The Memoirs of a Survivor

***

By the end of that summer there were hundreds of people of all ages on the pavement. Gerald was now only one of a dozen or so leaders. Among them was a middle-aged man — a new development, this. There was also a woman, who led a small band of girls. They were self-consciously and loudly critical of male authority, male organisation, as if they had set themselves a duty always to be there commenting on everything the men did. They were a chorus of condemnation. Yet the leader seemed to find it necessary to spend a great deal of energy preventing individuals of her flock from straying off and attaching themselves to the men. This caused a good deal of not always good — natured comment from the men, sometimes from the other women. But the problems and difficulties everyone had to face made this kind of disagreement seem minor. And it was an efficient group, showing great tenderness to each other and to children, always ready with information — still the most important of the commodities — and generous with what food and goods they had.

It was to the women's group that we lost June.

It happened like this. Emily had again taken to spending most of her days and nights at the other house: duty had taken her back, for messages had come that she was needed. She wanted June to move with her, and June did listen Emily's persuasions, agreed with her — but did not go. I began to think that I was to lose Emily, my real charge, for June, and I did not feel any particular responsibility for her. I liked the child, though her listless presence lowered the atmosphere of my home, making me listless, too, and keeping Hugo in a permanent sorrow of jealousy. I was pleased enough when she roused herself to talk to me: for the most part she lay in a corner of the sofa, doing nothing at all. But the truth was, I would have liked her to leave. She asked after Gerald when Emily came flying home to cook a meal of her favourite chips, to make pots of precious tea, to serve her cups half-filled with precious sugar: she listened, and asked after this and that person; she liked to gossip. She said to me, to Emily, and doubtless to herself, that she was going, yes, she would go tomorrow. She confronted Emily's frenzies and anxieties with: 'I'll come over tomorrow, yes I will, Emily,' — but she stayed where she was.

On the pavement Emily was being very energetic. Gerald's troop was about fifty strong, with the people actually living in his household and the others who had gravitated towards him from the crowds who kept coming in, and in, during the long hot afternoons.

Emily was always to be seen near Gerald, prominent in her role of adviser, source of information. I now did what I had once been careful to avoid, for fear of upsetting Emily, of disturbing some balance. I crossed the street myself 'to see what was going on' — as if I had not been watching what went on for so many months! But this was how all the older citizens described their first, or indeed their subsequent trips to the pavement — described them often, right up to the moment when they put together a blanket, some warm clothes and a little food to leave the city with a tribe passing through, or one taking off from our pavement. I even wondered if perhaps this visit of mine away from my flat to across the street was a sign of an inner intention to leave which I knew nothing about yet. This was so attractive an idea that as soon as it had entered my head, it took possession and I had to fight it down. My first trip to the pavement — to stand there, to mill around with the others for an hour or so, was really to hear what it was that Emily so ably and for so many hours every day, dispensed out there. Well, I was astounded… how often had this girl taken me by surprise! Now I drifted around among this restless, lively, ruthless crowd and saw how everyone, not only those who seemed ready to owe allegiance to Gerald, turned to her for news, information, advice. And she was ready with it. Yes, there were dried apples in such and such a shop in that suburb. No, the bus for a village twenty miles west was not cancelled altogether, it still ran once a week until December, and there was a trip next Monday at ten a.m., but you would have to be there in the queue the night before and must be prepared to fight for your place: it would be worth it, for it was said there were plentiful supplies of apples and plums. A farmer was coming in by cart every Friday with mutton fat and hides, and could be found at… Big strong horses were for sale, or barter. And yes, there was a house four streets away quite suitable for stabling. As for fodder, that could be procured, but better still, grow it, and for one horse you would need… A variety of chemical devices for cooking and lighting were being constructed tomorrow afternoon at the second floor of the old Plaza Hotel; assistance was needed and would be paid for in the form of the said devices. Wood ash, horse manure, compost, would be for sale under the old motorway at Smith Street at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Lessons in making your own wind-generators, to be paid for in food and fuel… air cleansers and purifiers, water cleansers, earth sterilisers… laying fowls and coops for them… knife sharpeners… a man who knew the plan of the underground sewers and the rivers that ran into them was piping water to the surface at… The street between X Road and Y Crescent was growing superb crops of yarrow and coltsfoot, and on the corner of Piltdown Way was a patch of potatoes people had planted and then forgotten: they had probably left the city. Emily knew all these things and many more and was much sought — after, by virtue of her energy and her equipment, in that scene like a fair where hundreds of egos clashed and competed and fed each other — Emily, Gerald's girl. So she was referred to, so spoken of. This surprised me, knowing the state of affairs in that house I had visited. This was yet another emotional, or at least verbal, hangover from the past? A man had a woman, an official woman, like a first wife, even when he virtually ran a harem?.. if one could use one old-fashioned term, then why not another? I did try the word out on June: 'Gerald's harem,' I said; and her little face puzzled up at me. She had heard the word, but had not associated it with anything that could come close to her. But yes, she had seen a film, and yes Gerald had a harem. She, June, was part of it. She even giggled, looking at me with those pale blue eyes that seemed always to be swallowing astonishment. There she lay, seeing herself as a harem girl, a little ageing woman with her childish flat waist, her child's eyes, her pale hair dragged to one side.

Emily of course had marked my appearance on the pavement, and was assuming I was ready to migrate. And how attractive it was there with those masses of vigorous people, all so resourceful in the ways of this hand-to-mouth world, so easy and inventive in everything they did. What a relief it would be to throw off, in one movement like a shrug of the shoulders, all the old ways, the old problems — these, once one took a step across the street to join the tribes would dissolve, lose import — ance. Housekeeping now could be just as accurately described as cavekeeping, and was such a piddling, fiddly business. The shell of one's life was a setting for 'every modern convenience'; but inside the shell one bartered and captured and even stole, one burned candles and huddled over fires made of wood split with an axe. And these people, these tribes, were going to turn their backs on it all, and simply take to the roads. Yes, of course they would have to stop somewhere, find an empty village, and take it over; or settle where the farmers that survived would let them, in return for their labour or for acting as private armies. They would have to make for themselves some sort of order again, even if it was no more than that appropriate to outlaws living in and off a forest in the north. Responsibilities and duties there would have to be, and they would harden and stultify, probably very soon. But in the meantime, for weeks, months, perhaps with luck even a year or so, an earlier life of mankind would rule: disciplined, but democratic — when these people were at their best even a child's voice was listened to with respect; all property worries gone; all sexual taboos gone — except for the new ones, but new ones are always more bearable than the old; all problems shared and carried in common. Free. Free, at least from what was left of 'civilisation' and its burdens. Infinitely enviable, infinitely desirable, and how I longed simply to close my home up and go. But how could I? There was Emily. As long as she stayed, I would. I began again to talk tentatively of the Dolgellys, of how we would ask for a shed there and build it up and make it into a home… June as well, of course. For from the frantic anxiety Emily showed, I could see it would not be possible for Emily to be separated from June.

And Hugo? The truth is she did not have time for him, and I was thinking that if he had been what kept her here before, this was not true now.

I believe that he gave up hope altogether during that time when Emily was hardly ever with us, and only flew in to see June. One day I saw him sitting openly at the window, all of his ugly stubbornly yellow self visible to anyone who chose to look. It was a challenge, or indifference. He was seen, of course. Some youngsters crossed the street to look at the yellow animal sitting there, gazing steadily back at them with his cat's eyes. It occurred to me that some of the youngest there, the real children of five or six years old, might never have seen a cat or a dog as a 'pet' to love and make part of a family.

'Oh, he is ugly,' I heard, and saw the children make faces and drift off. No, there would be nothing to help Hugo when the time came for him; no one could say: 'Oh don't kill him, he's such a handsome beast.'

Well… Emily came in one evening and saw the blaze of yellow at the window. Hugo was vividly there, illuminated by a flare from the late sunset, and by the candles. She was shocked, knowing at once why he should have chosen to disobey the instincts of self-protection.

'Hugo,' she said, 'oh my dear Hugo…' He kept his back to her, even when she put her hands on either side of his neck and brought her face down into his fur. He would not soften, and she knew he was saying that she had given him up, and did not care for him.

She coaxed him off the high seat and sat with him on the floor. She began to cry, an irritable, irritating, sniffing sort of weeping that was from exhaustion. I could see that. So could June, who watched without moving. And so could Hugo. He licked her hand at last and lay himself patiently down, saying to her by the way he did this: It is to please you. I don't care to live if you don't care for me.

Now Emily was all conflict, all anxiety. She kept rushing back and forth from my flat to that house, between there and the pavement. June, she had to see June, to bring her the bits of food she liked, to make the gesture of getting her into bed at a decent hour, for, left to herself, June would be in that sofa-corner until four or six in the morning, doing nothing, except perhaps to mark the interior movements of her illness, whatever that might be. And Hugo, she had to make a point" of fussing over Hugo, of loving him. It was as if she had set herself the duty of paying attention to Hugo, measured, like a medicine or a food. And there was myself, the dry old guardian, the mentor — a pull of some sort, I suppose. There were the children, always sending after her if she stayed away from that house for too long. She was worn out; she was cross and sharp and harried and it was a misery to see her at it.

And then, suddenly, it was all over.

It was solved: June left.

She got herself out of the sofa one day and was on the pavement again. Why? I don't know. I never knew what moved June. At any rate, in the afternoons she was again with the crowds out there. She did not seem to be more part of one group than another: her flat, pale, effaced little person was to be seen as much in the other clans as in the one that Gerald held together. She was seen, but only once or twice, in the women's group. And then the women's group had gone and June had gone with them.

And yes, we did not believe it, did not even, at first, know what had happened. June was not in my flat. She was not on the pavement. She was not in Gerald's house. Emily ran frantically about, asking questions. At that point she was stunned. June had left, just like that, without even leaving a message? Yes, that's what it looked like: she had been heard to say, so someone reported, that she felt like moving on.

It was this business of June's not having said goodbye, of not leaving a message, that Emily could not swallow. June had not given any indication at all? — we talked it over, the crumbs we had between us, and at last we were able to offer to the situation the fact that June had said on the day she left: 'Well, ta, I'll be seeing you around, I expect.' But she had not directed this particularly, to Emily or to me. How could we have understood this was her farewell before going away for good?

It was the inconsequence of the act that shocked. June did not believe we were worth the effort of saying goodbye? She had not said a real goodbye because she thought we would stop her? No, we could not believe that was it: she would have stayed as readily as she had left. The shocking truth was that June did not feel she was worth the effort: her leaving us, she must have felt, was of no importance. In spite of the fact that Emily was so devoted, and anxious and loving? Yes, in spite of that. June did not value herself. Love, devotion, effort, could only pour into her, a jug without a bottom, and then pour out, leaving no trace. She deserved nothing, was owed nothing, could not really be loved and therefore could not be missed. So she had gone. Probably one of the women had been kind to her, and to this little glow of affection June had responded, as she had to Emily's. She had gone because she could leave one day as well as another. It did not matter, she did not matter. At last we agreed that the energetic and virile woman who led that band had captured the listless June with her energy, at a time when Emily did not have enough to go around.

Emily could not take it in.

And then, she began to cry. At first the violent shocked tears, the working face and blank staring eyes of a child, which express only: What, is this happening to me! It's impossible! It isn't fair! — Floods of tears, noisy sobs, exclamations of anger and disgust, but all the time the as it were painted eyes, untouched: Me, it is me sitting here, to whom this frightful injustice has occurred… a great fuss and a noise and a crying out, this kind of tears, but hardly intolerable, not painful, not a woman's tears…

Which came next.

Emily, eyes shut, her hands on her thighs, rocked herself back and forth and from side to side, and she was weeping as a woman weeps, which is to say as if the earth were bleeding. I nearly said as if the earth had decided to have a good cry — but it would be dishonest to take the edge off it. Listening, I certainly would not have been able to do less than pay homage to the rock-bottom quality of the act of crying as a grown woman cries.

Who else can cry like that? Not an old woman. The tears of old age can be miserable, can be abject, as bad as anything you like. But they are tears that know better than to demand justice, they have learned too much, they do not have that abysmal quality as of blood ebbing away. A small child can cry as if all the lonely misery of the universe is his alone — it is not the pain in a woman's crying that is the point, no, it is finality of the acceptance of a wrong. So it was, is now and must ever be, say those closed oozing eyes, the rocking body, the grief. Grief — yes, an act of mourning, that's it. Some enemy has been faced, has been tackled, but a battle has been lost, all the chips are down, everything is spent, nothing is left, nothing can be expected… yes, in spite of myself, every word I put down is on the edge of farce, somewhere there is a yell of laughter — just as there is when a woman cries in precisely that way. For, in life, there is often a yell of laughter, which is every bit as intolerable as the tears. I sat there, I went on sitting, watching Emily the eternal woman at her task of weeping. I wished I could go away, knowing it would make no difference to her whether I was there or not. I would have liked to give her something, comfort, friendly arms — a nice cup of tea? (Which in due time I would offer.) No, I had to listen. To grief, to the expression of the intolerable. What on earth, the observer has to ask — husband, lover, mother, friend, even someone who has at some point wept those tears herself, but particularly, of course, husband or lover, 'What in the name of God can you possibly have expected of me, of life, that you can now cry like that? Can't you see that it is impossible, you are impossible, no one could ever have been promised enough to make such tears even feasible… can't you see that?' But it is no use. The blinded eyes stare through you, they are seeing some ancient enemy which is, thank heavens, not yourself. No, it is Life or Fate or Destiny, some such force which has struck that woman to the heart, and for ever will she sit, rocking in her archaic and dreadful grief, and the sobs which are being torn out of her are one of the pillars on which everything has to rest. Nothing less could justify them.

In due course, Emily keeled over, lay in a huddle on the floor and, the ritual subsiding into another key altogether, she snuffled and hiccupped like a child and finally went to sleep.

But when she woke up she did not go back to the other house, she did not go out to the pavement. There she sat, coming to terms. And there she would have stayed for good, very likely, if she had not been challenged.

Gerald came over to see her. Yes, he had been in before, and often, for advice. Because his coming was nothing new, we did not know that his problem, our problem, was anything new. And he didn't, at this stage.

He wanted to talk about 'a gang of new kids' for whom he felt a responsibility. They were living in the Underground, coming up in forays for food and supplies. Nothing new about that, either. A lot of people had taken to a subterranean existence, though they were felt to be a bit odd, with so many empty homes and hotels. But they could be actively wanted by the police, or criminal in some way, feeling the Underground to be safer.

These 'kids', then, were living like moles or rats in the earth, and Gerald felt he should do something about it, and he wanted Emily's support and help. He was desperate for her to rouse herself, and to energise him with her belief and her competence.

He was all appeal; Emily all listlessness and distance. The situation was comic enough. Emily, a woman, was sitting there expressing with every bit of her the dry: You want me back, you need me — look at you, a suitor, practically on your knees, but when you have me you don't value me, you take me for granted. And what about the others? Irony inspired her pose and gestures, set a gleam of intelligence that was wholly critical on her eyelids. On his side he knew he was being reproached, and that he certainly must be guilty of something or other, but he had had no idea until this moment of how deeply she felt it, how great his crime must be. He was searching his memory for behaviour which at the time he had committed it he had felt as delinquent, and which he could see now — if he really tried and he was prepared to try — as faulty… is this, perhaps, the primal comic situation?

He stuck it out. So did she. He was like a boy in his torn jersey and worn jeans. A very young man indeed was this brigand, the young chieftain. He looked tired, he looked anxious; he looked as if he needed to put his head on someone's shoulder and be told, There, there! He looked as if he needed a good feed and to have his sleep out for once. Is there any need to describe what happened? Emily smiled at last, drily, and for herself — for he could not see why she smiled, and she would not be disloyal to him in sharing it with me; she roused herself in response to the appeal which he had no idea he was making, the real one, for he went on logically explaining and exhorting. In a short time they were discussing the problems of their household like two young parents. Then off she went with him, and for some days I did not see her, and only by fits and starts did I come to understand the nature of this new problem, and what was so difficult about these particular 'kids'. Not only from Emily, did I learn: when I joined the people on the pavement everybody was talking about them; they were everyone's problem.

A new one. In understanding why this was, we householders had to come to terms with how far we had travelled from that state when we swapped tales and rumours about 'those people out there', about the migrating tribes and gangs. Once, and only a short time ago, to watch — and fearfully — a mob go past our windows was the limit of our descent into anarchy. Once, a few months ago, we had seen these gangs as altogether outside any kind of order. Now we wondered if and when we should join them. But above all the point was that when studied, when understood, their packs and tribes had structure, like those of primitive man or of animals, where in fact a strict order prevails. A short time with people living this sort of life, and one grasped the rules — all unwritten, of course, but one knew what to expect.

And this was precisely where these new children were different. No one knew what to expect. Before, the numerous children without parents attached themselves willingly to families or to other clans or tribes. They were wild and difficult, problematical, heartbreaking; they were not like the children of a stable society: but they could be handled inside the terms of what was known and understood.

Not so this new gang of 'kids'. Gangs, rather: soon we learned that there were others; it was not only in our district that such packs of very young children defined all attempts at assimilation. For they were very young. The oldest were nine, ten. They seemed never to have had parents, never to have known the softening of the family. Some had been born in the underground and abandoned. How had they survived? No one knew. But this was what these children knew how to do. They stole what they needed to live on, which was very little indeed. They wore clothes — just enough. They were… no, they were not like animals who have been licked and purred over, and, like people, have found their way to good behaviour by watching exemplars. They were not a pack either, but an assortment of individuals together only for the sake of the protection in numbers. They had no loyalty to each other, or, if so, a fitful and unpredictable loyalty. They would be hunting in a group one hour, and murdering one of their number the next. They ganged up on each other according to the impulse of the moment. There were no friendships among them, only minute-by-minute alliances, and they seemed to have no memory of what had happened even minutes before. There were thirty or forty in the pack in our neighbourhood, and for the first time I saw people showing the uncontrolled reactions of real panic. They were going to call the police, the army; they would have the children smoked out of the Underground…

A woman from the building I lived in had gone out with some food to see 'if anything could be done for them', and had met a couple on a foray. She had offered them food, which they had eaten then and there, tearing it and snapping and snarling at each other. She had waited, wanting to talk, to offer help, more food, even perhaps homes. They finished the food and went off, without looking at her. She had sat down: it was in an old warehouse near the Underground entrance, where grass and shrubs were growing up through the floor, a place both sheltered and open, so that she could run for it if she had to. And she did have to… as she sat there, she saw that all around her were the children, creeping closer. They had bows and arrows. She, unable to believe, as she put it, 'that they really were past hope' had talked quietly to them, of what she could offer, of what they risked living as they did. She understood, and with real terror, that they did not understand her. No, it was not that they did not understand speech, for they were communicating with each other in words that were recognisable, if only just — they were words, and not grunts and barks and screams. She sat on, knowing that an impulse would be enough to lift a bow up and send an arrow her way. She talked for as long as she could make herself. It was like, she said, talking into a vacuum — it was the most uncanny experience of her life. 'When I looked at them, they were only kids, that was what I couldn't get into my thick head, they were just children… but they are wicked. In the end I got up and left. And the thing that was worst of all was when one of them came running after me and tugged at my skirt. I couldn't believe it. I knew he would have stuck a knife into me as easily. He had his finger in his mouth, and he was pulling at my skirt. He was grinning. It was just an impulse, do you see? He didn't know what he was doing. The next minute there was a yell and they were all after me. I ran, I can tell you, and I only escaped by nipping into that old Park Hotel at the corner and I shook them off by barricading myself into a room on the fourth floor until dark.'

These were the children Gerald had decided must be rescued by his household. Where would they all fit in? Well, somewhere, and if they didn't, there was that other big house just across the road, and perhaps Emily and he could run the two houses between them?

There was much resistance to the idea. From everybody. Emily too. But Gerald wore them down: he always did, because after all it was he who maintained them, got food and supplies — he who took responsibility. If he said it could be done, then perhaps… and they were just 'little kids', he was right about that. 'Just little kids, how can we let them rot out there?'

I believe that the others in the house comforted themselves with 'they won't come anyway'. They were wrong. Gerald could make people believe in him. He went down the Underground, heavily armed and showing it. Yes, he was terrified… they crept from holes and corners and tunnels, they seemed able to see without much light whereas he was half-blinded by the flare of the torch. He was alone down there, and he was an enemy, since everybody was, offering them something they did not even know the words for. But he was able to make them follow him. He walked back from the Underground like a Pied Piper, and the twenty or so children who followed him ran and shouted all over the house, flinging open doors and slamming them, putting their fists through the precious polythene in the windows. Smelling food being cooked, they stood crowded together waiting for it to come their way. They saw people sitting down, children their own ages with the adults, a sight that was astonishing to them. They were subdued, it seemed; or at least their reflexes were temporarily put out. Or perhaps they were curious? They would not sit down at table — they never had, they would not sit down on the floor in an orderly way to be served, but they did stand snatching at food which was passed to them on trays, and bolted it down, their bright hard eyes watching everything, trying to understand. When there was not enough food to fill their aroused expectations, they ran shrieking and jeering through the house, destroying everything.

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 business-like 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 realised 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: I am 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 child, 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 terrorising 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 neighbourhood, 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 processes 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. Reform 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 'cleanout' 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: some thing organic, which had grown naturally, had been destroyed.