Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  During the lunch break at the founding meeting of the VSC, I was drawn into a protracted argument with two leading men in the International Socialists, Chris Harman, a member also of Hackney Young Socialists, and John Palmer, who was later to become a well-known journalist. I maintained that in socialist households men and women shared the housework. My conviction that this was self-evident and fair was based on my observation of the Thompsons and on my relationship with Bob. When Chris Harman and John Palmer pooh-poohed such an assumption as utopian I grew exceedingly irate. I had no idea that rows about changing personal behaviour in the here and now were to be shades of things to come. No connection was evident then between democratizing daily life and ‘feminism’, which meant to me simply professional women getting into well-paid jobs.

  A new feminism was, however, beginning to stir in 1966. Juliet Mitchell’s pioneering article ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ had just appeared in New Left Review when I met Jean McCrindle. A former member of the New Left, Jean had left the Communist Party in 1956. She and Juliet Mitchell had been discussing the position of women before Juliet wrote the ‘The Longest Revolution’ and Jean took me along to a meeting to debate the article. Juliet was ill and didn’t show up, so Robin Blackburn spoke instead. An American woman who was a member of the International Marxist Group stood up and talked about the importance of women controlling their own bodies – an idea which had persisted from the feminist-influenced socialism of the twenties. Of course I knew she meant contraception and abortion, which was still illegal, but thought mischievously to myself that what I wanted was more chance for my body to be out of control. The atmosphere was somewhat stuffy, so I kept my joke to myself. I came away considering that emancipation was too prim and proper for me.

  Neither the meeting nor Juliet’s article touched the exposed nubs of anger which kept making me question how women were expected to act. My awareness of women’s subordination arose from the sexual humiliation still evident in terms like ‘promiscuity’, ‘nymphomaniac’ and ‘slags’. The subtle constraints I encountered when expressing certain thoughts and feelings and the implicit assumptions of women’s place among many men on the left niggled away at my consciousness. I was troubled too by class differences; the narrow aspirations of the girls I taught and Margaret’s isolation in that upstairs flat. When David Godman wrote with the good news that his mother had finally been rehoused, I reflected on the waste of her life’s energy carting all that water. And this awareness of women’s thwarted potential merged with the sharp pain of my mother’s bitterness, with death upon her before she had known freedom.

  Dorothy Thompson’s conversations about the working-class women she had met through the Halifax labour movement had also made me aware of the personal meanings of class inequality. Dorothy always related abstract theories to people and to actual human relationships and I preferred this to the theoretical structuralism then fashionable in the New Left Review. I was later to discover that Dorothy had written an article which the editor, Perry Anderson, had rejected well before Juliet Mitchell’s. It was still the case in those days that differing viewpoints on the position of women were rarely debated on the left. A remark of Dorothy’s about Simone de Beauvoir registered: the existential freedom of living in two hotel rooms might be all very well for adults but it didn’t solve the really big question about women’s emancipation, which was how did you bring up children and retain your autonomy? I resolved I would somehow contrive both – but not quite yet.

  I did not apply any theorizing about emancipation to my own circumstances, assuming I was an independent woman purely by individual choice. However, I was learning from the responsibility of caring for Brian that while Bob and I shared the commitment and the cost, the practical reality was that Bob was in Cambridge during the week and the main brunt was on me. I’d always assumed we would have children after I finished my thesis, but how and where? Bob talked constantly of leaving Cambridge. But its intellectual pull was undeniable and its élitism pervasive. One don told him he should stop wasting his time with second-rate minds in London, like his Trotskyite mistress in Hackney. Me a Trot? Me a mistress?

  Our geographical toing and froing put considerable strain on our relationship. On the other hand, it gave us a degree of autonomy and we both also had relationships with other people. I did not feel jealous, but I did want to understand more about men and women’s responses to sexuality. Little cultural space existed at this time for expressing the sexual feelings emerging among young women of my generation. We were beginning to want relationships with men on quite new terms, yet were barely conscious of these needs. I was fascinated by the discussions of sex which appeared in Nell Dunn’s collection of interviews, Talking to Women. For the first time I was seeing in print perceptions I recognized from intimate conversations with women friends. But Bob dismissed it as frivolous and not political.

  Involvement in left politics remained quite separate from my personal experience as a middle-class woman. My thoughts about women remained fragmentary, embedded in specific discordant moments and clustering around specific incidents. An apprehension of discontent would come and go depending on circumstances, to be cast off when my interest engaged with something else. Even though we talked about ‘revolution’, cultural behaviour appeared as immutable. Powerless, I would resort to guerrilla outrages. In a restaurant with Bob, Perry Anderson and a group of other men from the New Left Review, I was, as usual, out of the conversation. Irritated and bored, I noticed a man’s silhouette through a lighted upstairs window. He was getting changed. I began a monologue on his state of undress. It took a while for the table to notice, they were so preoccupied with their intellectual debate. Perry regarded me with distaste. According to hearsay, he referred to me henceforth as ‘that girl’.

  We were definitely going to move. I had been left £4,000 after my father died, and Mary and I roamed estate agents in east London. ‘We want to buy a house,’ we declared. ‘Have you got any money?’ they inquired sarcastically. Stray young women simply did not purchase houses in Whitechapel or Hackney at that time. In Islington things were different and they were more polite, but property prices were too high there and a woman couldn’t get a mortgage. At last we found somewhere near Ridley Road that looked likely. I returned on the bus from an estate agent with the key, reading Mayakovsky’s The Bed Bug and feeling light-hearted and hopeful. The best thing about the house, 12 Montague Road, was a grey tumble-down shed which backed on to the garden wall which reminded me of those faded-out shacks on my blues records. I knew I wanted to live there.

  London seemed suddenly to be brimming with bright sunny colours and a new feckless stripy style that summer. A mysterious shift seemed to be occurring. Initially there were these little signals. Just before we moved, Peter Jenner, from the LSE, had come round to visit us in Junction Place. ‘I’ve just put £2,000 in a pop group,’ he announced, grinning. This enormous sum now meant half a house to me. I gasped. ‘You’re mad,’ opined Bob, the Marxist economist. Not so mad as it turned out. The band, Pink Floyd, were to produce a distinctive tangled sound heralding the inside-out sensations and criss-crossing lights of psychedelia.

  Pete Jenner’s other alternative venture, the Notting Hill Free School, started with Felix de Mendelssohn and John Hopkins (Hoppy) in a basement flat owned by the reformed hustler turned Black Power militant Michael X, was to prove much madder than leaving the LSE to manage a pop group. This effort at libertarian education was to founder, though it contributed to the Notting Hill Carnival. One thing seemed to lead irresistibly to another in an unexpected tumble of creativity in the summer of 1966 and music was the barometer of consciousness. Freedom and movement sang to you everywhere – the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ and the Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Keep on Running’ – while the playfulness was caught by the Beatles in ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Good Day Sunshine’. The clearcut throbbing sexuality of the blues bands inspired by the left-wing Alexis Korner was giving way to complex lyrics an
d mystical echoes. Eric Clapton typified the trend. He had been sleeping on the Covent Garden floor of a friend from St Hilda’s but hit the big time and moved out. He played first with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then with Cream, joining Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. The distinctive Pink Floyd zither sound was devised when Sid Barrett simply ran his Zippo lighter across his guitar strings. Much other weirdness in cultural innovation could be laid at the door of the increased consumption of LSD. The search for pure authenticity gave way to a delight in free expression. The result was to be that instead of borrowing the culture of black Americans, something original, energetic and confident was coming out of Britain.

  ‘Swinging London’ was the invention of an American journalist in Time Magazine that April. It was always an external definition and regarded as a joke. It did catch something that was happening, though, some process of interaction between music, art and fashion which Julian Palacios, in his book on Pink Floyd, Lost in the Woods, calls a ‘feedback loop’. The creative mix resulted in an alternative way to be which was no longer simply marginal. A gangly young man I met in Collet’s radical bookshop, David Ramsey, with whom I had a brief affair, recruited me for a German film on ‘Swinging London’. We had to act ourselves, he said. I wore my favourite dress, which was short with bright-green and golden-orange ‘V’-shaped stripes. Though I did not realize it at the time, my Hackney ‘Chelsea Girl’ dress exactly replicated the colours and stripes of a Venini glass vase designed by Ludovico de Santillano in 1965. Art was being rapidly turned into mass fashion.

  The pull of the market was evident everywhere. David Ramsey lived in a house full of folk musicians: Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and a group called the Young Tradition – Pete Bellamy, Heather and Royston Wood. They had all come out of that early-sixties quest for the ‘authentic’. But this was splintering by 1966. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn adopted a finger-picking style which meant they could meet the more popular blues and rock halfway. In contrast, the Young Tradition, influenced by the Hull folk singing family the Waterstones, sang English rural folk music which most resolutely defied ‘commercialism’.

  The Young Tradition lived in extreme poverty on a peculiar diet of cornflakes and treacle, with beds divided by hanging bedspreads. Into this household, the well-known singer Donovan had introduced his big influence, a by now very wheezy Derroll Adams, the older folk musician influenced by Woody Guthrie whom Mel had admired. Things looked up when they produced their first album, The Young Tradition. However, they faced a dilemma. What exactly was this ‘young tradition’? Royston Wood once said to me that they couldn’t really occupy the same place as the Waterstones. They smoked grass and were based in London, playing in the Soho clubs which were the beginning of the metropolitan ‘underground’. One bizarre and unforeseen outcome of the early-sixties folk revival, with its links to Woody Guthrie and the Communists who uncovered working-class protest songs, was its influence on the fantasy and whimsy folk songs of the hippies.

  When I visited David Ramsey, Heather Wood would survey my ‘Swinging London’ Chelsea clothes contemptuously and call me ‘the bird’. I turned up my nose but took note. Women on the folk scene were respected for their skills as musicians by the men. They were fiercely independent, wearing jeans and carrying their sleeping rolls like the men. But they seemed to relate more to men than to other women. It reminded me of a throwback to the beats or of CND without the politics. In defiance, I revelled in the fast-moving fashion of boutiques like Biba or Bazaar. The sharp zigzags of Op Art were being quickly superseded by the flowing lines inspired by Aubrey Beardsley and the vampish boas of the early silent movies. Young designers dived into the past like raiders searching for lost wrecks of spoil and their time-travelling motifs overlaid the early-sixties quest for an obscured bedrock of truth.

  Richard Wallis’s wooden bowls in the Kingston Road kitchen had defied commodity production by being made to last, but there was a shift towards the throw-away attitudes of the late sixties. A tiny anarchist with a bald head and a beard called Gustav Metzger kept popping up, busily making things he was going to annihilate. One of his former students, Pete Townshend, received rather more publicity when, following his teacher, he smashed up his guitars. Auto-destructive art was a joke, but it communicated something which was to have a deeper cultural resonance – a feeling that creativity should be cast upon the waters, not hoarded or exchanged as an art ‘object’.

  Ideas about spontaneous happenings – immediacy, fluidity, change – were in the air by the mid-sixties. There was talk of moving environments made out of startling new materials; the houses of the future need not stay in one place. This situationist approach to architecture appealed to me. Why should we be pinned down by our surroundings? Structures, I thought, should respond to human need instead of defining us between fixed barriers. From the vantage point of several decades of accumulation, I am doubtful. What about the clutter of daily life, the accession of knick-knacks and paper?

  In 1966 my belongings still fitted into one room and I saw things differently. That summer Bob hired a van and we moved our orange boxes and books round the corner into 12 Montague Road – a structure which, despite a bulge at the back, to be much measured over the years with a spirit level, conventionally stayed put. We painted it white all over, like the interiors of David Mercer’s film Morgan – a Suitable Case for Treatment, and Bob built long bookshelves down the corridor in the basement which he filled with sturdy tomes on economics.

  Our communal household had grown to include a south Londoner called Kathie Humby. From a working-class family with an Irish mother, Kathie worked as a dentist’s receptionist in Bethnal Green. Bob and I had met her in the Dolphin pub at King’s Cross, where London Young Communist League members used to gather. Kathie was in Lambeth YCL, though by the time we started living in Montague Road she was inclining to the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Dancing in the Streets’ rather than Marxist-Leninism. Kathie assumed a wise-woman role in the household and began reading everyone’s tarot cards and astrology charts. The neighbours couldn’t make us out at all. At first they thought that Brian and I were a young couple who had lodgers. This theory was exploded when they saw him going to school. So they then concluded that we all slept with one another. Visitors searching for our house would be immediately asked, ‘Looking for the ’ippies?’

  Like Bob, I considered rent irrational, so each week we all paid £1 into a common fund for bills and rates and £1 to a political fund of our choice. The economic flaw in this theory of rent was that we never covered the cost of repairs, and the house disintegrated gradually around us. Only Bob, who had done O-level carpentry, had any idea about how buildings hung together, and he worried persistently about this slow process of decay. The rest of us paid little heed to structural factors, regarding our living space in terms of purely surface aesthetics. I invested in fashionable dark-purple curtains. We covered up the marble fireplaces (restored by the eighties occupants) and installed ‘modern’ gas fires. Charlie Posner, a young academic at Essex University who was working with Bob on a document which aimed to alter Labour’s economic policy of wage freeze, came round and helped pull out an ugly fifties fawn tile fireplace in Mary’s room upstairs with truly auto-destructive zeal.

  Bob and Charlie’s document was published that September as a pamphlet, ‘Beyond the Freeze: A Socialist Policy for Economic Growth’. It was a collaborative effort of left academics with MPs such as Ian Mikardo and Frank Allaun and advocated import and capital controls and a reduction in military spending, along with devaluation, as short-term solutions to inflation. More generally ‘Beyond the Freeze’ challenged the Wilson government’s preoccupation with modernization, arguing that the Wilson model did not go far enough; there had to be a conscious shaping of society on human, as distinct from business, needs. Its authors added, ‘In the formation of any socialist programme for economic growth this ultimate objective must be kept clearly in sight. Immediate programmes must be related to socialist objectives. If
this is not done, socialist aims can become mere platitudes which are trotted out to still the conscience.’

  It was a gallant effort, but the Labour leadership wasn’t listening. A political vacuum was opening up as left-wingers all over the country internalized the fact that we were not going to have any impact on the Wilson government. The result was to be that we began to look outwards towards the emerging left in the trade union movement and towards the new community politics, influenced by the American New Left. My first encounter with this direct, informal approach to politics was a bearded member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination who came to Hackney Young Socialists from Islington to talk about how they were resisting slum landlords’ tactics of intimidation. When we started a similar private tenants campaign in Hackney, I responded with enthusiasm, keen to do something at last which connected with the problems of people in the borough rather than listening to sectarian wrangles.

  Yet when it came to the crunch of knocking on people’s doors and prying into their rent and housing, I felt an intruder rather than a deliverer. Only a handful of people wanted to come to meetings and make their landlords go to the rent tribunals established by Richard Crossman’s Rent Act to assess whether rents were ‘fair’. Our campaign required hours of work in making contacts and then advising tenants and following cases through; the positive results were small. Nonetheless, it was to be an eye-opener for me into the appalling conditions behind the exteriors of the old houses in Hackney. I would be invited in sometimes to listen to woes and found families living in one room with walls so wet that the wallpaper hung off them in great curling leaves. Cookers were out on the landing and lavatories and bathrooms were shared.