In one room a group of older black women with scarves wound round their heads sat in a circle sewing. I nodded in helpless sympathy as they listed complaints. A big, imposing woman spoke with authority. ‘These black landlords are the worst,’ she grumbled, leaving me wincing in white liberal embarrassment. But it was true that small landlords were harassing their tenants to make money. Next door to 12 Montague Road the Jamaican landlady was trying to get her tenants out with the help of her henchman, a pimp called Mr Archie. Bob and I became friendly with our neighbours, helping them to resist in court. They loathed Mr Archie. ‘He pushes those white prostitutes’ heads down the toilet,’ announced a woman who was to become a close friend, Barbara Marsh, indignantly. Indeed, one night I awoke to a terrible howling. A naked woman was lamenting in a strong Irish accent on the steps outside, ejected by Mr Archie.
That winter homelessness was exposed in the Loach/Garnett TV film Cathy Come Home, written by Jeremy Sandford. It was not Cathy’s poverty but the indignity which accompanied it which made the film so compelling. By no means a victim, Cathy kept on struggling against an overwhelming combination of forces until her children were taken away by Social Services. The response to the film was an indication of changing attitudes. A new kind of housing activism was appearing which blended pragmatism with anti-authoritarianism, and the same spirit was evident in the spread of libertarian ideas about education. These were no longer limited to the progressive schools. At Risinghill, the comprehensive at the bottom of Chapel Market in Islington, Michael Duane was causing a furore as an anti-authoritarian head.
The debate around education was particularly relevant to me because of both my teaching and the subject matter of my thesis. When I had begun my research I had hoped to find outright rebels among the worker students, like those who had revolted at Ruskin College in 1909 to form the Marxist education group Plebs. Instead I found respectable Lib-Lab artisans and the occasional Independent Labour Party member, all too inclined to be dazzled by the beauty of Balliol and the kind consideration of the dons. Exasperated with them for not following my revolutionary script, I was nonetheless intrigued by the accounts I was uncovering about the personal contacts between men of differing classes. I had never seen this kind of material in any histories of education and was unsure how to write about it.
Dorothy Thompson encouraged me to pursue the individual biographies I was building up of worker-students and an enthusiastic Raphael Samuel suggested that I should give a talk at Ruskin on the ‘Self-educated Working Man’. I quickly came to learn that Raphael-style historical productions grew in scale and occurred later than expected. In December 1966 a letter came from Raphael to say my talk had expanded into a day school. This was later to be postponed until the following autumn because he had another meeting coming up on Chartism early in 1967 – the first ever Ruskin History Workshop.
In retrospect, a synchronicity is apparent; my historical responsiveness to personal experience coincided with a new note sounding in popular culture. Recognition of subjective identity in Sartre’s philosophical writing had mysteriously been relayed, via the art colleges, out into the world. I had been hearing it pounding over the airwaves. ‘Help’ sang the Beatles at the end of 1965, and the singer-songwriters of 1966 were habitually exploring the personal unease of the working-class hero. As yet this new sensibility had not cohered into any explicit orientation about how to be; it was still not a cultural way of seeing, but was simply a disconnected voice charged with an unconscious force.
The changes occurring beneath the surface of events were affecting me unawares. Those two years since I had left university were not only to see me an orphan; I was also gathering impressions and understandings about class, race, personal identity and what was later to be called ‘sexual politics’. My outlook was being cast.
As 1966 drew to a close a counter-culture was emerging which was to run alongside the radical movement, sometimes interacting with it, sometimes diverging from it. A heady mix of music, drugs, art and underground papers was ready for take-off. The great congregation of people who showed up at the Roundhouse to launch International Times that October seemed to be the alternative manifest. The vast old round building, a former railway turning shed, in Chalk Farm, north London, belonged to Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42. It was dank and freezing cold, and the lavatories flooded, but the spirit of excitement was so strong it didn’t matter. Around 3,000 of us danced and wandered in the coloured lights while Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and a steel band played. In the middle of the Roundhouse a garish Pop Art fifties American car stood like a giant junk-shop joke about the hope of modernity. Its next stop was to be a cultural scrap heap, for on the cover of IT the kohl-rimmed black eyes of Theda Bara, the vamp, stared out – the designers had muddled her up with the original ‘It’ girl Clara Bow. Hippies didn’t bother too much about accuracy and that retro-decadent look was to be quickly marketed by Biba in Kensington Church Street.
That night the Roundhouse was claimed as a space for spontaneity. IT’s launch was filled with an expectation that something was about to happen and this sense of ‘happening’ was one of the most attractive features of the underground. ‘What’s Happening’ was to be the heading of IT’s listing section. However, while the underground was meant to be open-ended, in establishing its own space it also developed a self-engrossed ‘in ‘club’ atmosphere. Julian Palacios quotes the painter Duggie Fields: ‘There was definitely a group identity that was different. It wasn’t that we were going to change the world, but it was that the world would change.’ The emphasis on ‘vibes’ and on direct relating appealed, but I could never simply be part of the underground because of this abnegation of any attempt to change the external world.
In contrast to Britain, where older labour institutions of the left continued to retain more life, by 1966 in North America the counterculture’s utopianism had pervaded New Left politics. Unbeknown to me, Frank Bardacke was declaring ‘the first mission of the American radical is to escape. The radical must present a counter-vision, he must create new values.’ Though Frank was soon to be puzzling just how this transformatory vision could relate to the needs and aspirations of the mass of ordinary Americans, this stress on alternatives was to shape the emerging movements among blacks, women and gays in the United States.
Unlike me, Bob was never greatly affected by the shifts within popular culture or drawn to the anarchical ideas of alternatives and community politics heading east from Notting Hill. He maintained a strong commitment to the mainstream, which he still saw as working in the Labour Party. These differences were accentuated by tensions in our communal house. Kathie, whose day job at the Bethnal Green dentist’s was from nine to five, came home to groove, while Mary was casting off the rigorous denial of her upbringing and beginning to relax into hippie culture. Bob, in contrast, wanted to study and, being still early-to-bed, early-to-rise, was repeatedly enraged by the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan playing upstairs far into the night. I was torn between my relationship with him and my close friendship with Mary, who was gently blossoming in her new pleasure-loving hippie milieu up on the top floor. Less able to be comfortable amidst the joss sticks, the personal conflict left me wrestling indecisively with my own ambiguities about left politics and counter-cultures.
These external pressures were not the only problem. Something had gone flat within the relationship between Bob and myself. We were no longer able to spark off one another. When we went out to visit friends, I would find myself feeling distant from Bob’s responses. I was trying to locate my own bearings, no longer prepared to be in his orbit. But I did not know any language to express these inward rustlings of resistance. Overtly our relationship was egalitarian and democratic. I could find no reason for my growing unease. When I read the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self I, along with many others, decided that here was a metaphor for my discontent. Split in two, it was as if one part of me had begun to observe the other. This new self-consciousness brought a paralysi
ng sense of atrophy, accompanied by a fearful dread of being absorbed, of not existing.
I woke up from a nightmare panicking. I had dreamed there were translucent star-shaped fish, dark red, emerald green and turquoise, swimming towards me and they were grafting themselves on to the skin of my forearm, merging into my skin. I was desperately trying to tear them off me, screaming as they folded into my flesh.
1) Me, the sixth former, in the grounds of Hunmanby Hall, 1960
2) Me, aged 17, a new arrival in Paris, 1961
3) An existential-looking Bob Rowthorn in Paris, summer 1962
4) Hermione Harris in the mid-1960s
5) The communal household, 12 Montague Road
6) Mary Costain – the friend from St Hilda’s who lived with me in Hackney in 1967
7) John Hoyland in 1959, the radical bohemian in the Partisan Coffee Bar, which I never managed to get to
8) Wisty Hoyland in 1968 carrying her baby, Kate, at the Agit Prop Revolutionary Festival which John Hoyland was compering
9) Jean-Luc Godard filming ‘British Sounds’ in London 1969
10) Playwright David Mercer in the late 1960s
11) Me in my ‘Chelsea Girl’ Sergeant Pepper coat, holding the policeman from my puppet show against the Labour Government’s White Paper on industrial relations, Victoria Park, East London, May Day, 1969
12) Tariq Ali with Stokely Carmichael and black power activists at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference, 1967
13) Raphael Samuel the social historian who started the History Workshop conferences at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1967
14) Posters from the late 1960s
15) Protesting against the Vietnam War, 1968
16) Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech gave racism a new legitimacy. British Fascists marching in support of Powell in the late 1960s
17) Anti-racist demonstration 1968
18) Putting Black Dwarf together in the office in Carlisle Street, 1968
(Top left & centre: Bob Rowthorn; Top right: Bob with Clive Goodwin; Bottom left: Clive and Bob with John Hoyland; Bottom centre: Clive Goodwin; Bottom right: John Hoyland and me)
19) Me and Roberta Hunter Henderson at the Sheffield Women’s Liberation Conference, 1970
CHAPTER 4
1967
Not only had I turned into a divided self, I was leading a double life during the hippie revolution. I had embarked on a journey into the interior, covering scraps of paper with inchoate scribblings solemnly documenting the shifting nuances of my inner psyche. Meanwhile, with equal diligence, I was ploughing my way through my thesis, which had been extended into a PhD, supervised by Eric Hobsbawm.
Bob, long-suffering about reading the chapters on University Extension in my handwriting, was not at all interested in my obsessive analysing of emotions and relationships. His brain habitually worked on a level of abstraction which I could only glimpse in rare moments. I gathered impressions, anecdotes and stories, trying to piece them together, while he analysed, boiling life down to some essential element. Bemused by people who commented at length on literature, his approach was to say it in one line. His brain ran like a hare’s, while mine struggled along like the proverbial tortoise. As I laboriously contemplated my splintering identity, seeking words that somehow glanced off my fingertips, clinging to an assortment of stray ends I couldn’t fit together, Bob would breezily blow all this bother away, dismissing my half-formed psychological utterances with a puff of intellect. Winded and dismayed, I kept trying to communicate perceptions I could not articulate, wanting him to meet me halfway in a realm beyond reason. When I couldn’t reach him, I would give up and become withdrawn, which made him upset and angry.
I continued to equivocate. Part of me did not want to abandon reason, the reason which was so crucial to Bob’s personality and which had characterized our relationship together. On the other hand, the pull to float off once more into the irrational, where things just ‘happened’, was becoming irresistible. Some separate kind of me was developing, reaching around for footholds in memories I had put aside as irrelevant. I was tussling with myself. And, in some confused sense, I intimated that I could not become myself because I was always in Bob’s shadow. Not only was he older than I was, he was a particularly brilliant and compelling individual. Over the four years in which we had been together we had fallen into that common habit of couples, we had parcelled life out. Through this division he had been allocated the economics and the theory, while I went off with the poetry and the emotion. Contrary now, I wanted to wander off emotionally and not be accounted for, while also laying claim to think theoretically in my own right.
This was my first long-term significant sexual relationship; I had been crucially formed by Bob’s outlook and ideas. He was my closest friend and separation was barely conceivable to me. Yet I could not find an independent track while remaining connected to him. I was aware that the rush of feeling which was making me recoil in Bob’s presence, leaving me scratchy and disconsolate, must be partly generated from the many unresolved struggles with my father, whose death had left simply absence. But reasoning to myself that I was dumping the thwarted rage of childhood and adolescence upon Bob did not make me feel happy with him.
Our relationship was also affected by our responsibility for Brian, who was gravitating decisively towards the hippie visitors. It was becoming increasingly difficult to get him off to school and the rows between him and Bob were starting to resemble those in my own family. Only a few years away from my own teens, I was terrified by this cycle of anger which had repeated itself in my life so quickly. Neither Bob nor I had anticipated how difficult it would be for Brian to move from a North-East pit village to a London commune. The result was that we found ourselves caring for a troubled and difficult adolescent in rebellion against us.
Meanwhile, the unrelenting music continued to blast away, while brightly decorated figures floated up the front steps, exchanging hippie in-talk. Sociably, these visitors would invite people they met round at random. I was awakened one night by a terrible crash: two fat drunks had fallen through the front window of my bedroom in the basement. Someone had suggested at the tea stall in Ridley Road that they might like to drop in. Rather too literally, they had done just that. They stood disorientated and bemused, as I leapt out of bed and berated them with the self-righteous fury of an affronted property owner. Sheepishly they hung their heads and shuffled off, all meek and mild and dumbstruck. As they shut the back door, I calmed down and realized I had nothing on!
When Bob arrived from Cambridge at the weekends I would tense myself against his complaints. I could have asked Mary and Kathie to move out, but this would have been to act the landlady and violate my principled rejection of the economic power of ownership. It also seemed to me that this would have been disloyal to Mary, who had been a close friend through the terrible time of the fire and my parents’ deaths. Disregarding the emotional and physical chaos which surrounded me, I continued resolutely to turn out chapters on University Extension.
So we drifted, with me hoping that things would somehow get better. They got worse.
One afternoon, coming home from the British Museum, I climbed up to the top of a 38 bus and bumped into Arnold, whom I had not seen for several years. This chance encounter acted as a catalyst. The distress and discomfort of the preceding months steamed to a head and, after months of evasion, everything appeared with a startling clarity. That was it. I’d always really been in love with Arnold. I’d taken the wrong decision. Bursting with a sudden romantic inflammation of certainty and an overwhelming desire to act, I announced to Bob that I had met Arnold on the bus and this had made me decide to leave him. Bob received my initial declaration in blank astonishment.
I had not consulted Arnold before deciding he was my lost true love. Three years were three years. Arnold’s response when I announced I had now left Bob was to look aghast. The responsibility of an unattached me was clearly alarming. Well, that was that, the die was c
ast. I would be alone, I felt a mixture of relief and terror. But I was free.
In the room we shared together, I surveyed the familiar arrangements of Bob’s pencils, the ruler, the two paintbrushes in a jam jar on his desk, the cupboard he had designed, with long tall drawers too high for me to see in at the top. Everything was the same and yet utterly different now, for I was seeing it through new eyes. These had become external objects, they were no longer part of that lived intimacy which means that your surroundings simply ‘are’. I was distancing them, separating myself.
Needless to say, it was not so simple, this disentanglement. In the months that followed, Bob’s unhappiness haunted me, though I continued to be driven by a decisiveness I did not understand. Breaking away from someone you have loved is always painful, and our excessive rationalism during the whole affair left the emotions of parting even more raw because they had been so soundly covered. It felt as if I had been with him all my conscious life. It was hard to adjust to encountering the world alone, rather than as a person in a couple. There was no longer Bob to waft away unease with his laughter. Now I was alone.
The truth was that, having put so much effort into becoming separate, I was unsure how to be apart and on my own. A diffuse anxiety assumed physical form one night when I was overwhelmed by a choking feeling which left me panting for breath. Kathie, with dental nurse aplomb, took my pulse and declared we should send for the emergency doctor. This made me gasp and puff even more. Twenty minutes passed, half an hour. By the time the young emergency doctor arrived, an hour had gone by which seemed like an eternity. But I had calmed down and was just weak and frightened. He patted me, took my pulse, listened to my chest and suggested that I take a Rennie – which of course left me feeling a terrible fool.
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