Shikasta. Doris Lessing

particularly for children. At best they reinforced a low level of ethic – kindness to animals, for instance – but the worst was inherent in the sheer fact of the infinite repetition.

      Ventriloquism was popular. A person with a bland and conforming appearance and personality developed a subsidiary personality and presented it as ventriloquist’s dummy. This other personality could be of their own species, or variations on the animal theme. A popular one was a canine, endearing in appearance, who was clever in methods of successful dishonesty. In every episode of his story this animal stole, lied, and cheated, was able always to cover up after a failure, to deceive and boast and flatter and manipulate. It was also inordinately greedy for food. This creature was no major criminal or monster, only a small-scale trickster and, if you accepted the premise, it was quite funny. Of course, it was possible to find it humorous at all only in times of almost total corruption.

      Children were identified with these ‘unreal’ figures, which could never be taken for anything but dolls, or puppets, and which were particularly useful to take as secondary selves, simply because they did not demand the levels of self-criticism which would be demanded by creatures like themselves, who were ‘real’.

      A certain group of children, much neglected by parents, who were all working, and who left them almost entirely to themselves, developed a private world in which each one of them was this puppet, the half-grown dog with a typically flattering name, Crafty Collie. These children lived more and more inside the world they had created, taking, like their exemplar, to small ways of trickery, cheating, and lying – this in a motivated, patterned way, for all they had to do every afternoon was to press a button in order to see a programme for their alternative selves to follow. They took to more intricate crimes. Soon they had a leader. She was female, a bright resourceful child of eleven years. She it was who kept them together, who made sure they watched the succeeding episodes of the ventriloquist’s dramas, and who translated into action the messages of Crafty Collie. This went on for three years, while the children became young adults, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Their crimes, at this time when nearly everybody engaged in some form of cheating or stealing, were not remarkable. They stole from shops, broke into houses, kept themselves supplied with money and goods. After every escapade, the group would gather in a ritual where what they had done was played out in terms of their pattern.

      In the course of breaking into a house a murder was committed, almost accidentally, certainly without any sense of it mattering.

      They were caught, and details of the cult were made public. Photographs of these young criminals, and of the room they used – in an empty house, decorated with pictures and models of Crafty Collie – were reproduced everywhere. When the doctors and psychiatrists examined the youngsters, it was found that their identification with the puppet was not affecting them more than half the time, for each had an ordinary personality, with its aims, beliefs, and standards, quite different from the other personality, which was a group one.

      It was the girl who pointed out that only a month before Crafty Collie had been shown as tormenting and teasing a crazy old woman before knocking her down and leaving her apparently unconscious, reproved of course by his creator or other self, who always played the – ineffective – role of conscience to this secondary personality’s excesses. Or successes.

      The whole gang was tried, in a way not used before at that particular time, in an exemplary way: for child crime had become so prevalent that people were becoming more afraid of children than they were of adults.

      The girl was in a special position as self-confessed, or self-proclaimed leader, for she was proud of her role as mother of this gang.

      If Taufiq had been where he ought to have been, his role was to defend these children as victims of indoctrination. Whether this indoctrination was deliberate on the part of the authorities, or the result of ignorance, was not, could not be – he would have argued – any concern of the children, who had to suffer the consequences. In other words Taufiq, John, would have inspired a public campaign to get an extraordinarily lax and indifferent public to recognize where, when, and how the most sophisticated indoctrinational methods ever devised were being used on a population captive to them.

      Further, if Taufiq had been able to fit into these events, his particular personality would have influenced these young people in ways not otherwise attainable. All had been neglected, none had been given any exemplar of worth to identify with. He would have been able to direct them in ways that would lead to their eventually gaining enough inner freedom to make real choices about what their lives would be.

      But now, what one individual could have accomplished must be spread among several. I arranged that a group of lawyers not previously inspired to work of public responsibility take this case: they could be expected to do something at least of what was needed. As for influencing the youngsters, I saw to it that each one would come into contact with those who could help them, to some extent: a child-care officer with certain characteristics, a warder – three were sent to prison – a doctor, social workers.

      The task with these young people took much longer than I expected or had planned for. It was not the most successful of my endeavours. The girl was not able to recover from a sojourn in prison calculated only to harden and deform: she came out a real criminal, soon made an emotional transfer to one of the extreme political sects which flourished then, and was killed in an exploit that could be characterized as part terrorist and part for gain. She was not twenty years old. Her rehabilitation had therefore to be reserved until after her entry into Zone Six.

      INDIVIDUAL THREE (Workers’ Leader)

      A common type throughout the Century of Destruction in all parts of Shikasta, but the variation I am reporting on here was produced by the Northwest fringes and played a key part in the social structure. It was a stabilizing one, and that this was so was felt by many as a bitter paradox, since their ideological birth was nearly always in the philosophy of transforming society completely, quickly, and into a sort of ‘paradise’ not uninfluenced by the local ‘sacred’ literature.

      This individual was born into the chaotic conditions intensified by World War I. There was a small class living in affluence, but the bulk of the population was in poverty. He was an infant, a child, and then a young adult, among people who never had enough to eat, were cold, ill-housed, and often out of work. Of his immediate family three died of illnesses due to malnutrition. His mother was worn out by work and ill-feeling before she was thirty.

      He lived, from the moment he came to consciousness of his situation, and that was early, in a state of anguished incredulity about the hardships of the people around him. This undersized urchin would wander the streets, upheld through cold, hunger, and the bitterness of injustice by visions and dreams. Each man or woman or shrunken child he passed seemed to him to have a double, another alternate being … what could be, what could have been … He would gaze, exalted, into the face of one, and address him silently: ‘You poor exhausted thing, you could be anything, it is not your fault …’ He would watch his sister, a girl exhausted with anaemia who had been working since she was fourteen, with no hope for anything but a future as narrow as her mother’s, and he would be saying to her inwardly, ‘You don’t know what you are, what you could be’ – and it was as if he had put his arms around not only her, but the poor and the suffering everywhere. He cherished the twisted and the deformed with his gaze, he sustained the hungry and the desperate as he whispered, ‘You have it in you to be a marvel! Yes, you are a marvel and a wonder and you don’t know it!’ And he was making promises, fierce inward vows, to himself, and to them.

      He simply could not believe that this extreme of deprivation was possible in a country – he saw the problem in terms of his own country, even his own town, for ‘the world’ to him was names in newspapers – that described itself as rich, and headed a world empire.

      He was informed beyond most of his fellows, because his father was a workers’ representative, insofar as his hard life allowed him time and energy to be. There were books in his home, and ideas apart from those to do with the struggle to feed and clothe his family.

      He was in the army five years, in World War II. His predominant emotion of marvelling incredulity that people could inflict such suffering on others,