NF (1957) Going Home by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

yellow glow sank, a pair of red eyes could be seen moving along the top of the wall under the thatch. A mouse? A snake perhaps? For some reason they seldom came down to the floor. Once I saw a pair of eyes shining in the light coming through the window from the moon, and called for my parents to kill what I was convinced was asnake, but it was a frog. In the wet season, the frogs from the vlei two miles away were so loud they drowned the perpetual singing of the night-crickets; and the irregular pattering of frogs on the floor of my room was something I learned to take no more notice of than the pattering of rain from leaks in the roof. It must not be imagined that I am a lover of wild life. I am frightened of all these creatures—or rather, of touching them by accident in the dark, or putting my foot on one; but if you live in a house which is full of them, then your area of safety contracts within it to the bed. I never went to bed without taking it completely apart to make sure nothing had got into the bedclothes; and once safely in, with the mosquito net tucked down, I knew that nothing could fall on me from the roof or crawl over me in the dark.
    The family attitude towards the role of mosquito nets is illustrated by a dialogue I overheard between my parents in the next room.
    It was the first rains of the season, and the roof had begun to leak in a dozen places. I had already lit my candle and set out the pails and basins; and I knew that my father was awake because I could see the fluctuating glow of his cigarette on the wall through the crack of the door which did not close properly.
    I knew that he was waiting for my mother to wake up. At last I heard him say in a sort of hushed shout: ‘Maud, Maud, wake up!’ Nothing happened and the rain roared on.
    ‘ Maud! ’
    She woke with a crash of the bedsprings. ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘It’s raining.’
    ‘I can hear that it’s raining.’
    ‘The roof’s really bad this year,’ he said. ‘Like a sieve.’
    ‘When the grass swells, it won’t be so bad.’
    ‘It’s worse than it was last year.’
    ‘We’ll get the thatching boy up in the morning,’ she said sleepily, and turned over.
    ‘But it’s raining,’ he said desperately.
    ‘Go to sleep.’
    ‘But it’s raining on me .’
    ‘You’ve got your mosquito net down, haven’t you?’
    ‘A mosquito net has holes in it.’
    ‘A mosquito net will absorb a lot of water before it starts to leak.’
    ‘It has already started to absorb the water.’
    ‘What if I slung another mosquito net over the first?’
    ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to move the bed?’
    ‘Oh. Yes. I suppose so.’
    My father spent a large part of his nights sitting up in his bed smoking and thinking. Sometimes, if I lit my candle for something, he would say cautiously: ‘Is that you?’
    ‘Yes, it’s me, I’m only just…’
    ‘Well then, go to sleep.’
    ‘But I’m only just…’
    ‘You’re not to read at this time of night.’ And then, after a moment, ‘Are you asleep?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Hear that owl? It must be in the tree right outside.’
    ‘It sounds to me in the bush at the bottom of the kopje.’
    ‘Do you think so? You know, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Supposing we caught an owl and crossed it with one of your mother’s Rhode Island Reds. What do you think would happen?’
    ‘Almost anything, I should think.’
    ‘I was being serious,’ he said reprovingly from the dark room next door. ‘I don’t suppose they have thought of that, do you? An owl and a chicken. They could graft the seed somehow if they wouldn’t do it naturally. A rat-eating chicken. Or a chicken-eating chicken.’
    A stir in my mother’s bed.
    ‘Shhhhh,’ my father would say hastily. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
    Or: ‘Are you asleep?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’ve been thinking.’
    ‘What about?’
    ‘You know the centre of the earth is all molten, so they say?’
    ‘Well?’
    ‘Suppose they sank down a borehole and tapped