The first book after Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize
takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and
the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents
lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me
over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do
children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and
it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the
use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory,
my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, Doris
Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them
irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted
the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel
almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had
to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was
a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the
war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In
the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the
lives her parents might have made for themselves had
there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting
at a village cricket match outside Colchester as
children but leading separate lives.This is followed by
a piercing examination of their lives as they actually
came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to
Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's
childhood in a strange land. 'Here I still am,' says
Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that
monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the
publication of 'Alfred and Emily' she has done just
that. |
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