Ajit’s rationalism and his machiavellian preoccupation with strategy presented a very different take on politics from the anger of the American Black Power movement which was beginning to be discussed in Britain. Interest in the American debates was stimulated by the visit of Malcolm X in 1964. He was in the process of breaking with the Black Muslims to develop a left-wing black politics which combined race, class and anti-colonialism, speaking at several meetings including one at the Oxford Union which was filmed. The black and white footage catches a youthful Judith Okely in the audience, her head raised in attentive concentration, and a boyish Tariq Ali, who had become President of the Union that year, gripping Malcolm X by the arm as he descended from the podium.
Malcolm X was to be assassinated the following year. Though he died so young, the publicity surrounding him in the mid-sixties revealed not only racism but the endemic poverty existing within the richest country in the world. Sociological studies of race current in Britain in the first half of the sixties tended to focus on attitudes, but Malcolm X’s approach, along with an influential 1962 book by a white American socialist, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, connected the sources of material injustice with cultural domination. I seized on these insights from across the Atlantic because they illuminated the daily evidence of race and class inequality surrounding me in Hackney much better than concepts of a prejudice’.
This revival of radicalism in the United States after the Cold War made me wonder what had happened to the American left in the past. Bob Rowthorn used to talk in awe about Bob Scheer’s mother, who had been a militant in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. He also introduced me to the labour songs of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. It was to be these, together with plays at Unity, the left theatre at Mornington Crescent, and novels, which revealed to me that other’ hidden America of hoboes and labour organizers, of immigrants and poor farmers. I read everything I could find: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Frank Norris and many more. Without realizing it, I was retracing my steps back through the documentary tradition to naturalism. I did not see any connection at the time, but a fascination with the real’ was in focus more generally. There was a grainy interest in actuality in the Wednesday Plays on television, in Joan Littlewood’s drama based on oral history at her Stratford East theatre, in the folk and blues revival encouraged by Alexis Korner.
A favourite haunt in my search for old novels was a second-hand bookshop near the Narrow Way in Clapton, run by a very old man and a woman who told me how she had caused a scandal by wearing her skirts to her calf during the First World War. Happy amidst the random muddle of the shop, I was also looking for even more obscure works by or about the long-forgotten, dusty characters who had gone to lecture in the University Extension Movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Day after day I caught the 38 bus from Hackney to the British Museum reading room. Crab-like, I was teaching myself not simply about working-class education between 1870 and 1910 but about the social and intellectual background of the period. I ranged from church history to the history of economic thought, from the Independent Labour Party to social imperialism, from the emergence of economic history to arts and crafts. This apparently aimless process, though the antithesis of modern-day thesis-writing, was to serve me in good stead later in life.
Edward Thompson had warned me that the University Extension movement would be dull and he was right, though when you research any topic with intensity it acquires a certain fascination. Fortunately for me there were some eccentrics among the lecturers who went off to teach the workers. These included Edward Carpenter, the socialist and sex reformer who settled in a cottage outside Sheffield and wrote on homosexuality, and Charles Ashbee, the arts and crafts architect and designer, influenced by William Morris. After working at Toynbee Hall, the Whitechapel social settlement established in 1885 by anxious upper-middle-class reformers to encourage social harmony, and lecturing in University Extension, Ashbee formed a Guild of Handicraft, taking the cockney silver-workers out to the Gloucestershire village of Chipping Campden.
With great excitement I discovered that I could track down some of the working-class students who had attended University Extension courses through scraps of autobiographical material in the University Extension Journal or in local papers from the small towns, such as Todmorden in Yorkshire, which reported Extension lectures. The Toynbee Record, still tucked away in the leafy Oxbridge oasis of Toynbee Hall, contained amusing accounts of troublesome Russian Jewish Anarchists disrupting the University settlers’’ meetings.
I was deep in the Toynbee Record one day early in 1965 when I was startled by a voice inquiring, ‘And who are you?’ I twisted round from my desk to see, sitting in an armchair, a dark, balding man. The most arresting things about him were his eyes, which carried a challenge, and the extreme whiteness of his laundered shirts. Shirts in east London were just not that kind of white. I told him my name and, responding to the look in his eyes, asked him bluntly who he was. ‘I’m John Profumo,’ came the reply. I kicked myself under the table. Of course, I’d heard that the Conservative minister involved in the sex and spying scandal with Christine Keeler was doing good works in east London – ostensibly penance for lying to the House of Commons but really for being found out.
We all sat round at teatime with the warden, who was Labour but still somewhat in awe of his notorious visitor. The Tory Party had just decided to elect their leaders in future rather than appointing them. Democracy,’ declared John Profumo with a twinkle, doesn’t suit the Conservatives. They prefer that all the old animals in the herd get together and make a decision.’ As I sipped my tea, I couldn’t help my mind wandering off in the direction of Christine Keeler, though I tried to banish the images which kept flickering around the stiff white collar of his shirt. It was unfair on the man to be defined for ever by the disclosure of scandal.
The archive of the London School of Economics library was in Houghton Street, off the Strand, which meant I was also spending time there. The LSE had not yet turned into a synonym for revolutionary students, though there was a small group of socialists there and some sympathetic staff. Among them was Peter Jenner, then a young lecturer in social administration, whom I used to tease for being a reformist. Peter was soon to leave academia and, as a manager in the music industry, remained a resolute left figure behind all kinds of radical cultural happenings from Pink Floyd to Billy Bragg.
The LSE as an institution has a mixed tradition, being at once the intellectual centre of both social imperialism and anti-colonialism. One day Fei Ling Blackburn, Robin’s Chinese wife, took me off with the LSE sociologist Ruth Glass to meet a minister from Tanzania called Babu who was visiting London. I’d never met a government minister before and was amazed that such a young, jokey man could be part of a government. I was equally surprised to hear Ruth Glass, who had been his teacher, tell him off for adding Coca-Cola to brandy. ‘You mustn’t do that when you go to Paris,’ she admonished. Babu just grinned. Until this meeting, my idea of government ministers had been restricted to the stiff-backed, white-moustached Anthony Eden model.
Labour in office meant that even in Britain ministers were changing and were increasingly hanging out with academics. Barbara Castle now headed a new department, the Ministry of Overseas Development, marking the shift which was occurring from anti-colonial politics to economic growth. In 1965, another of Bob’s friends from Berkeley, Brian Van Arkadie, a development economist, went to work for this new ministry and, on a visit to 8 Junction Place, recounted how Barbara Castle used to hang her evening clothes up in the office. Ministers might be distant figures, but it dawned on me listening to Brian how difficult it must be for Barbara Castle as a woman in an official position. People always judged women by their appearance.
Brian Van Arkadie, a jovial Londoner with an Asian father and white working-class mother, who was to become an economic consultant for the World Bank, characterized himself as a
n extreme supporter of moderate causes, unlike the organizationally elusive Bob, whom Brian teased for being a moderate supporter of extreme causes. I reckoned this must make me an extreme supporter of extreme causes. Reared in Yorkshire intransigence, I went in head over heels.
Brian’s new boss, Barbara Castle, had been one of the many bones of contention which had disrupted our Roundhay teas in Leeds. She had made her way on to my father’s list of most hated socialists during the fifties, when she criticized British soldiers defending the base in Cyprus – a treasonable offence in my father’s eyes. My habit of disagreeing with him about the Empire and foreign policy, from Suez onwards, had personal roots which pre-dated any knowledge of anti-imperialist politics. When we first moved from Harehills to middle-class Roundhay, I had played alone. Children were kept away because I was too ‘rough’, until I made friends with a little girl called Janina, whose father, a Polish Jewish refugee, owned a button factory in India. I must have been eight when he returned with a servant called Ram, who used to looked after Janina. We were badly behaved girls but Ram was the kindest, most patient adult I had ever known. When I was about nine or ten he came round to say goodbye: he was returning to India. Strangely my father left him at the door. Sad that he was going so far away, I went out to the porch and hugged Ram goodbye. My father was furious. I could not understand his reaction and was upset and hurt that Ram was being treated differently from other adults. My mother explained it was because of my father’s attitude to Indians. The shame of the inhospitable reception which Ram had received became something wider as she spoke. In my distress, the conviction formed that my father’s outlook was wrong.
From this childish refusal, and encouraged by my mother’s attitudes, I was to question other barriers and divisions. This desire to cross over, to go beyond the place you happened to be, crystallized when I read E. M. Forster at school. Eventually this personal sensibility transmuted into a political resistance to the hierarchies and appropriations which prevented people from being regarded fully as human beings, making me a socialist and a feminist.
The rejection of my father’s views of the world was so intense that our moments of real contact were few and far between, occurring on the rare occasions when he ceased to be an infallible authority. My mother subverted one of his lectures on morality when I was in my teens with the query, ‘What about that woman with the fish-tail dress?’ She then recounted how, on one of their voyages to India, my father had enticed a woman with whom he played bridge up on to the deck. Unfortunately for the illicit lovers, she was wearing one of those tight twenties layered evening dresses. When she finally descended into the dance room, her ruffles were sticking out horizontally like a fish’s tail in shock for the whole boat to see. Exposed, my father had grinned sheepishly and shut up. He had a similar look on his face when I had walked out of St Hilda’s one day and, to my amazement, bumped into him sneaking out through the porter’s lodge dressed up in a new trilby hat he had bought in London. It was my last year at Oxford and he had given £500, a vast sum which he could not afford easily, to the college building fund because he thought the principal would then give me a good reference for a job when I left. I tried to convince him that principals of Oxford colleges could not be bought so directly, unlike the colliery managers he bribed to take pit motors, but gave up and laughed at his secretive, protective generosity.
When he asked me one autumn day in 1964 to meet him at King’s Cross station, I felt pleased. At last, now that I was living in my own flat and economically independent, I might be able to encounter him on a more equal, less conflictual footing. Just before we reached my mother at the Cumberland Hotel, sitting in the taxi, he told me that her medical tests had revealed a lump. She had throat cancer and would die in a few months. As yet she did not know this herself. I stumbled out numb. How was I to behave when we reached her room? I think he did not know how else to tell me.
My mother went back to Leeds, to the Brotherton Hospital. When I took Dorothy and Edward Thompson to visit her during the Christmas holidays, she perked herself up, putting on her lipstick, her bright social face and her posh telephone voice’ to greet them. I could see that these people I loved so deeply had little to say to one another; they were glancing off one another without really meeting. But I felt glad that momentarily my different worlds had at least been present together. Dorothy and Edward sustained me through the grim months that followed; they provided an alternative socialist family, including a twenty-first birthday cake cooked by Edward.
Few friends of my age had any experience of illness and dying, and they found it hard to comprehend grief and loss, including Bob. One surprise was the silent sympathy which came from the seemingly stolid and impervious John, the Dagenham worker who lived upstairs. His wordless perceptivity communicated directly with my raw grief. I returned after a bleak Christmas in Leeds to find Margaret had left him, taking Eddy and the baby to her mother’s. John had vanished too, along with my old transistor radio. I assumed that with no one to wield the pillow he had finally lost his job.
It had never occurred to us to put internal locks on our doors. Those were trusting times; danger simply did not occur to us. Mary and I would amble off without fear for a walk on Hackney Downs at night and one evening I invited eight young mods high on pills whom I met at Liverpool Street station back to our flat to keep them out of harm’s way. They chatted out the speed to Mary and me through the night, trotting off amicably at dawn. Violence was something confined to gangs like the Kray twins, or it was far away in other countries. Travelling up North one weekend to see my mother, I was drawn into an argument about British imperialism with some servicemen on the train. The man next to me, with a bitter expression, indicated under the table. He had lost his leg fighting to defend the British base in Aden.
Throughout the winter of 1964–5 I seemed to be permanently on trains, one weekend to Leeds and the next to Cambridge. On one of my visits to Bob, Mary rang from London. In a frightened, shaking voice she said there had been a fire in our flat. Fire was inconceivable, something that happened to other people. I returned to find that the top flat, where the fire had begun, had been destroyed. The ceiling of Mary’s bedroom was open to the sky and some of her books were charred by the heat. We had no electricity, but our gas cooker still worked and the room I shared with Bob was luckily unscathed.
Mary and I searched for another flat but, discouraged by a succession of bleak rooms in Amhurst Road filled with plastic settees, decided to stay. She moved into my room while we waited for the ceiling to be fixed. Months went by as we huddled over candles through a freezing winter, marking essays from Tower Hamlets College, where Mary was now also teaching. Her long hair touched a candleflame one evening and began to burn. Remembering an Enid Blyton story, I grabbed a rug and extinguished her.
The delay in repairing the damage was caused by the landlord’s attempt to blame the fire on the television of the new tenant upstairs; the insurance company maintained the wiring was faulty. The fire left me no longer simply theoretically against landlords; I loathed ours personally. Even after the memory of cold and discomfort had faded, the acrid, burnt smell, mingled with paraffin from the stove, would return. A brown hole right through the middle of my copy of Asa Briggs’s The Age of Improvement, which had been in Mary’s room, remained an incongruous memento of the miseries of the private housing market. After the fire, Bob, the Marxist economist, began to say we should move. It was irrational to pay rent. Buying somewhere would make more sense.
But throughout 1965 I was able only to take each day as it came. Every time I went back to visit my mother she had become weaker. She had defied all the predictions of a quick death. By that Easter it was evident she was surviving through her incredible inner will alone. I knew this powerful spirituality, mystical rather than religious, from the unspoken, umbilical closeness of childhood. It was simply part of my mother’s being, a private awareness which had no means of expression in her everyday public persona.
I was heavy with the guilt of being young, healthy and wanting life. On one visit I dug out the black and gold silk pyjamas bought on one of her voyages to India, which I had played with as a child. Could I take them back to London with me? The floppy trousers were coming into fashion for parties. She looked straight at me, nodding. ‘I won’t be having much use for them any more.’ My mother was speaking the truth. She could always use words to strike the core of meaning, but so much of this had been in fun. The truth of death was too terrible and it separated us.
Death and anger seemed everywhere. Apart from James Cameron and John Pilger, the press seemed to be uncritically pro-American. Photographs of the Vietnam War and its coverage on television were profoundly shocking to those of us who opposed it. Our eyes had not acquired that veil which was to come from prolonged subjection to images of pain and suffering. So many people were dying. I told myself I should feel the same grief for the unknown that I felt for the tiny, gaunt figure lying in her bed at Roundhay. But I didn’t.
The generalized peace politics of CND were beginning to seem irrelevant. Bob and Ajit Singh were planning a Cambridge teach-in against the war in Vietnam, along the lines of those held in US universities. On 29 May there was an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in London and I went on it before going up to Leeds. Bob needed to talk to people about the teach-in and I wavered undecided, missing a train.
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