As a teenager, Rebecca Swift was lost for words when the future Nobel laureate came to her house, but then they bonded over something very unexpected…
I must have been 15 or so, 35 years ago, a rumbustious adolescent. I recall that my mother, a writer, was cooking and tidying, and she asked me to “remove that book” from the end of the dining table in an atypically anxious tone.
“Why?” I asked. Books and papers never got moved if only one person was coming to a family meal.
“Because Doris Lessing is coming to dinner.”
I had read The Grass Is Singing, struggled with The Golden Notebook and knew that our impending guest had left Rhodesia, an ugly, faraway land where white people treated black people heinously in a system called apartheid – a land so ghastly she had to escape it at the expense of leaving her children behind.
“And why should I remove Penmarric?”
“Just do.”
Busy with her cooking, Mum didn’t notice that I didn’t move the book which I was reading and loving: a family saga set in Cornwall by bestselling commercial novelist Susan Howatch.
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“Why?” I asked. Books and papers never got moved if only one person was coming to a family meal.
“Because Doris Lessing is coming to dinner.”
I had read The Grass Is Singing, struggled with The Golden Notebook and knew that our impending guest had left Rhodesia, an ugly, faraway land where white people treated black people heinously in a system called apartheid – a land so ghastly she had to escape it at the expense of leaving her children behind.
“And why should I remove Penmarric?”
“Just do.”
Busy with her cooking, Mum didn’t notice that I didn’t move the book which I was reading and loving: a family saga set in Cornwall by bestselling commercial novelist Susan Howatch.
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