At the beginning of this 3-year period (mid 1979 to early 1982) I had left the theatre group (Sidewalk), split up with Berta (my partner of 5 years), and was looking for a way out of the communal house.
Berta and I parted relatively amicably - she wanted to come out and live her politics and went to join a radical feminist collective and be a writer. (Much later I was thrilled to discover that she became well-known internationally, as a Jewish Lesbian poet).
1979 was a time of coming out generally, following the new sexual politics of the women’s movement. The pretend-Latin caption here is the slogan of the time: ‘the personal is political’. Tom Robinson’s anthem ‘Glad to be Gay’ had come out the previous year and got to number 18 in the singles charts. Well-off people listened to it on their new Sony Walkmans.
More globally, Iran came out as an Islamic republic with a fundamentalist cleric as supreme leader; nuclear power came out as Armageddon in waiting at 3-Mile Island in the US. Sid Vicious and Lord Mountbatten came out dead.
Peter and I joined a local men’s consciousness-raising group. This was started by Colin and Mac, who were living round the corner in a 4th floor flat. They were both tall, good-looking, charismatic, and politically right-on (if somewhat anarchistic). With some other local guys we sat in a circle and earnestly confessed what was wrong with our attitude to women. Then we confessed what was wrong with our attitude to men. Once we all held hands. On another occasion we were going to do some group yoga, but one of the other guys wanted to do it unclothed in order to get in touch with our real selves, and the session never quite got off the ground. The high point was when we all went to the first ‘Men Against Sexism’ national conference in Manchester. Mac took his 3-year-old daughter and my abiding memory is of him and Colin cavorting in the crowd at the conference disco with the little girl whirling around above us on her Daddy’s shoulders, shrieking delightedly.
After leaving the theatre group I didn’t have any paid work for a while, and I think I got by on supplementary benefit. If you had an Equity (actors’ union) card, which I did, you didn’t have to make yourself available for work other than acting, and there wasn’t much of that. I passed some of the time playing bass for a post-punk band called ‘The Wimps’, whose singer was also in the men’s group.
Then Tony got me a job teaching with him on a summer school in Poland. There I met L. and my life changed. This image of her is dredged right out of my subconscious – it is based on a ‘snake’ Tarot card I once saw. The snake in Tarot is a complex symbol that stands for rebirth and forbidden knowledge as well as desire, seduction, craving, etc. All of which came to pass, and of course, the snake can also do for you! Behind her rears the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, needing no further explanation I hope. Poland at the time was in the grip of an unprecedented challenge to the authority of the Communist party from the Gdansk shipworkers and the Solidarity trade union movement. Tanks were involved. It felt exciting and dangerous. As did L., for me. Catalyzed by Wiborova vodka, we began an intense, doomed (because she was married with a family) affair. I cut my hair so that it stuck up like Sid Vicious. I dyed my old Spanish leather boots bright blue and wore them with white dungarees. She introduced me to TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) which I took to like a duck to water, mastering the modal conditional at a glance! I did a short training course, became a freelancer like her, and started to make a bit of money doing teacher training jobs with her. I moved out of the communal house and into Colin’s housing association flat with him and we put together an alternative cabaret act, where we wore school uniforms and sang Everly Brothers songs. To be fair, it wasn’t just me that was drunk on glamour – the whole country seemed to be in the thrall of the Royal Wedding (how prescient that ‘Don’t do it Di!’ badge now seems to have been).
The wheels came off the affair during a teaching job with L. in Kuwait in Autumn 1981. The snake escaped its cup (another Tarot card, standing for the perils of illusion and allure) and I was no longer smitten, but bitten. Enough said.
My bubble had collapsed, and my self-respect with it. But Myrtle came to the rescue, bless her. An occasional boyfriend of hers had gone to Mexico to study Spanish and she was proposing to go and visit him. Did I want to come? Yes I did. We flew to Houston, got a Greyhound bus to Neuvo Laredo and another bus from there to Mexico City. We had a few adventures there (Myrtle particularly, but my lips are sealed) and eventually took another bus to Xalapa where her friend was living. We found accommodation there and stayed nearly 2 months. I made some friends and some money teaching English and started to learn Spanish from children’s books. By the end of the time I had filled a notebook with poems and little stories (pastiches of Juan Rulfo who I also read) in my erratic Spanish. Myrtle went off travelling in the south but I decided to go home, as Colin had written to say he was moving out of the flat to live with a new girlfriend and we needed to go on paying the rent to make sure the Housing Association didn’t take it away. Some of my Mexican friends were convinced I was going back to England to join the army and go and fight the Argentines in the Malvinas (Falklands) but funnily enough it never crossed my mind. (I have just noticed that the final image of myself in front of the cactus is the same perplexed pose that I finished with in episode 7. Although staring at the future rather than at a toilet).
I had an eventful journey back – one coach caught fire, another left me in the service station at Saltillas and went off with my luggage, guitar, and a little bag with my book of poems and stories. When I finally caught up with it at Laredo I got the luggage and guitar back, but the little bag with the stories was lost for ever. I often wonder what the thief who took it made of my semi-literate ramblings.
The era ended with me getting the complete strip search treatment from a dim but enthusiastic customs officer at Gatwick airport who was convinced that the presence of dental floss and anti-diarrhoea pills in my toilet bag pointed with 66.666% certainty to me being a drug mule with a stomach full of cocaine wrapped up in condoms. He kept me for 3 hours until I finally agreed to have an X-ray to prove my innocence, at which point he let me go without giving me the X-ray. For some of that time my sister Gilli, who had come to meet me, was sitting outside in Mum’s mini. Before she gave up and went home.
