More masks, fairgrounds and people getting away and having fun appeared on television on 26 December in the Beatles’ sly satire of ‘straight’ society, The Magical Mystery Tour. Again there was a striptease. As I watched the black and white television, I caught myself picking up their excitement. Suspended, I observed myself divided in two, seeing another woman’s body through men’s eyes. It was a moment of incongruity when the outer world and my own perceptions collided uncomfortably.
At the end of 1967 I was feeling profoundly disjointed and askew. I was not, of course, the only woman sensing that personal experience was shifting in the late sixties. It was as if some hidden plate deep under the surface of appearances had moved irrevocably, sending out tiny, barely perceptible seismic shocks which were shortly to contribute to an earthquake. After this politics was never to be quite the same.
CHAPTER 5
1968
Early in 1968 the Vietnamese National Liberation Front were advancing through the south. I heard about the Tet offensive in the dusty, dilapidated building in Tottenham Street where Adam Hart, the friend who had sent Lawrence to be my lodger, was living. We watched the flickering television with incredulity and then began cheering. The news was more extraordinary than the fusions and partings of the light shows Adam was doing. The commentator was showing how much territory the NLF had taken; the victims were turning into victors. A small group in Saigon had raised the red, blue and yellow flag of the NLF over the American Embassy. Though the embassy was later recaptured, nonetheless it was a decisive turning point and the first indication that we had entered an extraordinary year.
One of the fatal reflexes of left politics is surely the celebration of noble defeats, and since becoming a socialist I had conditioned myself to supporting lost causes. The NLF winning broke through this habitual pessimism. There is nothing as powerful as example and the Vietnamese resistance sent a sense of possibility flashing out over the airwaves all around the globe. If the Vietnamese could take on the mightiest power in the world, what about us?
My own Vietnam Solidarity efforts that January in Hackney were not exactly at the cutting edge, being rather the revolutionary equivalent of ‘doing my bit’. The saga of the jumble sale for East London VSC was continuing. At the eleventh hour, with jumble bursting out of my bedroom, I discovered the Trotskyist secretary had considered himself too much the grand revolutionary to book a hall for the jumble sale. Suspecting sabotage and hardly able to move around in my room for boxes, I defiantly stuck up the notices in the newsagent’s anyway: ‘Victory to the Vietcong Jumble Sale, 12 Montague Road.’ Sure enough, the tough gangs of elderly women who were regulars at all the local jumble sales were in the door, down the corridor past the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ poster on the wall and bargaining fiercely. Then off they went, like the proverbial greased lightning, leaving sad little piles of debris in their wake.
The momentum of the jumble sale went with them. A few lost Hackney souls, bemused and aimless, were left ambling around my bedroom, evidently disorientated at finding themselves in a house. Indeed, one Caribbean man, who must have decided the solution to this oddness was that we were an extension of Mr Archie’s business next door, propositioned Mary and me. I steered him past the ‘Victory to the Vietcong’ posters and out through the front door.
Over the course of 1968, many people, radicalized through CND in the early sixties and then disheartened by sectarian politics in the mid-sixties, were to become involved in the demonstrations around Vietnam. The police assault on the counter-culture was also to bring younger people into radical activity in defiance of ‘the system’ and ‘the fuzz’. In the first few months, however, left politics continued to depend on tiny left groups who remained set in their inturned ways.
Early in 1968 personal worries rather than politics were preoccupying me. These were, as ever, a teenage Brian, with whom I could no longer communicate and who was soon to leave 12 Montague Road, and of course Steve, or rather the absence of Steve.
My whole relationship with Steve was about yearning really. I estimate it was around 70 per cent yearning and 30 per cent sex and relating. It consumed an extraordinary amount of emotional energy, though, regardless of the fact that actual contact was rare. Over these three years I would meet men, sex would come up, sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. Some vanished, some were smitten and some I ran away from. Yet others became good friends. However, the obsessive returning to Steve went on – because the sex was always amazing and because he would intimate things I couldn’t see myself but wanted to understand. Nothing was ever explicitly stated and I was never to unravel the power of the connection between us. I knew I was going round in circles, like a caged mouse on its wheel, but it took me a long time to get off. I carried on out of stubbornness, or perhaps because of wanting not to be afraid of knowing passion, of merging without being obliterated. When it ended, Steve wrote saying that I had always held him at a distance. Ostensibly, though, he had been the one who was always vanishing.
For several years after leaving Bob, despite my loneliness, I was terrified of becoming part of a couple again. The fishes growing on my skin made me shudder. A tragic love was in certain crucial ways safer than a reliable one. The times were as ambiguous as I was. By the late sixties sex was often not a big deal, though my generation of young women had been brought up to consider that it would be. This was just one of the splits we lived between. What happened and what we had been led to expect never seemed to be in sync. In 1968 practice had gone ahead of attitude and it was difficult to say, ‘I just felt like it’, ‘I was curious’, ‘I thought I might as well’, ‘There was nowhere to sleep.’ A grand romance balanced the other profligate and amicable sexual relationships which popped up in daily life. It was the ‘real thing’.
I was nearly twenty-five, about to hit that old borderline which, only a few years earlier, had seemed to mean you were definitely grown up. But I wasn’t feeling grown up at all. We had moved all the signposts anyway and nothing signified what it had done then. I had no clear idea how to live in the new space. Teaching seemed the only certainty which still made sense and I threw myself into work. I must have been looking conspicuously troubled, because Chris, the engineering student at Tower Hamlets, remarked with East End solicitude, ‘You take things too hard, gel. You’ll be a nervous wreck by the time you’re thirty.’
Amidst the chaos of my house I had managed to acquire two responsible house members with whom I was friendly, a bass player called Stevie York and his partner, Helen, who made clothes for pop musicians, including Jimi Hendrix’s drummer and the poet Pete Brown, who had been part of the jazz and poetry scene with Mike Horowitz in the mid-sixties. His song ‘I Feel Free’ had become a hit single for Cream in 1967. Pete had continued writing lyrics, though his real ambition was to be a singer in his own band.
I was teaching a new class of London Transport trainees, who all seemed to be budding poets, and to encourage them I persuaded Pete, whose grandparents had lived in east London, to come to the college in Jubilee Street. He started off in their class and went on right through the lunch hour. Some of the Port of London Authority messenger boys piled in, along with the group of engineering apprentices which included Chris and the hairdressing students. A great mélange of skinheads, greasers and long-haired Rolling Stones lookalikes sat listening intently to the tubby, hairy hippie. Pete was a great showman and extrovert, and the fact that he had written lyrics for Cream gave him God-like authority. It was all right to be weird: ‘She was like a bearded rainbow.’ It was all right to talk about your feelings: ‘Sunshine of your love’. And you could be a sexual loser.
Pete left a wave of creative enthusiasm in his wake. In return my appreciative classes tried to teach me some useful things they knew about, like wig-making or how the London Underground signalling system worked. But the boys’ main passion was for football and about this I hadn’t a clue. Once in desperation, with ten minutes to fill, I said, ‘Well, why don’t you tell
me about football?’ ‘Takes time,’ replied a Port of London Authority boy on the back row, with just the slightest of hand gestures. His studied irony put my gaping ignorance firmly but tactfully in its place.
None of us noticed a bewhiskered bad fairy glowering at us in the wings. Rhodes Boyson was about to make an entrance, flapping his ‘Black Paper’ on education and fulminating against anarchy. Throughout the seventies, war would rage about education and about liberal studies in particular, until the Boyson brigade took power in the eighties. The right wing were to then caricature the teaching of the previous two decades and idealize the period before the introduction of comprehensive schooling.
Those day-release students I was teaching in the sixties had all gone to secondary modern schools and been branded as failures because they had not passed their eleven-plus. When they came to Tower Hamlets they found themselves for the first time in small classes and given individual attention. As a result the principal, Bill Fishman, kept finding students who decided they wanted to do O-levels. I was aware of the arguments against the selection of the supposedly ‘academic’ through the eleven-plus, but it was actually teaching young working-class people who had been excluded from grammar schools which made me discount the linear testing of ‘intelligence’ at a much deeper experiential level. Tower Hamlets showed me how the expectation of the teacher really does affect the pupil and convinced me of the importance of small classes. We had them in groups of twelve and this meant – as the public school system has always recognized – that everyone had some flash of interest which could be a starting point. Confidence and the encouragement of creativity and originality are the first steps in the desire to learn.
The right wing in education was to make standards their official ground. This was a red herring. You had only to look at the greengrocers’ notices in the sixties to see that working-class pupils in the disciplinarian secondary moderns hadn’t learned to spell. Covertly, their project was control and slotting people into predetermined destinies. In the late sixties an opening seemed to be appearing in the rigidity of the English class-bound education system. From the late seventies the right were to mobilize in earnest to extract revenge for that moment of freedom.
In between teaching and working in the British Museum, I had taken to hanging out in the Arts Lab, a conveniently neutral space where you could chat to friendly people, watch weird underground avant-garde films, look at exhibitions and eat a cheap meal. Around Covent Garden and Tottenham Court Road there were now a series of counterculture centres: clubs like UFO, Middle Earth and the Marquee. I continued to dip in and out of the hippie world and my ex-boyfriend, the guard from Collet’s bookshop who had taken me to the Hendrix concert, David Ramsey, came visiting that March, a skinny beanpole exuding cosmic despair about everything being ‘plastic’. Since I had tripped around the Oxford cobblestones in high heels and my height-of-fashion black plastic mac, plastic had nosedived. First Claes Oldenburg’s telephones had made it a bit of a joke. Now it had become the symbol of sterility and capitalist degeneration. Like modernity, disgraced by Wilson and his white heat of technology and complicity in the Vietnam War, plastic had fallen into ill repute by the late sixties. This distrust was henceforth to run counterpoint with anti-capitalism before eventually merging with Green politics. The differing elements of modernization were not distinguished or thought through, and layers of misunderstanding muddled into a flip response over the decades – a double bind that is still with us.
Edward Thompson wrote to me on 5 March, grizzling about the introspective druggy youth culture: ‘I think it is neither better nor worse than other forms of psychic self-mutilation – but worse at the moment because it belongs to a culture so excessively self-absorbed, self-inflating and self-dramatizing. Very like Methodist revivalism, self-examining hence v. unhappy and not v. good at mutuality … the involuted culture you paddle in … that isn’t “you” … do try to talk a bit about other worlds.’
Little did he know all was about to change – though not in the way he might have wanted. Early in March a mysterious call came from John Hoyland, after which normal life was not to return for several years. John wanted to know if I would be willing to do something slightly illegal which involved being collected early in the morning. He was friendly with a group of radical architects who had been cleverly changing the wording on posters in the tube. For instance, there was a George Peppard film, New Face in Hell, showing and they had overlaid President Johnson’s face on the advertisements. I suspected it was something on these lines and, all for making subversion as funny as possible, I agreed.
Sure enough, the bell rang around 6 a.m. and a young man in a leather jacket stood on the front steps. As we drove off he explained the plan. The architects had produced stickers advertising the Vietnam demonstration which was to be held on 17 March. But these were stickers with a difference – they were designed to cover the faces of the new parking meters. Little teams like ours were out all over central London busily sticking away. We set to with zeal and had got through a few streets when a policeman appeared at our side. He told us to hand over our stickers and empty our pockets. To my horror, my kamikaze companion had pockets bulging with inflammatory stuff telling people to bring weapons on 17 March to defend themselves against police violence. My eyes were as wide as the saucer dog’s. I thought we were done for. What kind of anarchist situationist nut had I been lumbered with? To my amazement, we were let off with a caution and told to go home. But as the morning wore on the police became less patient and other people sticking were arrested. Our cultural guerrilla action was not in itself such a big deal, but it felt like a marker.
In the Young Socialists there had been all those inherited rituals for doing things and it never occurred to anyone to deviate from them. Jokes were inconceivable; it was all deadly serious. Moreover, communication was a matter of words. You presented a reasoned case, then off it went to a printer and back it came in small black ink. In the late sixties the barriers between propaganda and everyday activities came down. For instance, one of the left-wing architects produced a vast number of paper shopping bags made from the NLF flag. I carried mine around Ridley Road market, hoping to sway shoppers to the cause as I stuffed it with oranges.
The night before the 17 March anti-Vietnam War demonstration, the Vietnam Solidarity Committee called a meeting to discuss tactics. Members of the anti-authoritarian German student movement had come over and were clustering at the back of the hall. Having been engaged in a series of confrontations with heavy German police, they were held in considerable esteem and we all spun round to watch them show how to make a human wedge to break through police lines. The other demonstration tactic introduced by the Germans that March was linking arms and chanting, ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’.
On the day the demonstration had the buzz of a big march – around 25,000 people were there. It fizzled with defiance from the start, as we distributed leaflets with Gerald Scarfe’s grotesque cartoon of the ‘Special Relationship’ – a lapdog Harold Wilson licking Lyndon Johnson’s arse. Its ethos contrasted with CND’s ‘We the good people bearing witness’ style. We were more angry than good and far less passive than was customary on British CND demonstrations, pushing against the police lines, arms linked at Grosvenor Square. I was briefly at the front and saw a few demonstrators get through the police lines and run towards the embassy. I pushed, but not too hard, because the police were really beating isolated demonstrators behind the lines with their truncheons. Then the horses started going right through the crowd, driving people back and sideways and trampling them in the crush. The police seemed to go mad. I suspect they were taken aback by behaviour they had not predicted.
It was still the case, though, that a demonstration in Britain was not synonymous in most people’s minds with a violent clash with the police. Most people came dressed for a walk through London, not a battle. On 18 March the newspapers were plastered with a photograph of a young woman struggling as the police carried her of
f. Her skirt was pulled up to reveal stockings, suspenders and underpants. The hand of the policeman was raised. ‘Spanked’ was the salacious headline.
We didn’t know, of course, that the My Lai massacre, where American soldiers killed women and children, had occurred on 16 March. Ignorant of the full extent of the American atrocities, we also tended to idealize the North Vietnamese as the embodiment of good. But we knew enough to be desperate to stop the relentless bombing, the napalm burning on flesh and the chemicals being sprayed on the land. Eddie Adams’s picture of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a member of the Vietcong during the Tet offensive became the visible symbol of the brutality of the war.
The Vietnam Solidarity Committee’s slogans against imperialism were only part of what it meant to oppose the American government’s war in Vietnam. Beyond party and beyond sects, Vietnam came to symbolize a wider humanitarian struggle between the just and the unjust. Vietnam was to be my generation’s Spain and the suffering of its people became imprinted on our psyches. I kept seeing the image of a strange white creature, lacerated by red wounds, the embodiment of pain.
The mood of desperate frustration was tempered by an awareness of the need to break through what seemed like a universally hostile media. The innovative Americans in the anti-war Stop It Committee came up with a plan to drop the slogan ‘Oxbridge paddles while Vietnam burns’ over a bridge during the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, thus catching the TV cameras and millions of viewers. We were all to arrive as individual spectators, each with a letter on a cloth banner concealed about our person. When we reached the river, however, it was evident that police were privy to the Stop It Committee’s plans, for they had cut off access to the bridge. Conferring hastily, while trying to appear nonchalant, we settled for the riverbank. As the boats approached, we clutched the banners under our coats, then – whoosh! – out they came. We’d done it!
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