The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing Page B

at that young face, such a troubling mixture of the child and the young girl, and could see in it her solitary four-year-old self. Emily. I wondered if she remembered anything of her memories, or experiences, that were being ‘run’ like a film behind my living-room wall, which at the moment- the sun lighting a slant of air and the white paint where the flowery pattern of the paper maintained its frail but stubborn being - was a transparent screen: this was one of the moments when the two worlds were close together, when it was easy to remember that it was possible simply to walk through. I sat and looked at the wall, and fancied I heard sounds that certainly were not part of ‘my’ world at all: a poker being energetically used in a grate, small feet running, a child’s voice.
    I wondered if I should say something to Emily, ask her questions? But I did not dare, that was the truth. I was afraid of her. It was my helplessness with her I feared.
    She was wearing her old jeans that were much too tight for her, a bulging little pink shirt.
    ‘You ought to have some new clothes,’ I said.
    ‘Why? Don’t you think I look nice, then?’ The awful “brightness’ of it; but there was dismay as well. .. she had gathered herself together, ready to withstand criticism.
    ‘You look very nice. But you’ve grown out of those clothes.’
    ‘Oh dear, I didn’t realize it was as bad as that.’
    And she took herself away from me and lay on the long brown sofa with Hugo beside her. She was not actually sucking her thumb, but she might just as well have been.
    I ought to describe her attitude to me? But it is difficult. I don’t think she often saw me. When brought to me first by that man, whoever he was, she saw an elderly person, saw me very clearly, sharp, minutely, in detail. But since then I don’t think she had for one moment, not in all the weeks she had been with me, seen more than an elderly person, with the characteristics to be expected of one. She had no idea of course of the terror I felt on her account, the anxiety, the need to protect. She did not know that the care of her had filled my life, water soaking a sponge … but did I have the right to complain? Had I not, like all the other adults, talked of ‘the youth’, ‘the youngsters’, ‘the kids’ and so on. Did I not still, unless I made an effort not to? Besides, there is little excuse for the elderly to push the young away from them into compartments of their minds labelled: ‘This I do not understand’, or ‘This I will not understand’ - for every one of them has been young … should I be ashamed of writing this commonplace when so few middle-aged and elderly people are able to vivify it by practice? When so few are able to acknowledge their memories? The old have been young; the young have never been old … these remarks or some like them have been in a thousand diaries, books of moral precepts, commonplace books, proverbs and so on, and what difference have they made? Well, I would say not very much … Emily saw some dry, controlled, distant old person. I frightened her, representing to her that unimaginable thing, old age. But for my part, she, her condition, was as close to me as my own memories.
    When she went to lie on the sofa, her back to me, she was sulking. She was making use of me to check her impulse to step forward away from childhood into being a girl, a young girl with clothes and mannerisms and words regulated precisely to that condition.
    Her conflict was great, and so her use of me was inordinate and tiresome, and it all went on for some weeks, while she complained that I criticized her appearance, and it was my fault she was going to have to spend money on clothes, and that she did or did not like how she looked - that she did not want to wear nothing but trousers and shirts and sweaters for the whole of her life, and wanted ‘something decent to wear at last’; but that since my generation had made such a mess of