A Small Personal Voice by Doris Lessing

Author:Doris Lessing [Doris Lessing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007518319
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1974-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

II

In the Twenties, and even more in the Thirties, young middle-class people fled from hard times in Britain where they could not get work, to make a life in the Colonies. Often they had no money, but knew they would be given land and loans. They struggled, and very often failed. If their families at Home sent them their return fares, they went back to what they had left, degrees of genteel poverty, to be rescued, presumably, by World War II. How many of them were there? A great many, I think, for the turnover of white people, certainly in Southern Rhodesia, was always large. There is no way now of finding out about them. What a story! What stories! – and recently I read two of them, for I was sent a couple of manuscripts, memoirs by white women of their lives as white settlers, one in Kenya, one in Southern Rhodesia. These people, without any kind of training, either psychological or practical, found themselves in the bush, usually with not even an acre cleared for planting, in some kind of shack, coping with floods, droughts, fires, wild animals, and black labourers who, having been forced out to work by the Poll Tax, were sullen, angry, inefficient. Not the least of the ironies was that the whites saw themselves as pitifully poor, and the blacks saw them as unreachably rich. Both were right. Now what comes through most strongly in these accounts is that it seems, once these unsatisfactory members of the family had left Britain, it was out of sight, out of mind. The strongest and most frequent note struck is how small sums of money – £50, £25, would often have saved a situation, but money was never forthcoming. That the middle classes tend to be mean to their own is well-known, but never have I seen it so painfully shown as here. Perhaps their families did not have any money to help out with? There was no money to help my parents; all our relatives were just surviving.

These memoirs made me think about the differences between my parents and these settlers who would never have left Home if they could only have found what my father loathed so bitterly and left: a good, safe, respectable job. There were basically two kinds of immigrants: those who could not make it in Britain, and those who could, but who would not conform to British respectability. My father was one of the misfits who provided the landscape of my growing up with colourful characters whose eccentricities, suppressed in Britain, were given plenty of room to expand.

Above all, it was my mother who was defined by these women’s reminiscences, all of failure, incapacity, incompetence, muddle. They could not cope with floods and fires and snakes, or having to cook bread in antheaps when the kitchen burned down, or making furniture from paraffin boxes and curtains, and dresses from flour sacks. They could not do more than just suffer what was happening to them, and of course they despised and feared the blacks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.