by Jenny Diski
This would be the point at which I describe the three years I lived at Doris’s house as a schoolgirl from February or March 1963 until I left school and Doris’s house two weeks before taking my A-levels sometime in May 1966. That is, a period you might think of as the early 1960s, although the 1960s didn’t really announce themselves to us until 1967 (‘Good heavens, so this is the 1960s we will hear so much about’). And then rapidly, almost concurrently, the 1960s started to be dismantled and we were soon wondering how that terrible woman telling us that there was no such thing as society came to be in charge. Or think of it simply as a time when my skirts got shorter, I often went barefoot around London, or hung out at home, which at that earlier point was chez Doris, acclimatising myself to her friends, writers and poets and a handful of people from her past political life, most of them rare visitors except for Joan Rodker, in whose flat Doris had lived with Peter, then four years old, while they organised demonstrations and international ‘peace’ meetings. If anyone asked later if she’d been a member of the Communist Party, Doris would give a deep sigh at having to tell it yet again, and explain she was never a party member. But from a 1956 article of hers in the Reasoner, an opposition paper within the party, it’s clear that Doris was a member then, although she left soon afterwards. Doris unwrapped events with, I think, genuine conviction. One day at a party her then publisher asked where Joan was, and hadn’t they been really good friends? Doris shrugged and said they had been useful to each other, but not really friends. There were several people there who knew how important Joan had been – looking after Peter and engaging with Doris’s politics – and it came as a shock to them.
Even my semi-literate mother read, or partly read, The Golden Notebook, and asked me once when she came to visit whether I thought it was right, all that sort of thing. I thought she meant the sex, and the tampon moment that acknowledged that 50 per cent of the world menstruated. But when I asked what she meant, she said in a stage whisper, ‘All that communism’, in much the same way she said she was concerned about my being sent to St Christopher’s. She read through the brochure, about responsibility and democracy, about giving children the right to have a say in the working of the school. She looked up at me and said: ‘Do you think this is the right place for you, it’s a bit peculiar.’ When I asked what she meant, she said: ‘They don’t eat meat. And they feed you something called muesli.’ Neither problem turned out to be a deal-breaker. I managed the vegetarianism and snuck in salami from the town when I was desperate for meat and managed to cope with the rather more-than-thrice-denied socialist tendencies of my rescuer, even though I don’t doubt they left me deeply marked. Looking back at my mother’s spoken anxieties, I feel a dim affection. At our best moments we had the makings of quite a good comedy duo.
Doris was still demonstrating with the left on international politics and raging about international matters, but I arrived at the time when, having left the party in 1956, she was still in search of something else. She was adrift, as she hadn’t been before and wouldn’t be again for a long time. She had had two serious affairs, with Clancy Sigal, an American writer who wasn’t offering a stable masculine voice so much as searching at the edges of sanity with the likes of R. D. Laing. The other affair was with a psychiatrist from the Maudsley who, she said, had been the love of her life, but who was married and not prepared to leave his wife. When I arrived, there were a few one-night stands and weekends away with men she met, having instructed me who to phone if there was an emergency, but apart from inducting me into the secrets of good and bad sex during our kitchen table conversations, she seemed rather to have withdrawn or to be withdrawing from the idea of a settled relationship with a lover. Of course, I was there, and that, too, might have come into her invitation to live with her, either as a consequence or an excuse. The awkwardness of having me around as well as a strange man might not have been so accidental. No one ever stayed for breakfast, and when Peter was at home for the holidays an elaborate arrangement of a camp bed was erected last thing at night, so that it could be said that the interloper had missed the last train and had to sleep in the bathroom. I helped set the stage. She explained that a son should not be a witness to his mother’s sex life. Six years later, at her fiftieth birthday party, she told me that she was not going to have sex any more. At her age it was demeaning to trail a younger man around, and there didn’t seem to be any available and interesting older men. In any case, her interest in that sort of thing was over. She was still looking but not really for lovers. I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did stop having a sex life at that time, and only later, under very different circumstances, did she seem to wake up briefly to her sexuality. Once, in her late sixties, she began a sentence to me: ‘When I was . . . you know . . . a woman . . .’
In the early 1960s she was in search of people and books that would point her in the direction of a metaphysical education, an education for her soul rather than something satisfying her body. Around the time I turned up she was lacking a totalising commitment to materialism and an alternative to sex, which she began to speak of more in scorn than in terms of remembered pleasure. The big love affairs were firmly fixed in the past. The party had come unstuck after Hungary and Doris was left without an authoritative voice, Big Brother or Big Lover, to give her a sense of direction, a map that would direct her towards a dignified goal. Perhaps that’s part of the reason she chose to take up Peter’s suggestion and allow me into her house.
The life she led was exactly how I imagined a writing life would be. She worked alone in her room and then she had a break, a social period. There were friends (some old friends, some fans, some writers from South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and Americans and Canadians trying to get work in England after being blacklisted by the Un-American Activities Committee). She’d been accepted as a writer in London literary circles and shared a general forlorn hope in international socialism, but there was no group working with some kind of leader or teacher towards something that involved more than her own personal development. In all the time I knew her, apart from that brief period, she had some sort of regular lover, teacher or leader. Then, having found Watkins, a bookshop in Cecil Court that specialised in mysticism and occultism, she spoke to a woman who told her about Subud; she said that they were in hiatus awaiting the imminent arrival of a teacher from the East who was coming to teach a Westernised Islamic Sufism in a form modified to suit those who could learn how to learn, who could read beyond the words and sentences, and understand the intentions of Sufism. Doris went to her Subud group about once a week and waited patiently, telling those who were able to grasp it the truth behind what seemed to be slight tales and received wisdom. In the meantime she did yoga. She stood on her head for twenty minutes or so a day, and once a week did an hour of ‘concentration’ by fixing her gaze on a mandala. I was invited to the concentration sessions, which weren’t to be called ‘meditation’ because that was what people much further along in ‘the Work’ did. She was only on the nursery slopes. I joined her on the sofa and sat staring at the mandala, letting thoughts come and go, trying to take no more notice of them than I would if a wind blew occasionally in my direction, and wished for some sign of progress, which was probably my undoing, because wishing and the Work were just about incompatible.
Instead of skulking about and hiding, I read like a hoover, sucked it all up. I also took myself off to the movies in the afternoon. The French Nouvelle Vague, the Italians, the Swedes. It was like a tour of the present time, with flickerings of the past. And in the meantime I worked at being useful in the office of Doris’s friend, but turned out to be more of a liability, a maker of cumbersome mistakes rather than the Girl Friday it had been hoped I might be. Even if my father had refused to let me go back to school, I was having an education that was chaotic and fun, and listening to some of the makers of the wonders chattering over supper while never discussing their art.
I’d also found a different sort of gang of my
own, from among those who’d been tasked with keeping me safe at that Aldermaston March I finally went on at Easter 1963, especially from the peacenik Lotharios who saw my tender youth in need of attention. ‘Oh look at this sweet-natured virgin child,’ one of them cried, offering his hand to help me down from the back of his Land Rover at the end of a hard day’s marching to the not very urgent tune of peace and hope (‘We Shall Overcome’). To which I replied with a cruel sneer, ‘The fuck I am,’ and jumped out of the vehicle unassisted, which had the effect, surprising to me, of sealing some kind of hopeless adoration for me to this very day. They were mostly youngish to middle-aged, though even the youngest had a good ten years on me, offcuts of the New Left who originally met up at the Partisan Coffee House, but were in reality, rather than political activists or academic theorists, more the hefty drinkers, convivialists, half-forgotten artists and writers, or never-to-be-known thinkers working their way looking forward but stepping backwards to oblivion. (It seems that elongated ‘Some day-ay-ay-ay-ay’ had the effect of putting off the battle for freedom and equality until they’d had a final drink, another hangover, one last fuck, or two.) I found these talkers and drinkers, ageing into a repetitive narrative and early death, very affecting. I wonder if I wasn’t a cruel observer of those sad, flat-footed men, rather than a child hanging on to every vital word they offered me.
Nevertheless, they were the group I chose to be with in the evenings and at weekends, rather than my own generation, of whom there were plenty around. My older men were a disorderly group to hang out with, because finding them involved something of an Easter egg hunt. Actually they were rather more like slime mould, a species that has always enchanted me: myriads of minute individual organisms not exactly flora or fauna, nor quite fungal, that tend by some means, or some group consciousness they aren’t at all conscious of, to flow or creep together in the same direction, so that they appear to be a singular thing on an intentional march towards or away from somewhere they had or hadn’t been before. It would surprise us if we saw them with the naked eye as the individuals they really are, just as it would be a surprise to us to discover that our arms and legs were quite separate from the other bits of our bodies, yet through some unknown mechanism kept up with our torsos, or if you like, vice versa.
This group of the hard-drinking left flowed and tottered the length of Dean Street, and could be found finding each other by wandering solitary or in pairs in and out of pubs and clubs in Soho. First stop was the Highlander: you popped your head round the door, and if no one to your taste was there, the French Pub was next, just down the road. In the afternoons, when the pubs were closed by law to protect the livers of the land, it was over to the Kismet Club in a sleazy basement to check who was sitting on its foam benches trying to put enough money together to bet on a horse and buy everyone a drink (I put 2/6d on a horse called Just Jenny and it won a whole afternoon’s drink for us). And there was the Colony Club, also in Dean Street, with the proprietor and model for Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher, sitting behind the bar calling her favourites ‘cunty’ and those she disliked ‘cunt’. I was too low on the scale to be called anything. On the slime mould principle, most of the people you wanted were usually to be found together in the same venue, talking loudly, smoking Disque Bleu and reckoning their chances with the women present, while the other places, often virtually empty, waited their turn. I was late to the party. Soho by then was not so much a resting place for poetic or painterly talent, but more of a merry-go-round of ageing drunks with and without a ruined talent, and just one or two with enough genius to know how to make their livers keep on working well enough for them until the end.
I should be describing the geriatric sex, the notable and scurrilous company, my often desultory couplings, my almost instant transformation from baby-of-the-bin to baby-of-the-pub, where my tough-girl edgy determination to find older, clever men who would teach me all they knew about politics, literature, art and sex usually ended up with me in bed insomniac, because the slightest sniff of alcohol meant a night-long vigil beside an old roué with little more to offer than the excitement of sleep apnoea, which required me to push or pull at the usually ample flesh to check if he was holding his breath such an inordinate time because of the breathing disorder, or because he was actually dead. None of them turned out to be dead. At least not when I was with them. As an experience, having a one-night stand with a man suffering from sleep apnoea was like playing Russian roulette, and given the physical condition of my aged braggadocios, as exciting as sex or conversation at the end of the hard-drinking day with them could have got. It was certainly a doubling back to my status as the know-it-all bad kid looking to make it up to her own Humbert (who had been, I believed on my first reading, so dismally wasted by Lolita), if I could only find him.
In any case, no one meeting me then would have thought I needed protection. There was drink, and there were drugs and careless sex (as if that were possible for a fifteen-year-old), and long discussions about politics. At lunchtime on Sundays, the fairground moved to the Tally Ho in Kentish Town, a pub that had live jazz bands, making it difficult for anyone to have a clue what was being said about the state of England with the vile Henry Brooke and Enoch Powell in the cabinet. If a trip into town wasn’t to your hangover’s liking, there was the warm suburban welcome of the Magdala in South End Green in Hampstead’s lower depths, where Ruth Ellis had shot her lover (look, they’ve preserved the bullet holes in the brickwork outside) on Easter Sunday 1955, to become the last woman to be hanged in England. And that’s how it was, all that, my rackety social life, the suppers round Doris’s table with her engaged, debating friends, the one-night stands with lovers and leavers, the demonstrations against nuclear arms and apartheid, playing against a painted backdrop of what people would later call ‘the 1960s’. Or just think short skirts, black-and-white eye make-up, pale lips and white boots with square toes and a cut-out rectangle in the front.
It’s not very likely that I would have fared more freely and dangerously if I’d been living in the Bourne and Hollingsworth hostel (lights out at 11.30). But having moved in with Doris and taken the opportunities she offered me (the reading, the culture, the conversation), I felt like I was supposed to be doing this. Growing up, I would have called it. There was very little direction, as if Doris didn’t quite know what to do with this unrelated fifteen-year-old living in her house. And I hadn’t any idea what a fifteen-year-old was supposed to do in such circumstances. I only remember brisk notes on the scrubbed-wood kitchen table, telling me what I had done wrong, usually in the language of psychoanalysis. Mostly these were about not doing the washing-up, leaving my room looking like a tip and banging the front door when I went out. But there I was equipped with my Dutch cap and spermicidal jelly. More often than not sitting at the table listening to Doris – back after a weekend of peace and quiet to write, and back with tales of rapture in the shrubbery – telling me about her sex life: who was the worst fuck in London, who had been madly in love with her but was too dull. And I needed to know since the subject had been brought up why and how someone became the worst fuck in London. The answer was that the best fuck was considerate and kind, not in a rush, and definitely not one who fell asleep on top of you immediately after they had come. There was talk of anatomy. But time was the main thing. Time and anatomical accuracy. It wasn’t only Doris: everyone talked about sex, in every possible detail. I sometimes thought I ought to be taking notes. The married bliss beneath the blankets recounted in full detail by one friend resolved my problem with my shoe-selling friend in Banbury, the singletons and their one-night adventures. The meaning of a certain look. The sex so overpowering that no words could be spoken, I’d know it when I saw it. I looked and sometimes I saw it, but being just sixteen (by then) I didn’t have time to wait the livelong day for such a look. There was another look, more frequent, that led to the same result. The subheading of these kitchen conversations was always about being good or bad or indifferent in bed. I liste
ned, and laughed along with Doris, but it was clear that I had to get cracking on practice.
But it wasn’t really OK. Coming home at eleven o’clock with a man in tow usually meant a letter on the kitchen table, usually about noise, or, more often a silence, a withdrawal of comradely conversations. A friend of Doris’s gave her advice. ‘You must lay down rules,’ she said. But it was the 1960s and Doris thought people of sixteen should know the rules. And as long as no one actually spoke to me and told me what the problem was I was at a loss. I wasn’t having sex in dark alleyways, nearly always the cause of pregnancy in contemporary books and movies. I was being permissive, which was apparently some sort of feminist triumph. I said no when I didn’t want to, and sometimes that worked. And above all, I was learning how to be a good fuck, which was what seemed to matter most.
As for Doris, her son was in boarding school, and she had been landed with me in her house. It wasn’t what she’d planned. I think she thought Peter and I would come home for the school holidays, bring friends and a merry social life with troubled teenagers and lots of soup and wine, and then we’d all go back to school and give her another couple of months to write the next draft. But that wasn’t how it happened. At least not outside the cover of a book.
