The Memoirs of a Survivor. Doris Lessing

eye among birds following their roads, while traffic and human affairs were far below. No, I was one of those who looked up, imagining how things might be up there in higher regions where windows admitted a finer air, and where front doors led to the public lifts and so down, down, to the sound of traffic, the smells of chemicals and of plant life … the street. These were not flats built by a town council, the walls scribbled with graffiti, the lifts stained with urine, the walls of lobbies smeared with excrement: these were not the vertical streets of the poor, but were built by private money, and were heavy, were settled widely over the valuable soil – the formerly valuable soil. The walls were thick, for families who could afford to pay for privacy. At the entrance was a largeish hall, carpeted; and there were even stands of flowers, artificial but handsome enough. There was a caretaker. These blocks were models of what such buildings should be for solidity and decency.

      But by that time, with so many people gone from the city, the families who lived in these blocks were not all the class for whom the buildings had been put up. Just as, for years, all through the eroding streets of the poor, empty houses had been taken over by squatters settling in families or groups of families, so that for a long time it had been impossible to say: This is a working class area, this is homogeneous – so, too, in these great buildings once tenanted only by the well-to-do, by the professional and business people, were now families or clans of poor people. What it amounted to was that a flat, a house, belonged to the people who had the enterprise to move into it. So, in the corridors and halls of the building I lived in you could meet, as in a street or a market, every sort of person.

      A Professor and his wife and his daughter lived in the twin set of rooms to mine down the corridor; immediately above me was a family of Indians with many relatives and dependants. I mention these two sets of people, because they were closest to me, and because I want to make the point that it is not as if an awareness of what went on behind walls and ceilings had been lacking before the start of – what? Here I do find difficulty, because there is nothing I can pinpoint, make definite … now I am talking not about the public pressures and events we encapsulate in words like ‘They’ ‘Them’ ‘It’ and so on, but my own private discoveries which became so urgent and which were making such a claim on me at that time. I can’t say: ‘On such and such a day I knew that behind the wall a certain quality of life was being lived.’ Not even: ‘It was in the spring of that year that …’, No, the consciousness of that other life, developing there so close to me, hidden from me, was a slow thing, coming precisely into the category of understanding we describe in the word realise, with its connotation of a gradual opening into comprehension. Such an opening, a growing, may be an affair of weeks, months, years. And of course one can ‘know’ something, and not ‘know’ it. (One can also know something and then forget it!) Looking back I can say definitely that the growth of that other life or form of being behind that wall had been at the back of my mind for a long time before I realised what it was I had been listening to, listening for. But I can’t set down a date or a time. Certainly this inner preoccupation predated the other, public, concern to which I’ve given, I hope it is not thought frivolously, the word ‘it’.

      Even at my dimmest and thickest I did know that what I was becoming conscious of, what I was on the edge of realising, was different in quality from what in fact went on around me: above my head, the lively, busy, warming family life of the Indians, who came, I believe, from Kenya; and different again from what I heard from the rooms inhabited by Professor White and his family – the wall of whose kitchen was also the wall of mine, through which, although it was a thick wall, we had news of each other.

      Not realising, or allowing myself to take in, the full implications of the fact that something was going on behind the wall of my living-room was because beyond it was a corridor. To be precise about it, what I was hearing was impossible. The sounds that come from a corridor, even a much-used one, are limited. It is for getting from one place to another: people walk along corridors singly, in pairs, in groups, talking or not talking. This corridor led from the front hall of the building, past the door into my flat, then on to the White’s front door, and so around to the flats on the east side of the ground floor of the building. Along that corridor went the Professor and the members of his family and their visitors, myself and my visitors, the two families from the east side and their visitors. So it was used a good deal. Often one had to be aware of feet and voices, distanced by the solidity of that wall, but I would say to myself: ‘That must be the Professor, surely he is early today?’ Or: ‘That sounds like Janet back from school.’

      Yet there did come that moment when I had to admit that there was a room behind that wall, perhaps more than one, even a set of rooms, occupying the same space as, or rather, overlapping with, the corridor. The realisation of what I was hearing, the knowledge that I had been aware of something of the kind for a long time, became strong in me, at the time that I knew I would almost certainly have to leave this city. Of course by now everyone had a sense of this: knowing that we would have to leave was not confined to me. This is an example of something I have already mentioned: an idea coming into everyone’s mind at the same time and without intervention from the authorities. That is to say, it was not announced through the loudspeakers, or on public platforms, in the newspapers, on the radio, the television. God knows that announcements of all kinds were continually being made: yet these were not absorbed by the populace as was this other information. On the whole people tended to disregard what the authorities said – no, that is not quite true. The public information was discussed and argued and complained about, but it had a different impact. Suppose I said it was regarded almost as an entertainment? – no, that is not right either. People did not act on what they heard, that is the point: not unless they were forced to. But this other information, coming from no one knew where, the news that was ‘in the air’, put everyone into action. For instance, weeks before the official announcement that a certain basic foodstuff was to be rationed, I ran into Mr Mehta and his wife in the hall – the old couple, the grandparents. They were dragging between them a sack of potatoes; I, too, had a supply. We nodded and smiled, mutually commending our foresight. Similarly I remember Mrs White and myself exchanging good mornings on the paved area in front of the main entrance. She said, quite casually: ‘We shouldn’t leave things too long.’ And I replied: ‘We’ve got some months yet, but we ought to be making preparations, I agree.’ We were talking about what everyone was, the need to leave this city. There had been no public intimation that people should leave. Nor, for that matter, was there ever any recognition on the part of the authorities that the city was emptying. It might be mentioned in passing, as a symptom of something else, as a temporary phenomenon, but not as the big fact in our lives.

      There was no single reason for people leaving. We knew that all public services had stopped to the south and to the east, and that this state of affairs was spreading our way. We knew that everyone had left that part of the country, except for bands of people, mostly youngsters, who lived on what they could find: crops left ungathered in the fields, animals that had escaped slaughter before everything had broken down. These bands, or gangs, had not, to begin with, been particularly violent or harmful to the few people who had refused to leave. They even ‘co-operated with the forces of law and order’, as the newscasts put it. Then, as food became more scarce, and whatever the danger was that had first set populations on the move away from it came closer, the gangs became dangerous, and when they passed through the suburbs of our city, people ran inside and stayed out of their way.

      This had been going on for months. Warnings, first by rumour, then through the news-sources, that gangs were moving through such and such an area where the inhabitants had gone behind their locked doors until the danger had passed; that new gangs were approaching this or that area, where people would be well-advised to look after their lives, and their property; that another district, formerly dangerous, was now safe again – such alarms were part of our lives.

      Where I lived, on the north side of the city, the streets were not roadways for the migrating gangs until a long time after the southern suburbs had become accustomed to them. Even when parts of our own town took anarchy for granted, we in the north talked and thought of ourselves as immune. The trouble would vanish, dissolve, take itself off … Such is the strength of what we are used to, the first two or three appearances of gangs in our northern suburbs seemed to us isolated incidents, not likely to be repeated. Slowly, we came to understand