We stood there for a while, watching the bustle and movement, watching the children at work.
They get money, you see,’ said Emily. ‘Or get something in exchange - even the kids at school come here for an hour or so.’
And I saw that indeed, among these children, some of whose faces were familiar enough, from the pavements, were some better dressed, cleaner, but above all with that wary, self-contained I’m-only-here-on-my-own-terms look that distinguishes the youngsters of a privileged class when engaged in work that is beneath their conception of themselves. They were here, in short, doing the equivalent of the holiday tasks of middle-class children in the old days - packing goods for firms, cleaning in restaurants, selling behind the counter. Yes, I could have noticed this without Emily, in time; but her shrewd eyes were on me, hastening the process; she really was finding me slow to take in, to adapt, and when I did not seem to have understood as quickly as she thought I should, set herself to explain. It seemed that as people left these upper floors empty, to flee from the city, dealers had moved in. It was a large building, much heavier and better built than most, with good thick floors that could take weight. Mr Mehta had bought rights in a rubbish dump before the government had commandeered all rubbish dumps, and was in business with various people - one was Gerald’s father, a man who had once run a business making cosmetics. Usable stuff from the dump was brought here, and sorted out, mostly by children. People came up here to trade. A lot of the goods were taken down again to the street markets and shops.
Goods that were broken and could be mended were put right here: we passed rooms where skilled people, mostly older ones, sat and mended - gadgets, broken saucepans, clothes, furniture. There was in these rooms a great liveliness and interest: people stood around watching. An old man, a watch-mender, sat in a corner, under a light specially rigged up for him, and around him, fascinated, hardly drawing breath, pressed in a thick crowd - so thick that a guard kept asking them to stand back, and when they did not held them with a cudgel. They hardly noticed this, so intent were they, old and young, men and women, watching this precious skill - an old man’s hands at work in the tiny machinery.
There was a woman fitting lenses to spectacle frames. She had an oculist’s chart on the wall, and according to its findings was handing out second-hand spectacles to people who stood in a line and who, one after another, took from her a pair that she considered suitable. An oculist from the old days; and she, too, had a crowd of admirers. A chair-mender, a basket-mender surrounded with his twisted rushes and reeds, a knife-grinder - here they all were, the old skills, each with a guard, each watched by marvelling barbarians.
What wasn’t to be seen in the rooms we passed through, one after another? String and bottles, piles of plastic and polythene pieces - the most valuable, perhaps, of all commodities; bits of metal, wire flex, plastic tape; books and hats and clothes. There was a room full of things that seemed quite new and good and had reached the rubbish dumps shielded from dirt and spoiling: a jersey in a plastic bag, umbrellas, artificial flowers, a carton full of corks.
And everywhere the pressing, lively people, here as much for the show as for the goods. There was even a little café in one room, selling herbal teas, bread, spirits. A lot of people seemed tipsy, but they often do at markets, without alcohol. It was hard to tell the sellers from the buyers, the owners from the visitors; it was a polyglot crowd, a good-natured crowd, who respected the orders and instructions of the many guards; an orderly crowd, and one able in the new manner to settle among themselves disputes and differences quickly and without bad feeling being allowed to fester. People joked, showed each other their purchases, and even bought and sold from each other, without going to the formality of engaging the services of the official traders -a process which was quite in order and approved of. What the traders wanted was a crowd, was plenty of people, was the flow of goods, in and out.
We made a tour of the entire floor, and, having been greeted by innumerable people - many of the people from the pavement were up here - again entered the room for electrical goods and pushed forward our trolley. For this merchandise we were given a few vouchers, and I said to Emily that since it was her enterprise that had brought us there, she should have the spending of the results of it. She looked quizzical -I had come to expect this, and understood it was because I might be expecting too much in the way of a return. And what would be done, I wanted to know, with our toasters and roasters? Well, they would be dismantled for their parts, and these parts would be incorporated into other objects - obviously they were of no use as they were? Surely I didn’t mind seeing them go? Well, if I didn’t mind, she would very much like to take to Gerald’s house - was I sure I didn’t mind? - some stuff for the kitchen, because they were short. We found an old saucepan, an enamel jug, a plastic bowl, a scrubbing brush: this was what we got in exchange for the electrical equipment of what had been, after all, a lavishly equipped flat.
Back in our flat, Emily put off her little girl charm, without which she could never have brought herself to take me up on an expedition she clearly felt was into her territory and a long way from mine; and sat observing me. She was wondering, I suppose, unflattering though that was, if I had really understood that goods, ‘things’, were different commodities for her and for children like June; in some ways more precious, because irreplaceable, but also without value … no, that is not right, without personal value: things did not belong to people as they did once. Of course, this had been true among some people long before the time of getting and having had passed: all sorts of experiments in communalism had been worked through, apart from the fact that people like ‘the Ryans’ had dispensed with ideas of mine and thine, and this without any theories or ideas about it. June was June Ryan; her family had been the despair of the authorities long before the collapse of the old society, when things had still been assumed to be normal. And, as a Ryan … But more of this later, when I describe ‘the Ryans’ in their proper place…
Why am I postponing it? This place will do as well as another. Is my wanting to postpone what has to be said for the sake of the narrative about the Ryans no more than an extension and a reflection of the attitudes and emotions of the said authorities towards ‘the Ryans’? The point being that ‘the Ryans’, meaning a way of life, were unassimilable, both in theory - theories about society and how it worked -and in practice?
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 Affl
uent 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 colanders. 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 thy 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 middle-class 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 cliché - some of the boys found places in the police or one of the many military or semi-military organizations 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 civilization 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 reorganization 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?
The Memoirs of a Survivor Page 12