Article: Under My Skin: Volume One of my Autobiography, to 1949.

She is 8 years old in Africa. Her bitter, disappointed parents have shipped her off to convent school. Had you known that Doris Lessing spent four years in a convent school? That so admiring was she of holy water, rosary beads, Sanctus bells and a coffin as pink as a cake, in the shape of a violin, she actually converted, for a couple of minutes, to Roman Catholicism? That after her mother explained the Inquisition, she promptly quit religion, as she would quit piano? Anyway, she is 8 years old, at night, in her convent dormitory bunk:

The red light that burned always in front of the Sacred Heart and its bloody gouts lit the room with red. The nun in charge of us ...

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