the grass is singing of what did mary's brother and sister die

There might even be an inset, a small cameo of her in a neat shirtwaister, looking through the kitchen window, out onto a neat garden, thinking of something far away while she does the washing up. In the male version of the suitcase I’d guess at several shades of silk stocking samples, one of which will probably be used to strangle the life out of some lonely but restless woman, who at the moment hasn’t the slightest idea of the man descending the steps to try his luck in postwar London. It will turn out to be the beginning of a career that ends not long after she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her suitcase holds a few bits and pieces of clothing that are quite unsuitable for the new climate in which she will be living, but the manuscript of that first novel takes up most of the room. The woman obviously doesn’t have a free hand. The man uses his free hand to get ready to light a cigarette, pulling a silver cigarette case from his pocket. The suitcase holds the protagonists’ future.

In the other hand she held the sort of small, shabby suitcase that pulp fiction illustrators give to people running away from their lives – to heroines with gumption, or plausibly handsome yet morally flawed young men.

In my mind’s eye, I have Peter tucked head first under Doris’s free arm, as if he were swimming down to land, but kept safe in his mother’s clutch. Perhaps the tone of voice with which the adult announces the visit is the main clue to the import of what is happening. Did Peter hold Doris’s hand, walking carefully, or follow behind her, or did he run on ahead, holding onto the rail, descending the metal steps from the airliner to the tarmac of his new country that everyone at home called ‘home’? He was only two, how much sense could he have made of anything? By the time we are two we have been taken to many places: a visit to Auntie, shopping at the grocery store, a trip to England on a plane. The child is always noted, but in these mini-biographies or profiles, left to tag along. The manuscript was in the suitcase she carried, they say. The two packages are always mentioned together. Peter was Doris’s third child, the one who in 1949 she took with her, when he was two, to London from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) along with her first finished manuscript, The Grass Is Singing. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. P eter Lessing died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66.

The grass is singing of what did mary's brother and sister die