Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying: 'It was like that for you, too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn't imagining things.' We match or dispute like people who have seen remarkable creatures on a journey: 'Did you see that big blue fish? Oh, the one you saw was yellow!' But the sea we travelled over was the same, the protracted period of unease and tension before the end was the same for everybody, everywhere; in the smaller units of our cities — streets, a cluster of tall blocks of flats, a hotel, as in cities, nations, a continent… yes, I agree that this is pretty highflown imagery considering the nature of the events in question: bizarre fish, oceans, and so forth. But perhaps it wouldn't be out of place here to comment on the way we — everyone — will look back over a period in life, over a sequence of events, and find much more there than they did at the time. This is true even of events as dispiriting as the litter left on a common after a public holiday. People will compare notes, as if wishing or hoping for confirmation of something the events themselves had not licensed — far from it, something they had seemed to exclude altogether. Happiness? That's a word I have taken up from time to time in my life, looked at — but I never did find that it held its shape. A meaning, then; a purpose? At any rate, the past, looked back on in this frame of mind, seems steeped in a substance that had seemed foreign to it, was extraneous to the experiencing of it. Is it possible that this is the stuff of real memory? Nostalgia, no; I'm not talking of that, the craving, the regret — not that poisoned itch. Nor is it a question of the importance each one of us tries to add to our not very significant pasts: ' I was there, you know. I saw that.'

But it is because of this propensity of ours that perhaps I may be permitted the fancy metaphors. I did see fish in that sea, as if whales and dolphins had chosen to show themselves coloured scarlet and green, but did not understand at the time what it was I was seeing, and certainly did not know how much my own personal experience was common, was shared: this is what, looking back, we acknowledge first — our similarities, not our differences.

One of the things we now know was true for everybody, but which each of us privately thought was evidence of a stubbornly — preserved originality of mind, was that we apprehended what was going on in ways that were not official. Not respectable. Newscasts and newspapers and pronouncements were what we were used to, what we by no means despised: without them we would have become despondent, anxious, for of course one must have the stamp of the official, particularly in a time when nothing is going according to expectation. But the truth was that every one of us became aware at some point that it was not from official sources — we were getting the facts which were building up into a very different picture from the publicised one. Sequences of words were crystallising events into a picture, almost a story: And then this happened, and so-and-so said… but more and more often these were words dropped during a casual conversation, and perhaps even by oneself. 'Yes, of course!' one would think. That's it. I've known that for some time. It's just that I haven't actually heard it put like that, I hadn't grasped it…

Attitudes towards authority, towards Them and They, were increasingly contradictory, and we all believed that we were living in a peculiarly anarchistic community. Of course not. Everywhere was the same. But perhaps it would be better to develop this later, stopping only to remark that the use of the word 'it' is always a sign of crisis, of public anxiety. There is a gulf between: 'Why the hell do they have to be so incompetent!' and 'God, things are awful!' just as 'Things are awful' is a different matter again from 'It is starting here too,' or 'Have you heard any more about it?'

I shall begin this account at a time before we were talking about 'it'. We were still in the stage of generalised unease. Things weren't too good, they were even pretty bad. A great many things were bad, breaking down, giving up, or 'giving cause for alarm', as the newscasts might put it. But 'it', in the sense of something felt as an immediate threat which could not be averted, no.

I was living in a block of flats, which was one of several such blocks. I was on the ground floor, at earth-level; not as it were in some aerial village with invisible paths beaten from window to window by the inquisitive or the speculative eye among birds following their roads, while traffic and human affairs were far below. No, I was one of those who looked up, imagining how things might be up there in higher regions where windows admitted a finer air, and where front doors led to the public lifts and so down, down, to the sound of traffic, the smells of chemicals and of plant life… the street. These were not flats built by a town council, the walls scribbled with graffiti, the lifts stained with urine, the walls of lobbies smeared with excrement: these were not the vertical streets of the poor, but were built by private money, and were heavy, were settled widely over the valuable soil — the formerly valuable soil. The walls were thick, for families who could afford to pay for privacy. At the entrance was a largeish hall, carpeted; and there were even stands of flowers, artificial but handsome enough. There was a caretaker. These blocks were models of what such buildings should be for solidity and decency.

But by that time, with so many people gone from the city, the families who lived in these blocks were not all the class for whom the buildings had been put up. Just as, for years, all through the eroding streets of the poor, empty houses had been taken over by squatters settling in families or groups of families, so that for a long time it had been impossible to say: This is a working class area, this is homogeneous — so, too, in these great buildings once tenanted only by the well-to-do, by the professional and business people, were now families or clans of poor people. What it amounted to was that a flat, a house, belonged to the people who had the enterprise to move into it. So, in the corridors and halls of the building I lived in you could meet, as in a street or a market, every sort of person.

A Professor and his wife and his daughter lived in the twin set of rooms to mine down the corridor; immediately above me was a family of Indians with many relatives and dependants. I mention these two sets of people, because they were closest to me, and because I want to make the point that it is not as if an awareness of what went on behind walls and ceilings had been lacking before the start of — what? Here I do find difficulty, because there is nothing I can pinpoint, make definite… now I am talking not about the public pressures and events we encapsulate in words like 'They' 'Them' 'It' and so on, but my own private discoveries which became so urgent and which were making such a claim on me at that time. I can't say: 'On such and such a day I knew that behind the wall a certain quality of life was being lived.' Not even: 'It was in the spring of that year that…', No, the consciousness of that other life, developing there so close to me, hidden from me, was a slow thing, coming precisely into the category of understanding we describe in the word realise, with its connotation of a gradual opening into comprehension. Such an opening, a growing, may be an affair of weeks, months, years. And of course one can 'know' something, and not 'know' it. (One can also know something and then forget it!) Looking back I can say definitely that the growth of that other life or form of being behind that wall had been at the back of my mind for a long time before I realised what it was I had been listening to, listening for. But I can't set down a date or a time. Certainly this inner preoccupation predated the other, public, concern to which I've given, I hope it is not thought frivolously, the word 'it'.