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
