Economic Effects Of The War Upon Women And Children In Great Britain

I think the best of my father died in that war, his spirit was crippled by it. The love of life that survived public school education, religious intolerance, and economic exploitation could not survive World War I. In the much later memoir of her parents that appeared in Granta in 1985, Lessing returns to the mutilated bodies of her father and his Rhodesian neighbors in a somewhat different key: These nice people had one thing in common I didn't see then. They were survivors of World War I. The men had artificial arms or legs or eye-patches. -920- They would discuss the whereabouts of various bits of shrapnel that were forever travelling about their bodies out of sight, but sometimes emerging from healthy tissue to tinkle into a shaving mug or onto a plate… There was a man with a steel plate which kept his brains in, and another rumoured to have a steel plate holding in his bowels. They talked about the war, both men and women-the war, the war, the war-and we children escaped from it into the bush. When Lessing evokes these mutilated bodies for a third time in Shikasta, the macabre note of the Granta piece has deepened into an irony that overwhelms the elegiac cast of the original recollection ...»