The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  Yet even at that late stage, there was a level of our society which managed to live as if nothing much was happening -nothing irreparable. The ruling class - but that was a dead phrase, so they said; very well then, the kind of person who ran things, administered, sat on councils and committees, made decisions. Talked. The bureaucracy. An international bureaucracy. But when has it not been true? - that the section of a society which gets the most out of it maintains in itself, and for as long as it can in others, an illusion of security, permanence, order.

  It seems to me that this has something to do, at bottom, with conscience, a vestigial organ in humanity which still demands that there should be some sort of justice or equity; feels that it is intolerable (this is felt by most people, somewhere, or at least occasionally) that some people do well while others starve and fail. This is the most powerful of mechanisms for, to begin with, the maintaining of a society, and then its undermining, its rotting, its collapse … yes, of course this is riot new, has been going on throughout history, very likely and as far as we know. Has there been a rime in our country when the ruling class was not living inside its glass bell of respectability or of wealth, shutting its eyes to what went on outside? Could there be any real difference when this ‘ruling class’ used words like justice, fair play, equity, order, or even socialism? - used them, might even have believed in them, or believed in them for a time; but meanwhile everything fell to pieces while still, as always, the administrators lived cushioned against the worst, trying to talk away, wish away, legislate away, the worst - for to admit that it was happening was to admit themselves useless, admit the extra security they enjoyed was theft and not payment for services rendered …

  And yet in a way everybody played a part in this conspiracy that nothing much was happening - or that it was happening, but one day things would go in reverse and hey presto! back we would be in the good old days. Which, though? That was a matter of temperament: if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. I fancied a rather elegant sort of feudalism - without wars, of course, or injustice. Emily, having never experienced or suffered it, would have liked the Age of Affluence back again.

  I played the game of complicity like everyone else. I renewed my lease during this period and it was for seven years: of course I knew that we didn’t have anything like that time left. I remember a discussion with Emily and June about replacing our curtains. Emily wanted some muslin curtains in yellow that she had seen in some exchange-shop. I argued in favour of a thicker material, to keep out noise. June agreed with Emily: muslin, if properly lined - and there was a stall that sold nothing but old lining materials only two miles away - hung well, and was warm. After all, thicker material, supposedly warmer, hung so stiffly that draughts could get in around the edges … yes, but once this thick material had been washed, it would lose its stiffness:… this was the sort of conversation we were all capable of having; we might spend days or weeks on a decision. Real decisions, necessary ones, such as that electricity would have to be given up altogether, were likely to be made with a minimum of discussion; they were forced on us - it was that summer that I arranged for my electricity to be disconnected. Just before June’s visit, in fact. Her first visit: soon she was coming every day, and usually found us in discussions about lighting and heating. She told us that there was a man in a small town about twelve miles away selling devices of the sort once used for camping. No, they were not the same devices, but he had evolved all kinds of new ones: she had seen some, we should get them too. She and Emily discussed it, decided not to make the expedition by themselves, and asked Gerald to go with them. Off they went and came back late one afternoon loaded with every kind of gadget and trick for light and heat. And here was Gerald, in my living-room. From near by this young chieftain was not so formidable; he seemed harassed, he was even forlorn - his continual glances towards Emily had anxiety in them, and he spent all the time he was there asking her for advice about this or about that… she gave it, she was really extraordinarily practical and sensible. I was seeing something of their relationship - I mean, the one beneath that other perhaps less powerful bond which was evident and on the surface, and to which Emily was responding: beyond this almost conventional business of girl in love with boss of the gang, one saw a very young man, overburdened and over-responsible and unsure, asking for support, even tenderness. He had gone off with Emily and June to ‘help carry supplies in for Emily and her friend for the winter’, but this was not only kind-heartedness - he had plenty of that - but a way of saying to Emily that he needed her back in bis household. A payment, perhaps; a bribe, if you want to be cynical. She was dallying with going back. Robustly tired after the long walk carrying such a load, looking flushed and sunburned and pretty, she coquetted with him, made herself scarce and difficult. As for June, not yet able to play this game, she was quiet, watching, very much excluded. Emily, feeling power over Gerald, was using it; she stretched, and luxuriated in her body, and played with Hugo’s head and ears and smiled at Gerald … yes, she would go back with him to his house, since he so much wanted it, wanted her. And after an hour or so of it, off they went, the three of them, Emily and Gerald first, June tagging on behind. Parents and a child was what it looked like - and what it felt like, I guessed, at least to June.

  And now I suppose it must be asked and answered why Emily did not choose to be a chieftainess, a leader on her own account? Well, why not? Yes, I did ask myself this, of course. The attitudes of women towards themselves and to men, the standards women had set up for themselves, the gallantry of their fight for equality, the decades-long and very painful questioning of their roles, their functions - all this makes it difficult for me now to say, simply, that Emily was in love. Why did she not have her own band, her own houseful of brave foragers and pilferers, of makers and bakers and growers of their own food? Why was it not she of whom it was said: ‘There was that house, it was standing empty, Emily has got a gang together and they’ve moved in. Yes, it’s very good there, let’s see if she will let us come too.’

  There was nothing to stop her. No law, written or unwritten, said she should not, and her capacities and talents were every bit as varied as Gerald’s or anybody else’s. But she did not. I don’t think it occurred to her.

  The trouble was, she did love Gerald; and this longing for him, for his attention and his notice, the need to be the one who sustained and comforted him, who connected him with the earth, who held him steady in her common sense and her warmth - this need drained her of the initiative she would need to be a leader of a commune. She wanted no more than to be the leader of the commune’s woman. His only woman, of course.

  This is a history, after all, and I hope a truthful one.

  • • • • •

  One afternoon I returned from a news-gathering excursion, and found my rooms had been disturbed, and in exactly the same way as the place behind the wall might be disturbed by the ‘poltergeist’, or anarchic principle. This was my thought as I stood there looking at a chair overturned, books spilled on the floor. There was a general disorder, an emptiness and, above all, an alien feel to the place. Then, one by one, specific lacks and absences became evident. Supplies of food had gone, stocks of valuable cereals, tinned goods, dried fruits: candles, skins, polythene sheeting - the obvious things. Very well, then - thieves had broken in, and I was lucky it had not happened before. But then I saw that possessions only retrospectively valuable were missing: a television set unused for months, a tape recorder, electric lamps, a food mixer. The city had warehouses full of electric contrivances no longer useful for anything, and I began to think that these thieves were freakish or silly. I saw that Hugo lay stretched in his place along the outer wall; he had not been disturbed by the intruders. This was strange, and no sooner had I become convinced of the inexplicable nature of this robbery than the sound of voices I knew well took me to the window. There I stood to watch a little procession of the goods being brought back again. On a dozen heads, chil
dren’s heads, were balanced the television, sacks of fuel and food, all sorts of bags and boxes. The faces became visible, brown and white and black, when they tilted up in response to Emily’s voice: “There now, we’re too late!’ - meaning that I was back and stood at the window watching. I saw Emily coming behind the others. She was in charge: supervising, looking responsible, annoyed -officious. I had not seen her in this role before, this was a new Emily to me. June was there too, beside Emily. I knew all these faces - the children were from Gerald’s household.

  In a moment boxes, bundles and cases were filing into my living-room, the children beneath them. When the floor was covered with what had been taken, the children began to edge out again, looking at Emily but never at me: I might as well have been invisible.

  ‘And now say you’re sorry,’ she ordered.

  They smiled, the feeble, awkward smile that goes with: Oh how she does go on! They were obeying Emily, but she was found overbearing: those embarrassed, affectionate smiles were not the first she had wrung out of them, I could see. I became even more curious about her role in that other house.

  ‘No, come on,’ said Emily. ‘It’s the least you can do.’

  June’s thin shoulders shrugged, and she said: ‘We are sorry. But we have brought them back, haven’t we?’ My attempt to transcribe this is: ‘Aow, w’srry, ‘t wiv brung’m beck, ivnt wee?’

  In this effort of speech was the energy of frustration: this child, like others formed by our old time which above all had been verbal, to do with words, the exchange of them, the use of them, had been excluded from all that richness. We (meaning the educated) had never found a way of sharing that plenty with the lower reaches of our society. Even in two women standing on a street’s edge bartering their few sentences of gossip had been the explosive effort of frustration: the deprived, thinned speech of the poor had always had somewhere in it the energy of a resentment (unconscious perhaps, but there) fed by the knowledge of skills and ease just beyond them, and whose place in their talk was taken by the constant repetition of the phrases - like crutches - ‘you know?’ and ‘you know what I mean?* and ‘isn’t it?’ and all the rest, phrases which made up a good part of everything they said. Words in their mouths - now in June’s - had a labouring, effortful quality - dreadful, because of the fluencies so easily available, but to others.

  The children went off at last, June lingering behind. From her look around the room I could see sh’e did not want to go. She was regretting, not the act, but the consequences of it, which might sever her from her beloved Emily.

  “What was that about?’ I asked.

  Emily’s bossiness dropped from her, and she slumped, a worried and tired child, near Hugo. He licked her cheek.

  “Well, they fancied some of your things, that’s all.’

  “Yes, but…’ My feeling was, But I’m a friend and they shouldn’t have picked on me! Emily caught this, and with her dry little smile she said: ‘June had been here, she knew the lay-out, so when the kids were wondering what place to do next, she suggested yours.’

  ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted, raising serious eyes to me, so that I shouldn’t make light of her emphasis. “Yes, it does make sense.’

  ‘You mean, I shouldn’t think there was anything personal in it?’

  Again the smile, pathetic because of its knowingness, its precocity - but what an old-fashioned word that was, depending for its force on certain standards.

  ‘Oh no, it was personal … a compliment if you like!’

  She put her face into Hugo’s yellow fur and laughed. I knew she needed to hide her face from the effort of presenting it all bright and eager, good and clever. Her two worlds, Gerald’s place, my place, had overlapped in a threatening way. I could feel that in her, understand it. But there was an exhaustion in her, a strain that I did not understand - though I believed I had caught a glimpse of the reason in her relations with the children. Her problem was not so much that she was only one of the contenders for Gerald’s favour, but that the burdens on her were much too heavy for someone her age?I asked: ‘Why did they bother with the electrical goods?

  ‘Because they were there,’ she replied, over-short; and I knew she was disappointed in me. I had not understood the differences between them - a category in which she sometimes did and sometimes did not include herself -and me.

  Now she was looking at me. Not without affection, I’m glad to say, but it was quizzical. She was wondering

  whether to attempt something with me - if it would be resented? would be understood?

  She said: ‘Have you been upstairs recently?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Should I have?’

  ‘Well then - yes, yes, I think you should!’ And as she made up her mind to go ahead with whatever it was, she became whimsical, gay, a little girl charming or disarming a parent or adult. She cried out: ‘But we must find something to put things on - yes, this will do. And of course if the lift isn’t working - and most of the time it isn’t these days, oh dear!’

  In a moment she was flying about the rooms, gathering together every electrical object I had, except for the radio, without which we were still convinced we could not live -the news from other countries might just as well be from other planets, so far away did they seem now; and in any case, things went on there just the same as they did with us. Mixers, the television, lamps - these I have already mentioned. To these were added a hair dryer, a massager, a grill, a toaster, a roaster, a coffee pot, a kettle, a vacuum cleaner. They were all piled together on a double-layered trolley.

  ‘Come, come, come, come,’ she cried gaily, gently, her serious eyes ever on me, for fear I might be taking offence, and out we went, pushing the overloaded trolley. The hall was full of people: they streamed up and down the stairs, or waited for the lift - which was working; they laughed and talked and shouted. It was a crowd alight and a-glitter, restless, animated, fervent; everyone looked as if he or she had a fever. Now I realized that of course I had become used to seeing the hall and the pavement immediately outside the building full of this crowd, but I had not understood. This was because along the corridors of the lower floors of the building all was as it had been: quietness, sobriety, and doors marked 1, 2, 3, behind which lived Mr and Mrs Jones and family, Miss Foster and Miss Baxter, Mr and Mrs Smith and Miss Alicia Smith - little self-contained units, the old world.

  We waited for our turn for the lift, pushed the loaded trolley into it, and went up with a crush of people who glanced at our goods and did not think much of them. On the top floor we pushed the trolley into the passage, and Emily stood for a moment, undecided: I could see it was not because she did not know her way, but because she was working out what would be best for me: precisely, what would be good for me!

  Up here it was the same as on the ground floor: rooms all round the building with a corridor behind them; single rooms off that, a court in the middle - but here the court was of course a well, or gulf. There was a great bustle and movement up here, too. Doors stood open everywhere. It was like the approach to a street market, people with bundles of goods in their arms, or an old pram loaded with this or that, a man carefully holding a wrapped precious thing above his head so that no one could bump into it. It was hard to remember that in the lower parts of the building was quiet and the sense of people giving each other space. A room opposite the lift had a great mound of stuff, right up to the ceiling, and around it crouched children sorting things out into their categories. A child smiled up at Emily and explained: ‘I’m just helping with this load, he’s just come in,’ and Emily said: That’s good, I’m glad,’ reassuring the child. Again, there was in this exchange something which made me wonder: the little girl had been over-ready to explain herself. But we were in the entrance to another room, where an irregular gap in the wall, like bomb damage, communicated with the room we had left - the heap of things had hidden the gap. Through it were being taken by hand, or trundled on various kinds of little cart, ce
rtain categories of goods: this room was for containers - jars, bottles, cans and so on, and they were in every sort of material, from glass to cardboard. About a dozen children were at the work of carrying the containers from the heap next door through the gap, into this room: the one thing these markets were not short of, the one commodity no one had been short of for a long time, was labour, was hands to work at whatever was needed. In the corner stood two youths, on guard, with weapons: guns, knives, knuckledusters. It was not until we stood outside the door of yet another room, where the atmosphere was altogether lower, and more listless, and where there was no guard, that I understood the contents of the rooms with the two armed boys were valuable, but that this room held stuff not valued at all: electrical goods like these we were pushing on our trolley.