After a few months things were much as they’d been before. I’d avoid confrontations, lying about after-school activities, even inventing a fictitious youth club at which I played ping-pong once a week. If I ate at Maggie and Colin’s I’d force myself to swallow another dinner at home. Dad knew I was still seeing the beatniks, but had more pressing things to worry about. Brian had abruptly left school and started work in the sales department of an engineering company. He was spending most of his salary in the pub and came home drunk several nights a week, tripping over the furniture and leaving marks on the wall as he staggered upstairs. His confrontations with Dad were much worse than my own, and he had no patience with my mother, jeering at her as a mad cow, a mental case. In response, Mum grew ever more anxious. Soon after my seventeenth birthday she was committed.
I’m ashamed to say I only went to visit her once in the three months she was in St. Bernard’s. It was a large Victorian institution, a cluster of imposing Gothic buildings surrounded by a high perimeter wall. Inside, orderlies pushed trolleys and escorted patients
down long, echoing corridors. She was on a ward named after some royal personage, which smelled of urine and boiled cabbage. The beds were like little iron islands on the scuffed linoleum.
Brian had refused to come, saying he had better things to do with his weekend than go to a nuthouse. A nurse took Dad and me past a row of women sitting in vinyl-covered armchairs or lying in their beds. Mum had been given a course of ECT. She seemed not to know who we were. Trussed up in an unfamiliar flannel dressing gown she smiled uncertainly as my father tried to summon some gentleness into his voice. “How are you bearing up, Angela?”
She pointed out of the window. “You can see the birds,” she said.
Dad nodded encouragingly, then looked at his feet, unsure how to go on. There was a terrible silence. My eyes kept straying back to Mum’s hair, which was messy, tangled up in knots at the back of her head. This was what I found most upsetting. She was particular about her hair. She’d spend hours at her dressing table, pinning it up, freezing it into gâteaulike shapes with cans of lacquer.
Under Maggie and Colin’s influence I was reading books and working hard for my A levels. With my new confidence I’d acquired a new group of friends, boys my own age, with whom I listened to folk and modern jazz records, smoking cigarettes out of bedroom windows and talking about our various plans of escape from Ruislip. I’d applied to the London School of Economics: if I got in, I’d be able to go and live in hall.
As my exams came up, things at home got worse. Dad brought Mum home in a new hat with matching handbag, talking loudly and laughing a shiny, high-pitched laugh. Her brightness had something brittle about it, as if she were only performing her newly learned happiness, acting it out for our benefit. She had new pills too, which kept her awake. I’d hear noises in the kitchen at unearthly hours, three or four in the morning, and go down to find her rummaging in the cutlery drawer or polishing glasses.
Hello, dear, would you like some breakfast? For all her energy, she didn’t seem able to cook anymore, something about the complexity of it, the timing. There were small disasters, charred joints of meat, eggs at the bottom of pans brimful of cold water. Soon we were subsisting on a scavenger’s diet of canned food and fish and chips. Brian and Dad diverted themselves from their panic with breakages and shouting.
I spent as much time as possible out of the house, working in the public library or wandering around the West End, a habit I’d gradually developed since I first started taking the train into town for CND events. In drafty church halls I attended screenings of Bicycle Thieves and The World of Apu, accompanied by Czech cartoons in which people built walls and then all the flowers in the garden died. Soon I progressed to less elevated pursuits. Soho fascinated me, with its secret alleys and women sitting at upstairs windows, smoking and looking down at the street. There were coffee bars with rows of scooters parked outside. The amplified clatter of beat bands punched its way out of cellars. I didn’t dare go into these places. Sometimes I bought a frothy coffee in one of the quieter caffs and sat in a corner watching girls, hoping to be noticed.
I’d begun to despair of CND. There was something antique about it, something hopelessly polite. The year the Mods and Rockers fought on Margate beach, CND youth groups were up on the pier, offering donkey rides and a “non-violent Punch and Judy show.” “Don’t shout slogans as you march,” advised one of our leaflets. “This sounds ugly. Join in the singing, which sounds good and helps marchers along the road.” The warlords were trying to kill us but we had to be cheerful and take our litter home: good little citizens, asking nicely not to be irradiated. On the day I went on my first Easter march, the Committee of ioo held a sit-down demo at USAF Ruislip, just up the road from my house. I only heard about it afterward. Hundreds of people were arrested. While I was strolling around the West End singing “If I Had A Hammer,” people had been blocking the airbase gates.
Colin and Maggie disapproved of breaking the law. They said we had to show we were a responsible, rational part of society. If we were perceived as wreckers or undesirables, how could we hope to have an effect? We’d begun spending time at a folk club, held above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. Maggie and I would watch as Colin, who’d been taking guitar lessons, went up to take his turn with the other amateurs before the professional singers did their sets. Sitting next to Maggie in the smoky darkness, I absorbed her high-mindedness and her optimism. I thought things were going to change; I was young enough to think the very strength of my desire for change would be enough.
Then came the 1964 election. The prime minister we derided as Homeosaurus (“Too much armor, too little brain, now he’s extinct”) was booted out and a Labour government came in. At meeting after meeting, speakers had assured me that once Labour were in power, they’d disarm. I believed them: the Labour Party stood for international brotherhood and peace. I was too young to vote, but I thought a Labour victory meant I was living in a country that made sense, a rational country where people knew that one day they’d die and until that day wanted to live, as fully as they could. Instead, the new prime minister, Mr. Wilson, made speeches about economic progress, the white heat of technology. We would be keeping our nuclear weapons and getting more. After all my efforts, all the lost Saturday afternoons and the boring meetings, “we” had won and still nothing was going to change.
I lost faith in CND and Maggie with it, as if somehow Wilson was her fault. With the discovery of her feet of clay, my idol became incapable of absorbing any more adoration. I had no vocabulary for what I was feeling, and such a hopelessly low self-image that had she ever shown any signs of reciprocating, I wouldn’t have dared touch her, but all the same I knew my chaste knight-errancy— one part Tennyson to two parts song lyrics — was no longer sustaining me.
One day I was in the West End, listlessly handing out CND leaflets outside a theater in Drury Lane, when a pair of Danish
students stopped to ask directions. Freja and Sofie were both pretty, one dark and one fair, over to see the galleries and tick off sites of historical interest in their guidebook. I soon realized they didn’t want to hear about the amount of strontium-90 in the bones of children under one year of age and began to brag about how well I knew Soho. This was only partly true. I’d never actually been through the doors of the fashionable places I was boasting about. Luckily the girls had as little money as I did, so I was saved the humiliation of being turned away from the Scene or the Flamingo. They said they wanted to hear some music, so I stuffed my leaflets back into my satchel and took them to Beak Street, where there was a basement club little bigger than my living room at Avon Close, a cheap dark cellar where the management wasn’t particular about the age of their clientele. I’d been there once or twice to lean against the back wall and smoke an affected cigarette. It was a place where I judged I wouldn’t be out of my depth.