Walking in the Shade by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

turned out to be provincial.
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    And so I had made a life for me and for Peter. That was an achievement, and I was proud of myself. The most important part was Peter, who was enjoying this life, particularly the nursery school, in Kensington, and then the family atmosphere with Joan and Ernest. Never has there been a child so ready to make friends. Our days still began at five. Again I was reading to him and telling him stories for a couple of hours after he woke, because Joan’s bedroom was immediately below, and the floors were thin, and she did not wake till later. Or he listened to the radio. We have forgotten the role radio played before television. Peter loved the radio. He listened to everything. He listened to two radio plays based on novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, each an hour long, standing by the machine, absolutely riveted. What was he hearing? Understanding? I have no idea. It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults. At three or four, Peter understood everything, and at eight or nine read only comics. And I’ve seen this again and again with small children. A child of three sits entranced through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey , but four years later can tolerate only Rupert Bear.
    I was writing Martha Quest , a conventional novel, though the demand then was for experimental novels. I played in my mind with a hundred ways of doing Martha Quest , pulling shapes about, playing with time, but at the end of all this, the novel was straightforward. I was dealing with my painful adolescence, my mother, all that anguish, the struggle for survival.
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    And now there arrived a letter from my mother, saying she was coming to London, she was going to live with me and help me with Peter, and—here was the inevitable, surreal, heartbreaking ingredient—she had taught herself typing and would be my secretary.
    I collapsed. I simply went to bed and pulled the covers over my head. When I had taken Peter to nursery school, I crept away into the dark of my bed and stayed there until I had to bring him home.
    And now—again—there is the question of time, tricksy time, and until I came to write this and was forced to do my work with calendars and obdurate dates, I had thought, vaguely, that I was in Denbigh Road for…well, it was probably three years or so. But that was because, having been returned to child seeing, everything new and immediate, I had been returned—well, partly—to child time. No matter how I wriggled and protested, No, it can’t have been only a year, it was a year before I went to Joan’s, and I had been there only six months or so when the letter came from my mother. Yet those months seem now like years. Time is different at different times in one’s life. A year in your thirties is much shorter than a child’s year—which is almost endless—but long compared with a year in your forties; whereas a year in your seventies is a mere blink.
    Of course she was bound to come after me. How could I have been so naive as to think she wouldn’t, as soon as she could? She had been in exile in Southern Rhodesia, dreaming of London, and now…She and her daughter did not ‘get on,’ or, to put it truthfully, had always fought? Oh, never mind, the girl was wrongheaded; she would learn to listen to her mother. She was a communist? She always had disreputable friends? That was all right; her mother would introduce her to really nice people. She had written The Grass Is Singing , which had caused her mother anguish and shame, because it was so hated by the whites? And those extremely unfair short stories about The District? Well, she—the girl’s mother—would explain to everyone that no one outside the country could really understand the whites’ problems and…But the author had been brought up in the