The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  But let’s put aside this possibility. Here is another thought. I once read of an ‘ideal community’ set up by some Viennese doctor in the early days of psycho-analysis. This group outlawed jealousy, property feeling, and envy-by, as it were, an act of communal will. When this small community fell apart, it was said that it was because the couples who composed it began to marry for the sake of the children. ‘We could survive sexual jealousy but not property feeling about the children.’ Now, this could have been said about our people too. That is, if our ‘family’ had been set up on such lines, we might have said: we were threatened with discord and disintegration at the time we had most small children. But supposing our formulation had been: we are pacifist and outlaw violence. We might then have said: our danger time was when we were threatened by violence, and had to form a private militia to guard ourselves.

  This is why I don’t want to say that a spirit of irritable dissension set in at that time when people began asking us questions about our philosophic or religious basis, and we began to wonder what did hold us together.

  I make this point because theories about the rise, existence and reasons for the collapse of, Utopian communities, have always been prolific; and when the human race has recovered enough energy for such luxuries, will doubtless again be prolific.

  For a couple of years at the beginning it was a time when we were all very busy and very happy. (Personally very happy: your sister was born, our fifth child, and your cousin, Gwen’s second child, and your mother was finding that kind of simple work around the farm very much to her taste.) But our hard work and our pleasure did rather blind us to what was going on outside. I have said that we were over-reacting. We went on doing this-as Martha warned us. So did my father, either by letters, or when he visited us. They said we were naive, and foolish not to be prepared. But we were so happy to be out of London. When we visited it, we came back saying it was awful: it was increasingly frightening and awful; so we stayed away from it. Then things began to change in the towns and villages of the countryside. How? Well, it means conveying an atmosphere! At first it was an atmosphere. I can only suggest that a Memory should try and ‘gather’ an atmosphere-first let’s say from 1970, then from 1975, and try and transmit a feeling of the change. Looking back I see that ever since 1 was born to my knowledge, and the old people say before that, there has been an obsession with dates, decades, periods, times. It is because the ‘flavour’ of living changed so much from decade to decade, even from year to year. And it kept speeding up. We felt as if we were in the grip of some frightful acceleration. But it is just this I don’t know how to convey. You must pick it up. And perhaps it will be hard for you: you and the other children say those years were all bliss and you remember them as a sort of pre-eating-of-the-apple Golden Age.

  In 1969 and 1970 there was a worsening of the economic crisis, masked (as by then had become the norm) by large loans from the international bodies whose insistence on ‘stability’ led to the National Government of the early ‘seventies. This crisis did not affect us immediately: not economically. The people affected were those already affected, the working people, old people, everyone on fixed and low incomes. But what did affect us. what affected everyone immediately, was the tightening of the atmosphere away from the ‘everything goes’ of the ‘sixties. The new government stood for order, self-discipline, formal religion, conformity, authority. In America the new age of piety and iron’ (foretold by a Dr Spock on being sentenced for unconformity in 1968) began in 1969. In Britain it got into its stride a couple of years later. This was a government which got the British to swallow what no government before had ever dared suggest, or-rather-admit. For what had been previously considered unfortunate necessities, to be played down and apologized for, now became civil and national virtues. As early as the ‘fifties the regimentation of human beings by tapping telephones, opening letters, informal spying of all kinds had been established. In the seventies these were taken for granted, even approved of. (Anything that conduced to the expansion of business and ‘the recovery of the nation’ was good; everything that did not, was bad: these devices were supposed to help an atmosphere of discipline and order and were good.) Also good was the most sinister development of all: the docketing of every kind of information on citizens, not by government and police, but by business firms (on centralized computers) which information was used by police and government. It was a logical development in a society where the needs of industry came before anything else.

  But it was a government full of paradox. It stood for a national campaign against corruption and decadence; but in practice this meant the forms of behaviour which had been approved of in the late ‘fifties and the ‘sixties-that is, there was a swing towards puritanism, first of all in sex, followed by a reaction against the obsessions with food, clothes, furniture and so on. (This was partly out of fear, because of the threatening resentment expressed by the half of the world that was hungry or starving.) It was not that we thought less about food, décor, clothes and so on: a newspaper might campaign for ‘simplicity and sacrifice’ but changing one’s style would involve heavy expenditure in money and time. But while we were paying all this attention to surface problems, the basic structure of the economy remained unchanged: it had done since it was consolidated after the Second World War in a balance where it received continuous handouts from International Funds (really American) in return for being an obedient part of the American military machine. The working classes were sullen and rebellious. But they worked, on the whole: every pressure of public opinion, backed by police and army, was used to make them work longer hours and for less money

  I see that what I have written is misleading: the last part of what I’ve written describes any ‘fascist’ régime anywhere-this was what its enemies called it. But this time of bland, insular conformity, with its nasty amalgam of church, royalty, industry, the respectable arts, and the formerly unrespectable arts (every variety of ‘pop’), together with official science and official medicine, was also an age of anarchy which grew worse every month. It was as if while a ship was sinking, captain and officers stood to attention on the bridge saluting the flag, while the crew and the passengers danced and drank, rioted, though from time to time they went into a drunken parody of a salute to please the po-faced self-hypnotized officers. But how to convey the atmosphere? Tell a Memory to try and ‘catch’ one of those ‘appeals’ on television when a symposium consisting of a Duke, a senior partner from a national chain store, a visiting banker from Switzerland, a General from the Second World War, and a representative from the Federation of Trade Unions ‘talked to the nation’ on national recovery. Afterwards banks of pop singers and popular idols of all kinds would stand to attention to sing Land of Hope and Glory, and Jerusalem. Outside in the streets was a curfew because of the rioting over something like the cancellation of a football match or because it was a very hot day, or because a street fight had started between the private armed guards of two big businessmen. For this combination of a smiling, deprecating, velvet-gloved ‘establishment’ with a continually erupting violence, was the ‘feeling’ or ‘air’ of that time before the catastrophe, like a man making a speech about civic virtues to a well-dressed audience; but he turns to reach for a glass of water on the platform table, and he has exposed a monkey’s flamingly indecent bottom.

  But I’m writing all this from the view you get of things afterwards: capsuled, speeded up, less frightening, because understood. We understood only very slowly what was happening, because we stayed on the farms, and we were people who did not want to be interested in politics.

  The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked. I remember my father’s study (your grandfather, Mark) just before the house was vacated: he stripped the material from the walls, except for one thing. (The contents of this study, its facts, its arrangement, has been projected: this key is in the possession of 7X40 who ought to have arrived by now-she started four months ago from Momba
sa.) This thing was a model of a space rocket, a miracle of precision engineering, and pioneering precision engineering at that: it killed the astronauts in it because of the failure of minor electrical equipment on the level of an ordinary household’s room switch. This fact, or event, ended my father’s summing up of his time. I see no reason to disagree with it.

  Things did not work. That a car for which two thousand pounds had been paid went dull in colour because of poor quality paint; that it might take two days to buy a screw which could fit a newly-acquired bit of household equipment; that a newly-laid road went into ruts three months after it was opened; that the service one got was not what one had paid for-it seemed that nothing could be done about such things, and soon they were pressed into service as signs of national integrity. We believed we preferred to suffer hardship and inconvenience to further the interests of the nation. We on our farms and in our villages began early to do without the unnecessary, though this was never decided as a policy. Our lives were simple, though they did not have to be, since there were sources of money: we did not ‘choose poverty’. It was that quite soon machinery and gadgets became more trouble than they were worth; and the ordinary organization of life became so complicated, because everything was so inefficient, that it was simplified.

  I think this was really what most people were feeling: an electrician splicing a wire unconsciously cursed it out of a kind of hatred for what it stood for; it soon broke and burned out fuses and wiring. He did not know what he had done. Similarly there was a steady increase in all kinds of accidents everywhere. It was like an emotional Ludditeism: an unconscious ‘no’ to how we were expected to live. Unconscious, unrecognized, unofficial-for if you said to the electrician, or the mechanic whose carelessness caused the aircrash, or the men whose mistake had caused the fire in the factory: ‘Are you trying to ruin our national recovery? ’-they would one and all have replied, ‘Of course not’, -and believed it.

  Half believed it. I think it was the same kind of phenomenon as happened under Hitler with some Germans; they called it ‘an inner immigration’. It was a kind of non-co-operation, a suspension of ordinary living. Something of the same kind went on under certain communist rulers, a slump into a muddle where everything was allowed to go wrong, but no one ever decided this or even allowed themselves to understand it. However that may be, the most striking ingredient of the early ‘seventies was that nothing worked, everything fell apart-that is, from the point of view of ordinary living, where one caught buses and trains and posted letters. Or rather, things would work with extreme and inhuman efficiency in small areas, which did not connect with other areas: a machine or an institution could work brilliantly, but only in isolation. The next machine or a sister institution could be unholy anarchy. Meanwhile the government talked of nothing but national this and that, British that and this, but using the grandiose language of Imperialism, or the emotional language of wartime.

  Meanwhile we lived quietly, unaffected on the whole, like the similar communities or groups all over the country. So we would have remained if it were not that your grandmother (your mother’s mother) was prominent in this government; and that my father was prominent because of his Rescue schemes, and people were always confusing what we stood for. A kind of relative (by marriage), a Graham Patten (he was killed in the Catastrophe, presumably in a government shelter), suggested to his wife (he was for a couple of years Assistant Minister of Arts in the National Government), that there should be a programme on television about us. His wife had inherited his television programme when he became a government official. This was a kind of friendliness really: they ‘meant well’. We did not much like the idea, but we seemed to ourselves irrational. After all, we knew our friends to be happy, when very few people were. It was suggested to us we were being selfish in keeping ourselves to ourselves: we should share our formula. We agreed, and then were sorry. The programme itself was embarrassing, rather silly. The point was that by then no one was able to believe in the possibility of something unorganized, unregimented, undoctrinaire: this we had not foreseen. So the programme emphasized all the points that to us were not important-that there was no constitution, no legal agreements; that some of us had money and others not, and so on. The programme was called ‘An Essay in Primitive Communism’, was an hour and a half long, and occupied a monthly ‘slot’ reserved for programmes with a very high moral and cultural tone. For us it was a disaster. Martha and others had warned us not to let them use the word ‘Communism’. In the ‘seventies the word was as loaded as it had been in the ‘fifties, but loaded vaguely. In the ‘fifties it had meant, quite simply, the Soviet Union, and had associations of treachery and espionage. Twenty years later it meant anything that wasn’t good-a kind of portmanteau word of unpleasant and frightening associations that were never defined. Well, after that we were stuck with the word. There were two bad results, one immediate, one lasting. First, we were overrun by gangs who had come down from Birmingham. They smashed a lot of windows, burned down a thatched shed, stole two cars-nothing worse. Little enough considering the sort of damage done later in such raiding parties ‘for laughs’. And now we were exposed to neighbours as possibly dangerous eccentrics and never after lost the attentions of the police. But the real damage was done among ourselves. For the first time there was a bad atmosphere. Suddenly people were sitting around in ‘discussion groups’ and ‘forums’ and debates’ theorizing about us and about other ways of living. Some people left. One wrote an article in a local newspaper: ‘How I was taken for a ride by the Reds’ - yet five minutes before he left he was in tears and saying: I know I’ll never be so happy again. Officials started to investigate. Nothing much to begin with: Inspectors from the Ministry of Education to find out how we were indoctrinating the children. There was nothing to find out but they didn’t believe it and kept dropping in unannounced: by then it was taken absolutely for granted by everyone that it was the State and not the parents who had the last word about how children should be brought up. Welfare workers were very attentive. Quite a number of us had been in the hands of welfare workers and psychiatrists at some time or another (well of course this was true of every kind of person), and we found that long-outlived records were being opened up and re-examined. For instance, there was a couple whose first child had died probably as a result of the brutality of the husband-who was eighteen at the time. But since then they had had two children and did quite well except that he got bad depressions when he was convinced that ‘they would catch up with him’. A conscientious welfare worker began visiting the family. He became obsessed that he would have to go to prison. The two cracked, and fled to a Catholic institution like criminals claiming sanctuary in the Middle Ages. They left no address-doubtless thinking they were making things easier for us. But of course we were thereafter plagued by officials looking for them.

  This was the time Nicky and his family left us. (They all died in the Catastrophe.) His dossier had him as a professional troublemaker. (The Businessman’s Pool of Consumers’ and Employees’ Cross-references, centrally computered.) The police were trying to find out if he was using the farm as base for agitation in the factories at Reading where there was a lot of industrial trouble. The questions of the police started off self-questioning about politics: ought we to be living like this while Britain burned?

  So much quarrelling was engendered that we all agreed to try and return to the pre-programmed times. Things would blow over, we decided, if we refused to let ourselves be provoked into statements of principle. Well, they did, but only partly, and it was the end of our time of innocence.

  For one thing, we did as so many other organizations, or rice families, or clubs did: we arranged for our own protection. We formed our own militia from among the young men. (In secrecy of course-we had never before been secretive about anything.) It was by then a choice of protecting oneself, or being protected by the police. The police had remained ‘unarmed’ because British police always had been-but were equipped with
a large variety of weapons like tear-gas pistols, ‘humane’ anti-riot guns, etc. Being protected by the police was complicated. By then they were all in the pay of some criminal syndicate. Not directly of course. In the countryside it worked like this: the big farmers, separately or in groups, paid money into the funds of the crime syndicates. This was not known as protection money, but then the syndicates weren’t criminal. The funds would be called something like: Guardians of British Liberty, and the syndicates were integrated with ordinary industry; all were linked with the networks of the Maña and the old Ku Klux Klan on the pattern that had operated in America for years. But, of course, on the humble level of an English county, all it meant was that rich farmers, who protected less rich farmers in return for subsidies to funds, got their farms protected by the police, who were paid by one group or another. These warring groups might very well be subsidiaries of a central organization; but by then crime was pretty well centralized everywhere. In the cities it worked similarly: areas, or districts, were under the patronage of some personage, usually a very respectable one, who worked with the police to protect the district. That this protection was probably against the bullyboys of the patron of an adjoining area who was his business associate and possibly even a personal friend of course doesn’t make sense: it made sense when the getting and spending of money was what mattered. For everyone paid protection money in some form to somebody. Our people paid money to the police, but it was to be left alone by them while we looked after ourselves.