Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  Sure enough Steve reappeared that July, and sure enough passion erupted again. What was I doing for the holidays? He would meet me in Paris on a motorbike. But I was getting wise. ‘If no Steve by 1 August I must go somewhere,’ I wrote in my diary. On 28 July I announced, ‘No Steve shown up.’ Dorothy Thompson came to the rescue and took me off on a plane to Paris to join her younger son, Mark, in a flat owned by some French historians. It was a beautiful little place, stuffed with books on Marx and history, which I read happily. When Dorothy left I was put in charge of Mark, then sixteen, and a group of his schoolfriends. There was no sign of Steve.

  Mark and I decided to hitch down to Torremolinos to visit Roberta, who was in a flat owned by her father. On the journey my main concern was to keep going in the right direction and I routinely fended off lorry drivers, now considering myself an adept hitchhiker. Years later Mark told me he had gone through agonies of anxiety, feeling unable to defend me and convinced that I was about to be raped. Safely ensconced in one of the new Torremolinos holiday blocks, where ants were the only danger, Roberta and I persisted in turning up our noses inconsistently at the other holidaymakers, whom we termed the ‘tourists’, on the crowded beach. We spent happy evenings dancing in a club which let us in for nothing in the hope that we would bring in male customers. The news that the Beatles’ shop, Apple, was giving clothes away reached us, but we remained unaware of the Chicago demonstration in the United States, and of the tanks going into Czechoslovakia.

  I was determined to show Roberta Formentera and, when Mark set off for Morocco, we began hitching. ‘We can sleep on the beaches,’ I said chirpily. I had not allowed for us both being women. Hitchhiking across Spain with a woman, I was to learn, was really not the same as with a man. This ill-considered odyssey was, however, to attach me more deeply to Roberta.

  Formentera was no longer the cooperative paradise of the previous year. A certain stratification was apparent between the long-terms, bronzed and cool, dressed in the delicate faded mauves, blues and fawns which tie-dye had made fashionable, and the indigent others, whom we joined, sleeping in bags in the woods because it was now unsafe on the beaches.

  Back in London I arrived in the Black Dwarf office wearing a man’s old-fashioned shirt with a round collar which I had dyed lilac. I was showing off my suntanned legs, but there was an intensely serious mood and no one was interested in frivolous things like a Formentera suntan. The Dwarf had been raided while I was away, with the ironic result that we had sold out. Some 15,000 copies were gone, thanks to Scotland Yard.

  In September I noted in my diary that I was conscious of a tension ‘between desire to cut all my hair off, wear no make-up, look out and be’, and an equally strong urge to ‘cover up’. Irresolute, I went out and bought new clothes. I decided I was looking much older and felt relieved.

  I was equally ambiguous about the underground’s celebration of the irrational, remaining torn between belief and scepticism. Early that October Graham was taking a new inflatable to Hampstead Heath, where David Medalla and his artistic commune, The Exploding Galaxy, who lived near me at 99 Balls Pond Road, planned to do their Buddha Ballet – a kind of prototype of performance art. As we danced on the grass, I did feel an extraordinary sense of open delight being generated within the little group, which appeared to spread outwards to embrace passers-by. I did, however, retain sufficient scepticism to suspect that part of our popularity came from the startling beauty of Graham’s partner, Myrdel. One aspect of the hippie underground was the loving playfulness which it is easy to be cynical about. Looking back, I think they had an insight which I would value more now than I did then. Everyday relating was to be assailed by a much harsher set of attitudes at work, in the streets, in public services, in the media. Competition, fear, distrust and self-assertion won out and we socialists had no means of naming the shift in individual behaviour.

  Something else was there in play power too. In 1968 I hardly noticed the more worldly aspects of the underground, which were to tune into the changes in capitalism. When a young student who used to ring me up for his newsletter to get Agit Prop information launched a magazine called Time Out that autumn, I didn’t regard it as a particularly significant event. Papers were starting all the time. The difference was that Tony Elliott’s was to last. Hippie culture, like the Victorians, had its self-made men and these ingenious entrepreneurs discovered that you could market ways of living.

  An upper-class bohemia had also grafted itself on to the underground by 1968. Class snobbery merged with the élitism of cool which was one element in the underground. The ‘do your own thing’ sense of individual liberation was turned into a justification of living completely for yourself. Elements of this self-absorption were also to persist, transmuting into the ruthless selfishness which would come into ascendancy in the late eighties.

  During that autumn of 1968 the connection between the inner and outer forms of consciousness which had seemed possible a few months before was wearing thin. The over-simplified polarization which resulted tended to be presented as changing society or changing yourself. First Roland Muldoon and then John Hoyland were to contrast the Beatles and then quietism with the Rolling Stones in Black Dwarf. John Lennon was eventually stung to reply, ‘I’ll tell you something – I’ve been up against the same people all my life. I know they still hate me. There’s no difference now – just the size of the game has changed. Then it was schoolmaster, relatives, etc. – now I’m arrested or ticked off by fascists or brothers in endless fucking prose.’ In response to John Hoyland’s admonition about the need to ‘smash’ capitalism, he added a PS: ‘You smash it and I’ll build around it.’

  In theory I wanted the ‘revolution’ to combine the Johns and be about changing the outer world and building a new one within. In practice I had no idea how you could live this total revolution personally, trying in vain for balance in my own life and steering between the extremes of inward preoccupation and the denial which featured in the sectarian left.

  When Sally Alexander took me along to hear Gerry Healy speak to a group of her media friends at Tony Garnett’s flat, neither she nor I was thinking about my being a member of International Socialism. We had reckoned without that old bruiser Gerry Healy. In the discussion I remarked that the boys I was teaching would begin to change their political attitudes in general if one prejudice towards women or black people could be shifted. Gerry Healy responded with a ferocious aggression which reminded me of arguments with my father; it was as if he was beating me down with words. Well practised, I answered back, which incensed him so much he looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. ‘If you were a Marxist,’ Healy bellowed. The playwright David Mercer decided he wasn’t being fair. ‘How do you know this girl isn’t a Marxist?’ he demanded. ‘Have you spoken to her before?’ Gerry Healy’s mouth opened like a goldfish. Conversing with someone to ascertain what they thought was not his style. He knew everything already without ever listening. I couldn’t understand why all these gifted people Sally and Clive knew bothered with his bombast.

  *

  Clive asked me to photocopy excerpts from the original Black Dwarf that September, assuring me he would pay the bill. I went through every issue in the British Museum and found it fascinating – so fascinating that the final photocopying bill came to a monstrous £25. Clive was scathing; not because of the money, but because I’d wasted time producing piles of material for no practical end. ‘We can’t use this,’ he said contemptuously, and the gulf between the media and the historian’s craft opened at my feet.

  Inadvertently, by sending me back into the British Museum, Clive had reawakened my love of history. He was always particularly tough on me in relation to political ideas or writing, while being endowed with an uncanny ability to draw creativity from people without looking as if he had ever been trying. Towards the end of that September I knew I wanted to write; what, I was not sure.

  I had abandoned my thesis completely that summer as politically irrele
vant. That autumn a meeting with a tutor in the Workers’ Educational Association, Jim Fryth, provided a bridge back to historical work. Jim, an open-minded Communist Party member since the thirties, combined labour history with an interest in contemporary trade unionism. This combination of past and present, along with his whimsical humour, made him seem much younger than his years. He was to show me, by example, how to teach adults, in the process becoming a close friend. Meanwhile, my first WEA class of Guildford housewives was to give me insights into the lives of intelligent suburban housewives a little older than myself whose discontents could not be encapsulated in terms of either class conflict or student revolution.

  Edward and Dorothy Thompson also rounded me up that October to talk to their classes at Warwick and Birmingham universities about University Extension. Many of Edward’s Warwick students were left wing and the surroundings were informal. At Birmingham it was more stiff and proper. After Richard Johnson introduced me, I was beset by a powerful urge to slide under the table and make my escape through everyone’s feet. I couldn’t let Dotty down, though, so I kept my nose above the table and delivered.

  The atmosphere at their home in Leamington Spa was strained. Dorothy and Edward disliked Black Dwarf and were horrified by events in the United States, where the violent Chicago demonstration had been followed by the arrest and shooting of Huey Newton. They were similarly alarmed by the escalating invocation of violence accompanying the build-up for the anti-Vietnam War demonstration planned in Britain for 27 October. ‘There is nobody for you to trust and so you have to respect those who don’t deserve respect,’ Edward exploded as one of the students at Warwick argued with him. I wanted desperately for him to be with us. But the divide was there and wishing didn’t make it narrow. I remembered that conversation with Lawrence Daly – the New Left that might have been.

  Towards the end of September I had a nightmare of a sea monster, its head back and its mouth open in a scream although no sound came out. I felt pity towards its agony and then saw it carried a baby. A wave of love and protection consumed me for the baby, when two rocks moved in and crushed it. I associated the monster with my obsessive preoccupation with Steve. I was weary of subterranean emotions which went nowhere.

  Nick Wright popped up again at a dance at the Royal College for the sacked art school teachers and attached himself to me. ‘I like him but that’s it,’ announced my diary on 5 October. Nick wasn’t going to be shaken off. He invited me out. I was amused by such formality and had a good time. He made me laugh and I could sense he was a bit shy, which made me want to tease him. When we woke up the sun was shining on us through my bedroom window and Nick wasn’t shy any more. I was still brown and felt light-hearted and cheerful. This time I really had managed to meet someone I liked. No more blinding passion, I said to myself. Here was a warm, jokey human being I could be with and talk to.

  I could hardly get a word in edgeways. Nick, who seemed to think he had landed in a hornet’s nest of Trotskyists, argued all the time. The only thing that caused the ceaseless assault to falter was sex. Then off he would go again. He took on the whole household. Bob was often around visiting Theresa; Nick liked him but argued just the same.

  I was constantly being put on the defensive, retaining plenty of doubts of my own about Trotskyism and being always more at ease with Agit Prop. Just before the Vietnam demonstration, I was downstairs in my tiny basement kitchen with a woman from the Poster Workshop, thinking up slogans for posters: ‘Remember Whose Violence We Are Marching Against’, ‘We Are All Foreign Scum’, throwing in ‘Workers’ Control’ for good measure.

  By that autumn the student left had become a news story. We could see ourselves reflected back in the media. We had initially imagined that if we could put our case, reach enough people, they would be convinced. It was of course much more complicated. A lot of the coverage was overtly hostile; to the xenophobic gutter press we were indeed ‘foreign scum’. The liberal media’s representation was more perplexing. After being temporarily winded by the ‘Events’ of May in Paris, they were beginning to employ derision. On 24 October I watched a television programme of Nick during the Hornsey sit-in and the Agit Prop street theatre performing in Petticoat Lane. Along with Tariq and the International Socialist student activist David Widgery, they came over as reasonable enough, but by over-emphasizing the role of tiny Maoist sects the programme was skewed to make the student movement cranky. I was not conscious then that it is how a programme is framed which creates the impact on the viewer, but I knew something was wrong.

  As media hysteria about the march mounted and the argument about whether to go to Grosvenor Square continued to rage in the Vietnam Solidarity Committee, Tariq was under tremendous pressure. He had become exceedingly exposed as an individual figure in the media, branded as Mr Student Revolutionary, even though he was not connected to any group of students. I suspected that it was this isolation which caused him to join the International Marxist Group.

  Just before the October demonstration, Tariq asked me to write a short article about the history of direct action in British radicalism for Black Dwarf. Though I had been selling the paper since May out of personal commitment, it had never occurred to me to actually write in it. The unstated assumption was that political writing was something men did.

  I had continued to jot down comments about women in my diary, but the experience of being a woman remained personal, even though several public events had affected me. I had been annoyed when the Ford sewing machinists’ dispute over grading during the summer was headlined as ‘Petticoat Pickets’ and when Rose Boland, their spokeswoman, said, ‘It isn’t about pay, it’s about recognition.’ ‘Recognition’ rang a bell. I could see how women workers were put down as women, remembering the hostile response to the Hull fish-house worker, Lil Bilocca, who had campaigned the previous February against unsafe trawlers after a disaster in which forty fishermen died. A Women’s Rights group had been formed in support of the campaign in Hull and a new national organization called the National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights (NJACWER) had come into existence after the Ford strike. These initiatives from working-class women preceded the emergence of Women’s Liberation as a movement; indeed, they influenced us, serving along with the Vietnamese guerrilla fighters as what are now called our ‘role models’.

  Anger was to galvanize me. That summer I’d heard that Clive had held a meeting with David Widgery and his friend, who was also in IS, Nigel Fountain, and they had jokingly suggested putting pin-ups into the paper to raise sales. I had stormed into the office, pinning a furious poem about Rosa Luxemburg and wanking into revolution on to the wall. At an IS students’ meeting early that autumn, David Widgery joked about how the founder, Tony Cliff, should follow the example of another Trotskyist leader and find a young wife. Everyone laughed and I was outraged. I went up to David after the meeting and asked if he’d heard about Valerie Solanas and the Society for Cutting Up Men. He didn’t look at all worried. After he left, I glanced at the three other women in the group, afraid they would sneer at me. Instead we went to the ladies’ and began talking. This was really my first-ever women’s meeting – a crucial glimpse of how connection to other women makes it much easier to express disgruntlement.

  By 25 October the LSE was occupied again and people were pouring in with sleeping bags. An Agit Prop Poster Workshop had been set up in the building. Defying the sombre ‘struggle gear’, increasingly worn on the left, which marked you off as a breed of professional revolutionary, but mindful of the miniskirt fiasco at the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation meeting, I headed off there in an olive-green bell-bottomed satin trouser suit, bought in my September spending spree. The trouser suit shocked some friends of Kim Howells from Hornsey College who had joined the Socialist Labour League. ‘Don’t you find that your clothes put off the working class?’ ‘No,’ I replied point-blank. But I felt sad. A few months ago they had been warm, idealistic human beings; now they had been turned i
nto zombies by the SLL.

  In the bowels of the LSE the posters were coming off the silk screens at a great rate, hanging in serried rows from the ceiling like incendiary pillowcases. In their midst was Bert Scrivener, the tenants’ activist from the Agit Prop Poster Workshop, who had turned himself into a one-man pensioners’ wing of the RSSF, adding his own slogan for the march, ‘Freeze Rents Not Wages’. Bert was enjoying the anarchy, for he loved movements and taught me the term ‘ground-floor politics’, which he considered to be more appropriate for an urban setting than ‘grass roots’. When the press besieged the Poster Workshop in Camden, looking for wild, hairy, revolutionary youth, they would be met by the canny Bert, who parried their questions with, ‘This is nothing to do with politics, it’s the rent campaign.’