Four Gated City (100 page)
By the end of the evening I was in a condition of euphoria. I don’t remember another like it. All my life I had watched the powers of government grow, the liberties of ordinary people lessen; I had felt the slow tightening of control in every department of life. The air got steadily darker, more oppressive, claustrophobic. This government we were under whose standards were all to do with money, the making of it, the spending of it, the control of it, but whose slogans were all of service and self-sacrifice, had created an authoritarianism that governed as much by atmosphere as by law-and here we sat laughing, imagining how, in human beings themselves, were growing (faster every day, accelerated perhaps by the radiations and poisons we were subjecting ourselves to) powers which could make all this machinery useless, out of date, obsolete. I remember the evening ended on the thought that all existing forms of government were as irrelevant as dinosaurs: government by concealment, lies, trickery, even stupidity was-dead. The old right of the individual human conscience which must know better than any authority, secular or religious, had been
restored, but on a higher level, and in a new form which was untouchable by any legal formulas. We quoted to each other, Blake’s ‘What now exists was once only imagined’ - and did not, for once, choose to remember the dark side of the human imagination.
I went to bed in good humour, full of optimism. I woke up as I had done the day before, sullen and raging, like a trapped animal. I was amazed at my reaction. I reminded myself of the day before, but that did not help today. I hated my mother and I hated Martha, in waves of a pure resentful hatred that seemed to come out of the air, flow over me, and fade out leaving behind my usual wry affection for them. The last two evenings seemed like excursions into mania and yet I couldn’t see them as fantasy, or ‘imagination’ or speculation, because both old ladies had said, had repeated, that this is what they had asked me to talk about. But it was only when I cajoled or manipulated my own mind into saying: ‘Well, it’s an agreeable sort of game’, that I was able to push aside the hatred, and go on with what I wanted to do-think about it all quietly. For I knew what the hate was. I had spent so much of my time fighting; to run our community was hard enough, because of the increasingly authoritarian pressures from outside; and behind me was always my early childhood, which even now I can’t remember without pain. But I knew very well what it was Lynda and Martha wanted. And I didn’t want to have to fight, and expose myself and take risks-yes, I’m sure you are smiling, as you look back at what has happened. But I was hating them for reminding me that there was still fighting to be done, and I knew that was why.
Through the afternoon I sat by a window looking out over a soft English meadow with elm trees standing above an invisible river. On the table where the maid had put the tea-tray was a newspaper with its usual load of savagery, violence and horror. There was no connection between that soft English scene and the newspaper: or none that I could make. But sitting here I reminded myself that the euphoric talk of the night before had begun with their asking me to consider how a contemporary government would react on finding out that a number of its citizens had mental capacities which for a start (and considering nothing else) made all ‘official secrecy’ obsolete. They had not asked me to enjoy an adolescent hour or so of imagining the overthrow and discomfiture of authority. Well, I sat and considered. And what I was able to foresee frightened me.
Again I went to dinner with them sulking. They teased me. We discussed my psychological reactions of the day before, and of that day, and the reasons for them. My mother pointed out to me that accepting the evidence of her own senses against a climate of orthodoxy had cost her her health and, for long periods at a stretch, her sanity. It had taken her most of a lifetime. Martha said that in her case it had taken a decade of private experimenting without anything to guide her but hunches and a naturally tough constitution. But she thought she had been lucky not to damage herself permanently.
I had been subjected to ‘dangerous thoughts’ for only three days … I saw they were apologizing. They were tender. They were humorously appealing-there wasn’t much time, there wasn’t time, they kept repeating. Time for what? But I didn’t ‘catch’ this plea for attention to what they really wanted to say. We went on talking on the lines of the previous evening instead, considering previous periods of history when governments, churches, or courts might have suppressed certain evidence and why. (Again, these ideas will be commonplace to you: I am reminding you that in the mid-’seventies they came as a shock to an ‘educated’ person.) We spent time on the suppression of witchcraft in England. The old ladies had interesting things to say about it. (Check Key.) We drifted off again into a long fantasy about what would happen if any street in London were taken-it should be a fairly short one, where people knew each other at least by sight-and a rumour was spread that in such and such a house lived people who could hear what others thought, could see through walls, ‘knew’ when lies were told. I remember we talked about this as if it were a novel my father might have written, if he had not given up writing novels. We concluded it would not be long before this household found they had to move, if they were not locked up on some pretext-probably for creating public unrest and disorder.
I understood that my mentors were quite pleased the conversation had got on to these lines when my mother asked if I thought that they (herself, her associates) were wrong to work in secrecy. I agreed after difficulty that they were right; knowing that without the slow process of the last three days, when I was told things bit by bit, while my whole organism reacted against it, I would have immediately made statements about irresponsibility, about sharing information for progress, etc., and.
That night, they told me that a certain scientist working on orthodox lines on ESP had been approached by his government, which wished to employ potential telepaths in espionage. And it was in the early ‘sixties that the Russians were already talking about the use of astronauts with telepathic powers-legitimate, but what government was likely to stop at that?
They told me that ‘all of us’ - meaning not only the doctors and people working quietly in the hospitals, but friends outside, regarded their work, their experiments on themselves as a kind of trust vested in them on behalf of mankind. No vow or promise or oaths were asked for or given: but it was assumed among them that the nature of authority in our time was such that it could not be trusted with such a temptation. Not only for their own sakes, but to protect others (people who perhaps did not know their own potentialities) from danger, they must keep quiet, work in silence, secrecy and trust, to protect a developing human capacity from the wrong sort of attention.
It was an appeal for my secrecy. So I understood it. I remember that
I would have been childishly pleased if they had asked for promises, vows, that kind of thing. They asked me to consider that every kind of secret cult or group, let alone institutions like armies, law courts, religions, asked for oaths and promises: betrayal is implicit in formal oaths. Promises had value only between friends, when they did not need to be made at all: an oath that was worth anything had already been proved unnecessary.
I went to bed exhalted: I woke like an animal stung by wasps. Now I expected the reaction and was able to study it. My mind watched my emotions rage, as happens when one falls into a fit of being in love, or disliking someone, against one’s will.
Towards the hour of dusk over the water meadows, I regained my common sense and began thinking about what might seem to you the most interesting thing of all… that I had asked no questions, not even the ones that screamed out to be asked. I had been informed, with details, that in my own country, under my own nose, groups of people amounting by now to several dozen, had been seriously experimenting for years in what used to be known as the ‘occult’. Had they come up with anything interesting, I might have asked; particularly as no week passed then without forecasts of Armageddons or freshly minted Paradises.
I hadn’t asked because it was as if my brain had been numbed or jammed with an excess of new information: each meeting with my mother and Martha was a switchback ride through new information and my own emotions.
That night at dinner I asked the obvious question, and was answered simply by my mother: well yes, for one thing, it looks as if this country is going to have some kind of accident-probably fairly soon, but we don’t know when.
We discussed this for the rest of the evening. I remember (with interest, to put it mildly) my state of mind. I thought: ‘Well, of course, it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime.’ And: ‘Everyone has been unconsciously expecting something of the sort.’ And ‘Right, well in that case one ought to …’
My mother, as far as she knew, was the first to have this premonition, in the shape of a ‘vision’. Then others had had it too. The trouble was while the ‘visions’ or the dreams, were consistent with each other, the time was hard to pinpoint. ‘This region of the mind knows nothing about our scale of time.’ It looked as if the catastrophe would involve radio-activity. The country would be uninhabitable for some time. There would be great loss of life.
I went to bed making vague plans for my friends and family; and woke up in the morning, in a state that wasn’t (like the previous three mornings) a sullen anger; but of astonishment at myself. I could not believe what I had been told. It is simple to write that. I don’t mean that I thought Lynda and Martha were lying, or that they were
misguided. I mean, specifically, that while I accepted what they said, I couldn’t take it in. Nine-tenths of me, at least, did not believe in it,
because they had not heard what Lynda had said, and what I replied. I
was helped by remembering Dostoievsky’s account of the man who was to be hanged next morning. He slept well, and dreamed with enjoyment. He ate breakfast and was taken to the scaffold watching the sky. the streets about him. as if he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had plenty of time. And when he was reprieved, all his resolutions on the way to the scaffold to live differently, to maintain this sense that time was a treasure-house and every minute precious-were forgotten. He returned at once to humanity’s usual somnolent condition.
Several of the persons that made up his personality had never heard the news that he was to be hanged. Probably they would still be ‘enjoying themselves’ as the trap fell.
As an interesting psychological fact I tell you that throughout the day after I heard from Lynda-who I trusted and believed-that my country had at best a handful of years to live, I was considering (which I had been doing for some weeks now) how to buy a cottage across the lane from us as extension for the infants’ nursery, and what local sales it would be useful to attend so as to furnish it cheaply.
At the same time I was thinking of what I had heard, trying to ‘take it in’.
Well, I didn’t take it in for some time. I kept saying to myself: what you look at now will, fairly soon, be as dead as the corpse of a poisoned mouse-Lynda’s phrase. Meanwhile I was happily admiring tree, sky, the flowers in old Butts’s garden when I went to visit my cousin Gwen and her children. I found myself discussing the breeding of a new stock of cows on one of our farms. I remember how I spent a whole morning putting a splint on a puppy’s front paw: then suddenly I found myself crying. At least part of me had ‘taken it in’. It began to hit slowly, as the news seeped through to all parts of me.
It was this problem that I took back. I and Martha; who had told me that four people among us had been working quietly, and were ready to help in the task of telling our friends what was likely to happen in a way that would forestall panic, or the kind of derision that is a cousin to panic and stops people thinking.
We didn’t use any of the currently acceptable methods, like calling a meeting, or sending out a circular. For this kind of thing was not in the spirit of ‘movement’ which wasn’t one; and which people ‘joined’ by liking one of us, and settling somewhere close and sharing a house. After a period of not knowing what to do, we behaved as we would for any other problem, and simply began talking to friends. I don’t know what I expected, or was afraid of. Some sort of rushing about perhaps, or an angry rebellion at Fate. But nothing happened. Quite soon we were talking about a probable contamination of our country, what to
do, how to save people. But there were a lot of cults and movements active during the last days; a lot of ‘prophecies’ and forecasts, some accurate, some not, were in the air. When you came to talk to people, you found a great many confidently expected some form of disaster, but were not doing anything about it. Well, what could one do? That is, if one was trying to get more people to listen than just one’s friends.
And there were the authorities to consider. It really is hard to convey a ‘feel’ of those authorities. Now everything is so stratified and codified and hard-necessary, of course, when half the world is waste land, and there are so many millions of the homeless, contaminated and hungry to handle. We have an administration which is in feet exactly the same from country to country, though the divisions between them are so sharp and hostile. The administration is privileged and comparatively free. The hordes of human refuse have nothing but what charity can do for them. But we do all know more or less where we are. Then the Government, or any kind of authority, had to be handled like a hysterical person, or a mentally feeble one. It was touchy. It took umbrage. It bestowed favours and withdrew them! The one thing we could not expect from it was consistency or ordinary common sense.
And with the authorities (even worse than with oneself and one’s friends) one would be up against that reaction I had experienced when I was wondering how to buy a new cottage economically and furnish it cheaply, the morning after I had heard of the coming disaster. This psychological reaction would be of necessity a hundred times worse in an authority, a body of people, than in individuals or small groups. And besides, we couldn’t say anything more definite than: it looks as if this disaster will take place in between five and ten years’ time; that it will be pretty bad; but that nearer the time accuracy will be greater because some of what people have ‘gathered’ indicates that a good many will listen and escape with their families.
