The Grandmothers. Doris Lessing

noisy boys, slept in with Phyllis Chadwick, in her room. Another room was used by Phyllis’s grandfather, who was very old and dying of something or other. Victoria didn’t want to know. She had had enough of illness and dying. The two boys had been in the little room but Bessie was taking exams and needed quiet. It seemed Phyllis didn’t deserve quiet, and had to put up with the boys: it was this thought that persuaded Victoria to be grateful for what she was being offered. She reported back at school, and the teachers said she could stay an extra year, to make up. No more was said about scholarships and university – she was too far behind. She could go to commercial college and take book-keeping. She was good at figures.

      Being too old for the class she was in isolated her. She was alone too because of her experience of illness and responsibility. The others in her class seemed like children to her, and the whole school had shrunk, as people and places do. The playground, which on that long-ago night had seemed to her a vast and dangerous place, with shadows full of muggers and knives, she now saw was a pathetic paltry place, so small that at break there wasn’t room for the children to play. Victoria knew now how bad a school this was. That playground summed up everything for her. Grey cement and damp old brick walls, you’d think it was where prisoners were let out to exercise. Good enough for us, she thought, bitter, and then, I bet Thomas and Edward don’t go to a school where the playground is like a prison yard. Yes, they were taken swimming once a week in the summer, but that was about it. Good enough for class 5 people. Good enough for the under class. That’s us. She got this language from Phyllis Chadwick’s pamphlets and social-working guides.

      She knew she should be grateful to Phyllis Chadwick, who was a good woman. Without her, she would have been taken into Care. ‘You must think of us as your family,’ said Phyllis. ‘You must call me Auntie Phyl.’

      Now, coming home from school, Victoria made detours to pass the Staveney house, and one day saw a tall, fair boy coming up the pavement and turn in at the gate. She thought: Edward, and yearned for that long ago kindness but saw it was Thomas. He did look very like his brother. He noticed Victoria, frowned, and went in. Victoria did not at all resemble the skinny little black girl, with her sticking-out plaits. She was tall and slender, and Phyllis Chadwick had sent her to a hairdresser, who was a friend, and now Victoria had a neat soft Afro round a pretty face that had a pointed chin and a full mouth that Bessie told her was her best feature, ‘Wow, now make the most of that.’ But Victoria thought her big eyes were her best feature.

      Thomas had not been at their school for three years. He was at the kind of school people like the Staveneys would send their sons to: she knew enough to know that.

      Now she buckled down to exams, and sometimes sneaked looks at the Staveney house, but she did not see Thomas.

      She passed her exams well enough, but nothing like as well as had been expected of her, before her aunt’s illness. She at once found a job. Mr Pat, who had always liked her, said that his brother, who had a little dress shop, needed an assistant, and someone to keep his books. She would earn enough to give something to Phyllis Chadwick for her keep, but very far was she from a place of her own, and this was what she dreamed of, always. She was not the only one. Phyllis herself had two rumbustious boys in her room every night and, while sometimes they were separated for everyone’s peace’s sake, one sleeping in the lounge, and one beside Phyllis, the two of them could make the little flat sound like a fairground with noise. Bessie, who was going to be a nurse and needed space for her studies, used the table in the kitchen, where the light was good, but was always being interrupted by the boys. She and Victoria were friends, but Bessie knew that without Victoria she could have had a room to herself. The old man, Phylliss grandfather, occupied a whole room, with his little television and radio and piles of magazines. He had had a stroke and was part paralysed, and just as for Victoria’s aunt, nurses and home helps came in and out when Victoria and Phyllis and Bessie were out working. He sat in a big chair, his body dwindling away into cavities and lumps, under a great head that looked like a lion’s. Beside him on the floor was a flask always filled with strong-smelling dark yellow pee. There was a commode in a corner. His old thin knobbly legs stuck out in front, on a stool, and there were cracks in the black skin, which seemed to have grey ash in them. Phyllis oiled his feet and legs, but that didn’t help. Everyone secretly thought that it would be best if he died and took his miserable and unenjoyed life away, and then there would be a room, a whole room, where the boys could make their mess and noise and shut the door.

      Bessie was good to the old man: she saw it as useful for her training. Victoria dutifully did what she had to do, emptying the urine flask, and sometimes the commode, but she hated it. Phyllis, who worked long hours, and had four youngsters and the old man to see to, was sometimes able to sit with him a little. He said that no one cared about him.

      Phyllis said to Victoria, ‘We need a serious talk, girl, so when will that be?’

      It would have to be Sunday, and on Sunday evening when the boys were getting up to mischief outside in the streets, with their gang, Bessie absenting herself behind a shut door, Victoria and Phyllis closed his door on the old man, who complained. ‘But it will be only for a short minute, Grandad,’ Phyllis told him.

      Victoria had decided Phyllis was going to ask her to leave: there was not a reason in the world why Victoria should be here at all, adding to an over-burdened woman’s troubles.

      ‘Make us both a good strong cup of coffee, and then come and sit down,’ said Phyllis. She fitted her bulk into a sofa corner, and put her feet up. She seemed tempted to drop off to sleep then and there.

      ‘Victoria,’ she said, ‘I know you took that job in such a haste because you wanted to give me something, but it makes me sad, girl, you’re not doing as well for yourself as you could do.’

      Behind this directive, which was delivered in the manner of one who has been planning words, in Phyllis’s case for several nights, lay a story which neither Victoria nor Bessie knew anything about. Not even her grandfather knew half of it.

      Phyllis Chadwick’s grandparents came to London after the Second World War on the wave of immigrants invited to take on the dirty work which English labourers did not want. They came to streets they had imagined paved with gold and found – but all that has been well documented. A hard life, hard times, and the young couple had two children, one Phyllis’s mother, a lively rebellious girl who got herself pregnant aged fourteen, and had a botched abortion which left her, she was told, sterile, and she embarked on what she thought would be consequence-free sex, but became pregnant again, with Phyllis. Phyllis’s father, for she must have had one, never made himself known, and her mother kept the information to herself. The very young mother and child took shelter with parents who sermonised, but saw them fed. Phyllis did remember her as a shouting screaming mother, in fact a bit demented, who could disappear for days on some binge or spree, returning sullen and silent to lecturing parents, who had had to look after Phyllis. She got herself killed in a brawl. Phyllis was relieved. She was then looked after by her grandfather, who was now there, just behind that door, from where came loud television noises and radio (he often had both on at once) and her grandmother, who was kind but strict, because of the bad example of her mother. ‘You have bad blood,’ she was told, every day of her life. Phyllis worked hard at school, determined never to be drunken or vagrant or brawling, and was ambitious to get her own roof and her own family. She passed exams and then had a brief lapse from grace, as her grandparents saw it, telling her she was going the way of her mother, because she did not stick with one job, but took many, one after the other, from a feeling of power, of freedom. She was a large sensible girl, pretty enough, and worked at check-outs, sold shoes in an Oxford Street shop, served food at the big trade fairs in Earl’s Court, was a waitress in a coffee shop, and was having the time of her life. The money – yes, that was wonderful, it was fairy gold arriving in her hands every week, but what she was earning was the liberty to do as she liked. She stayed in a job just as long as it suited her, and then the best moment of all was the interview for the next: she was liked, chosen out of sometimes dozens of applicants. There was something about her employers trusted. While her grandparents grumbled and prophesied a feckless future and a disgraceful old age, she felt she was dancing on air, owned her self and her future. But then she met her fate, the father of Bessie, though not of the boys, and had to buckle