The Memoirs of a Survivor

  At once that household broke up. Gerald would not listen to reason, to the appeals of the existing inhabitants. There was something about the situation of those children which Gerald could not tolerate; he had to have them in there, he had to try, and now he would not throw them out. By then it was too late. The others left. It took a few hours for Gerald and Emily to find their ‘family’ all gone, while they were house-parents of children who were savages. Gerald had apparently actually believed that they could be taught rules which had been made for everyone’s sake. Rules? They could hardly understand what was said: they had no idea of a house as a machine. They wrecked everything, tore up the vegetables in the garden, sat at windows throwing filth at passers-by like monkeys. They were drunk; they had taught themselves drunkenness.

  From my window I saw that Emily had her arm in bandages, and went over to ask what was wrong.

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ said she, with her dry little humour, and then told how she and Gerald, descending that morning to the lower regions of the house, had found the children squatting and scratching all together, like monkeys in a too-small cage. There were bits of half-cooked meat about. They had been roasting rats: near the house was an entrance to some sewers. Nothing under the earth could be alien to these children, and they had crept down there with their catapults and bows and arrows.

  Upstairs, Emily and Gerald had had a talk about tactics. Their situation was bleak. They had not been able to find any of their own children - not one. These had all left for other communes or households, or had decided that this was the moment to join a caravan going out of the city for good. The two were completely alone with these new children. They at last decided that a sharp, businesslike descent into the lower part of the house, and a reasonable but stern talk must be attempted. What they envisaged was, in fact, the immemorial ‘sensible’ talk of adults appealing to children’s better sense before retribution had to fall. The trouble was, no retribution was possible, everything had already happened to these outcasts. Emily and Gerald realized they had nothing to threaten them with, and nothing to offer but the old arguments that life is more comfortable for a community if the members keep the place clean, share work, respect each other’s individuality. And the children had survived without such thoughts ever having come near them.

  But, not being able to think of anything else, the two young parents did go down, and one of the brats had suddenly run at Emily and hit her with a cudgel. Had hit her again and shouted - in a moment another little child had jumped in to attack. Gerald, going to rescue Emily, had found himself, too, being hit, bitten, scratched, and by a dozen or so of them. It had taken all their strength to fight off these children, not one of whom was over ten, and yet the inhibition against hitting or hurting a child was so strong that it ‘paralysed our arms’, as Emily explained. ‘How can you hit a child?’ Gerald had demanded, even though Emily’s arm was badly bruised. Standing there, embattled, blood all over the place, the two young people had fended off children, and, screaming above their screams, had tried to reason and persuade. The response to these exhortations was that the children had got themselves into a tight knot in a corner of the room, facing out, teeth bared, holding their cudgels ready to repel an attack, as if the words had been missiles. At last Emily and Gerald removed themselves, had another discussion, decided more must be attempted, but did not know what. That night, lying in their bed at the top of the house, they smelled smoke: the children had set fire to the ground floor, just as if the house were not their shelter. The fire was put out, and again the little savages cowered behind their weapons while Gerald, beside himself with emotion - for he simply could not endure that these children were not to be saved (for what, of course, was a question not one of us would ask) -Gerald pleaded and reasoned and persuaded. A stone from a catapult just missed his eye, and cut open his cheekbone.

  What was to be done?

  The children could not be thrown out. Who was to throw them out? No, with his own hands, Gerald had opened the gates to the invaders, who would now stay. Why not! They had piles of bedding, clothing, a fireplace to burn fuel in -they had never been warm before. Yes, almost certainly the house would soon burn down. It had been tidy and clean; now there was food everywhere, on floor, walls, ceilings. It stank of shit: the children used landings, even the rooms they slept in. They did not even have the cleanliness of animals, their instincts for responsibility. In every way they were worse than animals, and worse than men.

  They menaced everyone in the neighbourhood, and there was to be a big meeting about it tomorrow on the pavement. People were coming from the flats and from the houses round about. I was invited. That the barriers were completely down between the citizens and the life on the pavement showed how serious a threat were these children.

  Next afternoon I went out, careful to leave Hugo in my bedroom, the door locked, the curtains drawn.

  It was an autumn afternoon, the sun low and cold. Leaves were flying everywhere. We stood in a great mass, five hundred or more, and people kept coming in to join us. On a little improvised platform of bricks were the half a dozen leaders. Emily was up there with Gerald.

  Before the talking began, the children who were to be discussed arrived and stood a little apart, listening. There were now about forty of them. I remember that we were all encouraged they were with us, had come at all - community feeling of a kind, perhaps? At least they had understood there was to be a meeting that concerned them; they had taken in words, and understood them in the same way we did … then they began stamping around and chanting: Iam the king of the castle, you are a dirty rascal. It was terrifying. This ancient children’s song was a war-song, they had made it one, they were living it. But more than that, we could all see how familiar words could slip out of key - how quickly things could change, we could change ... Had changed: those children were ourselves. We knew it. We stood there, sullen and uncomfortable, listening. It was in accompaniment to this shrill, jeering chant that Gerald began to describe the situation. Meanwhile there was apprehension, a restlessness in the crowd, which was due to more than the presence of the children, or our knowledge of ourselves. For this was like a ‘mass meeting’ of the ordinary world, and we had every reason to fear such meetings. Above all what we feared more than anything was the attention of Authority - that ‘they’ should be alerted. Gerald, reasonable as he always was, explained how essential it was, for the sake of us all, to rescue the children, and we, standing shoulder to shoulder, again listening to a person talking down at us from a platform, were thinking that this was one street in one of many suburbs, that our comfortable habit of seeing only ourselves, our pavements and their energetic life, was a way of being able to cope with the fear. A useful way: we were not important, and the city was large. We were able to continue our precarious little lives because of our good sense, which enabled Them to take no notice of us. What they chose to overlook was all the time more; but they still would not stand for the burning down of a house or a street, or for a gang of children who were under no one’s control terrorizing everyone. They had their spies among us. They knew what went on.

  Perhaps, in describing as I have done only what went on among ourselves, in our neighhourhood, I have not been able to give a clear enough picture of how our by now very remarkable society worked … for after all, it was working. All this time, while ordinary life simply dissolved away, or found new shapes, the structure of government continued, though heavy and cumbersome and becoming all the time more ramified. Nearly everyone who had a job at all was in administration - yes, of course we ordinary people joked that the machinery of government was maintained so that privileged folk could have jobs and salaries. And there was some truth in it. What government really did was to adjust itself to events, while pretending, probably even to itself, that it initiated them. And the law courts worked on, plenty of them; the processes of law were infinitely tricky and prolonged, or sudden and Draconian, as if the impatience of the practitioners of law with their own p
rocesses and precedents got itself impressed by the way law could suddenly be dispensed with altogether, be overridden and rewritten -and then what had been substituted went grinding along as heavily as before. The prisons were as full as ever, though expedients were always being found to empty them: so many crimes were being committed, and there seemed to be new and unforeseen categories of crime every day. Reforms schools. Borstals, welfare homes, old-age homes -all these proliferated, and they were savage and dreadful places.

  Everything worked. Worked somehow. Worked on an edge, on one side of which was what authority tolerated, on the other, what it could not: this meeting was well over the edge. And very soon the police would arrive in a fleet of cars and drag off these children and put them behind bars in a ‘home’ where they wouldn’t survive a week. Nobody, knowing their history, could feel anything but compassion for them; not one of us wished for them an end in a ‘home’ - but neither did we want, we could not tolerate, a visit of the police which would bring to official notice a hundred living arrangements that were not legal Houses being lived in by people who didn’t own them, gardens growing food for people who had no right to eat it, the ground floors of deserted houses accommodating horses and donkeys which were transport for the innumerable little businesses that illegally flourished, the little businesses themselves where all the riches of our old technology were being so ingeniously adapted and transformed, minuscule turkey farms, chicken runs, rabbit sheds - all this new life, like growth pushing up under old trees, was illegal. None of it should exist. None of it, officially, existed; and when ‘they’ were forced into seeing these things, they sent in troops or the police to sweep it all away. Such a visit would be referred to in a headline, a broadsheet, a newscast as ‘Such and such a street was cleaned out today.’ And everyone knew exactly what had happened and thanked fortune it was someone else’s street.

  Such a ‘clean-out’ was what everybody feared more than anything, and yet we were tempting ‘them’ by gathering together. Gerald talked on, in an emotional, desperate way, as if the act of talking itself could produce some solution. He said at one point that the only way to cope with the ‘kids’ was to separate them and put them into households in ones and twos. I remember the jeering that went up from the children, and their white, angry faces. They stopped their pathetic war-dance and stood huddled, facing outwards, weapons at the ready.

  A young man appeared over the heads of the crowd: he had his arm around the trunk of a tree and was holding himself there. ‘What are we doing this for?’ he shouted. ‘If they came now that would be the end of us, never mind about those kids. And if you want to know what I think, we should inform the police and be done with it. We can’t cope with it. Gerald has tried - haven’t you, Gerald?’

  And he disappeared, sliding down the trunk.

  Emily now spoke. It looked as if someone had asked her to. She stood on the pile of bricks, serious, worried, and said: “What can you expect? These kids defend themselves. That’s what they have learned. Perhaps we should persevere with them? I’ll volunteer if others will.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ came from everywhere in the crowd. Someone shouted out: ‘You’ve got a broken arm from them by the look of it.’

  ‘Rumour broke the arm, not the kids,’ said Emily smiling, and a few people laughed.

  And there we stood. It is not often a crowd so large can remain silent, in indecision. To call the police would be a real descent away from what we could tolerate in ourselves, and we could not bring ourselves to do it.

  A man shouted: ‘I’ll call the police myself, and you can have it out with me afterwards. We’ve got to do it, or the whole neighbourhood will go up in flames one of these nights.’

  And now the children themselves began edging away, still in their tight little band, clutching their sticks, their stones, their catapults.

  Someone shouted: They’re off.’ They were. The crowd jostled and swayed, trying to see how the children ran across the road and disappeared into the dusk.

  ‘Shame,’ called a woman from the crowd. “They’re scared, poor little mites.’

  At that moment there was a shout: ‘The police!’ - and everyone was running. From the windows of my flat, Gerald, Emily and I and some others watched the great cars come roaring up, their lights flashing, their sirens shrieking. There was no one on the pavement. The cars drove by in a pack, around a block, and then back and around again. The shrieking, whining, clanging posse of monsters drove around and about our silent streets for half an hour or so, ‘showing their teeth’, as we said, and then they went away.

  What ‘they’ could not tolerate, could not tolerate even now, was the semblance of a public meeting, which might threaten them. Extraordinary and pathetic, for the last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government: we wanted only to forget it.

  When the streets were quiet, Emily and Gerald went off to the other house, to see if the children had gone back there. But they had been and gone, taking with them all their little belongings - sticks and stones and weapons, bits of roast rat, uncooked potatoes.

  The two had the house to themselves. There was nothing to prevent a new community being made there. The old one might be restored? No, of course it could not: something organic, which had grown naturally, had been destroyed.

  It was cold. There was very little fuel. In the long dark afternoons and evenings I sat with a single candle glimmering in my room. Or I would put it out, and let the fire light the room.

  Sitting there one day, staring at the fire-nicker, I was through it and beyond - into the most incongruous scene you could imagine. How can I say’ill-rimed’of a world where time did not exist? All the same, even there, where one took what came, did not criticize the order of things, I was thinking: What a strange scene to show itself now!

  I was with Hugo. Hugo was not just my accompaniment, an aide, as a dog is. He was a being, a person, in his own right, and necessary to the events I was seeing.

  It was a girl’s room, a schoolgirl’s. Rather small, with conventional flowered curtains, a white spread for the bed, a desk with school books laid tidily, a school timetable pinned on a white cupboard. In the room, in front of a mirror that ordinarily was not part of the room at all (it had a little looking-glass tacked to the wall above a washbasin), a long, capacious mirror all scrolled and gilded and curlicued and fluted, the sort of mirror one associated with a film set or a smart dress shop or the theatre - in front of this mirror, here only because the atmosphere and emotional necessities of the scene needed more than the sober small square looking-glass, was a young woman. Was Emily, a girl presented or parcelled up as a young woman.

  Hugo and I stood side by side, looking at her. My hand was on the beast’s neck, and I could feel the tremors of his disquiet coming up into my hand from his misgiving heart. Emily was fourteen or so, but ‘well grown’ as once they had been used to put it. She was in evening dress. The dress was scarlet. It is hard to describe what my feelings were on seeing it, seeing her. They were certainly violent. I was shocked by the dress, or rather, that such dresses had ever been tolerated, ever been worn by any woman, because of what they made of the woman. But they had been taken for granted, had been seen as just another fashion, no worse or better than any.

  The dress was tight around waist and bust: the word ‘bust’ is accurate, those weren’t breasts, that breathed and lifted or drooped and could change with emotion, or the month’s changes: they made a single, inflated, bulging mound. Shoulders and back were naked. The dress was tight to the knees over hips and bottom - again the accurate word, for Emily’s buttocks were rounded out into a single protuberance. Below, it twirled and flared around her ankles. It was a dress of blatant vulgarity. It was also, in a perverted way, non-sexual, for all its advertisement of the body, and embodied the fantasies of a certain kind of man who, dressing a woman thus, made her a doll, ridiculous, both provocative and helpless; disarmed her, made her something to hate, to pity, to fear - a gr
otesque. In this monstrosity of a dress, which was a conventional garment worn by hundreds of thousands of women within my lifetime, coveted by women, admired by women in innumerable mirrors, used by women to clothe their masochistic fantasies - inside this scarlet horror stood Emily, turning her head this way and that before the glass. Her hair was ‘up’, leaving her nape bare. She had scarlet nails. In Emily’s lifetime the fashion had never been thus - there had been no fashion at all, at least, for ordinary people, but here she was, a few paces from us, and sensing us there, her faithful animal and her anxious guardian, she turned her head, slow, slow, and looked at us with long lowered lashes, her lips held apart for fantasy kisses. Into the room came the large, tall woman, Emily’s mother, and her appearance at once diminished Emily, made her smaller, so that she began to dwindle from the moment the mother stood there. Emily faced her and, as she shrank in size, acted out her provocative sex, writhing and letting her tongue protrude from her mouth. The mother gazed, horrified, full of dislike, while her daughter got smaller and smaller, was a tiny scarlet doll, with its pouting bosom, its bottom outlined from waist to knees. The little doll twisted and postured, and then vanished in a flash of red smoke, like a morality tale of the flesh and the devil.