Shikasta by Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)

Author:Doris May Lessing(Little Dorrit)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: sf_social
ISBN: 9780006547198
Publisher: Flamingo/HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 1994-11-17T06:00:00+00:00

I see I must plunge in. The more I think about it, the harder it gets. Facts are best. I told George I was actually starting this, and he said, Get your facts straight first.

I have two brothers, George and Benjamin, two years older than me. They are twins. Not true twins. I am Rachel. I am fourteen.

Our father is Simon. Our mother is Olga. Our name is Sherban, but it was Scherbansky. Our grandfather changed it when they came to England from Poland in the last war. (Second World.) Our grandparents laugh when they say no one could pronounce Scherbansky. I used to get angry when they said this. I do not think the English are funny. They are stupid. My grandfather is Jewish. My grandmother not.

I see that our education has been far from ordinary. I am seeing a lot of things for the first time, as I think how to write this. Well of course that's the point I suppose.

First. Our family was in England where we were all born. Both our parents worked at a big London hospital. He did organising. She was a doctor. But they decided to leave England and got work in America. It was because England was so bureaucratic and stick-in-the-mud. They did not say this was why they left England never to return. Not to work. After America we went to Nigeria and then Kenya and then Morocco. Which is here. Usually our parents work together in a hospital or project. We always know about their work. They tell us what they are doing and why. They take a lot of trouble telling us. As I think about this so as to write it I see that this doesn't happen much to other children. Sometimes my mother Olga has to work somewhere by herself. I go with her. Even when I was a small child. It is funny I took it for granted. I must ask her why I was with her so much. I have asked her. She said, "In countries that have not become bureaucratic there is a lot of latitude." Then she said, "Anyway, they like children, this isn't England."

Our parents criticise many things about England. Yet they have sent us there quite a bit.

I have learned all sorts of things, but have not been regularly at school. I know French, Russian, Arabic, Spanish. And English, of course. My father has taught me mathematics. My mother tells me books to read. I know a lot about music because they are always playing music.

My brothers were sometimes with my mother, but these days mostly with Simon. When he went to seminars to give lectures or conferences he took them too. Sometimes our parents had us in school properly for a year or two years.

In Kenya this happened. I have just seen it. The headmaster was a friend of ours. He kept shifting us from class to class, pretending we didn't fit in, or had gone beyond a class or something.

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