A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  “Oh, he just gets muddled.”

  “You mean he’s mad?”

  “No, I don’t like that word; just muddled. Sometimes he gets very muddled, and then he goes away for a bit.”

  “And so you let him call you an ‘imperialist lackey’, a ‘revisionist sell-out’ like man if you dig that kind of scene, and heighho.”

  “You don’t understand at all, do you Tom? Jiminy’s all right; he’s had a rough time, that’s all—and so he gets muddled.”

  “Why don’t you chuck him out of the Free People?”

  “We don’t work like that …”

  “You keep saying that. So does Tella. How the hell do you work?”

  John shrugged. “You can’t understand unless you are actually in; you’ve got to commit yourself first.”

  “To something you don’t know anything about? To something that just exists, without any justification? You ask a lot.”

  “Yes,” said John; his voice was flat and cold.

  “And because that Jiminy chap has committed himself, you let him stay on, no matter what he says, like a village idiot?”

  “That’s enough, Tom.” The authority in his voice was sudden and sharp; of course I had been riding him hard, perhaps because I resented the way in which he had gone off with the others for their council of war. I had no right to feel excluded, but there was no doubt I did. But he was right. It was enough.

  “I must go home,” I said, looking at my watch.

  “Haven’t you got any more questions to ask, Mr. Lawyer?” He was smiling now, friendly again after the sudden whip of authority.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Was the fighting at the demonstration planned?” It was a question which had been at the back of my mind most of the evening.

  John smiled even more broadly. “You mean, should the jury have convicted me?”

  “No, I didn’t ask that. I asked for the truth.”

  “Oh, no, My Lawyer, it was a ‘spontaneous reaction to police provocation’, like you said.” The smile was still broad, the voice ironic. The implicit lack of trust hurt, though it did not surprise. I am a lawyer, not a philosopher; my interest is in evidence and proof, not in the truth as some abstract mistress. The flesh-and-blood lady is real enough for me usually, yet for once I wanted the abstract. And I did not know. Oh, the jury had been right enough to acquit him on the evidence, but if the evidence had been stronger, if say the police had produced their informer, would they have been just as right to convict? I couldn’t be sure, and I wanted certainties.

  A few moments later I was saying good-bye to John and Tella. They came to the door of the flat with me, arm-in-arm, just like any suburban couple saying good-night to a visitor; and just like any suburban visitor talking to his host and hostess, I was saying, perhaps because it suddenly seemed so ordinary a situation, “One week-end, you and Tella must come down to Wealdridge; I’d like you to meet Alison and my children.”

  “We’d love to,” said Tella. “Wouldn’t we, John?”

  “A week-end in the country …,” John smiled.

  “We’re not really in the country; it’s Green Belt commuter-land—but do come.”

  “Perhaps we will, perhaps we will,” said John.

  *

  Cloud on the mountains. Mist on the roads. A man, his face invisible, goes down a steep path to an empty valley; he is very tired—he cannot see the stones of the path clearly for tiredness and the mist, and he stumbles at every second pace, and each time he stumbles he looks up at the hillside above him; there are people there, bandits perhaps, and he is afraid they will hear his stumbling footsteps from the caves where they hide from the foul weather.

  At last he comes to the valley; there is a stream there, or rather a trickle of water down the middle of what used to be a river. The man is thirsty but dare not stop to drink; there is some urgency in his journey which I do not understand, though I do understand that the stream is a path he was told to follow. It winds along the valley-floor, past great overhanging rocks and sudden valley-flowers splashed red, purple and white on the old river banks.

  The stream opens out until suddenly it is an arena, still sandy-floored, still with the narrow stream running through it. In front of the man there is a crowd of men, armed and sullen. The man walks slowly forward, but the armed men show no friendliness to him.

  He walked right through the crowd, the ranks opening up for him and closing again behind him. He has some power over them, because they do not harm him, though they seem to hate him. Then he is on his own again, and the arena has become a stage: a giant spotlight focuses on the man. He begins to speak, meaning to tell the invisible audience about his journey. But he cannot talk sense any more; he is too tired and what he says is a jumble of the wrong words in a crazy order. The audience jeer and boo, and the man stops talking. The lights come up and he walks forward to the edge of the stage; he expects an amphitheatre, but finds instead he is looking into a huge round hole in the earth with rocky sides and sandy floor. Around the edge of the bottom of the pit are chairs in a circle; in each chair sits a dead man.

  This is horror worse than jeers and boos, and he walks backward until his shoulders touch a cliff. Now he looks round him and sees that he too is in a pit with sheer rocky sides. There is one chair there, only one. He is very tired and would like to sit down, but dare not, because of the dead men he has seen.

  7

  So I became, in my minor and uncommitted way, a follower of John Buckleson. I saw him about once a fortnight; I phoned him to pass on some snippet of political gossip, or I went to a meeting where he was speaking, or I phoned Tella and the three of us met somewhere to eat, or John came to chambers to see me after I was out of court for the day, to ask me about some law his people or he had tripped over. To the Free People I was a tame unpaid legal adviser; I told a couple of them to plead guilty to a charge of possessing cannabis, I defended a couple of them accused of ‘taking and driving away’ (officially I was briefed by Peale on behalf of Tella—even for the Free People I would not risk being reported for touting), I helped another on a charge of seducing a minor. I even found myself deserting criminal law to study the bureacratic wilderness of the laws around social security so that I could advise the Free People how best to take advantage of being unemployed or sick or divorced or lazy.

  Gradually I got to know other members of the Free People; some of them I had met at Tella’s party, others I met in my legal sessions in the commune. There was Lester, who disliked me for my softness and who frightened me with his coldness. There was Caister the silent, who had no past I could discover though from somewhere he had learned nearly as much law as most solicitors know, for he was always around when I talked to his comrades and would often interpret the complexities of my explanations into simple talk. There was poor mad Bowland with his fantasies of glory and death for the people. There was O’Brien, who was a pacifist and who would, I suppose, have been John’s deputy if John had ever allowed anyone to deputise for him. There was Metford and his wife—for some of the Free People were ordinarily married couples who had given up capitalism for community—there was East and his; there was Streeter and his girl, Edna; there was … well, they are all names now and, though I can put faces to them above the white peasant uniforms, they are no more than names and faces to me. Equality, fraternity, and I can’t remember anything special about most of them now that they have ceased to be the Free People, and are only people.

  *

  It was a strangely restless time in England, then as now. The Conservatives were in power, and their government was weak even by its own standards; it did nothing until it was too late, and then it acted one way hastily and another way incompetently, and ended up still having done nothing. The press quoted a Cabinet minister who had said in an unguarded moment, “I think the country’s ungovernable”, as if he were a political philosopher and not an incompetent. The Prime Minister quoted statistics which showed all was well, and even the ordinary salaried middle
-class began to change its eating habits to cope with the rise in prices. The unemployment which had been endemic in the north and west for years spread southwards through my home-country in the Midlands and into London, and then even into the south-east. The young came out of their schools to find they could, if they were lucky, get jobs as labourers, or the courses the universities and polytechnics had for them were ‘over-subscribed’ or boring, or what they called socially useless and so boring. The unions fought the government and the employers about money; the government consulted the unions and then ignored them, the shop-stewards consulted their leaders and ignored them. People must work harder, said the government. The Age of Leisure, said the pundits. Monopoly capitalism, said the communists. The masses are passive, said the new New Left. Faith is a leap in the dark, said the churchmen. Jesus Christ was the first social worker, said the New Christians. Smash computers, cried the Luddites. Participate, chanted the students. Workers’ control, yelled the anarchists. Law and order, growled the Tories. The age of pluralism, said the sociologists …

  *

  The Free People were, I suppose, one of the plurals, if you believe that particular untruth. For one thing, despite all their theory, and Tella’s bottomless purse, I don’t suppose they could have survived if it had not been for social security. They seemed to have no compunction about living off a state they regarded as despicable, no more at least than they had in accepting money from Tella, though they knew as well as I did that it came from South African gold-mines. For another, most of them were political dilettanti; they held the proper opinions for their time and their age, they said capitalism was dying and communism obsolete, aid was trade and trade was immoral, the society of mass-production and mass-consumption was evil but art had to concern itself with society before the individual, and since impermanence was permanent, art must be instant. But they were something else too because, extraordinarily, they caught the imagination of the people. Even quite staid, middle-aged, middle-class people like Alison’s parents regarded them with something like tolerant amusement that contained, like a seed almost, a sense of fascination, perhaps even a sense of respect. Was it that the Great British People were bored with politics, bored with the intricacies of parliamentary government in a modern state? Or was it that the Great British People saw in the Free People what I did, a kind of optimism it wanted desperately to share, even though mind and eyes said despair, despair? Or was it simply John Buckleson, with that mop of black hair and pale face and that searching, hesitating public voice?

  *

  It’s too easy to say it was the newpapers and the TV which created the Free People in the minds of the people. Perhaps the left-wing intellectuals who—we are told—run these things did start the fashion, but they make their fat livings out of what they think the people want, however the tastes of the people are formed; so the people got John Buckleson and the Free People in plenty. First, one colour supplement carried a photo-story of the Free People in their warehouse with a heavily jargonised commentary: ‘The Free People, an experiment in alternative living’.

  Another followed suit, with a glossy photographer replacing the grainy one, and a psychology graduate writing the equally jargonised commentary: ‘The Free Persuaders’, this time. The Guardian carried a long profile of John Buckleson. The Sun photographed pretty girls in the uniforms of the Free People. A columnist in the Standard wrote of the unrecognised wisdom of the young who joined the Free People. John Buckleson was featured in an hour’s long programme on B.B.C. 2 called ‘The Way We Live Now’. One of the independent TV companies began a series on ‘Young People Now’ and John appeared; a trendy psychologist spent the programme trying to show that such groups were authentic therapy for the young. I even got into one of the articles myself in the odd personage of ‘Thomas Grace, left-wing lawyer who has defended John Buckleson and others of the Free People in trials ranging from conspiracy to the possession of cannabis …’ And at last The Times carried a leader under the headline, ‘Free for What?’

  ‘There is much to be admired,’ it burbled, ‘in the ideas and even the activities of the miscellaneous grouping of young people who have taken for their name the medieval title, The Free People … they owe it to themselves, and to all members of our pluralistic, technological society to acknowledge not only their obligation to history in the shape of men like Robert Owen and William Morris but also to make clear, as those men did, what their vision of society is. Rejection is not enough; affirmation is a necessity. One day some of these young people may have to lead their country; they must think soon where they will lead us …’ and sundry other such burbles.

  *

  Of course there were people who held out even then. One, oddly enough, was Bob Henderson; for all he had told me John was a ‘remarkable’ young man, he disapproved of the sudden rage of adulation which came after the first trial. Was it because he preferred his perception of potential to be private, or because he—like me—preferred honourable failure to compromised success? For there was no doubt he thought popular success was inevitably a compromise; if John held rigidly to his notions of communality and anarchism, he must inevitably be unpopular—or so Henderson thought.

  About six weeks after the first trial, Alison and I dined for the first time with Henderson and … what do I call her? His mistress, I suppose, since he’s divorced from his wife who has the custody of their three children. Alison hadn’t much wanted to go—she doesn’t like London and didn’t think Henderson would be what she called ‘her kind of person’ at all—but in the event she seemed to like Henderson and she made friends with Muriel very easily. It was useful, that, because I don’t suppose either she or Muriel would have thought the conversation between Henderson and me much fun. For we talked almost exclusively about John Buckleson and the Free People, not just once, but every time we met. It was Henderson who made me read Marcuse and Laing, Lebraski and Fanon and the ghastly J. Rubin, who sent me back to Bakunin and early Engels, to the ‘masters’ of the New Left in all their disparate and theoretical glory. If the dreams came first, the reading came third—and there’s enough of me which has been educated by books to make that seem important.

  *

  And Henderson talked and I made my cynical disclaimers. Often Alison and Muriel would desert us, and when the time came for us to leave, we would find them sitting drinking tea in the kitchen and talking of things domestic.

  “It’s time to go home, love,” I’d say.

  “Oh, is it really? What a pity,” Muriel would answer. I think our visits mattered to her, because for all the obvious sensuality of her relationship with Henderson—they were for ever touching each other’s faces and hands, or putting arms about each other, or kissing surreptitiously—he seemed to ignore her intellectually; I never heard him say one word to her out of the domestic or affectionate range, though she seemed to mind this as little as Alison minded my silence about the law. I suppose the truth is that Muriel is stupid, for she seems not to resent that Bob treats her as a brainless child.

  “Have you had a nice talk?” she would ask.

  “Yes, very pleasant and informative.”

  “In other words,” Bob laughed, “I’ve been talking solidly for the last hour, and poor Tom hasn’t got in a single word.”

  “It’s because he has to talk so much in court,” said Alison.

  “And because I have to listen so much in the daytime that when the sun goes down, I don’t listen to anyone but myself,” said Bob.

  “I don’t mind; I enjoy listening.”

  “And I enjoy lecturing.”

  *

  “What you’ve got to understand about these kids, Tom, is that they are kids, and know they’re kids. They know as well as anyone that within a few years, they are going to be as ordinary as you and I are—ordinary middle-class people living in the suburbs, with ordinary children and ordinary salaries.

  “Of course you can’t say it to them—they’ll deny it publicly, but they know damn well it’s
true. Their apocalypses and millennia last only until they are twenty-five or thirty; then they start to see the world again as something that happens in their life-span, and they take out thirty-year mortgages, and the apocalypse becomes less important than the standing orders on their bank accounts…”

  “Surely that doesn’t apply to someone like John himself…?”

  “No, not John; he’s special—there are always some of them that won’t change, where the ideas run as deep as obsessions. John’s one of the exceptions—maybe his vision will contract a bit, and instead of trying to run a mass-commune in south London, he’ll go off to Scotland with a dozen friends and try to live off the land—rural communality, you know…”

  “But he’s not really a romantic in that sense; he’s a town-planner after all …”

  “Yes, perhaps; but can you see him settling down in a clerk’s office in some urban council, to draw up plans for in-filling a village or stretching a new town? He won’t compromise that way—he’ll compromise into a publicist, if anything, into a television man, an authority on Utopian planning who never needs to do anything about it but talk and criticize. That’s why I’m so scared of what all this stuff in the newpapers and on the box will do to him …”

  “Aren’t you underestimating his brain?”

  “Oh, no, I’m overestimating it if anything. If he had any sense, he’d go in for the box—turn into a TV pundit on architecture and planning; and maybe a lot of people would listen to him too. No, what I want is for him to be stupid enough to think he really can change things, can change the way people think as well as the way they feel. We’ve got more than enough people to make us feel guilty; what we want is people to change things as they are.”

  “Politicians?”

  “In a way. But a different kind of politician—not the kind that thinks politics is the art of the possible, nor the kind most of the Free People are, where it’s all slogan and jargon and crapulous optimism. No, something harder than that, something new—visionary, I suppose, but with one’s feet on the ground …”