by C. J. Driver
*
I was busy. I had a succession of trivial but demanding briefs, then a long and complex defence in a murder trial. At home Alison seemed to be perpetually at the kitchen stove, bottling autumn fruit, drying late herbs, making jams and jellies. I spent what part of the day I got at home taking the cultivated part of the garden another three yards down the steep hill-side—harder work than it may seem, what with digging and levelling and shifting topsoil, as well as making steps down the path and building walls to retain what I had levelled. The children grew daily; Sarah was going to be as tall as her mother, and Nell was beginning to lose the chubbiness of childhood and become recognisably a little girl. I made my annual journey back to Brenton, put some flowers on my parents’ graves, had supper with my sister and her teacher-husband, and spent the evening in the Labour Club which had been my father’s second home.
It breaks my heart to go back there now; my father’s friends try so hard to treat me as his son, and I smile and chat to them, trying to curb my legal voice, and feeling false every moment I am there; and I know the moment I have had my two pints and am walking back to the hotel near the station, they will be saying, “Not a patch on his old man, that one.” “A clever lad, all right, but he hasn’t got his father’s spirit.”
*
The date for the trial of Buckleson and others was set; there was no avoiding the meeting any more, unless I were to turn the case down, which I could not do at that late stage.
I was too busy to plan appointments far ahead. I had phoned Peale to see if he could fix a meeting with Buckleson, but he had not been helpful. “He’s not on the phone and, in my experience, doesn’t keep appointments—a filthy bourgeois trick, I expect he thinks—but I’ll try.”
He fixed one meeting and Buckleson didn’t arrive; he fixed another, and Buckleson phoned at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it. So I abandoned my creed, and went looking for him in what Peale called ‘that commune place of theirs’. I could always say it wasn’t a conference if anyone bothered to ask.
The commune was, as Peale had told me, a disused warehouse, about a mile south of the river, a little way off the shopping centre in Read Street. The Free People had taken over the warehouse about two months before and had turned it into some kind of a commune. I can’t imagine the G.L.C. liked the situation much; but the warehouse was empty in an area of derelict factories, it was not a residential area, and perhaps the Council thought the Free People were better there than camping in the streets or a park.
I took a cab as far as Read Street, then walked. It was late autumn then, November, and England was beginning to button up for the winter; umbrellas were out, coats were on, and women hurried their prams from shop to shop without stopping to talk to their neighbours and friends. One or two of the shops, not the smartest, carried signs which said firmly, ‘No Hippies’, but others obviously flourished on the trade of the Free People; an Indian curry shop carried a large sign, ‘A Welcome to all, whoever they be, whatever they were’. I suppose the owner meant ‘wear’, but I preferred the sign as it was.
A hundred yards or so past the shops, I found Factory Lane, little better than a path really, and hardly wide enough to take a single lorry. There were empty factories on each side: Smither’s Soaps; Lardner’s Metal Tubing; Bell and Wise, Timber Merchants; then three empty warehouses. I did not need to ask which one the Free People used, because there were rows and rows of the white peasant uniforms hanging up on drying lines in the waste land around the warehouse, and various Free People moving around the outhouses which I presumed had been turned into lavatories and kitchens. It was an enormous place, more like an aircraft hangar than anything else—and indeed it may have been a surplus hangar before it became a warehouse. The old sign had been roughly painted over, and someone had daubed ‘New Freedom Square’ on it.
No one stopped me, so I went in. I expected darkness, but the warehouse was surprisingly light and airy; looking up I could see there were large windows let into the curved roof where the girders stretched like the tenons of the wings of some enormous bird. There is a painting by one of the Victorians—is it Frith? I can’t remember—of a railway station a little like the warehouse; and indeed the scene inside was not all that different, with people moving about, talking, working, watching; and over all the chatter and laughter blared a transistor. Someone was singing, most aptly, though in an uncomfortable nasal squeal,
If you want free-dom
You won’t find it at ho-ome
If you want free-dom
You won’t find it al-one
If you want free-dom
You gotta be you-ung
If you want free-dom
It’s a song that’s su-ung …
and other words to the same effect. Fortunately, I had no desire to be free, and simply resented the noise, at least partly because it obscured the pleasant sound of people’s voices.
There were two extraordinary things about the people. First, of course, they were wearing the white peasant uniform, even though they were ‘at home’, so to speak; I half-expected someone to come up to me to offer me a uniform too, as people offer you slippers when you go into a mosque. But the second extraordinary thing was that no one took any notice of me, for all I looked so out of place in my dark city suit; it was almost as if I had been made invisible by the way I was dressed, and once again I had the strange sensation that I had for a moment strayed into the territory of dreams. The Free People looked at me all right, or their eyes looked in my direction; but they did so with a blankness at one and the same time incurious and yet not aloof. I find it hard to explain that look; it gave me something of the same sensation you have when you go into a party where everybody knows everybody well and you are the only stranger, yet where nobody looks directly at you for fear of making you feel you are the only stranger.
I suppose there must have been about two or three hundred people in the area of the warehouse, men, women, children—young mainly, though there were people of my age and some older, and about a hundred different activities going on—I had seen the people outside who were cooking and washing clothes and inside there were women sewing—they sat in a small circle working on the ubiquitous white cotton—there was a man at a typewriter watched by three admiring young girls—I suppose he was some kind of instant poet, because every now and then he would break off his tapping to declaim whatever it was he wrote to the rapt harem—there was a man obviously teaching something to another small group, there was a woman working on a large mobile sculpture which hung from the ceiling, there were children playing hopscotch, two men playing chess, another man making a water-wheel for some children who sat crosslegged on the floor watching him, people reading, people talking, people asleep—for, despite the song of freedom, I suppose there was really no more noise than there would be in a Continental cathedral or in a railway station. It was disorderly all right; and I don’t think it could be called purposeful, for there were enough people there who were simply standing around watching what others did or chatting idly to deny any kind of collective purpose, though the uniform did lend an intrinsic communality to the place. Yet the disorder and the lack of purpose carried warmth; simply, the people there seemed to be enjoying themselves, whatever they were doing.
Those were still the days before I learned to make distinctions between what I felt for Buckleson and for his followers; John Buckleson was simply one of the Free People, and I felt no anger against them, for all I thought what they believed intellectually shoddy. Yet I confess even then the warmth and the sense of enjoyment produced a niggle of resentment in me; I suppose I am thoroughly a captive of the Puritan ethic. I cannot prevent myself believing not only that work is valuable in itself, but that by its very nature it must (sometimes at least) be unpleasant, a bind, a sweat, a necessary evil. And gradually, as I stood there longer and still seemed to be invisible even to those a couple of yards away from me, the feeling of resentment grew.
Eventually, I picked
out one man to speak to. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on a folded blanket on the concrete floor, a young man, twenty, twenty-one, I suppose, with lots of long blond hair and National Health glasses. “I’m looking for John Buckleson,” I said.
“Why?”
Resentment grew. “I’m meant to be defending him in a trial coming on in less than a fortnight.”
“You a lawyer?”
I nodded; there was no need to say I was a barrister.
He stood up; he was very tall, at least six inches taller than me. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go and see if I can find him.” He picked up his blanket from the floor, casually folded it over an arm, and moved off through the warehouse. Out of stubborn resentment, I started to follow him, but he turned round and stopped me. “I think you’d better wait here,” he said. “I’ll have to see if he wants to see you, first.” He was not at all rude, simply matter-of-fact. If I had been someone else, I might have argued with him, but I went back to my place near the doors. A middle-class voice the young man had; plummy, softly modulated, polite even when rude. I expect he was a drop-out from somewhere like Cambridge, or a public schoolboy running away from riches … as I say, resentment had overwhelmed my response by then.
Two minutes later he was back. “John can see you,” he said, still without smiling or without showing anything but a sleepy boredom. “You’ll find him in the offices down at the bottom right-hand corner of the warehouse,” and he pointed to where some lean-to offices were built against the wall of the warehouse. Taking no more notice of me, he took the blanket from his arm, unfolded it and spread it on the floor, and sat down again. I went.
There was no one in the first office. In the second there was a huge pile of sleeping bags and blankets. In the third there was a group of men and women in earnest consultation; at first I didn’t see John and was about to move on to the fourth office, when suddenly he stood up from the group and gestured at me through the window, then came to the door, opened it and looked out.
“You looking for me?” he said. I nodded. “You the lawyer who got me bailed?” I nodded again. “Well, here I am.” The antagonism was direct. His private voice was very different from the public one I had heard, sharper, faster, with none of the deliberate hesitation and pause which was such a marked feature of his public speaking; he was slighter and smaller too—I had thought, from my own sight of him, that he was about the same height as I am, five feet eleven or so.
“I want to run through the details of the evidence. There are a couple of points needing explanation and clarification,” I said carefully, and then added, “You didn’t make it to those meetings …”
“O.K. You’d better come in here,” and he gestured me into the office. The ten or so people in there looked at me in the same blank way the young man at the door had. There was only one chair in there, the one which John had obviously been sitting in before he came to the door, and he went back to it. I was not even offered one of the packing cases, nor a corner of the table three or four more perched on.
“All right, Mr. Lawyer.” It was the first time he called me that.
I looked around the blank faces of his followers. “I’d prefer to talk in private,” I said as firmly as I could.
“Why?” asked one of the girls. Strangely enough, my resentment was going now; was it because John had called me ‘Mr. Lawyer’, or because I was beginning to realise that the Free People always asked ‘Why?’ when they wanted to, just as my daughters are always asking ‘Why?’, or because I was back in a territory, that of the law and its ramifications, where I am to some extent master?
“Well, in less than a fortnight I am going to have to defend your friend John Buckleson here on some pretty serious charges; and I don’t want you lot listening.”
Buckleson was the one who took decisions; they all turned to look at him, and he said simply, “Out, people; Mr. Lawyer knows what he’s doing. If he didn’t, I’d still be in Brixton.”
Within thirty seconds the room was empty except for Buckleson and me. I sat on one of the packing cases and we settled to business. I had brought a notebook with me in which I had noted down the various bits of evidence I was most worried about; I fished it out and began to question John. The details don’t matter very much; I wanted to get the sequence of events absolutely clear in my own head, I wanted to hear the story from him in the kind of way I’d try to get from him if I had to call him in his own defence, and I wanted to make sure I was not in fact dealing with what Williams’s story had suggested: a religious maniac or a megalomaniac. I didn’t believe myself he was either mad or even a little unbalanced; and I knew what Peale thought of him; but I didn’t want to get Buckleson into a witness box and suddenly find I had a raving nutter on my hands. But his answers to my questions were clear, sensible and intelligent, and I knew within a few moments that if it became necessary, I could put Buckleson into the witness box on his own account without fear of anything going wrong.
When I had finished my questioning, I shut my notebook and slipped it back into my pocket. “Well, that’s all I have,” I said. “Are there any things you are worried about?”
He smiled at me for the first time. “Bloody hell, yes. What defence are you going to have?”
“The line a defence takes nearly always depends on the line the prosecution takes; one dare not plan too far ahead. But, for instance, if you take your verbals …”
“My what?” he interrupted.
“Sorry. You know, what you said after they had arrested you. They did caution you, didn’t they? You know, the standard thing about ‘anything you say may be used etcetera, etcetera’.”
“I suppose so.” He shrugged. “I was so bloody furious I could have said anything. What did I say?”
“Something about ‘next time it’ll be machine-guns’.”
“Was that a bad thing to say?”
“It depends; what you meant was next time the police would use machine-guns.” I grinned ironically at him, but he did not respond. “Well, the prosecution will say you meant you would use machine-guns next time. And I’ll take the line you may have been coming down from the platform to break up the fighting.”
“Only ‘may’? Won’t you have to be more definite than that?”
“‘May’ is good enough in law; the prosecution has to prove you did—if we can say you may have been doing it for some other reason the jury may acquit.”
“The law sounds pretty indefinite.”
“Its lack of definition may keep you out of gaol.”
I could not resist saying that, but it seemed to make no impression on Buckleson at all.
“If I get convicted, what kind of sentence would I get?”
“Oh, it’s impossible to say; it depends on the trial—and on the jury—and most of all on the judge. It might be only a binding over to keep the peace; it might be a fine; it might be a gaol sentence. Affray is an odd charge, and conspiracy to make an affray is even odder.”
“The pigs really want to get me, don’t they?”
He sounded almost pleased, now; certainly he did not seem frightened. I suppose it is one of the inevitable paradoxes of the revolutionary Left; they want the police to persecute them, because that means they are succeeding in being a danger to the State. In just the same way they seem almost to want the police to be brutal, because every time the police baton-charge a crowd or plant a weapon on a suspect or beat up a black man they have won their argument that the police are agents of a fascist state.
I made no reply to Buckleson. After a moment or two in which he contemplated the desire of the ‘pigs’ to get him, he stood up from the solitary chair and said, “Well, is there anything else?”
I stood up too. “I’d quite like to meet Miss Raymond,” I said.
“Tella? Why? She’s not involved.”
“She is paying.”
“Bloody money again. Anyway, she’s not here.”
“Does she live here?”
“On and
off; she has a flat in Chelsea.”
“The Free People don’t have to live here?” I asked.
“The Free People don’t have to do anything.”
With that, he led me out of the office. “Which way did you come?”
“From Read Street and down the lane.”
“Brought a car?”
I shook my head.
“I’ll walk with you,” Buckleson said.
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not; I want some air after being cooped up in that office half the afternoon.”
So we walked slowly back down the length of the warehouse. The game of hopscotch had died, and the children were now playing tag round and through the various groups of adults. The instant poet had retired somewhere with his harem. The sewing women were still in their circle, the class was still in progress.
“What’s going on there?” I asked.
“It’s a class of some kind, I expect.”
“What about?”
“God alone knows,” he said cheerfully. “People run classes in things they’re interested in.”
“The listeners seem interested, anyway.”
“People will learn if you give them a chance.”
“And live better too.” I was quoting him as I had heard him in the park.
Buckleson looked at me carefully, but said nothing. So I explained. “I’ve heard you speak.”
“Where?”
“At that demonstration in Hyde Park; about the slum-clearance scheme?”
“What did you think?” He began walking again, slowly making his way past the children towards the doors of the warehouse.
“I think you’re very different on a platform; you speak differently, you seem different.”
His voice, when he replied, was informed with a strange and bitter irony. “Oh, that’s my real place, on a platform,” he said. “That’s where I’m really me. People say it’s a kind of acting; but I feel most alive then, as if the rest of my life was a kind of acting. Does that happen to you in court?”