I won’t go into details; they are still rather painful to recall. The main facts are that I put myself body and soul into the hands of the R.S.W.P., and within a week I had moved out of my cosy little flat in Acton and into a squat in what is now a very posh part of Notting Hill Gate. This was not for financial reasons, because I was still earning good money at the Round House, but so that I could live with other party members, and more particularly Deirdre. I still remember our ecstatic but loveless couplings with shame: not, I must admit, because they were loveless, but because the sound of them could be heard all over that dank and echoing squat.
As a member of the R.S.W.P. I found that I had no time to myself, none to reflect or consider. This, I am sure, was deliberately contrived. Life was full of activity, some of it interesting, but most of it not. I enjoyed the meetings and debates, the joining of picket lines. These events were imbued with the sense of an impending apocalypse in which I was going to be an important figure. I saw myself as one of Ed and Sonia’s chief henchmen; I even fantasised once or twice about taking over from Ed in a civilised coup, though I kept that very dark, even from myself.
This was thrilling, but there were other aspects to the R.S.W.P. which were sheer drudgery and worse. Most of these concerned the R.S.W.P. newspaper which was called
Red Worker
.
I call it a newspaper, but it rarely consisted of more than eight pages, sometimes only a folded sheet of A2 paper. It came out weekly, and one of the dreariest and most dispiriting duties of the R.S.W.P. rank and file was to have to stand at street corners or on picket lines, or outside meetings and sell it. The few who bought it only did so out of pity, or a kind of listless curiosity. The theory was, you see, that the Party could fund itself through the sale of its organ, but the truth was it rarely broke even, let alone made a profit.
I was also involved in the editorial side of the paper which was rather more interesting. The
Red Worker
meetings were presided over by Ed, who decided what the front page story was to be (nearly always some tale of government atrocity against striking workers) and would present us with his leading article for the inside pages. These tended to have titles like ‘Nationalism versus Internationalism’ or ‘Corporatism and Social Fascism’, and were written in his characteristically dry clear style.
It was notable that Ed’s belief in Worker’s Control did not extend to allowing anyone except himself to have much say in the paper’s content. If he wanted copy, he would solicit articles from one of us and sub-edit ruthlessly. He was there to supervise the ‘paste-up’ of
Red Worker
on Thursday nights and take the artwork to the printer’s, but he never joined us on the streets to sell the paper. Dissent from his views was not tolerated; comradeship was kept within rigid, and somewhat hierarchical, boundaries.
One of the things I was slowly beginning to discover — it just shows how immature I was — is that people’s niceness and nastiness have little or nothing to do with what they believe in. Sonia, for instance, has always had a heart as big as a hillside; her brother Ed’s was an icicle, and yet they subscribed to precisely the same creed: Ed made sure of that.
Red Worker
was run from a small office in Clerkenwell which we shared with something called the AFA, the Anti-Fascist Association. Do you remember the AFA? They were very big on the evils of racism. Nothing wrong with that, but if you see racism as the root of
all
evil, it can rather limit your point of view. That’s what we thought, anyway, but basically we were on their side, and it was all supposed to be terribly comradely. As it turned out, of course, we had rows with them the whole time: about the rent, the phone and electricity bills, when we could use the place. (I got into terrible trouble once for leaving an empty box of Black Magic chocolates in the waste paper bin. Racist chocolates, you see.) It was a bad relationship: we hated the AFA and they hated us with a bitterness that only one sect of the same religion can feel for another.
The office was on the third floor of a large old building containing similar offices, mostly housing obscure organisations with grandiose titles like the League of Communal Virtue, the Astral Philosophy Society, or Transcendental Therapists International. I never saw anyone go in our out of the building except us and the odd (very odd) Anti-Fascist, so I never met a Transcendental Therapist or an Astral Philosopher going up or down the bleak stone stairwell. I came to wonder if they existed at all.
A few weeks after the end of the run of
The Good Woman of Setzuan
, while we were doing the paste-up in the
Red Worker
office one night, Sonia approached me with that solicitous air that I had come to know and dread. She was going to ask me to make some great sacrifice for the Party. I knew also that, though it was Sonia who made it, the request originated from Ed. She had the ability to make any demand on one’s time or energy seem like the conferring of a mysterious privilege; only in retrospect was it revealed as an imposition.
‘Marcus,’ she said. ‘I am going to ask you to help us out with something, because Ed and I have absolute trust in you. We need someone to guard The
Red Worker
Offices at night. As you know, the R.S.W.P. is coming in for a lot of harassment from the authorities. They really feel threatened. What Ed puts up with at work from government stooges is just incredible. His flat is likely to be raided at any time, so we’ve secretly moved most of our important files here. But they may be on to us. Of course they’re not going to do this publicly, with a search warrant or anything. What they’re likely to do is an unofficial raid which they make to look like a break-in afterwards, so we need someone in the
Red Worker
Offices at night to guard against that. Now we’ve had a rota going for some time, but lately people seem to be crying off. I must say I’m very disappointed in them: it’s such a vital task. I won’t mention their names. I wonder if you’d spare a couple of nights a week? Would you do that? Ed and I would be incredibly grateful.’
I said I would, and she kissed me on the cheek. When I told Deirdre about the arrangement she simply nodded and said, ‘Right on!’ It was obvious she had been consulted before I had, but that was how things happened in the R.S.W.P. I wondered if I was being tested in some way, like those medieval squires who were made to stand guard all night over the Blessed Sacrament on the eve of their chivalric investiture.
The first night, I rather enjoyed. Clerkenwell is a part of London composed almost entirely of offices and warehouses. The odd shop or sandwich bar existed purely to serve the workers, and therefore closed when they went home. At night the streets were silent, deserted, and grey. Silence in a city at night has a special quality; it is the silence of suspended animation, a kind of temporary death. Only some distant city church clock chiming the hours broke the stillness, or, once or twice, the violent roar of a car or motorbike driven by a returning reveller. I felt held between moments of time, and that if I had a pair of wings I could have flown out of this life into another. It was the first time in the months since I had joined the party that I was able to be alone with myself.
My sense of solitude and liberation was enhanced by the conditions of my service. I was told that my ‘guard duty’ would be more effective if I were to keep the light off in the offices. The object was to save electricity and not to arouse suspicion. I suspected also that were the AFA to know of our nocturnal vigils they might object, or demand that we pay more rent.
On my second night of guard duty, a couple of days later, I found that the novelty of my circumstances had worn off and I had begun to feel restless. I had brought along a torch so that I could read, but my racing thoughts turned pages of print into meaningless runes. (My dullness was enhanced by the fact that I had dutifully brought with me only one book, Ed Tombs’s groundbreaking work
The Semiotics of Revolutionary Culture
, whose prose was like a featureless landscape full of signposts.) The silence which before had liberated my senses now had a deadness to it. I began to fret about the value of my activity in guarding this small circulation political sheet against, quite possibly, an illusory threat. This time I was carried not beyond myself but within, and there I found a desert.
At about three o’clock I must have passed into a doze, only to wake some time later to a very unexpected sensation. I felt a prickling on my scalp and heat in my cheeks. My ears burned. It was as if I were blushing with embarrassment; but for what?
Then I noticed that the dead silence was no longer dead. There was a noise of a kind, but I could not tell at first whether it was inside my head or out of it. It is difficult to define; all I can say is that the airwaves had somehow been disturbed. I went to the window and looked out. The street was deserted and grey, the surrounding buildings were grey, as was the light itself. Yet things moved in the street, unnumbered things, or rather the shadows of things: memories of innumerable goings troubled the grey light and made it shudder. The street below had become a river bed over which flowed the minds of countless people, heads bent, thoughts on other things, on home and money and work and routine. I had not thought that death had undone so many.
I blinked, shook myself, turned away from the window, and the illusion was gone. It was gone, but it remained a memory. A distant church clock chimed four. Another four hours and the ordeal was over. I swore that I would never consent to do guard duty again. Something inside me had been shaken, and I did not know what. I only knew that if I told anyone in the Party about it I would be sneered at and mocked for my ‘petty bourgeois fantasies’.
I had resolved to resist all blandishments and threats, even Deirdre’s withering disdain. I was not going do guard duty ever again. Then, about three days later, I met Sonia at a meeting. Almost as soon as I saw her I knew what she was going to ask of me. Yes, it was as I had expected, but this time she wanted me to stand guard every night for a whole week. She must have seen my dismay because, instead of exercising her charm, she launched into a tirade against all the people who had let her down over this ‘guard duty’.
‘I can’t understand it. They do it once or twice, and then they cry off. The reasons they give are all incredibly feeble. They’ve got no balls, no bottle. You know, Ed’s working incredibly hard to train up a cadre of leaders for the struggle ahead; and I’ve had to tell him that these people are quite unsuited for leadership roles. To be a leader, you’ve got to show first that you’re loyal and dedicated; you can’t just cry off when the going gets tough. Ed and I have great hopes for you as part of our inner cadre of leaders.’
You see, she had cunningly appealed to my lust for power; and this, I think, was the first time I consciously recognised it as a force in my life. I did put up some sort of feeble demur about having to do it for a whole week, so Sonia promised me faithfully that I would be relieved at the end of it. ‘I do realise, we are asking a lot of you,’ she said. There was a look in her eyes which told me that she was on the edge of hysteria. The pupils were little more than black pin pricks in those sea-green irises, and there was a tiny fleck of foam on her lips.
As a last bid for freedom I said: ‘Can’t you or Ed do it at all?’
‘We would, of course, but just at the moment we are so involved in action vital to the Movement. This is a time of crisis. The great struggle is beginning. Ed and I are needed on the front line.’
‘And I can safely be left in the rear,’ I said. ‘I quite understand.’
One of Sonia’s rather endearing characteristics is that she is absolutely immune to all forms of irony or sarcasm. This meant that one could relieve one’s feelings with a sardonic remark in the full knowledge that the barb would never penetrate. It has always astonished me that, despite this, she is an accomplished comedienne on stage. A kind of instinct must come into play, by-passing all intellectual faculties. She must be the theatrical equivalent of an idiot savant.
On the evening before I was due to begin my week of vigil, Deirdre took me to a fund-raising night for the R.S.W.P. at the old Half Moon Theatre in Whitechapel. I felt at the time rather as I had as a child when my parents took me out for a special treat before I went back to school. That was the nature of my relationship with Deirdre, except that she was more like a strict governess than a mother. She would mock my public school accent and ‘bourgeois’ attitudes, employing the same sanctimonious fervour with which Ignatius Loyola bullied any new Jesuit recruit who showed signs of his former life as an aristocratic dandy. But this evening Deirdre was less severe than usual.
I mention this entertainment only because I believe it had an influence on what happened to me. There was a comedian who made jokes mainly about Northern Ireland, an elderly and crapulous female blues singer who refused, despite repeated requests, to sing ‘Frankie and Johnnie’, and there were The Under-Dogs. The Under-Dogs were a band of socialist folk musicians who featured regularly on occasions such as these and were, as a result, immensely popular and celebrated in our little world. I believe they were extremely accomplished musicians in their way. They sang plaintive old songs about the plights of Lancashire weavers and agricultural workers, but they sang also about the picket lines of modern England, and, inevitably, British troops in Northern Ireland. There was a song, of theirs, called for some reason, One-eyed Pigs which had as its refrain, ‘Troops Out!’ This was taken up by the audience and the little ramshackle theatre shook for what seemed like an eternity to ‘Troops Out! Troops Out! Troops Out!’ Were we really as mindless as everyone else?