What was memorable about Godard, as I said, was the concentrated intensity in the way he worked. Marc Karlin was the same, totally obsessive. I recognize it from my own writing, you are oblivious of everything else. People at the university, in Manchester, just cannot understand.
Godard was really in there. You could feel his brain burning. I remember people groaning as they watched that film for the first time.
That famous image, the woman on the stairs of the Hackney house, was an illusion. It happened elsewhere: St John’s Wood, where Irving and Mo Teitelbaum lived, or Notting Hill. Sheila couldn’t remember. The walls were too white. Godard had never prowled these streets. His cones and holes and pinched citizens were far away to the west, they were the future: nobody in 1969 saw any advantage in rescuing Hackney from its dream of the Blitz. The rubble, the prefabs, the community bathhouses.
But Godard was wrong too, the prolonged close‐up of the pudendum of the woman from the Electric Cinema, slightly fuzzy in degraded reproduction, is never boring: because it is not a thing, a rhetorical landscape like the beautiful Courbet painting, but evidence of a particular biography, the pale bikini line of autumn and the curving scar of a Caesarean procedure or an appendix removal. The longer the shot is held, the more of the history of skin and texture we absorb. The episode subverts the director’s dogma with human awkwardness, a contrived social situation, the requirement of this woman to act – and act badly – as she echoes Rowbotham’s voice‐over in a telephone conversation.
The reality of Montague Road is contained in its nakedness. Sunlight polishing sanded boards. Marc Karlin settled here, seemingly by accident, but perhaps to complete the film that Godard chose, in the end, not to deliver. Rowbotham’s voice, as I listened to the tape, conjured images of an interior I had never visited. The problem with this Kentish Town interview was that I talked too much; there were parallels in our lives, coincidences, crossovers from the era of Liberal Studies teaching, friends in common, shared walks. But Sheila’s difficulties came from social and political engagement (individual desire set against the general good), where I was monkish and unyielding in my neurotic mapping of place. That warped and refracted autobiography.
Eventually, slurping a fresh mug of coffee, I allowed her to resume this account of Hackney in the 1960s.
I had a friend called Roberta Hunter Henderson who was at Warwick. She was very good at maths and logic, completely different from me. She did philosophy. She met Marc Karlin. She was living in my house in Montague Road. She brought Marc with her. Then Roberta moved out. I think she went to do anthropology in Oxford. Marc stayed. Was it 1969? He was working with Humphrey Trevelyan and James Scott. They raised money by doing films for a sheik. An Arab. A film about polo. They did a Martini advert too. They didn’t have any money. They were going round the country doing films for Cinema Action. Marc made Nightcleaners, it took about five years. A documentary about unionizing women who clean office buildings at night.
It was a very chaotic period in the house. But a generally safe feeling. Neighbours were burgled a few times. One burglar stole a book of mine, Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm.
The lorry driver who lived two doors down, he had his meter burgled. He was straight down the pub where the villains drank, checking out who had been spending money: in coins. He would go round to the guy’s door, immediately. Direct action. We never went near the police. As middle‐class incomers, we were sitting ducks. We didn’t know what to do.
There was a woman who went into hospital to have a baby. She told me to wake her husband up, every morning. I couldn’t get the guy to move. He had to go to work at five o’clock. I hit him with a pillow. ‘It’s really important,’ the woman told me. I also had to do his washing, he couldn’t cope with the launderette. He didn’t know how to operate the machine.
Montague Road was an education. I should be grateful to Bob, my partner at the time, for my only shrewd capital investment. ‘Rent is irrational. You should use your money and buy.’ I would have just dissipated the money over the years. It seemed a vast amount then. There was also a tendency in Hackney for women to own the houses. There was a strong feeling about Hackney being a respectable borough. People moved there from East London, Whitechapel. Our neighbours included ladies who kept haberdashers and were very proper.
A lot of our life in Montague Road revolved around the Mitford pub, which featured regular drag shows. Some hairy guy singing ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’. The local pubs and Ridley Road Market, that was it. I did go to Hackney Downs, but it wasn’t very exciting. I liked to walk down to the river, the Lea. It seemed so far – until I moved to Clapton. I loved walking my dog on the marshes. The space! There was some ancient battle down there. I used to get these strange feelings walking across that green wilderness.
I joined the Young Socialists. I think it was my Methodist schooling. If you have views, you should do something about it. I joined the Labour Party. In Hackney the party was intensely Trotskyist. Bob Rowthorn was involved with New Left Review. We would get Robin Blackburn, someone of that stature, coming to talk to the Young Socialists. We met in Graham Road, in the Labour Party rooms. Upstairs. A very grim space with fluorescent lighting. There was a pub opposite. That’s where everyone started to really talk. When we were at the meetings it was all dogma: ‘The comrade at the back.’ That stuff.
Bill Fishman and Raphael Samuel were important to me. I found Bill by ringing around like a mad person, looking for work. I was doing day‐release teaching, Liberal Studies. I wonder what happened to those kids? I wonder what they remember of the weird people who spouted jargon at them? Thanks to doing that teaching my pension is slightly more than I anticipated. But those forms! Those endless forms. Now, at Manchester, they make us do forms on the computer. I get into an hysterical state. The young lecturers don’t understand. The new academics are completely computer literate. You are judged these days on your ability to fill in forms.
I moved into Montague Road in 1966. I’d come to Hackney in ’64. The logical Bob said: ‘Buy.’ My friend Mary Costain, who was at university with me, moved in. We collected someone called Kathie Humby, who was in the Young Communists League. We knew her from the Dolphin pub. Young Communists used to go there. Kathie was a working‐class girl.
The people in Montague Road paid one pound, each, for the house – and another pound for a political cause. I paid too. We collected the money, everyone paid. It collapsed when the hippie thing in the late 1960s took over. Bob and I split up. The situation was made worse by the invasion of all these people who lived through the night, getting stoned.
I used to be going upstairs, asking them to shut up. I was trying to write my thesis. Bob was getting really fed up. He was coming from Cambridge. He had a job. These hippie characters were friends of Mary and I felt very loyal to her. I felt completely torn. I had all these democratic ideas. Mary had as much right to live there as me and Bob.
I invited some guy I’d met with Bob, out in the road, to move in. There was no reason why we had more right to live in this property than anyone else. Then I did become more brutal. I ended up expelling people.
The chaos in living works as long as the people involved really like each other. To be with Marc Karlin always lifted my heart – even though he was the most chaotic person. He contributed by the meals he used to cook.
I’m not great on anything being planned by other people, I resist rotas. On the other hand, I’m quite conscientious about cleaning. I’m very untidy but a great mopper. I often felt hard‐done‐by, because I was doing most of the cleaning. Marc cooked one meal. Then we would take it in turns. Nigel Fountain is a great fan of systems. As soon as he moved in, systems came with him. Marc was not much good with this. We had space for people to opt out, as long as they contributed something.
People had their own rooms. There was none of the thing of having to share. We were quite traditional and Trotskyist. We didn’t have much communal space, one tiny kitchen.
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Dave Phillips moved in with his girlfriend, Sue. She came first, then Dave. Sue and I would go to the market with a wheelie basket, to Ridley Road. There was a system for who shopped. That’s what Sue and I did. Paul – my son’s father – and Dave Phillips, they were better at electrics. David Widgery was pretty good too, his father had taught him. He didn’t live in Montague Road, but he was always visiting. Widgery was very keen on the Four Aces Club in Dalston Lane. We used to go there. I went a few times, it was a bit tomb‐like.
We had house meetings. The house‐maintenance committee used to agree that things didn’t need doing. Ha! It was like reproducing the normal sexual divisions of labour. Nigel had no practical or manly skills, but he had this great flair for cooking.
I had my son, Will, in . . . I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything. 1977? He’s thirty now, so it must have been. I lived in Montague Road when he was a baby. It provoked a bit of a crisis as soon as he began to crawl. I had a large room, but the television set was in there too. It took a long time before we had a television. People would all come to watch in my room. They wouldn’t rent us a set. They said that women were unreliable. They said, ‘No no, sorry. We can’t do it.’ We had to buy a set. Then all the people in the house would come to my room. I was trying to write. I had a baby.
By the end of the 1970s it was breaking up. The political climate was bitter. In ’79 we moved to Clapton. It took time to find a house. No one, apart from myself and Paul, had any motive for moving. We wanted more space for Will. I sold Montague Road to fund the move. It fetched £17,000. It was bought for £4,000. We made some profit. The new house cost a bit more, so I had to get a mortgage. It was a difficult shape, so long and thin. Nigel moved out. There was a small room for Will.
In Clapton, I liked being near Hackney Marshes. I made friends with a Turkish woman at the cleaners. Clapton didn’t have the atmosphere you would find in the area around Ridley Road. I liked the bit by the church, St Augustine’s Tower. And the old churchyard, the winding medieval road.
We shift with the geography; a flit of a few streets, across the Hackney Brook, over the Downs, and our interests change, evolve. We become different characters. At the start of it, this journey into a borough too large and strange to define, we were blank pages. Nothing in ourselves, but politicized by the connection with Ridley Road, sonar‐echoes of Mosley, counter‐currents of necessary opposition. Drifters sucked in from Cambridge and Essex. Every Hackney ward, every warring E‐number, had its disciples: the gardeners, the careerists, the ones who would move up and out. History infects us. Sheila Rowbotham, walking, exploring, recognized the long shadows in the road ahead.
Shacklewell Lane is wonderful. I loved knowing that Mary Wollstonecraft walked there. I used to lead historical tours. I followed the inspiration of Bill Fishman. We all went on Bill’s Whitechapel tours. I got my information from various old books. I’ve still got them, photographs of places that no longer exist. Lynne Segal was very sarcastic about my Hackney tours. ‘Most of your walks are to places that aren’t there any more.’ Ha!
The most famous one was the walk Julie Christie came on. It started to pour. I can’t remember who she was living with at the time or why she decided to come. She was accompanied by a woman who wrote adventure books, a well‐known person who was plotting to go off on some trip into the desert. A Turkish film star turned up, she wanted to talk to Julie. I had a Turkish film star, Julie and this famous woman whose name I have forgotten. And my mongrel dog, Scarlet. We started from my house in Clapton. We set off to look at some academy for young ladies and then a churchyard visited by Samuel Pepys.
I led the group through the very dirty streets of Hackney. We arrived somehow at Victoria Park. We went via Sutton House on Homerton High Street. It poured, absolutely poured, with rain. The heavens opened. We stood under a tree and didn’t know what to do. We decided to run, to try and find a café. By the time we got to the café, we were soaking. Of course Julie still looked incredibly beautiful. She was not wearing anything fancy. Even when she wore de‐glamorized things, the clothes just seemed to hang off her in this fabulous way. She had khaki trousers. She is quite practically made, but she’s very interested in history. Women’s history.
Poor Scarlet, my little ginger dog, was sodden. ‘I’ll never get her into the café.’ I was tying her, rather sadly, to the railings, when Julie turned on her charm. Sure enough, she is recognized. The café owner is agog. He’s got this radiant film star in his place. The dog is reprieved. That’s the great power of Julie Christie’s beauty.
I think Nigel was on that walk. He knew Duncan Campbell, the journalist who lived with Julie at one time, up in Stoke Newington. So he knew Julie too.
I’m not terribly good at geography, I usually get lost. My tours were always slightly anxious. I kept sneaking a look at my London A–Z. I modified my excursions accordingly. Sometimes we found ourselves doing somewhat abbreviated walks.
I was interested to discover that there had been an academy in Powerscroft Road, a dissenting academy. Which means that William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft must have walked up Powerscroft Road in Hackney! It felt very odd. You end up living in places through which people you have read so much about have already passed. We are treading, literally, in their footprints.
Even at the time I was in Clapton, Russian Mafia people were moving in – as criminals, not property developers. A guy called Terry, who worked at the swimming pool, told me about it. He knew, being black, all about the Yardies and the Russians. They were fighting it out in Clapton. It was getting really edgy just before I left.
I remember this scary incident. I went out with Scarlet, about seven in the evening, to post a letter. I saw this man being beaten up by a group of other men, in the road. I went back towards my house. I thought, ‘This is like Enid Blyton, the Famous Five. I must remember the number of the car.’ I’m hopeless at numbers. I was staring at the car when it spun round, just like in the films, and drove straight towards me. I was frozen in terror, clutching my little scrap of a dog. A guy gets out. I swear he had a purple halo of rage around his head. ‘You were fucking taking our fucking number.’ I thought I was going to be shot. ‘No no no, I wasn’t.’ Ha!
He thought I was so pathetic, he gave up on me. I rang Paul. He said, ‘It’s your duty to see whether the victim is still alive.’
I went back. The victim had vanished. My son, Will, said, ‘Mum, just stay out of it. Drug dealers. Leave well alone.’ Nigel said, ‘You should ring the police.’ I said, ‘They know where I live, Nigel. And anyway I can’t remember the number of the car.’ ‘Forget it, Mum,’ my son said. He had grown up in Hackney.
Because of coming from the north of England, I stare into people’s eyes. I smile. When Will was a teenager, walking around Hackney with me, he would say: ‘No no. Mum, no.’ When I was in Whitby, recently, I was so much at ease. Old ladies strike up conversations with complete strangers. I carried on like that in Hackney. I do miss Hackney – but it is more restful now, over here, in Kentish Town. I don’t drive. When I walked at night, home through Clapton, I was getting increasingly nervous about making it safely to my door.
Eleanor Road
There is nudity in the diary films, male as well as female, but there is no sound, just the memory of the projector grinding relentlessly on: the creased sheet, cracks in the wall. Nakedness, in theory, was democratic. Cameras did pass around between the males, women rarely got their hands on them, or showed any interest in doing so: sometimes, by use of a cable and a black bulb, a fish‐eye lens, we operated a primitive form of surveillance cinema. Everybody in shot, but one person is squeezing the bulb. It was a question of recording daily life, not setting up dramas; nobody would be asked to walk naked up and down the stairs, in an attempt to render that event tedious, banal. As with any home movie, the participants were also the audience. How far would it go, this record of coffee cups, the brushing of hair, meals, baths, walks, work? The way the streets looked. Peopl
e waiting for buses, buying bread. An American friend, who lived with us for some months, helping to fund Albion Village Press, sent back footage from Kabul. He also sent a copy of the Stan Brakhage film Lovemaking. Which, as much as anything, was about rhythms of light and breath. The intimate movements of an unknown couple, seen close, side on: flaring, burning out, as golden light pours through a naked window. The poetry of surveillance is in that quality of light. Brakhage’s engagement. Our trust.
Godard challenges Sheila Rowbotham in Montague Road. Deflecting the accusations that would surely come, prurience, misogyny, by quoting at length from Rowbotham’s Black Dwarf polemic: ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’. Politics of the body. Scruffy rooms enlivened by the complicit presence of a naked woman. How to dress it, the question they have to ask: ‘Will you get your kit off ?’ For art. For women’s liberation. The cause.
Barry Flanagan, the sculptor, the hare‐maker, friend of a friend, came to our door. His work, in the exhibition we attended on Bond Street, had progressed from provocative conceptualism, brokered by the book‐destroying John Latham, to coils of rope, Habitat felt and bags of sand. Our friend Mike, a Bristol associate of Flanagan, had an early piece in his Leamington Spa flat, a cloacal‐black, free‐standing figure: like a compacted Elizabeth Frink rescued from the ashes of an art‐store fire.
Would she, would Anna, pose naked for Barry Flanagan, a new series he was contemplating, on Hampstead Heath? The explanation became convoluted – and being there, offering coffee, I found myself eavesdropping on a parallel version of the Godard/ Rowbotham episode. The idea was: grass. The colour and texture of grass, at this time, this season, early autumn. With the naked woman an incidental but important element. At first light, one morning: soon. After‐images of Antonioni’s BlowUp were in the air. The municipal grass the art director had to spray, to achieve the required tone. Nobody, back then, was quite sure where this park was. I heard the director Michael Radford say that he was sure it was Victoria Park in Hackney. Flanagan’s proposed sequence – if anyone stalking the heath photographed him in action – would recall the illicit rendezvous, the fatal assignation in Maryon Park. A live woman lying on damp ground, in place of the corpse of the distinguished older man. Silk‐screen prints against white walls.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 29