“Oh, calm down.”
We parked the car in the yard behind Workshop Thirteen and covered it with a tarpaulin. I found the place full of people I barely knew. Two or three agit-prop friends of Jay’s were lounging around, bumming cigarettes and waiting for someone to cook. A young black woman was running off leaflets on the printing press.
In the Brixton prison rec room there had been a television. The news pictures seemed to tell a simple, chilling story. Glass on the streets of the Bogside. Blazing cars. “We have to fight back,” I told Leo that night. It was late and we were whispering. Everyone around us on the mattresses was asleep, bundled in blankets and sleeping bags. Nearby Anna spooned closer to Shirley, the young black woman. I was expecting to be with Anna on my first night of freedom. Either her or Claire. I was angry. Leo was too, though for different reasons.
“They’re ganging up on me,” he hissed, “calling me a misogynist. Anna said I was unable to distinguish rape from ordinary sexual relations. Fucking bitch.”
There was always a lot of tension at Thirteen. I think that was partly because so many things weren’t said. I wanted to talk privately, not least with Anna, but it was impossible. With Sean still away in prison, Anna had exerted control over the collective.
She’d become the advocate of a policy of absolute openness. The individual was a politically suspect category; privacy was just another name for isolation; the atomized worker was subject to feelings of depression and alienation that could only be cured by participation in an authentically communal experience. It was as if she subsumed herself entirely into Thirteen. Everything she did, whether it was washing herself or going to the toilet, she did in the presence, at least potentially, of someone else. And somehow she succeeded in placing herself entirely on the surface. Her nakedness became meaningless, even to me. It was as if she had no inner life at all. But that totalitarian sharing became the rule for every one of us that winter, not just Anna, and in most of us it bred furtiveness. It was easier not to speak about your feelings to anyone than be forced to offer them up to everyone, yet another sacrifice on the bonfire of openness.
Soon after I got out of prison, there was an argument among the women involving Leo’s traditionally minded girlfriend Cynthia, who rolled his joints, did his laundry, and looked at him with big eyes when he spoke at our meetings. Cynthia was told she was politically backward. She was informed that she was no longer welcome. Leo was furious at her expulsion and moved out with her to stay in a huge unruly commune that had been set up in an empty mansion in Piccadilly. When I went to visit I found more than a hundred people crashing in high-ceilinged reception rooms, climbing on the roof and shouting down from the windows at a besieging crowd of police and hostile gawpers. You had to get in and out using a makeshift drawbridge. After a couple of weeks, the place was stormed. Leo came back. Cynthia didn’t. Was Pat Ellis there when they expelled Cynthia? I think she was. I remember her face, twisted, shouting. I was upstairs, dozing on the mattresses. I went down to watch. Pat was listing Cynthia’s faults. Other women were joining in. Cynthia was whimpering. “You just aren’t human, you people. What’s so bloody revolutionary about being cruel?”
That would have been just after we burned down the first army recruitment office.
The noise of chatter in Miles’s Soho club was increasing, forcing us to raise our voices. “Are you telling me,” he said, draining his second glass of wine, “that Pat was completely unaware of what you were doing?”
“We weren’t exactly advertising it.”
“Not at first.”
“She was part of the women’s group. Most of them split off and set up some kind of commune in Tufnell Park.”
“She didn’t go, though.”
“She was married.”
“But she didn’t go. She wanted to be in the action faction, not the sisterhood.”
“Where did you get that? You sound like someone’s uncle trying to talk jive. She wasn’t part of either. The feminists thought she was soft because she wasn’t prepared to leave her husband. We thought she was just another bourgeoise. She was useful because she was a lawyer, but we didn’t trust her.”
“Regardless. She must have known.”
“Known? Why? She hardly ever came to Thirteen.”
“I’m not sure you’re remembering correctly.”
How is my memory? When Leo showed me the crate of petrol bombs it made sense. I didn’t discuss it. I didn’t really stop to think very much at all. Milk bottles filled with four-star and engine oil, ballasted with sand, stoppered with wadding. We drove the Rover down to a recruitment office in Blackheath where the two of us broke a window and threw a couple of our crude devices through the hole. As we drove away all I could think about was Kavanagh the junk man, me and Brian setting fire to his garage as kids.
When Anna found out, she was furious. We hadn’t consulted the group, meaning we hadn’t consulted her. “How could we?” I hissed. As we argued, Shirley was lounging nearby on the mattresses, pretending to read Régis Debray. The place was full of people I didn’t know and didn’t trust. That evening, we told the various interlopers and sexual partners and hangers-on that they needed
to find somewhere else to sleep. We shuttered the doors and held a closed meeting.
Q: Why have you done this?
We felt it was the only adequate response to the presence of the army on British streets.
Q: What political purpose does this serve?
It reminds people the system isn’t invulnerable. It has a small practical effect on the machinery of the military.
Q: Shouldn’t it have been a group decision?
It was spontaneous. Besides, all action seems equally meaningless in our alienated state. Why focus on this in particular? What’s special about it?
Q: How do you justify putting the collective at risk?
It was a provocation. We want to force you, our comrades, to think.
Q: What are we to think about? Your quietism.
Your continuing collaboration with Imperialism.
Q: Can you promise you won’t take such unilateral action again?
No. Why should we promise? Why would you want to extract such a promise? Is that you setting a limit, or the voice of some power that has a hold over you?
Q: Your gesture is infantile. The revolution will be led by the working class. A terrorist is just a liberal with a bomb, arrogantly presuming to lead the way.
Rubbish. You’re covering up your cowardice with quotations. Change is imminent. It’s happening around the world. The slightest pressure will tip the balance in our favor.
One spark, a thousand fires burning.
We were so impatient. We wanted the time to be now. Of the core group, only Matthias and Helen remained seriously troubled by what we’d done. We were supposed to be protesting against war. Surely a peaceful gesture would have been better? I accused them of fetishizing nonviolence, telling them they’d just internalized the state’s distinction between legitimate protest and
criminality. Leo and I were censured for our individualism, but the logic of confrontation did its work. By the end of the meeting, everyone was in agreement. We would go further.
That night I slid into bed beside Anna and asked her why she was ignoring me. I told her she was beautiful, and she asked how I’d feel if someone threw acid on her face. Then I pushed too hard and said I loved her, which made her pull my hair and hiss at me, tears of rage and frustration in her eyes. How could I be such a pig-thick bourgeois? Why didn’t I get it? Unless we were prepared to do something, we were just another part of it, more dead weight on the shoulders of the world’s poor. Our precious individuality was oppressive precisely because we found ourselves so special. To give ourselves pleasure, we’d countenance all sorts of horror, as long as it happened far away. So why didn’t I get it? Why didn’t I get that my stupid narcissistic idea of love made her sick?