Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

by Doris Lessing

  ‘That’s right, dear,’ the crone shrieked back.

  I knew Lil Pearce until she died, twenty-odd years later. I never, ever, not once, went into that house, or, later, into the council flat they took her to, without being greeted by histories of calamity. It began on my second visit. ‘It’s my breast,’ she announced. ‘I’ve this abscess. It’s the size of an orange. They’re going to cut it out.’ And she pulled out from her dress, under the cretonne apron, a long white fat bag of a breast. ‘Look at that, see that lump there?’ As well, the meter would have been broken into and three months’ electricity money stolen, the cat had worms, the dog had a torn ear, she herself had fallen through the floorboards in the second floor back, because they were rotten and the council wouldn’t mend them, and then she had reached for a pan over the stove and the heavy saucepan had fallen on her hand—see that bruise? There was no way you could visit Lil Pearce without hearing a tale of disaster, to her, or Mrs. Rockingham, or one of her children, who were always ill or a worry to her. I used to tell my friends, at first nervously—for it was hard to adjust to this level of ill luck—and hearing her name, they would enquire, ‘Well, what this time?’ It was not possible that a single human being could support such accumulations of misfortune, but Lil Pearce could, and did, year after year. It had all started because she was illegitimate, she was a love child, and that was why her mum had hated her and would not feed her right, but her gran loved her, and so she had not died of being treated bad. ‘That’s why I’m good to Mrs. Rockingham, see? It’s because I want to make it up to my Gran.’

  I used to sit there through my visits, keeping a good grip on myself, because I could feel the laughter welling up until it threatened my face. She had fallen out of bed and sprained her wrist. Her thighs were black and blue because her veins bruised easy. The dog had knocked a tray of boiling tea onto her lap and she had blistered you-know-where. Her knees had bad bones, and the doctor said they were past hoping for; she had lost her purse, with all her rent money in it; she had been mugged at the grocer’s, but luckily she had had only a quid; she had just heard that her son had to have a terrible operation. Believe me, I learned from Lil Pearce how tight the roots of comedy and tragedy are intertwined, for I would watch the helpless hysterical laughter rising in me as each lugubrious bit of news emerged from that dramatic fate-wracked face, until I had to excuse myself and run next door, where I put my head down on my arms on the kitchen table and laughed and laughed. She never invented, made it up; it was all true. There are people who step onto some escalator marked Disaster and cannot get off again, or perhaps plug into an unlucky wavelength, and so it was with her.

  ‘And there I was with the three kids, it was the Blitz, the bomb got the street corner near where we were, and the kids had the blast all over them, and I got my eyes full of plaster, but the hospital said they had much worse to cope with that night and gave me some aspirin. But the bomb shelter was full of water and so we had to get under the bed, me and the kids, while the bombs fell on us, and then the roof fell on the bed and…’ But we are in the exponential swell of catastrophe that is the distinguishing mark of such favourite victims of ill fate, and the tale has to go on: ‘…and a bedspring cut my face and the blood got onto us and we didn’t have no more clothes to put on, only the bloody ones, and in the morning the air raid warden saw us and said, Quick, Lil, into hospital, but I said, Too late, Ron, it’s too late for hospital, and the hospital didn’t have time for us when we needed it last night, aspirin, that’s what they gave me, and now what we could all do with is a good cup of hot tea, but the gas main’s cut and I’ve got nothing to give my kids and I can’t get to my stove because there’s a cupboard fallen down over it, and my wrist’s bent backwards with the blast and I couldn’t push the cupboard back for myself. And Ron said to me, he said, Lil, you’re a real heroine, I always said so, but now you’ve got to get out from under that house, because it’s going to fall around your ears. And I said, Then where are we to go? And he said, I’d say the church, you’ll get some soup and sandwiches, but the church took the best of the blast, so you’d better get yourself onto that bus and down to the main Shelter, but I said to him, I haven’t got a penny in the world, Ron, because my purse was blown out of my hand by the bomb….’

  I used to start on one of these sagas and watch my friends’ faces for that moment when a look of anguished guilt showed that they were wondering just how it was they had turned into such monsters of callousness they could laugh at this tale.

  No amount of trouble could stop Lil from keeping a helpful eye on her neighbours. She would send John, or Jack, to tell me that she had heard I planned yellow wallpaper for the second floor back, and I should know the sun fell into that room for hours on a sunny day, and I’d better be sure the wallpaper would stand it; or she would shout at me as I went by in the street that she saw the plumbers were digging out that new drain just where the dogs were buried, six dogs were buried in that place, and I’d better take care the bones didn’t find their way into the dustbins, or the police would be asking questions. And she would haul herself along the street and up my steps, on her two sticks, because of her bad legs, to knock on the door, because she had heard from the man who had the vegetable shop on the corner that he was making a special trip to Covent Garden next day and he would get those fancy fruits for me I had asked him for. ‘Was it garlickt? Just run along, darling, and tell him what you want; he’ll do it for me.’

  With the date set for the move only a few days ahead, I got German measles. For some reason, German measles makes people laugh. Is it the word ‘German’ in this context? What long-forgotten travelling epidemic does this word commemorate? Suppose we said Peruvian measles? There’s a smile lurking there too. (Italian measles? Russian measles?) Measles is all right, commiseration is in order, but German measles is funny. This was the second time I had it, both times badly, with a sullen rash all over, a high temperature, a headache. I got into bed in a darkened room and waited, having rung the pirates to tell them to just get on with it. I was deep under that queasy dark ocean which is illness when the doorbell rang. Cursing, I staggered to the door, and there stood a young woman with a sullen face, angry eyes, and a baby in a pushchair, which she had had to hoist up all those flights of stairs. I said I had German measles and was certainly a danger: she was pregnant. She disregarded this. The obligatory laugh was transmuted by her rage into a sneer. She said, ‘I’ve come for money. You’re rich and successful, and I need it.’ I said, truthfully, that I was very short of money at the moment. She said, ‘Don’t give me that.’ I have seldom disliked anyone more. ‘I’ve got to have it for my children.’ She wanted five hundred pounds. Or I think that was it. The trouble is, the value of money has shifted. I know it was so much that I had to increase my overdraft. Only a few weeks later I paid ten pounds for a picture to give a friend and was in a panic because I couldn’t really afford it. Perhaps it was fifty pounds, or a hundred. Later I wrote to this young woman’s extremely rich and famous uncle and asked if he mightn’t consider refunding the money, but he said he didn’t see why he should.

  All this is not as simple as it may seem.

  In the dark, with watering eyes, and very sick, I considered certain facts. I was what is known as an easy touch. There were good reasons for this. First, my parents, who even at their poorest gave ten percent, as enjoined by the Bible, to charity. I remember exchanges about this ten percent.

  My father, testily, laughing: ‘But we don’t have any income. When the money for the crops comes, it goes straight to Land Bank to reduce our debt.’

  My mother: ‘Well, I suppose we could say we never do have any income, but that means we’d never give anything.’

  Should my father’s war pension be included when they reckoned that ten percent? What about the money she made selling chickens and eggs to the store at Banket?

  They gave money every year to the League for Distressed Gentlewomen, a charity for indigent seamen, and another for
the dependents of World War I soldiers. I was told I should give ten percent of my pocket money, of the money I earned for the guinea fowl I took to the store, and of the money I earned writing advertisements. I felt permanently guilty because I didn’t do this: but had I not decided against the existence of God?

  Ever since I had left respectable middle-class ways, when I left Frank Wisdom, and thrown in my lot with the comrades, I had been with generous people: in my experience, the communists were always that. And, too, my early days in London coincided with a general contempt for money, probably because none of us had any. Since I had earned any money at all I was being asked for ‘loans’. A lot were for young men. Poor young men are often helped by older women, as is right and proper, for it is a psychological need of both parties, and this doesn’t have to have much, or anything, to do with sex. I could by now make a good list of ‘debtors’ if I wanted to. I did not regret any of this but was furious with myself for giving that unpleasant young woman anything at all. But I had had to give it to her, and that is why now I was lying in the dark, sick and hot and cross, contemplating my character. Now, it is easy to write insightful thoughts about one’s youthful character decades later, but I was even then glimpsing something basic about myself. Several times in my life I’ve done this: had a glimmering of understanding about myself long before I properly understood. I determined then and there that if I had this weakness in my nature, then at least it would be under control. I would, when settled in the house, actually choose someone for whom I would be responsible: it would be my choice, my decision, taking control:—acting instead of reacting. The house was going to be too big—so I thought then. Peter, in mid-teens, was already behaving as the young did all through the sixties: he was sometimes an honorary child in other families, just as his friends were with me rather than with their own parents. Soon that house would be full of adolescents.

  That incident of the unlikeable young woman presaged more than I could know. For one thing, her manner, a generalised snarl of contempt. She embodied a rancorous envy, and this was already beginning to interest me—it interests me even more now. She clearly felt she had been promised something she hadn’t been given. Whole generations of young people have had this as a primal drive. ‘They have cheated me out of my due.’ This one, with her load of unfathered children, was a victim, only that; her situation had nothing to do with any fault of hers, and she was entitled to loathe the world. Her very existence was an indictment, and yes, I had just begun to understand how much of what I said and, particularly, thought was that: The Indictment. J’accuse. I accuse the world.

  And there was the way she spat out, ‘You are rich and successful.’ Choosing me because my name had been in the newspapers. There it was, our national vice, envy, the tall poppy syndrome.

  I moved. It was no big deal. As in my youth—that is, when I lived with Frank Wisdom and then Gottfried Lessing, and we moved all the time, thinking nothing of it—I took books, a couple of beds, a table, bedding, the curtains, kitchen things. I left all the ugly furniture behind.

  So. That was the fifties, as I experienced the decade, which slopped over at both ends—1949 to 1962—as decades tend to do. I moved into the new house in the autumn of 1962. Just ahead was the famous winter of ’62-’63, when there was a nationwide freeze for seven weeks. There was one bad fog too; not as bad as the terrible dark fogs of the bad old days, which had been outwitted by the Clean Air Act, but my dazzling white walls lost their innocence. This was not because the new window frames had been badly made but because I cannot endure shut windows. All the pipes froze, up and down the street, and in all the other streets in Somers Town, but not mine, so I was supplying water to No. 58 when the standpipe the Water Board put at the corner of the street froze too. I wrote about this freeze in my little book Particularly Cats.

  I gave a great noisy housewarming party and asked all the people who had worked on the house. At its height, the man from three doors down came into the street and shouted abuse at me. Thinking, Well, I’m living in a working-class street, do as the Romans do, I went out onto the steps, put my hands on my hips, and shouted at him to shut up, stop being a spoil-sport, why didn’t he come and join the fun?

  Peter and his friend, witnesses of this unladylike behaviour, were upset.

  ‘Quite right, dear,’ says Lil Pearce, out of her window. ‘You don’t want to take any nonsense from that nasty old thing. And you don’t want him in your house either.’

  A few months later I got a Notice of Compulsory Purchase from the council. That is, you have to sell your house to whichever authority demands it. I managed to spin it all out until almost the end of the sixties, but there came a day when I was standing with a representative of the council in an empty room, to deliver the keys. My mother’s daughter could not have handed over the house in a less than sparkling condition, and it had been scrubbed from top to bottom. The man, full of official bonhomie, congratulated me on the clean house.

  No sooner had we left than the council workmen fixing the house in the next street came in and stripped my house of all the radiators, the pipes, the boilers. Lil Pearce rang me and then the council. The council then set a watchman on the front of the house, from six every evening until six in the morning, but left the back of the house open, so that the workmen continued to drop in to help themselves to anything they might have overlooked. This went on for weeks. When Lil Pearce told the council that the unguarded back of the house was admitting thieves, who were their own workmen, the reply was that they would look into the matter.

  The house was left empty for eight years, while the council debated what to do with the area, continually changing their minds. I could have taken them to court, but what sensible person can be bothered with that sort of thing? I have lived under Camden Council now for thirty-odd years, watching dazzling levels of incompetence and corruption. I was writing down what I observed—an Indictment—beginning with the treatment of the people in Somers Town being ‘rehoused’ against their will. Then I had to ask myself, What is this obsession? And I understood that this was a famous socialist borough, and they were loudly proud of themselves, just like the communist countries, boastful and swaggering; but as with the drunken braggart dressed up in smart clothes, you saw he had forgotten to button himself up, and there was the truth of the matter, a hairy red warty smelly arse. Why was I expecting any better? Because of the word ‘socialist’, of course. Would I be keeping this bitter record if it were a Tory council? Certainly not; that would be: ‘But what can you expect?’ So—basta. Enough. Stop it. People my age are always finding themselves in this situation: A young person is looking at you, trying not to show incredulity. The tactful, embarrassed query: ‘But, Doris, tell me—you say you expect a socialist borough to be better than a Tory one? I don’t think I understand.’ What he or she understands is that here is just another old bat with bees in her bonnet. And you are understanding that yet again, decades—a couple of centuries?—of idealism, of optimism, have disappeared as if they had never been.

  We were all still on the escalator Progress, the whole world ascending towards prosperity. Did anyone challenge this happy optimism? I don’t remember it. At the end of a century of grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state; passionate dreams of utopias and wonderlands and perfect cities; attempts at communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes—after all this, would any of us have believed that most people in the world would settle gratefully for a little honesty, a little competence in government?

  For about six years in the sixties I proved my rapport with the times by becoming a housemother—now, that is a sixties’ word—for adolescents or young adults who either lived at 60 Charrington Street or came and went. All of them were in some kind of trouble: were ‘disturbed’, were being seduced by drugs, were alcoholic, were having serious breakdowns, were known to the police. This was, for that particular t
ime, my growing point, what I was doing, though I was writing hard too, notably The Four-Gated City.

  The sixties are seen glamorously; seen, sometimes wrongly, I think, as the starting point for all kinds of behaviour that in fact began in the fifties—or before. But there is one thing that did start in the sixties: drugs. Drugs arrived from the East, available to everyone, and this had never before happened in our culture. I believe that the long view, the perspectives given by enough time, will reveal that this was the important fact about the sixties. ‘They are quite harmless really,’ people are still saying. A friend from Central Asia was saying then, ‘You people in the West have never seen these drugs. It’s all new to you. You are like a child trying to pet a snake: Look at the pretty snake. If you had lived in a culture where drugs have been endemic for centuries, you’d know that it is only the failures, the losers, the hopelessly poor, who use drugs.’

  My view of the sixties is jaundiced by what I was living through. And we are living in its aftermath. So many people landed in mental hospitals and prisons, and there are sudden silences in talk when someone who committed suicide is being remembered, and every week comes news of a far too early death.

  But that is the dark view, from the shaded side of the street, for only this week I heard a man now middle-aged say, ‘That was the time when everything was possible, we were going to move mountains, we were going to change the world. And what people forget is that there was this great upwelling of vitality from the working class and the lower middle class—it was the grammar schools that did it. Everywhere you looked, there were grammar school boys, like me, often in the arts. It was the first time this has happened in this country.’