My life as a Tapestry – 9 (the underground years)

My late twenties (1973-76) passed in a haze of tobacco and dope smoke - daydreaming on platforms, buses and tube trains across London as I circulated between Newham, where I worked, and North Kensington, Oakwood, and Riddlesdown, where I partied. The bad Latin title is meant to say ‘Here one is transported, to work and in reverie’. At that time it seemed to me that absolutely nothing was happening in my life. In retrospect the period actually seems to have been quite active and creative, as the images in this panel (drawn far too small in order to get everything in) might suggest.

For a start, global events were fairly momentous. The Vietnam war ended in humiliation for the US and Richard Nixon got hounded out of office. The IRA was carrying out a bombing campaign in London  - over 40 explosions in one 14-month period. Considering how much time I was spending in stations I was probably quite lucky not to get caught up – the nearest I came was the Camden Hill Square bomb in 1975 which I heard go off, 3 miles away in Westbourne Park. In 1972 Idi Amin threw 40,000 of his citizens, who happened to be of South Asian descent, out of Uganda and in 1973 27000 of them who also had British passports came to live in the UK, fueling Enoch Powell’s self-serving paranoia and the rhetoric of right-wing press.

My friend Dave who was doing a drama course at Trent Park invited me to be in his production of Peter Shaffer’s one-act play ‘The Private Ear’. I played Bob, with a Buxton accent I’d picked up from another Dave who I’d shared a room with at college. Dave and I would rehearse the play in the evening and then spend much of the night getting stoned and playing chess. Chess was a small metaphor for my life – it always started promisingly but ended with me losing my concentration and…well, losing. In the mornings I’d stagger onto the tube at 7am in order to be at Little Ilford School by 9 – ready to spend the day blagging my way, totally unprepared, through ‘drama’ lessons with crowds of feral 3^rd and 4^th years.

I lived in a series of bedsits and flats in east London, and during the week when I wasn’t at school I spent my time sitting around smoking and writing plays and recording songs, in between stuffing electricity meters with 50p pieces. For a while in 1974, due to an economic crisis, the government tried to persuade us not to use any electricity at all for half of the week. Mostly at weekends I took the tube to Westbourne Park and stayed at a communal house McGregor rd, where Peter lived, who played Irish jigs on the fiddle and introduced me to Marxism. We smoked and drank a lot and I spent quite a lot of time sitting in the toilet with the whirling pits - Peter knocked on the door from time to time to see if I was OK, and everyone else in the house had to use the upstairs loo.

When I didn’t go west I went south, via London Bridge, to sit at home and drink Dad’s whiskey and eat Mum’s shepherd pies. My sister Gillian was an aloof and guarded teenager by this time, no longer the child I used to tease and have rough-and-tumbles with.

After a year at Little Ilford I left and went to work with Tony at a much smaller school for boys, behind Newbury Park bus station (astonishingly now a grade 2 listed building). He ran a creative activities department in a separate annexe from the main school, where we put on a whole load of classes and workshops in music, art and drama, plays, events, happenings, and general creative mayhem that quite often involved cutting-edge technology such as reel-to-reel tape recorders. One event that captured the headteacher’s imagination was a reconstruction of the battle of Rorke’s Drift (as featured in the film ‘Zulu’) for which boys dressed up as Zulus and charged other boys dressed as British soldiers while Tony made rifle volley noises on a tambour. Our great achievement was to train them to do it in slow motion so that it wasn’t over in an instant and no blood was actually shed.

For a while I lived on the 7^th floor of a tower block in Walthamstow, in the flat of a middle-aged woman who was a primary school teacher with a five-year-old son. She used to let some drug dealers she knew use her hallway as safe house for suitcases full of hashish recently smuggled in from Morocco. I think she was looking for a father for her son, but I disappointed her by bringing my girlfriend Jean home to stay. I eventually disappointed Jean too – she gazes sorrowfully out of the picture and I feel a twinge of shame.

Tony and I joined Teachers’ Rank and File (actually International Socialist Party entryists in the NUT) and went around being militant about wages, conditions, and the right-wing backlash to the progressive education movement.

Towards the end of 1974 I started going out with Berta, also a Newham drama teacher, who lived in a tiny one-room brocade cave on the first floor of a house in Ilford, with an outside toilet. Berta played me her Bill Evans records, and got me interested in modern jazz. This was to complicate my musical development for quite a few years to come.

My career as a teacher came to an end in the summer of 76 when I left my job at Tony’s school to go and join a political theatre group.

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.