Two Memoirs of Childhood, Recommended by Diana Athill

Lately I've been devouring Diana Athill's books. (Too bad there aren't more of them.) Not sure why, but lately I've been on a memoir kick -- I crave them periodically -- and this time it probably started with Doris Lessing's excellent Under My Skin. I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of this influential editor until a couple of weeks ago when I happened upon her newest, Somewhere Towards the End, a memoir about ageing that Athill wrote in her late 80s.That's one of the most inspiring things about her -- she didn't start writing until she was 43 and she's gone on writing well into old age. (Abigail Thomas, whose work I am also devouring, is another writer who didn't start writing until her mid-40s. Refreshing, aren't they, these memoirists who wait until they've actually lived a little?)

Right now I'm in the middle of Athill's Stet: An Editor's Life, published in 2000, about her time at Andre Deutsch. I've just finished a chapter in which she describes the two books she worked on that have "floated to the surface as being of great value" to her:

   Neither of them was part of a literary career; neither of them sold well; neither of them will be remembered by many readers. What is remarkable about both of them is the person who speaks.
   Over and over again one sees lives which appear to have been shaped almost entirely by circumstances: by a cruel childhood, perhaps, or ... by a corrupt society. These two stories are told by a man and a woman who, if shaping by circumstances were an immutable law, would have been hopeless wrecks. They did not just survive what would have finished off a great many people: they survived it triumphantly.
   The first of these books is Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood by Morris Stock. He was found as a newborn baby on the steps of a synagogue in a small Ukrainian town; was shunted around the Jewish community to various foster parents, ending with a brutal couple who almost killed him. If an interfering peasant woman hadn't made a fuss when she noticed a little boy almost dead with cold, waiting on a wagon outside an inn, they would quite have done so. The community stepped in again, and he was passed on to a grain-merchant who was eventually to work him very hard, but treated him well. Almost at once he began to be liked and trusted, learning to read and writer and mastering his trade: it seems that as soon as he was free to be himself he revealed intelligence, resilience and generosity. Before he was twenty he had set up business on his own, married a girl he was to love for the rest of her life, and decided to move to London, where he spent the next fifty years prospering, and raising a family remarkable for talent and ability. He was an old man when his daughter persuaded him to write his story, which he did with vigour and precision -- a very charming old man. Some quality at the centre of Morris Stock had been able to triumph over formidable odds.
   And the same was true of Daphne Anderson, who wrote The Toe-Rags. By the time I met her Daphne was the beautiful wife of a retired general, living in Norfolk, better-read and more amusing in a gentle way than I expected a general's wife to be. It was astounding to learn that this woman had once been a barefoot, scabby-legged little girl whose only dress was made from a sugar-sack, knowing nothing beyond the Rhodesian bush and speaking an African language -- Shona -- better than she spoke English. Her parents were the poorest of poor whites, victims of her father's uselessness: he was stupid, bad-tempered, utterly self-centred, incompetent and irresponsible. He dumped her wretched mother, with three children, in the bush and left them there for months on end, sending no money. She scraped by, allowing occasional favours to such men as were about, and the children were looked after by Jim, their Shona servant (no white could be so poor as not to have a servant: it was like Charles Dickens's family taking their little maid into debtor's prison with them). Jim saved not only Daphne's life, but also her spirit, being a rock of kindness and good sense for the children to cling to.
   Not surprisingly, when a decent man asked the mother to go off with him she did, taking her new baby but leaving the three other children in the belief that their father would be arriving next day. She thought that if no one else was there he would have to cope. He did not turn up.

Three days later Jim, having run out of food, walked them to the nearest police station. They never saw their mother again, and had the misfortune to be delivered into the hands of their father's sister. She was like him in every way except in being (although unable to read) ruthlessly competent, so that she had become rich by running a brick kiln. She took the children in because of "What would the neighbours say?", then took it out on them by consigning them to the kitchen: where, once again, they were saved by an African man -- her cook. He provided kindness, common sense about good behaviour, and a comforting sense of irony. Their aunt it was who dubbed them the Toe-Rags.
   There followed, until Daphne was in her twenties, a long chain of deprivation and disturbing events, with one blessing in their midst: Daphne was sent to a convent school. Right from the beginning the child had fallen on every tiny scrap of good that came her way -- every kindness, every chance to learn, every opportunity to discriminate between coarse and fine, stupid and wise, ugly and beautiful, mean and generous. School came to her -- in spite of agonizing embarrassment over unpaid bills and having no clothes -- as a feast of pleasure. She does not, of course, tell her story as that of an astonishing person. She tells it for what happened, and out of delighted amazement at her own good luck. It is the reader who sees that this person who should have been a wreck had somewhere within her a centre so strong that all she needed were the smallest openings in order to be good and happy.
   I loved that book even more than I loved Morris Stock's; and both of them I loved not for being well-written (though both were written well enough for their purposes), but because of what those two people were like. They brought home to me the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also -- thank God -- of the light which continues to struggle through.

I've been able to reserve a copy of Parents Unknown in my library system (apparently it's tucked away in storage somewhere in Cape Breton) but I haven't been able to track down The Toe-Rags, which Doris Lessing, who grew up in Rhodesia, too, also mentions favourably in her memoir. Both books are available used, through Amazon, but prices start at $45.00 for Anderson's and $49.43 for Stock's. Seems to me it's time these books were reprinted or at least made available for e-readers.

Comments

[babelbabe]

send an email suggesting it to Persephone : ) sounds right up their alley.

[hc5coat]

I think I am going to try to drop hints about The Toe-Rags for my next birthday... Thanks for the tip! I recently finished reading "Into Africa - The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingtone" by Martin Dungard. It was on the bargain book table but was a surprisingly great read. I have also enjoyed "Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight" by Alexandra Fuller. I love biographies and these stories of growing up in Africa call to me more than most. Not sure why - I've never been.

[John Atlas]

I discovered the Toe-Rags in a house we rented for holidays in Durban in 1995 only 6 years after its first publication. Besides the coincidence as Durban being where her mother ran off to, further coincidences were my wife having grown up in Southern Rhodesia, and having first met my wife in Francistown Botswana where Daphne's parents met. Our daughter purchased a second hand copy for my wife for Christmas 09 on Amazon UK, where the price was considerably less than quoted above. I note that Amazon UK currently has 12 copies in stock ranging from £4.50 to an amazing £135. I am currently rereading with much enjoyment and would strongly recommend this book. However, try as I might I can find no account of Daphne Anderson post Toe-rags on the net, if anyone can assist please advise to ardaulin@gmail.com

[michael samuels]

i would love to contact Daphne Anderson if she is still alive and would appreciate any assistance anyone can give
my grandmother and my father are mention often in Toe Rags and i have a cherished copy
dapne or a child might be able to give me some background on my grandmother Johanna Geraghty who married my grandfather percival samuels in rhodesia , but we have no record of how she got to rhodesia from ireland as a young women