Just how complex is revealed when the man with the Lennon specs stands up to speak. He is slightly hesitant; he has a diffidence that seems to be at odds with his height and that endears me to him straight away. He says something like, ‘I firstly want to say that our society is organized violently or has violence at its core. All of our transactions and interactions are conducted from a place of inequality, which means that there is someone who has got the power and someone who hasn’t.’
He slowly settles into his argument, allowing his words and thoughts to find their rhythm. He says that the peace movement isn’t necessarily the same thing as the CND movement, and the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons might be anything but peaceful. The people with lower-case god are beginning to shuffle. He says that we have to be careful not to fall back on a lazy anti-Americanism, of how there is a big difference between opposing a government’s policies and opposing the people who have to live under that government, many of whom are as opposed to it as we are. (He must like Springsteen, then. I can be like him and still keep my record collection.) He says that the anti-nuclear movement needs to have what he calls a ‘class analysis’, that we will continue to have these weapons only so long as people are prepared to keep on building them and that what he wants is a more fundamental re-thinking of what it is that people should build.
I think, that’s what I want to think.
Next
‘Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing along was what girls did or was it that girls only sang because they didn’t play air guitar? These are not questions I asked myself at the time. I was pushing away such complications.’
Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls
In the Railway Hotel I sit and am introduced to another Accrington, an alternative Accrington that runs in parallel to the one I know but challenges all of its assumptions. I’m like Alice in Wonderland or Captain Kirk, boldly going down a rabbit-hole where people are talking in coded acronyms and hallucinatory possibilities. I go there every night I’m not in King Street, and occasionally when I should be. I go there every Saturday lunchtime when I know they will have finished with their paper sales, petitions and seemingly endless campaign collections. There’s talk of TOM, who I never meet, but I’m assured wants the troops out of Ireland. There’s the WRP and the RCT; the CP, the IMF, and the IMG. There’s people who want to smash the PTA, which I think is a slight over-reaction to the Parent–Teachers’ Association until I find out they mean the Prevention of Terrorism Act. There’s the Right To Work organizers who tell me that they are marching for the Right Not To Work. There’s the ANL (Anti-Nazi League) and RAR (Rock Against Racism); there’s entryists, separatists and revolutionary defeatists. There’s the Third International and Militant Tendency, the permanent arms economy and permanent revolution. And then there’s Gary and Sara.
Gary was the guy who had spoken, the one who had convinced me of what I already suspected I thought. A journalist on the local paper, he took his profession seriously. He knew lots of people and had a rare gift for a newsman (let alone a Marxist) in that he liked people. Genuinely liked them, was fond of their eccentricities. He was a talented mimic and had a repertoire of voices which would wend their way in and out of his monologues. He loved to argue and he loved to drink, and in the Railway we did lots of both. It was rhetoric as much as revolution that excited Gary, the making of phrases, verbal jousting. He called me a ‘callow youth’, a phrase whose assonance he clearly savoured. He teased me for being ‘ideologically promiscuous’ or ‘decidedly suspect’ and of falling prey to ‘bourgeois distractions’. Sara was the woman sat with him, the ill-looking punk their friend, Neil. Sara had dropped out of Salford University and was back living with her parents.
Within weeks I’d been ‘contacted’, quickly befriended, eagerly adopted. Sara was my first woman friend and I adored her with every inch of love in my twisted post-priest sixteen-year-old soul. She was sharp and imperious: detector of bullshit, shredder of male ego. I would offer up my literary pretensions to her knowing that, hoping that, she’d shoot them down, her judgement prompting me on to greater folly and further frustration.
I told her that after the revolution everyone would be a poet, to which she said that she sincerely hoped not. When I told her that my favourite poet was ee cummings and he’d said that ‘a pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues’, she sighed with the magisterial scorn of a headmistress nearing retirement:
What?
Er . . . a pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues.
What kind of statues?
Um . . . it’s poetry.
Why does she have to be naked, and what do you mean by ‘pretty’? And why is that a compliment? Who made those statues and why does he need a million of them? What are you talking about?
As I said, I loved her.
Her heroines were Colette, de Beauvoir and Rosa Luxemburg and I devoured their stuff with all the passion of the newly converted. She introduced me not just to new music but to new ways of thinking about old music. She handed me a copy of Dylan’s Desire with the barbed recommendation, ‘You’ll probably like this. You can have it.’ She said she used to quite like him, but that after she heard a song he’d done called ‘Just Like a Woman’, she couldn’t take anything he said seriously ever again. Dylan! The man to whom me and Eggy and Harry and every other Picador-packing sixth-former had been paying dutiful and attentive homage, summed up and dismissed. She didn’t care that he had changed the lyrics to a song when he performed it live at the Budokan. She didn’t even care that he had played the Budokan and ‘left his soul there’. She just wanted him to stop singing about women who broke like little girls. I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Or certainly allowed to do that and still be cool. And Sara was cool. She’d been to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris and written ‘They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers’ on it. She bought her clothes in charity shops and assembled outfits which juxtaposed girly frocks with men’s jackets, monkey boots and leggings. One night she was walking me home and a sleazy old man shouted something at her and she spun around and said, almost smiling, ‘If you talk to me like that again I’ll cut off your dick and dangle it from a lamppost.’
It was Sara who taught me about The Slits and Gang of Four, and it was Sara who took me to Salford University to see the Au Pairs. Until then my punk had been mostly American punk – New Wave – a term that seems less emphatic and more willing to find out what it wanted. Tom Verlaine’s Television were recording songs that lasted more than ten minutes, longer than most UK punks’ entire sets. The New Wave were allowed to do cover versions or record with Phil Spector or make records that flirted with other genres. In Sara’s front room in her parents’ house on Willows Lane, I discovered post-punk, a new world being built out of punk’s initial declaration of Ground Zero.
When she first played me the Au Pairs’ Playing With a Different Sex, we danced. And not the jumping up and down dance that seemed to be the only dance available at the time, but a new one, a mock-militaristic type strut with arms punching and head chicken-necking like Wilko Johnson’s had not too many years before. It was strident, its anger in the hips as well as the stomach, abrupt and erect.
‘I don’t mind if you want to sleep on your oooooown,’ sings Lesley Woods. ‘I don’t mind if you want to bring somebody hooooome, for the na na na na night.’ On maybe the fourth or ninth or eleventh listen, later the same night, it dawns on me that she is singing not just about relationships but about how relationships seem to be all about possession and ownership, about power and the proprietorial claims that people in so-called love appear to make on each other. ‘You must admit when you think about it that you’re mine,’ goes the chorus, a mantra that becomes more sinister each time it is repeated. I was listening to a band who were deconstructing the love song even though I didn’t know the word deconstructing. I knew that love songs were always about people staking claim
s, surrendering or belonging, that heartbreak was when you no longer ‘had’ the person you thought you had, and that ecstasy was ‘getting’ the person you wanted. I knew that because love songs told me so. Except that the Au Pairs didn’t seem to think so. They seemed to think that it was a business transaction that sold both parties short, a dream soon rinsed out in the washing machine.
Gary was showing me how politics shaped the world, Sara how politics shaped me. I learnt that there was a totality to political life, that it went all the way through a person, like the writing in a stick of rock. She told me why the word ‘cunt’ is the worst swear word there is, about how language inscribes all of society’s worst preconceptions about women and sex and sexuality. Politics, it seemed, was as much about bedrooms as barricades, as much concerned with private intimacies as it was about public demonstrations. It was the first glimmering I had that there might be a way for me to articulate what had happened to me.
I let Sara cut my hair: she spikes it up, but not too much. Kathleen is delighted. She asks me if Sara is my girlfriend.
They take me for a curry. I must pass at least five curry houses on my way to work, another five on the way to school. Yet it has never once occurred to me to go into one of them, any more than I would have popped into the local mosque or Methodist church. I silently shared my parents’ suspicion that they smelled funny. I didn’t believe the stories that were doing the rounds in the pubs and the schoolyard, the ones about pets going missing or about how ‘they’ didn’t wash their hands properly after they’d been to the toilet. (I didn’t, did I?) We all order lager and start to talk about how society deforms us, lies to us, makes it impossible for us to live authentically. (So why have I never gone for a curry before? Why did I get so angry with Jack and Kath when I saw the look on their faces when I told them where we were going?) Lager arrives and we talk about how the Front, as we now all refer to the National Front, are planning to march in Accrington, deliberately planning to march through Asian areas. (It certainly wasn’t due to racism. Take a look at my record collection; all those thin white boys with their angry guitars. Just how more anti-racist do you want?) Biriyani? (There was one Asian, or half-Asian, lad at school. Everyone called him Zebra, or Johnny Zeb, on account of the half-Asian half-white thing. It was, as we said, just a laugh.) Yellow food, with raisins? And everything mixed in together, so you can’t tell what’s what? Crisps for starters that weren’t really crisps, gravy that was nothing like proper gravy. I watch Gary and Sara tear chunks of naan bread, the ease with which they dip and scoop and seem blissfully unperturbed by all that glistening ghee. I listen to them talk about the coaches coming over from Salford and Manchester, comrades who will be helping to smash the Front. They’re kind and confident and generous and I think of how much I wish I could be like them. And I think, I’m not very good at this.
I wasn’t very good at being a vanguard Revolutionary Marxist generally. I never actually joined the Party, for a start. Which didn’t help. I helped defend their paper sales in Blackburn during a time when some Nazi thug used to go and stand in front of them and stare for what seemed like hours. I went on some of the demos, especially the ones with bands. I loved sitting and talking with them, their passion and humour infectious, their commitment unquestionable.
And yet . . .
And yet I never quite believed any of it.
I didn’t believe that the working class (or Jack and Kathleen Caveney as I called them) would suddenly find their consciousnesses permanently changed through the heroic experience of class struggle. I didn’t believe that a revolution was going to happen, but if it was going to happen, and happen with all the historical inevitability that I was told it would, then why the hell did it need me to usher it along? I didn’t care whether Russia was a deformed or a degenerate workers’ state, or whether it was state capitalist or whether or not history would have been different if Trotsky hadn’t got an ice pick or Lenin lived longer.
I knew my own religion well enough to know that class unity was not going to miraculously heal the wounds of the North of Ireland and that knowing all the words to Peter Gabriel’s ‘Biko’ was not the same as being an expert on apartheid.
It was partly a question of temperament. I either am, or was made, a sceptic. Father O’Neill saw to that. He turned me into a sceptic who is sceptical of his own scepticism, a sceptic par excellence. The Catholic Church had been my one totalizing system of belief, and I was damned if I was going to throw myself into another. Especially one which seemed to be as equally enthralled by the World to Come as my recently lapsed faith. The comrades would talk for hours about what life would be like after the revolution, a vision of utopia which had more than a passing resemblance to the Sermon on the Mount. I’d had one version of Messianic redemption and it would be fair to say that it hadn’t worked out too well. Both the Church and the Party wanted to save mankind, only the Party had a better soundtrack. And they didn’t want to fuck me.
I go to a meeting, a big one, addressed by Tony Cliff, leading theorist of the SWP. He is marvellous, a Jewish Palestinian stand-up who moves from anecdote to analysis with liberal sprinklings of misplaced ‘bloody’s. After the gig (and it had all the qualities of one), I talk to him for about fifteen minutes. I ask him about his own doubts, about how he manages to overcome his ambiguities. Arrgg, he says half amused, half disgusted, Hamlet! There was a man who was never a bloody revolutionary.
He was right. He wasn’t. And neither was I.
The SWP didn’t fix me. They couldn’t. It wasn’t their job. They were class warriors, whereas I was the victim of a different kind of war, one that was equally political but not one whose dialectics could be so easily synthesized. No picket lines were going to be formed demanding the emancipation of my twisted sexual oppression, no calls for industrial action. What would their banners have read, their chants have been? What do we want? Graham to be un-fucked! When do we want it? Er . . . ?
The comrades didn’t really do the inner world, certainly not the politically unsound netherworld of the libido. It was all a symptom of a sick society, the outcry of an oppressed preacher, pornographer, psychiatrist. I remember Gary saying that there was nothing wrong with adults and children having a sexual relationship in itself, but that the dynamics of capitalism were such that a relationship like that would have to wait until after the revolution, until the inequities of power would (presumably) wither away (along with the state). I’m not sure he believed it then, and I’m sure he wouldn’t believe it now, but at the time child-fucking was being reclaimed by the left as sexual liberation. I went to find solace amongst the champions of the oppressed only to find that my oppressor himself was just another oppressed minority.
Their arguments were insistently right, and, therefore only half-right. It is no use just describing what people are, so the position went. We need to ask why they are the way that they are. What are the socio-economic conditions that have constructed this thing we call the human being, what ideological forces have gone into producing their desires and hopes and dreams? Once they had achieved this task (and why wouldn’t they?) and identified the machinations of capital as being the driving force of human history (which they unquestionably were, weren’t they?), it seemed but a short step to building a revolutionary vanguard party (which would be them). The Party would then galvanize the energy of the proletariat who, as they were the ones whose labour created capital in the first place, were the only ones with the power to overthrow it. Marx would almost certainly be quoted here: philosophers have always interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it. Amen.
We go to see Scum, just me and Sara. There’s a lean Ray Winstone, proving that he’s the new fucking daddy by battering the old fucking daddy with pool balls wrapped in a sock. There’s a cocky Mick Ford polishing his feet with boot polish, reciting his name and number to a jaded and bitter Bill Dean, a screw more battered by his job than any of the kids in his so-called care. And then, of course, there’s a fragil
e Julian Firth, gang-raped in a greenhouse whilst the screws are on a cigarette break.
We walk out in stunned silence, tacitly agreeing not to speak until we get to the Railway. Once there Sara buys me a drink and we start to talk. She loves the way the film showed how the institution used race to divide the boys, like in the gym when they were deliberately set against each other. But it also showed that race wasn’t an issue in the riot scene. They’d found some solidarity; and even though it unleashed the full brutality of the prison, it showed that the inmates could be a real threat when they found their common cause. She thought that the rape scene was entirely justified. It wasn’t there gratuitously or to titillate. It was absolutely about how power is used sexually and sexuality is used violently. Brilliant film. She’s right. Of course she’s right. And I love her for it.
And I have something to tell her.
Next
‘It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature?’
R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
I’m back in his office. Strange how this office has transformed itself whilst remaining exactly the same. It wasn’t that long ago that I was here to sort out his books, my first job, although I didn’t consider it a job at the time. He’s let them slip again, his theology spilling over into his lit crit, his desk groaning with collected Shakespeare. There’s no wine on offer today, no chance of a sherry. I haven’t brought him bad poetry, neatly written with my Parker pen. Neither do I want to talk about Beckett or Kafka or any other of our prime-numbered literary heroes.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 17