Under My Skin

by Lessing, Doris May

• ISBN13: 9780060926649
• ISBN10: 0060926643
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

"I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by...robust and efficient hands." The experiences absorbed through these "skins too few" are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

Excerpts

Under My Skin
Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

Chapter One

'She was very pretty but all she cared about was horses and dancing.'

This refrain tinkled through my mother's tales of her childhood, and it was years before it occurred: to me,'Wait a minute, that's her mother she's talking about.' She never used any other words than those, and they couldnot have been her words, since she did not remember her mother. No, this was what she had heard from theservants, for she unconsciously put on a kitchen face, with a condemning look about her mouth, and she alwaysgave a disapproving sniff That little sniff evoked for me a downstairs world as exotic as the people in it wouldhave found tales of cannibals and the heathen. Servants and nursemaids brought the little children up, after thefrivolous Emily McVeagh died, in childbed, of peritonitis, with her third, when her first, my mother, was stillonly three. There is not even a photograph of Emily. She is nobody. She is nothing at all. John WilliamMcVeagh would not talk about his first wife. What can she have done? - I asked myself. After all, to belight-minded is not a crime. At last it came to me. Emily Flower was common, that must have been it.

Then a researcher was, invited to throw light in to those distant places and she came up with a mass of materialthat would do very well as a basis for one of those Victorian novels, by Trollope perhaps, where the chapterabout Emily Flower, called 'What Can Have Been Her Fault?', could only be a short one, if the saddest.

'The information on the Flower family was got through birth, marriage and death certificates, parish records,census records, apprentice records, barge owners' records, lightermen and watermen records, local history andwills says the researcher, evoking Dickens' England in a sentence.

There was a Henry Flower who in 1827 was described as Mariner, and in the 1851 census as a Victualler. Hewas born in somerset and his wife Eleanor was born in Limehouse. Their son, George James Flower, delinquentEmily's father, was apprenticed to a John Flower presumably a relative. The Flower family were barge owners,and on Emily's birth certificate her father was described as lighterman.

The Flower clan lived in and around Flower Terrace, now demolished, and George James and his wife ElizaMiller lived at Number 3 Flower Terrace. This was in Poplar, near what is now Canary Wharf. There werefour children. Eliza was widowed aged thirtyfive, and the closeness and mutual helpfulness of the clan is shownby how, although women did not do this then, the lightermen I and watermen allowed her to be a barge ownerand take apprentices. She made her son Edward an apprentice and he later became lighterman and barge ownerin her place. Her children did well, and she ended in a pleasant house, with an annuity. Emily was the youngestchild and she married John William McVeagh in 1883.

My mother described the house she was brought up in as tall, narrow, cold, dark, depressing, and her father as adisciplinarian, strict, frightening,, always. ready with moral exhortations.

The well-off working class had a good life in late Victorian times,with jaunts to the races, all kinds of partiesand celebrations. They most heartily ate and drank. Nothing dreary or cold about Flower Terrace and itscompanion streets full of relatives, and friends Emily came from this warm clan life into the doubtless ardentarms of John William McVeagh-he must have been very much in love to marry her-but she was expected tomatch herself to his ambitions, to the frightful snobberies of a man fighting to leave the working class behind. Iimagine her running back home when she could to her common family, for dances, good times and going to theraces. She must have lived in her husband's house under a cold drizzle of disapproval, from which, or so I see it,she died, aged thirty-two.

My mother never mentioned her grandfather, John William's father and that meant John William did not talkabout him any more than he did about Emily.

'The information for this family,' says the researcher, 'comes from births, deaths and marriages the clericaldirectory, the Public Record Office, army records and books on the Charge of the Light Brigade census reports,wills and local directories. John McVeagh's date of birth and place of birth conflict in the records. Armyrecords of birth and occupation are frequently incorrect as men enlisting, for reasons, of their own gave wronginformation, and it would have been difficult to check up in the pre-1837 registration time. In any case,recruiting stations were not particular in the army of the nineteenth century.'

John McVeagh was born in Portugal, and his father was a soldier. He was in the 4th Light Dragoons, and was aHospital Sergeant Major when he left the army in 1861. He was in the Crimea and East Turkey and in theCharge of the Light Brigade--he really was, for soldiers made that claim who had no right to it. But why didthey want to have been part of such carnage? John McVeagh's conduct as a soldier was exemplary. When hishorse was shot under him in the Charge he continued to tend the wounded though wounded himself, He receivedvarious medals. Here is an entry for March 1st 1862 the United Service Gazette:

4th (Queen's) Hussars-Cahir. On Friday, the 2Ist ult. Serjt-Major J. McVeagh late of this regiment, now Yeoman Warder of the Tower, was presented by the officers of his late corps with a purse containing 2O guineas, a silver snuff box beautifully engraved, showing his former services. Few men have been more honoured for their good conduct than Serjt-Major McVeagh on leaving his regiment, then at the Curragh, a few months back, to take his, new appointment after 24 years service. The non-commissioned officers and privates presented him with a splendid tea service with the following inscription: 'To Hospital Serjt-Major John McVeagh, as a token of respect for his general kindness.' During the Crimean War he was at all times with his regiment in the field, attending both sick and wounded, and for such distinguished conduct received a medal, with an annuity of £20, besides a Turkish and a Crimean one with 4 clasps.

Under My Skin
Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. Copyright © by Doris M. Lessing. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Under My Skin Pb: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 by Doris Lessing
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