The Memoirs of a Survivor

There was a woman fitting lenses to spectacle frames. She had an oculist's chart on the wall, and according to its findings was handing out second-hand spectacles to people who stood in a line and who, one after another, took from her a pair that she considered suitable. An oculist from the old days; and she, too, had a crowd of admirers. A chair-mender, a basket-mender surrounded with his twisted rushes and reeds, a knife-grinder — here they all were, the old skills, each with a guard, each watched by marvelling barbarians.

What wasn't to be seen in the rooms we passed through, one after another? String and bottles, piles of plastic and polythene pieces — the most valuable, perhaps, of all commodities; bits of metal, wire flex, plastic tape; books and hats and clothes. There was a room full of things that seemed quite new and good and had reached the rubbish dumps shielded from dirt and spoiling: a jersey in a plastic bag, umbrellas, artificial flowers, a carton full of corks.

And everywhere the pressing lively people, here as much for the show as for the goods. There was even a little cafe in one room, selling herbal teas, bread, spirits. A lot of people seemed tipsy, but they often do at markets, without alcohol. It was hard to tell the sellers from the buyers, the owners from the visitors; it was a polyglot crowd, a good-natured crowd, who respected the orders and instructions of the many guards; an orderly crowd, and one able in the new manner to settle among themselves disputes and differences quickly and without bad feeling being allowed to fester. People joked, showed each other their purchases, and even bought and sold from each other, without going to the formality of engaging the services of the official traders — a process which was quite in order and approved of. What the traders wanted was a crowd, was plenty of people, was the flow of goods, in and out.

We made a tour of the entire floor, and, having been greeted by innumerable people — many of the people from the pavement were up here, again entered the room for electrical goods and pushed forward our trolley. For this merchandise we were given a few vouchers, and I said to Emily that since it was her enterprise that had brought us there, she should have the spending of the results of it. She looked quizzical — I had come to expect this, and understood it was because I might be expecting too much in the way of a return. And what would be done, I wanted to know, with our toasters and roasters? Well, they would be dismantled for their parts, and these parts would be incorporated into other objects — obviously they were of no use as they were? Surely I didn't mind seeing them go? Well, if I didn't mind, she would very much like to take to Gerald's house — was I sure I didn't mind? — some stuff for the kitchen, because they were short. We found an old saucepan, an enamel jug, a plastic bowl, a scrubbing brush: this was what we got in exchange for the electrical equipment of what had been, after all, a lavishly equipped flat.

Back in our flat, Emily put off her little girl charm, without which she could never have brought herself to take me up on an expedition she clearly felt was into her territory and a long way from mine; and sat observing me. She was wondering, I suppose, unflattering though that was, if I had really understood that goods, 'things,' were different commodities for her and for children like June; in some ways more precious, because irreplaceable, but also without value… no, that is not right, without personal value: things did not belong to people as they did once. Of course, this had been true among some people long before the time of getting and having had passed: all sorts of experiments in communalism had been worked through, apart from the fact that people like 'the Ryans' had dispensed with ideas of mine and thine, and this without any theories or ideas about it. June was June Ryan; her family had been the despair of the authorities long before the collapse of the old society, when things had still been assumed to be normal. And, as a Ryan… But more of this later, when I describe 'the Ryans' in their proper place…

Why am I postponing it? This place will do as well as another. In my wanting to postpone what has to be said for the sake of the narrative about the Ryans, no more than an extension and a reflection of the attitudes and emotions of the said authorities towards 'the Ryans'? The point being that 'the Ryans', meaning a way of life, were unassimilatable, both in theory — theories about society and how it worked — and in practice?

To describe them, their circumstances — nothing here that the reader won't have heard a hundred times: it was a textbook case, as the social workers kept exclaiming. An Irish labourer had married a Polish refugee. Both were Catholics. In due time there were eleven children. He drank, was brutal, was intermittently affectionate. She drank, was hysterical, incompetent, unpredictably loving. The children would not stay in school. Welfare authorities, housing authorities, the police, the psychologists, all knew the Ryans. Then the two older boys were in court for stealing, and went to Borstal for a time. The second — not the oldest — girl, got pregnant. She was fifteen. No, there is nothing unfamiliar about any of it, but the Ryans' case seemed to be bigger and more hopeless because there were so many of them, and because both parents were large and colourful characters whose sayings were likely to be quoted at conferences and at meetings: it often happens that a single case takes wing out of its anonymity and represents others: in our city alone there were thousands of 'Ryans' of all kinds, colours, nations, unknown except to their neighbours and to the authorities, and these people in due time found themselves in prison, Borstal, remand homes, and so on. But some charity interested itself in the Ryan family, they were installed in a house: efforts were made to keep them together.

This was how the picture looked to officialdom, doing as well as it could; how it looked in reports; how a newspaper, choosing the Ryans out of so many because of this quality they had of being more visible than others, presented them. Below the Poverty Line and Lower this was called. A book recording a dozen cases, the Ryans among them, was: Rejects of the Affluent Society. A young man just out of university whose aunt was a welfare worker on the case, had collected notes for a book, The Barbarians We Make, comparing the Ryans to those who pulled down Rome from its heights.

The Ryans…

How about the Ryan house, for a start? Well, it was filthy, and what furniture it had fit for a rubbish dump. Nothing on the bare floors but dirt, a bone, a plate of rancid cat's food: dogs and cats, like children, were fed impulsively. There was never much heat, so the thirteen Ryans and their friends — the Ryans attracted others and kept them in orbit — were always in one room, huddling. The parents were usually drunk and sometimes the children were, too. The friends were of all colours, and often remarkable, with lives out of the ordinary, and they all sat about, eating biscuits or chips and talking, talking; but sometimes the mother or an older girl cooked up some potatoes with a bit of meat, or opened some tins of something, and it became a festival. Chips and sweet drinks and tea with six or eight spoons of white sugar to each cup — such was the diet of the Ryans, so they were always listless, or on some unnatural peak of vitality while the sugar jigged in their arteries. They sat and talked and talked; the room was lively with that perpetually renewed chronicle, The Ryans Against the World. How the three middle children had been set on in the playground by a rival gang or family, but had won; or how the welfare woman had left a piece of paper saying that the fifth child, Mary, had to go to the clinic on Wednesday, and really must try to remember this time, for her rash ought to be attended to; how Paul had found a car unlocked and had taken — whatever was there, because it was there. Two of the girls had visited a chain store and had come back with twenty small plastic purses, two pounds of coffee, gardening shears, some spices from the Indian shelf, and six plastic cullenders. These articles would lie about unused, or might be bartered for other objects: the thieving was for the sake of the act, not of possession. The black girl Tessa, Ruth's friend, and Tessa's brother, and Ruth's other friend Irene and her sister had watched the television all the afternoon in one of the friendly television shops on the main street which did not chase away children who sidled in for an afternoon's free viewing — the Ryans' set was always broken. Stephen had met a dog on the street, and had gone to the canal and thrown sticks for the dog and the dog was ever so clever, it brought back three, no five, even six sticks at once… they talked, they talked; they drank and made their day, their lives, through vivid shrewd comment; and when they went to bed, it was three, four, six in the morning — but they did not undress, no one in that house undressed to go to bed, for it was never bedtime. A child would drop off where he sat, on his sister's lap, and stay there asleep, or be set down on the floor on a coat. By morning the four beds of the house each had three or four bodies in them, with the dogs and cats, all close together, warm, warming, protecting. No one got up till ten, eleven, mid-afternoon: if a Ryan found a job, he or she lost it in a week, because it was impossible to get up on time.

They lived on welfare, unless Mr Ryan aroused himself, became sober, and found a job: he was a carpenter. Then money flowed in, and they got clothes and shoes. These garments were worn communally, for no one owned this jersey or that dress. Children wore what fitted and what lay nearest. New clothes might easily be in rags the day after they arrived in the house, for some reason or another.

The children went on a 'job' when the mood took them — which was often. June, the thin sweet-faced little girl, was leader from the age of about seven. Four or five children would slide their way into a flat or a shop and