The Sixties

by Jenny Diski

  There was music, too. Older friends introduced me to Mozart and Beethoven string quartets, opera, Brecht and Weill. I discovered Ives and Copland. And, of course, all the while listened to pirate radio, Caroline and London, and watched Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops religiously. Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelon-ius Monk, Charlie Mingus, the Beatles (though I was disdainful until Rubber Soul came along), the Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, all either accompanied me from the beginning of the decade or had emerged by the middle of it and were essential: the rhythm inside my head, the beat of my heart, the tuning of my sentiments.

  The Fifties are often characterised by a lack of colour. Like most of the movies, they were, everyone agrees, in black and white. In memory, the streets, the clothes, the prospects of the Fifties were in shades of grey. The arrival of colour was no more than implied in the early Sixties. The boldness, at first, was all about the insistent use of monochrome. Black and white was style, art and commentary. Aubrey Beardsley reproductions decorated walls and Bridget Riley paintings shimmered into fabric, Richard Avedon took pictures documenting the civil rights movement and mental hospital patients, David Bailey portrayed the rich and the influential. All of it in a kind of mockery of the 1950s lack of colour. Each of them using the dramatic contrast of black and white, or the grey tones between as a bridge from where we had been to where we were going. White lips, black eyes; implacable black dress, white Courrèges cut-out boots. Bergman, Antonioni, Pasolini. All of this spoke of the colour that wasn’t there, of an absence that until then we hadn’t really noticed. All that insistent black and white screamed the lack of colour that we had put up with and worked its way into forms of art and expression. Colour was possible before the Sixties, but it took time before the world needed to be represented by the full spectrum. Did colour explode into being with the increasing use of drugs? Or did the stark simplicity of black and white finally pall? The middle Sixties was that moment when Dorothy stepped through her front door, out of Kansas, on to the undreamed-of yellowness of the brick road on the way to the Emerald City, and the heart burst with pleasure at the sudden busting out of a full-blown Technicolor world.

  Pop and culture came together for people of my age who had encouragement and the opportunity to explore. It was always the case that middle-class young people were able to discover the arts if they were so inclined, but now the stuff that was coming at all young people from youth-oriented popular media pointed to other things and mixed it all up so much more than had happened before.

  The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the more militant Committee of 100 were political organisations devoted to unilateral nuclear disarmament. But the Aldermaston March and the sit-down demonstrations organised by the Committee of 100 became culturally and socially desirable for the young who wanted not only to create a sense of peace and security for the world but also to meet each other and rebel against the elders. Our parents, and the papers they read, hated the marchers with their long hair, jeans, resistance songs and clashes with the police. What more could an angry fifteen-year-old want? I had waited, along with the rest of the world, to be blown to pieces on 11–12 October 1962. While I sat on the snowy pebble beach watching the grim-grey sea in Brighton, America and Russia played chicken in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn’t history happening at the time – it was perfectly clear to me, and to others, that my world was very likely to end within forty-eight hours. There seemed every reason, once I got to London and my liberal new household, to join in the marches and sit down in the street. There was also the promise of tens of thousands of people of my age and older, like-minded, looking scruffy and cool, having, as the Daily Mail and the People promised, sex like rabbits, and really annoying, actually scaring, vast numbers of the majority we were so intent on being different from. I had ached to go when I was under my parents’ control and couldn’t. When I finally set off on my first Aldermaston in 1963, it was my version of the debutantes’ coming-out ball.

  Along with anger and style, mockery was another way to identify who we were and who we were not. Satire revived, and even those who considered themselves the majority sat down every Saturday night to watch That Was the Week That Was, either to huff and puff about the loss of respect or to cheer on the biting opposition to the abominable, reactionary Tory Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, the Cold War and the new Labour government’s collusion in the American war in Vietnam. Astonishing things had happened in the US. Over there, people of our age had grown up with nuclear drill, learning how to crouch under their desks in case of a nuclear attack. America became a synonym for violence and structural racism. Kennedy was killed, then Martin Luther King, another Kennedy and Malcolm X as the struggle for civil rights began to gather momentum, and radical student movements of the Left both in America and in Europe started to make themselves known. The Vietnam war drafted people of our age into a monstrous and unjust battle. Less violently but just as angrily, Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, and the early skirmishes commenced between the pure and the down and dirty of popular music. America was the beginning of all things new and forthcoming to parochial Britain, swinging as it might have been, and it seemed, looking across the Atlantic, as if the world was wobbling on its axis. It was dangerous, but it was exciting. It felt as if it was not just our time, my time as a young person, but that it was like no time ever before. A snowball had started its progress and had rolled hugely towards the generation born after the Second World War. Us, me. It was full of promise, and we developed an increasing sense of responsibility to use our time of being young – to indulge ourselves, golden generation that we were, but also to give warning that when our lot grew to be old enough to take charge, things were going to be radically, radically different.

  * Though Barbara Hulanicki herself, the actual Biba, imagined that ‘everyone’ was as thin as a stick because of being the generation born into post-war food shortages. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that fat girls wouldn’t have wanted to suffer the humiliation of not finding anything to fit, or the shame of the communal dressing rooms.

  2

  ALTERING REALITIES

  And the ones that mother gives you

  Don’t do anything at all...

  Jefferson Airplane, ‘White Rabbit’

  Drugs: my mother in the 1950s standing at the window of our fifth-floor flat clutching a huge white cardboard box of soluble codeine and aspirin tablets. She got them from the doctor on prescription, 100 at a time. Headaches. Later, early in 1962, when I was fifteen, I ran away from my father to her bedsitting room in Hove, where she had a much smaller box containing Nembutal on the chest of drawers. Insomnia. There were eight left in it when I swallowed them a couple of days later, certain that we couldn’t survive each other in the tiny room, and that there was and never would be anywhere else to go. Not enough to kill me, but sufficient, it turned out, to get me out of the room, into the care of a hospital and away from both parents for good.

  Before that I had been in Banbury with my father, working in a series of shops on the high street, not allowed to go back to school as punishment for my expulsion. At first I’d stolen the ether from the school chemistry lab, then bought it in bottles from local chemists, telling them it was for killing butterflies. I can’t remember how I knew about sniffing ether – the only prohibited drug used at the school in those days was tobacco – but when I tried it I was entranced – precisely – by the immensity of the time I seemed to have been unconscious in a fathomless and dreameasy world. I liked the aeons away from real it gave me, though in reality it was only minutes. But it wasn’t very long before the endless nether ether-world became inhabited by monsters. An eternity of bad dreams was not what I was after at all.

  Five years later, and in another hospital, not the one in Hove they sent me to after the Nembutal overdose, I discovered methylamphetamine – Methedrine. I was nineteen or t
wenty and a fellow patient shared a glass ampoule of it with me and showed me how to use a syringe to skin-pop into a muscle. Time stretched out again, marvellously, though now without a loss of consciousness. Thoughts paraded in front of me like actors taking their bows on stage, stopping for a time to be considered and then passing on. I watched them while I sat back, my favourite way of being in the world, as audience to my own but autonomous mind. A time-traveller’s way of inhabiting my own interior. I liked that very much. A lot better than the coal gas we bubbled through milk in the patients’ kitchen to get a cheap and available high.

  A year later, in a third psychiatric hospital, the Maudsley, I was admitted by the dour Dr Krapl Taylor, who told me that I was a typical addictive personality, and (in a strange non-sequitur) that he would treat my depressed, disordered personality with – I couldn’t believe my luck – Methedrine therapy. Twice a week I saw his crew-cut houseman, who injected Methedrine directly into my vein and then set about trying to get me to ‘abreact’. The idea was to make me distressed enough to have a crisis, which, magically, like a fever breaking, was supposed to relieve me of my depression. ‘You’re worthless,’ he would tell me. ‘I know,’ I’d say. ‘Can I have some more Methedrine, please?’

  Eventually, I left the Maudsley in a rage (abreacting, you might say) and found my way to the much-talked-of Arts Lab in Drury Lane. Upstairs in the café, above the exhibition space (Yoko Ono, I think, a little-known avant-garde artist), I turned around in my chair and said to the man who happened to be behind me, ‘Do you know where I can get some Methedrine?’ He did. I had found one of the speed kings of central London, it turned out, and for a while (until the Methedrine high got very much worse than the ether horrors) I mainlined the stuff. I moved into a flat in Long Acre in Covent Garden in which friends of my dealer lived and found myself my first home, at home as I had never experienced it before. Even as a small child with my parents, I had felt like I was in the wrong place with the wrong people. Now, I sat cross-legged on the floor with my back to the wall and watched the thoughts dancing across my brain, in a smoky room of stoned strangers or friends I’d known for only weeks, and in a way that was completely new to me, I was at last where I really belonged.

  Of course, I smoked dope, too. I always had a joint ready-rolled by the bed for first thing in the morning, and couldn’t imagine a time – when I tried to picture a future – when I would not smoke cannabis. It seemed ridiculous to choose not to be stoned. I also dropped acid, though with much more trepidation than any of the other drugs I used. I was sure, the first time I sucked on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.

  Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip happened to go the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate necessary? There was no choice but to take whatever risk was on offer. Or perhaps it was because I really didn’t care whether I was mad or sane, or more accurately, alive or dead? It’s hard to say, but during that time I was also taking Seconal capsules (a barbiturate, like Nembutal) all day and night, a high dose, prescribed, every four hours. I had discovered another way with Seconal, and sometimes injected myself with it in solution, the effect of which was instant and vacant unconsciousness. There was no other pleasure to be had out of shooting it, except the rush of blankness that filled me up the instant the Seconal hit my brain. I was after exactly that blankness, and also as importantly that millisecond of knowledge that I was becoming unconscious. It certainly wasn’t the permanent madness that a bad trip threatened. But apparently even the risk of madness was preferable to being on nothing at all.

  No one thought of the drug-taking as ‘ recreational’. That was a later concept. Even if my particular bent for self-negation was untypical, the drug-taking young of the Sixties I lived with and met also took their drugs very seriously. Not that we didn’t have fun, but having fun wasn’t recreational. We didn’t do recreation. Well, we didn’t do work very much. At our most pompous we told ourselves that we worked at finding out how best or better to be alive. But however we justified it, we really didn’t make the distinction between work and recreation that shaped our parents’ daily existence. We didn’t have to, because, to reiterate, one way or another the State was paying for us to study or take paid work (waitressing in the café in the Arts Lab, dealing hash, bookshop assistant, selling the International Times) very lightly. There was no need to worry, as our parents did on our behalf, about ‘getting on’, because we had no plan to live in a world in which getting on was of any importance. If there was a plan at all, it was precisely to prevent such a world from structuring our future. We were brainstorming ways of destructuring everything to suit ourselves. We were almost grown-ups, it was inevitable that the world would become fully ours eventually, and therefore, with ourselves in charge, it would be completely different.

  We were certainly not in the majority, not even in our own generation. There were far more ‘straight’ young people than those of us living self-consciously outside the law, dotted about London as well as most other towns and cities in the country. There were enough of us to produce underground papers to pass the news around, to fill the Roundhouse so that we could celebrate the crowd we made, to keep headshops selling pipes and joint papers, and bookshops like Indica and Compendium, busy if not in profit. But, of course, most people took on the world as it was offered to them. This is always the case. Possibly apart from the generations that came to adulthood around the start of the First and Second World Wars, most people aren’t actively engaged in what any given era is later characterised by. Not everyone in France was fomenting revolution in 1789; only a tiny proportion of the new generation were Bright Young Things of the 1920s. What may have been different by 1967 was how easy it was to opt out of the world of adults and yet find ready-made social networks to support our dissent. That the majority chose not to, made them, in our eyes, wilfully blind. The world was in fact going on as it always had, but it seemed to me and the people I knew that it had no idea what it was in for.

  The Stones’ two-and-a-half-minute sneer, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, accurately reflected the way in which we turned our backs on the ‘straights’. We didn’t take drugs to get by, we took drugs to see the world entirely differently. The straight world had our contempt. It wasn’t drugs as such that separated us and them. It was the kind of drugs and the reason for taking them. The Valium-popping wives isolated from reality, trying to keep up with phantom materialism in their suburban villas on Acacia Road or any of the other suitably pastorally referenced streets. The differently isolated working-class women who were also being dished out prescription tranquillisers, to help them cope with their children on the twentieth floor of the high-rise council blocks that were springing up everywhere. Those who colluded with stasis brought about their own doom. We were doing something with drugs, they were just surviving the intolerable world that they had either created or acquiesced in.

  Our youthful cruelty was boundless. Youth does cruelty quite easily, not having the accretions of time to deal with, but I remember a glaring clarity as I looked at the bourgeois life and its compromises, the working life and its compliance, and what seemed the direct consequences of both, that may have demanded cruelty to reassure ourselves that we could stay clear of it. Some of the generation that had come to their young adulthood in the Fifties had seen it too and hit the road. It’s a kind of laser-guided vision, a pure beam of light in a crepuscular landscape, that is available to the young when they look at the world that has been made ready for them, which they are about to step out into. You see it in your children when they get that pitying, disdainful smile on their face and don’t bother to argue wi
th you because you can’t possibly grasp what they know. Which is, simply, that they are new and you are old, and that what they see is being seen accurately for the first time ever. And they are right. The compromises that adults make cause much of the suffering in the world, or, at best, fail to deal with the suffering. Acceptance of one’s lot, maintaining a silence about what can’t be said, lowering your expectations for your own life and for others, and understanding that nothing about the way the world works will ever change, is the very marrow of maturity, and no wonder the newly-fledged children look at it with horror and know that it won’t happen to them – or turn their backs on it for fear it will. They know it’s too late for you to ‘get it’, so they smile and leave the room, away from your reasoning, well, actually, increasingly shrill voice. It’s unnerving – especially if you remember that same smile on your own face when you were young. Not everyone, of course not everyone, but that terrible clarity of vision is available to the young of every generation, and those who look become the trouble-makers, the difficult ones, that the elders complain about eternally.

  In the second half of the Sixties, if you were of the party that chose to look, you were either hell-bent on getting out of that world, as I perhaps was, or you were going to re-vision it and live the vision. Drugs were just one means, like a spaceship or a spell, of getting through the fog of what ‘they’ called reality. A presently available technology for bypassing what they assumed was the ineluctable way of the world. It seemed pellucidly obvious that it could, with a bit of effort, become our way of our world, of a kind we chose to live the rest of our lives in, not theirs. It was necessary, therefore, like explorers through the centuries who mapped routes to new worlds, to make extreme, ill-considered efforts to find it. I say this with a slight smile aged sixty in 2008. There were, in fact, many moments when it felt exactly like that in the flat in Covent Garden in 1968. Smiling gently on your younger self is one way of dealing with the astonishing lack of change. Timothy Leary describes the knowledge we had that the time had come ‘for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new, empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed, knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum...Politics, religion, economics, social structure are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure is biochemical.’3