The following Easter, a month or two before my sixteenth birthday, I marched to Trafalgar Square, part of a crowd (much smaller, I heard, than previous years, but to me still vast) who felt what I did; who had the imagination to look beyond their never-had-it-so-good daily lives to the threat that lay just over the horizon. We waved placards saying No Polaris. We sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Down By the Riverside.” Mothers wheeled their children in push-chairs. Bands played trad jazz, because trad was authentic. Authenticity meant roots and honesty, but according to Colin it also meant the reality of your death. If you knew — really held it in your mind — that one day you’d die, then the value of
life would be clear, and you’d live fully, deeply. Most people found the thought of death unbearable and fled into the everyday, so most people were only half alive. Colin felt this was why the majority of them seemed to be learning to live with the nuclear threat. That seemed logical to me. If your Being was already infected with Nothingness, annihilation probably didn’t seem so bad.
Authenticity was just one of the things I learned about from Maggie and Colin. They lived in a way I’d never even imagined. Their house, which from the outside looked just like ours, was open to all, and in contrast to the frozen routine of Avon Close, had a joyous and unpredictable rhythm. Even if Colin was working he was happy to open the door and let you make tea in the kitchen, with its jar of spaghetti on the counter and poster of a Picasso dove pinned above the stove. Colin was writing plays. I don’t know how far he ever got, but he’d sit and bang away at an old Remington typewriter on the dining table, making occasional contributions to whatever was happening around him, which might include four or five friends singing and playing guitar, or having a loud debate about Algeria. Maggie would “clear him away” when she wanted to serve dinner, which she did for however many happened to be there, pushing his papers to one side and clattering cutlery onto the typewriter keys to indicate that it was time to lay the table.
Maggie was the magnet that drew people to the house. Though Colin’s writing was the official center of things, it was her determination and her adventurousness, not the way he’d sometimes talk excitedly of “having a breakthrough” or sit around dejectedly when not having one, that gave the place its charged, purposeful atmosphere. She seemed inexhaustible, working as a teacher to support Colin’s literary ambitions and coming home every day to an establishment that at times seemed part boarding house and part fallout shelter. There would often be someone sleeping on the sofa, and one or two others on mats on the floor. Usually they were other activists, men with rucksacks and pipes, pairs of tanned young women just returned from camps and congresses in exotic-sounding places.
Maggie’s frank bossiness, her sudden inspirations, her willingness to put her shoulder to the wheel whenever there was something to be done infused the CND group with a sense of direction it would otherwise entirely have lacked. She listened patiently to my half-formed opinions, and took me canvassing with her on the Saturdays when Colin was “trying to get something done” and needed peace and quiet. We’d get a lift from Squadron Leader Myers, who had a car, and set up the table in our regular spot outside the station. We’d eat a packed lunch, and if I was lucky she would chat about herself. She told me she dreamed about “doing something really useful” with her teaching. Volunteering, going abroad. I began to understand, dimly, that she wasn’t happy; the thought both shocked and thrilled me.
At first I tried to keep Colin and Maggie a secret from my family. One Sunday Brian, always looking to stir up trouble, told Dad I was “hanging around with some beatniks” and there was a terrible row. My father threatened all the customary things. I stormed upstairs, leaving him shouting in the living room while my mum mumbled and wrung her hands. Slamming my bedroom door, I found Brian standing on my desk, holding the old suitcase in which I kept all my CND stuff, the cuttings and souvenirs and supplies of leaflets for canvassing. He’d dragged it from its hiding place under my bed and emptied the contents out of the window. Pieces of paper were turning end over end all down Avon Close, caught in hedges, silting up the gutters in little piles.
My professed nonviolence didn’t hold me up for a second. By that time I was as tall as Brian, though more lightly built, and he had an older brother’s complacency. My attack took him by surprise, and I soon had him wedged in the corner by the bedside table, his lip bleeding, covering his face to ward off my flailing fists. My dad pulled me away, pinning my arms to my sides until I stopped struggling.
The incident was judged to be my fault. Mum took to her bed and Dad forbade me to see Colin and Maggie again. My CND membership card, which I’d retrieved from the garden, was torn
up in front of my eyes. Shaken and furtive, Brian avoided any obvious triumphalism. I caught him smiling slyly to himself when he thought no one could see. That day was the end of something in our family. I couldn’t give it a name, but after that it had gone.
* * *
Leaving Dieppe, I’m exhorted by signs to remember to drive on the right-hand side of the road. I crawl along in a train of British cars, past industrial estates and big-box hypermarkets advertising cheap deals on alcohol. Gradually the country opens up into farmland, interspersed with gloomy towns overseen by brick church towers and war memorials.
I support Kenny’s cause with Sam for the simplest of reasons— he reminds me of myself. He’s a painfully serious boy, just as I was in my teens. One afternoon, about six months ago, he was mooching about the house after my stepdaughter, vainly trying to interest her in a vinyl record he was carrying. “Listen to the lyrics,” I overheard him say. “And the guitar on track three.” She was sending a text message on her phone. It was like watching a depressive footman hovering behind the queen.
Later that day, I tried to talk to Sam, to tell her that if she didn’t like him, she ought to put him out of his misery. “You’re being cruel,” I said.
“He’s here of his own free will,” she replied primly. “Anyway, what do you know about relationships? You’ve only ever been with Mum.”
She said it with such certainty. Suddenly I could see very clearly the unbroken borders of her world, the world of a child. She’d always treated me as a kind of country bumpkin when it came to feminine topics; amused, I’d accepted it as part of my fatherly identity. But her lack of imagination now struck me as odd, limited.
“Why do you think that?”
It was stupid of me. She looked up sharply. “You’ve never talked about anyone else. And you were a monk before, so I just
thought. .” She trailed o, I was in too deep, and retreated to wash up. She followed me into the kitchen. “You and Mum.”
“Yes?”
“You’re all right, aren’t you?”
I hugged her. “Of course we are.”
So I never solved the problem of Kenny, and he’s still hanging around, yearning for Sam just as hopelessly as I yearned for Maggie. After my fight with Brian and the ban on seeing her, I stayed away for three days, then went round to see her on my way home from school. As usual Colin was typing, Maggie sitting opposite him marking books. In melodramatic terms, I described what had happened, hoping they’d be able to help. Maggie gave my shoulder a squeeze and told me it was good to stand up for what I believed in, but I shouldn’t have lashed out at my brother. Dr. King had withstood much greater provocation. Colin frowned and asked whether my dad knew their address. They fed me bean soup and sent me home, Maggie’s good-bye kiss burning on my cheek.