James shares a five-room house with three other young men, and a girl and her two children. Each house is a cherished commune on a communal street. St. Agnes Place deserves to survive for its human value alone. James said: “Lambeth Council spends £500,000 a year on bed and breakfast accommodation and still they're trying to make the people here homeless too.”
On a derelict street in South London stands the Greens’ house, with an outside toilet, a roof that leaks so badly it has ruined the second floor, and mice everywhere. The furniture is dirty, worn junk. Mr. and Mrs. Green, aged 39 and 40, both illiterate, are at the end of their rope. They have five adorable little boys, aged 3 to 10 all with hair home-cut like close fur caps. They sit on the floor and listen quietly.
Three years ago, this poor, ignorant man, a cleaner in a police station, obliged a mate by pinching a gallon of detergent worth £2.50. Mr. Green got a £5 fine and a twelve-month suspended sentence. Job applications ask if you've ever had trouble with the police and Mr. Green, who cannot write or explain this single, modest trouble, must print the word yes. He's tried everywhere but has had no work since. “I made one mistake in my life. It's a shadow I can't get away from.”
On £32.95 for all living expenses, the kids’ clothes are in rags. No Christmas tree here. The children had gone to the back part of the room where, laughing, they turned somersaults on a broken-down daybed. Helpless and hopeless as they are, the Greens have managed to keep their children healthy and capable of fun. Walking with me through the night streets, to find a taxi, I saw tears on Mrs. Green's face.
On Christmas Eve, which was fiercely cold, I toured the town, talking to destitute single homeless. At a hostel for homeless women in north London I was not allowed inside the door. I stood on the steps and was handed the telephone number of the manageress. The walls of official silence positively towered.
By telephone I asked the manageress how she knew the women there wouldn't be pleased to chat on this lonely night? Why was she justified in setting herself up as a censor? I was angry enough to make her angry so that finally she said, “I've signed the Official Secrets Act and so have my staff. There's nothing more to say.” The unemployed, the homeless are an official secret?
The first paragraph of a booklet called “Welfare Rights Guide” states: The Supplementary Benefits Commission is given responsibility for deciding whether a claimant is entitled to benefit and if so how much. . . . In practice, of course, a great part of responsibility is delegated to local social security officers who make the day-to-day decisions, having regard to the statutes in force and instructions issued by the Supplementary Benefits Commission. These instructions are contained mainly in the “A” code and are covered by the Official Secrets Act. [My italics.]
What is the “A” Code? I found some of the answer in “The Fight to Live” handbook. “Excerpts from the Secret “A” code instructions to Employment Review Officers: Para 517: It is not essential that the applicant should be likely to derive benefit from a re-establishment center. . . . It may be felt acceptable that a particular man might most effectively be dealt with by obtaining a Section 12 order in the confident expectation that he would take employment rather than go to the center.”
The concept is horrifying. The unemployed are to be considered as enemies not victims, and repressive or harassing techniques for dealing with them hidden behind the Official Secrets Act?
A graduate from a reestablishment center, Gerry Cardiff, reported in “Fight to Live”: “I was at this rehabilitation place for eight weeks.” Gerry describes chiseling a piece of metal into a cube and later making concrete bricks. “You don't necessarily get any retraining course after that.”
There are happy endings. On Christmas Day I returned to the Greens. This newspaper had been there the day before and taken Mrs. Green shopping. I found a radiant family.
Janice got her £14 second-hand cooker for Christmas: the social worker from the council forced the Social Security visitor to relent.
In St. Agnes Place tables were borrowed, and 20 people would sit down to Christmas dinner. I was never worried about St. Agnes Place. Worry instead for the State which cannot put to use such honorable and intelligent young.
Probably the Government should turn over the whole ramshackle bureaucracy that handles and mishandles the unemployed to the organizational geniuses at Marks and Spencer. Let them devise a humane efficient system, free of suspicion and mistrust and Official Secrets.
The Seventies
From January 1969 to May 1975, “Beautiful Day of Dissent” was my only completed work. A writer's block made of solid concrete. Those few pages were not published. I suppose that my London agent sent the article to a couple of uninterested London editors. I was neither surprised nor downcast, I expected failure. “Beautiful Day of Dissent” is really a love letter, but also the record of one fine event in America. By the spring of 1970, hatred of the Vietnam war boiled all over the country. I no longer had to feel derelict in my duty; that duty was assumed by tens of thousands of my young compatriots.
The young had dug a deep wide trench around themselves called the generation gap. I understood it and did not blame them. The leaders in Washington, older generation, invented and prosecuted this war. The majority of older Americans took the docile my-country-right-or-wrong view. For myself, I felt sadly isolated while accepting it as unimportant. I was on the side of the young, I was angrier than they were because I knew more, but barred from joining them by my age. America had become the most foreign country in the world to me. When Richard Nixon was triumphantly re-elected in 1972, I gave up hope. The war went on and on.
I do not think the paralysis that gripped my mind was neurotic. The American war in Vietnam was mass neurosis. When I went to South Vietnam, I had already reported war in ten countries and in ten countries seen how it hurt non-combatants, the people who live on the ground. I was far beyond being shocked by war, but war in South Vietnam was not like any other. A whole nation of poor peasants was sacrificed remorselessly to an American phobia and the cold indifference of the Vietnamese ruling, profiteering class. Our weapons were horrendous and the way they were used was horrendous.
I would have loathed that war under any circumstances, but it was directed by the American government, administered and fought by Americans in Vietnam and all the time I thought: in the name of the American people. This unforgivable evil is committed in the name of the American people, in my name as an American. If I say that I felt responsible for every wounded, napalmed, amputated Vietnamese child I had seen, and all those I knew were suffering each day of the war, I refuse to believe that is neurotic: I think it is just. And it made everything meaningless except an end to the war.
Not that I spent those years in a dark room with my face turned to the wall. I spent them like a Mexican jumping bean, bouncing around for no reason except perpetual motion to Turkey, Greece, Russia, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, France, Costa Rica, Malta, always to Africa, always in and out of London, where I bought a flat with a view, still my one durable base. I dreamed up occupations which ranged from building a two-room house on the slopes of a volcano in the Rift: Valley to collecting litter at Kew Gardens. In 1972 I rang doorbells and drove about with a bullhorn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, urging the citizens to register for the vote. A friend who heard me said it sounded like a voice from on high bellowing Prepare to Meet Your God. I even took cooking lessons, rather late in life to face a kitchen stove.
Those years would have done me in if I had not been sustained by dear friends in need, who put up with me and gave me affection and laughter which I needed most. It was the worst time of my life. Compared to the variety of worst times then available, it was a long holiday; and I did not forget that.
Then the last American bombers and the last American diplomats left: Indo-China; the war in Vietnam was over. As if prison gates had opened, I walked out into a wide world where I could see to the horizon in all directions. I wrote two book
s one after the other; my life took shape again.
* * *
Franco was slow in dying. While he lay in hospital, the editor of New York magazine telephone to London and asked if I wanted to go to Spain. There was no assignment I wanted more; there was nobody I wanted dead more than Franco. I said I would wait until the execrable old tyrant had retired for good. News of his welcome demise came over the radio on the morning of November 20, 1975; I caught the afternoon plane for Madrid.
I had not been to Spain for fifteen years and decided then that I would not go again. The Franco supporters I met were, as expected, dull mean-spirited people but the young workers also depressed me. They had become sly and dishonest, adapted to fit the regime. I was afraid that I would not find anyone left in Spain who reminded me of the people I loved in the Republic. Finding the wonderful new Rojos felt like coming home to familiar friends.
Nobody in Spain, in the nervy climate of fear when Franco died, could have imagined Spain now. Certainly none of us imagined that Juan Carlos would turn out to be the guardian of Spanish democracy, the open-minded model of a constitutional monarch. Nor could anyone imagine that in a few years a young Socialist would be the popular Prime Minister of a country that had been ruled for thirty-six years by the deadening steel hand of Franco. Spain endured the longest Fascist reign; “tyrannical capitalism,” as the Basque priest said, enforced by torture, executions and prison. That defines Fascism everywhere.
Long overdue, Fascism has at last vanished from Western Europe. I wish to trust that it can never return. The term Fascism is out of date but not the fact. In modified forms and under different names, Fascism persists all over the globe. I have been reading with deep gloom Amnesty's report, “Torture in the Eighties,” which concentrates on sixty-four from a total of ninety countries where torture is sanctioned by the state. Ten of these states are communist and differ from each other as much as the fifty-four non-communist states. Torture is a political weapon used to suppress or intimidate any sign of dissent. We don't label nations “fascist” now; they are called Republics. The Republic of South Africa. The Islamic Republic of Iran. The Republic of Chile. The Republic of Turkey. The Republic of Paraguay.
“Christmas with the Outcast” is the product of indignation. I remember everything about unemployment in the thirties and the way it ruined lives, the loneliness, the sense of rejection, the despair of people who had lost what we all need: work, as our place in society. Here again, in England in 1976, I was reading and hearing slander about the unemployed that sounded like an echo from the distant past. Now, in 1987, there are officially half a million more unemployed and unemployment is a fact of life, something like arthritis. Painful and crippling to those who suffer from it, no problem for those who don't. Some treatments and pain killers help, but after all, arthritis has always existed and no one has found a remedy. The government will say it is sorry, though it has more pressing affairs on its mind. I have no idea how the terrible social sickness of unemployment can be cured; I am not an economist. But I do not think that any society will survive in health if millions of its members are destitute and idle; and the young grow up, faced by that empty future.
Riots in British cities should not surprise anyone; they are prison riots. Those millions without hope of work are living in an open jail. Maybe there are more Rolls-Royces per capita than ever before in Britain; mass unemployment makes the boast of growing prosperity suspect and unseemly. Capitalism needs a human face. British capitalism has a sharp hard face now and an ugly tone of voice: sink or swim, never mind who drowns, keep swimming.
I was ordered out of the London Social Security offices where the unemployed collected their weekly checks, but not before several men had started willingly to talk to me. I only learned, due to a fit of mutual bad temper, that the bureaucracy which administers the unemployed is guarded by the Official Secrets Act. Are we to believe that the KGB is panting for information about unemployment? The Official Secrets Act is a blanket cover-up. All governments claim secrecy as a need and right, to confound enemies, and use it to hide mistakes or misdeeds or plain incompetence. The British government is barricaded behind D-notices to the press—effectively censorship—the Official Secrets Act and the smoke-screen of “national security.” By now this secrecy looks hysterical and vindictive. What is the British government afraid of? Public opinion?
I cannot remember whether it was my brief encounter with the British Official Secrets Act that inspired me to test the American Freedom of Information Act. I asked about myself. I took my typed request to the American Embassy in London, passport in hand, to prove my identity and get my request authenticated by a consulate officer. To my delight, a roll of red tape was produced, I mean a huge roll of the stuff, like ribbon for Christmas presents, and a seal and a stamp; and my request was forwarded to Washington. Months later, a large manila envelope arrived. I saw at once that, properly, we should call it the Freedom of Partial Information Act. Blacked out lines marked every page. On one page, single spaced, the only words I could read were my name.
My first reaction was what I think I would feel if a peeping Tom lurked outside my bedroom window at night: shivery disgust. How dare these people sneak about, spying on me? Then I fell into a fury: why was the government allowed to collect misinformation trash at taxpayers’ expense; collect it anywhere, everywhere and hoard it? By what right and for what reason? Then I found it all so absurd that I laughed; but of course it is no laughing matter.
The FBI is intended to discover crime at home, the CIA is intended to winkle out enemies abroad; neither is empowered to snoop on the open activities of American citizens because the citizens dissent from official policies. We knew that J. Edgar Hoover would command the FBI, until his death delivered the nation, since he had gathered so much tattle about the private lives of politicians that none dared attack him, including Presidents. A sleazy system for the land of the free. Now that J. Edgar is laid to rest, perhaps the system has improved. Unrepentant, the CIA has a remarkable tendency to lurch from one abuse of its legal function to another. We can never really know what governments’ secret organizations are up to. Not in the U.S. Not in Britain. My Freedom of Partial Information file held seven references, clear of black marks, to my long ago New Republic article, “Cry Shame,” about the Un-American Activities Committee. Evidently the New Republic's most devoted readers were the FBI and their informants. One of those spy-notes state, unforgettably, “She tells the people to rise up and overthrow the government.” Not only snoops but crackpots who don't understand English.
Still, a Freedom of Partial Information Act is better than none. Better yet, stop spying on the lawful citizenry. Democracy and dossiers go ill together. It is all right for God but all wrong for the State to keep its eye on sparrows.
THE EIGHTIES
White into Black
GRANTA, January 1984
This is a cautionary tale, showing how travel narrows the mind.
I left my happy home in Mexico in February 1952 to spend five or six weeks in Haiti. I knew nothing about Haiti except the splendid name of Toussaint l'Ouverture, but Haiti as such was not the point. The point was scenery, weather, sea to swim in as background for sitting still and solitary and starting a novel. Resident travel. When you can't write at home, go someplace else. I had seen Haiti in passing, years earlier, and remembered high green mountains, cobalt sea and Port-au-Prince, a climbing white city festooned in flowering vines and bougainvillaea. Any Caribbean island would have suited; Haiti was a careless choice.
The years had done Port-au-Prince no good. A taxi-driver recommended the grandest hotel by the sea. The walls were peeling, a juke box deafened, drunks abounded, and the rooms were sticky with old dust. Bar talk whined in discouragement. Tourism was on the skids, people were selling up and leaving, president followed president, all crooks, and in the general chaos no one knew what would happen next. The streets of the city now looked like dust tracks, the black citizens wretchedly poor and glum. I
should have left then, after a day. The vibes, which existed before being named, were very bad. Instead, at ten o'clock on the second night, I moved from the loud hotel to a pension higher up the hillside where I was the only guest. Here, too, everything was seedy but at least quiet.
It rained; unheard of. I took against Port-au-Prince and bought a map. South over the mountains, on a bay, was a tiny dot marked Jacmel. The manageress at the pension had never heard of the place. This sort of information cheers me instead of sensibly putting me off. I imagined Jacmel as unspoiled, unexcited, a sleepy fishing village where I would find a simple room with sea view and breezes. Work hard, swim in the bay, amble about, eat, sleep and repeat same. It took two days to make travel arrangements, now forgotten; no one seemed to have any reason to go to Jacmel. The delay allowed time for Voodoo and a sprained ankle.
The waiter invited me to the Voodoo ceremony. I was flattered and interested: exotic mysteries in the Haitian jungle. In those days “Voodoo was a secret religion; now it figures in a popular TV serial. Slaves, in the seventeenth century in Haiti, invented Voodoo from confused West African tribal memories. Voodoo remains the true religion of the peasants, the majority of Haitians. That night, in a crumbling shack lit by kerosene lamps, I wondered whether these barefoot ragged people looked much different from their slave ancestors. The priest, a bony fiery-eyed man in a cloak and trousers, crouched and cavorted, tracing magical signs on the dirt floor, but kept a calculating eye on the believers. He seemed a dubious manipulator. A woman, another woman, a man, became possessed by a Voodoo god and thrashed about violently, ran, staggered, shouting in unintelligible unnatural voices. If enough people ended up foaming and fainting, presumably the priest was a success. The result of all the chanting and drumming and hysteria was fear. I could see it on the faces around me. When the priest grabbed a squawking chicken, preparatory to biting off its head in sacrifice, I moved silently out the door.
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