For seven years, until 1994, my father was the British Council representative in Malawi, and I was a regular on the British Airways service from Heathrow, with a fuelling stop in Harare. On one return flight, an unmistakable woman, grey hair pulled tightly back, sat in front of me on the leg from Zimbabwe. At Terminal 4 baggage claim, I helped her with her suitcases. No other passenger seemed aware, or remotely interested, that they’d shared a flight with Doris Lessing.
A Sunrise on the Veld captures the endless possibilities of an African dawn and a 15-year-old boy looking to his future…until a horrific incident changes the outlook. This is one of Lessing’s greatest stories, standing out in an oeuvre that earned her the Nobel Prize in 2007. (How did she take the news?)
First published in the collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country, Michael Joseph, 1951); has since appeared in several other collections
A Personal Anthology 