Free The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing

came indoors, sat thoughtfully in her sofa corner for some hours - and stopped eating.
    She lost weight fast. She was living on herb teas and yeast extracts. And now I watched the reverse process, a shape emerging whole and clear while increments of lard melted away around it.
    I began to remonstrate: you must eat something, you should set yourself a proper diet. But she did not hear me. I was distant from her need to make herself worthy of the heroes of the pavement… quite a few of them now that the days were lengthening and spring healed the scarred trees.
    We were watching, though I still did not recognize this, the birth of a gang, a pack, a tribe. It would be pleasant to be able to say now that I was aware of the processes going on in front of me. Now I judge myself to have been blind. How else do things work always unless by imitation bred of the passion to be like? All the processes of society are based on it, all individual development. For some reason it was something that we seemed to have a conspiracy to ignore or not to mention, even while most singlemindedly engaged in it. There was some sort of conspiracy of belief that people -children, adults, everyone - grew by an acquisition of unconnected habits, of isolated bits of knowledge, like choosing things off a counter:    ‘Yes, I’ll have that one,’ or ‘No, I don’t want that one!’ But in fact people develop for good or for bad by swallowing whole other people, atmospheres, events, places - develop by admiration. Often enough unconsciously, of course. We are the company we keep.
    In front of my eyes, on that pavement, for weeks, for months, I could have watched as in a text book or a laboratory the genesis, growth and flowering of society’s new unit. But I did no such thing, for I was absorbed in Emily, my concern for her. Those processes went on, and I observed them; details did stand out for me; I watched for the effects of this or that event on Emily. It is only now, looking back, I see what an opportunity I missed.
    Emily was not the only young girl preparing herself to take her place as a woman among other women. Janet White, for instance: before her parents stopped her, Janet passed a dozen times a day outside our windows in front of the jeering boys. There was a period when boys and girls, on opposite sides of the road, stood in hostile battalions exchanging taunts and abuse.
    Then it was noticeable that they jeered less, stood more often in silence, or quietly talked among themselves, though always watching the other groups while pretending not to.
    Inside the flat Emily remembered the sheepskins. Again she arranged them around her, belted them tight, swaggered about in them with her hair loose.
    She came to me: ‘I found that sewing machine. Can I use it?’
    ‘Of course. But don’t you want to buy clothes? That thing is so old. It must be thirty-five years old.’
    ‘It works.’
    The money I had given her was still in the drawer. This she now took out and quickly, almost secretively, walked the five or six miles to the centre of the city where the big shops were with the goods for the official class, or for anyone who could afford them. Nearly always the same thing. She came back with some good cloth from the pre-crisis time. She came back with sewing cottons and a tape measure and scissors. She also visited the secondhand shops and the market stalls, and the floor of her room was heaped with loot, with booty. She invited Janet White in from the pavement, having of course first politely asked my permission, and the two nymphs squeezed themselves into the tiny room, and chattered and competed, and arranged their images this way and that before the long mirror -a ritual which was repeated when Janet White in her turn went off on her foray to capture materials and old clothes … repeated in Janet’s room along the corridor. And this led to her being forbidden the street and the pleasures of the tribe and warned not to take Emily for a