Doris Lessing - The Diaries of Jane Somers

This had been stirred around and around, it seemed, so that the mess would have to be picked apart, strand by strand. Well, we didn’t have time to deal with that: first things first.

Vera and I went into action. I drove to the first furniture shop and bought a good single bed and a mattress. I had luck, they were delivering that morning. I came back behind the van with two young men to make sure they did deliver, and they carried it upstairs. When they saw what was there, they looked incredulous. As well they might. I bribed them to take the old bed down, with the mattress, to the dustbins. Meanwhile, Vera had bought blankets, sheets, pillows, towels. There was exactly half of one old towel in the place, and it was black. Looking out of the filthy windows, we could see neighbours in their gardens speculating over the mattress, with shakes of the head and tight lips. Vera and I wrestled the mattress to the top of my car, and we took it to the municipal rubbish heap.

When we got back the Special Cleaning Team were on the doorstep. Since the place was far beyond the scope of ordinary Home Helps, this flying squad of intrepid experts had been called in by Vera. They were two weedy young men, amiable and lackadaisical, probably from too much take-away junk. They stood about upstairs in the front room, smiling and grimacing at the filth, and saying, ‘But what can we do?’

‘You can start with buckets of hot water and soda,’ I said. Vera was already looking humorous.

I have not yet mentioned the kitchen. When you went into it, it seemed normal. A good square wooden table in the middle, an adequate gas stove, two very good wooden chairs, each worth at present prices what I would pay for a month’s food, ripped and faded curtains, now black, once green. But the floor, the floor! As you walked over it, it gave tackily, and on examination there was a thick layer of hardened grease and dirt.

The two heroes winced about on the sticky lino, and said, How could they use hot water when there wasn’t any?

‘You heat it on the stove,’ said Vera, mildly.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘aren’t you for the rough work the Home Helps can’t do?’

‘Yes, but there are limits, aren’t there?’ said one of them reproachfully.

‘Someone has got to do it,’ I said.

They did sweep the front room, and pushed a mop hastily over the floor. But over the kitchen floor, they went on strike. ‘Sorry,’ said they, and went off, good-natured to the end.

Vera and I pushed the big table out, with the dresser and the chairs, though they were stuck to the lino with decades of grease. We prised up the lino: it would not come up easily. Under this layer was another, and between them was a half-inch layer of grease and dirt. In all we prised up three layers of lino.

Then Vera had to go home to her family problems.

That weekend I scrubbed the floors, washed down walls and ceilings, emptied drawers, scrubbed them, cleaned a stove encrusted with thirty years of dirt. Finally, I filled plastic bags with this silent story, the detritus of half a lifetime, and took them to the municipal dump.

Mrs Bates marked my comings and goings up and down the stairs, sitting in her little parlour, drinking tea, and from time to time offering me a cup.

‘No, I haven’t been up there, not for ten years,’ she said. ‘If you give her an inch, it’s make me a cup of tea, fetch me this and that. I’m nearly ten years older than she is. Are you going to be her Good Neighbour, may I ask? No?’

Her rosy old face was distressed, reproachful. ‘You had her old mattress out there for everyone to see. Outside my place – they’ll think … And your hands, all in that dirt and muck …’

What was upsetting her as much as anything was that it was not for me, such a lady and all, to do this filthy work.

She gave me a key. I took it knowing she was offering me more than I was ready to take. Oh, I’m under no illusions now! Every street has in it several, perhaps a dozen, old women, old men, who can only just cope, or suddenly can’t cope; who dream of absent daughters and sons and granddaughters, and anyone coming near them must beware, beware! For into that terrible vacuum you can be sucked before you know it. No, I shall not put myself, again, into the situation I am with Maudie, who has only one friend in the world.

I drop in, for a few minutes, in the character they assigned me, because I am not in any of their categories, am unexplainable, of wayward impulsive benevolence. My main problem is that Maudie should never know I am visiting anyone else, for it would be a betrayal. Eliza Bates, Annie Reeves, live around the corner from Maudie.

If I take Annie a present, I have to take Eliza one, for Eliza watches me as I go up past her to the top floor. Eliza was in service, and knows what is good, and gets it, thus exemplifying, I suppose, To those who have will be given. I take her bread from the good bakery, a new romantic novel, a certain brand of Swiss chocolate, chaste white roses with green fern. Annie knows what she likes and that British is best, and I take her chocolate like sweet mud, a sickening wine that is made specially for old ladies, and small pretty flowers tied with satin ribbon.

Annie Reeves was in hospital for six weeks. She bruised a leg, but although they tell her she could walk again properly, she is on a walking frame and refuses. She is now a prisoner at the top of that house, with a commode that must be emptied, and Meals on Wheels, Home Help, a nurse.

Eliza Bates disapproves utterly of Annie Reeves, who let herself go, who was drinking up there by herself – oh yes, Eliza Bates knew what went on! – who let the dirt accumulate until Eliza sat imagining she could hear the bugs crawling in the walls and the mice scuttling. ‘I’m not like her ,’ says Eliza, firmly, to me, with a little churchy sniff.

‘I’m not like her ,’ says Annie, meaning that Eliza is a hypocrite, she never was interested in church until her husband died, and now look at her.

Annie yearns for the friendship of Eliza. Eliza has spent years isolating herself from the woman upstairs who has so rapidly gone to pieces, and who is not ashamed now of stumping about on a frame when there’s no need, and of getting an army of social workers in to her every day. They call each other Mrs Bates, Mrs Reeves. They have lived in this house forty years.

The Welfare are trying to ‘rehabilitate’ Annie. I would have reacted, only a few weeks ago, to the invitation to this campaign, with derision, even with cries of But it is cruelty! Since then, I’ve seen Eliza’s life, and understand why these experts with the old will fight the lethargy of age even in a man or woman of ninety or more.

I have become fond of Eliza; this quite apart from admiring her. If I am like that at ninety! we all exclaim; and feel the threats of the enemy ahead weakened.

Eliza Bates’s day.

She wakes at about eight, in the large front that was where she slept in the big double bed with her husband. But she has a nice single bed now, with a bedside table, and a little electric fire. She likes to read in bed, romantic novels mostly. The room has old-fashioned furniture: again this mixture of ‘antiques’ and stuff that wouldn’t fetch fifty pence. It is very cold, but she is used to it, and goes to bed with a shawl around her and hot bottles.

She makes herself a real breakfast, for she learned long ago, she says, never to let yourself get sloppy with meals. Then she does out one of her three rooms, but not as thoroughly as she once did. About eleven she makes herself coffee. Perhaps one of her many friends comes in. She has a special friend, a much younger woman, of about seventy, from opposite, who is ‘very young for her age’, wears fancy hats and clothes, and is a tonic for Eliza, always running over with something she has cooked, or making Eliza go out to the pictures. Every day Eliza goes to a lunch club, run by the Welfare for old people, and may afterwards detail everything, such as that the meat was boiled to rags, the sprouts too hard, or the rice pudding had just the right amount of nutmeg. For she was once a cook in a family. Until recently she stayed for a couple of hours to ‘work’: old people make calendars, paint Christmas cards, do all kinds of small jobs, some very well, for they may use skills of a lifetime. But now, says Eliza, she feels she must begin to cut down a little, she is not as strong as she was. After the lunch, and a cup of tea and a chat, she and one, or two, or three friends will go shopping. These are the old ladies I once did not see at all but, since Maudie, have watched creeping about the streets with their bags and their baskets – and I could never have guessed the companionableness, the interest of their lives, the gaiety. They love shopping, it is clear; and what shop they will patronize and what not on a given day is the result of the most intricate and ever-shifting tides of feeling. That Indian doesn’t keep a clean shop, but he was observed sweeping out yesterday, so they’ll give him a second chance. They’ll go to the supermarket this week, because there’s a new girl with a lovely smile who puts things into their baskets for them. The man at the hardware spoke roughly to one of them last week, and so he will lose the custom of five or six people for weeks, if not for ever. All this is much more to their point than cheap lines of biscuits or a reduction in the price of butter for old-age pensioners. After shopping, Eliza brings one of them home with her to tea, or goes to them. When she gets home she sits down for a little at the kitchen window, where she can see all the washing lines that dance about the sky when there’s a wind, and she looks down into the jungle of the garden, and remembers how the lilac there was planted on that afternoon thirty-five years ago, and that corner now so overgrown that used to be such a picture.