A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  But other things restricting my future input were not so apparent to me yet. I don’t think I understood how much the group protected Joaquin. His confident swift presence seemed so little to need it. He laughed at what might be thought vulnerabilities. But the group mostly understood that it could be catastrophic for someone in a fragile immigration status to be arrested for any reason. We were to take responsibility, and Joaquin was going to leg it. I saw what this meant three months later when Joaquin’s manner had persuaded the others that I could come out with him and Euan on a sloganeering jaunt at three a.m. on a Friday night. (It hadn’t taken my father long to give up on me. My Friday nights were always for Joaquin and Park Hill flats. Sometimes now I wonder if my father knew how old I was.) The rule about sloganeering turned out to be this: never fewer than three if Joaquin was there. One held the can of white paint. Another was the writer of the slogan with a brush. Joaquin stood back and directed and watched out. He had to be able to run. He must not have any of the incriminating properties on him. That evening, the other two had to run purposefully into the arms of the police, who were sweatily bounding out of their panda. We had to make it look convincing, too. I was no good at it, and got away. Euan did it shamelessly. He was well known to the police. They never knew a third person was involved. He was in bed when I got back. The paint on my hands was soon smeared all over his chest. The slogan had been his idea. We had nearly managed to finish it. At lunchtime the next day, I saw it from the bus going home up West Street. ‘ARM THE POOR’, it almost completely said.

  In the end, I was one of them, the one who stuck around, and not just because of Joaquin. The others drifted off. Ogden and Frinton, of course, Mohammed I don’t know about, and Tracy died. This morning in the year 2020, I was woken by the radio alarm, switched, I’m afraid, to Radio 4 these days. After the summary of the news, a guest started to speak. It was the anniversary of the murder of the London teenager Stephen Lawrence. Another event, this time a gross and public insult of a woman Somali refugee, had taken place three weeks earlier. The distinguished campaigner, barrister and community spokesman Lord Milne was being interviewed.

  ‘Is this helpful?’ the interviewer said. ‘These calls for extreme and direct action? In these tragic circumstances?’

  ‘I am not making these calls,’ Eric replied grandly. ‘I merely state that I have sympathy for those who do make such calls. What, you may ask, are we expected to do when history repeats itself in such a way? Are we to sit in the stalls in the theatre of history and applaud? When it repeats itself, not as tragic circumstances but as Marx said it would, as farce, what are we to do? Should we perhaps laugh?’

  ‘I taught him that,’ I said. ‘Introduced him to it. Joaquin, I introduced Eric Milne to what he’s talking about.’

  ‘What’s all this?’ Joaquin mumbled into his pillow.

  ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ I said. I got up. The dogs were clamouring for their morning walk.

  The lives that we were to lead were set in those days in the early 1980s. The lives that we now follow are not shaped by the commitments and principles we then endorsed. Most of them were ridiculous and impossible. I can hardly remember the rationales that justified them. But the paths were entered upon. The lives of politics, of saying what the world might be, as well as putting on a suit and kissing the Queen’s hand, being admitted to her Privy Council. What to make of it.

  I feel that these public lives began, in some sense, the Thursday after I first went to the flat in Park Hill. Many things had happened in the meantime. I had returned to the flat on my own, two days later. Joaquin and I had fucked for six hours. (I am now fifty-three. Joaquin is the only person I have ever fucked.) I had bought another copy of Marx’s Capital, so that my father would not see that his copy had been read. I had told Tracy about Joaquin. I was sixteen. I had to tell someone. She was sixteen. She had to tell someone. She told the school. And then I was properly in the Ogden group of outcasts.

  We went to break up the CND rally. We didn’t dress up in any special way. The faces pouring into the City Hall: clear, open, trusting, clean-scrubbed. These people were dressed quite as the Spartacists were dressed. Sometimes a 1950s tweed jacket. Otherwise the usual stuff. A lot of army surplus, a couple of dozen women in Afghan coats. There was an excited buzz within the hall, a decent ladylike excitement, like a mass gathering of Sunday schools. It was important that we were in the middle of a row in the balcony, in two quite separate groups. It should be as difficult as possible for the organizers to evict us. We reckoned we could get three solid uninterrupted minutes of disruption, given a good start.

  A lectern was placed at the front of the stage. Nine chairs stood in a row behind. Nine chairs! But this was CND’s high point. They had, in 1982, nine speakers prepared to spout their sanctimonious rubbish, aimed at depriving not just the West but the Soviet bloc of its means of support and defence. They were queuing up for their opportunity to speak to an audience as stupid as they were, back then in 1982. Of course we weren’t going to be allowed to listen to all nine. I looked behind me, quite casually, at the stewards. They were amateurs in tabards. The nearest were a pair of weedy teenagers. What contempt I had managed to acquire! The speakers filed in to bursts of applause here and there. More organized applause followed when the convenor told us to applaud. It was all like the headmaster’s plan to tell selected members of the audience what questions they were allowed to ask. Ogden was next to me. His face was red. He was biting his lip. His full concentration was on the stage. I thought, But this really matters to him! The same thought, too, that had come to me in the first moments of Joaquin’s touch, that I was doing it, I was actually going to do it. The applause died down. The first speaker was introduced. They had not been able get the monsignor who ran the whole shebang: he was in Middlesbrough tonight. That monsignor had never known such a fucking triumph. He had never been in such demand, the whore. But he had sent his friend, a Roman Catholic priest too. Joaquin was quite calm in outward appearance from here, but I knew what joy this announcement must be giving him. I do not know how he stopped himself giving a little groan of pleasure. He wanted to fuck with the Roman Catholic Church almost above all things. They were the ones who had fucked with his father. And I wanted to fuck with them too. My hand was on the handle of the device in my bag. My bag was a school satchel. It was on my lap. Innocent days. Nobody in 1982 had thought to search any of the nine bags that the nine of us had brought in.

  The priest came up to the lectern. I almost said pulpit. The lights in the auditorium dimmed. Another piece of luck. It would take them a bit longer to identify us in the pious semi-dark. He began to speak. He had a dry, practical voice that you couldn’t imagine praying. It had a peremptory, impatient quality. I was glad he was down there. He began by saying how happy he was for the turn-out – the idealism – so many young people – the importance of peace – the importance of love—

  The word love was so preposterous in his voice.

  —and he thought he would start not with a prayer but by remembering all those who had been killed in war and other episodes of violence in the thirty-seven years since the first nuclear weapon had been dropped on Hiroshima. The millions of dead. He suggested that we remember them in a two-minute silence.

  What a piece of fucking luck.

  The silence began. After eight seconds Joaquin broke in. I didn’t think he would last even that long.

  ‘Fuck pacifism!’ he yelled. ‘Fuck your fucking Pope!’

  ‘Fuck your disarmament!’ I could hear Tracy screaming.

  ‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’ a voice was shouting. It was mine. It felt like the day I became a man. The football rattle was out of my bag and making a din. The others had theirs – Eric’s klaxon, Mohammed and Kate on football whistles. The others were throwing bags of flour, some breaking up in mid-air, showering the pacifists in the stalls with clouds of powder. This was one of the
reasons to be in the balcony. The noise was immense. The priest looked up at us with weary distaste. He said nothing. The flour was not going to hit him. It was as if he was not going to break with his promise that two minutes’ silence would be held. It was absurd, too, that the stewards, cast into the exercise of reverence, were looking about them. They were only tentatively coming up to throw us out.

  ‘Arm the fucking poor!’ Mohammed yelled. ‘Arm the global fucking poor! Arm the revolution!’ They reached him first. I thought our time was up. I kept on sounding the football rattle. All around me were angry or frightened faces. I caught a glimpse of Joaquin, his set, determined jaw. Some poor sap started hitting him with a copy of a newspaper – Peace Times, I bet. Oh, you fool, you child, I thought. As I knew he would, Joaquin drew back his fist and hit the pacifist in the face, hard. Bleating broke out. Now Joaquin was running for it, over the backs of chairs, his size-thirteen boots in the laps of the two-minute silencers. All the time he was blowing his whistle. Ogden and I pushed after him. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ a timid teenager in a tabard was trying to say to us. ‘This is a police matter, this is a—’ Kate and Tracy were behind us. I hit the teenager as hard as I could. I had seen how it was done. Afterwards, the man you hit stands shocked, his hands to his bleeding nose. The last thing I saw was the smooth face of James Frinton, still in his seat by the aisle. He had brought no bag. I supposed now it had been agreed that he would not protest. Instead he was going to stay there. He would report back. We were not interested in what the idiots were going to say from the stage. We only wanted to know what effect the action had had. Nobody would have thought he had anything to do with us, the Spartacists. He caught my eye. He gave an immense, reckless grin and a massive wink, his face almost folding in half. There was nothing discreet about the gesture. But if you had seen it – if a pacifist in his seat were to have seen it – I’m pretty sure he would have thought a satiric point was being made. James Frinton was giving me a Norman Wisdom wink in support. Anyone who saw it would have thought he was saying, ‘You dickhead.’ But in detail, from my side: ‘Don’t you ever take the piss out of my mother, you dickhead.’ In still more specific and admonitory detail: ‘You – you poor fool – you are going to stay like this for ever. A boy, with a boy’s principles.’ James Frinton gave a wink. He thought he knew what growing up meant. I was to see that gesture again. Only years later did it occur to me that in no circumstances could anyone ever say that James Frinton had smashed up an orderly political movement in 1982. He was there. He knew that disturbances were planned. That was all that could be said of him. He knew that disturbances were inevitable.

  Part two

  I have always been interested in the processes of friendship. Dr Johnson said that friendship was a stuff in need of constant repair, which makes me think of my oldest friendships, the ones of decades, as objects that have been nailed, pinned and stuck together, stitched up, altered and added to without any ultimate plans. Probably in the end you notice that the thing has seven wheels of different sizes, a length of yak wool is loosely nailed to the rear corner (one of thirteen corners at different levels) and the coat of purple paint has only been applied here and there. It holds together. It makes me think, this aphorism of Dr Johnson, that if friendship had been put together solidly, with foresight from the start, these ad hoc staplings and patchwork would not be necessary.

  I was bad at friendship when I was a child. This was the case even before my mother packed her bags and left. You can see the causes of both my incompetence at friendship, and my mother’s departure. My father never really saw the point of human connection. He had a wife not because he much liked her but because he thought that a wife was what you had. Perhaps my mother was no better at human connection, or could not teach it. She was warm and open, but her friendships were intensely begun and petered out quickly, I think, as she took to venting her complaints. I had to analyse what friendship was made of from first principles.

  There was a boy in my class at junior school. I was crazy about him. He dressed much as others did, a white shirt, grey shorts, grey knee-length socks and brown shoes, but there was something about his presentation that set him apart, a kind of crispness. I was crumpled and untidy by the end of the day, but the boy I admired remained bright, clean and sharp-edged. Did he not sweat? Some things about him must have been his mother’s contribution – unusually for that time, his hair was neat and short – but his personal immaculacy could only have been attained because he himself valued it so. He seemed to me extraordinarily distinguished in all things, not least in his name, which was Ivan.

  The construction of friendships must be simple. You see the substance that results around you all the time. I asked my mother to invite two friends round for tea: Ivan and some other boy. There was a small craze at the time for having friends round in this way. My mother was surprised. My father openly thought that those extra-curricular social exchanges should be limited to annual happenings. He admitted the necessity of birthday parties. Ivan and the other boy came round. I don’t think it was a success. Certainly the next day someone who hadn’t been there asked when my parents were going to get divorced. I have a sense of the kitchen door being slammed. An invitation quickly followed from Ivan. In retrospect it was too quick. An obligation was being taken care of. The matter was closed. At the time it filled me with happiness. I loved to walk next to Ivan. I loved to hear his faint, non-committal tones. He was my very best friend. I went to tea. No other boy from school was there, just Ivan’s three elder brothers. I shrank back, daunted. Nevertheless the structure of friendship had been erected, within which future incidents could play out securely. Ivan was my friend.

  At some point after that, a couple of weeks later, I was standing next to Ivan as some playground crisis reached its peak – some kid pushed a girl’s face into the mud. The bully ran away screaming with excitement.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ I said feebly to Ivan. ‘Him doing that to her?’

  Ivan turned to me. His expression was astonishing: full of loathing and utter resentment. He felt passionately about me. My attentions to him, my proximity to him together formed a shocking injustice.

  ‘Why the hell would I tell you what I think?’ Ivan said. He didn’t even push me. There was no urge to waste physical energy on pushing me, or fighting. We were not friends. The encounter was over.

  *

  ‘And this is your room, my dear sirs,’ the lady said. She was clean, bosomy, wearing an apron over a white cardigan and black skirt. The apartment-pension was on the third floor of the quiet street off the Kurfürstendamm. We had taken a clattering brass-framed lift up to the front door. She had let us carry our own suitcases from the front desk of the pension. ‘This is the breakfast room,’ she said, gesturing with a turn and a smile. ‘Breakfast from seven thirty to ten, but it would be a kindness to Marlene, who helps, if you would try not to arrive at two minutes to ten. A hard-boiled egg. If you would like anything other than that, with cheese and ham and the usual, please inform me the night before. That will be fine? Very good. And here is your room.’

  Ogden followed her in, making no comment, not matching the smiling and nodding that I was offering. He dropped his bag. He flung himself on to the bed by the window without taking his boots off. There was a clean white counterpane. It was a beautiful room, clean and airy, a wide window giving on to the thick sunlit foliage of a lime tree in the street. The proprietor’s smile hardly changed at Ogden’s muddy boots on the bed. Perhaps it fixed a little. ‘And you are here for two nights,’ she said, switching to English. She must have guessed that I was the only one of us who could speak German. Perhaps she politely put Ogden’s roughness down to not understanding something.

  ‘No,’ Ogden said. He massaged his temples, his eyes shut. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow. One night only.’

  ‘It’s actually two nights,’ I said. ‘We have stuff to arrange tomorrow, Percy. I don’t know how long i
t will take, to be honest.’ I was on the verge of apologizing to Frau Dittberner for my friend. I settled for smiling warmly. It was Percy, after all, who I was going to be spending the next two weeks with. She smiled warmly back, withdrawing.

  ‘It’s pretty nice,’ I said. Ogden lit a cigarette. There was no other response.

  I was in charge of the arrangements. The first of these had been to find a place to stay in West Berlin. It was only for two nights. Still, I was concerned about my choice. This fortnight was the first time I had been away with Percy Ogden. Things had happened since we had last spent much time together. I wanted the journey to begin well. The tone of the place in West Berlin was important to get right.

  Ogden had arrived at the airport at the utmost pitch of lateness. I had long ago given up. I had got on the plane when he was escorted on by officials. A couple of people in business class even gave an ironic burst of applause. We had been sitting there for some time.

  ‘A close-run thing,’ Ogden had said, sitting down.

  ‘I’m sure you had important things to do,’ I said.

  ‘There was a phone call out of the blue. Went on and on. Had to be dealt with.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now.’

  ‘Looking forward to it.’

  Our lives were quite different now. Ogden had gone to London after university. He was working for a Labour MP. I had gone back to the town where we grew up. I was a year and a half into a PhD. I was starting to be given teaching work. I had all the time in the world. The suggestion that we go together for a two-week trip to East Germany had come out of the blue. I had agreed. I had actually never spent time in a socialist country. We would do it as holidaymakers. I had suggested going by rail, ferry and road, which would be cheaper. In the end Ogden had got his way. We had taken a plane from London, changing in Frankfurt. This was the requirement on commercial flights to Berlin reached by agreement between the four powers who had divided the city between them in 1945. There were other oddities about the formal arrangements, including the interesting fact (I had spent an hour at the airport in London reading a guidebook) that German residents of the three Western segments were not subject to call-up for military service by the Federal government in Bonn. This part of Germany was physically separated from the rest by a large wall.