Our government, behaving as usual as if they were sane men governing the sane, were always issuing solemn or indignant denials and explanations to a populace sullen, or roaring with laughter, or rioting, or committing arson. This is not to say the Government did not believe what it was saying. Government usually does. This government was more than usually in the dark about its own actions, partly because after all it was only a deputy or servant of the international banking system, and partly because so much of its function was taken over by obscure technicians whose names will never be known. For already was established that stratification which is the principle of the world we live in now: a horizontal, almost nationless organization-though then, as now, this did not prevent feverish and virulent nationalisms. As one small example: I know (check Key) that chemists in research institutes in Britain, Russia and the United States were exchanging information in code for their own private edification and in the interests of science, and this when such behaviour, if found out, would have probably got them life sentences. (Death sentences in Russia and the States.) But who was to find out? Huge, expensive espionage organizations looked for spies. They found spies, in great numbers. But under their noses, all the time, went on this quiet kind of exchange between men who could not be made to think in the old way. So when a government issued this or that statement, with all the authority of the ranked battalions, the eagles, the trumpets-it may or may not have been made in good faith. But it didn’t matter, because things had gone too far towards the edge.
On the edge there, during the last handful of years it was … I forget that you shared it. But you were a child, and you could say, even at the end: We were happy. It was a Golden Age. You told me that was true even when we moved, split, went into a solitary half-hidden sort of life. The world can be jittering as if it has the St Vitus’s dance, but one can still, by choosing a good house, a stretch of sea below a window, and a large sloping field, create for loved children a Golden Age. We shut the world away from you, in spite of the visiting inspectors, the welfare officers, the policemen; in spite of the aeroplanes that screamed overhead and split our nerves; in spite of everything. But now, when I look back from the high, silent, comparatively pure air of this country which is still half empty, I know I was more than a bit mad too. Despair was my illness.
At the height of my bad time two things happened-in the same week. One was a letter from my father, saying he was getting old and tired. He was not yet sixty, but he wanted me to take over his work for the Rescue organization. And Martha came to see me to say my mother then in a mental hospital near … most particularly wanted me to go and talk to her. Martha gave some indications of what she wanted me to hear: I reacted violently. The truth was, I had had enough of the fantastic. I wanted to shut it out. We all had to put up with planetary visitors and green men and herds of lurking watching animals (they were visualized as a kind of werewolf), but I didn’t want any more of it. I remember I said to Martha that I had no time for women’s magazine occultism. She said, dryly, that ‘it might be the worse for me’. We were irritated with each other, and were careful to be tactful. I said I’d visit my mother, but I wouldn’t listen to any ‘fortune-telling’. Martha said: ‘Please listen to Lynda. Please listen at least.’ I promised I would and went off to visit my father in your great-grandmother’s house: this was the occasion of the ‘remorse of generations scene’ I described before.
My father had Rita and his new family with him. His children were about the same age as mine. This made me sad, on my mother’s account. I knew she would not need this sadness which did not prevent me from feeling it. My father offered to take out all our people to one of his camps. He had three going in various parts of North Africa. He said he thought there was no point in staying in Britain: it no longer stood for anything a civilized man could care for. Margaret was angry. She was absolutely behind the Government, she was still active although over eighty by then. She said he was unpatriotic. She talked as if he. were personally responsible for the large numbers of people leaving the country
In parenthesis: more people left Britain in those years than ever had happened before, for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, various parts of Africa. It is these people who, taking with them so much furniture and Englishry of all kinds have set up everywhere communities with names like ‘Little England’, ‘Newest England’, ‘England Again’ which are more English than England ever was. I saw a village three hundred miles from Nairobi last week which Nanny Butts could have walked into and hardly known the difference. And parts of Africa once bitterly antagonistic to Britain now indulge in a sentimental nostalgia for an England that never was, and a breed of administrators that never were. There is, now England has gone, an archetype of England; and an English civil servant, as Kipling might have dreamed him up in a sanguine moment, all high incorruptible integrity coupled with the most sensitive tenderness for other people’s feelings.
But that week-end of quarrelling and tears … my father argued with his mother, as always. Both put pressure on me, one to go, one to stay. And now I have to confess that I nearly returned to our friends and advised them to go. The Rescue schemes had become becalmed. They were part of international government. The Red Cross, Unesco, the United Nations used them. The skirmishes that broke out continually in the Middle East kept the camps full of the homeless and the hungry, but while my father and his associates had been pleased to be of use, it was not what my father had wanted to do. Which I was never able to get him to define. If he wanted to assist the destitute, then that was what he was doing; but I suppose he wanted to rescue more than people. Something like the transplanted ‘Little England’ and ‘England Again’ communities but on a much larger scale, and widened perhaps to include the European Spirit-whatever that was. But he was dreaming of something vague and marvellous, I am sure of it. Anyway, we were not getting on that week-end; it wasn’t easy to talk. However, I was tempted by a farm of several thousand still undeveloped acres in Libya which he said we could use.
While we were talking, Lynda telephoned from her hospital, begging him to come back again and talk to her. It came out that he had been to see her that morning. Then I understood his mood-dry and edgy and sad. Rita was urging him to go back and see Lynda: she’s a kind woman, if not exactly brilliant. But he was angry with Lynda: she had been warning him of all kinds of imminent disasters. She had said she proposed to warn me too. I was not happy, and neither was he that the only way we could be in sympathy was when we were being irritated by Lynda. I remember his words: ‘She expresses with extreme clarity the landscape of her paranoia.’ He told me he thought she was much worse. He said he thought Martha was a bad influence on her. This last was a new trend in him, and it upset me. For the years of my childhoodI had felt intermittently bitter about that triangle, my father, my mother, Martha. Then later I came to take pride in it, because of its kindliness and its generosity. That evening I understood that my father was allowing himself to be angry with Martha because even now he loved my mother so much he could not bear to criticize her for anything. Rita saw this too and she said to him: ‘But you say Martha’s been a good friend to Lynda.’ My father continued; he was very unhappy. Rita went to bed. I went to bed and left him there alone. It was an awful evening. Yet that night I decided to put pressure on us to go out to Libya. I nearly decided not to go and see my mother until all the arrangements were made. You see how close I was to taking all of us into a certain or almost certain death, for bubonic plague killed most of the people on that farm a few years later.
Next morning I woke, having decided in my sleep to see my mother before anything else. I went back to the farm, picked up Martha, and we went together. Lynda left her hospital; and we took rooms in a hotel in … It was the most remarkable few days of my life. I was, of course, in a remarkable mood, after months of solitary misery, and in despair because of what I could see happening even among the people I loved most.
What I have written up to now is probably more of person
al interest to you than of general use. Nothing in it implicates anyone much. I’ll send it by Route C. If it arrives before the second half, expect that in Route G. When you’ve seen and taken in what is there, and had it absorbed by a Memory, then bum it.
I end with my love and …
(Here followed various messages to people from the old community who had found their way to the Northern National Area.)
III
Second Part of Francis Coldridge’s letter to his stepdaughter, enclosing Documents IV, V and VI.
Following the death of her friend Sandra Hill my mother was badly ill and found herself in a mental hospital she had not been in before, at 4B under a Dr YN2 now working in the Argentine with a Dr YR14. (Check Key.) She described this man as ‘the person I had been trying to find for forty years’. He had been looking for someone like her, defined as: ‘A patient of good intelligence who had undergone a wide range of deleterious treatments but who retained enough balance to be objective’. She quoted this with humour. They began working together under the guise of his giving her psychotherapy. I’d forgotten you probably won’t know what that was. Lynda did collect a lot of representative material and collated it: the last I heard of it, it had reached Delhi. Therapy, or analysis was a process which was supposed to release suppressed or unconscious drives in neurotic people. A doctor or similar involved himself with a patient in a kind of symbiosis. There might be any result. The commonest was that the patient became dependent on the doctor and was unable to free himself from the doctor, or, later, from an authority figure. This was the easiest to see.
Another, also common, but less easy to see because no one had thought of looking for it, was that doctors became dependent on their patients: as it were fed on them. A doctor of a certain type who treated a group of patients over years created and then became part of a kind of psychic group where everyone was dependent on everyone else. You will remember that it was not admitted that there could be any kind of interaction between people but a verbal one (the use of words or the withholding of words)-an interesting contradiction when you think of the premise of this kind of therapy. No research had been done on involuntary hypnosis or telepathy, in this type of situation. As for the idea that a doctor in the role of a leader of a flock might be a kind of scapegoat or shock-absorber for a collective of varying individual psychologies, it had not yet dawned. Research on this is going on in Delhi officially and unofficially-both at the Institute.
Anyway, Dr yn2 was able to use this pretext to spend a great deal of time with my mother, and later with others as well. This was a bad hospital. That is, it was one of the many which consisted of groups of old-fashioned unmodernizable buildings, and full of hopelessly damaged people. But it had a modern wing. They soon found another twenty or so people who could be described by the definition I’ve quoted. But only five had the essential qualification that they could be trusted to be discreet even when in a mental crisis of some sort. Thus was this unit created. Later they found another half-dozen hospitals (check Key) where doctors independently of each other were working on the same lines, the beginnings of a diagnosis of the hitherto not understood disease, schizophrenia. All these doctors had lines out to places or people whose medical knowledge included what had been called ‘mystical’ or ‘esoteric’. These continued to work under cover until the Catastrophe. Unfortunately a good deal of this work was destroyed: although we did try to save it. Some was dismissed (when we tried to release it) by doctors who were too conditioned to see anything outside the current orthodoxy; others became interested, but were frightened of their colleagues: this was probably the most conservative and hierarchic profession in Britain. To quote my mother: ‘Since the birth of modern science, any person with a conventional education has been sent into a state of abject apology, has been made to recant, by the simple device of telling him he is superstitious. This word has done in our time what previous generations needed the Inquisition to do … this word, and ridicule.’ I found this in notes for a book she planned to write, but unfortunately they got lost in the Catastrophe.
Nevertheless, towards the end, doctors everywhere were on the edge of the truth. What is extraordinary now is that they couldn’t see what was staring them in the face. But they were badly handicapped by their ‘scientific method’ evolved centuries before, useful for some things, but useless for others. Yet it had become sacred, surrounded by religious emotions: they were not able to jettison it.
Also, they suffered from the same problem as a modern-minded Pope convinced that the time had come to make his flock accept birth control. Millions of women and their mothers had accepted unlimited childbearing to please God and the Virgin Mary. It would take a brave man to face telling them that their sufferings and sacrifices were outdated because of the new Encyclical.
It would have taken a brave man to stand up and make the simple announcement that millions of people with nothing much wrong with them had undergone every kind of torture and maltreatment-but voilà! the profession had suddenly seen the light.
The shock had to be cushioned.
Meanwhile, people were quietly working in various places over the British Isles; and typically for that time, while mostly aware of each other, and even helping each other, were unorganized and unaffiliated, and using without ever formulating them the old concepts which will always be revived in times of dogmatism and persecution: Silence, secrecy, cunning.
This was about as far as I got on the first night of the days I spent with my mother and Martha in the White Hart Hotel at… Though of course I’m now putting in things that I learned later, that happened later. We talked about it over dinner, and afterwards drank brandy together. I left the two old ladies fairly early on the pretext that they needed an early night. The truth was, I wanted to think about it all. Two old ladies-1 am seeing myself as I was then.
I went to bed calmly, considering the information they had given me. I woke up in a state of angry shock, furious with them and with myself, as if they had been trying to trick me, and I had been gullible. I stayed in my hotel room that day. I sent a message by the maid I did not want to see them. I was in an uncomfortable state physically and mentally: as if some irritant had been stirred into a liquid, my normal self being the liquid, and now everything was in a rejecting angry ferment. They did not come near me: on purpose of course, as we afterwards discussed. They had expected this reaction, having experienced it, or variations of it.
On the next night I went to their rooms sulky. They were patient.
We drank whisky while they ‘invited me to consider’ the reactions of any government, any body in authority anywhere (remembering my own experience of politics, political methods and atmospheres), on learning that a significant proportion of the population had various kinds of extrasensory powers-not as a theoretical possibility but as a fact. We discussed this, almost as a game. It became a very amusing one. There was no government then (as now) which believed it could govern without a complicated structure of controls. Information was given or withheld from citizens who on really vital issues did not know what was being given or withheld. The movements of people were controlled. The passport for instance was granted not as a right but as a reward for good behaviour as defined by that government. There were vast interlocking systems of spies and counter-spies-in our country alone there were seven espionage organizations a good part of whose energy was devoted to spying on each other. Ever since the Second World War we had been told how much of our money we could spend on travelling and where, and the conditions under which it was possible to travel were more and more officialized. Letters were opened, telephones tapped, dossiers proliferated. Imagine then, the possible dent in this structure made by a group of people with ordinary telepathic powers-very well, such thoughts are familiar to you, but I’m writing down, for the benefit of researchers, the reactions of someone only twenty-five years ago, on first considering these very obvious-to you-facts. To imagine the possibilities of ordinary telepathy-I remember it enter
tained us during dinner. Through coffee and brandy I remember we left government and thought of industry, which locks up processes for fear rival firms might use its methods; we thought of the centralized computers on which all our vital facts were recorded-accurately or not as luck or the case might be. We thought of the stock exchange and the race tracks and the lotteries-which of course is where most people begin and end. We thought of the secret scientific processes that go on in laboratories.
By the end of the evening I was in a condition of euphoria. I don’t remember another like it. All my life I had watched the powers of government grow, the liberties of ordinary people lessen; I had felt the slow tightening of control in every department of life. The air got steadily darker, more oppressive, claustrophobic. This government we were under whose standards were all to do with money, the making of it, the spending of it, the control of it, but whose slogans were all of service and self-sacrifice, had created an authoritarianism that governed as much by atmosphere as by law-and here we sat laughing, imagining how, in human beings themselves, were growing (faster every day, accelerated perhaps by the radiations and poisons we were subjecting ourselves to) powers which could make all this machinery useless, out of date, obsolete. I remember the evening ended on the thought that all existing forms of government were as irrelevant as dinosaurs: government by concealment, lies, trickery, even stupidity was-dead. The old right of the individual human conscience which must know better than any authority, secular or religious, had been restored, but on a higher level, and in a new form which was untouchable by any legal formulas. We quoted to each other, Blake’s ‘What now exists was once only imagined’ - and did not, for once, choose to remember the dark side of the human imagination.
The Four-Gated City Page 78