Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

Perhaps, in describing as I have done only what went on among ourselves, in our neighbourhood, I have not been able to give a clear enough picture of how our by now very remarkable society worked… for after all, it was working. All this time, while ordinary life simply dissolved away, or found new shapes, the structure of government continued, though heavy and cumbersome and becoming all the time more ramified. Nearly everyone who had a job at all was in administration — yes, of course we ordinary people joked that the machinery of government was maintained so that privileged folk could have jobs and salaries. And there was some truth in it. What government really did was to adjust itself to events, while pretending, probably even to itself, that it initiated them. And the law courts worked on, plenty of them; the processes of law were infinitely tricky and prolonged, or sudden and Draconian, as if the impatience of the practitioners of law with their own processes and precedents got itself impressed by the way law could suddenly be dispensed with altogether, be overridden and rewritten — and then what had been substituted went grinding along as heavily as before. The prisons were as full as ever, though expedients were always being found to empty them: so many crimes were being committed, and there seemed to be new and unforeseen categories of crime every day. Reform schools, Borstals, welfare homes, old age homes — all these proliferated, and they were savage and dreadful places.

Everything worked. Worked somehow. Worked on an edge, on one side of which was what authority tolerated, on the other, what it could not: this meeting was well over the edge. And very soon the police would arrive in a fleet of cars and drag off these children and put them behind bars in a 'home' where they wouldn't survive a week. Nobody, knowing their history, could feel anything but compassion for them; not one of us wished for them an end in a 'home' — but neither did we want, we could not tolerate, a visit of the police which would bring to official notice a hundred living arrangements that were not legal. Houses being lived in by people who didn't own them, gardens growing food for people who had no right to eat it, the ground floors of deserted houses accommodating horses and donkeys which were transport for the innumerable little businesses that illegally flourished, the little businesses themselves where all the riches of our old technology were being so ingeniously adapted and transformed, minuscule turkey farms, chicken runs, rabbit sheds — all this new life, like growth pushing up under old trees, was illegal. None of it should exist. None of it, officially, existed; and when 'they' were forced into seeing these things, they sent in troops or the police to sweep it all away. Such a visit would be referred to in a headline, a broadsheet, a newscast as 'Such and such a Street was cleaned out today'. And everyone knew exactly what had happened and thanked fortune it was someone else's street.

Such a 'cleanout' was what everybody feared more than anything, and yet we were tempting 'Them' by gathering together. Gerald talked on, in an emotional desperate way, as if the act of talking itself could produce some solution. He said at one point that the only way to cope with the 'kids' was to separate them and put them into households in ones and twos. I remember the jeering that went up from the children, and their white angry faces. They stopped their pathetic war — dance and stood huddled, facing outwards, weapons at the ready.

A young man appeared over the heads of the crowd: he had his arm around the trunk of a tree and was holding himself there. 'What are we doing this for?' he shouted. 'If they came now that would be the end of us, never mind about those kids. And if you want to know what I think, we should inform the police and be done with it. We can't cope with it. Gerald has tried — haven't you Gerald?'

And he disappeared, sliding down the trunk.

Emily now spoke. It looked as if someone had asked her to. She stood on the pile of bricks, serious, worried, and said: 'What can you expect? These kids defend themselves. That's what they have learned. Perhaps we should persevere with them? I'll volunteer if others will.'

'No, no, no,' came from everywhere in the crowd. Someone shouted out: 'You've got a broken arm from them by the look of it.'

'Rumour broke the arm, not the kids,' said Emily smiling, and a few people laughed.

And there we stood. It is not often a crowd so large can remain silent, in indecision. To call the police would be a real descent away from what we could tolerate in ourselves, and we could not bring ourselves to do it.

A man shouted: 'I'll call the police myself, and you can have it out with me afterwards. We've got to do it, or the whole neighbourhood will go up in flames one of these nights.'

And now the children themselves began edging away, still in their tight little band, clutching their sticks, their stones, their catapults.

Someone shouted: 'They're off'. They were. The crowd jostled and swayed, trying to see how the children ran across the road and disappeared into the dusk.

'Shame,' called a woman from the crowd. 'They're scared, poor little mites.'

At that moment there was a shout: 'The Police!' — and everyone was running. From the windows of my flat, Gerald, Emily and I and some others watched the great cars come roaring up, their lights flashing, their sirens shrieking. There was no one on the pavement. The cars drove by in a pack, around a block, and then back and around again. The shrieking, whining, clanging posse of monsters drove around and about our silent streets for half an hour or so, 'showing their teeth,' as we said, and then they went away.

What 'they' could not tolerate, could not tolerate even now, was the semblance of a public meeting, which might threaten them. Extraordinary and pathetic, for the last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government: we wanted only to forget it.

When the streets were quiet, Emily and Gerald went off to the other house, to see if the children had gone back there. But they had been and gone, taking with them all their little belongings — sticks and stones and weapons, bits of roast rat, uncooked potatoes.

The two had the house to themselves. There was nothing to prevent a new community being made there. The old one might be restored? No, of course it could not: some thing organic, which had grown naturally, had been destroyed.

It was cold. There was very little fuel. In the long dark afternoons and evenings I sat with a single candle glimmering in my room. Or I would put it out, and let the fire light the room.

Sitting there one day, staring at the fire-flicker, I was through it and beyond — into the most incongruous scene you could imagine. How can I say 'ill-tuned' of a world where time did not exist? All the same, even there, where one took what came, did not criticise the order of things, I was thinking: What a strange scene to show itself now!

I was with Hugo. Hugo was not just my accompaniment, an aide, as a dog is. He was a being, a person, in his own right, and necessary to the events I was seeing.

It was a girl's room, a schoolgirl's. Rather small, with conventional flowered curtains, a white spread for the bed, a desk with school books laid tidily, a school timetable pinned on a white cupboard. In the room, in front of a mirror that ordinarily was not part of the room at all (it had a little looking glass tacked to the wall above a washbasin), a long, capacious mirror all scrolled and gilded and curlicued and fluted, the sort of mirror one associated with a film set or a smart dress shop or the theatre — in front of this mirror, here only because the atmosphere and emotional necessities of the scene needed more than the sober small square looking glass, was a young woman. Was Emily, a girl presented or parcelled up as a young woman.