But I was still in a state of stress when I arrived at my own doctor’s surgery in Bethnal Green next morning. With a chain of reasoning which I saw as irrefutable then, but later seemed clearly absurd, I decided he had forgotten I was in the waiting room and started banging on his door. Dr Michael Leibson, who had a profoundly conservative view of the human body as an inevitably disintegrating assembly of bits, took odd behaviour in his stride. He was sceptical about psychological theories and newfangled ailments, but he had watched a large section of Bethnal Green go by for twenty years and before then he had been an army doctor. This had left him with a savoir-faire about the vagaries of the human spirit. His face had a mask-like quality, lined with humour which could make most of my illnesses go down in size. His gruff irony usually did the rest.
I had been sent to Dr Leibson worrying about thrush the previous year by Bob’s friend Charlie Posner. ‘I know a doctor,’ declared Charlie, ‘who is never shocked.’ In the mid-sixties thrush was still a catastrophe. Its cure was not a matter of buying a tube of effective Canesten ointment from the chemist’s, but required a trip to Whitechapel VD clinic, where building workers leered at you as you went in. Once inside you were assumed to be either a prostitute or the wronged wife of a man who had caught the clap from prostitutes. ‘Where did intercourse take place?’ they would ask me, presumably to determine categorization. ‘I don’t see the relevance of the question,’ I would reply, and get into a row. Then they needed the name and address of the ‘contact’. ‘No intercourse for a week,’ declared the tight-lipped nurse, giving me another appointment and a cream that took for ever to work.
Michael Leibson lived up to his recommendation from Charlie Posner of being unshockable and uncensorious. His ‘I’ve-seen-it-all’ chuckle became familiar over the years. I went to him for about twenty-five years, until he retired. My usual ailments were of the sore throat and sinus type, and he always offered me a cigarette. ‘I don’t smoke.’ ‘Oh, no, of course you don’t,’ he would say regretfully, putting them back in his pocket. His questions were not easy to answer. ‘Why do you think people go to doctors?’ he wanted to know, as if we would get to the root of the matter together. ‘What do you think is really important, ecstasy or security?’ he inquired once in oracular tones as I snuffled, woeful and fluish, in the seat opposite him.
My panic attack he treated with time and a walk to Bethnal Green Hospital, where the white-haired consultant had a brisk, fatherly manner. ‘I suggest you get married. Women need security, you know.’ Enraged by this inapplicable advice, I started shouting at him furiously. Didn’t he know these were completely reactionary attitudes? The pesky man wrote to Dr Leibson saying it had obviously done me good to get things off my chest.
I kept on going to the British Museum as a kind of habitual security that February, but I was too abstracted and agitated to concentrate on my research. As I gradually inched out of self-preoccupation that spring, I noticed that things were not quite as they had been. I was surrounded by people in a drifting, ambling daze, quietly absorbing the Beatles singing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
The ska stall in Ridley Road had turned into a record shop and the young black man behind the counter appointed himself as my musical adviser. ‘Listen to this,’ he said one day. It was the Jimi Hendrix Experience. David Ramsey, who had deserted the folk scene, took me to his concert at the Saville Theatre, where the wild energy of Hendrix on stage tearing up the American flag was accompanied by ear-bursting music exploding from the biggest speakers I had ever seen. Music throbbed through 1967: Cream, the Incredible String Band, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas. And music was no longer just for dancing; it signalled psychic discovery.
Peculiar and interesting places were sprouting. Tony Godwin had opened his alternative bookshop, Better Books, on Charing Cross Road, selling slim volumes of poetry. The hippie club UFO had started in Tottenham Court Road, and the underground entrepreneur Jim Haynes had set up his avant-garde Arts Lab with its café in Covent Garden.
The counter-culture extended options by creating a new kind of public space which was accessible to women. In a conventional club, as a young woman, you were there to be picked up and it was not easy to feel comfortable sitting in a pub on your own. As everything in the counter-culture was meant to be weird and mystical, you could take cover under the imperative on everyone to be a free spirit. You could hang around alone, bump into people you knew, pirouette in the light shows to music, hide in a corner or meet someone new. None of the old rules applied.
Moreover, the very topsy-turviness of the underground provided a way of being women which could bypass some of the restricting rules. It was the licence of misrule. We could all play the fool. The whimsy and nonsense rhymes were not only fun, they also provided a route into remembering direct responses, before the self-consciousness of puberty. This fascination with childhood was there in the music. We could be kind children, loving children, bad children, way ward children or awestruck children – and all these children could forget about being grown up.
Hippie London was pleasantly sociable; the dancing and the dressing up for special occasions constituted a round of engagements without any defined etiquette. At the fourteen-hour Technicolor Dream at Alexandra Palace, in north London, 10,000 of us wafted past one another, displaying our latest exotica like bizarre courtiers in a science fantasy court where there were no rules and everyone was young. Such mass gatherings confirmed the realization that there were more and more odd people in the world. They were multiplying so rapidly that it seemed as if large sections of the country would shortly become completely detached from that dull mainland where straight ruled OK, to create variegated and decorative cooperatives where the sun always shone and everyone did their own thing.
Hippies were more cheery and colourful and decorative than the beats in their austere minimalist black sweaters, but some of the attitudes were the same. The emphasis on direct relationships, on more natural ways of being, the introspection and the preoccupation with pushing experience to the psychological limits, were all familiar. I felt betwixt and between. I’d been a very junior beatnik; now at twenty-four I was a bit old for the hippies. I could go along with them but I wasn’t quite of them.
Throughout 1967 I wavered. I enjoyed the prettiness, the display, the release, the conviviality of the hippies and their gatherings. I was affected emotionally by the great rush of creativity in music and in design which had been gathering momentum from 1966. At various times I was to be deeply moved too by the trust between strangers and the genuine mutuality of hippie settlement. The exploration of inner states of consciousness also made long-hidden private preoccupations surface as part of a communicable culture. It was a relief to be able to envision the knotted veins of my father’s hand in my own or muse on the instability of meaning in a word. The membrane which separated the inner and outer worlds seemed to have become permeable. I sensed some shift in how men were too. Some of the unstated barriers between femininity and masculinity were down. The self-decorative aesthetic of the urban hippie and the unquiet serenity of cool augured a different kind of maleness.
But I could see the tribe-like underground possessed its own snobberies and conceits like any other social world. In rejecting the ways of ‘straight’ culture, hippies surreptiously introduced implicit conventions of their own. Exclusivity and hierarchy appeared and were policed with the sneeering snobbery of ‘cool’. The hippie subcultures which formed, renouncing these hip aristocracies, were, in their turn, rapidly to be soured by that curse of those who would purify – sanctimony and pride.
At first glance hippie culture appeared androgynous. In fact, as certain assumed facets of masculine power were relinquished, others took on a greater significance. Real women could never live up to these sad-eyed ladies of the lowlands – the Belle Dames of legend who were the ideal heroines in John Lennon’s, Bob Dylan’s and Jimi Hendrix’s songs. In Revolution in the Head, Ian Macdonald points out, ‘In folk tradition, the
se love/death figures traditionally dwell in a twilight borderland of the male psyche where masculine identity dissolves.’
It was terror of annihilation perhaps which bred a particular kind of ruthlessness – the antithesis of chivalry. The divested trappings of masculinity could, as if to compensate, produce a more exaggerated desire to control women. It was to be this peculiar combination of a new spaciousness in gender identity and a tighter grip in unexpected places which laid the basis for women’s rebellion.
My dithering and dathering about hippie culture related to a persistent indecisiveness in my character. While part of me hankered after some utopian harmony apart from the bustle of the everyday, an even stronger wish was to dive into a normality which was transformed by becoming so intensely real it ended up being more normal than normal.
When it really came down to it, I found the hippie camp too confining; it pinned you down and rolled you out like a gingerbread person with hair and beads. What I wanted was fluidity and being able to move between worlds. So I bought my bits of velvet and lace on the King’s Road and then went off to Chelsea Girl on Dalston Lane and tried on mass-market compromises.
This oscillation was not just a matter of philosophy but a practical necessity. Despite personal upheavals and regardless of hippie flower power, I was still teaching at Tower Hamlets College, where I had graduated from typists to engineering apprentices. The majority were boys with short-cropped hair and pullovers, class conscious in a defensive trade union way, still linked to the world of their fathers and to the past of the labour movement. When I took them to a trade union exhibition in Stepney library they listened with earnest expressions to an old socialist, Walter Southgate, who believed in teaching labour history through memory-jogging objects. His exhibition ‘Things’ was to inspire the Labour History Museum (now the People’s History Museum in Manchester). However, a minority, influenced by the mods, were listening to Cream and smoking marijuana. They were not particularly interested in unions or in being connected to a labour tradition, but, taking their cue from the music they liked, were more likely to be anti-racist.
Regardless of whether they identified with traditional working-class culture or were exploring the new values of popular culture, they were all very confused about girls. With sexual values exploding and colliding and miniskirts all around them, the boys were profoundly disturbed. ‘What do they expect us to do?’ The girls, for their part, were increasingly up in arms. In three years east London femininity had changed markedly. Those sober young matrons of eighteen with their perms had been replaced by forthright sixteen-year-olds with long straight hair and leather jackets. ‘Every boy in this place is a raving sex maniac, and yet they say they want to marry a virgin.’
The mod boys’ hairstyles had shifted from the fringe to two longish and rather becoming wings over the brow with a central parting when, to my dismay, they suddenly walked in with no hair. Working-class east London was proudly presenting the exaggerated hard-edged masculinity of the skinhead against the hippies’ flowing locks. And, no doubt about it, the skinheads had declared war on hippies. A sixteen-year-old mod-turned-skinhead called Chris in one of my new classes gave me a terrible time. He was the undisputed leader of the group and I knew that, unless I could somehow deal with him, I hadn’t a chance. In despair I decided to cop out of a lesson and show them a film. The film hired that week was Alexander Nevsky. I had recently wiggled my way through a film projection course by being good at the ‘theory’ and buttering up the ponderous trainer, but I couldn’t work the actual projector. Somehow I got the film inside the machine and it began to whirr. We all settled down. I suspect they thought it was some kind of horror film. Then the subtitles appeared. An uprising was imminent when we came to the famous scene on the ice. ‘Shut up,’ said Chris to the grizzling apprentices. ‘This is good.’ Silence fell and from that day I had an efficient and draconian sergeant-major and no trouble at all with that class. Despite my resemblance to a hippie – Chris continued to hate them – thanks to Eisenstein I had passed some mysterious test.
We were on our way to the British Museum one day (the mummies were always a popular draw) when Chris came face to face with a hippie in a dark-grey duffel coat and long, black greasy hair and glasses. ‘Fuckin’ ’ippie,’ snarled Chris, jowl to jowl. ‘Come along, Chris,’ I said briskly in a determined-teacher voice. But this was Chris’s male honour and he stood there, glaring and provocative. I walked a few paces back, remaining protectively by the persecuted hippie being bullied by my skinhead. Chris’s demeanour changed suddenly. Out from inside the duffel coat a knife was gleaming. The knife was at Chris’s face. Oxbridge saved the day. ‘Come along, Chris,’ I said in ringing middle-class loco parentis tones, striding off down Great Russell Street. This time Chris obediently trotted after me. Only when we were at a safe distance did he begin cursing hippies again.
Far from being the stereotypical skinhead, Chris was well disposed to all other groups of humanity, apart from hippies. Passionately anti-racist, he argued with the rest of the class against any suspicion of racial prejudice. He was class-conscious too. But again this came from his own angry, individual perceptions, not simply in a handed-on collective manner. A Käthe Kollwitz exhibition was showing at Bethnal Green Museum. Before taking the class, I explained the historical context of her work and showed them some other German art, including drawings by Georg Grosz. Chris, who was fascinated by Grosz’s satires, reacted ferociously against Käthe Kollwitz’s portrayal of workers. I think it was her sympathy towards workers which he loathed. It felt patronizing in 1967, when young skilled workers were confident that life was going to be good. Images of the oppressed proletarian of the past just seemed insulting.
A woman from the radical theatre group the San Francisco Mime Troupe came with me to Tower Hamlets and talked to my class about their approach to theatre. When she suggested that we should try out some acting exercises, I felt a little worried. But to my surprise, they all wanted to have a go. It was me who was being the conservative one, fearful that my fragile teacher-pupil relationship was going to be overturned. One exercise involved standing in a circle with someone in the centre who relied on the others to catch them. When it was my turn I looked around at them all, meeting their eyes. They were smiling ‘Trust us’, communicating the certainty that I could fall without fear. Next week they shook their heads and smiled. ‘That was a funny lesson,’ one boy said. But we all knew that the games had revealed something we had not noticed happening. Liking and mutual respect had grown regardless of dissimilarity, without us even stopping to notice it.
My American actress friend told me after the class that she was recovering from a period of taking speed. Her account of how it had drained her confirmed my decision that speed was not for me. I’d tried it once in Paris and found the hollowing-out sensation in the come-down unpleasant. I was equally resolved never to take heroin. A small group of friends were completely dependent on getting their next fix. ‘Hooked’ was a good word for this subservience to the deal. Not only did it mean you had to live your life helplessly around heroin, but it also left you with a white, greasy, slightly luminous spotty skin and the sweating agony of the cold turkey. I was as unromantic about junk as I was about nicotine and now I added speed. My head had always tended to buzz too fast anyway and the dozy calm of marijuana suited me better.
There was suddenly a lot of acid around and I approached it with the cautious conservatism I had had towards marijuana, sitting around for a long while with friends who were taking trips before deciding it seemed not to cause them harm. Even then, I took the sugar cubes (later the blotting paper) warily and only occasionally, over a period of several years in the late sixties and early seventies. Each time brought some insights I valued. Acid stripped away many of the socially acquired buffers and reminded you of the wonder of the ordinary. It intensified for me the capacity to see beauty in details which my eye would normally have lazily passed over, and it deconstructed the customary: the ta
ken-for-granted symbolism of money could suddenly appear so evidently artificial, while a snail could be revealed as a magical and majestic creature.
Acid also helped me to reflect upon childhood, which now seemed to be without obvious reference points because of my parents’ death, enabling me to reconsider my relationship with them. It was to heighten my awareness too of the discordance in the personal exercise of power I could observe in the everyday relations between men and women. Ever the historian, I was anxious to record and trace how my perceptions were being altered. But this was chasing bubbles; the scraps of paper document banalities. Acid, like sex, defies the chronicler. The cascading insights of the moment won’t sit still and allow themselves to be transplanted into words on the page. They are apt to lose the gleaming intensity of their moment, like pebbles which reveal startling colours in the water but look dried and dull when the tide goes out.
There was certainly risk involved in taking a drug which had such a powerful effect. However, in my twenties I was prepared to take risks which later would seem unnecessary. I had no faith at all in the blanket condemnation of all drugs by officialdom, which I dismissed as biased and inaccurate. Relying instead on observation, I had ascertained that the risks did not seem insuperable. We regarded ‘trips’ as solemn ceremonials rather than recreational highs and took acid only in very safe circumstances. Out of the many people I knew who took LSD, only a tiny minority ever suffered serious psychological distress. I could acknowledge that it would be better in an ideal world to see the world anew as an artist, a poet or a mystic. But the scrambling of customary reality and the vividness of the particular which usually passed unnoticed were, in the meantime, things which fascinated me.
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