The Sixties

by Jenny Diski

  The permission was already available, long before the Sixties generation were blamed for instigating the permissive society. During his time as Home Secretary, Jenkins (hardly a radical socialist) oversaw the relaxation of a series of legal curbs on sexual and social freedom: on divorce, the abolition of theatre censorship, the legalisation of abortion and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The world wasn’t waiting for the post-war children to make it free, the post-war children were reinventing their own freedom in a climate made ready for them. Jenkins’s near contemporary Mary Whitehouse, a woman who described herself as an ‘ordinary housewife’ and was in the vanguard of the backlash against all things permissive, complained about the terrible freedoms the young were taking, but she complained much more about the liberality of those like the Home Secretary, the BBC’s director-general Hugh Carlton Greene, and the Bishop of Woolwich. All of them, as far as we were concerned, were the establishment, the grown-ups, those whom we gave ourselves permission to rebel against.

  Nevertheless, it was in the late Sixties that the Gay Liberation Movement took off. In London, mysterious graffiti appeared on walls everywhere saying simply ‘’Tis Gay’. To this day, I don’t know if it was part of a campaign or just some happy wall-writer extolling the joys of life. It was certainly my first sighting of the word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual – if indeed that’s what it was. It was much clearer in Greenwich Village, New York, when on 29 June 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn one time too many, and the gays, drag queens and transgendered patrons finally had enough. The Stonewall riots lasted for days, with local people swelling the rebellion, blockading the street and torching the inn while the drag queens sang their anthem:

  We are the Stonewall Girls

  We wear our hair in curls

  We wear no underwear

  We show our pubic hair

  We wear our dungarees

  Above our nelly knees

  Gay Power was born in the Sixties to battle alongside other persecuted groups – blacks, Hispanics and women – who were fighting for justice. If the general sexual revolution had its problems, gay power was the acceleration of a genuine liberation. Not that homophobia has been decisively defeated, any more than racism or sexism, even now, but attitudes have been changed, and even if it only means that bigots have to whisper their bigotry to each other, it is a real achievement of which (along with those engaged in the battle previously) the Sixties generation can be proud.

  4

  REMAKING THE WORLD

  ...the advance guard of the new order. We wished to transform Western civilisation because we regarded it as politically, morally and culturally bankrupt. That was the hallmark of 1968.

  Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years, 1987

  There was an American staying in our flat in Covent Garden, on the run from the US draft to Vietnam. Seymour was a small, dark, quite round, full-bearded, long-haired, gentle soul, softly spoken, who sat in the lotus position and smiled benignly at the world he looked out at when he was tripping and even when he wasn’t. We were pals. We might have had sex once or twice, I can’t remember, but it wasn’t the point. On Sunday morning, 17 March 1968, we set off together to Trafalgar Square for the start of the second Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam war demonstration. He had more urgent reasons than me for protesting the Vietnam war but I’d been marching and sitting down, not being moved (actually being both physically and emotionally moved) since the Aldermaston march in 1963, when I was still just fifteen. Back then I remember walking in the middle of a great straggling column of people, mostly older than me, but many not very much older, who were chanting, singing, debating politics, and feeling I was part of something undeniably important – the continuing existence of the planet, actually – thrilled to be among them, at last, to have found a group I liked appearing to belong with. The gaiety was powerful and beguiling, the uniform of denim, long hair and beards reassuring. We were the beatniks and weirdies the popular press wrote about and our parents worried so much about. I was marching with a group of people in their late twenties, who met regularly at the Highlander and the French pubs in Dean Street, and the Partisan café round the corner, where the New Left congregated. One of them was the son of a friend of the woman I was staying with, and they had been charged with my care.

  It was a moment when I felt I might be in the right place, among these like-minded, humanist, socialist, hard-drinking, fast-talking, clever people who treated me not as if they were looking after me but as one of their group. But there were moments, as I put one foot in front of another through the towns of Reading and Slough, when the point of what we were doing vividly came back to me. I really did believe that sooner or later the bombs would explode in Washington and Moscow, Paris and London. I was quite sure that I would have to live part of my life, perhaps most of my life, in a post-nuclear devastated world. If I lived at all. I knew it in the way that children suddenly come to know that one day inescapably they will die, and try to understand it by rehearsing the catastrophe as they lie in bed at night, while their parents believe they are dreaming fairy tales. Much of the time, of course, like the children, I forgot, and behaved like a young person with their whole life in front of them, but that knowing place would intermittently reassert itself, making me almost dizzy with the fact of it. So I looked around sometimes during the three-day march at all of us having such a good time, comrades, conversationalists, drinking pals, and flirting the promise of all kind of pleasures to come, while nonetheless feeling fervently opposed to a politics based on mortal fear, and I wondered if everyone really believed that the worst would actually happen, in the way I did in those moments of certainty. Perhaps everyone thinks that they are the only ones who believe the worst. Or perhaps all fifteen-year-olds think they are the only ones who really know the truth. Anyway, I couldn’t quite imagine that my companions and the other thousands on the march, some of them quite militant for those early days, truly believed they were going to go up in or die slowly from the forthcoming planetary explosion.

  What went with that feeling of being sole keeper of the truth was astonishment, a complete inability to comprehend how those who were in charge of the world could operate as they did. Not just their building of nuclear weapons, and the creation of fear, but their acceptance of, let alone their complicity in the interrelated wicked-nesses of social and educational inequality, racism and poverty. I had the flashing sense that it was a kind of dream world I inhabited, that I would wake up and, of course, none of those unthinkable ills were permitted by rational, educated, responsible people. I knew a little about the required intricacies and compromises of realpolitik, inasmuch as I’d studied European history for A level, but what was more real than the fact of hungry, sick and dispossessed human beings living on the same planet as the well-fed, highly schooled and skilled people in charge who could do something about it? I was not, to put it another way, political. I paid attention to the world and saw suffering being tolerated for political and economic reasons, or greed, or laziness, and, being somewhat new on the planet, it shocked me.

  Five years later, I hadn’t grown any more sophisticated. The American invasion of Vietnam wasn’t a British war, not even a blunder of the British empire, but the Wilson government publicly supported the Americans, though it did manage to avoid – that time – sending troops as proof of their support. But at that point in the history of the world, as ever since, it mattered very little what the British government did or didn’t do. What the Americans were doing in Vietnam was startlingly clear; everywhere people watched TV reports and read in newspapers of a world power napalming peasant villages in the hunt for an ill-equipped guerrilla army, in the name of US security. We learned of American soldiers turning savage against the ‘gooks’ – the less than human, the not-us – and transforming ancient South Vietnamese cities into whorehouses for their rest and recreation. It was shown around the world, for everyone to see. No one I knew, apart from the draft-dodging Seymour, was caught up in the war, but t
hat wasn’t the point. Something was different from previous wars and foreign adventures: access by the media and to the media, and for me and many others of the post-war generation, the world could no longer be divided up into those I knew and those I didn’t. What happened far away to strangers mattered. If what America did wasn’t my fault, I had no doubt that it was my responsibility to stand against it.

  Tariq Ali, unlike me, was political, but he too was young. Speaking to the Vietnamese contingent from the National Liberation Front at the Helsinki Peace Conference in 1965 had convinced him ‘that there was one overriding priority for radicals, socialists and democrats in the West. We had to do everything in our power – if necessary turn the world upside down – to help the Vietnamese drive the Americans out of their country. I had thrown myself wholeheartedly into political activities related to the Vietnam war on my return to Britain.’8 He became the visible head of the British Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which had organised the first, and now the much-anticipated second anti-war march on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square.

  The sweet-natured Seymour underwent an astonishing seachange as we arrived in Trafalgar Square for the speeches and the beginning of the march. Clutching my hand and dragging me behind him (I think now of Alice being rushed by the Red Queen to the next square on the chessboard – ‘Faster, faster!’), he manoeuvred through the crowd until he found the group he was looking for. It was widely reported that the German SDS, led by Rudi Dutschke, had come over for the march. The German students had organised the first European demonstration against the war and, along with the Japanese, led the field in militancy. Seymour, his dark beard and short stature now seeming not emblematic of peace and love but the very insignia of a feral street-fighting man, forced his way to the front line of the German contingent, taking me with him. I don’t think he knew I was there any more, he just held onto my hand firmly because the tension and fury in him kept his grip firm. The SDS wore crash helmets and had with them a thick wooden stave which they held at waist height across the eleven or so strong young men (and me) as they lined up to begin the demonstration. We set off at a rapid marching pace. Soon someone shouted an order and the front line, including Seymour and me, stopped. We were not marching properly, Dutschke or whoever it was bellowed. That is, I wasn’t. He glared in my direction. We were to march at a uniform pace. He spoke in German but his meaning was clear. We set off again, the leader counting us firmly into step. Left, right, left, right. I did my best, but I’ve always felt ridiculous trying to be synchronised – group dancing or singing, uniforms, any of that stuff makes me cringe. Every now and then at a barked signal the line broke suddenly into a real run, an organised trot, but still (apart from me) keeping in step. It was a small but quite alarming charge, an organised, running phalanx, which returned to a brisk march only at the next shout of our leader. I was hopeless. Not just unrehearsed but innately rubbish at doing anything in formation. I was used to the soft shuffle, the occasional moving jive to a jazz band of the Aldermaston march. The German group were very strict, and I got told off a lot. ‘Keep in step! Stay in time!’ It wasn’t that I wanted to be there, but Seymour’s iron grip wasn’t loosening and no matter how hard I looked at him he kept his face to the front, and his eyes glazed in excitement.

  Near Marble Arch there was an extraordinary manoeuvre. After one of the sudden charges, a policeman came and stood in front of us, holding us up with a warning not to do it again; we were to walk like everyone else. Without anyone saying anything, but perfectly in unison, the two ends of the front line moved ahead of the middle, bringing round those behind them, and in seconds the policeman had been surrounded, as if by an amoeba putting out pseudopodia to consume its food. The pincer swung open and then closed, the two ends meeting in a new middle, swallowing him completely, as the front line reformed in an orderly fashion, concealing what was going on behind and in the middle of the group. Something was happening behind us, even as we marched, left, right, left, right. A scuffle, a digesting of the bacteria we had consumed, and, as if nothing had happened, we continued neatly and in time on our way. I looked back, but I was too short to see over the forest of helmets. I don’t know what happened to the policeman. It was as if he was lost for ever.

  When we got to the metal fence surrounding Grosvenor Square we were brought to a halt for a short conference. Then the whole group were given a shouted instruction to push back a few yards. On a signal, they began a full charge, complete with an almighty bellowing. They held out the wooden stave in front of them, straight-armed, and it and I hit the fence. They were strong, muscular young men, prepared for a fight, angry and flooded with adrenalin – their use of military formation and varying manoeuvres helped them with that. The hurtling force from the rows behind pressed hard on the front line, the boots and the stave given extra power to attack the barrier, and after two or three runs at it, during the last of which I, of course, fell over, the fence was flattened. Demonstrators poured into the Square through the breach, while I kept very still on the ground and hoped one of their great triumphant boots wouldn’t snap my spine. Eventually, someone lifted me up. I’d lost Seymour, who had finally dropped my hand in the scrummage, and I last saw him running, head down and screaming like a dying bull, towards the front entrance of the Embassy, a small, dark invasion force of his own. The German contingent were all long gone, headed in the same direction, ready to confront the lines of police standing in rows with their arms linked, as if they were about to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, to protect the integrity of the Embassy. I stood still and caught my breath about halfway into the square. Then the horses arrived, galloping out of the streets at the sides of the Embassy, huge and terrifying and to me, pretty crazed by now, like a multiplication of the Four Horsemen, hooves thundering on the grass. The mounted police swung about with their batons, landing blows on heads, necks and shoulders, wherever and on whomever they fell. The crowd fought back, embattled and largely trapped in the square. Even experienced demonstrators in England were unused to this degree of not casual but joyful police violence. They caught at the batons, at legs and arms, and pulled some of the police from their mounts, while spreading the word that it was all right, the horses were trained not to trample people. I hoped they were right, it seemed like a lot of faith to put in a posse of large and frightened animals, but I was more worried about being trampled by the demonstrators who were being pressed back in a mass by the mounted police, and when I found myself eventually backed against a substantial tree it was perfectly plain to me that I was going to be crushed to death.

  I wasn’t. The crowd, smarter than I was, streamed to either side of the tree and I slipped away from it. I fled the fighting and the crowds and took myself home, shaken by the violence of the police and perhaps more by the military organisation of the demonstrators. I was also astonished and worried about Seymour, whom I’d seen for a moment in hand-to-hand combat outside the Embassy with a policeman who towered over him, while gentle Seymour threw his fists and feet at him furiously. But somehow he managed not to get arrested, and turned up at the flat scratched and bruised late that night, utterly different. Dark, bitter, brooding, furious. He stopped taking drugs and paced around the flat enraged as if he had been incarcerated after all. He was completely transformed. Either that, or the person he had been suppressing during his period of sweetness, his smiling and stoned exile, had at last been released. Within a couple of weeks Seymour decided to return to the States. There were ways of getting back incognito, he’d discovered. He proposed to live in hiding, wild in the woods, doing whatever he had to do to fight the US government. I had a grey cape that was really part of the uniform of the Greycoat School which I’d bought in a jumble sale. I gave it to him when he left to help him keep warm in the woods during his resistance. I never saw or heard from him again.

  There were other versions of changing the world. For readers of Marcuse, even such as Tariq Ali, for example:

  ...the long march did not mean ‘boring from within�
� but gaining experience of production, education, computers, mass media, the organisation of production, while simultaneously preserving one’s own political consciousness. The aim of the long march was to build counter-institutions.9

  This was a serious preparation for a new order, but I think there were very few young people prepared to forgo the more demonstrative, emotionally satisfying forms of revolution, or engage seriously if covertly with the ‘straight’ world in the way ‘boring from within’ (in both senses) required. There were endless meetings, of course, if you had signed up to the VSC (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign), IMG (International Marxist Group), IS (International Socialists) or WRP (Workers’ Revolutionary Party); you could keep to agendas, take minutes, debate and make points of order, and feel you were part of the righteous few who were in possession of the true way. In this sense, too, I was not political. I continued to see and abhor what was wrong, but I wasn’t convinced by any of the true and mutually exclusive solutions on offer. Other people’s certainty always made me uncertain. I failed to join anything and merely continued my long-standing inclination for non-engagement. I told myself that smoking dope, dropping acid, shooting up Methedrine and reading about other ways of being was a form of resistance against the unsatisfactory world. I settled for outlawhood. Or escape, as others, more politically committed, would reasonably have said. It suited my temperament, and the interdisciplinary arguments and fractional in-fighting in the meetings I did attend – I made small efforts from time to time – seemed far too much like microcosmic versions of what went on in the real world that we all so much disliked. I had the airy idealism of M. Poupin, Henry James’s refugee from the Paris Commune in The Princess Casamassima: