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<title> The Fifth Child - a repressing story - </title>
After having read Doris Lessing's book The Fifth Child I can see more clearly how unpredictable life can be. I can also understand better how and why people react as they do when confronted with something unknown. This unknown becomes unpleasant and frightening in their view, and they do their best to get rid of and to repress it. These are some of the things that I think that the book wants to tell us and that is together with the importance of setting what I would like to discuss.

The young Lovatts are very naive to think that they can plan to have six children, a big house, expensive parties and then also live happily ever after. They take their perfect future together for granted, which is very foolish. I think that most people don't just take happiness for granted, because most of us know that unexpected things always occur, but the Lovatts don't seem to under-stand this. People want to think that bad things happen to other people but not to them, some kind of natural repression. The Lovatts try their best to hide away from the unpleasantness going on in the world, thinking that they will not be affected by it. Though the violence in their neighbourhood is growing. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now common-place...the house next door had been burgled three times: the Lovatts' not yet, but then there were always people about. (p. 29). 

The spirit of times is changing. The easy good times had utterly gone. David's firm had been struck...but others had lost their jobs and he was lucky. (p. 29) Harriet's sister Sarah has Down's syndrome baby, which Harriet believes that she deserves. Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had prob-ably attracted the mongol child (p. 29) Harriet and David find that they deserve something quite different. Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. (p. 28). David also points out how important it is to have your own room, probably to hide away in. 
'It's important' said David, fierce; 'everyone should have a room.' 
Harriet and David are of the opinion that if you are only happy and loving and stay in your house, then everything will be fine. But the world does not really work like that; one cannot just hide away from the injustices in the world. Even if one hides away in a cave or behind the walls of a magnificent house one can get a terrible disease or, as in this story, give birth to an abnormal child. The impossibility to prevent unpleasant events to occur in life and that things don't always turn out the way you want them to, are the Lovatts experiencing when their fifth child Ben finally is born. 

They do actually try to escape the unpleasantness also when it has now come inside the protecting walls of the happy house. David and the relatives are trying to send Ben away to die. Harriet wishes him dead at several occasions.
 The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in...and refused to be shocked at herself. (p. 73) 
The doctors choose not to see the unpleasantness about Ben, because then they may have to deal with it. The other children are afraid of him and have made some kind of pact against him. This rejecting behaviour that all the people around Ben are showing are different ways of trying to deny and get rid of this unpleasant and frightening "thing", which is intruding on their happiness and which does not fit in, in their perfect world.

This behaviour is perhaps typical for the 60's, which is called a selfish and greedy period. Lessing might also have chosen the 60's, because the knowledge about disturbances like Ben's is perhaps greater today than it was in the 60's. The story would then have been less interesting, because the reactions from the people meeting Ben would probably have been quite different, if it would have taken place today. The purpose of situating the family in the rich neighbour-hood is probably to show that you are not safe away from unpleasantness wherever you may choose to live, which the Lovatts seem to think. The fact that both Harriet and especially David seem to come from good and wealthy families and that they demand so much from their lives, makes the story even more striking, because if they were poor and thankful the story would not be that interesting.

In conclusion could be said that what we learn from The Fifth child is that one should not take happiness for granted and that things don't always go as one plans.
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