DOR.IS LESSING
549
night after night and went off to enjoy yourself" A small boy, the son of
parents who did not approve of smacking, had his fingers smacked once
when he persisted in putting them through the paper covering jam pots.
This became, "And you used to hit me when I was small." These petty
recollections are to the point.
For years I lived in a state of accusation against my mother, at first
hot, then cold and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and
genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what promises,
was I matching what actually happened? And this is the second area of my
preoccupation, which has to be linked with the first.
Why is it [ have lived my whole live with people who are automati–
cally against authority, "agin the government," who take it for granted
that all authority is bad, ascribe doubtful or venal motives to government,
the Establishment, the ruling class, the local town council, the headmaster
or mistress? So deep-rooted is this set of mind that it is only when you
begin to climb out of it you see how much of your life has been deter–
mined by it. This week I was with a group of people of mixed ages, all on
the left (or who had been once), and someone happened to mention that
the government was doing something - quite a good thing, but that isn't
the point - and at once every face put on a look of derision. Automatic.
Push-button. This look is like a sneer or jeer, a
Well, what can one expect?
It
can only come out of some belief, one so deep it is well out of sight,
that a promise has been made and then betrayed. Perhaps it was the
French Revolution? Or the American Revolution, which made the pur–
suit of happiness a right with the implication that happiness is to be had as
easily as taking cakes off a supermarket counter. Millions of people in our
time behave as if they have been made a promise - by whom? when? -
that life must get freer, more honest, more comfortable, always better.
Has advertising only set our minds more firmly in this expectant mode?
Yet nothing in history suggests that we may expect anything but wars,
tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always tem–
porary. Above all, history tell us nothing stays the same for long. We
expect gold at the foot of always renewable rainbows. I feel we have been
part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and
convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expedi–
tions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.
I have just read of an historian who claims that the distrust, even con–
tempt, of government is precisely because of the First World War, be–
cause of the stupidity and incompetence of its generals, because of the
slaughter of Europe's young men.
When journalists or historians come to ask about something in the
past, the hardest moment is when I see in their faces the look that means,
