zola.
The American writers were almost as much of a thrill as the Russians. Theodore Dr.eiser – but it seems no one reads him these days, yet he has written some great novels – Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, but him with less admiration, The Great Gatsby, but I think Scott Fitzgerald wrote only one great novel; Faulkner, but he came later, and then the English writers, but I had already read most of them by then. Hardy has ever been a favourite, George Meredith – also out of fashion – Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, and the mad, wonderful Tristram Shandy. What have I left out? The poets, but I had been given them early. And far from last on my list was Proust, an improbable passion, and I read and reread The Remembrance of Things Past, knowing it was an antidote to what I actually lived in – Rhodesia at war, the last throbs of the British Empire – though no one would have believed that possible then.
Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, but not all of these were easily got. For instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was an expurgated edition. Periodicals produced with great difficulty in paper-rationed England were New Writing and New Writing and Daylight.
I have, of course, left out a lot, but this list represents what people were reading then, if they read at all. And here it is, for what it is worth, but I feel it will already be seen as a survivor from a quaintly old-fashioned past.
My mother’s letters to me were dreadful. Only a mad woman could have written them. That I was embarking on the career of a prostitute was only one of her accusations. Even then I knew she was ill, and I would tear up the letters as they arrived. It was probably the menopause. These days she would not have suffered as she did. I keep coming back to the same thing: now, the clever medicine we have would have seen her through.
That I was saving myself by escaping from her I did know, but had no idea of just how powerful is the need to take over a child’s life and live it. And back we must go to her confrontations with her father.
John McVeagh was the ideal father. He gave his children everything that an Edwardian father should. They were taken to see every public event, like the visit of the Emperor of the Germans to London, the parades, royal birthdays, tattoos, the Relief of Mafeking. My mother’s memory was like an almanac of official occasions. She went to a good school. She had everything in the way of concerts and theatre, she played hockey and tennis, and was brilliant at the piano. But there was a point when this idolized girl stood up and said, ‘No, I won’t.’ Why did she have to? John McVeagh, unusually for his time, wanted his clever daughter to go to university. It had to be the girl, and not the boy, who wasn’t good enough. His ambitions therefore were focused on her, the one who passed examinations and was always at the top of the class. But she said, ‘No,’ to him and went off to be a nurse, which made him say, apparently without any consciousness of the absurdity of it: ‘Never darken my doors again,’ and ‘I shall no longer consider you my daughter.’
Now, there is something inexplicable here. The Royal Free Hospital was training women doctors: why did she not decide to be a doctor? Her father would surely have been pleased – but I have answered the question. Precisely: her father would have been pleased. So, no, she would be a nurse and ‘wipe the bottoms of the poor’.
But why? I cannot remember her saying anything that could elucidate. She didn’t like her stepmother but she never said much about her, except that she was cold and a disciplinarian. How extraordinary, then, that Emily McVeagh stood up to her father and said, ‘No.’ But the real question surely has to be, Why did that fat papa of a man, that burgher, have to see his clever daughter as his continuation, his justification?
How strange that she never explained it, or perhaps did not see it as needing explanation.
There was this obedient little girl, obeying her father in everything, afraid of disappointing him, standing in front of him as rigid as a ruler, arms down by her sides, waiting for praise or blame (and she acted this scene for me so I could see her, and the stern, powerful father). And all that went on and went on, while she did better and better and won applause for everything, was told she could have a career as a concert pianist if she wanted, was clever Emily McVeagh, and then – finish – she said, ‘No, no, no, No.’
John McVeagh’s first wife, Emily Flower, had died, and left him with three little children, one a disappointing boy, and his second wife was probably not an armful of fun. But there was his clever girl, who triumphed over everything. So, suppose she had gone to university, done very well, emerged with honours and applause. Studying what? Something he had chosen for her. Is that what he was dreaming of to make his own life end in achievement? But we shall never know. What influences did Emily McVeagh have that caused her to choose nursing of all things? ‘But nurses are not of our class, Emily’ – choosing nursing to fulfil herself.
And now her daughter was saying, ‘No,’ tearing up her letters, was running from her as fast as she could, a flight culminating in that ancient resort of girls beset by their mothers, ‘Well, of course I got married to get away from my mother.’