The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  To describe them, their circumstances — nothing here that the reader won't have heard a hundred times: it was a textbook case, as the social workers kept exclaiming. An Irish labourer had married a Polish refugee. Both were Catholics. In due time there were eleven children. He drank, was brutal, was intermittently affectionate. She drank, was hysterical, incompetent, unpredictably loving. The children would not stay in school. Welfare authorities, housing authorities, the police, the psychologists, all knew the Ryans. Then the two older boys were in court for stealing, and went to Borstal for a time. The second — not the oldest — girl, got pregnant. She was fifteen. No, there is nothing unfamiliar about any of it, but the Ryans' case seemed to be bigger and more hopeless because there were so many of them, and because both parents were large and colourful characters whose sayings were likely to be quoted at conferences and at meetings: it often happens that a single case takes wing out of its anonymity and represents others: in our city alone there were thousands of 'Ryans' of all kinds, colours, nations, unknown except to their neighbours and to the authorities, and these people in due time found themselves in prison, Borstal, remand homes, and so on. But some charity interested itself in the Ryan family, they were installed in a house: efforts were made to keep them together.

  This was how the picture looked to officialdom, doing as well as it could; how it looked in reports; how a newspaper, choosing the Ryans out of so many because of this quality they had of being more visible than others, presented them. Below the Poverty Line and Lower this was called. A book recording a dozen cases, the Ryans among them, was: Rejects of the Affluent Society. A young man just out of university whose aunt was a welfare worker on the case, had collected notes for a book, The Barbarians We Make, comparing the Ryans to those who pulled down Rome from its heights.

  The Ryans…

  How about the Ryan house, for a start? Well, it was filthy, and what furniture it had fit for a rubbish dump. Nothing on the bare floors but dirt, a bone, a plate of rancid cat's food: dogs and cats, like children, were fed impulsively. There was never much heat, so the thirteen Ryans and their friends — the Ryans attracted others and kept them in orbit — were always in one room, huddling. The parents were usually drunk and sometimes the children were, too. The friends were of all colours, and often remarkable, with lives out of the ordinary, and they all sat about, eating biscuits or chips and talking, talking; but sometimes the mother or an older girl cooked up some potatoes with a bit of meat, or opened some tins of something, and it became a festival. Chips and sweet drinks and tea with six or eight spoons of white sugar to each cup — such was the diet of the Ryans, so they were always listless, or on some unnatural peak of vitality while the sugar jigged in their arteries. They sat and talked and talked; the room was lively with that perpetually renewed chronicle, The Ryans Against the World. How the three middle children had been set on in the playground by a rival gang or family, but had won; or how the welfare woman had left a piece of paper saying that the fifth child, Mary, had to go to the clinic on Wednesday, and really must try to remember this time, for her rash ought to be attended to; how Paul had found a car unlocked and had taken — whatever was there, because it was there. Two of the girls had visited a chain store and had come back with twenty small plastic purses, two pounds of coffee, gardening shears, some spices from the Indian shelf, and six plastic cullenders. These articles would lie about unused, or might be bartered for other objects: the thieving was for the sake of the act, not of possession. The black girl Tessa, Ruth's friend, and Tessa's brother, and Ruth's other friend Irene and her sister had watched the television all the afternoon in one of the friendly television shops on the main street which did not chase away children who sidled in for an afternoon's free viewing — the Ryans' set was always broken. Stephen had met a dog on the street, and had gone to the canal and thrown sticks for the dog and the dog was ever so clever, it brought back three, no five, even six sticks at once… they talked, they talked; they drank and made their day, their lives, through vivid shrewd comment; and when they went to bed, it was three, four, six in the morning — but they did not undress, no one in that house undressed to go to bed, for it was never bedtime. A child would drop off where he sat, on his sister's lap, and stay there asleep, or be set down on the floor on a coat. By morning the four beds of the house each had three or four bodies in them, with the dogs and cats, all close together, warm, warming, protecting. No one got up till ten, eleven, mid-afternoon: if a Ryan found a job, he or she lost it in a week, because it was impossible to get up on time.

  They lived on welfare, unless Mr Ryan aroused himself, became sober, and found a job: he was a carpenter. Then money flowed in, and they got clothes and shoes. These garments were worn communally, for no one owned this jersey or that dress. Children wore what fitted and what lay nearest. New clothes might easily be in rags the day after they arrived in the house, for some reason or another.

  The children went on a 'job' when the mood took them — which was often. June, the thin sweet-faced little girl, was leader from the age of about seven. Four or five children would slide their way into a flat or a shop and emerge with — money? No, not so, that was not the point; or if it was money, then their pockets would be stacked for days with wads of notes which would fall out or be given away or 'lifted' by someone else. No, they were more likely to return with a marble table lamp, a stack of coffee tables which they had seen on a television advertisement and fancied the look of, a mirror with a pink plastic frame, and cigarettes — which last were valued and instantly shared out.

  The point was, the goal of the saints and philosophers was theirs by birthright: The Way of the Ryans, it might be called. Each day, each experience, was sufficient unto itself, each act divorced from its consequences. 'If you steal that you will have to go to prison.' 'If you don't eat properly you will suffer from vitamin deficiencies.' 'If you spend that money now there won't be any to pay the rent on Friday.' These truths, always being presented to them by the officials in and out of the house, could never stay in a Ryan head.

  And surely the priests and spiritual preceptors were abashed? To be attached to property is bad? What property? A Ryan had none, not even a shirt or a comb. To be the slave to habit is a chain? What habits — unless to have none is a habit of a kind. Regard they neighbour as thyself? — This grace of the very poor was theirs: within the clan which was the Ryans and their friends, white black and brown, who came and went day and night in and out of the house, was infinite giving and tolerance, was a generosity of judgement, a delicacy of understanding not given to many more fortunate people, or at least not without hard jostling with event and circumstance.

  One ought not to care for appearances? — It was a long time since the Ryans had been able to afford this luxury.

  One ought not to be puffed up, should not stand upon one's rights, should be humble and non-demanding? — Five minutes in the Ryan household would have any middleclass person indignantly on the telephone to his lawyer.

  Feckless and irresponsible, hopeless, futureless, uneducated and ineducable — if they could read and write their names they did well; debased and depressed and depraved — but what could you expect when four or five people of any sex or age slept together in one bed? — dirty, unhealthy, louse — ridden and limp with bad feeding when they weren't on a momentary 'high'… in short and to be done with it, everything that our old society regarded as bad the Ryans were. Everything that our old society aimed at the Ryans did not even attempt, they had opted out, it was all too much for them.

  The poor Ryans, doomed and damned; the dangerous Ryans, such a threat to us all, to our ways of thinking; the lucky Ryans, whose minute-by-hour life, communal and hugger — mugger, seemed all enjoyment and sensation: they liked being together. They liked each other.

  When the bad times started, or rather, were seen to be starting, a very different thing, the Ryans and all the others like them were suddenly in a different light. First of all — but of course, this
is a sociological cliche, some of the boys found places in the police or one of the many military or semi — military organisations that sprang up. And then, it was these people who took most easily to the hand-to-mouth life in the wandering tribes: nothing very much had changed for them, for when had they not been on the move, from room to broken — down house to council flat to hostel in a squatters' street? They ate badly? They were eating better and more healthily now than when civilisation had fed them. They were ignorant and illiterate? They were surviving capably and with enjoyment, which was more than could be said of so many of the middle — class people, who either lived on pretending nothing was really happening, only a reorganisation of society; or who faded away in a variety of ways, not able to bear an existence where respectability and gain could no longer measure the worth of a person.

  'The Ryans', no longer an extreme, disappeared into society, were absorbed by it. As for our Ryans, the actual family described here, there was still a nucleus somewhere near, the mother and three of the smaller children: the father had died in an accident to do with drink. All the older children had left the city, except for two in the police. June had attached herself to Gerald's household, and one of her younger brothers was there part of the time. 'The Ryans' had turned out to be nothing special, after all. In their humble, non-demanding way they had been part of our society, even when they had seemed not to be: they had been formed by it, were obedient to it. They were as far from what was to come afterwards, and quite soon — when 'the gang of kids from the Underground' appeared in our lives and wrecked Gerald's household — as we were, or had been, from 'the Ryans'.

  I use that phrase Gerald's house as people had once said the Ryans, meaning a way of life. Temporary ways of life, both: all of our ways of living, our compromises, our little adaptations — transitory, all of them, none could last.

  But while they lasted, so much clung to and worked at, like Emily with her duties in Gerald's house. Which I now visited, for Emily and I had not been back down in our rooms for more than a few minutes when the doorbell went and it was June, all bright anxious smiles. At first she did not mention the robbery, but sat on the floor with her arms around Hugo. Her eyes were on the move around the room, to see where the things she had taken away and been forced to return, now were. Most were out of sight, back in cupboards and storeplaces, but there was a bundle of fur pieces on a chair, and at last she said, in a spurt of desperate restitution: 'That's all right, is it? I mean, it's all right?' — and even got up to pat the fur, as if it were an animal she might have hurt. I would have liked to laugh, or to smile, but Emily was frowning at me, very fierce indeed, and she said gently to June: 'Yes, everything is fine, thank you.' At which the child brightened up at once, and she said, turning her attention to me with difficulty: 'Will you visit us? I mean Gerald says it is all right. I asked him, you see? I said to him, can she come, do you see what I mean?'

  'I'd like to very much,' I said, having consulted Emily with my eyes. She was smiling: it was the smile of a mother or a guardian.

  But first Emily had to prepare herself: she emerged in due time from the bathroom, her hair newly-washed and combed down, her clothes neat, her breasts outlined in blue cotton, cheeks soft and fresh and smelling of soap — a tidy package of a girl, all ready to present herself to her responsibilities, to Gerald. But her eyes were sombre, defensive, worried, and there beside her was June the child, and her face was laid open and absolutely undefended in a trustful smile at Emily the woman — her friend.

  We walked, the three of us, through streets dusty and as usual littered with paper, cans, every kind of debris. It would be necessary to pass a tall hotel built in tourism's last fling, and I was watching to see the route Emily would choose: every individual picked out a careful way between hazards in these streets, and one could tell a good deal about a person's nature by whether she chose to go past a dubious building, taking a chance she might be seen from it as prey or a target, or move into another street altogether; by whether she boldly called greetings into defended gardens or walked past quickly with an averted face. Emily went direct, walking carelessly through all the rubbish. Not for the first time I marvelled at the different standards for in and out of doors: inside her home, Emily was as pernickety as a little cat, but outside she seeme dnot to see what she walked through.

  The hotel had been taken over by squatters long ago: another obsolete word. But all kinds of people lived there, although as a machine the place was useless, like all the complicated buildings which had depended on technicalities.

  Looking up the tall shaft, today outlined against an over — hot and dusty sky, it showed ragged and patched, like lace: windows had been smashed or blown in. Yet the upper parts of it bristled everywhere with devices. Outside one window would be a whirr of light — someone had rigged up a little windmill for catching wind and turning it into power for hot water or lighting. Outside others were slanting discs held out on what looked from down in the street like spider webs: these were solar snares of various kinds. And among these up-to-the-minute contraptions danced and dangled coloured washing held out into the air on timeless string and wood.

  Up there it looked gay and even frivolous, with the blue sky as backdrop; down here rubbish was banked up all around the building, with pathways cleared through it to the doors. The smell — but I'll ignore that, as Emily and June seemed able to do so easily.

  Recently I had gone into the building, had gone up to the very top: there I stood, looking down over the city which — I suppose not surprisingly — did not look so very different than it did in the years before the machines stopped working. I had gazed down and fancied myself back in time: all of us did this a great deal, matching and comparing, balancing facts in our minds to make them fit, to orient ourselves against them. The present was so remarkable and dreamlike that to accommodate it meant this process had to be used: It was like that, was it? Yes, it was like that, but now… As I stood up there, thinking that there was one thing missing, an aeroplane, a jet rising up or descending to the airport and dominating the sky, I heard a soft droning, a bee's sound, no louder, and there it was — a plane. A little one, like a grasshopper, painted bright red, all alone in the empty sky where once so many great machines had filled our lives with noise. There it was, a survivor, holding perhaps the police or the army or high officials off to some conference somewhere to talk, talk, talk and pass resolutions about our situation, the sad plight of people everywhere in the world — it was pretty to look at, it lifted the spirits, to see that little thing glittering up there in emptiness, off to some place which no one looking up at it could get near these days except in imagination.

  I had walked slowly down through the erstwhile hotel, exploring, examining. I had been reminded of a new township built for African labourers outside a large mine in Africa that I saw in the after all not-so-long-ago days when the continents were close together, were a day's journey away. The township covered acres, had been built all at one time, and was made of thousands of identical little 'houses', each consisting of a room and a small kitchen, a lavatory with a wash-basin. But in one house you would see the pattern of tribal village life brought to the town almost unchanged: a fire burned in the centre of the brick floor, a roll of blankets stood in a corner, and two saucepans and a mug in another. In the next 'house' a scene of Victorian respectability: a sideboard, dining table, a bed, all in hideous varnish, with a dozen crocheted articles for ornament, and a picture of Royalty on the wall opposite the entrance so that the Queen, in full military regalia and the observer could exchange glances of approval over this interior. In between these extremes was every variation and compromise: well, that was what this hotel had become, it was a set of vertical streets in which you could find everything, from a respectably clean family making jokes about conditions in England before the advent of proper sewage disposal and carrying chamber pots and pails down flight after flight of stairs to the one lavatory that still worked, to people living, eating, sleepi
ng on the floor, who burned fuel on a sheet of asbestos and pissed out of the window — a faint spray descending from the heavens these days need not mean imminent rain or condensing steam.

  From the possibility of which event I wanted to hurry on and away, instead of standing there, among rubbish, gazing up; particularly as I could see through the windows of the ground floor a couple of young men with guns: they guarded the building, or part of it, or just their own room, or rooms — who knew? But June, seeing them, exclaimed and called out and looked pleased — in the way she had of being pleased, as if every little event offered her undeserved riches of pleasure. With an apology to Emily for keeping her waiting (my presence she had the greatest difficulty in remembering at all), in she went, while we two, Emily and I, stood there in a cloud of flies, watching a scene through a window of June being embraced and embracing — one of the two young men had visited in the Ryan house, which meant he had been almost part of the family. Now he gave her a dozen pigeons: the guns were airguns; the pigeons would come back — they had flown off as we arrived — and settle again over the rubbish where they had been feeding. We left, carrying the dead birds which would do for the household's next meal, hearing the silken whirring of many wings, and the pop, pop, pop of the airguns.

  We crossed some old railway lines, flourishing now with plants, some of which Emily pulled up, as she passed, for medicine and flavourings. Soon we were at the side of the house. Yes, I had walked past it, out of curiosity, in my walks, but had never wanted to go in, fearing as always to encroach on Emily. Again June waved at a youth standing behind ground floor shutters that were half-open because of the heat, and again some weapon or other was put aside. We entered into a room which was very bare and clean — this struck me first of all, for I had not shed old associations with 'the Ryans'. No furniture at all, but there were curtains, and the shutters were scrubbed and whole, and mats and mattresses were rolled and stood along the walls. I was being taken from room to room on a rapid tour, while I looked for the communal rooms — dining-room, sitting-room, and so on. There was a long room for eating, with trestles and benches, everything scrubbed bare; but otherwise each room was self-sufficient as a workroom or as a home. We opened door after door on groups of children sitting on mattresses which were also beds; they were talking, or engaged on some task, and on the walls were hanging clothes and belongings. It could be seen that natural affinities and alliances had made, were making, of this community a series of smaller groups.