General Chat

Doris Lessing British Nobel-Prize winning author whose best-known works include The Golden Notebook, dies aged 94.

A good age and a good writer

RIP

“When I look back I seem to remember singing.
Yet it was always silent in that long warm room.

Impenetrable , those walls , we thought,
Dark with ancient shields. The light
Shone on the head of a girl or young limbs
Spread carelessly. And the low voices
Rose in the silence and were lost as in water.

Yet, for all it was quiet and warm as a hand,
If one of us drew the curtains
A threaded rain blew carelessly outside.
Sometimes a wind crept, swaying the flames,
And set shadows crouching on the walls,
Or a wolf howled in the wide night outside,
And feeling our flesh chilled we drew together.

But for a while the dance went on -
That is how it seems to me now:
Slow forms moving calm through
Pools of light like gold net on the floor.
It might have gone on, dream-like, for ever.

But between one year and the next – a new wind blew ?
The rain rotted the walls at last ?
Wolves’ snouts came thrusting at the fallen beams ?

It is so long ago.
But sometimes I remember the curtained room
And hear the far-off youthful voices singing.”
(1959)

She was a friend of my auntie who lived in what was then Southern Rhodesia.
She was and remains one of my heroines.

Try and get hold of these:

Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage,A Ripple From From The Storm, Landlocked, The Four Gated City