Periodically we would go out on recruitment drives, knocking on estate doors or bellowing through a loudspeaker in Ridley Road. It was a labour of Sisyphus: we would lure some normal, inquiring Hackney youth into our midst, only to repulse them by the byzantine disputes in our meetings about the pros and cons of minimum programmes’ or revolutionary defeatism’ during the Second World War.
The memory of Hitler and the Holocaust was relatively close when I arrived in Hackney. Anti-fascism still permeated the local labour movement and meant the Hackney left was politically sympathetic to anti-racism, though the Jewish experience of discrimination remained the main point of reference. Culturally the two communities of Jews and West Indians remained distinct and a new politics of race had yet to emerge locally. I was nonetheless regaled with stories of contemptuous Ridley Road stall-holders pelting the fascists when they tried to renew their agitation and whip up hostility towards black immigrants in the late fifties.
On one occasion, when the rumour reached the Young Socialists that the fascists were about to return to Ridley Road, a rota was hastily drawn up. Told that the local police tacitly agreed that whoever was there first had the right to speak, Mary and I were given the early morning shift. Off we went in trepidation at the crack of dawn, wondering how we would safeguard the speaking pitch. To my pusillanimous relief, the fascists stayed in their beds. Bob, who was at Cambridge during the week, could escape such duties because he came and went like the Scarlet Pimpernel, but Mary and I were easily organizable. In fact we were even promoted to chairman and vice-chairman – which meant I cooked a meal for the executive meeting.
Despite our best efforts to prove our seriousness, we never managed to look right in our King’s Road hipster skirts, our Op Art dresses and the ragged old fur coats which we began retrieving from the mothballed cupboards of mothers or other relatives around 1965. Brian Smith would sadly shake his head about our petit-bourgeois’ clothes. To this day I hear the term repeating in my head in regretful Liverpudlian tones, petty boogewah’.
Elected to the social committee, Mary and I decided to use our new bureaucratic power to branch out from the customary jumble sales. We started to hold dances in a pub room, playing recent hits by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Kinks. All kinds of people came: south London Young Communist League members, snappy dressers in bell-bottom trousers, Robin Blackburn representing the New Left Review in a fashionable pale-blue linen jacket and briefcase, International Socialist men in donkey jackets. It rankled that Hackney Young Socialists never really appreciated the London-wide fame of those socials, which in my opinion constituted the pinnacle of our organizational achievement in office. Despite the fact that people travelled from faraway places like West Norwood, Mary and I had to be content with being prophetesses recognized only in distant boroughs.
The Militant types, in the grey shiny suits which they mistakenly believed made them look proletarian, behaved like real wet blankets at the socials by refusing to dance to the Beatles on the grounds that they were petty boogewah’ and demanding Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire’ instead. I had nothing against Great Balls of Fire’, I just wanted our Hackney Young Socialist socials to be à la mode. What was it about socialists, I wondered? Why did they approve only of music from times gone by?
Belonging to Hackney Young Socialists taught me how there was no such thing as a homogeneous working class. The Northern members of Militant were utterly different from the fun-loving skilled workers who joined the Young Communist League, for instance, and both were remote from the details of working-class daily life surrounding me at Junction Place. When my neighbour upstairs, Margaret, became pregnant, terror of her unfamiliar surroundings in Hackney intensified and she started keeping Eddy at home for company on the pretext that he had a cold. Opening the door one day to the school attendance officer, I was excessively polite and apologetic. Filled with dread of the state, I nervously told John and Margaret that the school attendance man had been round asking why Eddy wasn’t at school. Tell him I’ll thump his head if he comes again,’ was John’s response. I was aghast. Anxious about Eddy’s academic future, I took him to join Hackney library, which was near my bank. ‘Are you going to the bank?’ he would inquire tactfully, his squeaky cockney voice pronouncing the new word ‘bank’ with my short Yorkshire ‘a’. I watched him gradually stretch into imagining other worlds as we read the stories. While his parents had already taught Eddy many practical skills, fancy was a luxury and already circumscribed.
Before Margaret went off to the maternity hospital in Plaistow for two weeks, she made me promise to wake John up in the mornings so he wouldn’t miss work. She explained he was a very heavy sleeper and that I would have to hit him with a pillow. I didn’t believe her, but set the alarm clock at five and headed dutifully upstairs. The double bed took up most of the room; Eddy normally lived in the rest behind a sheet in the corner, but he was staying with Margaret’s relations. John, square, muscular and blond, was fast asleep, lying in a vest on the bed. I tried shouting, but he did not even stir. Margaret was right after all. I picked up the pillow and hit him, but John slept on. I had to belabour him about the chest and head with the pillow before I was able to wake him. Every morning this became a regular routine and I concluded that to sleep in such a coma must indicate a profound psychological dread of Ford.
I had promised to visit Margaret and her new baby in hospital. Ignorant, I asked for Plaistow as if it were connected to plaice’. The ticket collector at Liverpool Street station looked blank and then translated, ‘You mean Plarstow.’ At the maternity hospital, we visitors sat on a wooden bench outside until it was time to go in. There I found Margaret looking contented and relaxed in a pink woolly bed-jacket on her own – the babies at that time were all kept separately from the mothers. She was worried about how John was managing. Everything, I assured her, was fine. Exhausted by rising at five, I was exceedingly relieved when she returned home.
The personal existence and relationships of Margaret, John and Eddy might be shaped by the circumstances of class, but they were outside the scope of the politics I encountered in Hackney Young Socialists. The members of the Trotskyist groups saw themselves as professional revolutionaries and thus apart. Despite rebelling against their approach to socialism, I could acknowledge at source it was driven by a romantic rejection of the narrow restrictions capitalism imposed on the human spirit. It was just unbearably closed in the meantime.
Sectarianism buried the hatchet briefly during election time in October 1964. The Conservatives, much ridiculed on the TV satirical programme That Was the Week That Was and in Private Eye, had started to look not so much a government as a grouse-moor comedy routine. Labour, in contrast, under Harold Wilson’s leadership, was presenting itself as the party of brass tacks and streamlined efficiency. Officially the left line was that Harold Wilson was an opportunist who could be pushed towards radical politics. Rationally we had no illusions, but the Tories had been in power all our conscious lives and thus, despite our theories, we sat on the edge of the leather seats in Hackney’s thirties town hall and cheered as London, defying the sociologists’ prognostications of embourgeoisement, swung to Labour. The excitement of a Labour victory was irresistible, even though at the final count they had won only by a narrow majority. At last those rusty old establishment Tories like Alec Douglas-Home had been ejected from power.
Our ardour was to cool over the next few months as we studied the bland pamphlets issued by Labour Party headquarters about the need to increase productivity and embrace modern technology. We Hackney Young Socialists would diligently comb their opaque pages for hidden traces of exploitation and class struggle. Without realizing it, we were practising semiotics well before the cultural theorists popularized the search for signs and meanings.
The Labour Party central office, for their part, regarded us askance and, by error or intention, crucial documents would reach Hackney Young Socialists late. The older socialists in Hackney we
re generally tolerant, for they inclined to the left on the whole themselves. One member had been blacklisted for trade union organizing, another was a revolutionary syndicalist, others were close to Militant. Some were odd and some artistic. One older Militant sympathizer, for instance, was a member of the Flat Earth Society – an organization which denied the world was round. Art was upheld in the Hackney Labour Party by Alderman Bert Cohen, a supporter of Arnold Wesker’s attempt to take art to the people, Centre 42. Thanks to Bert Cohen, we had not only the Hackney Arts Festival but also the sensual joys of saunas in our municipal swimming baths, because he had been inspired by a Progressive Tours holiday in Finland. Though he liked culture – especially the Jewish all-male choir which always performed at the festival – Alderman Cohen was wary of the artistic temperament. You should never allow artists to organize anything,’ he told an embarrassed young speaker from Centre 42. Bert Cohen was an active member of the Hackney Debating Society and Bob and I went to hear him speak against the motion England is a Philistine Nation’. His Irish opponent wearily pointed out that the English were indeed such philistines that they could not even defend themselves, but had to have an Irishman opposing them and a Jew defending them.
They all seemed far too patient and trusting to us. Bob’s influence and the experience of CND had convinced me that a combination of direct action from extra-parliamentary movements and pressure from within the Labour Party was needed. Inside the Labour Party a much more passive view of politics persisted. When a right-wing local labour MP came to speak, an old cab driver inquired of him, When are you going to bring us socialism? Is it to be five years, ten years? Just give me a date. I’m an old man and I want to know.’ At twenty-one I was convinced that Parliament would never give socialism to you. But when the taxi driver went on to describe how he saw the class system all too starkly as he drove through London, I knew exactly what he meant. I too read the city like a social document on my long bus journey from Hackney to Chelsea College on the King’s Road.
I had been given some teaching by the head of the Liberal Studies Department at Chelsea to supplement my grant. Chelsea was one of the Colleges of Advanced Technology set up by the Tories during a burst of enthusiasm for science and technical instruction. Someone had decided that the scientists needed Liberal Studies’, which involved a mix of history, sociology, philosophy and what later became known as cultural studies. The students, bored scientists training to be pharmacists or teachers, were only a few years younger than I was and called me Kinky Boots, which troubled my dignity. In my first lecture a cocky young man crossed his leg over his thigh, compelling me to deliver my lecture on time and work discipline in the Industrial Revolution with a yellow sock directly in front of my nose. I knew if I wobbled I was lost, but couldn’t help noticing that he was fanciable. I joked about the sock in a letter to the Thompsons and in reply Edward sent one of his many letters back admonishing me affectionately about personal and political responses. Dorothy, he said, had felt that I was letting down the side. The side was that of women’s emancipation. I felt exasperated at the older generation’s strictness about how women could be in the public world. It seemed so restricting. Surely you could be a teacher and feel sexy, I thought to myself. Why should ‘emancipation’ restrict whimsical desire?
I needed more teaching and at this time it was possible to collect a few hours by ringing round the principals of further education colleges. I took my list of numbers to the call box in Hackney Downs station, glancing out nervously as a queue began forming outside. After a rejection from Hackney College, I tried one in Bethnal Green. I’ve got a history degree from Oxford, and I’m looking for some teaching in liberal studies.’ ‘Have you heard of Blanqui?’ demanded the cockney voice on the phone. Of course I had, and Babeuf, the earlier advocate of conspiratorial groups, to boot. This odd interview was my introduction to Bill Fishman, anarchist, historian and principal of Bethnal Green College of Further Education. Bill had winkled his day-release students off local employers like Charrington’s brewery and the Port of London Authority by spiel and gift of the gab. He was a veteran of Hackney Labour League of Youth, had studied while in the army in India and was to go off to Balliol while I worked at Bethnal Green College (renamed Tower Hamlets when the boroughs were reorganized). Later he wrote on the history of Jewish anarchism and became a professor at St Mary’s College, remaining indefatigably outrageous regardless of eminence.
When I started teaching secretarial girls for two hours a week, Bill Fishman translated Rowbotham into Yiddish as Rowtuchas – a sobriquet I regarded as preferable to Kinky Boots. My pay was £2 12s. and I researched my first class on housing as if it was an Oxford seminar. The East End girls, who were aged around eighteen and nineteen and already accommodated to adulthood in their brightly coloured sling-back coats and perms, patiently set about teaching me to teach. They held decided opinions. Either you had a job or you had kids and that was it. They didn’t hold with talking about sex. There’s them that do and them that talks about it,’ declared the spokeswoman for the class. They were in favour of capital punishment. ‘Rich people’s daughters don’t get murdered, it’s working-class people’s,’ an otherwise mouse-like girl remonstrated. They hated the sociological studies of kinship in east London which I showed them. It’s not like that down here, miss.’
They often surprised me. For instance, they belied the ‘embourgeoisement’ theories about the working classes current at the time. My Bethnal Green typists had no desire at all to be counted among the middle classes. Indeed, a lesson on imagery compared their fellow office workers to ‘lovely white wedding cake, icing on top and inside nasty, gooey marzipan’. They wanted to marry dockers or lorry drivers – real men. ‘He ain’t half tasty, miss,’ was the metaphor that really made me laugh. In a series of classes on crime and the law, I read them the ballad of ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ about transportation to Australia during the eighteenth century and asked them why they thought people had risked such harsh punishments. As we talked about poaching off the land, the pale face of a tall, dark-haired girl lit up and she answered with animation, Perhaps they thought they had a right to it, miss.’
At least I taught them history sitting down. This was not the case with an old socialist teacher, a friend of Bill Fishman’s who loved local history. He conducted his classes about the Stepney Parliament and the route of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt at a great pace through the East End streets. When our group joined his I was just able to keep up because I had abandoned high heels for the fashionable stubby Cuban heels. But in Bethnal Green stilettos still prevailed and my students tottered along far behind. They never taught us about all this history at Oxford,’ I told the enthusiastic local historian breathlessly. He gave me a conspiratorial look and nodded sagely. There’s a lot they don’t teach you there.’
Under Bill Fishman’s benign rule, Tower Hamlets College of Further Education on Jubilee Street, near to the site of the old Jewish Anarchist Club, provided a historical home for Wat Tyler and revolting peasants, Blanqui and nineteenth-century revolutionaries, along with sundry species of east London Anarchists. From Bill I learned about Rudolf Rocker, the Anarcho-Syndicalist who had organized Jewish clothing workers in the early twentieth century, and about Guy Aldred and Rose Witcop, Anarchist-Communist advocates of birth control who had lived together in a free union. Bill invited Mary and me to meet an old anarchist woman in her eighties who had known Emma Goldman. She explained with pride that she had never married because she did not believe that love was the concern of the state. I inclined more to her version of emancipation’ than the kind I associated with feminism.
My visits to Bob in Cambridge would be stark culture shocks after east London. Its architectural beauty and the intellectual peace of its libraries were undeniable but I was uncomfortable amidst the cool superiority of many of the academics, for whom a clear demarcation line divided dons from the rest of humanity. Aware of being tolerated simply as Bob’s appendage, it was a relief to escap
e into the sawdust-floored Criterion pub, the hang-out of a marginalized Cambridge where leather-jacketed bikers, American GIs and alienated town druggies met students taking a walk on the wild side – a harmonious conjuncture of beer heads’ and tea heads’.
I was to realize from Cambridge that being on the left was not a guarantee of approachability. Joan Robinson, the distinguished Keynesian economist, liked Bob, but remained a forbidding figure to me, grumbling about the materialism of the West, which she contrasted with China. I bet you don’t do all your own washing by hand,’ I thought, silent and resentful as she dismissed the need for washing machines. However, thanks to Joan Robinson, Bob and I went to the rather bizarre Sword Edge Society, where Cambridge China enthusiasts converged, including the inspiring, white-haired expert on Chinese science and technology Joseph Needham.
Bob’s Sikh friend the economist Ajit Singh became my friend too. Ajit was sympathetic to China and active in the Cambridge movement against the Vietnam War. The hostility towards him in the local Chinese restaurant puzzled me until Ajit explained that the British had used the Sikhs to police the Chinese and I understood how the legacy of imperialism continued to divide long after political dominion had ended.
Ajit’s descriptions of his village in India, which had collectively enabled him to continue his education, gave me another perspective on India to put beside my mother’s stories. We used to argue furiously about the position of women, for Ajit, rather like my father, combined an admiration for women of spirit with a patriarchal outlook. Unlike my father, however, he was a man of reason and if I could make a convincing case for equality he would concede the argument. Ajit would explain how the Sikh religion put a high value on organization and told me about the Asian left groups in Britain.
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