African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [80]
I am being taken on a trip to a Jesuit school, Silveira House, by Sister Dominica. She is a nun, but refuses to wear the uniform or accept discipline which she thinks arbitrary and foolish. She lives in a holy house but makes her own life. She is responsible for the recruitment and welfare of large numbers of young whites who teach mostly in remote parts of Zimbabwe and in very poor schools. She wears dresses, skirts, blouses, but with a large silver cross. A colleague, an equally independent soul, wears culottes and a halter top. They are feminists, critical of the male authority of the Church and the Pope.
I wonder what Mother Patrick would make of them? Kindred spirits, I think.
Sister Dominica was a nun at the convent where I did five years hard, from the ages of seven to twelve. We compared notes, from such different points of view about the administrative and teaching nuns, educated women from Ireland and from Germany, and about the ignorant peasant women, all German, who looked after us. If that is the word for it. For all these years I have remembered Mother Bertranda with gratitude. Once a child literally ill with homesickness crept towards the august office that was surrounded by a sea of grey granite chips crunching under feet trying to be silent, and, daring an upright pillar of black and white, the Dominican habit, climbed on to a lap that sloped away under the many slippery robes, and wept in arms that turned out, after a first stiffness of surprise, to be kind, warm, close, hospitable. Over the child’s head Mother Bertranda exclaimed and consoled in German, swinging back and forth as strenuously as a rocking horse.
Sister Dominica said, ‘Perhaps, but if you were a very young and frightened novice thousands of miles from home, you would have experienced her differently. She terrified us.’
Silveira House is an old school, privileged, funded, well-known. Comrade Mugabe taught a course on trade unionism here, I was told, with pride. The school consists of many single-storeyed brick buildings scattered among trees, and shrubs and flowers. Cats lie about in shady places expecting to be admired. The place is empty, because the pupils have gone for their holidays. We are taken over it by the principal, whose life links with mine, just as Sister Dominica’s does. His family was German. He spent four years of his childhood in an internment camp near Salisbury. During the Second World War. My second husband, Gottfried Lessing, a German, was six weeks in the internment camp, then let out to pursue an ordinary life, instructed only to report once a week to a certain office, so lax a requirement he often did not bother and no one seemed to notice. He was anti-Nazi, but then so was the interned family. I listened to the principal describe his years in the camp, thinking about what makes the so different fates of people: often chance, luck, some small happening. About Zimbabwe he was talking in that voice characteristic for this time: anxious pride, a passionate need to explain and excuse–the pride for what is being achieved, the anxiety for what is needed, so much and for so many.
Under a group of trees was a spread of benches and tables, and on them all kinds of carvings in stone and in wood, watched over by their creators, young men who are unemployed and hope to better their fortunes in this way. Some of their creations are on sale in galleries in Harare.
There is also a good crafts shop, run by one of the forceful women to be seen everywhere. From Sister Dominica I again hear the words: It is the women that keep this country going. They do all the work. Everywhere you look women are working and men lazing about.
THE DIGESTER
Based at Silveira House is an internationally known expert on alternative technology, Brian McGarry, at once recognizable as one of that breed, people passionately concerned with saving the world from our stupidities. He is, among