The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Then we decided to move. The decision was made ‘by feel’, as it were, without even formal discussions. The detectives who by then attended our every occasion were even more baffled, because from the way their minds worked, no decision had been taken. It was like birds migrating. We didn’t stay together-that is, within an area. There was nothing to stay together for. So many other groups of people had ‘opted out’ as the old phrase was, and were living quietly together in various places: if someone went away from us, they left individuals, not a way of life. Living simply is living simply, it is a matter of temperament. Half a hundred people went off to other places where they had friends, in this way spreading the information that an accident of some sort was expected. And. quietly, groups and families moved off to the west coast and lived there as before, without fuss or making demands or drawing attention to themselves. By the time we moved you were twelve or thirteen years old, so you will remember as well as I do how we lived and how we prepared. I attach the names of all the people I can still remember who survive and where they are now as far as I know, excluding those who are with you in the Northern National Area. I will ask the people in Delhi to send you the material put together by Lynda from the work done by her group and by the associated groups.

  The names are divided into: (a) Those people who were with us for any reason at all, including those who came at the last moment because of our offers to look after and save anyone who came to our places on the coasts. Of course I don’t have all the names, there was much too much confusion at the end. (b) The small number with capacities of ESP who were divided among the others in such a way that every group would have some sort of specially qualified help. These names are not to be kept written down, only to be remembered, (c) Those who left Britain before the accident to warn people in other countries of possible repercussions, (d) Those who we think might still be in sealed-off Britain, either in a shelter (as you know this is considered impossible) or on one of the islands.

  My greetings to your husband. I was invited to the Mongolian National Area last year as a fraternal guest to their Pan-Asian Conference. I made excuses in case this would prejudice my chances of being invited by your government to the conference on Pan-Europe and Russia. Any chance do you think? I’d like to meet your husband. My love to you and to the children …

  IV

  Public statement on the Notice of Disbandment and Dispersal served on the Community on the White Boar Farm and Environs. Signed by Phoebe Coldridge as Minister.

  We have taken this step in the interests of the community as a whole and for the preservation of democracy. This is a singularly unpleasant cult which divides families, purports to provide a ‘healthy’ way of life while inculcating principles inimical to those held by the majority of the people in this country, and, as we have become satisfied, financially disreputable. We have therefore ordered its dispersal.

  V

  Portion of a letter from Paul Coldridge to Phoebe.

  … you’re putting me in such a position! I am wondering how much of this is my fault? The lawyers got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I was ill that week, or I’d never have let them go ahead. A detective visited me yesterday. I was asked if I would give evidence against them if it came to court. I said no, of course not. Surely you’d never expect … (a line crossed out). Jill is (three lines crossed out) happier than I’ve seen her ever. I know it’s not your way of life, nor is it mine. Yes, I do agree when people say it is affected of them. When I was down last time I felt they got increasingly away from the problems of ordinary people. But I have friends there. I’m a kind of father figure to some of them. Yes, I suppose that is funny. I feel it is dangerous to say to you, Phoebe (I can’t believe this is happening1.) that I put money into this right in the beginning and as far as I was concerned Francis was free to use it. The lawyers misunderstood. Francis is very competent. I mean the last thing I’d want anybody to think is that he’d been capable of misusing funds! Yes I suppose he is high-handed sometimes, but then look at the responsibility. Everybody puts things on to him and then they criticize when they go wrong-an old story, isn’t it, Phoebe? Please, please, I do beg you, is there anything now you can do to …

  VI

  Letter from Phoebe to Paul, the envelope marked Private and Confidential, the letter delivered by band.

  The order has been rescinded, as you’ll probably have seen by now. I acted on the advice of my officials. Of course what you say in your letter has made a difference. I hope I do not have to ask you not to let your letter or this letter become public? I shall issue another statement to the papers and let it be understood that we would be glad if the thing was dropped.

  My personal feeling is that these so-called simple life places should be forbidden. I can see the attraction of course-who can’t? But it’s a very selfish way of living. It withdraws much-needed skilled labour. If some of the riff-raff and troublemakers would only go off and occupy themselves on the farms-but no, it has to be people who could give something to the country if they didn’t think they had better things to do. With our poor country in the state it is and every hand needed at the wheel, I’m not surprised public opinion is so hostile to these people. The fact that my daughters have chosen that way of life has nothing to do with it. I hope I can be trusted at my age to separate public and personal feelings. I may say that while Gwen is kind enough to see me occasionally, I haven’t so much as had a postcard from Jill for years. Nor does Francis honour me with his confidence. I do not see my grandchildren. And how are you? Why didn’t you ask for an interview and come and see me rather than writing. (Pleasanter and safer!!) If you people had ever troubled to keep in touch, to explain, then this unfortunate incident would not have happened. Unfortunate for this poor Government, but I don’t suppose any of you care about that. I hear your efforts on behalf of the Coldridge bandwagon are well thought of.

  Yours affectionately,

  Phoebe.

  VII

  Portion of a Letter from Martha Hesse addressed to Francis Coldridge. It was written in an old school exercise book. When it came into Francis’s hands he wrapped it in Top Strength Barrier Paper and wrote on the outside: From the contaminated island of Faris, off the North-West Coast of Scotland: Dangerous Material.

  Is it you I am writing to, Francis? I hope so. I shall die soon and that’s why I feel I should write things down. Memories might have become precious. To what an extent they have the young ones will find when they leave here. I know you have gathered where we are. I have gathered where you are. I have often heard you. You have had a hard time? I’ve heard your father. He is very unhappy. I’ve tried to talk to him-but I was never very good. I’ve imagined once or twice talking to you? But I’ve been afraid to say too much, in case it was picked up by the wrong people: will it surprise you to hear that no group of people cast away on an island have been less anxious to be rescued? If this letter is to you. dear Francis, then I need start only at that moment when the last panic began. You’ll know the rest.

  I lost touch with you the last three weeks. It was three years before I gathered you had got safely away with your party. My trouble was I lost Lynda. We had planned that each unit concerned with rescue should keep with them a first-class ‘listener’, a first-class ‘seer’. Ours was Lynda (who was both by then). We didn’t begin to foresee how great the confusion would be. For one thing, there was our decision that so many of us had links with mental hospitals was a mistake and that this should be changed: it made no difference at all. (That was in 1977, if you remember.) In the hysteria of the end, they were hauling in anybody and everybody and locking them up on the grounds that they were crazy. Lynda had been living out of hospital for some time but they arrested her and put her into a closed wing of a hospital. They called these arrests ‘taking people into custody for their own protection’. The paradox was that those who were already in the hospital were free to move as they liked just as usual. The ones they scooped up at the end were not. So during the l
ast weeks some of our best were locked up and didn’t get out till the very last minute. If at all. They were of no help when we needed them most. They were the last to reach the embarkation points. I heard Lynda had got out but I did not see her again.

  At the end when I was standing on the pierhead looking back over the past six months I was thinking how very differently we should have done it. (Six months because of our knowledge that we should have four to six months warning of the event.) Our plan that when we knew definitely, from four to six months before, we should-simply stand up, announce and warn and take the consequences, was ill-prepared. Our mistake was, not to have expected the mass hysteria. I suppose it was because everybody had been so jittery and violent for so long that we couldn’t believe things would get even worse? We had not foreseen that the whole country would be rocking with rumours of impending disaster. Many people who had potentiality and who had never developed it (would probably even be angry or frightened if they knew they had it) were ‘picking up’ fragments of the future. And Britain was only part of it. There were as many rumours about the inundation of New York and New Jersey, the partial inundation of Virginia-surprisingly accurate. But the general effect was of a thousand voices crying Woe! ours among them and-when people are frightened, they are cruel and stupid. That’s all. I suppose, if you’re expecting a bad time when people are bound to be frightened, the most important thing is to guard against the panic and the cruelty.

  We were too reasonable. We put advertisements in newspapers that would take them; made as it were casual warnings in the course of television appearances; and we called meetings. A meeting in the Caxton Hall coincided with one of the evenings when the streets were full of ‘dancers’. They were like the hordes afflicted with St Vitus’s dance of long ago. We sat waiting for people to come into the hall. Then half a dozen people reeling in, giggling, said they knew they were doomed by they didn’t care, and reeled out again. They were middle-aged people: drunk women, drunk men. Or perhaps they weren’t drunk: it was hard to see when people were. But that was the way things were happening at the end. It was as if people were damned. As if they didn’t care what happened. At any rate, on that last morning before our party was picked up off the beach we understood that nearly everyone that came had personal contact with one of us: they had responded because of a personal trust or liking. Was that true for your party as well. I wonder? Of course a lot did come at the last moment because we had left leaflets about with addresses. And some came up and said things like: I’ve come because I felt this was the right place. And people brought children that they had rounded up from where they were wandering frightened on the streets. A black man came up to me with his ten-year-old son and said Look after him. He went back, to try and rescue more people. I don’t know what happened to him. And of course a lot of people had left before the disaster because we had been saying: if events take place which make you think our forecast of a disaster about such and such a date is true, then go as fast as you can.

  Would you believe that for some days our group were not sure what form the accident had taken?

  We were in the north-east helping our people to move west with as many as would go with them. The Government denied the rumours about the gas leaks. People were saying that gas from the North Sea supplies were escaping due to vandalism and lying over a large area of north-east England, held there by a ceiling of warm air. Others said that radioactive missiles carried by the Russian submarine which had been missing for some weeks had sunk, releasing its poisons, in the North Sea. We still don’t know if there was anything in this! But when we left the beaches were piled with stinking fish, the birds were dropping dead from the sky, and for miles inland, there was a creeping death that spread from the sea’s edge. The authorities were issuing statements, then withdrawing them. The Russians did the same. I suppose we can conclude that nobody knew the truth at that time? Anyway, that part of Britain was sealed off first, and no one could go in or out except the decontamination squads. And by that time we were already at our embarkation points on the coasts. The announcement then came, and was contradicted, that a wing of the research station at Porton had caught fire, and that in the confusion, some sort of nerve gas had been released and was affecting everyone. We should be calm, report to the nearest hospital. For all I know this might have been true, and not another of those rumours that swept through the country like fire or a storm. On the same morning that there was a rumour that an accident had occurred at Aldermaston, and that half the country was already doomed, it coincided with an announcement on radio that a Chinese aeroplane had crashed in Oxfordshire. A pilot ‘choosing freedom’ had got into a warplane full of particularly lethal nuclear devices destined for delivery to the guerrilla armies in Brazil. His crash-landing did for Britain. This announcement was not made by a representative of the Government. All officialdom had descended to the underground war-proof shelters.

  Some of them are there still-so I really believe, Francis. I know it sounds absurd. While I know (have seen) that at regular intervals the squads visit Britain to see if it is yet fit for the work of rehabilitation and restoration, I know that there is no map or plan of all the underground shelters that exist in a thick net all over Britain. The whereabouts of some are known, but others not. This is the price that is being paid for the abnormal secrecy, the paranoic envy, among the different branches of the armed services who would not trust each other with such information. It is conceivable that more than fifteen years after the event survivors still live like moles in their concrete tunnels, not daring to come up. I think this is so. I’ve seen a lot of ‘pictures’. But perhaps these are old ones, not recent, I don’t know.

  At the end, the announcement of what had happened was made for the most part over private radio stations, set up for this purpose. Those people who were not dead or dying or expecting to die were told to make their way to the western coasts and wait there. For no aircraft would dare to land inside infected Britain.

  On our particular station at the coast, we had gathered every kind of scientific gadget and medicine, with people trained to use them. We had money and barterable objects of all sorts. We also had concentrated foodstuffs and quantities of warm clothing and blankets and furs. For in this last and most ‘sophisticated’ of wars it remained more than ever true that the first casualty in time of war is warmth.

  We stood with these things stacked up around us and watched waves of aircraft coming in from every part of the sky. They landed where they could, took off loads of people to points in Canada, Newfoundland, the West Indies, and came back again. Ships converged towards us from the horizons. It seemed as if all the world was at its skilled and brave and resourceful rescue work after yet another foreseeable and preventable horror.

  There was no particular reason why our party left at the moment it did. I was reminded, as we stood there with our babies and our bundles, of a story told me about the Second World War. A man was on the ‘unsinkable’ battleship Repulse when it was sunk by Japanese warplanes within a few minutes. He was an officer. He stood at the foot of the stairway which was already perpendicular from the slant of the ship. Men went past and up, very fast, but disciplined, knowing the ship had only a few minutes to live and that those at the end of the queues waiting to go up the stairs would die. My friend stood there watching. A fellow officer went past him and said: ‘Aren’t you coming? ’ This moved him into joining the stream of men. It had been some sort of sense of honour, or even good manners that had kept him standing there letting others pass while every second meant life or death.

  For us it was not a question of seconds, or minutes, or hours, or even days. We knew that with a strong wind blowing from the coast eastwards, we would be safe for a time.

  We waited in a body for some hours, surrounded by weeping, beseeching people; and by people who were sober and sensible; and by people dying because they had been too late in leaving; and by children who had become separated from their parents, and were alone.

/>   Our party moved together down on to a small boat of the kind that was used to take people on pleasure trips around a coast. There were about a hundred of us, with the children, and a very great deal of baggage. At the end we hastily discarded the baggage which had the instruments and medicines in it: we would soon be across the Atlantic and in safe hands, and would not need these things.

  The sea was calm enough. When we were out of sight of land the wind changed and the seas rose and we were in a bad storm. We believed that when the storm was over we would be picked up by one of the big vessels that were everywhere in that part of the Atlantic. But the boat was not designed for more than travelling from port to port in sheltered waters. It did very well for a day, then the engines went. We were driven northwards by the storm for nearly a week. We did not think the boat would survive, the seas were so high. Several people died: from cold, from the insane rolling and pitching, and from seasickness. We were crashed on to the coast of this island early one morning in the hissing whistling dark of a storm. The boat was held by rocks at an angle which had us huddled together like maggots in the corner of a matchbox. When it was light we saw it was low tide and that the sands began at the boat’s prow. More people had died. We rolled the bodies down off the slanting deck into the sea: later they were washed up and we had to bury them. We staggered ashore on a chilly morning with the sun hidden behind a veil of angry reddish cloud.