I went to the founding meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation at the LSE on 14 June, straight from a discussion with my London Transport class about automation. Since their ‘revolution’ against me, they had acquired the habit of debating all manner of things. I decided to say to the RSSF students that the further education colleges received the least resources and that the young worker-students on day release spanned two worlds. It was important to open the RSSF to them.
I stood on the platform, feeling like a jelly before it sets. I had never spoken to so many people before. It was a warm, sunny day and I was wearing a black and gold summer miniskirt. To my horror, as I walked to the mike, I was greeted by a tumultuous barrage of wolf whistles and laughter. I remained frozen for what seemed an eternity. My eyes fixed on a face I recognized, an Italian postgraduate I’d met through Bob at Cambridge. His head was tilted back and his mouth was open. He was guffawing. I had ceased to be an individual and had become an object of derision. It was like a living nightmare. Stubbornness kept me in front of the microphone. I’d got up there and I was going to say what I’d meant to say. Somehow through the whistling and laughter I managed to speak about further education.
The tiny, anarchical dynamo Danny Cohn Bendit had come over for the RSSF meeting and Clive Goodwin threw an extraordinary party for him. This event, in the luxurious Cromwell Road flat, was more of a production than a party. Clive’s speciality was bringing people together and this time he went over the top, assembling a gathering as motley as those space creatures who appear in the pub in Star Wars. The socialists collected together that night were of such different species, they could hardly recognize one another as belonging to the same universe. An International Socialist building worker from Glasgow was denouncing everyone for being middle class and enjoying the freely flowing alcohol, while a suave Ken Tynan sat languidly on a couch, laughing about how Princess Margaret expected you to call her ‘ma’am’ when she smoked dope. I felt gauche in an old, cheap, straight grey dress I’d turned up to keep it in style amidst such fashionably elegant people and was relieved when I came across Nick Wright from Hornsey College, who was feeling even more out of it than I was.
Clive’s party even made the newspapers. A disgruntled Dennis Potter wrote an article headed ‘Tea-bag Rebels’ on 17 June in the Sun, comparing it to ‘a benefit concert for clapped-out seaside donkeys’ – he clearly hadn’t enjoyed himself. Potter’s ‘Nigel Barton’ TV plays in the mid-sixties about class and Labour politics had evoked the earlier Bevanite left; his response to 1968 was one of abhorrence. I didn’t register the article at the time. Nor did I consider how Clive’s commitment to Black Dwarf and the May ‘Events’ affected his relationships with people from his own circle. His friends came from other worlds to me. Suddenly there were all these slightly older writers and directors around who, despite being far more sophisticated than I was, were so evidently clueless about the organized left and the history of the socialist movement. Just as I had bumped into bits of the New Left and then spent years working out all the nuanced differences between them, Clive’s group introduced me to another set of cultural and political puzzles.
I was drawn to Clive’s communicative skills, so acutely attuned to immediacy. Clive the entrepreneur and gambler could deal with the mutability of the era. He enjoyed his deals and making money. ‘I’ve just made £1,000,’ he once boasted, showing me the cheque. Being the daughter of a salesman, I respected commissions on sales, even though my capitalist propensities had been overlaid by Methodism, the beats, Oxford and socialism. Having landed in circles where money-making was not the thing, Clive’s touching delight in the material seemed to be left over from the fifties and slightly quaint. On the other hand, I admired his capacity to sell visions. With hindsight, Clive was ahead of his time; it was as if he could sense a brutal new capitalism was in the offing and was saying desperately, ‘We’ve got to get there first with our version of flexibility.’
Part of his risk-taking was his mixing of people and his generation-jumping. He was a kind of cultural explorer, through friendship and through sex. I found all these qualities enticing. Yet I was never completely at ease with Clive and I do not think this was simply a personal response. There were tensions between his generation of left-wingers, politicized during Suez and the Cold War, and people like me who were in their twenties during the sixties. Trevor Griffiths, a friend of Clive’s, was to dramatize these conflicts in his play The Party in 1973, where a TV producer (modelled on Tony Garnett) calls together a drunken playwright (based on David Mercer), a man from Agit Prop theatre, a young Trotskyist woman and a male socialist lecturer.
You tend to define your sense of a rebellious identity against the people who are just ahead of you. Then, as time moves on, the distinctions blur. I was to be left with a vague perception of differing assumptions and a shyness because so much was never to be stated as my sexual relationship with Clive petered out into a political friendship that summer.
With the poet Christopher Logue, whom I met through Clive, dissimilarity did lead to conflict – which was ironic, for he had been another of my schoolgirl idols. His rasping voice, the spoken equivalent to Bob Dylan’s penetrative singing, was already familiar because I had played his ‘Red Bird’ record of poetry to jazz over and over again in my Leeds bedroom. One beautiful warm spring evening in the middle of May, Clive, Christopher, Bob, a young woman from Hackney Young Socialists and I met in the Cromwell Road flat to go out for a meal. It started badly when Christopher ordered me to fetch his drink. Leeds gruffness came to the fore. ‘Get it yourself,’ I snapped. Whereupon the young woman from the YS, who was only seventeen, dutifully went and handed it to him. ‘That,’ declared Christopher in his scratchy voice, ‘is real emancipation.’ In the posh restaurant Clive and Christopher enthused about how under socialism the working class would all eat like this. At the time this sounded an incredibly complacent acceptance of privilege. ‘What are you doing to yourselves?’ I screamed, and ran into the ladies. When I eventually emerged, Christopher said to me that he had never been so bullied by a woman since his mother. I sat sullenly wondering to myself what she had been like.
Cornered, without any way of expressing how I felt, I had become irrational and impossible. This self-ostracism was partly an intuitive reflex, a sense of being annihilated by the way men behaved – my ‘bullying’ was about more than a posh meal. But Christopher had accurately spotted the rectitude. The extraordinary sequence of events during 1968 led my generation to believe we were moving in the same direction as history. We considered that, unlike our elders, we had no apologies to make; we hadn’t justified labour camps, we hadn’t compromised. In contrast to the fifties, when both Stalinism and the Labour Party had loomed large, we were convinced that we could make everything anew. Unlike the fifties New Left, we did not see any need for a politics with space carefully hewn out for doubt. This sixties certainty was simply brash at first, but it was to harden as hope of fundamental change evaporated over the next decade. The righteousness, which passed into the libertarian left social movements, festered as an internal problem, eventually providing the triumphant right with the stick of ‘political correctness’.
There are no easy answers to the question of how you live in a world you want to change radically. Edward Thompson once said to me that in the lean, ascetic faces of old Communist workers who had renounced everything for their beliefs there was also a terrible bitterness. We were less abstemious in the late sixties. I loved shopping for clothes or books or records, though I did not equate spending money with having a good time. Our conviction that revolution was approaching inclined us to the view that to travel fast, you should travel light, reducing needs rather than making them become more elaborate.
The sense of urgency resulted in various political short cuts. My honeymoon with Black Dwarf ended abruptly on 5 July, when the second issue appeared with the headline ‘Students the New Revolutionary Vanguard’. I sat on a pile of paper
s in the Dwarf office and wept. I couldn’t abide vanguards. Tariq maintained that the designer had forgotten to put in a question mark. But I suspected the ideological influence of the New Left Review, whose office was upstairs. At least in the Bolshevik party the ‘vanguard’ had been tried by experience; I thought the New Left Review simply assumed it could be self-appointed – and, being in their own image, would necessarily be young men like themselves. Intellectuals in my opinion might be ahead on some things, but they remained way behind other people on others.
I went home and pounded out my dislike of vanguards into an article called ‘The Little Vanguard’s Tail’, which later appeared in the underground paper Oz. The little vanguard was only very small but it was very hard and its job was to ‘inject … the unorganized lumps and clusters’ with ‘correct ideas’. One day the trusty lumps had rebelled and shouted a warning to the clusters: ‘Keep an eye on your vanguard. Vanguards get out of hand.’ Whereupon a commune of clusters proposed an alliance with the lumps, generously suggesting that the lower-level cadres might like to join in and get ‘a bit squelchy and squashy sometimes. More human altogether.’
I stepped back a little from Black Dwarf that summer and Agit Prop came to take up most of my time. It had mushroomed into a network of about 100 people, who ranged from members of antiquated socialist tendencies which pre-dated Leninism to alternative types from the underground. The latter were making Roland Muldoon from the CAST group restive; he was noisily claiming that the hippies were taking over. Roland was always leery about his proletarian ‘cred’, even though his shaggy locks would have made him indistinguishable from the hippies to the uninformed eye. A further reason for his ill-humour was the beginnings of another theatre group, the Agit Prop Players (later to become Red Ladder), whose approach to drama he considered to be fundamentally flawed. Long after the theatre groups themselves had vanished, he continued to battle it out with former members of Red Ladder – like old rivals still jousting after the tournament had come to an end.
Special Branch, meanwhile, appeared to have decided that Agit Prop was some command centre for Rent-a-Mob, calling on John and Wisty Hoyland with questions about the ‘organization’. Like the Trots and the New Left Review, the police were attuned to vanguards. If they had but known it, our position was closer to piggy in the middle, caught between warring left factions.
Agit Prop that July was busy organizing a ‘Revolutionary Festival’ which we hoped would generate support for the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation in a less aggressive way than the militant demonstrations. This alone was enough to make us suspect of reformism by the Trotskyists, especially as one component of the festival was to be the arrival of members of the Young Communist League riding white bicycles which they’d been collecting for the Vietnamese. The British Communist Party by 1968 was trying desperately hard to be modern, but it creaked along so ponderously that it was always a few years behind. White bicycles, for instance, had been pioneered by a group of Amsterdam Anarchists, called the Provos, as a cooperative solution to traffic jams – a utopian move thwarted when the communal bicycles had been stolen and resprayed. Now the YCL had revamped the idea and were sending them off to a Communist Youth festival for the war effort. The ingenious Vietnamese would divide the wheels in two and attach goods to them.
Organizing the festival meant that I spent a lot of time in an outhouse off Upper Street, Islington, belonging to one of John Hoyland’s radical architect friends, with a gang of Young Liberals from Hackney, anarchists, various apprentices and Theresa Moriarty. Like the art nouveau architect Charles Ashbee at Chipping Campden, we were strong on ideas but weak on implementation. Apart from Theresa, who was going to study art at the John Cass Institute, we possessed few artistic skills. We laboured away regardless, producing Coca-Cola bottles with French riot police helmets you could knock off with tennis balls and a big picture of Karl Marx with a baby on his knee. We cut holes in the board so you could stick your heads through either Marx or the baby’s face. This innovation in left propaganda was inspired by a photo of me aged four in Whitby, my head through a picture of a girl in a grass skirt with a bunch of bananas, with ‘Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo’ written in a bubble by my right ear.
I did make a brief official appearance as the representative of Agit Prop at a meeting with the police about the festival. Also there was the current leader of the Young Communist League, a young worker with film-star good looks, and Jack Straw, from the National Union of Students, who had ended up having to hang out with the Communists when everyone else turned into revolutionaries’. They spent ages discussing routes. With no grasp of geography, I kept quiet, sure that the Agit Prop/Revolutionary Festival types would ignore any arrangements anyway.
We were misunderstood all round. If the Trotskyists regarded us as ‘soft’, we were distinctly dodgy to the Communist Party. The Morning Star choked over ‘revolutionary’, altering our advert to ‘Festival of the Left’. The North Vietnamese, for their part, were utterly perplexed by ‘Agit Prop’ and Fei Ling Blackburn acted as our anxious ambassadress. The hippie underground also divided. Among those in opposition was John Peel, who gave us backhanded publicity by announcing on his radio programme that he definitely wouldn’t be going.
I had been overdoing it. Just before the festival, a mysterious insect had bitten me in the Islington workshop. The bite had become infected and an enormous carbuncle appeared at the bottom of my left leg. When I finally limped off to a doctor I was so dazed by exhaustion and pain, I misunderstood the dosage instructions, taking the painkillers as if they were the antibiotics and vice versa. By the morning of the festival on 20 June I was out of it.
In Trafalgar Square I was compèring speakers from various left groups and campaigns, who instead of the customary box were speaking from an imitation TV box made by an art student at Chelsea College. I became embroiled in a furious argument with an extreme and obdurate revolutionary with long black greasy hair from the LSE who refused to speak from the box. I stomped off defeated in a temper, my leg cushioned by painkillers. Through a haze I could perceive that otherwise everything was going according to plan. The white bicycles and the YCLers duly arrived. John Hoyland acted as master of ceremonies, a role for which he has a natural talent, introducing Mick Farren and the Deviants in tight black-leather trousers, which made ascending on to the plinth problematic. They proceeded to play amidst purple smoke, followed by Pete Brown, who had managed to put a band together. Agit Prop Theatre Group made a début appearance. Adam Hart came along with a friend of his, a kinetic artist called Phil Vaughan, and blew golden plastic bubbles, much liked by children. Graham Stephens brought his pioneering inflatable – a first at a left demonstration.
Our efforts to communicate appeared to be working. People began to gather, intrigued by the bubbles and bands. An advertising friend of Roland Muldoon’s had designed us leaflets which were intended to show the horror of the war. In an effort to describe the effect of napalm, he had written in large letters, ‘Pour a gallon of petrol over your baby. Let it burn.’ One woman screamed as I gave it to her. He was to go on to have a successful career in advertising, but our over-effective leaflet became a malevolent legend – the left advocated burning babies.
As the afternoon wore on we marched round and round Trafalgar Square, chanting, ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ and bearing aloft a big hamburger made out of papier-mâché. A human body was squashed inside, the blood oozing out like tomato sauce. The irate police slashed at Graham’s squashy plastic inflatable with knives and impounded the hamburger, which they seemed to regard as the equivalent to our standard. The hamburger artist declared stoically that he could always make another one. But I was upset to lose it, being too Yorkshire and waste-not-want-not for the spirit of auto-destructive art.
After the festival, with my carbuncle slowly healing, I found time to take stock for the first time since March. It seemed as if I had lived through several years during the last few months.
I had learned to think for myself about politics and I felt responsible in a way I could not have imagined before. Moreover, I had glimpsed that rulers can totter. Once you’ve seen this happen, you don’t forget – even if the world does appear to go on much the same. But it was hard to think clearly; we were being pounded by circumstances. In so far as I could grasp anything amidst the dizzy momentum of events, it was not to let ourselves get isolated, to keep on going outwards beyond the ‘revolutionary’ student milieu.
Many people I liked and respected in 1968 were in the International Socialist group, which had assimilated William Morris and left Independent Labour Party strands of libertarian socialism into its Trotskyism and was beginning to attract dissident and thoughtful trade unionists. Bob, who started to have a relationship with Theresa that summer, was around again at Montague Road and we talked about joining. I tried to banish my unease, then went away for a few days and thought better of it. In the meantime, he had become a member. As I dithered, he said, ‘You can’t do this to me,’ and I signed up. Now, instead of recruiting for the Labour Party, off I went with Bob to sell Socialist Worker at a clothing factory in Shacklewell Lane. I didn’t know then, as I shivered in the early-morning chill, that we were part of a long tradition of agitators. Mary Wollstonecraft used to walk down that lane from Newington Green to discuss the French Revolution with a radical clergyman who lived there. Our only regular customer was a tall, beaming young African who told us he was a prince learning the clothing business. Bob thrived on the early mornings of course, but I would be wrecked, returning home to find the sensible Theresa just getting up for breakfast. ‘Workers have to get up at this time every morning,’ I told myself, finding solace in penance.
Throughout that hectic spring and summer, personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were all snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn’t settle upon them. It was as if intimacy had acquired an almost random quality. The energy of the external collectivity became so intense, it seemed the boundaries of closeness, of ecstatic inwardness, had spilled over on to the streets. While creativity bounced through the world at large, the libido defied borders and appeared in some peculiar way to have been shaken out into the everyday. I thus caught a glimpse of the peculiar annihilation of the personal in the midst of dramatic events like revolution – just a glimpse, of course, for the spring and summer of 1968 were not actually revolutionary times. In retrospect, revolutions seem puritanical, although that is not how they are experienced at the time. It is true that this readiness to put self aside subsequently increased the danger of merging individuality into the collectivity, though in times of ferment and upheaval this is never apparent. In such periods the distinction between inner and outer shifts and the significance of sexual encounters fall into a new relief. Caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion, it felt as if we were being carried to the edge of the known world. Then that July we were left marooned in a lull – the summer lull.
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