There are moments from those eight days of occupation that stand out, images that over time have become unmoored from their context, floating free in my memory. Rolling a joint and passing it round with three friends as we sat by an open upstairs window, listening to a police inspector barking orders through a megaphone. Two students from my year busking folk songs and
rattling a tin. I had sex with a girl called Tricia in the toilets of the administration building. She wasn’t anything to do with the university, just one of the people who’d appeared out of the woodwork, attracted by the spark of possibility flitting temporarily around our stuffy college. There were mysterious middle-aged men with flasks of tea and sheaves of self-printed leaflets, feral-looking hippies, delinquent teens, raggedy thirties Marxists looking to warm their hands at the revolutionary fire.
You could make something out, dimly, through the blizzard of opinion that seemed to surround even the simplest question of right and wrong: change, the sense that everything was in play, all verities suspended. We were getting telegrams from the CGT union in Barcelona, from Bertrand Russell. We were a sign of something, the canaries in the capitalist coal mine, the Vanguard. We issued self-important statements: “WE HAVE CHALLENGED AND CONTINUE TO CHALLENGE THE WAY IN WHICH LSE SERVES THE NEEDS OF THE RULING CLASS IN PROVIDING THE RIGHT MANPOWER, STRONGER IDEOLOGY AND RESEARCH THAT MAKES EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION OF THE WORKING CLASSES MORE EFFICIENT.” Early one morning we broke into the administration building, barging past the night porter when he opened the door. We milled around in the corridor outside the director’s office, built barricades of chairs and desks and metal shelving, scribbled on the backs of notices, trying to formulate a statement for the press. I slept for a few hours, curled up with Tricia on the floor by a radiator. After a while I felt her get up. “Got to go toilet,” she said. “Go toilet,” like a child. She never came back. A week or two after the occupation I started to itch and went to visit the doctor, who gave a short speech about living in an era of moral confusion and used Latin to tell me I had crabs. Pacing up and down in my room, slathered in white cream from knee to chest, I read a letter from the university authorities saying that as a result of my participation in the sit-in I would be fined, but no further action would be taken.
Round and round. Did I agree with the written record of my personal effects? The deputy governor’s Home Counties voice was
crisp with authority regularly exercised and obeyed. Club tie, thick plastic-rimmed glasses, pompous donkey-face made longer by its mutton-chop sideburns. Beside him, shuffling papers and glowering at me, sat the stern, crop-haired chaplain in the role of the Church Militant. The welfare officer was asleep, from the look of him, hunched over his notes like a great black beetle. He didn’t move at all during the interview, presenting me with his balding crown, a featureless pink oval that I gradually came to think of as his face.
Yes, I said. I agreed with the written record of my personal effects.
The chaplain said he believed I was Church of England, and looked forward to seeing me in chapel. I’d derive much sustenance from attending services. The deputy governor wanted me to take the opportunity to ask myself some hard questions. I was an educated fellow. He hoped I’d come to see that my posture of rebellion was essentially immature. We were living in changing times, which made it all the more regrettable that certain irresponsible social elements were leading some of our best and brightest to squander their advantages, advantages most of the young lads in this place would give their eye teeth for. Watching one hand seamlessly over to the other, I started, for the first time since my trial, to recover myself. God-man and state-man, working in concert, indistinguishable in their pose of bland benevolence. When I moved I could feel the bruises from the previous day’s beating. Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you and your polite, civilized tone. Fuck your unearned air of authority, your smug talk about advantages, as if the world is some kind of game you’re refereeing.
Round and round. Miles’s question. What would freedom look like? That first university summer, instead of going home, I’d crashed on the sofa of a friend’s house in Muswell Hill. I found a temporary job at a small factory in Archway, which made control panels for industrial equipment. I had to sit at a bench, screwing glass dial-facings and Bakelite knobs to anodized aluminum plates.
It was easy enough work, and well paid. After a month I had enough money to travel, and set off for Europe. It was my first time abroad. I sat on the ferry’s rear deck, watching the coast of England recede behind me. In Ostend I showed my brand new passport to a smiling immigration official, who waved me through into Belgium with such warmth that I felt I’d been given the keys to the kingdom. Soon I was on a sleeper train heading south. I lay awake for hours in my upper berth, listening to the whistles and slamming doors of nighttime stations, the labored breathing of the middle-aged Dutch businessman in the bunk below.
I spent a month and a half sleeping in youth hostels or on station platforms, making fleeting alliances with other travelers to share a ride or a meal or an evening in a bar. I went to sleep in one country and was woken up by the border police of the next, fumbling blearily for my documents as another unfamiliar landscape took shape through the window. I wanted to travel far and fast and rarely stayed anywhere for longer than a night, passing through Berlin, Vienna, and Rome without really seeing them. When I arrived in a new place there was always a moment of choice, of having to find something to do with myself. I had very little money. I saw a lot of parks. I was most content listening to wheels on a track, the sound that confirmed I was going farther on, farther out. Finally I found myself swimming off a beach on a rocky Greek island, turning circles in the water, my world reduced to a dazzle of white light. If someone were to ask me when and where I was happiest, I’d describe that afternoon swim.
Circle the yard then back up to the threes, walkways above and below, a palimpsest of girders and wire netting. My cell had a single grilled window high up on the wall, made of little four-inch panes of muddy glass. Sit, stare, eat slops from a pressed metal tray. Nine-thirty sharp, lights out. Bad dreams on a narrow bed, cut through by the reveille bell. The best moment of the day was the first step onto the landing, where there was light and space, a distance on which to fix your eyes. At morning employment we sat, elbow to elbow, in a low-roofed atelier, dismantling old electrical equipment.
Radios, televisions. It was like being in the back of Parker’s, with my dad. Once we were given a pile of Second World War gas masks and spent a couple of days unscrewing the filters, cutting the glass eye panels away from the rubber. I never found out what happened to the parts we salvaged. I suspect they were just thrown away.
Lunch in the cell. Three slops in the molded metal tray and a cup of stewed tea. Afterward, locked in. For an hour or two after a meal, the sharp tang of boiled cabbage hung over the wing. Once every few days a trusty pushed a library cart along the landings. Usually it had nothing on it but religious tracts or textbooks, but for a while I lived with a tattered old copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, its green cloth binding shiny with years of use. I’d never liked fiction, never seen the point in something that wasn’t real; Baroness Orczy’s class-ridden Paris did nothing to change that. Her heroes were blameless gentry and the common people were “human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seemed naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.” Disgusted, I started to imagine another book, the mirror-image of the one I was reading, peopled by greedy, vicious aristocrats and starving sans-culottes dreaming of a better world.