The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  In some of the cities across the peninsula they pay allegiance to a female deity, so we hear; she goes under various names. We in The Cities have always scorned such backwardness, worshipping, as we do, The Sun, our progenitor. We know that our view of things is the true one. But were we so different, with our uncritical love for Destra?

  Beauty is a terrible thing: but it is dangerous too for a person to be seen as the sum of his or her admirable qualities. What is left out, the shadow, has to be understood. But there rises a question, not without relevance here: if Destra had been too good, too noble, to get rid of The Cruel Whip, our affliction, the result would have been her continuing wretchedness and our misery as The Cities fell into ruin under him. Well, they have fallen into ruin, under his son, who is stupid. But The Cities enjoyed more than a hundred and fifty years of prosperity, high public morality and culture. Of course, a lot of people are satisfied with the crude raucous violent times we have now, because we eat well – most do – and enjoy the plunder from the Barbarian cities. And we have all our dirty work done for us, by the captured Barbarians. Good times: ‘We are having a good time,’ you often hear people say.

  So, which of us would Destra have liked us to choose? Looking back now, it is easy. She was always gently, tactfully, drawing attention to one of us, citing his good qualities, but not in a way that would make us look bad in comparison. It is easy to see now: I think we spent our childhood in a state of unconditional love: we were dazzled, eyes blinded. She would have liked the one who became our water engineer. Nine. And she was right: he would have made a fine ruler. Why did she not ever say, This is my choice? She did, as openly as she could. But if she had said, I want this one to succeed me, then the other families would have complained, made an alliance against her. Then they would have fought among each other to make sure their own offspring succeeded. A civil war – that is what would have happened. But to arrange things so that all of us were chosen to choose, meant that our families would be responsible with us. I cannot now remember what was being said in my family: the truth is, memories of my family life are dim and dull compared with Destra’s home and her lessons. I am sure my family were excellent people, but they did not matter to me. Destra was my mother. She was our mother.

  I wonder if she was anxious about our affection for her son, about how we always supported and helped him? It was natural to behave like that, with kindness; she had taught us kindness.

  When she was ill, at the very end, and was carried in on the day that we had to choose, how she must have suffered. I do remember her face, though I see it now differently from how I have all these years. She was ill – that was all I saw. But she was also ill with anxiety. She lay there, held up on her pillows, and watched us choose, thoughtlessly, gaily, her silly son, her charming, delightful silly son – and now I see her face, that old grim face, set hard. She knew what was to come.

  And now it is easy to see why we, The Twelve, never did like to call things by their proper names. We complained of DeRod, feared him, speculated Why, but we never said, ‘We, The Twelve, are responsible for everything that has happened because we chose him, and we didn’t have to.’ Any one of us would have done better than DeRod. None of us was wicked, all of us revered Destra, and would have done what we thought she would have wanted. Even I, slow and lacking in resolution, would have done better.

  We let her down. It was our fault. We are responsible. The famous Twelve, so busy with our efforts on behalf of The Cities, proud of our accomplishments, we, and no one else, were the cause of The Cities’ downfall. And, very likely, of breaking Destra’s heart, before she died.

  Before sealing this away I have to record one more thing, a strange thing. There have been rumours from across the mountains of strong earth shakings, that have brought down whole cities. We know that rumours always exaggerate, and so we await confirmation. And at the same time, came news that workmen, building a new section of DeRod’s wall, found the ruins of a buried city. We do not yet know how extensive these are. They are at the depth of about two ordinary pickaxe handles. The construction of the buildings is different from ours, more elaborate, and they used very small stones in different colours as pavements and floors and ceilings. This is a craft we know nothing of. We hear that DeRod is wild with excitement and has ordered all other work to cease, so as to dig out the city. ‘All of it,’ he ordered. ‘It will be a wonder people will come to see.’ Meanwhile our people have reacted with forebodings. They are remembering that among the tales from the old part of The Cities are some that speak of earth vomiting, rivers swallowing mountains and changing their courses, the sea inundating coasts. Strange to see the old tales, scorned by this sensation-loving people who want only the new and the exciting, coming back into favour, but only because they match with new anxieties. ‘Once there was a fine city here, under where we are now,’ they say. ‘And what is to stop it all happening again? Look what is going on on the other side of the mountain.’

  Note to the published manuscript, by the Archaeologist

  The site we are excavating is certainly not less than seven thousand years old. Over it is a layer of pumice and ash. We have not yet unearthed anything similar anywhere in the world. This is a civilisation of a type new to us. The manuscript is of inestimable value in reconstructing the ordinary life of that time. We have taken due note of the fact that under this city, which is still only part exposed, is another. In due course we shall reach that too.

  This manuscript was found in a recess in a thick wall, which had been partly toppled. The script was unknown before a group of experts found that there are in some places analogies with cuneiform – enough to unlock the rest. The translation has been made for our easy reading. Words such as ‘time’ would translate as ‘that which is passing and which carries us from birth to death on the rays of the sun’. A year: ‘a cycle of changes in the colours of the vegetation, matching the sun’s movement from hot to cold’. A stupidity: ‘that which is missing from the nobler parts of the mind’.

  Our usages, less picturesque, are at least speedier.

  We have been labouring over this excavation for four years now. What we see, what we work with, is rock, rocks, hard grey stone, a type of granite. Rock and stones. But what is described by the author in this manuscript are gardens, trees, water, and above all the Fall of water over great blocks of stone which we at first, before the finding of the manuscript, described as a great ceremonial ascent of steps to – we expected a temple or something on those lines.

  A LOVE CHILD

  A young man descended from a train at Reading and his awkwardness swung the suitcase in his hand so that it nearly clipped the face of a youth who turned, putting a hand to his head to add force to a protest, but then his scowl vanished and he shouted, ‘James Reid, it’s Jimmy Reid,’ and the two were shaking hands and clapping each other about the shoulders in a cloud of steam from the shrieking engine.

  Two years ago they had been schoolboys together. Since then James had been taking a course in office management and accountancy, greeting news that Donald was ‘doing politics’ with ‘Fair enough, they’ve got money’. For Donald had always been able to take advantage of treats and trips and opportunities, whereas, he, James, was kept watching pennies.

  ‘I’m afraid we have to watch the pennies,’ was what he heard at home, far too often, and, he now believed, often unnecessarily.

  Donald had shone in debates and the dramatic society, and started a magazine called New Socialist Thought. James had had no idea what he wanted to do, provided it wasn’t sitting from nine to five at a desk. His mother had said, ‘Just get the certificates, dear, they’ll come in useful.’ His father said, ‘Don’t waste time at university, you’ll learn more in the school of life.’ But they couldn’t have afforded university.

  Now Donald said, ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘I’m off home.’

  ‘You do look glum. What’s up?’

  With Donald, this affable person whose rou
nd and smiling face invited frankness, with the guarantee of understanding, it was easy to say what he could not remember even hinting to anyone else, ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

  Donald laughed out loud, and at once said, ‘Then, come along with me. I’m off to the Young Socialist Summer School.’

  ‘But I’m expected at home.’

  ‘Ring them. Come on.’ And he was already on his way to the tea-room where there would be a phone.

  James remembered that Donald always assumed everything was easy, and so for him it was. To ring home and say, I’ll not be home this weekend, was for himself a big deal, something to think about, plan, steel himself for, consider the ifs and buts, but here he was at the telephone, while a waitress smiled at the two youths, Donald grinning encouragement. He said to his mother, ‘Will it be all right if you don’t see me till Monday evening?’

  ‘Yes, of course, dear.’

  He knew she thought he should get about more, make friends, but it had needed Donald. The two got on a train returning to where James had just come from, but now, instead of the dismalness of, Oh God, another day pen-pushing, they were off on an adventure.

  So began the wondrous summer of 1938 that changed everything for James. That weekend summer school for which Donald wangled his attendance – it was booked out, but James knew the organisers – was about the war in Spain, but as far as James was concerned it could have been about the conditions of tin-miners in South America (a later lecture). He was dazzled by this largesse of new ideas, faces, friends. He slept in a dormitory of a college that catered for summer courses and schools, and ate in the dining-room, with young men and women from all over the country, in a cheerful argumentative atmosphere that accommodated every conceivable shade of left-wing opinion. Defining one’s exact nuance on everything from Spain to vegetarianism was an essential duty to oneself. The weekend after it was the pacifists, where Donald was speaking to provide opposition. For Donald was a communist. ‘But I’m not a joiner, I’m with them in spirit.’ He felt it his responsibility to combat wrong-thinking everywhere. His duty was politics, but his pleasure was literature, particularly poetry, so James found himself at a weekend of ‘Poetry as a Weapon in the Struggle’, and another of ‘Modern Poetry’, then ‘The Romantic Poets as Precursors of Revolution!’ He heard Stephen Spender speak in London and recite his own poetry in Cheltenham. And so the summer went on, ‘The Communist Party for Freedom!’ ‘American Literature’, which meant Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, meant Waiting for Lefty, and Studs Lonigan. ‘Whither the British Empire?’ ‘India’s Right to Self-Government’. And it was not just weekends. After his day at the business college he would join Donald somewhere for an evening’s lecture or debate, or study group. He was going home to pick up clean clothes, have a bath and tell his mother where he had been. She listened all interest, and there was no end to her questions. A year ago he would have been irritated and evaded her, but he was beginning to understand the indigence of her emotional life and was learning patience. His father listened – James had to suppose – but did not comment more than a grunt or a snort at what he disagreed with.

  James seemed to be meeting only vivid personalities who made him feel lack-lustre and timid, and the girls were unlike any he had known, talkative, free with their often alarming opinions, and with their kisses too: he was at first surprised they did not mind his approaches to them and even teased him for his hesitations. Easy with kisses, but parsimonious with everything else: this reassured him for he certainly did not believe in Free Love, the subject of one of the debates. He was not only living in a dream of companionship and quick friendships, but above all he was seeing himself in ways that surprised, shocked or shamed him. Chance remarks, overheard, a sentence or two from a lecture on ‘The Fascist Threat to Europe’ or ‘The Working Conditions of Miners’ left him with ears throbbing with what he had heard: for they seemed sensitised to hear words that might have been designed for him personally.

  At a pacifist weekend he had his childhood put into perspective as neatly as in a cartoon: ‘The soldiers from the Great War, they either can’t stop talking about it, they’re obsessed …’ ‘Like my Dad’ came from the floor, ‘… or they won’t talk about it at all’ – ‘Like my father,’ contributed another.

  James’s father, a survivor of the Trenches, wounded at the Somme, was one who never opened his mouth. Not about the war, and not much about anything. A large man, a rock, with shoulders and hands surely too powerful for what he did – he was in the office of an engineering firm – he could sit silent from the beginning of a meal to its end. Most evenings he went to the pub, to meet his mates, and James had often seen them, all old soldiers, sitting in a group around the fire, not saying much. James had grown up with silence. His mother could not talk if his father didn’t, but once, going home for a weekend for the sake of good feeling, he saw her at a social that followed the summer fête, animated, flushed, a glass of sherry being generously replenished by Mr Butler, the local vet, and … was she flirting? Actually flirting with him? Surely not; it was just that James had not really noticed her as a woman that could talk ten to the dozen and laugh. ‘I’m a bit tipsy,’ she remarked, walking home, her flush of social animation already gone.

  He did remember through his childhood sometimes being secretly ashamed of his mother’s animation at public occasions, so unlike was she to her self at home. But now he thought, My God, being married to my father, to be married to a man who never speaks unless you put a question direct, and not even then! And she’s not like him, she’s good fun, she’s … but this was his mother, and an impulse of violent pity suppressed thoughts that were unbecoming about one’s mother. What she must have suffered all these years: for that matter, what had he suffered, the silent child of a man who had known such horrors in the Trenches that he could be himself only with other soldiers from that old war.

  This uncomfortable view of himself and his family was only a beginning. He learned at ‘The English Class Structure’ that Donald was middle class and he lower middle class. What had he been doing at the same school as Donald, then? He had got a scholarship, that was it, though he hadn’t thought about it much before. His mother had wangled the scholarship, writing letters and then pulling strings, wearing her best dress. He knew now his mother had good taste, in simple dark dresses and her little string of real pearls, where other women were in loud florals and too much jewellery. She had impressed – well, who? – with the urgency of her son going to a good school. His mother was a cut above his father, so he could see now. He had been in a daze and a dream about all this sort of thing until Donald had woken him up.

  He went home with Donald for a weekend and found a large house crammed with family and friends. Two brothers, older; two sisters, younger; a noisy fun-loving lot. The mother and the father argued – in his home it would be called quarrelling – about everything. The father was a member of the Labour Party, the mother a pacifist, the children called themselves communists. Long loud abundant meals: James thought of the frugal decent meals his mother cooked, with the Sunday joint as high point of the week; but it was a small joint, for it wasn’t right to waste money. In Donald’s home a large ham stood always ready on the sideboard, with a fruit cake, and bread, and a slab of cheese and a pile of yellow butter. They played games in the evenings. The two girls had boyfriends and were teased, not very nicely, thought James, but his ideas were changing and he wondered if it was right to be shocked. Surely he was shocked too often?

  ‘Good to have you home, son,’ said his father, on the weekend when James attended the Sunday joint (two potatoes each and a spoon of peas), and this so surprised both son and mother they exchanged glances. What could have got into the old man? (His father was not yet fifty.)

  ‘And so you’re getting into politics, are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m listening, mostly.’

  The big man, with his large red face, moustache cut close (trimmed every day), short grey hair neatly parted
(cut weekly by his wife), his big blue eyes that were usually abstracted, as if concentrated on keeping his thoughts in their place, now focused fully on his son, and he was certainly taking him in, judging.

  ‘Politics is a mug’s game. You’ll find that out for yourself.’ And he returned to the business of loading his fork with beef.

  ‘James is only finding things out for himself, dear,’ said Mrs Reid, as always conciliatory, surely too much so, as much as would justify a secret fear her husband would one of these days explode and demolish her and everything in their life.

  ‘That’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ said Mr Reid, presenting an angry face to her, and then to James, chin forward: he might have been expecting a punch on it. ‘Crooks and thieves and liars.’

  This was a fierce choking cry, in a voice the son did not remember ever hearing. Had his mother? He saw her lower her eyes, play with a bit of bread on the tablecloth, then knead it with her knuckles.

  James thought: this has been going on all my childhood, and I never noticed. And now it was the pain he felt for both of them that took him out of the house, as much as his fascination with this brave new world of politics and literature.