The Memoirs of a Survivor

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I think this is the right place to say something more about 'it'. Though of course there is no 'right' place or time, since there was no particular moment marking — then or now — 'its' beginning. And yet there did come a period when everyone was talking about 'it'; and we knew we had not been doing this until recently: there was a different ingredient in our lives.

Perhaps I would have done better to have begun this chronicle with an attempt at a full description of 'it'. But is it possible to write an account of anything at all without 'it' — in some shape or another — being the main theme? Perhaps, indeed, 'it' is the secret theme of all literature and history, like writing in invisible ink between the lines, which springs up, sharply black, dimming the old print we knew so well, as life, personal or public, unfolds unexpectedly and we see something where we never thought we could — we see 'it' as the ground — swell of events, experience… Very well then, but what was 'it'?.. I am sure that ever since there were men on earth 'it' has been talked of precisely in this way in times of crisis, since it is in crisis 'it' becomes visible, and our conceit sinks before its force. For 'it' is a force, a power, taking the form of earthquake, a visiting comet whose balefulness hangs closer night by night distorting all thought by fear — 'it' can be, has been, pestilence, a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men's minds, the savagery of a religion.

'It', in short, is the word for helpless ignorance, or of helpless awareness. It is a word for man's inadequacy?

'Have you heard anything new about it?'

'So and so said last that it…'

Worse still when the stage is reached of 'Have you heard anything new', when 'it' has absorbed everything into itself, and nothing else can be meant when people ask what is moving in our world, what moves our world. It. Only it, a much worse word than 'they'; for 'they' at least are humanity too, can be moved, are helpless, like ourselves.

'It', perhaps — on this occasion in history — was above all a consciousness of something ending.

How would Emily put what she felt into words? She would describe this, perhaps, in terms of that image of her sweeping, sweeping, the sorcerer's apprentice put to work in a spiteful garden against floods of dying leaves that she could never clean away no matter how hard she tried. Her sense of duty but expressed in images — she could not say of herself that yes, she was a good little girl and not a bad dirty little girl; a good little girl who must love cherish and protect her brother, her baby, the defenceless, the powerless, the amiably indifferently smiling, who sat there all loose and slack in their damp strong — smelling white wool. 'It was so hard,' she might say. 'Everything was so difficult, such an effort, such a burden, all those children in the house, not one of them would do a thing to help unless I got at them all the time, they turned me into a tyrant and laughed at me, but there was no need for that, they could have had something equal and easy if they had done their parts but no, I always had to overlook everything, comb their dirty hair and see if they had washed and then all those sores that they got when they wouldn't eat sensibly, and the horrible smell of disinfectants all the time that the government supplied and the way June got sick, it drove me crazy with worry, she kept getting ill for no particular reason — that was it, there was never any good reason for things, and I worked and I worked and it was always the same, something happened and then it all came to nothing.'

Yes, that is probably how Emily's version of that time would sound.

June, returning with Emily to my flat one day, about a fortnight after her induction into womanhood — I put it like that because this was how she obviously felt it — had changed physically, and in every way. Her experience had marked her face, which was even more defenceless, in her sad-waif style, than before. And she was looking older than Emily. Her body still had the flat thickness through the waist of a child, and her breasts had fattened without shaping. Anxiety, or love, had made her eat enough to put on weight. We saw her, that eleven — year-old, as she would look as a middleaged woman: the thick working body, the face that accommodated, that always seemed able to accommodate, two opposing qualities: the victim's patient helplessness, the sharp inquisitiveness of the user.

June was not well. Our questions brought out of her that this was nothing new, she hadn't been too good 'for quite a time'. Symptoms? 'I dunno, jst feel bad, you know what I mean.'

She had stomach pains and frequent headaches. She lacked energy — but energy cannot be expected of a Ryan. She 'jst didn't feel good anywhere at all, it comes and goes, reely'.

This affliction was not only June's; it was known to a good many of us.

Vague aches and pains; indispositions that came and went, but not according to the terms and times prescribed by the physicians; infections that seemed to be from a common source, since they would go through the community like an epidemic, but not with an epidemic's uniformity — they demonstrated their presence in different symptoms with every victim; rashes that did not seem to have any cause; nervous diseases that could end in bouts of insanity or produce tics or paralyses; tumours and skin diseases; aches and pains that 'wandered' about the body; new diseases altogether that for a time were categorised with the old ones for lack of information until it became clear that these were new diseases; mysterious deaths; exhaustions and listlessness that kept people lying about or in bed for weeks and caused relatives and even themselves to use the words malinger and neurotic and so on but then, suddenly vanishing, released the poor sufferers from criticism and self-doubt. In short there had been for a long time a general increase in illness, both traditional and newly-evolved, and if June complained of 'just not feeling good anywhere, do you see what I mean?' — then we did, for it was common enough to be classed as a recognisable illness in itself. June decided to move in with us, 'for a few days,' she said, but what she needed was to evade the pressures, psychological or otherwise, of Gerald's household, and Emily and I knew, if June did not, that she would have liked to leave there altogether.

I offered the big sofa in the living-room to June, but she preferred a mattress on Emily's floor, and even, I think, slept on it, though of course I wondered. Silently wondered. Too often had I experienced a sharp shocked reaction to questions asked innocently. I really did not know if Emily and June would consider lesbianism as the most normal thing in the world, or as improper. Styles in morals had changed so sharply and so often in my lifetime, and were so different in various sections of the community, that I had learned long ago to accept whatever was the norm for that particular time and place. I rather believe that the two girls slept in each other's arms for comfort. Of course I could have no doubt, after what Emily had told me, about how she must feel now she had the child, her 'real friend', alone with her there. Almost alone — there was me and there was Hugo. But at least there weren't so many others around all the time.

Emily tried to 'nurse' June. That is to say, she fussed and offered food. But a Ryan doesn't eat like an ordinary citizen: June nibbled, all fancies and antipathies. Probably she was, as Emily said, suffering from vitamin deficiencies, but she said: 'That doesn't make sense to my mind: I never eat any different, do I? But I feel bad inside and everywhere now, don't I, and I didn't before.'

So if June were asked to say what 'it' was like for her, she would very likely answer: 'Well, I dunno reely, I feel bad inside and everywhere.'

Perhaps, after all, one has to end by characterising 'it' as a sort of cloud or emanation, but invisible, like the water vapour you know is present in the air of the room you sit in, makes part of the air you know is there when you look out of a window — your eye is traversing air, so your intellect tells you when you look at a sparrow pecking insects off a twig; and you know that the air is part water vapour which at any moment — as a slap of cold air comes in from somewhere else — will condense as mist or fall as rain. 'It' was everywhere, in everything, moved in our blood, our minds. 'It' was nothing that could be described once and for all, or pinned down, or kept stationary; 'it' was an illness, a tiredness, boils; 'it' was the pain of watching Emily, a fourteen-year-old girl, locked inside her necessity to — sweep away dead leaves; 'it' was the price or unreliability of the electricity supply; the way telephones didn't work; the migrating tribes of cannibals; was 'them' and their antics; 'it' was, finally, what you experienced… and was in the space behind the wall, moved the players behind the wall, just as much there as in our ordinary world where one hour followed another and life obeyed the unities, like a certain kind of play.

As that summer ended there was as bad a state of affairs in the space behind the wall as on this side, with us. Or perhaps it was only that I was seeing what went on there more clearly. Instead of entering into a room, or a passageway, where there was a door which opened into other rooms and passages, so that I was within a sense of opportunities and possibilities, but limited always to the next turn of the corridor, the opening of the next door — the sense of plenty, of space always opening out and away kept within a framework of order within which I was placed, as part of it — now it seemed as if a perspective had shifted and I was seeing the sets of rooms from above, or as if I were able to move through them so fast I could visit them all at once and exhaust them. At any rate, the feeling of surprise, of expectancy, had gone, and I could even say that these sets and suites of rooms, until so recently full of alternatives and possibilities, had absorbed into them something of the claustrophobic air of the realm of the 'personal' with its rigid necessities. And yet the disorder there had never been so great. Sometimes it seemed to me as if all those rooms had been set up, carefully, correct to the last detail, simply in order to be knocked flat again; as if a vast house had been taken over and decorated to display a hundred different manners, modes, epochs — but quite arbitrarily, not consecutively and in order to give a sense of the growth of one style into another. Set up, perfected — and then knocked flat.

I cannot begin to give an idea of the mess in those rooms. Perhaps I could not go into a room at all, it was so heaped with cracking and splintering furniture. Other rooms had been used, or so they looked, as refuse dumps: stinking piles of rubbish filled them. Some had their furniture neatly set out in them, but the roofs had gone, or the walls gaped. Once I saw in the centre of a formal and rich room — French, Second Empire, as lifeless as if it had been arranged for a museum — the remains of a fire built on a piece of old iron, some sleeping bags left anyhow, a big pot full of cold boiled potatoes near the wall in line with a dozen pairs of boots. I knew the soldiers would come back suddenly, and if I wanted to keep my life I should leave. Already there was a corpse, with dried blood staining the carpet around it.

And yet, with all these evidences of destructiveness, even now I could not move behind the wall without feeling something of the old expectation, hope, even longing. And rightly, for when the anarchy was at its height, and I had almost lost the habit of expecting anything but smashed and dirtied rooms, there was a visit when I found this — I was in a garden between four walls, old brick walls, and there was a fresh delightful sky above me that I knew was the sky of another world, not ours. This garden did have a few flowers in it, but mostly it had vegetables. There were beds neatly filled with greenery — carrot tops, lettuces, radishes, and there were tomatoes, and gooseberry bushes and ripening melons. Some beds were raked and ready for planting, others had been turned and left open to the sun and the air. It was a place filled with industry, usefulness, hope. I walked there under a fruitful sky, and thought of how people would be fed from this garden. But this wasn't all, for I became aware that under this garden was another. I was able easily to make my way down into it along a sloping ramp of earth, and there were even steps of, I think, stone. I was down in the lower garden which was immediately under the first, and occupied the same area: the feeling of comfort and security this gave me is really not describable. Nor was this lower garden any less supplied with sun, wind, rain, than the upper one. Here, too, were the tall warm walls of weathered brick, and the beds in various stages of preparedness and use. There was an exquisite old rose growing on one wall. It was a soft yellow, and its scent was in all the air of the garden. Some pinks and mignonette grew near a sunny old stone: these were the old flowers, rather small, but subtle and individual: all the old cottage flowers were here, among the leeks and the garlics and the mints. There was a gardener. I saw him at the moment I realised I was listening with pleasure to the sound of water running near my feet where there was a channel of earth, with tiny herbs and grasses growing along its edges. Near the wall the channel was of stone, and wider: the gardener was bending over the stone runnel where it came into the garden from outside through a low opening that was green and soft with moss. Around every bed was a stream of clear water, the garden was a network of water channels. And, looking up and beyond the wall, I saw that the water came from the mountains four or five miles away. There was snow on them, although it was midsummer, and this was melted snow-water, very cold, and tasting of the air that blew across the mountains. The gardener turned when I ran towards him to ask if he had news of the person whose presence was so strong in this place, as pervasive as the rose-scent, but he only nodded and turned back to his duties of controlling the flow of water, of seeing that it ran equably among the beds. I looked across at the mountains and at the plain between, where there were villages and large stone houses in gardens, and I thought that what I was looking at was the under-world — and one just as extensive and productive — of the level to which I now had to return. I walked up to the first level again, and saw the old walls warm with evening sunlight, heard water running everywhere though I had not heard it when I stood here before; I took small cautious steps from one solid but moist spot to the next, with the smell of apple — mint coming up from my knees and the sound of bees in my ears. I looked at the food the earth was making, which would keep the next winter safe for us, for the world's people. Gardens beneath gardens, gardens above gardens: the food-giving surfaces of the earth doubled, trebled, endless — the plenty of it, the richness, the generosity…

And back in my ordinary life I watched June listless in a deep chair, shaking her head with a patient smile at a plate of food being held towards her by Emily.

'But she has to eat, hasn't she?' said Emily to me, sharp with worry, and when the child continued to smile and refuse, Emily whirled about and set the plate down in front of Hugo who, knowing he was being used to demonstrate rejection, as if she were tipping food into a rubbish bin, turned his face away. I saw Emily then, all loving remorse, sit by her neglected slave, and put her face down into his fur, as once she had so often been used to do. I saw how he turned his head a little towards her, despite his intention not to show response, let alone pleasure. Despite himself, he licked her hand a little, with a look on him that a person has when doing something he doesn't want to do, but can't stop… and she sat and wept, she wept. There they were, the three of them, June with her malady, whatever it was, the ugly yellow beast in his humility, suffering his heartache, and the fierce young woman. I sat quiet among the three of them, and thought of the gardens that lay one above another so close to us, behind a wall which at this time of the day — it was evening — lay quite blank and with no depth in it, no promise. I thought of what riches there were in store for these creatures and all the others like them; and though it was hard to maintain a knowledge of that other world with its scent and running waters and its many plants while I sat here in this dull shabby daytime room, the pavement outside seething as usual with its tribal life — I did hold it. I kept it in my mind. I was able to do this. Yes, towards the end it was so; intimations of that life, or lives, became more powerful and frequent in 'ordinary' life, as if that place were feeding and sustaining us, and wished us to know it. A wind blew from one place to the other; the air of one place was the air of the other; as I came to the window after an escape into the space behind the wall there would be a moment of doubt, my mind would sway and have to steady itself as I reassured myself that no, what I was looking at was reality, was real life; I was standing foursquare in what everybody would concur was normality.