It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. He cried openly, fists in his eyes. He lay face down, gasping. He was strained; his eyes were glazedlooking. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. Supposing he turned dizzy in the tunnel? His hands, groping forward, met nothing; and his feet, kicking back, propelled him out into the open sea.
Or just go straight back to the villa, if you like. Soon he was clear inside. It explorse her later disavowal of Communism after witnessing conflicts in Hungary and Afghanistan, then examines her fascination with Sufi mysticism, the horrors and the promise of modern technology, and her later experimentations in science fiction. He reached the sunlight, swam to the shore, and lay on the diving rock. The big boys had made the passage while he counted a hundred and sixty.
Then he was clutching it and pulling himself up on to it. He rushed to the bathroom, thinking she must not see his face with bloodstains, or tearstains, on it. First, he thought, he must learn to control his breathing. He thought he must be swimming fast, and he was frightened of banging his head if the tunnel narrowed. In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. After they had dived and come up, they swam around, hauled themselves up, and waited their turn to dive again.
The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. He swam back to the big rock, climbed up, and dived into the blue pool among the fanged and angry boulders. He ran straight into the water and began swimming. Going to the shore on the first morning of the vacation, the young English boy stopped at a turning of the path and looked down at a wild and rocky bay, and then over the crowded beach he knew so well from other years. And he almost ran after her again, feeling it unbearable that she should go by herself, but he did not. They began diving again and again from a high point into a well of blue sea between rough, pointed rocks. That night, his nose bled badly.
Each of her works repay repeated readings, and resist easy categorisation. It was then when she met and then married her first husband, Frank Wisdom with whom she also had two children. Later she moved to Salisbury and started working as a telephone operator. He climbed back to the diving rock and sat down, feeling the hot roughness of it under his thighs. Lessing, however, dropped out of school by the age of thirteen and thereafter started self educating herself.
He can swim like a fish. She was a novelist and short story writer of astonishing ability and limitless empathy — one who confronted and interrogated the injustice, racism and hypocrisy of a troubled era with imagination and force. The roof was sharp and pained his back. He was being continually pressed against the sharp roof, which felt slimy as well as sharp. He had found the hole.
His feet and hands moved freely, as if on open water. He let it go and began to count. He took the edges of the hole in his hands and drew himself into it, wriggling his shoulders in sidewise as he remembered he must, kicking himself along with his feet. It was like swimming in flaked silver. Then one, and then another of the boys came up on the far side of the barrier of rock, and he understood that they had swum through some gap or hole in it. He was trembling with fear that he would not go; and he was trembling with horror at that long, long tunnel under the rock, under the sea.
His head was swelling, his lungs cracking. He gave himself a panicky, convulsive kick forward, ducked his head, and swam. He could see no gap in it. One moment, the morning seemed full of chattering boys; the next, the air and surface of the water were empty. Introduction by Doris Lessing was always able to get to the very heart of things. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school such as and , Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.
He felt he would sink now and drown; he could not swim the few feet back to the rock. He was an only child, eleven years old. He was at the end of what he could do. In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. They sat down to lunch together.