1 - Introduction

Summary

Epigraph:

One begins to feel the large consistent wholeness behind the swarming parts …. They smoulder along through years, criss-crossing each other, keeping the character of their own genes, working out their completeness. Until the cycles themselves, which are already made up of smaller cycles, begin to look like members of greater cycles … it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe.

Ted Hughes on Vasko Popa's Collected Poems

It is a question whether it were not better to be the shabbiest of fools, and know the way up the little stair of imagination to the land of dreams, than the wisest of men, who see nothing that the eyes do not show, and feel nothing that the hands do not touch.

Olive Schreiner, The Story of An African Farm

By now, it hardly needs saying that, in life as in her writing, Doris Lessing resists labelling. Her parents were British, both born in England, but Doris was born in Persia in 1919, and from 1925 grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then under British rule. In 1949 she left Africa for Britain, and has lived in London ever since. Her early years on a remote African farm are remembered in her writing as both a time of wandering freely, alone or with her brother, through the surrounding veld, and a time of outrage and rebellion against her mother's rule, underpinned by standards more appropriate to Edwardian England than to a poor farm in Africa. Indeed, apart from the freedom to roam the bush, it was not an easy childhood: the First World War, Lessing would come to see, had damaged both her parents, permanently. Her father, who had lost a leg to shrapnel, was haunted by memories of the trenches; her mother nursed the wounded of that war and lost the love of her life – a doctor – as so many did. Decades later, Lessing would admit, in Alfred and Emily,

That war, the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.