My life as a Tapestry - 8 (welcome to the permissive society)

The years 1968-72 were turbulent both globally and personally.  I spent them at a teacher-training college in Cheshire, where I bought a 1953 Ford Poplar from another student for £10. I serviced it myself, fixed it when it broke down, ran it for 2 years, and then sold it to another student for £10. Getting that car the 200 miles from Purley to Alsager (South Circular road, North Circular road, M1, A45, M6, A500) was, for me, an equivalent feat to the moon landing (and took nearly as long).

There were so many other significant national and world events and developments during this period that I’ve had to think hard about which ones to depict here. In the end I went for the ones that seemed at the time to signal that a new order was a-coming (I’m still waiting for it). The Paris student ‘revolution’ and the Vietnam war on TV sparked a mood of rebellion and the search for an ideology with which to counter the brutality of imperialism and the paternalism of the College Principal. I also wanted to stand out from the various conventional student tribes and be myself. I realise now that everyone else probably wanted exactly the same, but at 21 I still thought most other people were sheep.

The rugby crowd made lots of noise, got drunk and broke things. I played classical guitar in my room with the window open, while they raged up and down the corridors. The rock climbers were hairy, got drunk and punished some bloke they didn’t like by dismantling his whole study bedroom one evening while he was out and reassembling it on the roof of the gym. I bought them drinks. The drama and dance students wore black stretch slacks and black rollneck sweaters and spoke with exaggerated intonation. I went with them to see ‘Hair’ at the Shaftesbury Theatre and took my shirt off during ‘Let the Sun Shine in’.

My new best friend Steve and I read ‘Waiting for Godot’ in English Lit. and then sat in the bar every evening reproducing the script in Pete & Dud voices.

The ‘good girls’ (who seemed to be the majority) wore miniskirts, washed togs for the rugby club, and generally did what they were told. I tried not to fancy them and focused my attention on quirky girls. My best lover was Lynne, a long-haired, chunky-sweatered and be-jeaned intellectual who shocked me and everyone else by turning up at one of the college dances wearing an outrageously décolleté full length evening dress. (I’ve depicted her here as John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’).

I backed Britain by spending my newly decimalised grant money on double diamond, and beans on toast. I supported the fledgling illegal drugs trade through the occasional £1 deal. One day in 1971 Lynne and I dropped acid together – it was very colourful and intense and it went on far too long, but I’ve never forgotten it. It somehow helped to synergise all the absurdist theatre, logical positivism, radical politics, child psychology and underground comix that I’d absorbed, into a coherent set of exam answers that got me a B.Ed honours. As the Latin title proclaims (I hope) ‘Here the mind expands’.

I was ridiculously proud of that academic success (though I never let on). I’d written hundreds of words, all in longhand with a fountain pen, in the first such test since my meagre O levels, and got ‘A’s for nearly everything. I wrote a dissertation on Alfred Jarry and a pastiche of Ubu Roi lampooning just about everybody. I wrote a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ piece inspired by Antonin Artaud which the Drama Department said I could put on (it never happened). I got an interview with the Theatre in Education group at the Bolton Octogon and it seemed that my future was assured.

Except I failed the interview, and had to go back to London and be a teacher.

My life as a tapestry - 7 (summer of lavatories)

This panel, which depicts events from my 20^th year, seems busier than the others. It may be that the pace of life speeds up as one approaches adulthood, but I think the clutter is quite a good metaphor for my summer of 1967.

It was the first time I’d lived away from home for a significant period, staying in Mick’s student flat in Leytonstone with a shifting population of his university mates, foreign visitors, old school friends etc. I worked in a series of casual jobs around Newham – although luckily not in the Tate & Lyle factory in Silvertown shown here, a dark satanic mill if ever I saw one.

Dark and satanic were my own feelings too, in that summer of love. I had failed to get into several Art Colleges to do a degree – blew the interview every time. And my relationships with friends and girlfriends were all going wrong. As the Greek junta goose-stepped into Athens and BP’s chartered tanker Torrey Canyon dumped millions of barrels of crude into the sea off Cornwall, I hit the rocks with Wendy, my lover of the past two years, two very attractive Swedish friends in London for the summer, and my good friends Paul and Bev whose holiday I nearly wrecked by pulling out of the arrangement at the last moment.

Throughout the emotional turmoil I still got an odd sense of satisfaction from learning how to carry stacks of 12ft 6-by-2 deal planks around a timber yard, paint railings and nail down bitumen roof-coverings for the Council, and unblock school toilets without gagging. 

(I notice this is the 2^nd time a toilet has figured in this tapestry – clearly a theme is developing here. I guess the toilet is also quite a good metaphor for a set of emotional problems that took root around this time and continued to unsettle me for most of my adult life).

The cod Latin rendering of ‘All you need is love’ is therefore more than a little ironic. As, for different reasons, is the image of Charles De Gaulle, whose firm ‘non’ scuppered the Wilson government’s efforts to take Britain into the then Common Market, for the second time in four years.


But ‘swinging London’ and the hippy revolution went on anyway, without me. My only consolation for a pretty miserable summer was the Beatles singing their sixties anthem with all their celebrity friends on television – the first global, live, TV broadcast ever, and a cracking pop song.

My life as a tapestry - 6 (1966 and all that)

This July saw the premature celebration of next year’s 50^th anniversary of our personal invasion of Sweden – which in turn took place on the 900^th anniversary of the Vikings’ (Christianised, French-speaking and re-baptised as Normans) notorious intrusion on Saxon life at the battle of Hastings.

The theme of this panel is our voyage and the subtext is the emotional rites of passage that it led me into (and out of).Mick, Tony and I didn’t actually sail across the North Sea in a Norman galley in 1966, we travelled in relative luxury on Svenska Lloyd’s flagship Saga. Mick was still sick though. We didn’t leave from Broadstairs either, as the presence of Bleak House in the picture might suggest. But Broadstairs was, in a way, where the journey began, as that was where we first met Ann-Mari and Elisabet - depicted here in subtextual in-my-dreams welcoming poses (the pseudo Latin caption says ‘Here the affections of Viking girls’).

Wendy, my first proper lover, never came to Broadstairs and we didn’t split up until 1967 but that eventual break-up is part of the subtext of this trip for me too.

Eva sits in the cool Garbo-esque pose she adopts in my favourite photo of her from that time. Karin is playing the piano – what else? (Too much subtext here to even hint at).

I’m showing off my newly-learned Bert Jansch clawhammer guitar style and probably singing ‘Running from Home’. Tony is monkeying around as usual.

The lower border shows some of the  things that attracted us and many of our generation to Sweden and all things Swedish in the 1960s: Margareta Arvidsson as the most beautiful girl in the Universe (I can just see Ann-Mari’s lip curl); The Seventh Seal as the best-ever art film; the tulip chair as Sweden’s supreme gift to the world of interior design.

Some things we didn’t know about Sweden at the time are referenced in the top border: the prominence of Bofors and Scania in the world’s arms trade; the secret nuclear weapons development programme at Ursvik (now a primary school apparently – hope the kids don’t get their rods mixed up); and the ‘mountain land rights’ trial that started that year in Ostersund, our destination, beginning a legal process that would eventually deprive 90% of Sami people of their traditional habitation in the northern forests.

The rune stone depicted in the top right of the picture is also near Ostersund and marks the furthest northern extent of Christianity 900 years ago – brought to Sweden by Ostman, son of Gudfast in 1050. Yeah – thanks for that Ostman.

Bergman’s black-hooded Death checkmated Ann-Mari two years ago, just as he did Paul last year –  that was another reason for wanting to get together with our long-lost Svenska flicka friends.

Apologies to Agneta for not including her running home behind the taxi from the station on the night we arrived in Ostersund – now, as then, there just wasn’t room in the picture, little as she was.

Sports-loving viewers will notice no reference to England winning the world cup. We watched every minute of that dramatic game in Ann-Mari and Agneta’s mum’s living room. The triumph fitted our mood. Followed, unfortunately, by 50 years of…. well the hurt started to fade away and be replaced by indifference sometime during the reign of Sven Goran Ericsson – there, another Swede gets a namecheck.

My life as a Tapestry - 5 (the perilous '60s)

This panel was inspired by a tragedy - the recent death of my old school friend Paul. He is the one on the left in the white raincoat and silly grin. I'm the one on the right, also in a white shorty raincoat (very cool in 1963). Mick (Paul's older brother) and Tony make up the rest of the gang, swaggering down Romford North St., trying to look hard. 

The faux-Latin caption says 'Here, gang violence breaks out', reflecting the awareness of the possibility of violence that we all had in our early teens (a characteristic of the early 1960s, or of our adolescent hormones?). 

The main picture depicts us getting beaten up by mods in Trafalgar square. We hadn't done anything to them - mods were just psychotic.

(Eagle-eyed Londoners will notice that the buildings in the background are on the wrong sides. The spire of St. Martin-in-the-fields should be on the right, not the left. Well, the only photo of the square I could find from this angle had too much space to the right of the column and not enough on the left, where the action happened. So I reversed it. Actually I reckon St. Martins looks better there).

The doomsday bus that the nuns warned me about (see Tapestry 3) lurks in the background.

The borders reflect on violence that was going on elsewhere in the world. The Cuba crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Kray brothers. Mods invading Margate on their Lambrettas. 

And two examples of sanctioned aggression - scouts boxing in approved style (I had two bouts but never had a punch landed on me because I was nimble-footed and terrified of being hit), and the TV cop show Z-Cars which showed a country brought up on 'Dixon of Dock Green' that policeman are as capable of illegitimate violence as criminals (who'd have thought it?).

Although we were scared of it, we laughed at all the violence at the time. But it got poor Paul in the end. Rest in peace mate.