Alfred and Emily
(Book)

Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother, Emily, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel. In the fictional first half of the book, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war--a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by an examination of their relationship as it actually was, the family's move to Africa, and the impact of her parents' marriage on herself, a young woman growing up in a strange land.