Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

Straying through room after room all open to the leaves and the sky, floored with the unpoisoned grasses and flowers of the old world, I saw how extensive was this place, with no boundaries or end that I could find, much larger than I had ever understood. Long ago, when it had stood up thick and strong, a protection from the forest and from the weather, how very many must have lived here, multitudes, yet all had been subdued to the one Presence who was the air they breathed — though they did not know it, was the Whole they were minuscule parts of, their living and their dying as little their personal choice or wanting as the fates and fortunes of molecules in a leaf are theirs.

I walked back again, towards the border region on whose other side was my 'real' life, and found that here was a set of rooms still solid, still unthinned, with floors and ceilings intact, but as I looked I saw how the floorboards were beginning to give, had collapsed in some places; then that there were ragged holes in them, then that in fact these were not really floorboards, only a few rotting planks lying about on earth that was putting out shoots of green. I pulled the planks away, exposing clean earth and insects that were vigorously at their work of recreation. I pulled back heavy lined curtains to let the sunlight in. The smell of growth came up strong from the stuffy old room, and I ran from there, and pushed my way back through fine leafy screens, leaving that place, or realm, to clean growth and working insects because — I had to. After all, it was never myself who ordained that now I must interrupt my ordinary life, since it was time to step from one life into another; not I who thinned the sunlight wall; not I who set the stage behind it. I had never had a choice. Very strong was the feeling that I did as I was bid and as I must; that I was being taken, was being led, was being shown, was held always in the hollow of a great hand which enclosed my life, and used me for purposes I was too much beetle or earthworm to understand.

Because of this feeling, born of the experiences behind that wall, I was changing. A restlessness, a hunger that had been with me all my life, that had always been accompanied by a rage of protest, (but against what?) was being assuaged. I found that I was more often, simply, waiting. I watched to see what would happen next. I observed. I looked at every new event quietly, to see if I could understand it.

What happened next was June.

One afternoon, when Emily had been home with me and Hugo a full day and a night, had not gone at all to the communal household, a little girl came to the door asking for her. I say 'a little girl' conscious of the absurdity of the phrase with its associations of freshness and promise. But after all, she was one: a very thin child, with strong prominent bones. Her eyes were pale blue. She had pale hair that looked dirty hanging to her shoulders and half-hiding an appealing little face. She was small for her age, could have been eight or nine, but was in fact eleven. In other words she was two years younger than Emily, who was a young woman and loved — precariously — by the king, Gerald. But her breasts were stubby little points, and her body altogether in the chrysalis stage.

'Where is Emily?' she demanded. Her voice — but I shall only say that it was at the extreme away from 'good English', the norm once used for announcements, news, or by officialdom. I could hardly understand her, her accent was so degraded. I am not talking about the words she used, which were always sharp enough when one had uncoded them, were stubborn and strong attempts to lay hold of meanings and ideas every bit as clear and good as those expressed in tutored speech. The peremptoriness of the 'Where is Emily?' was not from rudeness; but because of the effort she had to put into it, the determination to be understood and to be led to Emily, or that Emily should be brought out to her. It was, too, because she was a person who had not been brought up to believe she had rights. Yet she set herself towards goals, she wanted things and achieved them: she would reach her Emily without the help of words, skills, manners — without rights.

'She's here,' I said. 'And please come in.'

She followed me, stiff with the determination that had got her here. Her eyes were everywhere, and the thought came into my mind that she was pricing what she saw. Or, rather, valuing, since 'pricing' was somewhat out-of-date.

When she saw Emily, today a languid suffering young woman on a chair by the window, her two bare feet set side by side side on her attendant yellow beast, the child's face lit with a heartbreakingly sweet smile all confidence and love, and she ran forward, forgetting herself. And Emily, seeing her, smiled and forgot her troubles — love-troubles and goodness knows what else, and the two girls went into the tiny room that was Emily's. Two girls in a young girls' friendship, despite one being already a woman, and one still a child, with a child's face and body. But not, as I discovered, with a child's imaginings, for she was in love with Gerald. And, after having suffered jealousy because of the favourite Emily, by turns hating and denigrating her or feverishly and slavishly admiring her, now she was her sister in sorrow when Gerald was being loved, served, by another girl, or girls.

It was morning when she came; and at lunchtime the two emerged from the bedroom and Emily asked with her unfailing visitor's manners: 'If you don't mind, I would like to ask June to have a sandwich or something.'

Later in the day the two tired of the stuffy room, and came into the living-room, and sat on the floor on either side of Hugo and talked while they patted and petted him. June was wanting advice and information on all kinds of practical matters, and particularly about the garden, which was Emily's responsibility, since Emily understood about all that kind of thing.

She did? I knew nothing of this in Emily, who with me had not showed the slightest interest in such matters, not even in the potted plants.

I sat listening to their talk, reconstructing from it the life of their community… how very odd it was that all over our cities, side by side with citizens who still used electric light, drew water for which they had paid from taps, expected their rubbish to be collected, were these houses which were as if the technological revolution had never occurred at all. The big house fifteen minutes' walk away had been an old people's home. It had large grounds. Shrubs and flowerbeds had been cleared and now there were only vegetables. There was even a little shed in which a few fowls were kept — another illegality that went on everywhere, and to which the authorities turned a blind eye. The household bought — or acquired in some way — flour, dried legumes, honey. But they were about to get a hive of bees. They also bought the substitutes 'chicken' and 'beef and 'lamb' and concocted the usual unappetising meals with them. Unappetising only to some: there were plenty of young people who had eaten nothing else in their lives, and who now preferred the substitute to the real thing. As I've said, we learn to like what we get.

The place was a conglomeration of little workshops: they made soap and candles and wove materials and dyed them; they cured leather; they dried and preserved food; they reconstructed and made furniture.

And so they all lived, Gerald's gang, thirty of them now, with pressure always on them to expand, since so many people wanted to join them and had to be refused: there was no space.

It was not that I was surprised to learn of all this. I had heard it all before in various forms. For instance, there had been a community of young adults and small children not far away where even the water system and sewage had broken down. They had made a privy in the garden, a pit with a packing-case over it, and a can of ashes for the smell and the flies. They bought water from the door, or tapped the mains as they could, and cadged baths from friends: there was a time when my bathroom was being used by them. But that group drifted off somewhere. All over our city were these pockets of life reverting to the primitive, the hand-to-mouth. Part of a house… then the whole house… a group of houses… a street… an area of streets. People looking down from a high building saw how these nucleii of barbarism took hold and spread. At first the observers were all sharp hostility and fear. They made the sounds of disapproval, of rectitude, but they were in fact learning as they, the still fortunate, watched these savages from whose every finger sprouted new skills and talents. In some parts of the city whole suburbs had reverted. Miles of people, all growing their potatoes and onions and carrots and cabbages and setting guard on them day and night, raising chickens and ducks, making their sewage into compost, buying or selling water, using empty rooms or an empty house to breed rabbits or even a pig-people no longer in neat little families, but huddled together in groups and clans whose structure evolved under the pressures of necessity. At night such an area withdrew itself into a dangerous obscurity where no one dared go, with its spare or absent street lighting, its potholed pavements and rutted streets, the windows showing the minuscule flickering of candles or the shallow glow of some improvised light on a wall or a ceiling. Even in the daytime, to walk there seeing wary faces half-visible behind shutters, knowing that bows and arrows, catapults, or even guns were held trained for use on you if you transgressed — such an expedition was like a foray into enemy territory, or into the past of the human race.