‘Read Marx, not people on Marx,’ advised my tutor Beryl Smalley wisely. I read him voraciously – so much better than A. L. Rowse. With dialectics bursting my brain, I was dismayed to find that I was quite unable to squash him into the one essay we were allowed on Marx. My fascination with political ideas was always in relation to their context and I pursued them historically from several angles at the same time. I thought this would eventually enable me to understand the contemporary arguments among socialists. I liked G. D. H. Cole’s histories of socialism because they were clear and easy for me to follow. From him I gleaned a more sympathetic account of the early socialists than from Marx and was particularly taken by Flora Tristan, the French utopian, who developed the idea of a workers’ international before Marx. I added her to my favourite women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Olive Schreiner and Emma Goldman. Unlike the starchy-looking Miss Buss and Miss Beale, the founders of St Hilda’s, whose portraits looked down on us from above high table, my rebel women all had passionate love lives.
On visits to the Thompsons during the holidays I began to work my way through the books about socialism in Britain which Edward had accumulated while writing William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. Among these was a little book of verse written by a socialist in Leeds called Tom Maguire in the 1880s and 1890s. Some were ironic and affectionate poems about the young women workers in the Leeds factories whom he and other local socialists had tried so hard to organize. Tom Maguire, a handsome man in the photograph at the front of the book, had died in poverty in 1895, aged twenty-five. I was intrigued by him and by a comment in the essay Edward wrote about how socialism took root in Leeds, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’, in Essays in Labour History. In passing, Edward remarked how Tom Maguire and other members of the Independent Labour Party had fought not only capital but ‘Mrs Grundy’ – the sexual hypocrisy of middle-class Victorian society. I could identify now as a person in a long line of Leeds socialists.
Edward was working on the manuscript of The Making of the English Working Class when I turned up in Halifax. Published in 1963, it was to demonstrate a new way of writing labour history which looked at relationships and processes, rather than simply focusing on institutions. As I read the first part in manuscript, I delighted not only in the drama but also in discovering early women radicals. Years later Edward told me he had groaned to himself when I had said how good it was to find so many women, knowing there were fewer in the latter part. Subsequently the book was to be criticized in the light of the women’s movement for not looking at women enough. But this is hindsight. The Making of the English Working Class was actually far more aware of women’s participation in radical politics than was customary at the time. Although an earlier generation of women historians had written about women, in the early sixties very few historians even mentioned them.
The Making of the English Working Class broke new ground by presenting class dynamically, by combining the political with the social and by linking work with community – all ways of seeing which were to be crucial for the emergence of what later came to be called ‘women’s history’. In 1963, despite the imaginative portrayal of living relationships of class in books, plays and films, from A Taste of Honey to Billy Liar, the prevailing sociological approach to class was a static affair which sliced it up in occupational surveys. In contrast, The Making of the English Working Class restored individuals making choices in their workplaces and communities, becoming aware of themselves in new ways through ideas and action. Edward was not alone; the French historians who had influenced Richard Cobb were engaged in a similar project. This moment in social history was to leave me with a continuing fascination for that most tantalizing of endeavours – catching an emergent awareness in movement.
Edward’s book had an impact far beyond history. Existing ways of theorizing class clearly did not fit the changes which had occurred during Harold Macmillan’s ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ years. A cultural sensibility about class as a relationship had been appearing through the writing of the men (and a few women) who created the ‘angry’ novels and plays. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy had similarly delineated the cultural parameters of a particular kind of class experience. There was, however, a strong counter-current. When I was a student, even radical sociologists such as Tom Bottomore were suggesting that class was no longer a useful category of analysis on the grounds that in the South-East the stark divisions were more blurred. Instead the fact that deference was beginning to decline, especially among the young, was seen as much more significant.
I was exasperated by the denial of class, which to my newly class-conscious eyes was everywhere evident. Though full employment under the Tories had led to greater prosperity by the early sixties, basic kinds of poverty persisted. This was particularly evident in the old housing in poor parts of the big cities – the inadequacies of which were being documented in the recently started journal New Society. Dave Godman took me to Hull to see his mother, who had brought up a large family in a house which still had no running water inside. I watched in horror as she had to go outside to a tap, fill a kettle and boil the water before she could wash up – so much extra work. On a holiday near Aberdeen, I saw a line of beaten men and was shocked to realize the dole queue continued to be present in Scotland.
My socialism made me observe the world around me more closely and learn from people I would have previously dismissed. Returning on the train from the 1963 Labour Party conference in Scarborough, where Bob was doing Focus with Peggy Duff, I became embroiled in an argument with a working-class Scottish delegate. He was a right-winger who loathed CNDers. By the time we got to York, however, the man had softened, having discovered I had been ill with gingivitis, sipping milky porridge through swollen gums. He had suffered from ‘trench mouth’ during the war. The St Hilda’s diet must have been akin to the British Army’s. He proceeded to reveal a burning hatred of the big landlords and described to me the humiliating power they still exercised over agricultural labourers through the system of tied cottages.
I was discovering that I liked not being an outsider. Labour was doing well in the polls, Harold Wilson was leader of the opposition and the Tories were going to have to call an election. Change was imminent. As I marched through the streets of Leeds brandishing Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, I got a friendly twinkle. ‘We’ll get the buggers out yet, love,’ declared the man walking across the road towards me. Comradeship! When a Welsh bus conductor in Oxford began chatting to me about the historical studies in E. H. Carr’s Studies in Revolution and gave me a free ride, I was chuffed to find a revolutionary proletarian. There was, however, a snag. He began to complain to me about the Oxford students – so scruffy. ‘In Aberystwyth the students look ever so nice and tidy, see. They wear their college scarves.’ I looked up at him from my seat in mute anguish. Wear a St Hilda’s scarf – that was just too much to ask!
Fortunately for me young working-class styles were in the process of metamorphosing. In March 1963 I saw a band with fringe haircuts on TV. ‘College-boy haircuts,’ said an apprentice from Wakefield I met on the train coming back from our ‘Spies for Peace’ Aldermaston. The Beatles had arrived and we were soon dancing to ‘Twist and Shout’ at Oxford parties. Music and style crossed and recrossed class boundaries.
Thanks to Braham Murray’s training for The Hostage, I could do the twist, though my swotty youth left me unable to do any other dance. In the summer of 1963 Bob and I went on a Progressive Tours holiday, spending part of our time building the foundations for a library at the University of Lublin in Poland. (My father took out a passport so he could rescue me from behind the Iron Curtain. ‘They want us to go,’ I expostulated.) It was in Lublin that, for the first and only time in my life, I became a dance star. Bob and I performed the twist to admiring Poles who wanted to buy his bell-bottom jeans.
I was not very good, however, at the digging and was always the slowest on the line shovelling earth. An obstreperous Irishman who had
been in a Jesuit seminary in Dublin gave me a hard time. Pink and dizzy in the sun, baking in my allocated navy boiler suit and lacerated by his taunts, I was close to humiliating tears. There was no way I could keep up. Incredibly Bob, who despised chivalry, came to my rescue. Standing between us, he began digging like a madman. Bob had rowed for his college and the arm muscles went into his shovelling. My tormentor was left way behind and had to admit defeat. After that I was left in peace. When I was in Belfast in the eighties, I met Michael Farrell and finally made the connection between the sardonic, argumentative ex-Jesuit with a beard and the man who became one of the leaders of the 1968 Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. At last I could gloat, ‘Bob dug faster than you.’
During our stay in Lublin I was often sad, because Bob fancied a young working-class Frenchwoman (who had no trouble digging). Even worse, the romantic Poles kept pitying me because Bob was flirting with her. I hated being pitied, though the archaic chivalry they displayed in order to cheer me up made me smile. Young Polish men still clicked their heels when they asked you to dance – particularly odd for the twist to Trini Lopez’s ‘If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out freedom’. Once a student ran round a corner when we were on an outing and returned with a bunch of flowers. ‘Hopelessly unemancipated,’ Bob grumbled.
We spent a few days in the beautiful old town of Kraków, where I fell for a dissident art student whom we met in a jazz club decorated with Nescafé labels. He asked me to dance and announced he was an Anarchist Communist. As we danced, I decided this must be what I was and the reason that I never fitted in. I was too Anarchist to be a Marxist and too Marxist to be an Anarchist. I had no sooner discovered our common hybridity, and was beginning to float into romantic union, when an official came across the dance floor and rebuked us for the abandoned style of our dancing – I’d taken my shoes off.
These holiday flirtations were geographical non-starters but they were emotional watersheds. We had both found that our relationship did not preclude being attracted to other people – but that we still wanted to stay together. We had not explicitly called it an ‘open relationship’, but the idea was around already on the left. This was to work all right in practice, but sometimes the emotions got more bumpy than our rational calculations had assumed that they would. On balance it was to be Bob, the sexual rationalist, who was more emotionally distressed by infidelity than me with my existential assumptions of freedom and promiscuous curiosity.
It is easy to be dismissive of the application of reason to sex. Yet in contrast to the muffled confusion I had known before Bob came along, his approach was liberatory. Officially I enthusiastically endorsed his outlook. Yet some contradictory impulse which would not quite settle for reason continued to twist and turn and wriggle and jiggle. Something that made no apparent sense, for which I had no words, rose out of the deep.
I had nothing in common with Paul, a scaffolder with an already passé Tony Curtis quiff hairstyle. I failed to get the punch lines of the jokes he related in an Oxford town burr. We did not converse much about life and politics, though once he screwed up his penetrative blue eyes at the gates of St Hilda’s and, looking down the road at Magdalen College, remarked apropos of nothing in particular, ‘They need people like me when they have their wars.’ I wanted to say, ‘That’s not true,’ but stayed silent, for I knew he was absolutely right. The eyes had hooked and aroused me and made me tumble into a brief affair. But, in 1964, I had no terms to countenance powerful physical arousal which could not be categorized as either a romance or a relationship. It flared, burnt quickly and died. And would have been simply a memory, except for Paul’s friend Jess, who had introduced me to Paul.
Jess had chatted to me when we were waiting at a bus stop on a foggy winter night. He had dyed blond hair and wore a leather jacket and came from a mining village in the North-East. A few years younger than Paul, he hung around with the rockers who rode motorbikes and were under the protection of an amiable gay professor who used to defend them when they appeared in court. The teenage girls Bob and I were to meet through Jess still had backbrushed bouffant hair and rejected my rationalist admonishments about contraception. Pregnancy meant the boy might marry you and they wanted to get married more than anything. Jess developed a longer-term relationship with a friend from St Hilda’s and my chance encounter with him at the bus stop was to set off a series of repercussions which were to play their way out in my life over the next few years.
While I was sitting with Jess and his rocker friends drinking beer in the pubs that students avoided, marijuana was hitting Oxford. That clear divide between beatniks, who smoked pot, and the rest of the world, who drank alcohol, was breaking down. The mods had emerged as a visible antithesis to the rockers, with their fringe haircuts and art-school styles, and they were into speed. Denim protest clothes and the protest songs were no longer confined to CND. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had appeared at the Monterey Folk Festival in May 1963;by 1964 they were bringing an American stardust to beat styles. As the denim skirts we bought in the market became shorter, suspender belts were discarded for tights. I scuttled around Oxford in my denim outfits with a short black belted shiny mac – though still in the Leeds stilettos. In some barely perceptible ways, cultural assumptions were shifting. There was nothing definitive you could put your finger upon, just an anticipation of modernity.
Instead of watching flickering black and white films like Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Howard Hawks was the thing; Hollywood was being rehabilitated. That celebration of the popular in art which laid the basis for the design explosion of ‘Swinging London’ was already in the air. The avant-garde and mass popular culture were beginning to discover the pleasure of one another’s company.
I must have tuned in to this mood somehow, for I adopted a position of extreme cultural relativism in one of my finals papers, arguing against hierarchical value judgements which placed Beethoven above the rhythm and blues singer Howlin’ Wolf. If I had possessed an ounce of strategic gump I would have kept my opinions to myself. Even I should have known that the examiner, Hugh Trevor-Roper, would not be on this wavelength.
I was not in a strategic state at all during my finals, being consumed by thwarted longing for a student at Balliol called Arnold Cragg. Arnold, who was in the year below me, belonged to a new species of floppy masculinity which had started to appear there. Displaying no interest in revolutionizing the world, they just listened to Bob Dylan and watched the world go by.
I first saw Arnold at a party, sitting like a crumpled doll in a corner, looking as if life was just too much for him. It was a characteristic pose – a passivity which had an irresistible pull for women. The reason was simple. As he was always inert, it left a delightful space for pursuit. In the sexual mores of 1964 this was novel and went to my head.
I had veered from one extreme of masculinity to the other. The only thing Paul and Arnold shared was that they were utterly unlike Bob in every respect. I was not able to explain at the time why I was so intent on unsettling the sexual order. One interpretation might have been pique. Bob, being much better than me at reasoning, held all the aces as long as you stuck with the rules. Another rendering would reveal an absence – some kind of connection that eluded me in relation to him.
Arnold, who was troubled by terrible angsts of every description, seemed quite unaware of my smitten response to him. I used to go round to tea with him and listen to his woes like a celibate and concerned maiden aunt. Bob, who was happily going up mountains with an athletic young woman who fancied him, mocked mercilessly. After a prelude which resembled the buried sexual tensions of a Victorian novel, Arnold and I did eventually make love in a sleazy London hotel. In a dazed glow as we hitched back to Oxford next day, I noted the name of the tube, Arnos Grove. Through the years this unlikely place on the tube map continued to evoke memories of a sweet and daffy romance.
Because of a distraught Bob, I agreed to end my sexual affair with Arnold. When I looked at my life steadily, I knew I wanted
to stay with Bob; indeed I could not imagine existing apart from him. The result, though, was that Arnold became a repressed romantic ideal who lived on in my imagination, a might-have-been love who was to boomerang back.
In the autumn of 1964 life was changing too fast for musing. I was going to do a thesis at Chelsea College, London, on the history of an adult education movement called University Extension, and Bob was leaving Nuffield, where he had been studying economics, for Churchill College, Cambridge. He insisted that he had no desire to be in an academic ivory tower; he was going to live in London during the holidays and at weekends. Logical as ever, he took out a compass and drew an arc round Liverpool Street station and King’s Cross, marking the areas from where he could get a train easily to Cambridge. How could I have known that my geographical location for the next thirty-two years was being determined?
It was a landlord’s market. We were staying at Gareth Stedman Jones’s parents’ house far over to the west in Twickenham. Thus by the time we reached Whitechapel tube, the flats would all have gone. Exasperated by my slow-moving morning sloth, eventually Bob set out alone and came back victorious. He had found somewhere called 8 Junction Place in Hackney. I’d never heard of Hackney and, as we took the little train from Liverpool Street station, I looked out in apprehension at a grey, tumble-down, dingy London I had never seen before. I noticed a strange, sweet smell of vanilla which was soon to become a familiar sign of the approach of home. It arose from a sweet factory which used to be at London Fields, and hung thick and sticky in the polluted air. On that first journey it seemed as if London went on for ever and that we were heading for the end of the known world. But it wasn’t even the end of the line, just Hackney Downs and a two-room flat, with kitchen and box room, at the junction of Amhurst Road and Dalston Lane.
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