Polly Put the Kettle On

by Hilary Bailey

  So the rabble of groupies, hangers-on, friends and acquaintances who had come out for the day to see Alexander tried, got into cars, trains, old taxis and transit vans and weaved back to London, stopping at pubs, or by the grassy roadside for a joint or at a restaurant for a meal. Lester Dent got a piece about himself in the Evening Standard by telling the reporter all he knew about Alexander’s life-style, the pop-stars, the drugs, the women, the freaked-out hippy existence around Ladbroke Grove. Martin Sutcliffe pulled a groupie. The man from the record company, Alexander’s agent and Fred Dinner the demon publisher, had a steak and Beaujolais together en route at the Green Pastures Rest Inn, and shook their heads about it all.

  ‘Six months is a long time, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘I warned him about all this.’

  ‘It’s only to be expected when you lead that kind of life.’

  ‘Poor old Alexander won’t be seeing much of this kind of thing where he’s going.’

  ‘What do you think of Polly Kops?’

  ‘Bit of a tartar. Bit unpredictable.’

  ‘Hm.’

  Polly sobbed into her pillow crying, ‘Oh my God, my God, poor Alexander.’

  Clancy, naked, with his arms behind his back and his legs sprawled wide said, ‘Yeah.’

  The owl hooted in the tree outside as Polly drowned on her pillow, moaning.

  ‘Can’t be helped, Poll’, Clancy said. ‘It won’t be long.’

  ‘Oh,’ she groaned, ‘oh, oh, oh.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Clancy said, shifting to a more comfortable position, ‘don’t forget, I’m getting tried myself soon.’

  Polly did not care.

  The men and women came quietly into the hall and sat down removing their macs, hanging their umbrellas on the seats in front. It already smelt of public meeting halls, old wood, stale cigarette smoke, rain. Polly, relieved that they had come, stood by the door and surveyed the room, seating for two hundred, table at the top, chairs arranged. It reminded her of a hundred such occasions, endemic to British life. Speechday, Save King Charles’s Oak Committee, Young Communists meeting in the Scout Hut, Edeline Avenue, confirmation class, Young Conservatives in St Martin’s Parish Hall, whist drive, lantern slides of the Holy Land, Stop the War in Vietnam, build a new school, stamp out polio, Friends of the Alsatian, stop immigration, British League of Fascists, save the badger from extermination, build a ring road, Hitler Memorial Club, preserve the old almshouses. Here was a meeting, like any other, the audience turned up dripping wet, the speakers were gathered, drinking their drinks in the room at the back, exchanging news of their journeys to the meeting hall, checking the length and content of each other’s speeches.

  Long Tall Timmy came up behind her and said, ‘Who are all these?’

  ‘Doctors, social workers, reporters, magistrates, mothers-of-ten, headmasters. Anyone who’s had a long hard day and come out in the rain.’

  ‘Looks like it’, said Timmy. ‘Shall I pass round a joint?’

  ‘We’ve been through that one’, Polly said. ‘I haven’t filled the carafe for the speakers yet, in case someone gets at it.’

  ‘I’m not really into all this’, Timmy said. ‘Are these people for dope or against it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Polly, ‘still, at least they came.’

  Timmy looked depressed. ‘It doesn’t look like getting things done. Still,’ he said prophetically, ‘I bet it will be in all the history books.’

  ‘I daresay’, said Polly. ‘Here come the freaks.’

  He went back to his seat—Blockade, Lady Clarissa and Dylan, Ulla and the others had come in the van and bagged seats in the front row, where they sat among the elastoplast of society like butterflies at an ants’ convention.

  ‘Who were the guests at the Alternative Society Ball?’ Polly asked herself as the spaced-out, bedizened, bebooted, beribboned and bejeaned crowd came pushing through the doors. More satin than a Busby Berkeley musical, more Afghan coats than a show at Crufts—there was L S Dee the well-known DJ, Mesca Lynn the freaked-out sweetheart, Mandy and Mary Juana, exotic dancers, see them pirouette, Sheik Hash Ish of Pot and O P Um, the Moroccan millionaire. Polly had sneakily invited the straight part of the audience by invitation twenty minutes early so that the social workers, teachers, doctors and men and women of goodwill would not feel crowded out by those who were plainly partisan in the campaign and mostly had the stuff on them. She had considered the idea of Securicor, but abandoned it in favour of the Edgware Chapter of the Hell’s Angels who now stood about in their leathers, ready to keep order. They owed Alexander a favour for acting as a defence witness in a case where they were accused of causing an accident to an MG driven by a bishop’s son, and were pleased to help his old lady out now he was in the nick.

  She noticed some of the most prominent pushers in the Grove, turned out to assist the cause they loved. There were wasted people there who were not going to benefit from any legalization of the soft drugs or hallucinogens. But the word would have gone vaguely round that the meeting was to get all prohibited drugs legalized. Raquel, the notorious transvestite with the unpleasant habit of giving himself fixes in public—although the talk went that it was glucose, vitamins, water, or just a nice cup of tea that he pumped ostentatiously into his overworked veins—had come along in his bright green pull-down hat with the feather, bringing a crowd from the gay squat in Tavistock Avenue. Some of them were so overdressed as to be downright vulgar, done up like a drag queen’s dinner in beehive hairdos and deep décolletages; while others, hairy-legged and tweed-suited, went too far in the other direction.

  Polly was worrying. There was the possibility of a bust: most people would have left their stuff at home but it was likely that one or two daredevils would have some dope or pills on them. But there was something else amiss. There were suited young clerks there. There were also those in hippy garments who were not true hippies. Your true hippy has his own mien. He stands back, does not push, act fast, react, judge, condemn or praise. His hippy clothes were not bought yesterday in a boutique in Bromley, they were bought, or stolen over a period from Portobello Road or Kensington. They were old in the first place, patched or embroidered, they are the slowly accumulated gear of the old soldier—the helmet picked off the beach at Dunkirk, the jacket from Aldershot Barracks, the boots from a dead comrade in Africa, the socks off the washing line of another unit in Berlin. And he is thin. Imagine the face of an old guru sitting under a tree, change his complexion to that of Harpenden, his clothing to King’s and Portobello Road and there he is, a starving hippy.

  These pseudo-hippies had not the mien, the pot-smoker’s pallor, the slow eyes, and their clothes were ridiculous, brand-new, all of a piece, they did not cling to their well-fed forms. They upset the real freaks they were sitting next to by making remarks to them like, ‘This is a really far-out idea, this meeting’, and ‘I beg your pardon’ when they squeezed past them, or trod on their feet, which they did unnaturally often, showing the embarrassment and awkwardness of the upper classes at being in close contact with many others. Polly replaced the headbands and beads with collars and ties, bowlers, Jacqmar scarves and bright make-up and said instantly to herself: stockbroking louts, Oxford and Cambridge yobbos, merchant banks and trainee accountants, girls taking modelling, secretarial, cordon bleu courses. What does all this mean?

  ‘Len,’ she said, ‘there are some people pretending to be hippies, here. They might cause trouble.’

  ‘Thought some of them looked a bit cleaner and tidier than the others’, he said. ‘There’s a crowd outside, and coppers. And a black maria and two radio-cars parked round the corner and down the road a bit.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Polly, ‘I’d better get this started.’

  She pushed down the aisle, where people were standing against the walls, and went into the back room.

  She led the speakers on stage.

  Pitching her voice to the back of the hall, she introduced Gascoyne, the chairman. In front t
he respectable audience applauded politely. The freaks at the back, used to a less formal kind of assembly, stamped their feet, cried ‘Right on’, put their fingers in their mouths and gave piercing whistles. Gascoyne said stolidly that they were all here to talk about the possibility of getting legislation introduced to permit the sale of marijuana and the hallucinogens. The speakers, Theodore Ramkin, MP, Dame Mary Tarbutt, former Principal Secretary of the Home Office, and Professor Amos Corbett, the noted alienist, all weirdly tall and thin, sat on like a trio of skeletons. Gangling Ramkin rose to speak first.

  At the same time Lord Bee, wearing a white mac and carrying an HMG briefcase, walked up Elgin Crescent, smelling the cherry blossom in the gardens, the April air cleansed by rain, feeling a spring-like tingling in the loins. He was only fifty-two. The hard road to wealth and power had robbed him of many things, like friendship, relaxation, good cheer, joy, his family. It had reduced his sexuality to an itch he had sometimes to scratch. Now it was spring, he was only fifty-two, he was a Cabinet Minister and a millionaire. If he had not reached the top of his mountain, he was at least ready to pause on the fertile plateau for a year or two. The seduction of Polly, which had begun as part of his itch-scratching routine, had somehow ended by having another quality. Perhaps Polly’s attitude after the seduction told him that there was something not just wrong, but absolutely peculiar, about such mechanical and loveless proceedings—an attitude which he had naturally pretended to ignore in the interests of saving valuable time and energy. There was a convention of matiness after the rapid fuck of women of inferior status, which Polly seemed not even to know about. It was not pleasant to be looked at like a man from Mars. He had sensed a hollowness. Clancy’s revenge, too, had stirred something in him, some sense of a colour he could not see. He recalled the crumbling house, the cushions, the smell of incense—he was like a young soldier freshly back from an Eastern bazaar. And acting on Lord Bec also, was the peculiar quality of the cousins, who felt softer but harder, warmer but colder to the touch, who were sensual, who gave the impression of being fires at which you could warm yourself freely, if only you could get near enough. He only half-realized there was something familiar, something to remember, in that quality.

  All this, and the fairy-like atmosphere of an April dusk, with the street lamps just alight and shining on the blossom, worked on Lord Bec. He was prepared for deception, his own world was full of it, but almost looked forward to the new deceptions of this Oriental world. ‘This is Polly’s cousin—she wants very much to see you this evening’, Tracy had told him.

  ‘I thought there was a meeting’, he said carefully, for opposite him on the cream leather sofa sat his wife, her two thin legs together on the carpet, reading The Listener.

  ‘She can’t go. She’s got an attack of agoraphobia—can’t go out of the house. It’s all organized. She’s left someone else in charge.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll be there’, he said. Putting down his brandy glass he told his wife he had to go out. As he went, he left the telephone number of the house at Elgin Crescent with the radio-car which now stood permanently outside his house.

  ‘If there’s any trouble at this drug reform meeting, I want to know straight away’, he said.

  Theodore Ramkin was going down badly. In the front, the orthodox part of the audience had heard it all before; to those at the rear it was all new and dull. Ramkin, oddly dressed in an ill-cut grey suit, dingy white shirt, tightly-knotted plaid tie, and school boyish round-toed black shoes, was awkward, hung-up and quite without style. He spoke at length about the extent to which the state had in the past, did now, and conceivably would in future, intervene in the private lives of its citizens. He mentioned John Stuart Mill, the Factory Acts, the anti-immigration laws in South Africa, Prohibition, little boys being sent up chimneys, war-time rationing and many other prehistoric events which were passively accepted at the front and not understood at all by the hippies at the back, whose sense of the past, the general structure of society and its laws was as vague as if they came from Betelgeuse 9.

  And how different he was from your ideal public man, who should convey a certain gravitas, common sense and ordinary decency without being completely the sort who never takes a drop too much or fancies a pretty girl on the sly. He should be the kind of man to whom you hesitate to confide your bestiality problem but who, when in desperation you do, surprises you with his tolerance, acquaintanceship with the subject—he has even had a weak moment in that direction from time to time—and can suggest useful ways of combating it, or at any rate, of indulging it without embarrassment, inconvenience, noise or public exposure. Ramkin, an obvious airy-fairy intellectual, a nervous, jumpy ectomorph, always like the two famous maggots, fighting in dead earnest, conveyed no such reassurance. His response to your little problem would have been to offer awkward, sincere and useless advice, and counsel you to tell your story to the Observer to reassure others in the same predicament; then to confide your difficulties to the biggest gossip in town, believing mistakenly that he or she could help. He also saw himself as a crowd-stirrer, although he had none of the will to power or the actor’s gifts of an orator. He delivered his best lines and hit the desk at the same time. ‘I say to you, this situation cannot—thump, thump, thump.’ His voice became weak when he called on it for strength, his gestures—the raised pointing finger, the straightened back, the challenging head poked forward—were ill-timed and marionette-like. Polly watched his performance gloomily.

  From outside the hall came a noise. As Ramkin went on, the sounds became distinguishable. ‘Free Alexander Kops, Free Alexander Kops’ came the chant. It abated, evidently as the police moved people about, then started up again. A couple of hippies went out and came in to tell their friends what was going on. Ten or fifteen left. It was plainly more fun outside than in. There was a dispute outside, as people tried to come in to take their places and were sent off by the four Hell’s Angels at the door. The fighting Bishop of Bromley fell on a policeman.

  Slowly Ramkin came to his conclusion, it was desirable that the government should, in some cases, interfere in the lives of private individuals where their behaviour affected only themselves, but not in others.

  The chant went on: ‘Free Alexander Kops’.

  Lord Bec rang the doorbell, pushed the door open and walked into the hall. Tracy stubbed out her cigarette in the kitchen, put her mug of tea on the draining-board and moved upstairs. She wore a red and purple kaftan and plenty of khol about the eyes.

  She walked up, close to Lord Bec and said, ‘Polly managed to go out after all. Would you like a drink upstairs?’

  Lord Bec, already dizzy with desire for a fuck, a new atmosphere, for some glamour, followed her up.

  The noise outside went on and Ramkin sat down, pouring himself, with trembling hand, a much-needed glass of water. Gascoyne presented Dame Mary Tarbutt. At first sight she seemed no more promising of fun and excitement than poor Ramkin. In her beige dress and beads, her greying hair in an untidy bun at the back, she was everyone’s first headmistress. The smell of wet wellies, pee and poster paints filled the air. But Dame Mary, who had stood beside her mother as she set a match to Birmingham Public Library in aid of the suffragettes, who had served on every committee to do with rudeness, knickers, sodomy and after-hours drinking set up for the past forty years, who was said to have had liaisons with everyone in the Labour Movement from H. G. Wells to Aneurin Bevan and was even reported to have been seen coming out of the Kremlin looking flushed but unembarrassed—Dame Mary was a horse of a different colour. Her beautiful smile beamed across her big, long face. She leaned, thin as a whippet, on the table and said, ‘Put up your hands those of you who’ve smoked pot or tripped out’, and raised her own. People smiled. All the hippies at the back did too, and nearly half the straights in the front. Everyone craned around to look at everyone else, jokes went round. The faces of the pseudo-hippies, hands stuck straight in the air, showed all the strain of good boys confessing to a crime done
by others and hoping not to be believed.

  Dame Mary said, ‘Yes—you might as well put your hands down now—and half our teenagers at school, and a considerable number, let me assure you, of the legislators who will vote against our Bill in the House of Commons, all have tried, on occasions, one kind or another of what are called soft drugs. I have myself. Unlike many people I don’t like making pronouncements in ignorance. Ignorance,’ she said, ‘is one of the things this meeting is all about—’ Horse-faced Dame Mary, just to cheer up the audience, then applied a pair of pince-nez. She was a gas, no doubt about it, Polly thought. Topped up with Professor Amos Corbett, the meeting would succeed in being, if nothing else, a little bit of fun.

  The only trouble was that the shouting outside was getting louder, the Angels were beginning to hunch around the door talking to each other in low voices, the pseudo-hippies were assuming the look of aggressive, baffled stupidity which means that the school bully is going to come up behind and bash you with a cricket bat because you’re reading.

  She slipped outside. There was a short length of corridor where two Hell’s Angels stood, then the main door, which had glass panelling. Through it she could see a line of five policemen, and behind them the chanting crowd. A nest of Blockade T-shirts, gangs of teenyboppers, a lot of freaks, a big bunch of men and women with placards—‘No Drugs in Britain’, ‘Stop The Rot’. There were about two hundred of them. No one was trying to get through the line of policemen, Then a beer bottle smashed just outside the door. Polly went back. As she entered, a wild cheer came up from the hippies at the back.

  ‘She looks like such a nice old lady’, one of the Angels said to Polly. ‘She’s just said she’s all for drugs and free love.’

  ‘I don’t like the look of that lot’, Polly said pointing at the stockbrokers in disguise.