Our lives changed very rapidly that year. We moved out of Thirteen, splitting up to stay in rented flats, two in London, the other in Manchester. I cut my hair and started to dress conservatively, something I found oddly wrenching. I hadn’t realized how attached I was to my Bohemian self-image, how empty it would feel to be a man in slacks and a drip-dry shirt. Passing other young people on the street, I’d feel angry and envious. In Criticism-SelfCriticism I was diagnosed as a closet élitist, still trying to set myself apart from the proletariat. Since we’d stopped organizing or participating in mass actions, I knew the others were just as isolated as I was. We saw no one, spoke to no one who wasn’t part of an increasingly narrow and rarified network. What, I wondered, was the difference between a vanguard and an élite?
Discipline, certainty: the way they seem to bleed into one another, to blur at their borders. Because I am disciplined I am certain. Because I am certain, I am disciplined.
Sean pinned a magazine picture to the kitchen wall, a NASA image of the earth seen from space. It was the only decoration in
the tiny Kentish Town flat and it wormed its way into our heads. A green and blue disc surrounded by infinite blackness. The shortest of shorthands. We were on the world’s side, the side of life.
WE ARE EVERYWHERE. We needed funds. Our best source of money was cars, luxury models we stole from quiet streets in Mayfair and Belgravia. The market is not nature. The ruling classes are not invulnerable. They have no immutable right to power. First comes refusal, then resistance. Fumble with the lock, break open the plastic housing round the ignition and yank out the cable. Touch the wires together, then listen for the starter motor. We sold the cars to a connection of Leo’s, a feral-looking ex-con called Fenwick who ran a garage out of a railway arch in Bethnal Green. It wasn’t an arrangement I felt happy about. Fenwick had little reason to be loyal to us, still less the pair of black mechanics he had working for him. I never knew their names and they never asked questions, but they were always checking us out. They knew there was something odd about us. Our accents, our manner. We didn’t fit. I hoped Fenwick was spreading a little of his profit around.
Pigs, know that we can get to you behind your high walls, your mock-Tudor mansions, your barracks, your police stations, your plush offices. There is nowhere to hide. Sean and Leo went to meet a Spanish contact in Earls Court, someone connected with the anti-Franco resistance. They took elaborate precautions, getting on and off buses and trains, watching, doubling back. They came back with two handguns, snub black Czech pistols that they proudly unwrapped on the kitchen table. The guns looked brand new.
“What are we going to do with these?” I asked.
“Expropriations,” said Sean, pointing one at the wall and squeezing the trigger. “And self-defense, of course.”
“It’s a serious business,” said Leo, pointing the other at Sean. He swung round, so the muzzle was pointing at me. “Have a go?”
We had a rule. We’d all agreed. We would attack property but never people. That was supposed to be an absolute prohibition, a
line we would never cross. What good, I wanted to know, was a gun against a building? Sean told me to relax. It was all spectacle. We had no reason to use them.
As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with misgivings. A few days later Sean went over to the other London flat. He arrived back a couple of hours later, swearing and slamming the door. I’d never seen him so angry. “I’ll kill them,” he said. “I’ll fucking kill them.” He picked up a coffee mug and smashed it against a wall. “Fucking cowards. Can you believe it?”
It was a while before I could get any sense out of him. Helen and Matthias had disappeared. They’d packed their things and left. They hadn’t communicated with anyone. Jay, who’d been staying with them, thought they’d seemed unhappy, but hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. The news provoked a flurry of paranoia. We wondered if they’d informed on us, if perhaps we were about to be raided by the police. In the next few hours, we moved the guns and explosives out of their hiding place under the floorboards and left London.
Through Claire, we’d found ourselves a hideaway, a tumbledown farmhouse in North Wales that we could use in emergencies. Driving there, behind the wheel of a stolen Ford Cortina, I tried to work out what had happened. The last Criticism-Self-Criticism had been particularly hard on Helen. She’d admitted she was missing the work she used to do, the women’s group, the housing activism. Though Matthias had covered for her, it was obvious she was losing faith. Anna told her bluntly that her problem was psychological. If she agreed in theory that we had to resist the power of the state, it must be the reality she found disturbing. Leo joined in. He’d said he’d always thought of her as a typical intellectual, happiest with ideas, so nice and neat and antiseptic. Why couldn’t she admit that real people disgusted her, that she wished she was back in the library? When Matthias tried to defend her, he too was accused of harboring reactionary tendencies. The whole tenor of their relationship was suspect. Monogamy was tied up with all sorts of other capitalist formations. If they couldn’t bring
themselves to reject that particular residue of the old world, who knew what other sentiments they might be harboring? After a couple more hours, Helen was in tears. Matthias tried angrily to leave, but we prevented him, blocking the door. It was one of our new rules that no one could leave a Criticism-Self-Criticism session until the group agreed it was finished. Nothing could be broken off. Every interaction, every interrogation, had to run until the bitter end.
So instead of complying with the will of the collective, Matthias and Helen had run away. The rest of us — eight or nine people, as I remember — met up in Wales, more or less convinced none of us had been followed. Outside, rain lashed at the windows as we tried to light a fire in the damp hearth. In the corner of the room a carryall contained the guns and explosives. Everyone was nervous and depressed, except Anna, who chain-smoked cigarettes and stared into the fire and talked, half to herself, half to the room. She approached the situation methodically. This wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity, a chance for us to confirm our commitment to the armed struggle. Matthias and Helen had shown us they were objectively reactionary. Of course it was hard for us to accept. We’d loved them, treated them as our brother and sister, but they were pigs, end of story. They were pigs and now they’d gone. Things like this were to be expected. As revolutionaries, worse misfortunes would happen to us than losing a weak comrade like Helen. Once we became a serious threat to the state, we shouldn’t expect it to show us any mercy. It was important to know this, to know how strong we had to be. She proposed an answer. We should conduct a Criticism-Self-Criticism session to discover if anyone else was thinking of leaving or, worse, was working for the enemy. We had to nip our paranoia in the bud. Sean caught on quickly. We had to trust one another. It was, he agreed, the only way. That night he and Anna seemed to be marching in lock-step. They were thinking with one mind, finishing each other’s sentences.
Sean produced a sheet of blotter acid. By then the only drug we used with any regularity was speed and none of the rest of us liked
the idea of tripping in our anxious, mistrustful state. Sean argued that this was exactly why it was necessary. If we were going to break down barriers, everything had to be in play, everything out in the open. So we sat round the fire and swallowed our hits, washing them down with gulps of ice-cold water, drawn from the pump outside the kitchen door. Then, to my horror, Sean loaded a round into one of the pistols and put it on the rug in front of the fire, smiling beatifically.