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.
My father was sick nearly all the way to Cape Town, and then Beira. My mother loved every second. This must have been the last time in her life she enjoyed herself in the way of deck games or bridge, dressing up and dancing and concerts – very much
