The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Also, of course, he had been ill. Very ill. His painfully thin body, which had always frightened him, had put him into bed for months in a sanatorium, and for months in the bare-boarded black-windowed room on the first floor of his house.

  Jack said that she, Martha, had not changed at all. He needed to believe this. When he repeated and insisted that she had not, it was the only time that he had been straightforward, non-theatrical, not playing games-with her, or with himself.

  It was probable that some time while he had been ill the old Jack had simply died, or gone away, and this new person had walked in and taken possession.

  Chapter Four

  Easter Monday. Knightsbridge. Four, five abreast, they came past, under the black and white banners, the black-on-white posters, escorted by darkly-uniformed policemen. Banners, pennants, symbols, pamphlets, broadsheets, badges, said what they said in white and black. For the rest, this crowd shambled along in variegated colour. They had been passing for three hours-impressive. From above, television helicopters had seen in England’s hedgy landscape a road along which wound a moving column of little people five miles long, and had hovered low to make the most of this ‘national’ phenomenon, just as reporters making estimates had put them high, at twelve thousand, rather than low, at six thousand, the ungenerous figure. The publicity people were making the most, rather than the least. Why? It would be easy to say ‘nothing succeeds like success’; unless of course one chose to remember the original aim of the March which was not only to put an end to war conducted by means of nuclear weapons; but to put an end to nuclear weapons; to put an end to war.

  Also, these impressive figures (more probably somewhere in the middle, at eight thousand, rather than twelve, or six) were not so impressive when one remembered that any communist or a Labour Party May Day Parade might attract five, eight, ten thousand people; but these figures were usually lowered by unsympathetic editing to ‘a few hundred’ if the Marches were mentioned at all: which thought naturally led one to speculations about the nature, not only of ‘news’ but of facts.

  For there was no doubt that to have been ‘on’ a March unmentioned by the Press or television was a very different experience from this one, where for the whole of the Easter holiday one could count on all newspapers and the television programmes ‘covering’ the March.

  Not only that; it was a different kind of a fact altogether, reading a column of print which began:’ The Aldermaston Marchers set out today in sun/fog/snow/rain, two/three/four/five thousand strong …’ horn seeing a picture of several thousand people under the magpie-coloured banners; as different again as from walking several miles in procession under this or that set of banners without seeing a word of it mentioned afterwards in a newspaper or photographed on to a television screen.

  There were some among this crowd who had been walking across this or that part of the British Isles under banners for decades. Sometimes these walks, or excursions, had been public facts, like The Hunger Marches; some had remained almost private, like a nice ramble among friends.

  From time to time, people in crowds feel impelled to express feelings of one sort or another by marching in company along roads to some goal, carrying devices and banners: the Crusaders (to stretch time a little) of course, had no other means of locomotion but their own feet, or horses. But feelings about the use of nuclear energy for destruction were not expressed by rushing across continents in express trains, or circling the globe in jets, or even by driving an automobile across countries, but by putting one foot after another across earth. Strange that. Suppose none of these people had read about those earlier Marches, the Crusades? Or about the pilgrimages to holy places, on foot, across landscapes? Would they, we, still be putting one foot before the other across earth to say: Down With … or Ban the … or More Money for … Well, yes, it seems more than likely. To move from one point to another on one’s feet, as a means of expressing communal feeling about something or other seems basic.

  In other parts of Britain on that Easter Monday, groups of young people, mostly young men, were engaged in violently rushing from place to place, in gangs, either on motor-bikes, or on their feet, but what they were for or against was not clearly stated or understood. They, too, were reported widely, given, in fact, as much as or more space than Peace Marches-for homosexuality had dropped out of the spotlight of Morality, and had been succeeded by Teenage Violence.

  Most of these people on this March were teenagers … probably three-quarters. Some of them were violent. To move fast along the March, from the back to the front, or to stand still and let it flow past one, was to feel oneself in a sort of river, sometimes quiet, sometimes tumultuous. In parts it ran fast-violent; people shouted slogans, and generated anger; the temperature was high. A few minutes later it ran quiet again. Those, by no means all teenagers, who needed the high temperature, were attracted to the parts of the column where the slogan-shouting and the aggressive singing took place. Others moved away to parts where people chatted, or sang indifferently. The fact was, the people on this March, united by the black and white banners, were extremely different from each other, had little in common except for the leaven of organizers.

  This thought, like many others, was better kept quiet, or shared with a friend of one’s own age. Martha leaned against a tree waiting for Lynda who said she would be there. She waited, also, for Mark, who was bound to be at the end of the March. As usual he had nearly not come at all. The week before, by a coincidence, he had had two visits, one from an American, and one from a Hungarian, both under the impression that the well-known Marxist Mark Coldridge was a leading light in the anti-Bomb movement. Mark had tried to refer them both to his brother Arthur, but as everyone knows, writers are more attractive as exemplars than politicians. Why? To answer that means to answer why writers are employed by universities to give lectures on ‘creative writing’, when no creative writing ever comes out of this process. It means, being able to answer why writers are asked to give lectures at all. It means, to understand why writers …

  Why; how; where; when. Such questions are spawned by the hundred by social phenomena like the Aldermaston March and its spirit; which was something rather warm, generous, a little self-mocking, and very romantic.

  Five thousand, or eight, or twelve thousand people amble across a damp soil at Eastertime to protest at the world’s arsenals of poisonous weapons. But, as they joked frequently up and down the columns, every week-end in football stadiums all over the country hundreds of thousands of people paid out fortunes to watch teams of men kick a small ball around.

  On the very first Aldermaston, a tall pretty girl had wheeled a pushchair with a baby in it, and carried a small square of card which said: Caroline Says No.

  Did it matter a damn what Caroline said? Well, this concourse of people paid tribute to the proposition that it did matter what Caroline said: against all reason and probability.

  But if it mattered what Caroline said anywhere else, in Parliament for instance, would this March then be taking place? Very probably not, but who knew.

  Such negative thoughts one has in England, leaning against a tree, watching five, or twelve thousand people march past. In England, we are privileged. The Hungarian visitor was a communist of forty-five or so, imprisoned and tortured under Horthy, then imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis, then imprisoned and tortured by that aspect of communism now labelled Stalinism. He enjoyed a prominent position in the newly liberated communist Hungary, and was full of infectious enthusiasm for the good qualities of the human race. When he lunched with Mark, he could eat nothing but boiled potatoes, since his stomach had been ruined long since by his various confinements, and had had to spend most of his time standing up, because his back, twisted in some bout of torture, hurt him when he sat too long. His demand was that Mark ‘on behalf of all lovers of liberty everywhere’ should continue to march and demonstrate, not of course that these activities would have any effect at all on the arms race-he hoped that Mark would not
think him so naive; but it was important that the youth of his country, Hungary, should see on newsreels and in newspapers that there were countries where people protested, were able to protest, that they had the right to protest. Freedom! Liberty! Democracy! For these, Mark should get on to his feet and walk from Aldermaston to London under banners: what the banners actually said was almost irrelevant. Mark said Yes; that was why he had been marching, though it was not a view which found much sympathy. At which his visitor had shaken his hand, called him comrade, and departed to some meal organized by the Arts Council.

  The American, a young man of twenty-five, son of socialists, his father working as a clerk in a store because a Joe McArthy committee had seen to it that he could no longer get work in a university, his mother in a mental hospital because of prolonged attention by the police, came to Mark saying that it was essential that Mark and people like him should march, because newsreels, and reports of the marchers were making it easier for him ‘and the twenty people like him in the States’ to get young people on to their feet politically. ‘You are doing’, said Brandon Stone, ‘more to undo what Joe McArthy did than anything else that is happening anywhere.’ He had left to address a meeting of the New Socialists on American Poverty; but he knew it was a waste of time. For America was still, according to everyone except the American poor, not only wealthy but wealthy in such a way that there weren’t any poor. To say anything different at that time, was to earn tolerant or irritated smiles as for crankishness, or wilfully negative criticism.

  Liberty. Freedom. Justice.

  Caroline said No.

  Mark was on the March somewhere. Phoebe had telephoned the night before, indefatigably efficient organizer that she was, to inquire: Are you going to be there or not?

  Well I have been so far, haven’t I?

  Yes, but you are so irritating. I suppose you are going to be childish again? This sour note was due not to his perverse reasons for marching: she merely hoped he would keep his mouth shut, and not corrupt unspoiled people; but because ‘like all the other VIPs’ he would still not march in the front where they could be seen.

  What’s the point of your coming at all, she cried, if no one knows it? In this way did she sum up the interesting question of the nature of fact: of how presentation alters an event. For if Mark Coldridge had been photographed by television cameras and newspapers, then there is no doubt that he would have been more’there’ than if merely mentioned in print; while marching even if ‘all the way’ was as good as not marching at all since he didn’t get either mentioned or photographed. And in fact, it could be said that being photographed, let’s say on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, without having marched a foot, was to be more’there’ than’marching all the way’. That is, from the point of view of an organizer who, teased with‘But, Phoebe, I’m bearing witness’, replied ‘Who’s interested in your conscience?’

  Between people like Phoebe and Caroline, with her square of cardboard, there were, in fact, gulfs in outlook.

  ‘I simply don’t understand you, Mark-surely you’re not still angry with the newspapers? They are all on our side this time.’

  Mark, looking at his study walls and ceiling and their lethal messages, while he telephoned, said:’ Quite clearly it doesn’t matter a damn whose side they are on. I was stupid to care then, and when the wind changes again I’ll remember just what it’s all worth.’ And, when Miles Tangin, now the producer of a television news programme, caught sight of Mark on the second day, and shook him by the hand, while his eyes grew damp with that emotion generated by the sight of thousands of people marching, Mark went out of his way to give him a great deal of good advice about his new novel. For Miles was marching ‘part of the way’ with them.

  Who were’they’ this year, on this, the biggest of the Aldermaston Marches? The phenomenon had reached its peak. But why? Who knew? Who knows how to chart such a curve? It had started unexpectedly, had grown on its own logic, had reached its height, would now decline. At the peak, this year, as at all similar peaks of political feeling, were thousands of people who had never before been near anything remotely political, and would soon drift off, to find, for one reason or another, anything remotely political rather distasteful. ‘Childish’ - that word would be revived again when it always is, at the beginning of a time of reaction. Meanwhile the banners were those to be seen at any demonstration: CND… Peace … Labour … Communist … Pacifist … Trade Union … Youth … Young … Jewish … German … French … Trotskyist … Anarchist … And then the theatre groups, the bands, and the dancers and the singers.

  But at the core, people from all over the world who agitated and protested and complained and fought. A Tory newspaperman muttered that if a bomb could be dropped on this lot, they’d have no more trouble for a decade. His view was in fact the same as Caroline’s: it mattered if people, individuals, said no.

  Heartening: except that to stand under a tree watching the columns pass it was to see on how small a number depended the belief in saying no.

  Suppose one had had to stand here not being able to pick out this face, that face; suppose one did not know how twelve thousand melted to a couple of dozen when the heat came on? As it was, one looked for the faces-one here, one there, for the most part as ordinary, as unremarkable as Phoebe’s.

  Joss Cohen’s for instance. Having helped to organize a large mass movement ‘up North’, he had been expelled by the Colonial Government, and was now living in Britain, in Phoebe’s flat, where he advised, aided, found money for Africans from many parts of Africa. He was now a stout man from behind whose spectacles his eyes gleamed as sensibly as ever. He had messages from Jasmine, in the process of being tried for Treason in South Africa. They were cheerful messages, rather banally so. The words had been carefully chosen to be easily quotable in a newspaper and to give a good impression of’the cause’. ‘Down with the Nats!’ was one. Another:’ Men and women of goodwill continue to fight!’ But if Jasmine had been there, she would have been unnoticeable, a rather stolid woman in her good expensive clothes, and not anyone to look at twice. It was almost certain that she would be going to prison soon, and it was not likely to be a short sentence.

  The core of the March was composed of such people. Yet to look at it was as if socialism had decided to have a carnival. There was a wryness, a spirit of parody, or of sending oneself up, expressed in what looked like fancy dress, or carnival costume. Yet why, since what could be more practical than jeans and duffle coats, or Phoebe’s blue plastic mac and blue headscarf, or Phoebe’s daughters’ fishermen’s jackets? Perhaps it is that any large mass of people must have a look of charade if there is no common dress to wear? Mark, who rose every morning at six to polish his shoes, and shave, and brush his tweeds and his umbrella, to join the March at its start-wherever that was for the day, looked like a gentleman farmer, and raised cheers from the duffle-coated teenagers. A group of young Tories wearing striped trousers, black coats and bowler hats (on principle, as they took pains to explain) raised another cheer-appreciatively ironical. There was no dress, or form of behaviour that was not affectionately received; and perhaps the most telling incident of that March was when a Tory Member of Parliament, annoyed with the March, stood by the columns in a wet field playing a portable gramophone and shouting insults at the Marchers. But since one could not hear what he was playing (it was the National Anthem), nor hear what he was shouting, he was taken to be an eccentric supporter, and cheered accordingly. Similarly, on the first March, in 1958, the man of peace in charge of Reading Cathedral pealed his bells as the marchers came in to express his hostility, but was assumed to be friendly and greeted by cheers. And, a hostile bystander, who shouted: ‘I wish I could drop a bomb on all of you, ’ was swept into the columns by some girls with long wet hair and rainy faces, and ended drinking tea under dripping trees in a field singing ‘When the Saints …’ and so on.

  But in the evenings, warming themselves with brandy in Mark’s study, Mark, Lynda, Martha (not
the children, who were sleeping in school halls somewhere along the route) sat quietly together, three middle-aged people with nothing in their experience of the world to help them to faith in the utility of Caroline’s saying no. They sat in Mark’s study and they looked at the walls. They looked at the walls, and they drank brandy and talked of the last war. which at no point had been within anybody’s control, or indeed within anyone’s imagination, before it happened. They thought that Caroline, walking sandalled with long hair down her back pushing a small baby in a chair said no; and wondered if perhaps the spirit of the March, the wry gaiety, its gentle self-mockery, was a salute to the knowledge that no one wished to own; and despair being its own antidote, it was breeding from its nucleus something like a laugh.

  When Mr. Quest lay dying, he looked around, in a moment of extra lucidity, at the creatures fussing around his bed, animals with clothes on who made strange noises with their mouths and noses to communicate and to express feelings, and he remarked, ‘A funny thing laughter, what’s it for?’ They did not understand him; so he kept quiet, again became an old man nearly dead, to be given medicines.

  To leave Mark’s study each morning early, so as to join the March wherever it had reached, was to leave a cold, clear light for a carnival light.

  A carnival, so some people said, critically or approvingly, of children. Well, one way of looking at this March was to remember three-quarters of these people were children born either during the last war, or soon afterwards. One way of’doing’ the March was in fact to talk to children. One might march, or amble, day after day, from Aldermaston with its great wire fences and its police dogs and its air of official righteousness and secrecy, on to Reading, most hideous of towns, from Reading on to riverside Staines, from Staines, on to Chiswick and so through London and its doomed streets, to Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square-talking to people under twenty-one. One might also set oneself to find out what place the last war had played in the beginnings of these people’s lives. One found out that there was probably no person here whose conception, babyhood, childhood or youth had not been’disturbed’ (to use the psychiatrist’s phrase) by that war. One might also go on to make inquiries about the parents of these people, most of whom, very likely, had been fundamentally involved in the war before the last. There were very few people indeed, in, or near or associated with these columns of walking people whose lives did not have a great gulf in them into which all civilization had vanished, temporarily at least. There was probably no one here whose life had, or could, he remotely like that one once described by Thomas as ‘being born under the elm tree, living, courting, marrying, dying, being buried under the elm tree’.