The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  There must be two or three hundred people here, and of a most extraordinary variety. Groups of strangers kept passing each other; and the most frequently used words were: ‘Who is that, do you know? ’ The least numerous guests were those for whom the impulse had first sprung. The ‘family’ were hardly there, or came and went away early.

  The Arts, as had been the case for many years now, predominated; particularly the theatre in all its forms, with the cinema and the television. There were some ballet dancers, a couple of choreographers, a new soprano from Wales.

  Graham sat in a corner with an Indian film director, a Polish film director, a Russian poet, and an American poet. The apparent stars of the party however were not these, but a couple of veterans of the peace movement who had just returned from North Vietnam: their expenses had been paid by the Daily X, whose editor was Miles Tangin. They were in discussion with a couple of young men, relations of Oscar Enroyde, who had ended their stint of fighting in Vietnam, one wounded in the hip, one whole. Graham, while conducting the conversation in his group, looked across towards this one, planning how to get them on to a television programme to continue or repeat this discussion (amicable) for the benefit of the public.

  In another room Rosa Mellendip was in conversation with one of her clients, a man who ran a chain of holiday camps around the Mediterranean. She, with her vital face, white hair, and a strong-minded white suit like a uniform of service, dominated a room-full of people hoping to catch her eye for free advice, as they used to do for psycho-analysts; and made this very rich and able man (self-made, still on the way up) appear like a suppliant.

  But it was not here that the practised Margaret-watchers were looking for auguries.

  On a low stone wall by a sunk garden Martha found Mark sitting, and she sat by him. Rita was flirting maternally with Paul some yards away. Gwen was telling a young American who did not wish to fight in Vietnam that there was plenty of room for him and his friends in Radlett Street. Phoebe was explaining to John Patten that he was evading his responsibilities by going to North Africa; he ought to be canvassing for the Labour Party by-election due in this area next month.

  Margaret was sitting under a large oak tree beside a couple of bishops and a mini-Royal with her ex-commoner husband. With them was Oscar Enroyde, and an associate from this side of the Atlantic, a key man in the Associated Federation of Industries of the British Isles. There were a couple of other discreetly powerful looking people, among them Hilary Marsh, now retired from the Foreign Office, but with a mild job as adviser to industrialists about certain tricky international problems.

  A dozen or so paces away, this group were only just visible, and their voices were a pleasant murmur.

  ‘Well, ’ said Mark, ‘there it is.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, ’ said Martha.

  Many years ago, in one of the unconstituted committees-which? Ah, yes, it had been when ‘everyone’ was a communist-Britain’s version of a fascist phase had been competently forecast. There it was now in the wings, ready to come on, gentlemanly, bland, vicious. There it was: big business, backed by the landowning landlording Church (its face however would be chummy, slangy, modern, tolerant) and Royalty, solidly and narrowly traditional (its face easygoing, goodfellow, amiable) and all taking orders from America-not of course directly, anything open and straight- forward being inimical to the spirit of these ancient partners, but indirectly, through groups of international bankers and vaguely-named and constituted advisers.

  As they watched, Graham Patten emerged from the house: he stood on the terrace with the light behind him to survey the disposition of the garden, then descended into a dark patch to arrive in the half-light of Margaret’s group. He joined them. They caught the phrase (he was talking to a bishop known for his progressive theological outlook): ‘… and if you could join in the dialogue then I’m sure …’ After him, from the house, wafted a cloud of poets and writers and artists and pop-singers which settled on the dewy grass around those so solidly-shod feet.

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised, ’ said Martha.

  ‘I’m afraid so, ’ said Mark.

  Here a purple billow materialized from the dark, and Rita inserted herself between them, kissing and hugging them as she sat down.

  ‘I’ll go home with Paul, ’ she said. ‘You don’t want to come yet, do you? ’

  On her knees rested the unknown baby, and she held strong young arms carefully around the bulge.

  ‘Oh I’ve had enough, ’ said Mark. He got up. Martha watched Francis collecting his car-load, Mark collecting his. They had forgotten her? No, Francis ran across to ask if she wanted to come yet. Martha said she would get a lift back in later. She walked up and down the long lawns that were springy and wet under great trees, while one after another people moved past her into the house. The stars came out.

  Now the voices and the sound of movement were gone, and the stream could be heard running quietly under its banks. The air was full of the scent of water and of flowers.

  She walked, quiet, while the house began to reverberate: a band had started up. She walked beside the river while the music thudded, feeling herself as a heavy, impervious, insensitive lump that, like a planet doomed always to be dark on one side, had vision in front only, a myopic searchlight blind except for the tiny three-dimensional path open immediately before her eyes in which the outline of a tree, a rose, emerged then submerged in dark. She thought, with the dove’s voices of her solitude. Where? But where. How? Who? No, but where, where … Then silence and the birth of a repetition. Where? Here. Here?

  Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever…?

  England. July 1967/July 1968

  RAF Man ‘Victim of Porton Nerve Gas’

  (Report in The Observer, August 1968)

  The Ministry of Defence has admitted that a former RAF flight-lieutenant, Mr William Cockayne, aged fifty, was a victim of nerve-gas exposure, while serving as an armaments officer at Porton Down.

  The admission came last week in a letter to Mr James Dickens, MP for Lewisham West.

  It says: ‘While at Porton he reported sick twice to the small hospital there. On the first occasion, on 5th August 1953, he was suffering from myosis (contraction of the pupils), caused by a mild exposure to a nerve agent. He was treated for this with codeine and there was no recurrence of the complaint. Almost certainly this mild exposure occurred as a result of a field experiment to assess the vulnerability of tanks, which records show took place on 5th August 1953. It was not unknown for members of the Porton staff at the time to suffer mild myosis as a result of small accidental exposures to agents; recovery was normally complete within a few hours without any treatment at all.’

  Mr Dickens is now pressing the Ministry of Social Security to allow a nerve-gas specialist to make a fresh examination. Mr Cockayne has spent fourteen years trying to establish the cause of a series of nervous breakdowns. He has tried three times to commit suicide.

  He served in the secret weapons department at the chemical and microbiological establishments at Porton from 1952 to 1954. In 1952 Churchill called for a special department to be set up at Porton to develop a gas weapons system. The department did not, according to Cockayne, come under the Ministry of the Services, but was answerable only to 10 Downing Street.

  ‘The problem was to develop a weapon that would cover as large an area as possible, ’ he claims. ‘A crop-spraying device from an aircraft covers only a very limited area. I had nothing to do with tanks at Porton. That was the Army’s job.’

  Cockayne’s explanation of how the accident happened is that, one evening in the middle of a mess party, he agreed to escort a scientist from the mess to his laboratory.

  ‘The scientist was a bit drunk. When we got to the lab, he opened one of the jars, unscrewed the glass cap-it was still sealed with a rubber top-and said: “Here’s the filthy stuff,” or some such words, “there’s enough here to wipe out Salisbury. Go on, take a sniff.”
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  ‘Like a fool I did. An involuntary action I suppose. The next thing I knew was that I’d collapsed on the path to the squash courts and had to crawl back to my billet.’

  Although there is at present no evidence that the exposure to gas, however it happened, was the cause of the breakdown which followed it, Cockayne has been a sick man virtually ever since, plagued by irrational attacks of depression (a symptom of nerve-gas poisoning).

  Several doctors have examined him without being able to identify any specific cause for his condition. At one time he was treated as an alcoholic.

  His problem has been to persuade people to take seriously what seemed, on the face of it, to be a sick man’s fantasy.

  The Ministry letter says: ‘There is no record that when he resigned from the RAF in 1954 he made any complaint about his health having suffered from nerve-gas poisoning. Nor is there any evidence that he suffered any lasting ill-effects from the mild dose of nerve-gas poisoning in 1953.’

  Appendix

  Various Documents, Private and Official, Dated between 1995 and 2000, in the Possession of Amanda, Francis Coldridge’s stepdaughter, destroyed by her before the Northern National Area (formerly North China) was overrun by the Mongolian National Area.

  I: Appeal

  It is requested that survivors from Destroyed Area II (British Isles) should write down as much as they can remember, as they personally experienced them of the events leading up to the Catastrophe, the weeks of the crisis, and their subsequent escape. It is of course generally realized that the destruction of historical material and artefacts from which history can be recreated has been very great, since so many of the world’s great museums, libraries and archives are either destroyed, or contaminated and unreachable, being temporarily or permanently sealed. People everywhere have been magnificently co-operative and generous with their time. But the available material for the recording of the last thirty years is scant and scattered. It is emphasized: what is needed is personal recollection, in the greatest possible detail, with names, dates, places. This material should be handed in, or posted to, the Embassies of the Mongolian National Area in any city throughout the world.

  Signed: (illegible)

  For the Preserver of Historical Studies

  Mongolian National Area.

  II

  From X30 (Francis Coldridge, working as Deputy Head of the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Area, near Nairobi) to X32 (Amanda née Coldridge, wife of Mao Yuan, working as a clerk in the temporary administration), enclosing the document I (above). [In the following letters codes were used for all names of places, persons, also dates. Names have been replaced where they are likely to be familiar to the reader]

  Dearest Amanda,

  These documents seem to be everywhere: to my knowledge all over Africa and I gather over North and South America. In America they are as from the Mexican Central Government. I am sending them in case you have not seen them. For if not you soon will. I gather that there is no official contact between your third of China and the Mongolian National Area, between you and the Southern National Area-nor between these two areas. In short, the joke that China is repeating previous epochs in a pattern of warlords ruling territories with rapidly changing frontiers is true? Also that all written material exchanges through the mediation of people planted in various armies-since there is little movement except by the military? See therefore that our people in your National Area, and in the Southern National Area, and in the Mongolian National Area (these above all] are warned that this appeal is a method of extracting names and information with a view to immobilizing or exterminating us. The older people will hardly need a warning-but the younger people? Is it any less true, even after the experience of the last decades, that the human race cannot learn from experience?

  See that the following information is spread and absorbed.

  The mass of the human race has never had a memory. History, the activities of historians, has always been a sort of substitute memory, an approximation to actual events. In some epochs this false memory has been nearer to events; in others very far-sometimes by design. Previous deliberate creations have been for instance when the officials of the young Christian Church destroyed or sufficiently distorted the facts of what the first Christians were really teaching; and such records as there are of the activities of the Inquisition (most particularly the official reasons for the destruction of the Albigensians); and the suppression of witchcraft. At such times ‘history’ becomes a deliberate distortion instead of, as it usually is, the dirty smoke left in the air after the fire of events. The real facts are committed to memory and passed on verbally; or written down and concealed for the information of the few. The deliberate creation of false history is taking place now on your borders in the National Area of Mongolia; in Mexico; in Brazil; and in Kenya; (the new ruling points of the world) because of what emerged into ordinary human knowledge-that is, the consciousness of the man in the street, before, and in the time of the Destruction. It is our function to guard against what might happen; and what may easily happen is that inside half a century, if what is left of the human race has not yet again committed hara-kiri, there will be no true record of the events of the Epoch of Destruction, except in certain carefully chosen, prepared and preserved human minds for careful transmission to similar minds. You know the Memories; and we are looking for one or two safe places for the preservation of written material-we have not yet found the latter. The purpose of this letter is to ask you to see that our people in your care understand these facts; and that whatever they personally know or remember, is carefully committed to one of the Memories, but never to paper unless there is no doubt of the authenticity of the request.

  And now, as my personal contribution to the record, I am writing down what I know to be truth.

  I begin with the moment when we and our friends left London to live in the country.

  Towards the end of the ‘sixties, about thirty of us left London for Wiltshire: our friends, or Paul Coldridge’s friends, or friends of these. We had nothing in common, not even an expressed desire to ‘live simply’ or ‘drop out’ - or any of the other reasons why similar groups or movements of young people left conventional society to set up communities of one kind or another. When we did it, we did not have motives, or reasons, or rationalizations: we did it because it seemed sensible. Now, looking back, I am struck at how it happened. For one thing, not so many years later it was these people and their friends and families who were among the not so very many who escaped. (How may do you think? I’ve just seen the amended figures. All figures so far released by the Controls have been very wrong, even by my personal experience-half or less what I, and Check, think are likely. From this I estimate that very many people must have already been destroyed as unrehabilitatable.)

  Now I wonder about things that were not important then, trying to isolate what might be significant. One is that, of our people (at the most five or six hundred when our ‘community’ was at its height), very few would have been chosen by currently acceptable yardsticks as ‘good human material’ - to use the phrase so much in use by authority during the last phase. Few were anywhere near what would be classed as ‘average’ or ‘normal’ or even ‘desirable’. Of course, as that decade went on, and the general madness deepened, even they were using such terms more carefully; but it is certain that the people who were attracted to us were by definition those who were ‘eccentric’, or slightly ill. or damaged, or simply unable to cope with the demands of that society. For one reason or another all were unwilling or unable to live according to the norms of the time-which were the more savagely defended as norms, as society got crazier and crazier.

  I repeat: these are thoughts I have now, the last I or any of us had then. On the contrary, what was remarkable about us was that we were not self-conscious. This was perhaps because so many of us had had contact with psychiatry in one or another of its forms: it was perhaps an over-violent reaction. And most of us had had some kind o
f contact with politics: our teeth had been set on edge. Whatever the reason, it was not until the middle of the ‘seventies that we realized, because of other people’s interest in us, that our chief characteristic was that we had no ideology, plan, constitution, or philosophy. We had grown as a community. People had started to live together. Others joined us. We moved to the country because it was cheaper and easier to live there with the children. Typical of how someone might join us was the way Martha came to visit us, offered to stay and housekeep while I and your mother took you children for a holiday, and then moved down from London altogether to help in the nursery school. (Incidentally, if you have not already received this information in material sent off a year ago, I believe Martha to be alive: she was certainly alive fairly recently. She is on an island somewhere, but would not give whereabouts for fear of being rescued. I’ve heard her several times, but receiving was bad

  To begin with we had a farm of about a hundred acres, with some farm buildings. These we made habitable, and we grew vegetables and fruit and kept some cows. Some of us had money. Others had none. Some worked very hard; others did not. Yet there was no feeling of mine or thine, or resentment because some were less useful than others. (Not at the beginning, nor for some time: this is because we hadn’t formulated anything, hardly understood what was happening.) We did not all live in one place either, for we soon expanded. For instance, when Nanny Butts died we took over their cottage and land, and Gwen and her husband who had always wanted to garden, continued his work: growing plants for sale and advising on gardens. Other places were bought. Yet a feeling of community remained even when we lived apart. This was not expressed in any formal way, such as meetings or discussions. Not to begin with: later there was a monthly discussion, but it didn’t bind anyone to anything. I repeat: this did not then strike us as extraordinary. Now I wonder about it. In all the histories of the many utopias or ideal communities has there been one without any kind of religious political or theoretical basis? I don’t think so. And they all grew, prospered or faded-conformed to the laws of change. So did ours, of course. If we hadn’t had the sharp shock of having to move when we did, I’m pretty sure we would have come to grief-split by quarrelling, then disintegrated. But of that later. It has been asked since (as they asked on that unfortunate television programme): ‘How do you account for this harmony? ’ I don’t know. Perhaps it was that no one was ever asked for anything: they offered. But now I put forward what I wouldn’t have been capable of thinking then; nor have said publicly if I had thought it: I believe that unconsciously we knew what was going to happen, that a shadow of fore-knowledge was in us; and that this put ordinary laws out of action, or at least forestalled them. And that this shadow from the future was in everyone, affected everyone: accounted for the fantastic character of that decade. But some people it quietened and sobered; made them grow fast, developed them