Walking in the Shade (57 page)

All this is not as simple as it may seem.

In the dark, with watering eyes, and very sick, I considered certain facts. I was what is known as an easy touch. There were good reasons for this. First, my parents, who even at their poorest gave ten percent, as enjoined by the Bible, to charity. I remember exchanges about this ten percent.

My father, testily, laughing: ‘But we don't have any income. When the money for the crops comes, it goes straight to Land Bank to reduce our debt.'

My mother: ‘Well, I suppose we could say we never do have any income, but that means we'd never give anything.'

Should my father's war pension be included when they reckoned that ten percent? What about the money she made selling chickens and eggs to the store at Banket?

They gave money every year to the League for Distressed Gentlewomen, a charity for indigent seamen, and another for the dependents of World War I soldiers. I was told I should give ten percent of my pocket money, of the money I earned for the guinea fowl I took to the store, and of the money I earned writing advertisements. I felt permanently guilty because I didn't do this: but had I not decided against the existence of God?

Ever since I had left respectable middle-class ways, when I left Frank Wisdom, and thrown in my lot with the comrades, I had been with generous people: in my experience, the communists were always that. And, too, my early days in London coincided with a general contempt for money, probably because none of us had any. Since I had earned any money at all I was being asked for ‘loans'. A lot were for young men. Poor young men are often helped by older women, as is right and proper, for it is a psychological need of both parties, and this doesn't have to have much, or anything, to do with sex. I could by now make a good list of ‘debtors' if I wanted to. I did not regret any of this but was furious with myself for giving that unpleasant young woman anything at all. But I had had to give it to her, and that is why now I was lying in the dark, sick and hot and cross, contemplating my character. Now, it is easy to write insightful thoughts about one's youthful character decades later, but I was even then glimpsing something basic about myself. Several times in my life I've done this: had a glimmering of understanding about myself long before I properly understood. I determined then and there that if I had this weakness in my nature, then at least it would be under control. I would, when settled in the house, actually choose someone for whom I would be responsible: it would be my choice, my decision, taking control:—acting instead of reacting. The house was going to be too big—so I thought then. Peter, in mid-teens, was already behaving as the young did all through the sixties: he was sometimes an honorary child in other families, just as his friends were with me rather than with their own parents. Soon that house would be full of adolescents.

That incident of the unlikeable young woman presaged more than I could know. For one thing, her manner, a generalised snarl of contempt. She embodied a rancorous envy, and this was already beginning to interest me—it interests me even more now. She clearly felt she had been promised something she hadn't been given. Whole generations of young people have had this as a primal drive. ‘
They
have cheated me out of my due.' This one, with her load of unfathered children, was a victim, only that; her situation had nothing to do with any fault of hers, and she was entitled to loathe the world. Her very existence was an indictment, and yes, I had just begun to understand how much of what I said and, particularly, thought was that: The Indictment.
J'accuse
. I accuse the world.

And there was the way she spat out, ‘You are rich and successful.' Choosing me because my name had been in the newspapers. There it was, our national vice, envy, the tall poppy syndrome.

I moved. It was no big deal. As in my youth—that is, when I lived with Frank Wisdom and then Gottfried Lessing, and we moved all the time, thinking nothing of it—I took books, a couple of beds, a table, bedding, the curtains, kitchen things. I left all the ugly furniture behind.

 

So. That was the fifties, as I experienced the decade, which slopped over at both ends—1949 to 1962—as decades tend to do. I moved into the new house in the autumn of 1962. Just ahead was the famous winter of '62-'63, when there was a nationwide freeze for seven weeks. There was one bad fog too; not as bad as the terrible dark fogs of the bad old days, which had been outwitted by the Clean Air Act, but my dazzling white walls lost their innocence. This was not because the new window frames had been badly made but because I cannot endure shut windows. All the pipes froze, up and down the street, and in all the other streets in Somers Town, but not mine, so I was supplying water to No. 58 when the standpipe the Water Board put at the corner of the street froze too. I wrote about this freeze in my little book
Particularly Cats
.

I gave a great noisy housewarming party and asked all the people who had worked on the house. At its height, the man from three doors down came into the street and shouted abuse at me. Thinking, Well, I'm living in a working-class street, do as the Romans do, I went out onto the steps, put my hands on my hips, and shouted at him to shut up, stop being a spoil-sport, why didn't he come and join the fun?

Peter and his friend, witnesses of this unladylike behaviour, were upset.

‘Quite right, dear,' says Lil Pearce, out of her window. ‘You don't want to take any nonsense from that nasty old thing. And you don't want him in your house either.'

 

A few months later I got a Notice of Compulsory Purchase from the council. That is, you have to sell your house to whichever authority demands it. I managed to spin it all out until almost the end of the sixties, but there came a day when I was standing with a representative of the council in an empty room, to deliver the keys. My mother's daughter could not have handed over the house in a less than sparkling condition, and it had been scrubbed from top to bottom. The man, full of official bonhomie, congratulated me on the clean house.

No sooner had we left than the council workmen fixing the house in the next street came in and stripped my house of all the radiators, the pipes, the boilers. Lil Pearce rang me and then the council. The council then set a watchman on the front of the house, from six every evening until six in the morning, but left the back of the house open, so that the workmen continued to drop in to help themselves to anything they might have overlooked. This went on for weeks. When Lil Pearce told the council that the unguarded back of the house was admitting thieves, who were their own workmen, the reply was that they would look into the matter.

The house was left empty for eight years, while the council debated what to do with the area, continually changing their minds. I could have taken them to court, but what sensible person can be bothered with that sort of thing? I have lived under Camden Council now for thirty-odd years, watching dazzling levels of incompetence and corruption. I was writing down what I observed—an Indictment—beginning with the treatment of the people in Somers Town being ‘rehoused' against their will. Then I had to ask myself, What is this obsession? And I understood that this was a famous socialist borough, and they were loudly proud of themselves, just like the communist countries, boastful and swaggering; but as with the drunken braggart dressed up in smart clothes, you saw he had forgotten to button himself up, and there was the truth of the matter, a hairy red warty smelly arse. Why was I expecting any better? Because of the word ‘socialist', of course. Would I be keeping this bitter record if it were a Tory council? Certainly not; that would be: ‘
But what can you expect?
' So—
basta
. Enough. Stop it. People my age are always finding themselves in this situation: A young person is looking at you, trying not to show incredulity. The tactful, embarrassed query: ‘But, Doris, tell me—you say you expect a socialist borough to be better than a Tory one? I don't think I understand.' What he or she understands is that here is just another old bat with bees in her bonnet. And you are understanding that yet again, decades—a couple of centuries?—of idealism, of optimism, have disappeared as if they had never been.

We were all still on the escalator Progress, the whole world ascending towards prosperity. Did anyone challenge this happy optimism? I don't remember it. At the end of a century of grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state; passionate dreams of utopias and wonderlands and perfect cities; attempts at communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes—after all this, would any of us have believed that most people in the world would settle gratefully for a little honesty, a little competence in government?

 

For about six years in the sixties I proved my rapport with the times by becoming a housemother—now, that is a sixties' word—for adolescents or young adults who either lived at 60 Charrington Street or came and went. All of them were in some kind of trouble: were ‘disturbed', were being seduced by drugs, were alcoholic, were having serious breakdowns, were known to the police. This was, for that particular time, my growing point, what I was doing, though I was writing hard too, notably
The Four-Gated City
.

The sixties are seen glamorously; seen, sometimes wrongly, I think, as the starting point for all kinds of behaviour that in fact began in the fifties—or before. But there is one thing that did start in the sixties: drugs. Drugs arrived from the East, available to everyone, and this had never before happened in our culture. I believe that the long view, the perspectives given by enough time, will reveal that this was the important fact about the sixties. ‘They are quite harmless really,' people are still saying. A friend from Central Asia was saying then, ‘You people in the West have never seen these drugs. It's all new to you. You are like a child trying to pet a snake: Look at the pretty snake. If you had lived in a culture where drugs have been endemic for centuries, you'd know that it is only the failures, the losers, the hopelessly poor, who use drugs.'

My view of the sixties is jaundiced by what I was living through. And we are living in its aftermath. So many people landed in mental hospitals and prisons, and there are sudden silences in talk when someone who committed suicide is being remembered, and every week comes news of a far too early death.

But that is the dark view, from the shaded side of the street, for only this week I heard a man now middle-aged say, ‘That was the time when everything was possible, we were going to move mountains, we were going to change the world. And what people forget is that there was this great upwelling of vitality from the working class and the lower middle class—it was the grammar schools that did it. Everywhere you looked, there were grammar school boys, like me, often in the arts. It was the first time this has happened in this country.'

But usually, when I hear someone talking nostalgically about the sixties—‘If you remember it, you weren't there'—what comes into my mind is a line from a poem I wrote when I was very young, not more than a girl: ‘When I look back I seem to remember singing.' Well, yes, that seems to be about it.

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. Her most recent works include
Love, Again
and
Under My Skin
, the first volume of her autobiography. Doris Lessing lives in London.

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N
OVELS

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

Love, Again

“Canopus in Argos: Archives” series

Re: Colonized Planet 5-Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

The Sirian Experiments

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

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

S
HORT
S
TORIES

African Stories

Volume I This Was the Old Chief's Country

Volume II The Sun Between Their Feet

Stories

Volume I To Room Nineteen

Volume II The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories

The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (U.S.), London Observed (U.K.)

O
PERA

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

P
OETRY

Fourteen Poems

N
ONFICTION

In Pursuit of the English

Particularly Cats

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

Particularly Cats…and Rufus

African Laughter

Under My Skin

The Doris Lessing Reader