The Memoirs of a Survivor

***

One afternoon I returned from a news-gathering excursion, and found my rooms had been disturbed, and in exactly the same way as the place behind the wall might be disturbed by the 'poltergeist', or anarchic principle. This was my thought as I stood there looking at a chair overturned, books spilled on the floor. There was a general disorder, an emptiness, and above all, an alien feel to the place. Then, one by one, specific lacks and absences became evident. Supplies of food had gone, stocks of valuable cereals, tinned goods, dried fruits: candles, skins, polythene sheeting — the obvious things. Very well, then — thieves had broken in, and I was lucky it had not happened before. But then I saw that possessions only retrospectively valuable were missing: a television set unused for months, a tape recorder, electric lamps, a food mixer. The city had warehouses full of electric contrivances no longer useful for anything, and I began to think that these thieves were freakish or silly. I saw that Hugo lay stretched in his place along the outer wall; he had not been disturbed by the intruders. This was strange, and no sooner had I become convinced of the inexplicable nature of this robbery, than the sound of voices I knew well took me to the window. There I stood to watch a little procession of the goods being brought back again. On a dozen heads, children's heads, were balanced the television, sacks of fuel and food, all sorts of bags and boxes. The faces became visible, brown and white and black, when they tilted up in response to Emily's voice: 'There now, we're too late!' — meaning that I was back and stood at the window watching. I saw Emily coming behind the others. She was in charge: supervising, looking responsible, annoyed — officious. I had not seen her in this role before, this was a new Emily to me. June was there too, beside Emily. I knew all these faces — the children were from Gerald's household.

In a moment, boxes, bundles and cases were filing into my living-room, the children beneath them. When the floor was covered with what had been taken, the children began to edge out again, looking at Emily but never at me: I might as well have been invisible.

'And now say you're sorry,' she ordered.

They smiled, the feeble awkward smile that goes with: Oh how she does go on! They were obeying Emily, but she was found overbearing: those embarrassed, affectionate smiles were not the first she had wrung out of them, I could see. I became even more curious about her role in that other house.

'No, come on,' said Emily. 'It's the least you can do.'

June's thin shoulders shrugged, and she said: 'We are sorry. But we have brought them back, haven't we?' My attempt to transcribe this is: 'Aow, w'srry, 't wiv brung'm beck, ivnt wee?'

In this effort of speech was the energy of frustration: this child, like others formed by our old time which above all had been verbal, to do with words, the exchange of them, the use of them, had been excluded from all that richness. We (meaning the educated) had never found a way of sharing that plenty with the lower reaches of our society. Even in two women standing on a street's edge bartering their few sentences of gossip had been the explosive effort of frustration: the deprived, thinned speech of the poor had always had somewhere in it the energy of a resentment (unconscious perhaps, but there) fed by the knowledge of skills and ease just beyond them, and whose place in their talk was taken by the constant repetition of the phrases — like crutches — 'you know?' and 'you know what I mean?' and 'isn't it?' and all the rest, phrases which made up a good part of everything they said. Words in their mouths — now in June's — had a labouring effortful quality — dreadful, because of the fluencies so easily available, but to others.

The children went off at last, June lingering behind. From her look around the room I could see she did not want to go. She was regretting, not the act, but the consequences of it, which might sever her from her beloved Emily.

'What was that about?' I asked.

Emily's bossiness dropped from her, and she slumped, a worried and tired child, near Hugo. He licked her cheek.

'Well, they fancied some of your things, that's all.'

'Yes, but…' My feeling was, But I'm a friend and they shouldn't have picked on me! Emily caught this, and with her dry little smile she said: 'June had been here, she knew the lay-out, so when the kids were wondering what place to do next, she suggested yours.'

'Makes sense, I suppose.'

'Yes,' she insisted, raising serious eyes to me, so that I shouldn't make light of her emphasis. 'Yes, it does make sense.'

'You mean, I shouldn't think there was anything personal in it?'

Again the smile, pathetic because of its knowingness, its precocity — but what an old-fashioned word that was, depending for its force on certain standards.

'Oh no, it was personal… a compliment if you like!'

She put her face into Hugo's yellow fur and laughed. I knew she needed to hide her face from the effort of presenting it all bright and eager, good and clever. Her two worlds, Gerald's place, my place, had overlapped in a threatening way. I could feel that in her, understand it. But there was an exhaustion in her, a strain that I did not understand — though I believed I had caught a glimpse of the reason in her relations with the children. Her problem was not so much that she was only one of the contenders for Gerald's favour, but that the burdens on her were much too heavy for someone her age?

I asked: 'Why did they bother with the electrical goods?'

'Because they were there,' she replied, over-short; and I knew she was disappointed in me. I had not understood the differences between them — a category in which she sometimes did and sometimes did not include herself — and me.

Now she was looking at me. Not without affection, I'm glad to say, but it was quizzical. She was wondering whether to attempt something with me — if it would be resented? would be understood?

She said: 'Have you been upstairs recently?'

'No, I suppose not. Should I have?'

'Well then — yes, yes, I think you should!' And as she made up her mind to go ahead with whatever it was she became whimsical, gay, a little girl charming or disarming a parent or adult; she cried out: 'But we must find something to put things on — yes, this will do. And of course if the lift isn't working — and most of the time it isn't these days, oh dear!'

In a moment she was flying about the rooms, gathering together every electrical object I had, except for the radio, with out which we were still convinced we could not live — the news from other countries might just as well be from other planets, so far away did they seem now; and in any case, things went on there just the same as they did with us. Mixers, the television, lamps — these I have already mentioned. To these were added a hair dryer, a massager, a grill, a toaster, a roaster, a coffee pot, a kettle, a vacuum cleaner. They were all piled together on a double-layered trolley.

'Come, come, come, come,' she cried gaily, gently, her serious eyes ever on me, for fear I might be taking offence, and out we went, pushing the over-loaded trolley. The hall was full of people: they streamed up and down the stairs, or waited for the lift — which was working; they laughed and talked and shouted. It was a crowd alight and a-glitter, restless, animated, fervent; everyone looked as if he or she had a fever. Now I realised that of course I had become used to seeing the hall and the pavement immediately outside the building full of this crowd, but I had not understood. This was because along the corridors of the lower floors of the building, all was as it had been: quietness, sobriety, and doors marked i, 2, 3, behind which lived Mr and Mrs Jones and family, Miss Foster and Miss Baxter, Mr and Mrs Smith and Miss Alicia Smith — little self-contained units, the old world.

We waited for our turn for the lift, pushed the loaded trolley into it, and went up with a crush of people who glanced at our goods and did not think much of them. On the top floor we pushed the trolley into the passage, and Emily stood for a moment, undecided: I could see it was not because she did not know her way, but because she was working out what would be best for me: precisely, what would be good for me!

Up here it was the same as on the ground floor: rooms all round the building with a corridor behind them; single rooms off that, a court in the middle — but here the court was of course a well, or gulf. There was a great bustle and movement up here, too. Doors stood open everywhere. It was like the approach to a street market, people with bundles of goods in their arms, or an old pram loaded with this or that, a man carefully holding a wrapped precious thing above his head so that no one could bump into it. It was hard to remember that in the lower parts of the building was quiet and the sense of people giving each other space. A room opposite the lift had a great mound of stuff, right up to the ceiling, and around it crouched children sorting things out into their categories. A child smiled up at Emily and explained: 'I'm just helping with this load, its just come in,' and Emily said: 'That's good, I'm glad,' reassuring the child. Again, there was in this exchange something which made me wonder: the little girl had been overready to explain herself. But we were in the entrance to another room, where an irregular gap in the wall, like bomb damage, communicated with the room we had left — the heap of things had hidden the gap. Through it were being taken by hand, or trundled on various kinds of little cart, certain categories of goods: this room was for containers — jars, bottles, cans and so on, and they were in every sort of material, from glass to cardboard. About a dozen children were at the work of carrying the containers from the heap next door through the gap, into this room: the one thing these markets were not short of, the one commodity no one had been short of for a long time, was labour, was hands to work at whatever was needed. In the corner stood two youths, on guard, with weapons: guns, knives, knuckle dusters. It was not until we stood outside the door of yet another room, where the atmosphere was altogether lower, and more listless, and where there was no guard, that I understood the contents of the rooms with the two armed boys were valuable, but that this room held stuff not valued at all: electrical goods like these we were pushing on our trolley.

We stood there for a while, watching the bustle and movement, watching the children at work.

'They get money, you see,' said Emily. 'Or get something in exchange — even the kids at school come here for an hour or so.'

And I saw that indeed, among these children, some of whose faces were familiar enough, from the pavement, were some better-dressed, cleaner, but above all with that wary self — contained I'm-only-here-on-my-own-terms-look that distinguishes the youngsters of a privileged class when engaged in work that is beneath their conception of themselves. They were here, in short, doing the equivalent of the holiday tasks of middleclass children in the old days — packing goods for firms, cleaning in restaurants, selling behind the counter. Yes, I could have noticed this without Emily, in time; but her shrewd eyes were on me hastening the process; she really was finding me slow to take in, to adapt, and when I did not seem to have understood as quickly as she thought I should, set herself to explain. It seemed that as people left these upper floors empty, to flee from the city, dealers had moved in. It was a large building, much heavier and better — built than most, with good thick floors that could take weight. Mr Mehta had bought rights in a rubbish dump before the government had commandeered all rubbish dumps, and was in business with various people — one was Gerald's father, a man who had once run a business making cosmetics. Usable stuff from the dump was brought here, and sorted out, mostly by children. People came up here to trade. A lot of the goods were taken down again to the street markets and shops.

Goods that were broken and could be mended were put right here: we passed rooms where skilled people, mostly older ones, sat and mended — gadgets, broken saucepans, clothes, furniture. There was in these rooms a great liveliness and interest: people stood around watching. An old man, a watch — mender, sat in a corner, under a light specially rigged up for him, and around him, fascinated, hardly drawing breath, pressed in a thick crowd — so thick that a guard kept asking them to stand back, and when they did not held them with a cudgel. They hardly noticed this, so intent were they, old and young, men and women, watching this precious skill — an old man's hands at work in the tiny machinery.

There was a woman fitting lenses to spectacle frames. She had an oculist's chart on the wall, and according to its findings was handing out second-hand spectacles to people who stood in a line and who, one after another, took from her a pair that she considered suitable. An oculist from the old days; and she, too, had a crowd of admirers. A chair-mender, a basket-mender surrounded with his twisted rushes and reeds, a knife-grinder — here they all were, the old skills, each with a guard, each watched by marvelling barbarians.

What wasn't to be seen in the rooms we passed through, one after another? String and bottles, piles of plastic and polythene pieces — the most valuable, perhaps, of all commodities; bits of metal, wire flex, plastic tape; books and hats and clothes. There was a room full of things that seemed quite new and good and had reached the rubbish dumps shielded from dirt and spoiling: a jersey in a plastic bag, umbrellas, artificial flowers, a carton full of corks.

And everywhere the pressing lively people, here as much for the show as for the goods. There was even a little cafe in one room, selling herbal teas, bread, spirits. A lot of people seemed tipsy, but they often do at markets, without alcohol. It was hard to tell the sellers from the buyers, the owners from the visitors; it was a polyglot crowd, a good-natured crowd, who respected the orders and instructions of the many guards; an orderly crowd, and one able in the new manner to settle among themselves disputes and differences quickly and without bad feeling being allowed to fester. People joked, showed each other their purchases, and even bought and sold from each other, without going to the formality of engaging the services of the official traders — a process which was quite in order and approved of. What the traders wanted was a crowd, was plenty of people, was the flow of goods, in and out.

We made a tour of the entire floor, and, having been greeted by innumerable people — many of the people from the pavement were up here, again entered the room for electrical goods and pushed forward our trolley. For this merchandise we were given a few vouchers, and I said to Emily that since it was her enterprise that had brought us there, she should have the spending of the results of it. She looked quizzical — I had come to expect this, and understood it was because I might be expecting too much in the way of a return. And what would be done, I wanted to know, with our toasters and roasters? Well, they would be dismantled for their parts, and these parts would be incorporated into other objects — obviously they were of no use as they were? Surely I didn't mind seeing them go? Well, if I didn't mind, she would very much like to take to Gerald's house — was I sure I didn't mind? — some stuff for the kitchen, because they were short. We found an old saucepan, an enamel jug, a plastic bowl, a scrubbing brush: this was what we got in exchange for the electrical equipment of what had been, after all, a lavishly equipped flat.

Back in our flat, Emily put off her little girl charm, without which she could never have brought herself to take me up on an expedition she clearly felt was into her territory and a long way from mine; and sat observing me. She was wondering, I suppose, unflattering though that was, if I had really understood that goods, 'things,' were different commodities for her and for children like June; in some ways more precious, because irreplaceable, but also without value… no, that is not right, without personal value: things did not belong to people as they did once. Of course, this had been true among some people long before the time of getting and having had passed: all sorts of experiments in communalism had been worked through, apart from the fact that people like 'the Ryans' had dispensed with ideas of mine and thine, and this without any theories or ideas about it. June was June Ryan; her family had been the despair of the authorities long before the collapse of the old society, when things had still been assumed to be normal. And, as a Ryan… But more of this later, when I describe 'the Ryans' in their proper place…

Why am I postponing it? This place will do as well as another. In my wanting to postpone what has to be said for the sake of the narrative about the Ryans, no more than an extension and a reflection of the attitudes and emotions of the said authorities towards 'the Ryans'? The point being that 'the Ryans', meaning a way of life, were unassimilatable, both in theory — theories about society and how it worked — and in practice?

To describe them, their circumstances — nothing here that the reader won't have heard a hundred times: it was a textbook case, as the social workers kept exclaiming. An Irish labourer had married a Polish refugee. Both were Catholics. In due time there were eleven children. He drank, was brutal, was intermittently affectionate. She drank, was hysterical, incompetent, unpredictably loving. The children would not stay in school. Welfare authorities, housing authorities, the police, the psychologists, all knew the Ryans. Then the two older boys were in court for stealing, and went to Borstal for a time. The second — not the oldest — girl, got pregnant. She was fifteen. No, there is nothing unfamiliar about any of it, but the Ryans' case seemed to be bigger and more hopeless because there were so many of them, and because both parents were large and colourful characters whose sayings were likely to be quoted at conferences and at meetings: it often happens that a single case takes wing out of its anonymity and represents others: in our city alone there were thousands of 'Ryans' of all kinds, colours, nations, unknown except to their neighbours and to the authorities, and these people in due time found themselves in prison, Borstal, remand homes, and so on. But some charity interested itself in the Ryan family, they were installed in a house: efforts were made to keep them together.

This was how the picture looked to officialdom, doing as well as it could; how it looked in reports; how a newspaper, choosing the Ryans out of so many because of this quality they had of being more visible than others, presented them. Below the Poverty Line and Lower this was called. A book recording a dozen cases, the Ryans among them, was: Rejects of the Affluent Society. A young man just out of university whose aunt was a welfare worker on the case, had collected notes for a book, The Barbarians We Make, comparing the Ryans to those who pulled down Rome from its heights.

The Ryans…

How about the Ryan house, for a start? Well, it was filthy, and what furniture it had fit for a rubbish dump. Nothing on the bare floors but dirt, a bone, a plate of rancid cat's food: dogs and cats, like children, were fed impulsively. There was never much heat, so the thirteen Ryans and their friends — the Ryans attracted others and kept them in orbit — were always in one room, huddling. The parents were usually drunk and sometimes the children were, too. The friends were of all colours, and often remarkable, with lives out of the ordinary, and they all sat about, eating biscuits or chips and talking, talking; but sometimes the mother or an older girl cooked up some potatoes with a bit of meat, or opened some tins of something, and it became a festival. Chips and sweet drinks and tea with six or eight spoons of white sugar to each cup — such was the diet of the Ryans, so they were always listless, or on some unnatural peak of vitality while the sugar jigged in their arteries. They sat and talked and talked; the room was lively with that perpetually renewed chronicle, The Ryans Against the World. How the three middle children had been set on in the playground by a rival gang or family, but had won; or how the welfare woman had left a piece of paper saying that the fifth child, Mary, had to go to the clinic on Wednesday, and really must try to remember this time, for her rash ought to be attended to; how Paul had found a car unlocked and had taken — whatever was there, because it was there. Two of the girls had visited a chain store and had come back with twenty small plastic purses, two pounds of coffee, gardening shears, some spices from the Indian shelf, and six plastic cullenders. These articles would lie about unused, or might be bartered for other objects: the thieving was for the sake of the act, not of possession. The black girl Tessa, Ruth's friend, and Tessa's brother, and Ruth's other friend Irene and her sister had watched the television all the afternoon in one of the friendly television shops on the main street which did not chase away children who sidled in for an afternoon's free viewing — the Ryans' set was always broken. Stephen had met a dog on the street, and had gone to the canal and thrown sticks for the dog and the dog was ever so clever, it brought back three, no five, even six sticks at once… they talked, they talked; they drank and made their day, their lives, through vivid shrewd comment; and when they went to bed, it was three, four, six in the morning — but they did not undress, no one in that house undressed to go to bed, for it was never bedtime. A child would drop off where he sat, on his sister's lap, and stay there asleep, or be set down on the floor on a coat. By morning the four beds of the house each had three or four bodies in them, with the dogs and cats, all close together, warm, warming, protecting. No one got up till ten, eleven, mid-afternoon: if a Ryan found a job, he or she lost it in a week, because it was impossible to get up on time.

They lived on welfare, unless Mr Ryan aroused himself, became sober, and found a job: he was a carpenter. Then money flowed in, and they got clothes and shoes. These garments were worn communally, for no one owned this jersey or that dress. Children wore what fitted and what lay nearest. New clothes might easily be in rags the day after they arrived in the house, for some reason or another.

The children went on a 'job' when the mood took them — which was often. June, the thin sweet-faced little girl, was leader from the age of about seven. Four or five children would slide their way into a flat or a shop and emerge with — money? No, not so, that was not the point; or if it was money, then their pockets would be stacked for days with wads of notes which would fall out or be given away or 'lifted' by someone else. No, they were more likely to return with a marble table lamp, a stack of coffee tables which they had seen on a television advertisement and fancied the look of, a mirror with a pink plastic frame, and cigarettes — which last were valued and instantly shared out.

The point was, the goal of the saints and philosophers was theirs by birthright: The Way of the Ryans, it might be called. Each day, each experience, was sufficient unto itself, each act divorced from its consequences. 'If you steal that you will have to go to prison.' 'If you don't eat properly you will suffer from vitamin deficiencies.' 'If you spend that money now there won't be any to pay the rent on Friday.' These truths, always being presented to them by the officials in and out of the house, could never stay in a Ryan head.

And surely the priests and spiritual preceptors were abashed? To be attached to property is bad? What property? A Ryan had none, not even a shirt or a comb. To be the slave to habit is a chain? What habits — unless to have none is a habit of a kind. Regard they neighbour as thyself? — This grace of the very poor was theirs: within the clan which was the Ryans and their friends, white black and brown, who came and went day and night in and out of the house, was infinite giving and tolerance, was a generosity of judgement, a delicacy of understanding not given to many more fortunate people, or at least not without hard jostling with event and circumstance.

One ought not to care for appearances? — It was a long time since the Ryans had been able to afford this luxury.

One ought not to be puffed up, should not stand upon one's rights, should be humble and non-demanding? — Five minutes in the Ryan household would have any middleclass person indignantly on the telephone to his lawyer.

Feckless and irresponsible, hopeless, futureless, uneducated and ineducable — if they could read and write their names they did well; debased and depressed and depraved — but what could you expect when four or five people of any sex or age slept together in one bed? — dirty, unhealthy, louse — ridden and limp with bad feeding when they weren't on a momentary 'high'… in short and to be done with it, everything that our old society regarded as bad the Ryans were. Everything that our old society aimed at the Ryans did not even attempt, they had opted out, it was all too much for them.

The poor Ryans, doomed and damned; the dangerous Ryans, such a threat to us all, to our ways of thinking; the lucky Ryans, whose minute-by-hour life, communal and hugger — mugger, seemed all enjoyment and sensation: they liked being together. They liked each other.

When the bad times started, or rather, were seen to be starting, a very different thing, the Ryans and all the others like them were suddenly in a different light. First of all — but of course, this is a sociological cliche, some of the boys found places in the police or one of the many military or semi — military organisations that sprang up. And then, it was these people who took most easily to the hand-to-mouth life in the wandering tribes: nothing very much had changed for them, for when had they not been on the move, from room to broken — down house to council flat to hostel in a squatters' street? They ate badly? They were eating better and more healthily now than when civilisation had fed them. They were ignorant and illiterate? They were surviving capably and with enjoyment, which was more than could be said of so many of the middle — class people, who either lived on pretending nothing was really happening, only a reorganisation of society; or who faded away in a variety of ways, not able to bear an existence where respectability and gain could no longer measure the worth of a person.

'The Ryans', no longer an extreme, disappeared into society, were absorbed by it. As for our Ryans, the actual family described here, there was still a nucleus somewhere near, the mother and three of the smaller children: the father had died in an accident to do with drink. All the older children had left the city, except for two in the police. June had attached herself to Gerald's household, and one of her younger brothers was there part of the time. 'The Ryans' had turned out to be nothing special, after all. In their humble, non-demanding way they had been part of our society, even when they had seemed not to be: they had been formed by it, were obedient to it. They were as far from what was to come afterwards, and quite soon — when 'the gang of kids from the Underground' appeared in our lives and wrecked Gerald's household — as we were, or had been, from 'the Ryans'.

I use that phrase Gerald's house as people had once said the Ryans, meaning a way of life. Temporary ways of life, both: all of our ways of living, our compromises, our little adaptations — transitory, all of them, none could last.

But while they lasted, so much clung to and worked at, like Emily with her duties in Gerald's house. Which I now visited, for Emily and I had not been back down in our rooms for more than a few minutes when the doorbell went and it was June, all bright anxious smiles. At first she did not mention the robbery, but sat on the floor with her arms around Hugo. Her eyes were on the move around the room, to see where the things she had taken away and been forced to return, now were. Most were out of sight, back in cupboards and storeplaces, but there was a bundle of fur pieces on a chair, and at last she said, in a spurt of desperate restitution: 'That's all right, is it? I mean, it's all right?' — and even got up to pat the fur, as if it were an animal she might have hurt. I would have liked to laugh, or to smile, but Emily was frowning at me, very fierce indeed, and she said gently to June: 'Yes, everything is fine, thank you.' At which the child brightened up at once, and she said, turning her attention to me with difficulty: 'Will you visit us? I mean Gerald says it is all right. I asked him, you see? I said to him, can she come, do you see what I mean?'

'I'd like to very much,' I said, having consulted Emily with my eyes. She was smiling: it was the smile of a mother or a guardian.

But first Emily had to prepare herself: she emerged in due time from the bathroom, her hair newly-washed and combed down, her clothes neat, her breasts outlined in blue cotton, cheeks soft and fresh and smelling of soap — a tidy package of a girl, all ready to present herself to her responsibilities, to Gerald. But her eyes were sombre, defensive, worried, and there beside her was June the child, and her face was laid open and absolutely undefended in a trustful smile at Emily the woman — her friend.

We walked, the three of us, through streets dusty and as usual littered with paper, cans, every kind of debris. It would be necessary to pass a tall hotel built in tourism's last fling, and I was watching to see the route Emily would choose: every individual picked out a careful way between hazards in these streets, and one could tell a good deal about a person's nature by whether she chose to go past a dubious building, taking a chance she might be seen from it as prey or a target, or move into another street altogether; by whether she boldly called greetings into defended gardens or walked past quickly with an averted face. Emily went direct, walking carelessly through all the rubbish. Not for the first time I marvelled at the different standards for in and out of doors: inside her home, Emily was as pernickety as a little cat, but outside she seeme dnot to see what she walked through.

The hotel had been taken over by squatters long ago: another obsolete word. But all kinds of people lived there, although as a machine the place was useless, like all the complicated buildings which had depended on technicalities.

Looking up the tall shaft, today outlined against an over — hot and dusty sky, it showed ragged and patched, like lace: windows had been smashed or blown in. Yet the upper parts of it bristled everywhere with devices. Outside one window would be a whirr of light — someone had rigged up a little windmill for catching wind and turning it into power for hot water or lighting. Outside others were slanting discs held out on what looked from down in the street like spider webs: these were solar snares of various kinds. And among these up-to-the-minute contraptions danced and dangled coloured washing held out into the air on timeless string and wood.

Up there it looked gay and even frivolous, with the blue sky as backdrop; down here rubbish was banked up all around the building, with pathways cleared through it to the doors. The smell — but I'll ignore that, as Emily and June seemed able to do so easily.

Recently I had gone into the building, had gone up to the very top: there I stood, looking down over the city which — I suppose not surprisingly — did not look so very different than it did in the years before the machines stopped working. I had gazed down and fancied myself back in time: all of us did this a great deal, matching and comparing, balancing facts in our minds to make them fit, to orient ourselves against them. The present was so remarkable and dreamlike that to accommodate it meant this process had to be used: It was like that, was it? Yes, it was like that, but now… As I stood up there, thinking that there was one thing missing, an aeroplane, a jet rising up or descending to the airport and dominating the sky, I heard a soft droning, a bee's sound, no louder, and there it was — a plane. A little one, like a grasshopper, painted bright red, all alone in the empty sky where once so many great machines had filled our lives with noise. There it was, a survivor, holding perhaps the police or the army or high officials off to some conference somewhere to talk, talk, talk and pass resolutions about our situation, the sad plight of people everywhere in the world — it was pretty to look at, it lifted the spirits, to see that little thing glittering up there in emptiness, off to some place which no one looking up at it could get near these days except in imagination.

I had walked slowly down through the erstwhile hotel, exploring, examining. I had been reminded of a new township built for African labourers outside a large mine in Africa that I saw in the after all not-so-long-ago days when the continents were close together, were a day's journey away. The township covered acres, had been built all at one time, and was made of thousands of identical little 'houses', each consisting of a room and a small kitchen, a lavatory with a wash-basin. But in one house you would see the pattern of tribal village life brought to the town almost unchanged: a fire burned in the centre of the brick floor, a roll of blankets stood in a corner, and two saucepans and a mug in another. In the next 'house' a scene of Victorian respectability: a sideboard, dining table, a bed, all in hideous varnish, with a dozen crocheted articles for ornament, and a picture of Royalty on the wall opposite the entrance so that the Queen, in full military regalia and the observer could exchange glances of approval over this interior. In between these extremes was every variation and compromise: well, that was what this hotel had become, it was a set of vertical streets in which you could find everything, from a respectably clean family making jokes about conditions in England before the advent of proper sewage disposal and carrying chamber pots and pails down flight after flight of stairs to the one lavatory that still worked, to people living, eating, sleeping on the floor, who burned fuel on a sheet of asbestos and pissed out of the window — a faint spray descending from the heavens these days need not mean imminent rain or condensing steam.

From the possibility of which event I wanted to hurry on and away, instead of standing there, among rubbish, gazing up; particularly as I could see through the windows of the ground floor a couple of young men with guns: they guarded the building, or part of it, or just their own room, or rooms — who knew? But June, seeing them, exclaimed and called out and looked pleased — in the way she had of being pleased, as if every little event offered her undeserved riches of pleasure. With an apology to Emily for keeping her waiting (my presence she had the greatest difficulty in remembering at all), in she went, while we two, Emily and I, stood there in a cloud of flies, watching a scene through a window of June being embraced and embracing — one of the two young men had visited in the Ryan house, which meant he had been almost part of the family. Now he gave her a dozen pigeons: the guns were airguns; the pigeons would come back — they had flown off as we arrived — and settle again over the rubbish where they had been feeding. We left, carrying the dead birds which would do for the household's next meal, hearing the silken whirring of many wings, and the pop, pop, pop of the airguns.

We crossed some old railway lines, flourishing now with plants, some of which Emily pulled up, as she passed, for medicine and flavourings. Soon we were at the side of the house. Yes, I had walked past it, out of curiosity, in my walks, but had never wanted to go in, fearing as always to encroach on Emily. Again June waved at a youth standing behind ground floor shutters that were half-open because of the heat, and again some weapon or other was put aside. We entered into a room which was very bare and clean — this struck me first of all, for I had not shed old associations with 'the Ryans'. No furniture at all, but there were curtains, and the shutters were scrubbed and whole, and mats and mattresses were rolled and stood along the walls. I was being taken from room to room on a rapid tour, while I looked for the communal rooms — dining-room, sitting-room, and so on. There was a long room for eating, with trestles and benches, everything scrubbed bare; but otherwise each room was self-sufficient as a workroom or as a home. We opened door after door on groups of children sitting on mattresses which were also beds; they were talking, or engaged on some task, and on the walls were hanging clothes and belongings. It could be seen that natural affinities and alliances had made, were making, of this community a series of smaller groups.

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.'