Doris May (Tayler) Lessing was born 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia (now Bakhtaran, Iran), one of two children born to Alfred Cook Tayler, who had been a bank clerk in England before World War I, and Maude McVeagh Tayler, who nursed her husband following the amputation of a leg as a result of wounds suffered in the battle of Passchendaele. Tayler had worked for the Imperial Bank in Persia, but with a better education for the children in mind, the family moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where Lessing's younger brother, Harry, still lives. The Taylers settled in an isolated area one hundred miles west of the Mozambique border, where Tayler was unsuccessful as a farmer; for some twenty years the family lived in poverty. As a child Doris was sent to the Dominican convent school in Salisbury (now Harare) and later to a government school for girls, also in Salisbury. At the age of twelve or thirteen she moved back home because of eye trouble and subsequently was selfeducated. At age sixteen she began working for the telephone company, having taught herself to type. In the late 1930s she began working for a firm of attorneys in Salisbury, where she taught herself shorthand; she subsequently worked for the Rhodesian parliament as a secretary and in 1947 as a typist on a Cape Town (South Africa) newspaper, the Guardian.
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