‘All You Need Is Love’ sang the Beatles; Cream released ‘Strange Brew’. Throughout the summer of 1967 floating, gyrating rhythms played all around us. When Steve acquired tickets for Pink Floyd’s gig at Warwick University that June, I wore a wafty green-gauze dress and we waved our arms in the air to the hypnotic lights. When the Pink Floyd roadie offered me a lift home in the van, dropping me off near the 38 bus stop on New Oxford Street, I sailed back to Hackney feeling the cat’s whiskers of cool.
My fixated longings for Steve had persisted, but we saw one another only spasmodically and I had no idea when or whether he would appear. As everything became a hopeless tangle, I tangled matters all the more by a series of transient affairs. I even broke my own rule, which was not to get involved sexually with someone living in my house. Mary and Kathie had departed to live the simple life in floppy trousers on the tiny Spanish island of Formentera, when a friend from Oxford called Adam Hart sent me a new tenant he had met at the London Film School. Lawrence arrived at the door of 12 Montague Road wearing an extraordinary pair of winged sunglasses which made him look like Robin in Batman – well, a Robin who had been hanging out with the Beach Boys. His blond hair was eccentrically short by 1967 London standards and he had that brown, lean, healthy sheen that no one in London possessed. He was a surfer from California.
Lawrence looked so much the all-American conventional boy he seemed like a send-up. He said odd things like ‘gooky chicks’ and ‘gremmy chicks’ and ‘go crash’ (when he went to bed). He couldn’t adapt to our diet (in which fried yams figured largely) and kept buying himself steaks, which seemed like excessive luxury to English commune dwellers at the time. He suffered greatly when we teased him; mildly sardonic jokes were deadly barbs to Lawrence, who interpreted run-of-the-mill irony as cruel.
Another oddness about Lawrence was his approach to geography. He thought nothing of hitching down to Cornwall and back in a weekend to go surfing. Later, when I learned how he had surfed in Hawaii as well as California, wandered around sleeping rough in Mexico, dodged fighting in Vietnam and twice hitched across the Sahara, I came to see how Cornwall must have seemed a piffling little distance. When I accompanied him one warm summer day, I was surprised to find that it was indeed feasible and that, in Newquay, the Lawrence we teased was treated as a god-like figure because he had been in surfing films riding the enormous waves of Hawaii on acid. This was my first introduction to beach society and I noted that, like any other, under its free-and-easy exterior it was regulated by strict rules and marked by rigid status divisions. These were of course all male-determined. However, I wasn’t too proud to bask a bit in his reflected glory.
Lawrence managed to persuade unphysical me that the sun and the sea could be sources of pleasure. I had regarded the sun as an enemy before, assuming that because I had ginger hair I would never be able to go brown. As for the sea, I liked swimming but was secretly frightened of monsters. Lawrence showed me I could swim for much longer than I imagined. To him the sea was something to read and to move within; understanding how to negotiate its currents, he could dive through big waves or ride them in triumph. His approach to nature was part physical, part mystical and part practical. His sunny demeanour was charged with a frisson of darkness, but he kept this in reserve. Surfers, like racing-car drivers and gliders, carry their death wish lightly.
He had been a lifeguard and I listened carefully to his advice. I have always worried that through lack of gump I would fail in some testing natural disaster. Consequently I store away information about what to do in unlikely circumstances. ‘What to do if shipwrecked’; ‘What to do if stranded on an island’; ‘What to do if someone is drowning’. Lawrence was emphatic; never try to rescue a drowning person without being trained in life-saving because they would undoubtedly hit you on the head, knock you out and drag you under. I worried nonetheless how you could stand there and let them drown, mumbling apologetically, ‘Sorry, I never did a life-saving course.’
Lawrence was going off to surf in Spain and suggested that I went with him. The daily upkeep of the house, filled with decorative and unemployed musicians who were friends of friends, had foisted a landlady responsibility upon me which I hated. I was lonely and unhappy about Steve for long stretches of time. Travelling with the amiable, pleasant Lawrence would, I imagined, allow me to shake off all my troubles in the sun. The night before we left, like a telepathic homing pigeon, Steve appeared. Ecstatically happy because he was there, I didn’t want to waste time being angry about the occasions he had not shown up. ‘Why is my life such chaos?’ I asked him. The question was rhetorical but he replied, ‘Because you invite chaos into your home.’ Part of me acknowledged responsibility, part of me still believed that things just happened.
The usually easygoing Lawrence was fuming next morning because of Steve’s nocturnal arrival. ‘I did tell you I was with Steve,’ I protested. But Lawrence clearly considered being ‘with’ someone meant you actually saw them in person. As far as he was concerned Steve was some guy who had appeared out of nowhere. Nonetheless, we headed off to Bilboa to pick up his surfboard, lent to a surfer in Newquay. In Bilboa things began to go seriously wrong. It took us a long time to track down the place on the docks where the surfboard was to arrive. When we got there, we were told by a shrugging Spanish official that it had not been sent. Day after day we returned. Lawrence became more and more wretched. Eventually he was forced to admit that the Newquay surfer had betrayed him. We would go on without it. I was relieved because I was fed up of being stuck in Bilboa. We went first to Barcelona, where we would get a boat to Ibiza, which had become a hippie holiday place, and then cross to the secluded island of Formentera.
A lorry carried us through brown rocky countryside which I scanned in excitement. Spain felt very different from France; not only was the landscape starker, the heat made the air heavy. I was conscious of being in a country ruled by the fascist Franco and in my imagination it seemed as if oppression weighed physically on the land. I was telling myself that you can’t sense a dictatorship in the air when an old peasant woman walking towards us on the dusty road in the middle of nowhere fixed her eyes on the lorry driver’s in silent communication. Slowly and eloquently, she raised a finger to one eye. ‘Police,’ announced the driver, and promptly hid us in the cab.
General Franco retained his power over the Spanish state during the late sixties and early seventies, though the economic need to attract tourists, which left the coastline scarred with concrete ugliness, was to loosen the authoritarianism of his regime in everyday culture. However, in 1967 this commercialization had not reached Formentera and no tourist hotels existed on the island. There was just a tiny landing place, a cluster of houses and two small restaurants inland where the roads joined. Up on La Mola, the hill with its Roman track still leading down to the sea, another café was run by a laconic youth nicknamed ‘the fat boy’ and his severe mother, who had straight black eyebrows and a black shawl over her head. The rest of the island was flat, with a tawny bleak beauty dotted with green fig trees. Profoundly peaceful, Formentera had a long history as a place of retreat; the Carthaginians had fled there after the Romans sacked their city. The island people behaved distantly, though they were not unfriendly to the strange flocks of hairy visitors who were coming to their little settlement.
By the time Lawrence and I arrived, Mary and Kathie had already left the small white house with a well where they had been living for several months. But the transient community of hippies from Europe and the United States radiated a welcoming spirit of cooperative spontaneity, enhanced by apparently unlimited supplies of hash – great chunks of it, like Cheddar cheese portions in a supermarket. Nature, immediacy and love were the watchwords of this wandering society. Strangers were greeted and shown the isolated beach where everyone spread out their sleeping bags. Nobody bothered to wear clothes much – nakedness felt unaffected and comfortable. We played with lizards on the sand or swam amidst the shoals of tiny fish in the warm sea. I
was to return again and again to Formentera and each time found a special serenity in its landscape. But that hippie moment of innocence, when freedom and security were held in harmonious balance, was to be unique to the untroubled summer of 1967.
Lawrence was not one to lounge around and announced we had to move on. I followed him, puffing and panting through Spanish towns, a rucksack on my back, going dizzy and swaying in the sun. ‘Eat olives and salty things,’ instructed a sun-wise Lawrence. I didn’t like olives but ate them nonetheless. In Alicante we arrived in darkness and couldn’t find anywhere to sleep. The clear patch of land hidden away where we finally collapsed turned out to be the town dump. I awoke in the early light of morning surrounded by rubbish, desperate for a coffee and extremely disgruntled. And Lawrence, grinning and good-natured, extracted his revenge for me not being in love with him by filming me stomping off bleary-eyed through piles of rubble. My mother had always warned me that with my attitude to life I would end up on the Mile End Road. Well, the Mile End Road was manageable, but a rubbish tip was too much. I demanded the luxury of a hotel the next night.
Lawrence was a firm believer in sleeping on beaches to avoid mosquitoes and one night on the south coast, heading in the direction of Morocco, we put down our sleeping bags on the sand. Shortly after we had settled, two Spanish policemen appeared, towering over us in their intimidating regalia. They let us stay with an admonition to be off at dawn so we didn’t upset the ‘tourists’. Later that night I woke again and thought I was having a nightmare. A man was bending over me in the darkness. I could see a gun and holster lying on the ground. A face with a moustache was just above mine. One of the policemen had returned and had unzipped my sleeping bag. He had the cover folded back and was looking at me. The eyes that met mine were filled with a dangerous fear.
For a moment I froze, too terrified to speak. Lawrence stirred. The Guardia flicked back the cover of the sleeping-bag and grabbed his gun belt, standing up and abruptly resuming the authority of the law. Lawrence awoke and assumed that some arbitrary change of mind had brought him back. The policeman brusquely demanded our passports. We dug around in our bags and he solemnly inspected them, telling us to get going. Light was just beginning to break over the sea as we tramped across the sand with our bags. It took me a while to tell Lawrence what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, though rationally I knew these were incongruous responses. He listened in silence and I got the impression that he thought things could have been much worse. As dawn lit the sky I glanced at my watch to see the time. It had gone, stolen by the law – this was Franco’s Spain.
As I staggered through the heat down the Spanish coast I tried to remember the history of the Civil War. Gerald Brennan’s The Spanish Labyrinth had given me romantic expectations of Malaga, the city of heroic Anarchist defiance. I could not connect the city through which we were walking with the pictures in my mind. It was only about thirty years before but no traces of that other Spain were apparent. The revolutionary past had, it seemed, been entirely erased. Not until over a decade later, after Franco died, did Spanish socialist women tell me how a continuity had persisted – ‘the historical memory’.
That summer of 1967 I wondered how on earth anyone could fight in such heat. The sun burned down on my head and I could barely walk with my bag on my back. As I talked to Lawrence about the Spanish Civil War I realized to my amazement that he had no idea what I was talking about. Lawrence would enthuse about Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Ambrose Bierce’s stories, but history seemed to have passed him by. How could you be a radical kind of person with no knowledge of the history of revolutions, I asked him? Lawrence smiled his smile of the sun and the present. He was still hoping to surf. In the long dead periods between rides, I resolved to fill him in with lectures on the debates between Jacobins and Girondins, the differences between the left Communists and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, and a few asides on the history of Anarchism. Lawrence was a patient man and listened with moderate interest. On a dusty Spanish road there was not much alternative entertainment.
Eventually we crossed the sea to Morocco and arrived in Tangier. The courtyards and variegated levels of flat-roofed houses linked by narrow criss-cross streets enclosed and confused, evoking those wandering dreams of being lost in an aimless maze. With my appalling sense of direction, I feared I could well disappear in the old part of the city for ever and stuck close to Lawrence and the boy carrying our bags. My miniskirt fascinated street urchins, who would surround me if I ever faltered, so I kept moving. At last we found a hotel, where I was startled to see myself in the mirror. Ginger or not, I had changed colour. My hair had lightened in the sun and my face looked like a freckled brown egg. I was delighted with this other ‘me’, and kept checking to see if I was still there. Lawrence was perplexed by my frequent scans in the mirror – like many effortlessly good-looking people, he was without petty vanity.
On our return journey we caught a plane to Madrid to avoid hitching through the centre of Spain and were befriended by a group of friendly elderly American tourists who loved Lawrence. His short surfer hair meant he could easily pass for the all-American boy and we were briefly treated as sweet young things. I was touched by their genuine warmth and liked being mopped up and fussed over by them, leaving me perplexed by the paradox that was North America, so kind to the familiar, yet so cruel to the Vietnamese far away.
Our last stop beyond the Pyrenees was Biarritz, where at last Lawrence could ride the surf. The old resort had gone out of fashion and its past grandeur was peeling. Undeterred by the pervasive feel of decay, indefatigable sixties surfers, attracted by the Atlantic breakers, had rediscovered its fading delights. A band of French and Australian surfers were camping in an abandoned hotel and we moved our sleeping bags into a room with bare wooden boards. Downstairs an enterprising Frenchman had established a grill which produced baked potatoes and steak.
When I saw how much the surfers ate, I realized why our Ridley Road diet had seemed so frugal to Lawrence. They were tall, craggy men, their skin darkened by the sun and their hair so bleached they looked as if they used peroxide. These global roamers had their own versions of the Marxist International: instead of exchanging information about workers’ struggles, they discussed waves in various parts of the world. They had a ballerina grace on the waves, but out of the sea they were monosyllabic billy-goat-gruffs and they would never speak to me or even nod in acknowledgement of my presence. ‘Why don’t they talk to me?’ I fumed to Lawrence. He would patiently explain that in surfer etiquette – especially in Australian surfer etiquette – if you spoke to a chick, it was assumed you were coming on to her and that would be to insult the man she was with. The Australians might seem like rough diamonds; in fact, they were being studiously polite. But I continued to grumble, because I felt like a non-person.
There seemed to be a pattern in this: first Bob’s intellectual New Left Review friends, then the Oxford bikers, now these Australians. How could apparently dissimilar men have this peculiar behaviour in common? Why did being a woman make you invisible if they weren’t going to chat you up? Lawrence just shrugged off these questions and got back on a surfboard. I didn’t even have a captive audience to lecture on the French Revolution.
I tried body-surfing and Lawrence was encouraging, but I was an awkward novice in this world. The young French women, ‘gremmy chicks’, as Lawrence called them, were much more skilful. ‘Women,’ Lawrence declared, ‘can never really be good surfers on big waves.’ I began arguing with him furiously. He insisted that it was something about women’s bodies which meant they couldn’t balance. I refused to be convinced. The Biarritz beach was fostering feminist thoughts. What chance had the women in this male scene, I wondered to myself grumpily?
*
Leaving Lawrence to his waves, I returned to London, turfing an unknown hippie out of my bed before I wearily fell asleep. Lawrence was soon to leave London; he had decided that despite the danger of being drafted he needed his big
waves. I resumed my occasional meetings with Steve, seeing him briefly at a party given by some of Adam Hart’s innovative friends from Balliol, who were now making gliders and inflatables.
With Kathie and Mary back, the music and the visitors had recommenced at 12 Montague Road and a Hammond organ was now playing in the room next to my study. I felt lonely and isolated in the house and would lie in bed putting off complaining about the noise, then finally, unable to sleep, would run upstairs shaking with fury. Ruefully I remembered the story of The Good Woman of Setzuan. Authoritarianism, I was painfully learning, was not so much ingrained as circumstantial.
I was distressed by my estrangement from Mary. Our friendship had been strained by the tensions in the house and the distance between us was growing ever harder to cross. Occasionally we could still talk as we had done about ideas and observations, but the ease of the exchange had gone. We no longer shared the same assumptions or wanted to live in the same way; our outlooks had split apart.
Brian, meanwhile, had dropped out of school and been stopped late one night carrying a minute piece of hash. Cursing his thoughtlessness, I had to go to court dressed up in my teacher-type clothes to defend his character. He was let off with a warning and I managed to look the part so convincingly that the policeman assumed I was the probation officer. There seemed to be some profoundly respectable welfare state ethos about my character. At the British Museum the security guards assumed I was a librarian, while taxi-drivers in east London took me for a nurse.
I continued to search for working-class University Extension students, busily pestering libraries from Durham to Exeter with queries. Cambridge University Press wrote saying they would like to look at the manuscript of my thesis. I explained it was in handwriting, but offered it just the same, whereupon a tactful note came back: ‘Perhaps it would be best to wait until it is typed before submitting it here. I say this because the usual procedure is to ask one or two professional referees to advise the Syndics, and I will not be able to send it out until I have a typed version.’
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