I Who Have Never Known Men

The fact is that none of us seems to have any coherent memories that would enable us to piece together what happened.

I was the youngest, the only one who’d still been a child when we were locked up.

None of the women remembered actually being hit, but Anthea told me about it later. It must have happened in the hazy period in the early days of our captivity for such a deep fear to have taken hold of us. No one ever disobeyed the whip, and the women sometimes described the bloody marks that the thongs made on bare skin, the searing pain that lasted for days.

As soon as I looked down, I saw the bus. I say bus, but of course, initially, I didn’t know what I was looking at. First of all, it was half an hour away and all I could make out was a rectangular shape in the middle of the plain; and then, naturally, I’d never seen a bus. All I had to go on was what the women had told me, and none of them had given me precise descriptions of things that they took for granted. I only knew that it was a vehicle that could carry a lot of people.

I was amazed. I’d never heard music before, I was barely aware of its existence. ‘Look how beautiful the sky is!’ Annabel exclaimed, and everyone turned to watch the sunset.

We quickly organised ourselves into teams: some women went on ahead and removed the stones while others followed, scraping the ground with a shovel. At the slightest obstruction, we halted the trolley to clear the way. Because it was heavily laden, it took several of us to get it moving again. When we arrived, the fires were burning and grilled meat awaited us.

I felt a surge of happiness: whatever happened, I had left the bunker, and, like the others, I knew I’d rather die than go back there. Already, I no longer understood how I’d been able to bear living there. I said to myself that if it hadn’t killed the women, it was because a person can’t die of sorrow.

There were forty of us living in that big underground room where no one could hide from the others.

When I think back on it now, what a horrid little prig I was! I prided myself and revelled in having found a distraction that I thought was extraordinary. I felt as if I was being hounded by a mob, whereas we were all equally helpless prisoners. Isolated due to my young age and the constraints imposed on us, perhaps like the others I needed to create an illusion to enable me to cope with the misery.

‘We’re human again,’ declared Dorothy. ‘We can do our business in private, sheltered from view.’