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
