Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

By the end of that summer there were hundreds of people of all ages on the pavement. Gerald was now only one of a dozen or so leaders. Among them was a middle-aged man — a new development, this. There was also a woman, who led a small band of girls. They were self-consciously and loudly critical of male authority, male organisation, as if they had set themselves a duty always to be there commenting on everything the men did. They were a chorus of condemnation. Yet the leader seemed to find it necessary to spend a great deal of energy preventing individuals of her flock from straying off and attaching themselves to the men. This caused a good deal of not always good — natured comment from the men, sometimes from the other women. But the problems and difficulties everyone had to face made this kind of disagreement seem minor. And it was an efficient group, showing great tenderness to each other and to children, always ready with information — still the most important of the commodities — and generous with what food and goods they had.

It was to the women's group that we lost June.

It happened like this. Emily had again taken to spending most of her days and nights at the other house: duty had taken her back, for messages had come that she was needed. She wanted June to move with her, and June did listen Emily's persuasions, agreed with her — but did not go. I began to think that I was to lose Emily, my real charge, for June, and I did not feel any particular responsibility for her. I liked the child, though her listless presence lowered the atmosphere of my home, making me listless, too, and keeping Hugo in a permanent sorrow of jealousy. I was pleased enough when she roused herself to talk to me: for the most part she lay in a corner of the sofa, doing nothing at all. But the truth was, I would have liked her to leave. She asked after Gerald when Emily came flying home to cook a meal of her favourite chips, to make pots of precious tea, to serve her cups half-filled with precious sugar: she listened, and asked after this and that person; she liked to gossip. She said to me, to Emily, and doubtless to herself, that she was going, yes, she would go tomorrow. She confronted Emily's frenzies and anxieties with: 'I'll come over tomorrow, yes I will, Emily,' — but she stayed where she was.

On the pavement Emily was being very energetic. Gerald's troop was about fifty strong, with the people actually living in his household and the others who had gravitated towards him from the crowds who kept coming in, and in, during the long hot afternoons.

Emily was always to be seen near Gerald, prominent in her role of adviser, source of information. I now did what I had once been careful to avoid, for fear of upsetting Emily, of disturbing some balance. I crossed the street myself 'to see what was going on' — as if I had not been watching what went on for so many months! But this was how all the older citizens described their first, or indeed their subsequent trips to the pavement — described them often, right up to the moment when they put together a blanket, some warm clothes and a little food to leave the city with a tribe passing through, or one taking off from our pavement. I even wondered if perhaps this visit of mine away from my flat to across the street was a sign of an inner intention to leave which I knew nothing about yet. This was so attractive an idea that as soon as it had entered my head, it took possession and I had to fight it down. My first trip to the pavement — to stand there, to mill around with the others for an hour or so, was really to hear what it was that Emily so ably and for so many hours every day, dispensed out there. Well, I was astounded… how often had this girl taken me by surprise! Now I drifted around among this restless, lively, ruthless crowd and saw how everyone, not only those who seemed ready to owe allegiance to Gerald, turned to her for news, information, advice. And she was ready with it. Yes, there were dried apples in such and such a shop in that suburb. No, the bus for a village twenty miles west was not cancelled altogether, it still ran once a week until December, and there was a trip next Monday at ten a.m., but you would have to be there in the queue the night before and must be prepared to fight for your place: it would be worth it, for it was said there were plentiful supplies of apples and plums. A farmer was coming in by cart every Friday with mutton fat and hides, and could be found at… Big strong horses were for sale, or barter. And yes, there was a house four streets away quite suitable for stabling. As for fodder, that could be procured, but better still, grow it, and for one horse you would need… A variety of chemical devices for cooking and lighting were being constructed tomorrow afternoon at the second floor of the old Plaza Hotel; assistance was needed and would be paid for in the form of the said devices. Wood ash, horse manure, compost, would be for sale under the old motorway at Smith Street at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Lessons in making your own wind-generators, to be paid for in food and fuel… air cleansers and purifiers, water cleansers, earth sterilisers… laying fowls and coops for them… knife sharpeners… a man who knew the plan of the underground sewers and the rivers that ran into them was piping water to the surface at… The street between X Road and Y Crescent was growing superb crops of yarrow and coltsfoot, and on the corner of Piltdown Way was a patch of potatoes people had planted and then forgotten: they had probably left the city. Emily knew all these things and many more and was much sought — after, by virtue of her energy and her equipment, in that scene like a fair where hundreds of egos clashed and competed and fed each other — Emily, Gerald's girl. So she was referred to, so spoken of. This surprised me, knowing the state of affairs in that house I had visited. This was yet another emotional, or at least verbal, hangover from the past? A man had a woman, an official woman, like a first wife, even when he virtually ran a harem?.. if one could use one old-fashioned term, then why not another? I did try the word out on June: 'Gerald's harem,' I said; and her little face puzzled up at me. She had heard the word, but had not associated it with anything that could come close to her. But yes, she had seen a film, and yes Gerald had a harem. She, June, was part of it. She even giggled, looking at me with those pale blue eyes that seemed always to be swallowing astonishment. There she lay, seeing herself as a harem girl, a little ageing woman with her childish flat waist, her child's eyes, her pale hair dragged to one side.

Emily of course had marked my appearance on the pavement, and was assuming I was ready to migrate. And how attractive it was there with those masses of vigorous people, all so resourceful in the ways of this hand-to-mouth world, so easy and inventive in everything they did. What a relief it would be to throw off, in one movement like a shrug of the shoulders, all the old ways, the old problems — these, once one took a step across the street to join the tribes would dissolve, lose import — ance. Housekeeping now could be just as accurately described as cavekeeping, and was such a piddling, fiddly business. The shell of one's life was a setting for 'every modern convenience'; but inside the shell one bartered and captured and even stole, one burned candles and huddled over fires made of wood split with an axe. And these people, these tribes, were going to turn their backs on it all, and simply take to the roads. Yes, of course they would have to stop somewhere, find an empty village, and take it over; or settle where the farmers that survived would let them, in return for their labour or for acting as private armies. They would have to make for themselves some sort of order again, even if it was no more than that appropriate to outlaws living in and off a forest in the north. Responsibilities and duties there would have to be, and they would harden and stultify, probably very soon. But in the meantime, for weeks, months, perhaps with luck even a year or so, an earlier life of mankind would rule: disciplined, but democratic — when these people were at their best even a child's voice was listened to with respect; all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone — except for the new ones, but new ones are always more bearable than the old; all problems shared and carried in common. Free. Free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens. Infinitely enviable, infinitely desirable, and how I longed simply to close my home up and go. But how could I? There was Emily. As long as she stayed, I would. I began again to talk tentatively of the Dolgellys, of how we would ask for a shed there and build it up and make it into a home… June as well, of course. For from the frantic anxiety Emily showed, I could see it would not be possible for Emily to be separated from June.