Well, what distinguishes them from the others? There’s nothing you can measure or count, but we all feel it, and particularly the other children. For one thing, they are grown up-no, not physically of course, but mentally, emotionally. One talks to them as if they were adult-no, not that; one talks to them as if they are superior to us … which they are. They all carry with them a gentle strong authority. They don’t have to be shielded from the knowledge of what the human race is in this century-they know it. I don’t know how they know it. It is as if-can I put it like this? -they are beings who include that history in themselves and who have transcended it. They include us in a comprehension we can’t begin to imagine. These seven children are our-but we have no word for it. The nearest to it is that they are our guardians. They guard us.
I think of these people, babies in appearance, out in the world and-I can’t bear it. They tell us not to be afraid. They say that in three years’ time Britain will be opened again, will begin to revive. The islands around the coast will be searched. We, this community, will be taken off and to America. From there we will disperse. The seven will not stay in one place, but will be scattered over the world. I will be dead by then. We are vague about the exact date, but it is the summer of 1997 now. Next winter will be severe and will take me off. Therefore I am writing down what I can remember and what I think is important. Joseph, the black child, will come to your settlement near Nairobi, and you will look after him. So he says. He says more like them are being born now in hidden places in the world, and one day all the human race will be like them. People like you and me are a sort of experimental model and Nature has had enough of us.
Well, my dear Francis-after all these years, I am able to send you this marvellous child … He will tell you everything much better than I can.
If you are in contact with Amanda will you please send her my … (etc.).
VIII
From M’tuba Selinge. Head of the 3rd Reconstitution and Rehabilitation Centre Nairobi to his Deputy Head, Francis Coldridge.
Dear Francis,
Among a new batch of fifty reconstituées just arrived from Little England (Los Angeles) are five survivors from an island off Scotland. (Incredible!) Also some discovered in caves in the Lake District when the Squads went in last year. These latter are not rehabilitable. I have put them in Closed Camp 7. Among the five is an eight year old who calls himself Joseph. Surname, Batts. Father black, mother white. He has been classed 3/4 Negroid (on appearance). His parents are in Little England (LA) undergoing First Degree Testing. He has asked to be directed to you. It seems on the island was a woman, Martha Hesse (now dead), who was a relation of yours. She befriended this child. The parents have consented to Release from Family. Anyway, it is unlikely they will be released from First Degree Testing for at least four years. There seems to have been some sort of administrative balls-up at base again. This child was given permission to leave clearing base within three months of his arrival! God only knows what they think they are doing. Dr Kalinde has examined him.
He classes him as subnormal to the 7th, and unfit for academic education. But fit for 3rd grade work. Perhaps you could find work on the vegetable farm?
Yours, M’tuba.
How about chess tomorrow night, 9 o’clock … we’ve been sent a case of Bristol sherry from Brazil!
IX
Notes found in Mark Coldridge’s papers after his death.
What sort of irresponsibility is it that takes people whose job is quite something else into administration? Last week 1 found among a shipload of rubbish from Tel Aviv dumped on the quays of Alexandria an old copy of my first book written when I was a boy in my early twenties. In it was everything I needed to have foretold all that has happened since I lost my senses-and became an administrator. This outburst is because yesterday I totalled the amounts that have passed through our hands in thirty years: £1, 900, 000, 000. Nineteen hundred million pounds. Of course such sums are meaningless. This was true before the World Crisis. All the same I cannot help dreaming of that perfect city, a small exquisite city with gardens and fountains that one might build somewhere with that money. This although cities have become like people, refuse to be shovelled into the nearest incinerator.
I sit in a valley fitted with tents and army huts already refilled since the epidemic of Asian ‘flu that emptied it three months ago.
Suppose I and Willie Perkins had refused all this international money that took us prisoner almost from the beginning … but we did plan to make in the world refuges for those people who would be homeless because of easily foreseeable disasters. It’s what I’ve done. It could only have been a question of scale. But somewhere in my mind must have been a premonition of the coming death of England, and a need to save and protect-all folly, and hubris. Stupidity. Right at the end I was still thinking, all right, we’ll whisk them off, we’ll keep them safe, we’ll warm them and feed them, and afterwards we’ll … take them back and put them gently down again on their own soil! Loving a country is like loving a person, it’s all moonshine and anguish. What is it one loves? If you say: It’s history, that means the gallantry and endurance of some men and women. Or, the look and the smell of it … but the world is full of exiles who revive for themselves the taste of their own air or the feel of their own sunlight from wind or sun in countries that are alien. Or you can say: My forebears walked on that soil, and try and make it a truth for your own feet: but that soil and what they saw went long ago. Yet the word England, England, makes me ache, makes me stretch out my arms. They’ll read Shakespeare and have poetry recitals. They’ll try to recreate Harold Butts’s garden. All those sweet fields and good people gone, and I keep thinking, how can they have been saved, how; meanwhile that murder is twenty years old and I sit here in a valley of tents in a hot dusty moonlight with thirty thousand people to see fed and clothed and most of them are under thirty years old. I’m eighty years old, and I should let it go now, I should be able to let it all go. I can’t. I ache and I rage and I anguish. Nothing has been done right, and I don’t know who I can tell it to. Lynda is dead, Martha is dead, and my son had not forgiven me for not forgiving him when he would not give up what I thought was an eccentric bit of amateurishness with his compost-loving health-farm friends. When I flew to see him last year in Nairobi he was polite. Oh yes, he was very kind. We do the same kind of work, he and I; I among tents full of the survivors from the cataclysms of the Middle East, he among mud huts populated with survivors from Britain.
He says: ‘I have hope for the future of the world.’
I said: ‘Please convince me.” I know my manner was wrong. I could hear my own voice, dry and critical.
We played chess all night and drank cognac. ‘Cleared by the Commission for Pure Foodstuffs.’ Farce. All food, all products, all humanity is passed, is cleared, is classified and subclassified into grades of purity-while the world’s air and the world’s soil is rampant with poison and quite soon there won’t be norms any more for plants or people or even for the cats and dogs in our houses. We live among sports and freaks and the living dead, governed by bureaucrats stratified on a world scale into 119 divisions. I am one of them. Mark Coldridge, Administrator, Class 13.
As administrator I eat First Category Food and drink ‘cognac’ from vineyards whose vines have all been replanted in the last five years. There are fashions again. World Centre-Brazil. Well, they always did have a flair … farce, farce, farce. My son has hope for the future of the world. He says there is hope in the world, a good thing happening, a new start. He sounds like an old socialist tract. He says that soon England will be replanted and there will be the start of a new history.
He flew over the British Isles on one of the early reconnaissance flights. He lies when he tells me what he saw. Just as I lie when people ask, what did you see when you flew over the devastated areas of the Middle East. All those old cities, the olive trees, the vines, the fields, all gone, fusing the civilizations under them into seas of glass, so that looki
ng down under a violent angry sun it was as if one looked at an icy sea where a world had been drowned and frozen.
We said Nineveh and Tyre, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and Rome, Carthage, Balkh and Cordoba-but that never meant anything. A desert which was a graveyard becomes a place where cities are not built. That is all. We live on the edge, or in the fertile seams of the Sahara and the Gobi and the Arabian deserts that once held gardens and cities and orchards. We say, there were once civilizations here.
Soon new people (with two heads and fifty fingers-I can’t help it, I’ve been in the clinic all afternoon among the monstrous children) will live on the edge of the new desert and start boring through a crust of glass to pilfer new objects to fill the world’s new museums. I’ve heard that people are creeping back to live in the great dead buildings along where the Thames ran once. They say it is silted up from its source to the sea with weed like a giant seaweed.
And what next? Oh, how full the world is now of brotherly love and concern! How we all sacrifice ourselves for the poor children! If one hundredth of all this love and money had been spent before to teach something as simple as that if you light a fuse a bomb will go off, then…
For two decades the world has had no wars, no prisoners, no armies. Only the armies of the rescue workers.
We have no enemy. The human race is united at last. We used to joke a long time ago that we would not stop fighting till someone invented an enemy on one of the planets-oh, what a joke that has turned out to be. One that will keep us all busily looking into each other’s faces for marks of difference-1 suppose it is a step forward.
We are all brothers now, except for those who might turn out not to be.
But suppose we had noticed before the disasters that we had no enemy? Even then our armies were mercenary armies-no government could conscript for the last of our ‘small’ wars. Called differently (everything went under false names), mercenary armies fought over issues whose names changed every month. The mercenaries were the death-loving of the world who knew they loved death before humanity’s acts proved we all did. They were officered by men whose occupation had gone-men from Britain’s public schools, from America’s officers’ schools, from Russia’s military schools. A nastier race of savages has never been seen anywhere, but we put up with them because the rest of us were left in peace from the absurd game of playing enemies. The enemy was Russia. Then, when it was discovered that America and Russia were allied (had been secretly allied long before the world knew it), the Enemy became China. China had split into warring provinces long before, but we had to have an enemy, so the war against communism (or against capitalism) was fought with all of mankind’s wealth, and with psychopaths and sadists and those who wanted to die before they had to. And the rest of us crept about minding our own business; and I and some other fools played God saving handfuls of the homeless and starving while we allowed our governments to make certain the death of whole nations.
Last night I dreamed of Lynda. My son dreams of her, he says. He says she isn’t dead. I’m not going to ask what he means. I can’t stand that nasty mixture of irony and St John of the Cross and the Arabian Nights that they all (Lynda Martha, Francis) went in for. He says Martha is alive. He says he ‘feels’ she is. I’m not going to ask why or how or where. If they find the thought of forgiving ghosts a help, then why not. I can’t talk to him.
Who can I talk to, who can share what I feel?
My young wife? But of course she is not, that is an old man’s vanity. She is a woman of sixty who spends her time tending children who have lost their parents, her own children being dead. Mine, of course, but never mine as-is it very terrible to feel like that? I suppose one ought to be able to help what one feels. I’ll burn this, throw it away. What I’ve felt has always been absurd. Lynda, and then Lynda, and then Lynda. Lynda and England. And now it is still Lynda and England and Francis, but he says his mother talks to him and that he believes in the glorious future of humanity.
Rita’s children died of bubonic plague in the same week that Lynda did. In the camp outside Addis Ababa they came to tell me that the plague was there agí tin. We had thought it was over. I went down to see the first victims. That being my third ordeal by plague I had become hard. As I walked back through the lines of tents where everyone was silently waiting-praying no doubt, Lynda started up from behind a lorry. This time he was a Yemeni Arab, twenty years old, with her face, her wide blue eyes, her smile.
I gave him some money to fetch me something from the village.
The holocausts of the flesh in our lifetime have made it hard to believe that there can be any conversation between the shape of a face and the spirit. To walk through that camp piled in twenty places with the plague victims-can anyone believe after that that any God would care to inhabit such self-mutilated flesh?
The boy came back with some cigarettes and my change. I joked so that I could see Lynda’s smile. He went outside and sat in the moonlight by a wall. The shadow he threw was purple on pale sand. Next morning he was not there. I had not asked his name. With twenty thousand in the camp I did not try to find out. Next week, I walked past a pit ready for the day’s intake of plague victims and saw him stacked with the others. My children were there too.
Thirty years of living with Rita, whom I was never sorry I married, all that could not mean to me what that boy’s smile meant that night when he squatted down by the mud wall-because of Lynda, who is dead. And so I used to torment myself that Martha, who brought up the children and kept my house and was reliable and good, did not mean to me what it meant when Lynda was well and came upstairs to sit with us a little before going down again to that awful sick hole under our feet.
All this is crazy, I know that.
I don’t see any point in writing any more-what point has there ever been? To whom? What for?
I write every night when the camp is quiet and Rita has gone to bed, but I don’t know why or who to. Lynda, I suppose, or Martha.
X
OFFICIAL, attached to private enclosures. From Tsien Pu (Amanda’s husband) to Francis Coldridge, Nairobi.
We have extended your visa to include your employee, Joseph Batts. You will appreciate that as he originates from Contaminated Area Β he will have to be confined in quarantine for the regulation month before being permitted to enter. It will be in order for him to inspect parks and gardens with the limits of seven miles from the city. No aliens are allowed outside that limit. It will be in order for him to attend courses on gardening. I take it that your statement that he is ten years old is a misprint?
Yours, etc.
Author’s Notes
This is the fifth and last volume of the series Children of Violence. The first was Martha Quest, 1952; the second, A Proper Marriage, 1954; the third, A Ripple from the Storm, 1958; the fourth, Landlocked, 1965.
*
When I started writing this series Zambia was Northern Rhodesia and Rhodesia was Southern Rhodesia. (I lived for twenty-five years in Rhodesia before being made a prohibited immigrant.) I used the name Zambesia for the white-dominated colony described in these volumes because I did not want it to be thought that what I described was peculiar to Southern Rhodesia. My Zambesia is a composite of various white-dominated parts of Africa and. as I’ve since discovered, some of the characteristics of its white people are those of any ruling minority whatever their colour. But ‘Zambesia’ is not meant to be Zambia, which was born in 1964.
*
This book is what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. This kind of novel has been out of fashion for some time: which does not mean that there is anything wrong with this kind of novel.
*
Finally, I’d like to thank Miss Juliet O’Hea of Curtis Brown who has been my agent for nearly twenty years. When publishing firms are bought and sold like pounds of sugar, and are tiny parts of great empires, agents can make up for it. Juliet O’Hea stands by her authors when she dislikes their politics, is sad about their lack of religion, and considers t
hat they would be more usefully occupied in writing something else than novel-series which drag on for a couple of decades. She backs us when we aren’t writing profitably, and are not behaving profitably either … in short, she’s a gem of an agent: Juliet, my grateful thanks.
DORIS LESSING
ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet s-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for
Planet Eight
Documents Relating to the Sentimental
Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
This Mas the Old Chiefs Country
The Habit of Loving