The 16th Annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : BIOGRAPHY WINNER, DORIS LESSING : Clear Visions, Persian Nights : Excerpt from “Under My Skin”

For works ranging from “Martha Quest” (1952) to “the Golden Notebook” (1962), Doris Lessing has long been known as an especially vivid and realistic novelist. In this first volume of her autobiography, she writes vividly of her childhood and young adulthood as the daughter of a British colonial family in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and, in the following passage, Persia. While she believes that many of her experiences were absorbed through “skins too few,” many others recall those special moments of childhood “when one is alive, and noticing, as if injected unexpectedly with some substance whose gift is that you should see clearly.”

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In that house in Tehran--not in the overcrammed nursery, but down in the drawing room, equally crammed and crowded with furniture but at least not white, white, deadly white--every night took place a ritual. We, the small children, were led down by the nurse for the bedtime game. We had pillow fights, were chased, caught, thrown up in the air--and tickled. This goes on now in middle-class families, considered salutary, character building.

I see now the inflamed, excited face of my mother, as her pillow flailed against mine, or my little brother’s. I hear the excited cries from myself and my brother and my mother as the air filled with feathers and my head began to ache. And then the moment when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap. By now my head is aching badly, the knocking headache of over-excitement. His great hands go to work on my ribs. My screams, helpless, hysterical, desperate. Then tears. But we were being taught how to be good sports. For being a good sport was necessary for the middle-class life. To put up with “ragging” and with being hurt, with being defeated in games, being “tickled” until you wept, was a necessary preparation.

It does not have to be like this, for you may watch a very little child being gently chased and tickled in a real game, not an exercise in disguised bullying. But I did not stop having nightmares about those great hands torturing my ribs until I was seven or eight. These nightmares are as clear in my mind now as they were then, though the emotion has long gone away. I became an expert on nightmares and how to outwit them when I was a small child, and that nightmare of being helpless and “tickled” was the worst.

Yet my father was my ally, my support, my comforter. I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by “games,” by “tickling.” No, I am not one of them. In all my life I have never been hit, slapped, or in any way at all physically maltreated by a man, and I am saying this because at 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 overworked 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. She was taught to admire Darwin and Brunel, 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 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 tea trays, 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. 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.