Under My Skin

‘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.