The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  There was a kitchen, a large room where half of the floor had been covered with asbestos sheets and then corrugated iron sheets, where fires of whatever fuel was available could bum. There was a fire burning now, and a meal being prepared by two youngsters who, when they saw it was Emily, stood aside to let her taste and examine: it was a stew, made of meat substitute with potatoes. She said it was good, but what about a few herbs, and offered them the handfuls she had gathered off the railway lines. And here were some pigeons: they could pluck them if they liked, or otherwise find somebody who would like an extra task — no, she, Emily would find someone and send them to do it.

  I understood now what I had half-noticed before: the way the children reacted when they saw Emily: this was how people respond to Authority. And now, because she had criticised the stew, a boy knelt and chopped the greenstuff on a board with a piece of sharpened steel: he had been given an order, or so he felt, and was obeying her.

  Emily's eyes were on me: she wanted to know what I had seen, what I made of it, what I was thinking. She looked so worried that June instinctively put her hand into Emily's and smiled at her — all this was such a sharp little presentation of a situation that I did not avoid it by pretending I had noticed nothing.

  Only a few days before Emily had come in late from this household, and had said to me: 'It is impossible not to have a pecking order. No matter how you try not to.' And she had been not far off tears, and a little girl's tears at that.

  And I said: 'You aren't the first person to have that difficulty!'

  'Yes, but it isn't what we meant, what we planned. Gerald and I talked it over, right at the start, it was all discussed, there wasn't going to be any of that old nonsense, people in charge telling people what to do, all that horrible stuff.'

  I had said to her: 'Everybody has been taught to find a place in a structure — that as a first lesson. To obey. Isn't that so? And so that is what everybody does.'

  'But most of these children have never had any education at all.'

  She was all indignation and incredulity. A grown-up — a very grown-up and responsible — question she was asking: after all, it is one that most adults never ask. But what had confronted me there had been a young girl in whose eyes kept appearing — only to be driven down, fought down — the needs of a child for reassurance, the sullen reproach against circumstances of a very young person, not an adult at all.

  'It starts when you are born,' I said. 'She's a good girl. She's a bad girl. Have you been a good girl today? I hear you've been a bad girl. Oh she's so good, such a good child… don't you remember?' She had stared at me; she had not really heard. 'Its all false, it's got to do with nothing real, but we are all in it all our lives — you're a good little girl, you're a bad little girl. 'Do as I tell you and I'll tell you you are good.' It's a trap and we are all in it.'

  'We decided it wasn't going to happen,' she said.

  'Well,' I had said, 'you don't get a democracy by passing resolutions or thinking democracy is an attractive idea. And that's what we have always done. On the one hand 'you're a good little girl, a bad little girl', and institutions and hierarchies and a place in the pecking order, and on the other passing resolutions about democracy, or saying how democratic we are. So there is no reason for you to feel so bad about it. All that has happened is what always happens.'

  She had got to her feet: she was angry, confused, impatient with me.

  'Look,' she said. 'We had everything so that we could make a new start. There was no need for it to get like it's got. That's the point, I'm afraid.' and she had gone off to the kitchen, to get away from the subject.

  And now she was standing in the kitchen of her, or Gerald's, household, angry, confused, resentful.

  That child hurrying over his task, not looking up because the overseer still stood there and might criticise — this humiliated her, 'But why,' she whispered, staring at me, really — I could see — wanting an answer, an explanation. And June stood smiling there beside her, not understanding, but gazing in pity at her poor friend who was so upset.

  'Oh all right, never mind!' said Emily at last, turning away from me, June, the scene and going out, but asking as she went: 'Where's Gerald? He said he would be here.'

  'He went with Maureen to the market,' said one of the children.

  'He didn't leave a message?'

  'He said we must tell you that we must have our heads done today.'

  'Oh he did did he!' But then, already relieved of her distress, she said: 'Right, tell everyone to get to the hall.' And she led the way to the garden.

  It was a fine garden in every way, planned, prepared, organised, full of good things all for use — potatoes, leeks, onions, cabbages, the lot — and not a weed or a flower in sight. Some children were at work there, and as they saw Emily they quickened their pace of work.

  Suddenly she exclaimed: 'Oh, no, no, I said the spinach should be left until next week, it's being overpicked.' A child of about seven quite openly grimaced at June — it was that face which is made to say: Who does she think she is, bossing us? — that absolutely routine reaction, to be observed in one form or another anywhere there are groups, hierarchies, institutions. In short, everywhere. But Emily saw it, suffered, and softened her voice: 'But I did say leave it, didn't I? Can't you see for yourself? The leaves are still tiny.'

  'I'll show Pat,' said June, quickly.

  'It doesn't matter really,' said Emily.

  Before we left the garden Emily had again to exclaim and explain: wood ash from the fires to control fly on the cabbages had been laid too close around the stems. 'Can't you see?' said Emily to the child, a black child this time, who stood rigid in front of her, his face agonised with the effort of taking this criticism, when he felt he was doing so well. 'It shouldn't be close to the stem, you should make a circle, like this…' And she knelt down on the damp soil and trickled ash out of a plastic bag around the cabbage stem. She did it neatly and quickly, she was so expert; and the child sighed and looked at June, who put her arm around him. When Emily looked up from her task with the ash, she saw the two children, one in the protective embrace of the other, allied against her, the boss. She went scarlet, and said: 'I'm sorry if I spoke sharply, I didn't mean to.' At which both children, disengaging themselves from each other, fell in on either side of her and went, distressed by her distress, through the paths of that exemplary garden, towards the house. I followed, forgotten. The black child had put his hand on Emily's forearm; June had hold of her other hand; Emily was walking blind between them, and I knew this was because her eyes were full of tears.

  At the back door she went ahead by herself, the black child following. June fell back to be with me. She smiled at me, really seeing me for this one time: her shy, open, defenceless smile offered me her inadequacy, her deprivation — her history. At the same time her eyes asked that I should not criticise Emily, for she could not bear Emily to be disliked.

  In the hall, or dining-room, the trestles had bowls of water set all along them that smelled of a strong herb; there were fine combs and bits of old cloth. Beside the trestles stood the children, and the older ones, with Emily, began to comb through the scalps presented to them.

  Emily had forgotten me. Then she saw me and called: 'Would you like to stay and eat with us?'

  But I could see she did not want me to.

  I had scarcely turned to take myself off, when I heard her anxiety ring out: 'Did Gerald say when he would be back? Did Maureen say anything? Surely he said something about how long they would be?'

  Back in my home, I saw, through the window, Gerald arriving on the pavement with a girl, presumably Maureen, and he stood surrounded as usual with the younger children, some from his household, some not. He probably saw his loitering there for hours at a time as a function. I suppose it was. Collecting information, as we all had to; attracting new recruits for his household — but he had more applicants than he could take in; simply showing himself, displaying his qualities among the
four or five other young men who were the natural leaders — was this the equivalent of a male going out to hunt while the women kept themselves busy at home? I entertained these thoughts as I stood with Hugo beside me, watching the young man in his brigand's outfit prominent among the people there, with so many young girls hanging about, catching his eye, waiting to talk to him… old thoughts, about stale social patterns. Yet one had them, they did not die. Just as the old patterns kept repeating themselves, re-forming themselves even when events seemed to license any experiment or deviation or mutation, so did the old thoughts, which matched the patterns. I kept hearing Emily's shrill, over-pressured voice: 'Where's Gerald, where is he?' as she stood in her woman's place, combing nits and lice out of the younger children's heads, while Gerald was probably planning some expedition to capture supplies from somewhere, for no one could say of him that he was unresourceful or lazy.

  Later he was gone from the pavement, and Maureen, too. Soon after that Emily came home. She was very tired and did not try to conceal it. She sank down at once beside the animal, and rested, while I made the supper. I served it, and washed up while she rested again. It seemed to me that my visiting that other house and seeing how much she had to do there, enabled her at last to relax with me, to sit and allow herself to be served by me. When I finished the washing up, I made us both a cup of tea, and sat with her on into the dusk of that summer evening, while she sat limp beside her Hugo.

  Outside, the noise and clamour of the pavement under a colourful sunset. In here, was quiet, a soft light, the purring of the animal as he licked Emily's forearm. In here, the sound of a girl crying, like a child, with small fastidious sniffs and gulps. She did not want me to know she was crying but did not care enough to move away.

  The wall opened. Behind it was an intensely blue sky, a blue sharply clear and cold, blue that never was in nature. From horizon to horizon the sky stood uniformly filled with colour, and with nowhere in it that depth which leads the eye inwards to speculation or relief, the blue that changes with the light. No, this was a sky all self-sufficiency, which could not change or reflect. The tall sharp broken walls reached up into it, and to look at them was to experience their tough hardness, like flakes of old paint magnified. Glittering white were these shards of wall, as the sky was blue, a menacing hardened world.

  Emily came into view, her frowning face bent over a task. She wore a soft blue smocklike garment, like an old-fashioned child from a nursery, and she held a broom made of twigs, the kind used in gardens, and she was massing fallen leaves into heaps that were everywhere on the grass that floored this broken house. But as she swept, as she made her piles, the leaves gathered again around her feet. She swept faster, faster, her face scarlet, desperate. Her broom whirled in a cloud of yellow and orange leaves. She was trying to empty the house of leaves so that the wind could not spread them out again. One room was clear, then another; but outside the leaves lay as high as her knees, the whole world was thickly covered with the leaves that descended as fast as snowflakes everywhere from the horrible sky. The world was being submerged in dead leaves, smothered in them. She turned herself about in an impulsive movement of panic to see what was happening inside the rooms she had cleared: already the piles she had made were being submerged. She ran desperately through the unroofed rooms, to see if here, or here, or here, would be a place that was still covered over and sheltered, still safe from the smothering fall of dead vegetable matter. She did not see me. Her stare, fixed, wide, horrified, passed over me. She saw only the fragments of the walls that could not shelter her, nor keep out the sibilant drift. She stood back against the wall and leaned on her futile little broom, and looked and listened as the leaves rustled and fell over and about her and over the whole world in a storm of decay. She vanished, a staring little figure, a small bright — coloured girl, like a painted china ornament for a cabinet or a shelf, a vivid clot of colour on painted whiteness, the horrible whiteness of the nursery world that opened out of the parents' bedroom where the summer or a storm or a snow — world lay on the other side of thick curtains.

  White. White shawls and blankets and bedding and pillows. In an interminable plain of white an infant lay buried and unable to free its arms. It stared at a white ceiling. Turning its head it saw a white wall one way and the edge of a white cupboard the other. White enamel. White walls. White wood.

  The infant was not alone; something was moving about, a heavy tramping creature, each footstep making the cot shake. Thud, thud, went the heavy feet, and there was a clash of metal on stone. The infant lifted its head and could not see, it strained to hold its head up from the damp heat of the pillow, but had to let go and fall back, into the soft heat. Never, not until she would come to lie helpless on her deathbed, all strength gone from her limbs, nothing left to her but the consciousness behind her eyes, would she again be as helpless as she was now. The enormous tramping creature came thudding to the cot, whose iron bars shook and rattled, and as the great face bent over her, she was excavated from the hot white and whisked up, losing her breath, and was gripped in hands that pressed on her ribs. She was dirty. Already. Dirty. The sound of the word was disapproval, disgust, dislike. It meant being bundled about, turned this way and that, between hard knocking hands, like a piece of filleted fish on a slab, or a chicken being stuffed.

  Dirty, dirty… the harsh cold sound of the word, to me watching this scene, was the air of the 'personal', the unalter — ability of the laws of this world. Whiteness, dislike sounding in a word, a frigidity, a smothering, as the air fell and fell, dragged down by a storm of white in which the puppets jerked on their strings… Suppose, then, that the dams were to fill up with ice and the snows came down for ever, an eternal descent of white; suppose the rooms filled up with cold powder, all water gone and crystallised, all warmth held latent in dry chill air that shocked and starved the lungs… a scene of the parents' bedroom, where the white curtains are drawn back, drifts of white dotted muslin. Beyond these the snow is white on white again, for the sky is blotted out. The two great beds lifted high, high, half-way to the smothering white ceiling, are filled. Mother in one, father in the other. There is a new thing in the room, a cot, all white again, a gelid glittering white. A tall thing, this cot, not as high as the towering beds that have the great people in them, but still beyond one's reach. A white figure bustles in, the one whose bosom is a full slope, which is hard. A bundle is lifted from the cot. While the two people in the beds smile encouragingly, this bundle is held out and presented to her face. The bundle smells, it smells: sharp, and dangerous are these odours, like scissors, or hard tormenting hands. Such a desolation and an aloneness as no one in the world (except everyone in the world) has felt, she feels now, and the violence of her pain is such that she can do nothing but stand there, stiff, staring first at the bundle, then at the great white-clothed nurse, then at the mother and the father smiling in their beds.

  She could have sunk down and away from the sight of them, the smiling ones, the great people held up high there against the ceiling in their warm stifling room, red and white, white and red, red carpet, the red flames crowding there in the fireplace. It is all too much, too high, too large, too powerful; she does not want anything but to creep away and hide somewhere, to let it all slide away from her. But she is being presented again and again with the smelling bundle.

  'Now, then, Emily, this is your baby,' comes the smiling but peremptory voice from the large woman's bed. 'It is your baby, Emily.'

  This lie confuses her. Is it a game, a joke, at which she must laugh and protest, as when her father 'tickles' her, a torture which will recur in nightmares for years afterwards? Should she now laugh and protest and wriggle? She stares around at the faces, the mother, the father, the nurse, for all have betrayed her. This is not her baby, and they know it, so why… But again and again they say: 'This is your baby, Emily, and you must love him.'

  The bundle was being pushed against her, and she was supposed to put her arms out and hold it.
Another deception, for she was not holding it, the nurse did. But now they were smiling and commending her for holding the thing in her arms. And so it was all too much, the lies were too much, the love was too much. They were too strong for her. And she did hold the baby: it was always being lifted down to her, against her, towards her. She held it and she loved it with a passionate violent protective love that had at its heart a trick and a betrayal, heat with a core of ice…

  Now the room is the one with the red velvet curtains, and a little girl of about four, dressed in a flowered smock, is standing over a pudgy open-mouthed infant who sits slackly on a piece of linoleum stretched across the carpet.

  'No, not like that, like this,' she commands, as the little boy, gazing in admiration at this strong and clever mentor of his, attempts to put a block on another block. It topples off. 'Like this,' she shrills, and feverishly kneels and puts blocks one on top of another, very fast and skilfully. She is quite absorbed, every atom of her, in her need to do this, to do it well, to show she can do it, to prove to herself she can do it. The amiable infant sits there, is watching, is impressed, but to do it is the thing, yes, to do it, to place the blocks one above the other, perfectly, corner to corner, edge to edge: 'No, not like that, like this!' The words ring through the room, the room next door, the rooms downstairs, the garden. 'Like this, Baby, don't you see? Like this.'