The Memoirs of a Survivor

I found myself making excuses to sit there, to hear what she would come out with. But I was reluctant too, watching the knife being slipped in so neatly, so precisely, and again and again.

Of Janet White, a girl of about her age: ‘She’ll spend her life looking for someone like Daddy, but where will she find him. I mean now, he won’t exist.’ She meant, of course, the general break-up of things, times which were not conducive to the production of professors with very clean white shirts and a secret passion for the unrespectable – since respectability itself was sentenced to death, and with it the distinctions his secret needs must feed on. The professor she called The White Rabbit. His daughter she called Daddy’s Girl, making the point that in doing so she was of course describing herself: ‘What else, after all?’ When I suggested that she might enjoy making a friend of Janet, she said: ‘What, me and her?’

There she sat, most of the day, lolling in a large chair that she pulled up for the purpose: a child, presenting herself as one. One could almost see the white socks on her plump well-turned legs, the bow in her hair. But what one really did see was different. She wore jeans and a shirt she had ironed that morning whose top two buttons were undone. Her hair was now parted in the middle, and at a stroke she was turned into a young beauty: yes, already, there she was.

And, as if in acknowledgement of this step forward into vulnerability, now her worst, or best, comments were for the boys who went past: this one’s way of walking which she knew represented an uncertainty about himself; that one’s flashy way of dressing: the other one’s bad skin, or unkempt hair. These unattractive grubs represented a force, an imperative which there was no way of evading, and like a girl on a too high swing she was shrieking in thrilled terror.

She was dreadful in her accuracy. She depressed me – oh, for many reasons; my own past being one of them. Yet she did not suspect this, she really did believe – so the bright manner, her confident glances at me said – that she was, as usual, ‘paying her way’; and this time by her perspicacity. She simply could not let anyone pass without swallowing them, and regurgitating them covered in her slime: the clever child, the one who could not be deceived, who could not have anything put over on her: who had been applauded for being like this, had been taught it.

And yet I came into the room once and saw her talking through the window with Janet White: she was earnest, warm, apparently sincere. If she did not like Janet White, she intended Janet White to like her. Infinite promises were made by both girls on the lines of joint forays into the markets, visits, a walk. And when Janet went off, smiling because of the warmth she had absorbed from Emily, Emily said: ‘She’s heard her parents talking about me, and now she’ll report back.’ True enough, of course.

The point was that there wasn’t anybody who came near her, into her line of sight, who was not experienced by her as a threat. This was how her experience, whatever that had been, had ‘set’ her. I found I was trying to put myself in her place, tried to be her, to understand how it was that people must pass and repass sharply outlined by her need to criticise – to defend; and found I was thinking that this was only what everyone did, what I did, but there was something in her which enlarged the tendency, had set it forth, exaggerated. For of course, when someone new approaches us, we are all caution; we take that person’s measure; a thousand incredibly rapid measurements and assessments go on, putting him, her, in an exact place, to end in the silent judgement: yes, this one’s for me; no, we have nothing in common; no, he, she, is a threat … watch out! Danger! And so on. But it was not until Emily heightened it all for me that I realised what a prison we were all in, how impossible it was for any one of us to let a man or a woman or a child come near without the defensive inspection, the rapid, sharp, cold analysis. But the reaction was so fast, such a habit – probably the first ever taught us by our parents – that we did not realise how much we were in its grip.

‘Look how she walks,’ Emily would say, ‘look at that fat old woman.’ (The woman, of course, was about forty-five or fifty; she might even be thirty!) ‘When she was young, people said she had a sexy walk – “Oh what a sexy little wriggle you have there, ooh you sexy thing you!” ’ And her parody was horrible because of its accuracy: the woman, the wife of a former stockbroker who had become a junk-dealer, and who lived on the floor above, was given to a hundred little winsome tricks of mouth and eyes and hips. This is what Emily saw of her: it was what everybody must see first of her; and on these tricks she was likely to be judged, by most people. It was impossible not to hear Emily without feeling one’s whole being, one’s sense of oneself, lowered, drained. It was an assault on one’s vitality: listening to her was to acknowledge the limits we all live inside.

I suggested she might like to go to school – ‘for something to do’, I added hastily, as I saw her quizzical look. This look was not measured: it was her genuine reaction. So I was catching a glimpse of what I had needed for some time: to know what she thought of me, made of me – it was tolerance.

She said, ‘But what’s the point?’

What was the point? Most schools had given up the attempt of teaching; they had become, for the poorer people at least, extensions of the army, of the apparatus for keeping the population under control. There were still schools for the children of the privileged class, the administrators and overseers. Janet White went to one of them. But I thought too much of Emily to offer to send her to one, even if I was able to get a place for her. It was not that the education there was bad. It was irrelevant. It merited – a quizzical look.

‘Not much point, I agree. And I suppose we won’t be here long, anyway.’

‘Where do you think you’ll go then?’

This broke my heart: her forlorn isolation had never shown itself so sharply; she had spoken tentatively, even delicately, as if she had no right to ask, as if she had no right to my care, my protection – no share in my future.

Because of my emotion, I was more definite about my plans than I felt. I had, in fact, often wondered if a certain family I had known in north Wales would shelter me. They were good farming folk – yes, that is exactly the measure of my fantasies about them. ‘Good farming folk’ was how safety, refuge, peace, – utopia – shaped itself in very many people’s minds in those days. But I did know Mary and George Dolgelly, had been familiar with their farm, had visited their guesthouse, open through the summers. If I made my way there, I might perhaps live there for a while? I was handy, liked to live simply, was as much at home out of cities as in them.. of course, these qualifications belonged these days to large numbers of people, particularly the young, who could increasingly turn their hands to any job that needed doing. I did not imagine the Dolgellys would find me a prize. But at least they would not, I believed, find me a burden. And a child? Or rather a young girl? An attractive, challenging girl? Well, they had children of their own … you can see that my thoughts had been pretty conventional, not very inventive. I talked to Emily, on these lines, while she listened, her sour little smile slowly giving way to amusement. But amusement concealed from politeness: I could not yet bring myself to believe that it was affection. She knew this fantasy for what it was; yet she enjoyed it, as I did. She asked me to describe the farm: I had once spent a week there, camping on a moor, with silvery water in little channels on a purple hillside. I took a can to Mary and George every morning for new milk, buying at the same time a loaf of their homemade bread. An idyll. I developed it, let it gather detail. We would take rooms in the guesthouse, and Emily would ‘help with the chickens’ – a storybook touch, that. We would eat at the guesthouse table, a long wooden table. There was an old-fashioned stove in a recess. Stews and soups would simmer there, real food, and we would eat as much as we liked … no, that was not realistic, but as much as we needed, of real bread, real cheese, fresh vegetables, perhaps even, sometimes, a little good meat. There would be the smell of herbs from the bunches hanging to dry. The girl listened to all this, and I could not keep my eyes off her face, where the knowing sharp little smile alternated with her need to shield me from my inexperience, my sheltered condition! Stronger than anything else, was something she was quite unconscious of, would certainly destroy all evidence of if she knew she was betraying weakness. Stronger than the tricks, the need to please and to buy, the painful obedience, was this: a hunger, a need, a pure thing, which made her face lose its hard brightness, her eyes their defensiveness. She was a passion of longing. For what? Well, that is not so easy, it never is! But I recognised it, knew it, and talk of the farm in the Welsh hills did as well as anything to bring it out, to make it shine there: good bread, uncontaminated water from a deep well, fresh vegetables; love, kindness, the deep shelter of a family. And so we talked about the farm, our future, hers and mine, like a fable where we would walk hand in hand, together. And then ‘life’ would begin, life as it ought to be, as it had been promised – by whom? When? Where? – to everybody on this earth.

This idyllic time – of not more than a few days, in fact – came abruptly to an end. One warm afternoon I looked out and saw under the plane trees of the opposite pavement about sixty young people, and recognised them as a pack of travellers on their way through the city. This recognition was not always easy, unless there were as many as this, for if you saw two or three or four of such a troop separated from the others, you might think they were students who still – though there weren’t many of them – were to be seen in our city. Or they could be the sons and daughters of ordinary people. Seen together, they were instantly unmistakable. Why? No, not only that a mass of young people in these days could mean nothing else. They had relinquished individuality, that was the point, individual judgement and responsibility, and this showed in a hundred ways, not least by one’s instinctive reaction in an encounter with them, which was always a sharp apprehension, for one knew that in a confrontation – if it came to that – there would be a pack judgement. They could not stand being alone for long; the mass was their home, their place of self-recognition. They were like dogs coming together in a park or a waste place. The sweet doggie belonging to the matron (her smart voluminous coiffure a defence against the fear visible in her pet, whose coat is an old lady’s thin curls showing the aged pink scalp but sheltered by a home-knitted scarlet wool coat); the great Afghan, made to range forty miles a day without feeling it, shut it into his little house, his little garden; the mongrel, bred from survivors; the spaniel, by nature a hunting dog – all these dear family companions, Togo and Bonzo and Fluff and Wolf, having sniffed each other’s bums and established precedence, off they go, a pack, a unit … this description is true of course of any group of people of any age anywhere, if their roles are not already defined for them in an institution. The gangs of ‘kids’ were only showing the way to their elders, who soon copied them; a ‘pack of youngsters’ nearly always, and increasingly, included older people, even families, but the label remained. That is how people spoke of the moving hordes – this last word at least was accurate before the end, when it seemed as if a whole population was on the move.

On this afternoon, with the trees above them heavy and full, the sun making a festival – it was September, and still warm – the pack settled down on the pavement, building a big fire and arranging their possessions in a heap with a guard stationed by it: two young boys armed with heavy sticks. The whole area had emptied, as always happened. The police were not to be seen; the authorities could not cope with this problem and did not want to: they were happy to be rid of these gangs who were in the process of taking elsewhere the problems they raised. Every ground-floor window for miles around was closed and the curtains drawn, but faces could be seen packing all the higher windows of the blocks around us. The young people stood around the fire in groups, and some couples had their arms around each other. A girl played a guitar. The smell of roasting meat was strong, and no one liked to think too much about it. I wondered if Hugo was safe. I had not become fond of this animal, but I was worried for Emily’s sake. Then I realised she was not in the living-room or the kitchen. I knocked on her bedroom door, and opened it: the piled stuffy nest of bedclothes she crept into for shelter against the world was there, but she was not, and Hugo was not. I remembered that in the mass of young people was a young girl in tight jeans and a pink shirt who was like Emily. But it had been Emily, and now, from the window, I watched her. She stood near the fire, a bottle in her hand, laughing, one of the gang, the crowd, the team, the pack. Standing close against her legs, fearful for himself, was the yellow animal: he had been hidden by the press of the crowd. I saw she was shouting, arguing. She retreated, her hand on Hugo’s head. Slowly she backed away, and then turned and ran, the animal bounding beside her: to see him thus even momentarily was a painful reminder of his power, his capacity, his range, now feebled by the little rooms that held his life and his movements. A great shout of raucous laughter went up from the young people; and from this it was evident they had been teasing her about Hugo. They had not really intended to kill him; they had been pretending that they would; she had believed them. All this meant they had not considered her as one of themselves, even potentially. Yet there were children as young as she among them. She had not challenged them as a child, no; but as a young girl, an equal – that must have been it, and they had not accepted her. All this came into my mind, had been reasoned out by me, by the time she came into the living-room, white, trembling, terrified. She sat down on the floor and put her arms around her Hugo, and hugged him close, swaying a little, back and forth, saying, or singing, or sobbing: ‘Oh no, no, no, dear Hugo, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t let them, don’t be so frightened.’ For he trembled as much as she did. He had his head on her shoulder, in their usual way of mutual comfort at such times.

But, in a moment, seeing I was there and that I had understood her rejection by the adult group she had challenged, she went red, she became angry. She pushed Hugo away and stood up, her face struggling for control. She became smiling and hard, and she laughed and said: ‘They are quite fun really, I don’t see why people say such nasty things about them.’ She went to the window to watch them out there lifting the bottles to their mouths, passing around hunks of food as they shared their meal. Emily was subdued: perhaps she was even afraid, wondering how she could have gone out to them at all. Yet every one of us, the hundreds of people at our windows, knew that, watching them, we were examining our own possibilities, our future.

Soon, without looking at me, Emily pushed Hugo into her bedroom and shut the door, and she was off out of the flat and across the road again. Now the light of the fire made a tight bright space under the singeing trees. All the lower windows were dark but reflected the blaze or a cold gleam of light from a half-moon that stood between two towers of flats. The upper windows were full of heads outlined against varying kinds and degrees of light. But some of the ordinary citizens had already joined the young people, curious to find out where they had come from, where they were going; Emily was not the only one. I must confess that I had more than once visited an encampment for an evening. Not in this part of the town: no, I was fearful of my neighbours, of their condemnation, but I had seen faces I knew from my own neighbourhood: we were all doing the same, from the same calculation.

I was not fearful for what might happen to Emily if she behaved sensibly. If she did not then I planned to cross the street and rescue her. I watched all night. Sometimes I was able to see her, sometimes not. Most of the time she was with a group of boys younger than the rest. She was the only girl, and she did behave foolishly, challenging them, asserting herself. But they were all drunk, and she was only one of the many ingredients of their intoxication.

There were people lying asleep on the pavement, their heads on a bundled sweater or on their forearms. They slept uncaring while the others milled about. This careless sleep, confident that the others would not tread on them, that they would be protected, said more than anything could about the kind of toughness these youngsters had acquired, the trust they had for each other. But general sleep was not what had been planned. The fire had died down. It would soon be morning. I saw that they were all gathering to move on. I had a bad half hour, wondering if Emily would leave with them. But after some embraces, loud and ribald, like the embraces and the jesting of tarts and soldiers when a regiment is moving off, and after she had run along beside them on the pavement for a few yards, she came slowly back – no, not to me, I knew better than to think that, but to Hugo. As she came in her face was visible for a moment in the light from the corridor, a lonely sorrowful face, and not at all the face of a child. But by the time she had reached the living-room the mask was on. ‘That was a nice evening, say what you like,’ she remarked. I had not said anything, and I said nothing now. ‘Apart from eating people, they are very nice, I think,’ she said, with an exaggerated yawn. ‘And do they eat people?’ ‘Well, I didn’t ask, but I’d expect so, wouldn’t you?’ She opened the door to her little room, and Hugo came out, his green eyes watchful on her face, and she said to him: ‘It’s all right, I haven’t done anything you wouldn’t have done, I promise you.’ And with this unhappy remark, and a hard little laugh, she went off, saying over her shoulder: ‘I could do worse than go off with them one of these days, that’s what I think. They enjoy themselves, at least.’

Well, I preferred that good night to many others we had exchanged when at ten o’clock she would cry, ‘Oh, it’s my bedtime, off I go’ – and a dutiful good night kiss hung between us, a ghost, like the invisible white gloves of Professor White.

It happened that during that early autumn, day after day, fresh gangs came through. And, day after day, Emily was with them. She did not ask if she could. And I wasn’t going to forbid her, for I knew she would not obey me. I had no authority. She was not my child. We avoided a confrontation. She was there whenever the pavements opposite were crowded and the fire blazing. On two occasions she was very drunk, and once she had a torn shirt and bite marks on her neck. She said: ‘I suppose you think I’ve lost my virginity? Well, I haven’t, though it was a close thing, I grant you.’ And then the cold little addition, her signature, ‘If it matters, which I doubt.’

‘I think it matters,’ I said.

‘Oh, do you? Well, you are an optimist, I suppose. Something of that kind. What do you think, Hugo?’

That sequence of travelling gangs came to an end. The pavements up and down the street were blackened and cracked with the fires that had been blazing there for so many nights, the leaves of the plane trees hung limp and blasted, bones and bits of fur and broken glass lay everywhere, the waste lot behind was trampled and filthy. Now the police materialised, were busy taking notes and interviewing people. The cleaners came around. The pavements went back to normal. Everything went back to normal for a time, and the ground floor windows had lights in them at night.

It was about then I understood that the events on the pavements and what went on between me and Emily might have a connection with what I saw on my visits behind the wall.

Moving through the tall quiet white walls, as impermanent as theatre sets, knowing that the real inhabitant was there, always there just behind the next wall, to be glimpsed on the opening of the next door or the one beyond that, I came on a room, long, deep-ceilinged, once a beautiful room, which I recognised, which I knew (from where, though?) and it was in such disorder I felt sick and I was afraid. The place looked as if savages had been in it; as if soldiers had bivouacked there. The chairs and sofas had been deliberately slashed and jabbed with bayonets or knives, stuffing was spewing out everywhere, brocade curtains had been ripped off the brass rods and left in heaps. The room might have been used as a butcher’s shop: there were feathers, blood, bits of offal. I began cleaning it. I laboured, used many buckets of hot water, scrubbed, mended. I opened tall windows to an eighteenth century garden where plants grew in patterns of squares among low hedges. Sun and wind were invited into that room and cleaned it. I was by myself all the time; yet did not feel myself to be. Then it was done. The old sofas and chairs stood there repaired and clean. The curtains were stacked for the cleaners. I walked around in it for a long time, for it was a room large enough for pacing; and I stood at the windows, seeing hollyhocks and damask roses, smelling lavender, roses, rosemary, verbena, conscious of memories assaulting me, claiming, insinuating. One was from my ‘real’ life, for it was nagging and tugging at me that the pavements where the fires had burned and the trees had scorched were part of the stuff and the substance of this room. But there was the tug of nostalgia for the room itself, the life that had been lived there, would continue the moment I had left. And for the garden, whose every little turn or comer I knew in my bones. Above all, for the inhabitant who was somewhere near, probably watching me; who, when I had left, would walk in and nod approval at the work of cleaning I had done and then perhaps go out to walk in the garden.

What I found next was in a very different setting: above all, in a different atmosphere. It was the first of the ‘personal’ experiences. This was the word I used for them from the start. And the atmosphere was unmistakable always, as soon as I entered whatever scene it was. That is, between the feeling or texture or mood of the scenes which were not ‘personal’, like, for instance, the long quiet room that had been so devastated, or any of the events, no matter how wearying or difficult or discouraging, that I saw in this or that setting – between these and the ‘personal’ scenes a world lay; the two kinds ‘personal’ (though not necessarily, to me) and the other, existed in spheres quite different and separated. One, the ‘personal’ was instantly to be recognised by the air that was its prison, by the emotions that were its creatures. The impersonal scenes might bring discouragement or problems that had to be solved, like the rehabilitation of walls or furniture, cleaning, putting order into chaos – but in that realm there was a lightness, a freedom, a feeling of possibility. Yes, that was it, the space and the knowledge of the possibility of alternative action. One could refuse to clean that room, clear that patch of earth; one could walk into another room altogether, choose another scene. But to enter the ‘personal’ was to enter a prison, where nothing could happen but what one saw happening, where the air was tight and limited, and above all where time was a strict unalterable law and long, oh my God, it went on, and on and on, minute by decreed minute, with no escape but the slow wearing away of one after another.

It was again a tall room, but this time square and without grace, and there were tall but heavy windows, with dark red velvet curtains. A fire burned, and in front of it was a strong fireguard, like a wire meat cover. On this were airing a great many thick or flimsy napkins, baby’s napkins of the old-fashioned sort, and many white vests and binders, long and short dresses, robes, jackets, little socks. An Edwardian layette, emitting that odour which is not quite scorch, but near to it: heated airless materials. There was a rocking horse. Alphabet books. A cradle with muslin flounces, minute blue and green flowers on white … I realised what a relief the colour was, for everything was white, white clothing, white cot and cradle and covers and blankets and sheets and baskets. A white-painted room. A little white clock that would have been described in a catalogue as a Nursery Clock. White. The clock’s tick was soft and little and incessant.