Four Gated City (97 page)

I think this was really what most people were feeling: an electrician splicing a wire unconsciously cursed it out of a kind of hatred for what it stood for; it soon broke and burned out fuses and wiring. He did not know what he had done. Similarly there was a steady increase in all kinds of accidents everywhere. It was like an emotional Ludditeism: an unconscious ‘no’ to how we were expected to live. Unconscious, unrecognized, unofficial-for if you said to the electrician, or the mechanic whose carelessness caused the aircrash, or the men whose mistake had caused the fire in the factory: ‘Are you trying to ruin our national recovery? ’-they would one and all have replied, ‘Of course not’, -and believed it.

Half believed it. I think it was the same kind of phenomenon as happened under Hitler with some Germans; they called it ‘an inner immigration’. It was a kind of non-co-operation, a suspension of ordinary living. Something of the same kind went on under certain communist rulers, a slump into a muddle where everything was allowed to go wrong, but no one ever decided this or even allowed themselves to understand it. However that may be, the most striking ingredient of the early ‘seventies was that nothing worked, everything fell apart-that is, from the point of view of ordinary living, where one caught buses and trains and posted letters. Or rather, things would work with extreme and inhuman efficiency in small areas, which did not connect with other areas: a machine or an institution could work brilliantly, but only in isolation. The next machine or a sister institution could be unholy anarchy. Meanwhile the government talked of nothing but national this and that, British that and this, but using the
grandiose language of Imperialism, or the emotional language of wartime.

Meanwhile we lived quietly, unaffected on the whole, like the similar communities or groups all over the country. So we would have remained if it were not that your grandmother (your mother’s mother) was prominent in this government; and that my father was prominent because of his Rescue schemes, and people were always confusing what we stood for. A kind of relative (by marriage), a Graham Patten (he was killed in the Catastrophe, presumably in a government shelter), suggested to his wife (he was for a couple of years Assistant Minister of Arts in the National Government), that there should be a programme on television about us. His wife had inherited his television programme when he became a government official. This was a kind of friendliness really: they ‘meant well’. We did not much like the idea, but we seemed to ourselves irrational. After all, we knew our friends to be happy, when very few people were. It was suggested to us we were being selfish in keeping ourselves to ourselves: we should share our formula. We agreed, and then were sorry. The programme itself was embarrassing, rather silly. The point was that by then no one was able to believe in the possibility of something unorganized, unregimented, undoctrinaire: this we had not foreseen. So the programme emphasized all the points that to us were not important-that there was no constitution, no legal agreements; that some of us had money and others not, and so on. The programme was called ‘An Essay in Primitive Communism’, was an hour and a half long, and occupied a monthly ‘slot’ reserved for programmes with a very high moral and cultural tone. For us it was a disaster. Martha and others had warned us not to let them use the word ‘Communism’. In the ‘seventies the word was as loaded as it had been in the ‘fifties, but loaded vaguely. In the ‘fifties it had meant, quite simply, the Soviet Union, and had associations of treachery and espionage. Twenty years later it meant anything that wasn’t good-a kind of portmanteau word of unpleasant and frightening associations that were never defined. Well, after that we were stuck with the word. There were two bad results, one immediate, one lasting. First, we were overrun by gangs who had come down from Birmingham. They smashed a lot of windows, burned down a thatched shed, stole two cars-nothing worse. Little enough considering the sort of damage done later in such raiding parties ‘for laughs’. And now we were exposed to neighbours as possibly dangerous eccentrics and never after lost the attentions of the police. But the real damage was done among ourselves. For the first time there was a bad atmosphere. Suddenly people were sitting around in ‘discussion groups’ and ‘forums’ and debates’ theorizing about us and about other ways of living. Some people left. One wrote an article in a local newspaper: ‘How I was taken for a ride by the Reds’ - yet five minutes before he left he was in tears and saying: I know I’ll never be so happy again. Officials started
to investigate. Nothing much to begin with: Inspectors from the Ministry of Education to find out how we were indoctrinating the children. There was nothing to find out but they didn’t believe it and kept dropping in unannounced: by then it was taken absolutely for granted by everyone that it was the State and not the parents who had the last word about how children should be brought up. Welfare workers were very attentive. Quite a number of us had been in the hands of welfare workers and psychiatrists at some time or another (well of course this was true of every kind of person), and we found that long-outlived records were being opened up and re-examined. For instance, there was a couple whose first child had died probably as a result of the brutality of the husband-who was eighteen at the time. But since then they had had two children and did quite well except that he got bad depressions when he was convinced that ‘they would catch up with him’. A conscientious welfare worker began visiting the family. He became obsessed that he would have to go to prison. The two cracked, and fled to a Catholic institution like criminals claiming sanctuary in the Middle Ages. They left no address-doubtless thinking they were making things easier for us. But of course we were thereafter plagued by officials looking for them.

This was the time Nicky and his family left us. (They all died in the Catastrophe.) His dossier had him as a professional troublemaker. (The Businessman’s Pool of Consumers’ and Employees’ Cross-references, centrally computered.) The police were trying to find out if he was using the farm as base for agitation in the factories at Reading where there was a lot of industrial trouble. The questions of the police started off self-questioning about politics:
ought
we to be living like this while Britain burned?

So much quarrelling was engendered that we all agreed to try and return to the pre-programmed times. Things would blow over, we decided, if we refused to let ourselves be provoked into statements of principle. Well, they did, but only partly, and it was the end of our time of innocence.

For one thing, we did as so many other organizations, or rice families, or clubs did: we arranged for our own protection. We formed our own militia from among the young men. (In secrecy of course-we had never before been secretive about anything.) It was by then a choice of protecting oneself, or being protected by the police. The police had remained ‘unarmed’ because British police always had been-but were equipped with a large variety of weapons like tear-gas pistols, ‘humane’ anti-riot guns, etc. Being protected by the police was complicated. By then they were all in the pay of some criminal syndicate. Not directly of course. In the countryside it worked like this: the big farmers, separately or in groups, paid money into the funds of the crime syndicates. This was not known as protection money, but then the syndicates weren’t criminal. The funds would be called something
like: Guardians of British Liberty, and the syndicates were integrated with ordinary industry; all were linked with the networks of the Maña and the old Ku Klux Klan on the pattern that had operated in America for years. But, of course, on the humble level of an English county, all it meant was that rich farmers, who protected less rich farmers in return for subsidies to funds, got their farms protected by the police, who were paid by one group or another. These warring groups might very well be subsidiaries of a central organization; but by then crime was pretty well centralized everywhere. In the cities it worked similarly: areas, or districts, were under the patronage of some personage, usually a very respectable one, who worked with the police to protect the district. That this protection was probably against the bullyboys of the patron of an adjoining area who was his business associate and possibly even a personal friend of course doesn’t make sense: it made sense when the getting and spending of money was what mattered. For everyone paid protection money in some form to somebody. Our people paid money to the police, but it was to be left alone by them while we looked after ourselves.

But I must try and describe the violence of that time: it was a development of the type of the violence of the ‘sixties. Its essential quality was a pointlessness, a senselessness, as when in the ‘sixties groups of football fans smashed train compartments for fun, or street gangs wrecked telephone booths, or adolescent boys raced down a dark street smashing milk-bottles against kerbs or motor cars.

For a long time before that in the United States it had not been safe to walk in the big cities at night: sometimes in certain areas not in the day. For years they had moved about by the grace of paternal or brutal police; or under the protection of some gang. (It was in the mid-’seventies that it came out for how long the United States had been run by an only partly concealed conspiracy linking crime, the military machine, the industries to do with war, and government.) Whether he chose to be protected by the bullymen of the gangster groups, or by the police, or by the deliberate choice of a living area that was safe and respectable and inside which he lived as once the Jews had lived in ghettoes, in America the citizen had long since become used to an organized barbarism. This state of affairs spread to Britain. The difficulty was, it spread slowly, and subtly; nothing was ever called by its right name; and there was always a good patriotic reason for every one of the liberties we gave up. I’m apologizing! One generation apologizing to the next for ‘the mess we’ve made’ became a sad joke at the end.

I remember a ridiculous scene. I was visiting your great-grandmother, Margaret (she died in the Catastrophe), at a time when your grandfather, Mark, was trying to get me to join his Rescue schemes. We were met at the station by a chauffeur engaged because he knew karate, and during the afternoon the man from the next estate came over to say gangs from South London were on the prowl in our area, and we should let loose
the guard dogs. Your great-grandmother burst into tears and apologized to your grandfather for the ‘mess they had made’. My father was very moved. He apologized to me for the delinquency of his generation. I imagined myself to be the innocent recipient of the contrition of History itself-then I realized you were in the room, forced to remain in the house to play because there were so many kidnappers about, and it was time I began polishing up my lines for delivery to you.

But who did all this rioting or fighting for fighting’s sake?

Sometimes it was gangs of young men linked with a street or a factory, who might decide to go off in cars or even running in a pack like wolves to smash up some other place. Or it was men and women together-but these usually rioted around their own living area. Sometimes it was students. Sometimes it was the semi-organized militia employed by a big farm or industry, who decided for an evening or a week-end that attack was more enjoyable than defence. But the fighting and rioting tended now to be between students and students, workers and workers, one area of streets against another, one group of strong men against another; not between public and police who were becoming more like referees, or who might even fight against each other as members of opposing gangs.

Apart from the raiding and rioting expeditions for fun, the fighting tended to go on under high-flown slogans. They were mostly patriotic and the reverse, for these had absorbed many of the party-political divisions. But fighting did go on between ‘fascists’ and ‘socialists’; though less and less as time went on. This was not because there were less left-wing and right-wing people; but because the labels were used so cleverly by groups of
agents provocateurs
in street fighting that the old banners of the socialist and communist demonstrations were tarnished. Once everyone had known more or less what the word ‘socialist’ meant. Now, for lots of people it meant the gang who smashed up Lord’s cricket ground last week. The fighting was more like one of the old Westerns, between goodies and baddies. From the early ‘seventies onwards individuals or groups or even whole cities might suddenly succumb to a condition like a child’s ‘promising to be good’. A university would suddenly ‘pledge solidarity with’ or ‘obedience to’ or ‘support for’ the country. This was like the waves of self-immolating fervour that happened under Stalin. But nearly always when this occurred, there would be a minority in the factory or institution, or an opposing factory or trade union who would ‘choose independence’. They would be (according to their opponents) ‘talking the trade union jargon of the ‘thirties’. This last, under the National Government became the equivalent of saying that the group or trade union concerned was seditious, anti-British, dangerous, and deserved punishment. Some group would administer the punishment while the police watched.

There were race riots too, but not as bad as people had feared: black
and white people beat each other up, as part of the general disorder. The Government tended to be lenient about the fighting. But it severely punished offences against property-the waves of casual smashing and burning and looting which grew more frequent and more violent. Such a wave might start in one city (usually in summer, for summer was increasingly for violence all over the world) with burnings and smashings and theft, and sweep across the country, this process taking a month. Then things might be quiet for a bit: while the nation followed on television and in the newspapers the stories of how inciters and ringleaders were being caught and punished. Our systems of punishment reverted: there were higher sentences for theft and damage to property than for assault or murder. Throughout this time there was agitation for the reintroduction of hanging, of severer conditions in prison, of beating. The cat was reintroduced for property offences: hanging for assault against certain categories of people, the police and members of the Government for instance. Citizens took things into their own hands when they disagreed with the sentences of the courts. There were odd hangings made to look like suicide, quiet beatings up, and so on.