The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  But I must try and describe the violence of that time: it was a development of the type of the violence of the ‘sixties. Its essential quality was a pointlessness, a senselessness, as when in the ‘sixties groups of football fans smashed train compartments for fun, or street gangs wrecked telephone booths, or adolescent boys raced down a dark street smashing milk-bottles against kerbs or motor cars.

  For a long time before that in the United States it had not been safe to walk in the big cities at night: sometimes in certain areas not in the day. For years they had moved about by the grace of paternal or brutal police; or under the protection of some gang. (It was in the mid-’seventies that it came out for how long the United States had been run by an only partly concealed conspiracy linking crime, the military machine, the industries to do with war, and government.) Whether he chose to be protected by the bullymen of the gangster groups, or by the police, or by the deliberate choice of a living area that was safe and respectable and inside which he lived as once the Jews had lived in ghettoes, in America the citizen had long since become used to an organized barbarism. This state of affairs spread to Britain. The difficulty was, it spread slowly, and subtly; nothing was ever called by its right name; and there was always a good patriotic reason for every one of the liberties we gave up. I’m apologizing! One generation apologizing to the next for ‘the mess we’ve made’ became a sad joke at the end.

  I remember a ridiculous scene. I was visiting your great-grandmother, Margaret (she died in the Catastrophe), at a time when your grandfather, Mark, was trying to get me to join his Rescue schemes. We were met at the station by a chauffeur engaged because he knew karate, and during the afternoon the man from the next estate came over to say gangs from South London were on the prowl in our area, and we should let loose the guard dogs. Your great-grandmother burst into tears and apologized to your grandfather for the ‘mess they had made’. My father was very moved. He apologized to me for the delinquency of his generation. I imagined myself to be the innocent recipient of the contrition of History itself-then I realized you were in the room, forced to remain in the house to play because there were so many kidnappers about, and it was time I began polishing up my lines for delivery to you.

  But who did all this rioting or fighting for fighting’s sake?

  Sometimes it was gangs of young men linked with a street or a factory, who might decide to go off in cars or even running in a pack like wolves to smash up some other place. Or it was men and women together-but these usually rioted around their own living area. Sometimes it was students. Sometimes it was the semi-organized militia employed by a big farm or industry, who decided for an evening or a week-end that attack was more enjoyable than defence. But the fighting and rioting tended now to be between students and students, workers and workers, one area of streets against another, one group of strong men against another; not between public and police who were becoming more like referees, or who might even fight against each other as members of opposing gangs.

  Apart from the raiding and rioting expeditions for fun, the fighting tended to go on under high-flown slogans. They were mostly patriotic and the reverse, for these had absorbed many of the party-political divisions. But fighting did go on between ‘fascists’ and ‘socialists’; though less and less as time went on. This was not because there were less left-wing and right-wing people; but because the labels were used so cleverly by groups of agents provocateurs in street fighting that the old banners of the socialist and communist demonstrations were tarnished. Once everyone had known more or less what the word ‘socialist’ meant. Now, for lots of people it meant the gang who smashed up Lord’s cricket ground last week. The fighting was more like one of the old Westerns, between goodies and baddies. From the early ‘seventies onwards individuals or groups or even whole cities might suddenly succumb to a condition like a child’s ‘promising to be good’. A university would suddenly ‘pledge solidarity with’ or ‘obedience to’ or ‘support for’ the country. This was like the waves of self-immolating fervour that happened under Stalin. But nearly always when this occurred, there would be a minority in the factory or institution, or an opposing factory or trade union who would ‘choose independence’. They would be (according to their opponents) ‘talking the trade union jargon of the ‘thirties’. This last, under the National Government became the equivalent of saying that the group or trade union concerned was seditious, anti-British, dangerous, and deserved punishment. Some group would administer the punishment while the police watched.

  There were race riots too, but not as bad as people had feared: black and white people beat each other up, as part of the general disorder. The Government tended to be lenient about the fighting. But it severely punished offences against property-the waves of casual smashing and burning and looting which grew more frequent and more violent. Such a wave might start in one city (usually in summer, for summer was increasingly for violence all over the world) with burnings and smashings and theft, and sweep across the country, this process taking a month. Then things might be quiet for a bit: while the nation followed on television and in the newspapers the stories of how inciters and ringleaders were being caught and punished. Our systems of punishment reverted: there were higher sentences for theft and damage to property than for assault or murder. Throughout this time there was agitation for the reintroduction of hanging, of severer conditions in prison, of beating. The cat was reintroduced for property offences: hanging for assault against certain categories of people, the police and members of the Government for instance. Citizens took things into their own hands when they disagreed with the sentences of the courts. There were odd hangings made to look like suicide, quiet beatings up, and so on.

  And I am ashamed to say that throughout the growth of this we did our best to ignore it. Yet I also defiantly assert that it would have made no difference if we hadn’t! I didn’t start seriously thinking until Nicky left us. I suppose my state of mind was something like: Things are going from bad to worse, but then they always have. Nicky left and both I and your mother were upset. We had been close, all of us, since our ‘teens. We had been close even when we disagreed politically. That was before we left London. On the farm he was not interested in politics. I swear that he hardly read the newspapers. Of course very few of us did. But when he went back into London with his family he went back too into active politics. It was a repetition of his first introduction to politics, as if he were saying: You say I’m an agitator! Very well, that’s what I shall be! But the first time it happened he was fifteen, and even then he used to make jokes about it, about the way he became political. Now he was over thirty. I went to see him in London, but could not talk to him: he was a fanatic. Later he wrote me a letter. It was quite unlike him. Its tone was, if I can try a crazy sort of description, as if he were roaring with laughter while he was telling me about an accident in which his family had been killed. The letter said that he had made a bet with a friend that he could start a riot or demonstration in any highly educated audience (such as a university) by the simple means of describing how the banking system worked, or a mortgage, or an insurance company, or even reading them portions out of that old socialist book. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It would have to be a middle-class audience. His point was that the education of middle-class people was always a blank about the mechanics of their own country-increasingly so under this government. A working-class audience would say something like: Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. The educated audience would riot not because of their anger at suddenly exposed wrongs, but because of their anger at having been made fools of: this moment in such a person’s life was always explosive. Having made the bet he proved it, in Sussex, Essex, and Reading. Then he was charged with assaulting the police with violence and given five years. I went to see him. I couldn’t recognize him. He was like the teacher’s pet in class, the good boy. He talked of earning remission of sentence by good behaviour; had already earned privileges. He said he deserved his sentence, was �
��grateful to the magistrate’.

  I went home and realized I was thinking about him as if he were drugged or poisoned. Not because of this conversion to conformity. It was because of the suddenness of it. I began thinking about what was really going on. Yes, of course I should have done it before. But when I did at last sit down and say to myself that I had been lazy and blind-I realized that in fact I did know quite a lot about it already. This sudden change in a person wasn’t new. Things like that kept happening. An old friend would suddenly send a crazy letter full of untrue accusations: a week later you’d meet him-he’d literally forgotten about it, or behaved as if he’d had a boil lanced-a boil full of general hatred but it was bad luck you got the discharge. Someone you’d never met would write you a violent accusation that you’d ruined his life. You’d never know why. A woman whom you knew to be kind and honourable, you’d hear had stolen something and gone around blaming somebody else, or had started a slander campaign against somebody or other. And in public life too, it was a time of abject apologies, and new starts after false ones. The Government would dramatically issue an order for someone’s expulsion, or the disbanding of an organization; this without warning, or explanation to the public, and in the name of democracy. A month later it would be acknowledged that there had been a mistake.

  People kept taking leave of their senses-and then returning to them, astonished. This is why I thought Nicky’s conversion to being a prize pupil of the police, and a model prisoner grateful for what was being done for him, wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. He broke out of prison and went into hiding somewhere. I never saw him again.

  I began reading and studying, trying to understand what was happening. I went into London and studied the files in newspaper offices. I saw that in what in the old days had been called ‘informed opinion’ our condition had been stated for years. We were poisoned. Our nervous systems were shot to pieces-mainly from the noise we had to endure from traffic and (most particularly) aircraft; the air we breathed was foul, and full of toxic substances; we were ill because of the drugs we filled ourselves with-aspirin, for instance, which people took like sweets or cigarettes-and purgatives of all kinds and sedatives and sleeping drugs. Our food was poisoned by preservatives and the toxic substances we used on crops, and the atomic wastes dumped in the sea. The air was increasingly filled with radioactive substances-already in the ‘sixties they stopped giving milk to schoolchildren in certain parts of the United States because the poorly-fed among them couldn’t tolerate the level of radioactivity in it.

  All these facts had been known and had been discussed; sometimes there would be an agitation or a protest, and then it died down. The authorities would always deny danger and disclaim responsibility. They said there was no danger. They were in good faith. Any one of these things taken separately was tolerable, we could have stood it. But put them all together and the fact was-we were slowly driving ourselves mad. The human race had driven itself mad, and these sudden outbreaks of senseless violence in individuals and communities were the early symptoms. In moving out of the city away from some of the noise (though not the worst-aircraft), and by growing food less contaminated than that which could be bought, we had done the right thing for the children. The people on our farms were quieter, healthier, happier, less neurotic than most, and that in spite of the fact that so many had started badly as rejects from conventional society-but that wasn’t saying much; for the atmosphere was affecting us too. Suddenly we had to face outbreaks of savagery among ourselves. This was among our private militia: logically enough. There were hysterical crises in the women; soon over, but frightening while they lasted, with suicide threats and threats that they intended to kill the children-what was the point of bringing up children to live decently and honestly when it was clear that our little enclave of quiet and simplicity would soon be destroyed-and by internal pressures as much as by external ones. Then some babies were born deformed-all about the same time, in the space of about eighteen months. Chu• doctor said it was a coincidence. A number of us got a kind of mononucleosis (a blood disorder) and got rid of it only with difficulty. There was a sharp increase in migraine. Marriages that had been happy broke up … mine among them.

  But I was back in a very early childhood atmosphere: the facts were known, but no one knew what to do. There was no need to look for extraordinary reasons for the riotings and the illness and the hysteria and so on: the reasons were all there, out in the open, had been for years; but people couldn’t add two and two together, or if they could, were numbed by despair.

  And so, for a time, was I, because of your mother. To begin with, our marriage wasn’t one: it was a kind of despairing alliance against what we called ‘the mess our parents had made of everything’. Later we were happy, when we left London. And then your mother suddenly fell violently in love with a newcomer to our community and went to live with him. It happened overnight-literally; she met him one afternoon and left me next morning. We couldn’t even talk about it: she had become a stranger to me. The children, you, were left with me, that is. in my cottage. Jill had taken leave of her senses, as other people had, were doing, would do.

  More and more, because a continually greater strain was being put on us. But I think now it was more than that: it was the instinctive knowledge I mentioned before: a kind of despair because of the future. The very near future.

  I went through a crisis of my own about then. I could have gone over the edge into-whatever the general illness was. Because I was so close I think I understood it. The sudden fits of silliness, of taking leave of oneself, of rioting and so on, were a way of saying: I can’t manage, it’s too much, I can’t be responsible. A man in a mental hospital will have a fit of violence and destroy his bed and his bedding and his locker. Why? He’s learned he can’t destroy the doctor, or the nurse or the superintendent. And anyway, what for? Long ago he learned it was useless to think of beating up the teacher or the old woman in the basement. What did he want to kill? His father? His mother? His sister? It doesn’t matter. Long ago he became filled with an enormous sorrow, he knows that somewhere he lost a birthright, he diverged from himself, he will forever be shut out from some sweet truth that once he sucked in like air through his pores. He’d really like to kill himself-but he daren’t. He mutters sullenly: They’d punish me for that too, I know them, they’d be waiting for me just over the frontier …

  I was alone and miserable. I loved your mother and there she was, close to me, on the same farm, across a farmyard with her new lover. And it was literally as if she did not see me. She’d say, Hello, Francis, how are you? With a charming smile. But only if I went right up to her and made her acknowledge I was still there, and the children were still there. Above all I knew the misery you children felt when your mother treated you as importunate strangers. I had known that myself.

  But above all I was tormented by our helplessness-I mean, the helplessness of us all. I saw the human race, or at least, my countrymen (I’ve never been able to care a damn about ‘the world’, other countries, the way our family always has), as people who had a spell put on them by a magician. I felt myself as a solitary sane person among maniacs. I spent months like this. My work for the farms and the community was done by friends, and I shut myself away except for you children.

  During this time I went for long walks. I walked over Wiltshire and Somerset. It wasn’t easy. It already wasn’t easy to walk as one wanted. A move to make us all carry identity cards had been rejected by a people still able to say no (a ray of hope which a lot of us felt too strongly), but one was continually challenged by policemen, guards, people in and out of uniforms, continually coming to fences or boundaries beyond which one couldn’t go. Also, one had to dodge any group of people, particularly young men; for it was as if the act of being together in a crowd was enough to spark off the aggression-usually suddenly and without warning.

  All that part of England was more or less army property. It was the seat of a dozen military establishments of v
arious kinds. Of course Salisbury Plain, which once held the sacred places of England had long since been in the hands of the army. Quietly, more and more of Britain had passed into military hands. There were more and more research stations to do with warfare by gas and chemicals and disease. There were more and more nuclear stations for manufacture and research. There were more army exercises and training. Yet there was less protest about them. They were less noticeable. A new research institute would be part of a hospital or university and its purpose disguised. An army exercise would be unnoticed because fewer but more specialized people took part. The skies were full of all kinds of highly secret weapons, but few people ever looked at the sky and when they did these objects were taken to be flying saucers or space ships from other planets-much to the relief of the authorities.

  At this time rumours proliferated, and so did denials of rumours. Nobody and everybody believed the rumours-which were as fantastic as you can possibly imagine (but not as fantastic as the truth) and nobody and everybody believed the denials. People had ceased to care. Or had become a different sort of creature, able to believe and disbelieve at the same time. Flying saucers and visitors from space, both benign and malignant; armies which landed and took off in transparent space ships (which was why they were so hard to see), swarms of animals which were supposed to be in hiding waiting to take over the earth; civilizations of fantastic advancement and beauty which were prospering on the inner surface of the earth (hollow, like a Hallowe’en pumpkin)-anything and everything was both true and untrue.