CHAPTER 3
1964–6
Tired and hungry after carrying our belongings up to the flat on the second floor at 8 Junction Place, Bob and I went out to find some food. I remember wandering for about half a hour until we finally came across a solitary fish and chip shop down on Mare Street. It appeared that no one in Hackney ate out.
When I said I lived in Hackney, friends looked blank. Hackney. Where’s that?’ At that time the dissident young middle class tended to settle in Earls Court or Notting Hill, so our choice of borough was regarded as eccentric. Islington was just being discovered’ but it was half an hour away on the 38 bus. Our isolation was heightened by the absence of any underground station and lack of a telephone. Living in Hackney was well off the known map – no conforming nonconformity for us.
The flat was above a Do-it-Yourself shop. Its rooms, being on the corner, were strange triangular shapes, and the whole building would rattle when the trains came into Hackney Downs station opposite. Our rent seemed high at £6 a week, but three of us would be paying as a friend from St Hilda’s, Mary Costain, who was studying history of art at the Courtauld Institute, was to join us. Bob and I had to make a down payment for the furniture: a blue plywood kitchen cabinet with frosted glass, a Formica-covered kitchen table, beds and tall wooden chairs. These household possessions were to be gradually discarded or disintegrate over the next three decades of my life in Hackney. The chairs lasted the longest: painted and then sanded, they were eventually to be borne off by a second-hand furniture dealer in the early nineties, proving that the not-at-all-desirable of one era can be valued in the next.
Bob constructed a desk of orange boxes and I piled them on top of one another to make bookcases. As new books moved in, I would trek off to the nearby market in Ridley Road and collect more boxes. The bath was in the kitchen, making bathing a chatty and sociable event. It was covered by a useful wooden lid, painted in the ubiquitous cream, upon which visitors would sit in a row, discussing politics or gossiping.
Hackney in 1964 had the air of a borough which had seen better days. Settled by Romans and Vikings, it had been a thriving medieval community and then a place where puritans of the better sort had built their houses. Solid blocks of improved dwellings’ had been erected for the nineteenth-century deserving poor, followed by the utilitarian modernity of the council flats constructed between the wars. Older housing had been flattened yet again for the disastrous sixties replicas of Corbusier tower blocks on the cheap. Nonetheless, the elegant architectural traces of the eighteenth-century dissenting villages in Clapton and Stoke Newington, where radicals like Mary Wollstone-craft, Joseph Priestley and Tom Paine had greeted the French Revolution, were still discernible. The 253 bus route took you from the worn-down urban wastes of Whitechapel, along Cambridge Heath Road, to pass by the refreshing oases of Victoria Park and London Fields, where handsome 1840s houses threaded between new council flats. The big houses in Hackney were multi-occupied by the sixties and the greenery was dirty and dishevelled, but you could still imagine how the move from the East End had seemed like a real step up for the Jewish working-class socialists whom Arnold Wesker was to portray sipping their chicken soup with barley in the trilogy of plays which began with Roots in 1959.
Even as he had been writing about them, however, they had been leaving, moving westwards to Golders Green or out east to Chingford. In 1964 you could still sometimes hear the very old speaking Yiddish on the 253 as it headed down Cambridge Heath Road to Bethnal Green. But in aspiring Hackney, the precarious second generation of the Jewish middle-aged who had remained regarded the changes they saw around them with displeasure. They complained that the borough was going down. Their eyes had a look of disappointment and their lips were set with a resolve to maintain standards come what may. On Sandringham Road a genteel elderly lady resolutely sold cream cheese, pickled cucumbers and smoked salmon in a fastidious shop which had survived the changing composition of the borough. At weekends, when the weather was sunny, this middle-aged aristocracy within the Hackney working class, clerical and skilled craft workers, could be found relaxing and reading in deck chairs on the steep slopes of Springfield Park, by the River Lea. Looking at them, I could visualize life in Vienna before fascism.
My neighbour in the flat downstairs, a Jewish woman in her fifties who worked in a betting shop and described herself as in business’, would return each day to survey my unbrushed stairs. Obsessed by the impinging dangers of the urban slum, Cassandra-like she would screech up the staircase, reproaching me for inviting rats and mice. I would try to creep up to avoid her, bitterly resenting the fact that Bob was not held similarly responsible.
The woman upstairs was, in contrast, a friendly ally. Margaret and her partner, John, came from Dagenham, where he worked at the Ford plant. They had been forced into Hackney because the planners who had established a council estate there for Ford had not taken the housing needs of a new generation into account. Margaret, who at twenty-five was a few years older than John, had a child from another relationship, Eddy, a little blond boy who was about five when we moved in. Margaret had dark, short, curly hair; her face was still pretty, though unglamorized. She was beginning to put on weight and padded around in a heavy quilted dressing-gown, hoovering and mopping every day. Women,’ my mother had warned, often give up and let themselves go.’ Sometimes Margaret would come downstairs for a chat, looking out at the busy crossroads as if she were a prisoner.
There were only a few years between us but Margaret’s air of resignation made her seem like a grown-up to me. I used to worry that twenty-five was a kind of dividing line: when you reached it you were definitely ‘young’ no more. I liked Margaret’s warmth and respected her wisdom about children and men, but her fatalism terrified me. By some arbitrary throw of fate I had been granted a degree, my freedom and another destiny. But I couldn’t leave it at that, for I knew that Margaret had many similar aspirations. She would observe our visitors with interest, cheekily sizing up the men. Yet her life had already become enclosed, not only because of external circumstances but because she was filled with fears of unfamiliarity which I found nonsensical, refusing to venture into Ridley Road because of the darkies’.
The diverse cultures of Hackney touched shoulders in Ridley Road. The cockney greengrocers were ensconced up at the top near Kingsland Road. Further down, Kossoff’s Jewish bakery bustled with elderly women buying fresh white loaves topped with sesame seeds. Near Dalston Lane, around the dodgy but friendly butcher who everyone knew received stolen goods, new stalls had sprouted, selling yams and other West Indian vegetables. The Caribbean rhythms of ska records on the Blue Beat record label blasted out from a stall where young black people congregated.
In 1964 there were still many more West Indian men than women in Hackney. They congregated in the pubs, the older men still in suits with wide trouser legs and broad trilby hats. Many retained the slow, considered calm of country dwellers. Once, late and panicking on my way to teach a class, I asked a man in Ridley Road market the time and he gazed upwards at the sun before replying laconically, It must be around noon.’
Drawn by the British government’s job-recruitment programmes’ promises of prosperity, they had brought their histories and hopes from Jamaica, Trinidad, Antigua and the smaller islands like St Lucia across the Atlantic, to the damp and crumbling multi-occupied late-nineteenth-century houses around Ridley Road market which white families were vacating. When I recognized French words in patois the children in the streets would look at me wide-eyed. How can you speak our language?’
I took to Hackney, perhaps because I came from Leeds, a city accustomed to cultural mixtures. Because there was no single defining way of being, I could attain a fine balance in relation to my surroundings, treading a thin line of tension between separation and connection. Having arrived there by chance, I was to stay, and the place affected me as deeply as the Yorkshire in which I had grown up.
Two bronzed and skinny American friends of Bob
’s came to stay when we first moved in to Junction Place. Like Bob Scheer, Frank and Nancy Bardacke were part of the emerging Berkeley student movement which was to influence the British student protests of the late sixties. They were my introduction to the new American radicalism, the first friends to connect me to an international left politics. In 1967 Frank was to be arrested after an anti-draft demonstration, becoming one of the Oakland Seven’ charged with conspiracy. He was an activist-theorist from a left background, with an energetic appetite for ideas and irony in equal part. Irony ran in the family: his grandfather had adopted the name Bardacke’, which meant whorehouse’, when he arrived at the immigration point on Ellis Island in New York. The tiny Nancy Bardacke had long black hair and a most impressive tattoo – a butterfly on her buttock. She showed it to me with pride, saying it had been hard to find a man in San Diego who would do it; they had all said, ‘Nice girls don’t get tattooed.’ Before Nancy’s butterfly, my own efforts at not being a nice girl paled into insignificance. I formed a mental picture of San Diego as a wild place filled with tattoo parlours. California, already an accretion of myths about beatnik life in Berkeley and Emma Goldman’s tumultuous lecture tours, had gained yet another notch.
Frank and Nancy, for their part, found Hackney a romantic neighbourhood, with its recognizable working class. Eagerly they set out looking for class consciousness, to return chastened. An old Jewish man, recognizing fellow Jews from across the Atlantic, had waved towards a huge, ugly block of flats in Amhurst Road, declaring with pride, We own all these.’ Despite this disappointment, a hopeful Nancy spotted a new proletariat arriving at Hackney Further Education College, opposite our flat, on their scooters. Their floppy-fringed mod hairstyles and green parka jackets with furry collars were unknown in Berkeley and she gazed at them with delight.
East London was in the midst of a style revolution. Working-class women of my age still sported elaborate beehive hairdos as they pushed their prams from the housing estates and flats to the small shops on Amhurst Road. But the teenage girls’ hair was now straight and they wore the dark-coloured three-quarter-length leather jackets made in the local East End sweat shops. The east Londoners’ legacy of deprivation had left them small; at five feet three I loomed over everyone, a giantess in my new short black coat which tied at the front. When Mary Costain arrived, she could just about pass as a local because she was smaller than me. Our long straight hair and pale make-up meant that both Mary and I were generally assumed to be in our teens.
Mary came from a lower-middle-class background in Lincolnshire. An undiagnosed spine injury when she was a child had caused her pain and unhappiness which still marked her face. The resulting combination of suffering, resolve and stoicism prevented Mary from being simply pretty and blonde and gave her a tragic, waif-like look. Part of the group of dissident friends who had clustered together at St Hilda’s, Mary was to be the woman friend with whom I shared thoughts and musings on life for the next few years. I would borrow her art history books, while she read the novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries I was working my way through as background to my thesis.
Mary was also my cover. Bob was not meant to be living in the flat as far as my father was concerned, though I confided in my mother, who, being a natural underground operator, could be trusted with everybody’s secrets. I was nearly always able to be frank with her, censoring only information which I thought would worry her too much – like cannabis, which she associated with the moral panics about Chinese opium dens of her youth in the twenties. She had been impressed at Bob’s discovery of Dr Mary Adams and pleased to hear about the diaphragm, but she never really took to him as she had to Mel and Barry. He’s too like your father,’ she insisted. I could see no resemblance – apart from their liking of maths. He’s domineering.’ I didn’t think this was fair. Bob was forceful but always democratic, while my father’s approach was encapsulated by the Lancashire saying, ‘I’m not arguing, I’m telling tha’.’
My parents came down to London shortly after I moved to Junction Place. My father was visiting an engineering firm he represented and my mother was having some medical tests done. Everything seemed to be fine when they arrived in a taxi to inspect the flat: the stairs were brushed, the orange boxes in place and all signs of Bob well hidden. Only later was I to discover to my chagrin that my father, who had popped out to buy some fruit, had tipped the greengrocer on Amhurst Road to keep an eye on his daughter!
They were staying in the Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch and when Bob and I visited them with Douglas Gill for tea my father grumbled indignantly about the disgraceful presence of elegant call girls stalking the lounge. It shouldn’t be allowed.’ When he left the table to telephone, my mother, always sympathetic to women on the make, arched her brows and remarked, Men like your father are frightened by women like that, because they can make comparisons.’ Douglas looked profoundly shocked. I smiled to myself with pride, thanking my lucky stars that I had a mother on the side of vice.
After my father returned to Leeds, she stayed on for a while at the Cumberland, in order to continue the medical tests. One day when I was visiting her there was a great din outside, and I looked out of the hotel window to see a demonstration weaving around Hyde Park. Enormous banners of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky were being borne aloft. The revolution, it seemed, had reached the Cumberland Hotel. Obviously this was not to be missed. I’ll be back soon,’ I said, putting down my teacup and hurrying out to join a great host of black-leather-jacketed boys from the North-East. Being all dressed up in a turquoise patterned straight-skirted summer dress and high heels, I received a warm welcome. The demonstrators had been scooped up by the Socialist Labour League, the hard-line Trotskyist group which had recently been expelled from the Labour Party for tucking themselves in as a deep entryist’ faction.
The SLL had stuffed them all into buses early in the morning, promising a cheap good time in London. There was consequently a powerful odour of smelly socks as we marched through the West End. Amidst the enormous icons of Communist leaders, the boys had improvised their own. ‘Up the Revolution’ nestled with ‘Girls wanted. Cockers only.’ This march was not at all like Aldermaston. On the other hand, they were undeniably proletarian and some of them were socialists. You should join the Young Socialists, love,’ they told me.
I decided that they were right. I didn’t think it was enough to just talk about ideas like the New Left Review. Socialists should do things – proper working-class things. I looked Young Socialists’ up in the phone book and found the Hackney branch met in Graham Road. I was thus probably the only person to be recruited into the Labour Party Young Socialists via an expelled Trotskyist sect. Moreover, I had landed by chance in one of the most intensely political Young Socialist branches in the country, where I was to learn about left politics in a very different way from Oxford.
The burly Liverpudlian who gave me a membership form looked very worried indeed when I explained how I had got there. ‘You should stay away from them,’ Brian Smith warned me. Brian was a member of Militant, another Trotskyist group secretly burrowing away in the Labour Party. They hated the expelled Socialist Labour League, but Brian must have weighed me up and concluded that I was a complete dumbo rather than an infiltrator sent by the SLL’s stern father figure, Gerry Healy. Never one for small talk, he decided to waste no time with my political education. As I filled in my membership form, I was puzzled to hear the kindly but uncompromising figure in a brown suedette jacket with a furry collar intoning like a nineteenth-century schoolmaster, United Front, yes; Popular Front, no.’ I blinked, trying to concentrate. It would be easy to get this the wrong way round, and his tone suggested the consequences could be dire. Whatever did it mean?
Brian was from a Liverpool working-class family with a long memory of resistance. He had been brought up with stories of riots against the police and tenants’ rebellions, as well as with tales of the Blue Union’, the breakaway dockers. This ingrained class-consci
ousness proved stronger in the end than his adherence to any sectarian form of Trotskyism. But when I met him he was a great admirer of J. P. Cannon, the American Trotskyist leader, and lent me a well-thumbed cheap edition of the didactic Cannon’s collected essays. I was never to share this enthusiasm, though Brian did awaken my interest in the international history of Trotskyist groups. It was also Brian who persuaded me, along with Bob and Mary, who both proceeded to join the Young Socialists, to read Robert Tressell’s proletarian novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. Like Wajda’s films, Tressell contrived to dramatize Marx’s labour theory of value – though I groused to Mary about the women characters, who were far too virtuous for my liking.
Every Friday all three of us would trail from 8 Junction Place to the Young Socialist meetings in the dingy Labour Party rooms. There, under the stark, fluorescent lights, in our serried rows, we endured the solemn rituals of sectarian combat, while Militant battled it out with their opponents in the International Socialists, about whether the Soviet Union was a degenerate workers’ state which required reforming or a state capitalist regime which necessitated revolution. Even then the models seemed to me schematic and the disputes scholastic. Indeed, these meetings were never enjoyable, nor were the weekly talks intellectually stimulating. Indirectly, though, I came to apprehend something of the dramatic tragedy of Trotsky’s life and was soon well versed in the complex lineages of the tiny sects. I admired the tenacity and resolution of Trotskyism, though I found its emotional make-up alienating. Based on betrayal, forged in the bitterness of failure, Trotskyism subordinated all individuality to the calling of the professional revolutionary. For the Trotskyist, personal joy could be expected only as the faintest glimmer of sunlight on grass.
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