It felt like a coronation, such a violent release from the frustration of wanting her. Afterward she lay in my arms and I felt, narcissistically, that we’d sealed some kind of bargain.
Early the next morning I woke up to find Sean sitting at the end of the bed, shirtless, smoking a roach he’d fished out of last night’s overflowing ashtray. Anna was asleep next to me, one arm thrown over my chest. He was examining us, a curious look on his face. In the gray half-light the blurred tattoo on his chest was an amorphous stain, a Rorschach blot. I asked him where he’d left Claire and he grinned humorlessly. After that something changed between the two of us. I was no longer an observer of the game he was playing with Anna. I’d earned full participant status. Being Sean’s rival (the term seems archaic, with its overtones of chivalry,
and somehow coy, evasive) committed me to something. To the group. To whatever it was we were all daring one another to do. I’d thought of leaving once or twice, of going traveling or just finding somewhere else to live. Now I put those ideas from my mind.
A month or so later, as we were planning our next action, Charlie Collinson turned up. He was making one of his periodic visits back home to sell the rugs and jewelry (and the charras) he’d picked up in India. It was the first time I’d met the owner of the Lansdowne Road house. With his long, matted hair, his beads and mirror-work waistcoats, he was an alien presence in our increasingly puritanical group. By early 1969, Lands End, as we’d started to call it, had more or less become a formal commune, with an exclusive and fairly stable membership, a habit of collective decision making and a grueling schedule of meetings at which personal and political issues were debated with a sort of Möbius-strip logic that made them indistinguishable from one another. Charlie was a lotus-eater, rich and not particularly bright. He was unselfconscious about his status as landlord, moving his things back into “his” room and expecting the people staying there to make themselves scarce. He was obviously used to having his banalities about love and peace taken seriously and was shocked when Anna called him a “neocolonialist parasite” as he was showing off a batch of silver necklaces he’d bought in Ladakh. The atmosphere of round-the-clock revolutionary preparation freaked him out. He’d left behind a scene of genteel Bohemianism, but things had moved on, fast.
Above all, Charlie wanted the printing press gone. Sean and Jay had moved an ancient offset machine into the sitting room, a monstrous thing that was kept working by a mixture of improvisation and brute force; at most times of the day or night someone was tending it, doing repairs or running off leaflets. Stakhanovite slogans were painted on the wall behind it. The floorboards were stained with ink. Charlie wanted it out. He also wanted at least half the residents out. He wanted the women’s group to stop using the place for teach-ins. “It’s my own fucking house,” I overheard
him complain to someone on the phone, “and these dykes want me to leave whenever they’re hanging about in the kitchen.”
One day, Sean called a meeting. Charlie had indicated that he wasn’t happy. How were we going to accommodate ourselves to his wishes? Should we move the press, ask the women to meet somewhere else? We decided that to make any concessions would be objectively Imperialist. The fault lay with Charlie, not us. He was politically backward. He needed re-education. When he came home he was told that if he wanted to participate in the household he would be welcome to do so, but he had to commit, as we were committed, to the project of forming a disciplined vanguard, to being one of an exemplary group of people who could credibly go out to the workers, raise consciousness through agitation and propaganda, and grow the movement to the point where overthrow of the capitalist state would become feasible. He was told he fell short in several ways. There was the whole area of individualism. There was the implicit racism of his business activities.
“A pig?” he shouted. “You’re in my house and you’re calling me a pig?”
“You never let anyone forget that you own the house. That’s one of the things that makes you a pig. You think you deserve more respect because you’re a property owner.”
“It’s my fucking house.”
“Why should that give you a greater say than any other resident?”
“It’s not — for Christ’s sake, you’re not even paying me rent. I don’t even know most of you people.”
I have to say I never expected Charlie to call the police. He didn’t even tell us. The first we knew about it was when a patrol car pulled up outside. Sean was so livid that he punched Charlie in the face. People were scaling the back fence. Sitting on the kitchen floor clutching his jaw, Charlie suddenly remembered the five pounds of hash stashed in his room, sewn up in leather cushion covers. He spent the next twenty minutes on the doorstep trying to get them to go away again.
After that, for obvious reasons, we had to leave.
For the next couple of months the group was forcibly split up. I drifted around, sleeping on floors and sofas, sometimes with Anna, but often not, which upset me more than I let on. Without even telling me, she went to Ireland for a week with Sean. For a few days I stayed with Pat and Gavin Ellis up in north London. I remember Pat cooking pasta, working on papers at the kitchen table. I stayed at Free Pictures for a while, trying to look after Uther. Free Pictures was a good place to sulk.
In addition to being the guardian of Free Pictures, Uther was the local shaman. Pretty much everyone had their Uther story. He was our talisman, the guy who once painted himself red with household gloss because he was thinking about color. As the most visible freak in the area, he acted as a lightning rod for neighborhood feelings about hippies. He was regularly beaten up; teenagers would follow him around, imitating his complicated, bustling walk. He collected junk, pulling it back on a homemade trailer he’d welded to his bicycle; when it was stolen, he roamed the locality day and night, hairy and tragic, like a despondent wolfhound. The police loathed him. One night, when I wasn’t there, they broke down the cinema door and arrested him. They held him for twenty-four hours and asked him a lot of questions, then released him without charge. Uther swore he’d been cooking and the detectives had tipped the contents of his pan into a bag “for use as evidence.”
After the raid, the doors to Free Pictures were left hanging open. Kids got in and broke the place up. They smashed all the toilet bowls, ripped most of the seats to pieces. Within days the place had been taken over by a group of Italian junkies, who sat squabbling round a fire on the roof. Stinking rubbish silted up in the corners and there was a scorched patch on the floor where someone had started a fire. Uther refused to move out, more or less living behind the screen in the auditorium, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by the box files containing his most precious possession, an enormous collection of postcards he liked to arrange in
occult sequences on the floor. I tried to chase the junkies off, and I managed it for a while, but Uther was slipping into a state of full-blown paranoia. When he was dancing on the roof of Chatsworth Mansions, he’d already begun to hint at a vast conspiracy, involving the Queen, the Labour Party, and the makers of a particular brand of breakfast cereal whose packet was illustrated with a picture of a glowing child. Later he started to spot threats in newspaper headlines and the license plates of parked cars. His garbled explanations would go on for hours, always arriving at the same conclusion — that he was at risk from some elusive but diabolical force.