One afternoon a friend dropped in to tell me he’d seen Uther being picked up by the police. At one in the afternoon, with hundreds of people walking by, he’d decided to share with the world the genius of William Blake by painting THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM in foot-high letters on the side of a building just off the Harrow Road. He’d got as far as Leads.
What bothers me is that we lost track of him. He disappeared into the system and never resurfaced. As soon as we heard of his arrest we tried to bail him out, but before we could get a lawyer to the police station he was sectioned and taken to a hospital out in the north London suburbs. I hated the idea of Uther on a locked ward, but after Mum I had such a horror of mental institutions that it was almost a month before I steeled myself to visit him. I found him morose and suspicious, sitting in front of the television in the common room, watching the news through a haze of medication. After a few minutes of awkward conversation he accused me of being an agent of the Queen and refused to speak anymore.
I told myself that sooner or later Uther would come back, happy and cured. Instead they moved him to another hospital, then another, out of London. There was so much else happening, so many battles to fight, that Uther was left along the way. I’d like to imagine he got out and found a better, easier place for himself, that even now he’s on a beach, gnarly and wrinkled, standing on
his head and spooking backpackers. All I know is, without him things got cold. Cold and hard.
Finally our homeless commune found the Victorian sweatshop that became Workshop Thirteen, a name that (as Anna pointed out) was almost as bad as the “Imperial War Museum” in its combination of negative associations. Thirteen was an old light-industrial unit in Hackney, on a back street near a forlorn patch of park, a place that had once been a garment factory in a row of other garment factories, crammed with Jewish tailors sewing cheap shirts and trousers for the market stalls of the East End. By the time we found it, it had been empty for years. The machines were long gone and the building was just a thin skin of bricks and rotting floorboards, so bowed and warped with age that the whole structure appeared to twist on its axis and the floor sloped in a sharp diagonal from one corner to another. It was drafty in winter and baking in summer. The upper story had been roosted by generations of pigeons; we found it caked with an acrid white carpet of their shit.
The name started as a sort of shorthand. It had none of the complicated meanings I’ve heard ascribed to it. The address was B Moreno Street and on the brick façade was painted some kind of advertisement, which had faded so much over the years that only the single word workshop was still legible. Thirteen was cheap. As in free, once we’d broken the lock and put on our own. No one ever turned up claiming to be the landlord; there were no immediate neighbors. For a long time I don’t think anyone even knew we were there. At first the place saw a rapid turnover of people who used it as a crash pad, staying for a night or two, or a week, or a month. All that had to stop when security became an issue, but for a while Thirteen was a bizarre mix of encounter session, politburo meeting and house party. We cleaned and scrubbed upstairs and pushed mattresses together to make a large soft area, piled with blankets and sleeping bags. If people wanted to go to bed they just grabbed a space. You got used to falling asleep with people fucking right next to you, or rolling onto
sleeping people as you fucked. Downstairs we built kitchen units and a long refectory table and partitioned a bathroom with sheets of plasterboard. We pulled desks and chairs out of skips, rigged lights and switched the water back on, heating it in a tank we ripped out of a house someone had been squatting in Bow. Finally we screwed a thick reinforcing sheet of scrap iron to the door and moved in the printing press, which had been moldering in Charlie’s garden, making Thirteen a propaganda center as well as a living space, a laboratory (or so we intended) for the new society.
The question of violence had started to raise its head. We wanted change. We felt it was part of our duty to sharpen contradictions, to make the difference between the rulers and the ruled glaring and unambiguous, impossible to ignore. This meant confrontation. At meetings or demos we adopted a deliberately aggressive attitude, trying to provoke people and intensify whatever was going on. Our behavior often brought us up against other activists. If they criticized us, we were sarcastic and patronizing; we’d question their courage, the extent of their commitment to the revolution. We began to judge ourselves by our willingness to take risks. I was arrested on a demonstration in Brixton after a young West Indian died in custody. Anna and Helen were wrestled to the floor in a department store when they smashed up a lingerie display. After any action, we’d meet up at Thirteen for what we’d started to call Criticism-Self-Criticism, each of us pointing out moments when we felt we’d failed, when we’d been too conciliatory or someone else’s behavior had fallen short of our increasingly high standards.
There was an anarchist bookshop in Whitechapel where we’d sometimes go to listen to foreign speakers, anti-Franco Spaniards, Greeks on the run from the Colonels. Half of Europe was still Fascist and secretly our own government was collaborating with them, sharing information with their police forces. I heard about things that weren’t reported in the papers — bombs in airline offices, assassination attempts against European leftists. In the East End we had our own Nazi problem. I can’t remember if we were already
calling them skinheads. They were crop-haired mods out of Hoxton or Bethnal Green, kids who beat up immigrants, put lighted rags through their letterboxes. The police didn’t do much because many of them were sympathetic to the attackers. I’d started to do odd jobs to make money, casual work on building sites. I’d hear the same thing everywhere, how the Pakis were moving in, breeding like flies. Historically they’d always stayed farther south, near the Thames in an area the Spitalfields boys called Brown Town, but now the council was redeveloping it and suddenly little knots of dark-skinned men were standing on street corners they had no business to stand on, corners that had always belonged to white people.
Though much of the violence was random, some of it was organized. There was a pub in Cheshire Street, which over the years had become a kind of Fascist shrine, a place where Nazi splinter groups went to form new parties or sniff Eva Braun’s knickers or whatever it was they got up to when they weren’t marching around saluting the Union Jack. I heard about it from Leo Ring, the leader of a group who were living in one of the semiderelict squares in Stepney. Leo, at twenty-four, was tall and dark, with a head of curly black hair and a past as a member of the Firm, a gang of Barking mods who’d once terrorized every blues and R&B club in London. Leo’s friends had gotten into acid, then the revolution. They talked about “street politics,” about “keeping it low to the ground.” The idea that a cabal of Mosleyites could hold meetings in the saloon bar of their local was an affront and they wanted to do something about it.
At Workshop Thirteen I reported Leo’s plan to the others. Should we get involved? Some of us were very much against it. A suggestion was made (by Sean, I think) to exclude the women, but was rejected as chauvinist. We were in or out as a group. I said we should be in. Anna agreed. Sean asked me whether I had the stomach for it. Secretly, I wasn’t sure, but of course I said yes. The logic of confrontation started to do its work. I cycled over to Leo’s to give him the news.