A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Do you like Lloyd Cole?’ Ogden said. Without waiting for an answer he pushed a cassette into the slot of his mother’s player. I knew it. It was the sound of that year, the way by which people like us distinguished ourselves from the mass consumers of pop culture. Then, it was the epitome of freedom, of a taste unshaped and unfunded. Ogden explained about Joaquin, Kate and Euan. I can hardly remember Euan now, and Kate is just a hairstyle and a particular coat. It’s strange to think of a time when Joaquin had to be explained to me, now that I’ve settled into knowing him, the best of men, for thirty years. But it was in that car, driving from the comfortable west of the city towards the brutalist centre, that I was first told about my friend. Hardly anybody in the car from that day is still much a part of my life, rather than just my thoughts. But that was where I heard that there was a man called Joaquin.

  Percy Ogden explained about the Spartacists during that drive. The others must have known it all, but listened with enjoyment, sometimes putting in a correction about details if Ogden forgot something, or confused one thing with another. There were three of them. I suppose there must have been more than that to get their newspaper printed every month or six weeks. I suppose they submitted the money they collected to some organization with a bank account and a hierarchy of responsibility. The three of them lived in a flat in Park Hill, where we were going now. The flats were a huge 1960s development, then very much out of fashion. For the most part they were desperately vacant. (By now they have been renovated and rendered possible for chic provincial taste to live in.) From the air, the blocks of rain-stained concrete curved in and around each other, desolately overlooking empty and threatening spaces where muggers, I believed at the time, lurked. Although there was no mistaking the dramatic force of the architecture, the idea of the designers that everyone would have a quiet patch of green to admire had not come to pass. I had never been inside the development although, of course, everybody knew its unnatural, many-jointed curve along the ridge of the hill above the railway station. If you wanted to be civil about it you called it brooding.

  Joaquin, Kate and Euan lived there because it was so cheap. ‘They’re squatters, actually,’ Ogden said, but Eric corrected him. They were not squatters. They paid Mr Das, their landlord, fifty pounds a week, quite in order. ‘Fifty pounds a week each?’ I asked, wanting to have a grip on the situation, but, no, it was between the three of them. They were students at the university, in solid academic subjects: Kate, who wrote poems, studied English, Joaquin and Euan history. Ogden and Eric had met them first, outside the library. An argument had taken place. Ogden did not specify – ‘Just a discussion,’ he said dismissively – but it may have been over some now discarded piece of ideology, somehow visible on Ogden’s person. I strongly suspected this of being a CND badge. Ogden’s earlier dismissal of nuclear disarmament as an idea suggested to me that he had, at some point in the past, been an adherent to the point of wearing badges in support. ‘How did you get talking?’ I said. They had just seen them – some kind of sceptical comment had been made, the other side had defended it, a counter-argument had followed. ‘Then Joaquin turned up and we all went to the pub,’ Eric said. It had been half past five on Saturday. They were probably not going to sell any more copies of the newspaper. Eric had been passing as eighteen in pubs for five years, a useful accessory to the under-age even though he himself didn’t much like drinking. In the winter the three Spartacists stood outside one of the town’s two football stadiums. I wanted to know whether Ogden and the rest were Spartacists, too, but it didn’t seem so. They were cousins, as it were, or pen-pals. There was an odd note of derision when Ogden talked about them. Euan and Kate were, he said, your typical middle-class rebels, children of doctors and shop-owners. Even at the time it seemed to me that the same could be said of Ogden.

  Joaquin, too, was the son of a doctor, but there was no question over his status, no suggestion that his existence was somehow comic. I think he was the reason that the group fastened on to the Spartacists, and treated them, in the end, with respect. He was Chilean. His story was the first thing I ever heard about that country. His father, the doctor, had been a leftist radical. After 1973 he and all his like had been prosecuted, placed in jail, tortured. Joaquin’s mother had left the country, going first to Spain. Then, quite quickly, she had come to England, where she had some cousins in Camden Town. She and Joaquin and her daughter Rosa had made a kind of life in London. There was no rebellion there. Joaquin’s politics were just as his parents’ had been. They had no idea what had happened to his father, the doctor: disappeared. He had been disappeared. That was the phrase, which hardly seems English to me. For Joaquin to have professed anything but a politics in line with the first principles of the Soviet revolution would have been an unthinkable betrayal of his martyred father. There was no arguing with that.

  ‘He was twelve when they came in 1973,’ Ogden said. ‘So he’s twenty now. Rosa’s our age. I’ve never met her. She’s named after Rosa Luxemburg, of course.’

  I didn’t then know who Rosa Luxemburg was, but I thought I’d start at another end of the story.

  ‘What happened in 1973?’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Ogden said. ‘I forget. If you hang around with us you get to hear a lot about 1973. In Chile. You forget not everyone knows about it.’

  There had been a coup, and a Fascist government had expelled the democratic government of the left, imprisoning and torturing people. It was hard to envisage. I forced myself to envisage it. I saw men in guns bursting through the presidential doors of a palace, splintering white paint and gold ornamental baroque flourishes, shooting machine-guns into putti-laden ceilings. Was this what revolution meant? And could it happen in the country where I lived? In many respects these are the questions I have gone on living with for thirty or more years. The possibilities of revolution, I think, are always present in a society. They must be present in the society we live in – England now and England then. Yet the idea of a revolution taking place or of a group of military taking over is and always was remote from the streets, the suburbs, the parks, schools, libraries and open spaces we live in. Major Urch points a finger at Percy Ogden. Half a dozen soldiers leap forward to drag the questioner off to … to where? Hither Green police station, where PC Brewster and the other constables are going to take time off from filling in dog-licence applications to torture him to death? Really? The imagination fails. But Chile in 1973 was just as ordinary to Joaquin as our town was, in 1982, to us. Sometimes I cannot say whether we were closer to revolution in 1982 than we are now. At both times it has an impossible aspect that we try to overlook.

  A conversation had been taking place in the back seat between Tracy and Mohammed about Scritti Politti. Now she was warbling that she was in love with Jacques Derrida, quite ignoring the music playing on the cassette machine. We were by the entrance to the car park by the library. Ogden was signalling left.

  ‘Has anyone got any change?’ he said.

  ‘Why are we parking here?’ Tracy said, breaking off. ‘This is miles away. James, why is he parking here?’

  ‘I always park here,’ Ogden said, which could not have been true. He had only been able to take his test in the last month or two. But lives change so quickly. We forget what they were like before those changes. ‘This is a good place to park.’

  ‘You can park right by the Spartacists,’ Frinton said. ‘There’s a car park there. There’s always spaces.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Ogden said. He leant out of the car, took the ticket from the machine. He drove up the ramp under the raised barrier.

  ‘What does that mean, “yeah, right”?’ Mohammed said. He sounded surprisingly outraged. ‘Why can’t you park your mummy’s car by Park Hill flats for nothing? This is going to cost two quid at least.’

  We all knew, I think, why Ogden was parking his car in the secure, enclosed, supervised space, rather than in an open area of near-darkness where deprivation
roamed, bored. It was indefensible. It would have been bad enough if the car were Ogden’s own, but it was clear to Mohammed in particular that Ogden was parking there for the sake of his mummy’s precious car. He said so.

  ‘Well, I tell you what,’ Ogden said, as we walked down the stairs of the car park. ‘Why don’t you borrow your mummy’s car the next time and park it wherever you like? How about that?’

  ‘Two problems,’ Mohammed said. ‘My mum can’t drive and neither can I. The thing with you is that you don’t trust the ordinary working class. You deep-down think they’ll bash up your stuff. You don’t even know them.’

  ‘Who?’ Ogden said. ‘The lumpenproletariat? If they do smash it up, set it on fire, then what if it was just a group of kids who’ve been sniffing glue and wanted to smash something up? Nothing follows. Not all violence is ideological. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to put my mum’s car in the car park by the library.’

  We had crossed the dual carriageway. We skirted the railway station, walking up into the landscape of orange lights, half of them broken, and rancid concrete doorways, deep in shadow, that constituted the Park Hill estate. There was nobody about. It was hard not to feel some fear. I had never been there before. The others were talking too loudly, in bravado. Around a corner a large, solid figure stepped, a darkly unshaven man, disappearing at once into the unlit gloom of a concrete recess.

  There were no lighting schemes then. What lighting there was remained unrestored to function. There were no closed-circuit cameras to record the moment. Joaquin stepped out of thick shadows at the base of a twelve-storey block, a tender, dark face, a large, broad, muscular shape. He could have been a murderer.

  I recognized him from the library steps. He was wearing the same army-surplus jacket I had seen before. His head had been shaved maybe two weeks ago. Now the hair was even all over to a length of a quarter of an inch, showing the first signs of curliness, like astrakhan fur. He had shaved his chin more recently, but not very recently. He came towards us with hand outstretched – I think Joaquin was the first person I knew who shook hands on meeting you. He had carried on shaking hands without any kind of reference to how people greeted each other in the place he now lived. The noise he made as he approached was of slapping – he wore yellow flip-flops with his jeans. He shook my hand, too, with warmth and energy, and with a burst of bright whiteness in his cheerful mouth. From his body came a physical smell, quite strong. It was a fleshy smell, Joaquin’s odour, the smell of an animal who has run a good deal, but not at all unpleasant. He was perfectly clean, but never used perfumes or deodorants, either to mask or to erase what his flesh smelt of. This was an age of anti-perspirants and guilt and fretting, deodorants called Worry for Men and a pong of metal and chemicals in the mornings on buses and in classrooms. I think I can honestly say that it was Joaquin’s smell – the smell of a warm human body at ease with itself – that changed my mind as much as what I heard people say. I wanted to be in a room with this man.

  ‘Who is this?’ Joaquin said politely. ‘I know Eric and James and Tracy and Mohammed but this one, no.’

  ‘I’m Spike,’ I said.

  ‘We only have tea and maybe not milk,’ Joaquin said. ‘I come down, I came down for you. Kate told me I must come. She says you don’t know where to come. I tell her she must be crazy, you’ve been a hundred times to our place. Number seven hundred twelve, seventh floor. Elevator is not working. As always not working.’

  ‘How did you know we were coming?’ Tracy said.

  ‘I came down and I waited,’ Joaquin said. ‘I waited for you, Tracy.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ Tracy said.

  Joaquin gave a brief, joyous bark of laughter. ‘No, we see you coming. Don’t you know that? On the seventh floor, we see all the way over the city, we see anyone coming over the bridge, you know, the footbridge on the dual carriageway—’ this phrase produced with care and some pride, a phrase recently mastered, perhaps ‘—and tonight we see one-two-three-four-five-six kids coming and Kate she says who is the sixth and Euan says his friend Percy mentioned a new friend comrade and I say good, I go down and meet them, bring them up if Kate says it’s necessary. Today six comrades. Tomorrow maybe we see the police and the army running over to us, come to arrest or shoot us, me and Kate and Eu-aron—’ it was always touching, the lengths Joaquin went to not to call Euan Juan – ‘and I tell you, we see them coming with their batons and guns and uniform, and we know what to do. But today it is again Percy and the good guys we see coming. Ten minutes ago.’

  Joaquin burst out laughing once more, there on the second floor ascending the flights of stairs. We didn’t have the same right as he did, the survivor (at twelve) of real policemen running over real bridges to take action, the right to laugh at the idea if he chose to. We waited, impressed and disconcerted. It was my first glimpse of Joaquin’s lightness of spirit, the way that for him things both mattered and didn’t matter, could be done away with and forgotten or fiercely engaged with, given a good slap. It depended not on their inherent gravity but on the dignity and decision of the thinking person. The spirit of laughter. There was nothing in the world like Joaquin’s laughter. It came up from the depths of him, in his bowels and belly, a sound that burst out like a single man applauding in a crowded place, and could make strangers turn round and even, sometimes, join in. There was a ripple and a gurgle in it you could never forget. I loved Joaquin’s laugh. I still do. Did he think that the English policemen were going to run across the bridge over the dual carriageway to beat him and his flatmates into submission because of their ideological convictions? They could not, while he could laugh at the idea. That was stronger than any policeman. And so Joaquin went out after midnight with lightness in his heart to paint walls and to smash windows. Of course he did.

  ‘Did you come on the bus?’ Joaquin asked.

  ‘No,’ Mohammed said. ‘Ogden drove us. He passed his test last month.’

  ‘He’s got his mum’s car,’ James Frinton said, quite neutrally.

  ‘He’s parked it in that multi-storey car park by the library,’ Mohammed said. ‘He thought it would be safer there.’

  This was clearly meant as a jibe, but Joaquin either didn’t catch the tone or didn’t see the point.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very good idea. Not to come down here and leave it. Not safe. The little kids round here, they strip it, smash the windows, cut the wheels, the tyres. Or I tell you, last week, these kids, they break into a lady’s flat, old lady. Two, three flats away from us, she’s sitting there, can’t do anything, was watching, they take TV in front of her, take it out, throw the TV out of the window, bang, explodes. Why? No idea. I have not the foggiest. You are underneath a TV falling from seventh floor, I tell you, you know about it when it hits you, or even car, empty, bash, bang. No, that’s good idea, park your mum’s car in the multi-storey. Gonna be safe there.’

  I glimpsed the kind of authority that Joaquin had. Nobody contradicted him, or reverted to the previous stages of the argument. The only resistance to Joaquin’s sensible-sounding point was James Frinton, saying, ‘Well, but they’re deprived, aren’t they, these kids, they’re the real victims here.’

  ‘I tell you what these kids are,’ Joaquin said. ‘They are the total little cunts. Mrs Gunnarsson, she’s scared now all day long, and guess what, she has no TV. So the real victims – no. They are the real total little cunts. And here we are at last home. I wish they mend that fucking elevator some time.’

  Joaquin jiggled at the blue-painted door. In the pane of glass, there was a small poster advertising a people’s gathering with the date of a year earlier. The door stuck, then fell inwards. We all followed Joaquin in, dumping our coats on a plastic chair in the hallway. There were pairs of scuffed shoes, walking boots, old plimsolls and two more pairs of flip-flops, red and green. On the wall was a framed front page of the Spartacist newspaper – I can’t now remember what it was cal
led, although I know it wasn’t the Spartacist. But I remember that the issue they had gone to the trouble of framing was one they had produced to celebrate the royal wedding a year or two before. Over a photograph of the happy couple in uniform and medals and massive cream finery in taffeta was a headline reading ‘GET OUT THE GUILLOTINE’. Underneath, a subhead purported to claim that 2,745 malnourished children in inner cities could have been fed for a year on the cost of that one dress. A brilliant piece of fabrication, I learnt later. They had been turned away by three framing shops.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ Joaquin called. ‘We’re home.’

  A thin wail of delight came from upstairs – it was, I realized, a two-floor flat, something I didn’t know was possible.

  ‘I got the kids,’ Joaquin said, trotting upwards, his flat brown hairy feet slapping happily. ‘And a new one, too! What’s your name?’

  A woman came to the door of the sitting room, a wide, untidy blonde woman. Her hair was up and in it, like a Japanese woman’s hair-chopsticks, was a pair of biros. She had been writing. Her tools were her ornament, her display. The sitting room behind her had a long, plate-glass window, giving out onto the city centre. From here, it was a long way down to the grime and the empty, dumpy streets smelling of piss and beer. And Joaquin was right. From there you could see anyone approaching across the bridge over the dual carriageway – police thugs, young radicals, anyone. They were up there looking down on the direction that humanity could take, whether individuals or in groups. I was overcome with admiration and envy. I wanted to be these people. Joaquin’s physical presence in particular filled me with joy – the teeth, the hair, the wonderful smell of him as he cast off his jacket, dropping it on the floor, his hairy humorous feet idling and gripping the yellow flip-flops, a joy that, at that moment, I did not quite understand. If I’d had an explanation it would soon have been proved incomplete.