The Blue Touch Paper (12 page)

Roger and I were awed by the Durrs' sweetness and eloquence, but also by the knowledge of how close they were to the most important political movement in America. The four of us sat down for dinner. Not long after, the telephone rang in another part of the house. At once, Virginia sprang up to get it. Clifford continued eating and talking, until from the next room we heard Virginia's voice raised in horror and disbelief. The words rang out clear as a bell. ‘But Lyndon, what are you
doing
in Vietnam?' When she came back, she was shaking her head. ‘That was the president.' It turned out she and Lyndon Johnson had started out as union school organisers in Texas together, and he still regularly telephoned her from the White House to get soundings on what his old friends and contemporaries back in the real world were thinking. When in March 1968 Johnson refused to run again for the presidency, pleading in mitigation for his actions that no one at the time had warned him of how dangerous it would be to expand the doomed American operation in Vietnam, I knew he was lying. I'd heard someone warn him.

It's extraordinary how quickly your view of a whole country can change. Roger and I travelled on up the East Coast, neither of us ever likely thereafter to succumb to the facile
anti-Americanism of the European left. At first hand, I would come to know and loathe the crimes of American imperialism, the toll it took on the innocent when in the following years, under Nixon and Reagan, the US enthusiastically sponsored terrorism and dictatorship all over the world, particularly in South and Central America, where it killed many and saved none. But I would also experience the true principles of American dissent and the startling honesty of American dissenters, many of whom had already paid a price for their beliefs unimaginable to leftists back home. In 1965, the US was starting to be a country at war with itself, and the evidence of that war was everywhere. Chastened, we moved on to Atlanta, to Charlotte, to Williamsburg, to Washington and then to Philadelphia, before arriving in Manhattan on our ninety-ninth day. We had nowhere to stay, and my Cranleigh wages were long gone.

I'd suffered from asthma and from its neurotic shadow eczema throughout my upbringing, and the heat and humidity in New York that July were sometimes asphyxiating. They were certainly tiring. I'd never been anywhere before where the thermometer stayed steady at night. It was hard to sleep, and by day it was hard to move. My most urgent need was to get a job. The only available short-term employment was on commission. Within a day, I had signed up to sell vacuum cleaners door to door. Every morning I would report to an office on Third Avenue where all the salesmen would be given an inspirational talk before setting out on the day's trudge. You got a free doughnut and a cup of coffee, so I never missed it. Every day it was explained to us that it was not enough to sell the basic Electrolux. For some extra dollars, the client could buy something called a power nozzle, which, we were told, made the machine even more effective. It was part of the daily uplift
to tell us that we should not be ashamed of trying to push the case for the more expensive nozzle. ‘Think of it this way,' the instructor would say. ‘If you fail to sell it, you're not just depriving the client of a valuable nozzle. You're depriving America of nozzles.'

This kind of speech had already been parodied in movies a thousand times, but there was something splendid about a man – I think he was even called Art – who could deliver it without self-consciousness. Anyway, I was in no position to sneer, because I was hopeless at selling door to door. It was not just that I found it embarrassing. It was also that, when I was lucky enough to get inside anyone's apartment, I referred to the machine as a Hoover, which I wrongly believed was the generic name for any apparatus which sucks up dust. I'd been calling my product a Hoover for some days before a woman, well into her seventies, corrected me. ‘What you're selling's an Electrolux. Hoover's your opposition.'

The city was divided up on a grid among Electrolux salesmen, and you didn't stray onto other people's territory without their permission. Because I arrived last, I got the least promising. I spent every day in the insufferable heat up on the Upper East Side, knocking on every single door in every single building around 93rd and 94th. What struck me first was how dark the apartments were. I had imagined New York as a city of light, and from the cinema knew it as a place of towering verticals and shimmering silvers. Instead, when you actually started going inside people's homes, you found tiny, cramped little boxes with cream venetian blinds and ornate table lamps which needed to keep burning all day. Everyone was overlooked.

Large parts of the city were still as described by Richard Yates and Sloan Wilson. Office workers drank Martinis and
men wore hats to work. The women radiated a brisk kind of elegance which was formidable without being uppity. But the place Roger and I found to stay was in the less tony part of town. The Lower East Side, where an alternative culture was just beginning to be forged, was by no means the glamorous
quartier
it is now. You looked behind you quite a lot and what you saw made your pace quicken often. I came upon my first dead body on East 6th Street, lying halfway across the sidewalk. The man had a stab wound in his back and the blood, scarlet, was still running into the gutter. We were given bunks, six to a room, in something called the International Student Hospice. At $1.50 a night, it was suspiciously $3.50 cheaper than any other in the city. It turned out there was a reason. The warden was a predator. There were breweries close by, so every morning I would set off to work through streets already sopping with the yeasty stink of warm beer. I used to divert through the hippyish St Mark's Place for no other reason but that I associated it with Bob Dylan. I hoped to catch sight of him. The photograph of Dylan with his arm round the artist Suze Rotolo on the cover of the album
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
was, for me, a definitive image of romance, one I had stared at longingly more times than I cared to admit. It represented a perfect fantasy of everything I might wish my life to be.

Unfortunately, I was not making a penny. On 21 July I sold my first packet of carpet shampoo bags, and that was it. Nobody wanted to buy from an emaciated teenager whose unlaundered shirts were darkly patterned with sweat. In the evenings Roger and I would eat the unsold food supermarkets passed on to the hostel owner, and then, according to my diary, we headed off to see what was on offer: as it turned out,
Intolerance, The Zoo Story, Krapp's Last Tape, Les Quatre Cents Coups, La Strada,
Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, Les Amants, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, The Informer, Great Expectations, Darling, Paths of Glory
and
Sunset Boulevard
– these last three in a single day. At the Village Vanguard we heard Sonny Rollins play several times. Cecil Taylor, too. The admission charge was $1.

Eventually, in an act of philanthropy which I absolutely associate with Americanness, my senior colleague Mr Baker, who sold four or five Electroluxes a day, gave me a couple of his sales, just so that I would be able to go on living. Baker had been doing the job for thirty years, and he had a notebook with a handwritten record of the state of household machinery within more or less every apartment to the east of the park. He spent as much time updating and consulting the book as he did selling. For him, information was power. He knew when people needed a change.

What Roger and I were exploring, to our surprise, was a nineteenth-century city which took its character from the fact that the working class and the immigrants still lived in the middle of it. You could move around, eat in cheap places, stay in cheap hostels, go to cheap shows, because there were lots of people who lived in Manhattan who were far worse off than you were. It wasn't just the famous racial mix, it was much more a mix of fortune which made life liveable at the bottom, if never as luxurious as it was at the top. From the outside, as you looked across, the skyline was all soaring Gershwin and grandeur. But in its interstices, non-vacuum-buying people hung on, finding ways of getting by.

I stayed about a month, and in mid-August, as Roger headed on to Boston, I went back to fulfil a long-hatched plan. Each year Patrick Halsey took two of the pupils he liked most on a camping trip in Europe. In August 1965 he wanted to take
me and another boy, David Ransom, to what Patrick still called Constantinople. My old housemaster's overexcitement at driving his battered Triumph through Salzburg, Oto
ec and Zagreb was palpable, so progress down through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to the Bosporus was speedy but hair-raising. We seemed to spend days staring out at women drying tobacco, or bathing up to their waists in mud-holes in the fields. But after a four-day stay on the waterside in Istanbul it was the homeward leg of our long journey which left the more lasting impression. As a historian of the Third Reich, Patrick wanted us to take in as much as possible in a single transit. We travelled in the famous elevator cut out of the rock at the very centre of a mountain to visit the Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle's Nest. At Berchtesgaden we also went to see the burnt-out site of Hitler's Berghof. But for Patrick the most urgent priority was that we should visit Dachau, the Nazis' first purpose-built concentration camp, where he had regularly been since the war. It was part of what made him such a fine teacher. He did not think a civilised education would be complete unless a pupil visited at least one of the places where civilisation came to a halt.

In the mid-1960s, few tourists took in concentration camps. They were little visited. Acts of commemoration were few. Probably on the day we went there were only twenty or thirty people trooping round, staring at the exhibits which were all the more powerful for being so amateurish and unadorned. The sister of someone who had been killed in the camp haunted the place every day of her life, picking out strangers at random and explaining to them the exact ways in which the rituals of the camp had been organised. Many different reasons have been advanced for the peculiar time-lapse of perhaps a generation after the end of the war before deep curiosity about the nature
of Nazi crimes spread wide, and about what it was in Jewish history, or perhaps Israeli history, which freed survivors up to speak out. But on that day in 1965, the three of us left shaken to our roots. Throughout my childhood, the Second World War had been a presence, an essential part of the perspective from which so many events in my life had been seen. But I had known only the war's victors. Now David and I learned a little about its victims. We travelled on up the Mosel because Patrick wanted to attend the annual wine festival. We went from town to town, sampling, in tents. Bands played. The wine, we were told, was especially delicious because it had grown on vines in fields fertilised by so many dead bodies. I stuck to beer.

5

Serious, Not Solemn

From the start, the language of Cambridge was the language of rebellion. We still dressed in ties and sports jackets, we had to wear gowns in the street and to lectures, shoulder-length hair didn't arrive until 1966, and in some crazy affectation, or perhaps because it was the cheapest way of absorbing the most nicotine, I took to smoking a pipe. Like everyone else, I ordered bottles of dry sherry from the buttery to keep in my room. Occasionally, port. But the way I saw the world, with the Vietnam war darkening daily, was increasingly about authority and opposition. The city of Cambridge looked dirty and down at heel, while the colleges had an air of benign neglect. We were all given threadbare rooms of our own, in my case in college, and there was a system in place whereby the young gentlemen's beds were made and their rooms tidied by women from the town. The culture of college servants, Raymond Williams pointed out in his 1970 TV documentary in the series
One Pair of Eyes
, was one which the university studiously ignored. Although a bedder's duties theoretically included letting the college know if their young men had made it back before the 11 p.m. curfew – any later and you had to climb in over railings – it never occurred to me they would take their obligations seriously. I always trusted people. In my first year I was therefore astonished to be hauled before my moral tutor, Bernard Towers, who was a hardline Catholic and a scholar of Teilhard de Chardin. He threatened
to send me down because my bedder had reported finding me one morning with a girl in my room. Magnanimously, he said he was going to be lenient and let me off with a fine of £10. I said, ‘Oh you mean like a brothel charge?'

Jesus College brought out the glibness in me. Often I took refuge in a sort of exhausting facetiousness which I look back on without pride. California drained out of my bones the moment I arrived, like a suntan which had taken too fast. I was back in the worst of authoritarian, self-deluding Britain, dealing with characters even more arcane than those of my childhood. With teachers like Harry Guest and Donald Bancroft I had already experienced university teaching of the highest standard. Why did I need to go to another? In the outside world, a vigorous burst of working-class energy was transforming the feeling of the country, often giving voice to groups in society which had never been heard. And here I was, contracted to spin my wheels in one of the places that surge of energy was certain never to reach. After scanning only the first page of a Pelican, how was I to know that I would land in a reactionary rowing college, full of resonantly white South Africans and Rhodesians – van der This and van der That – who longed for nothing more than for their college to be Head of the River? Jesus, or more properly, ‘The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St John the Evangelist and the Glorious Virgin St Radegund', had been founded on the site of a twelfth-century nunnery. It was stuck away down a side-lane, off Cambridge's main strips. From 1503, Thomas Cranmer, the first of a long line of theologians and archbishops, had studied there. The chapel had survived the assaults of both Edward VI and Cromwell. Now we all lived in chilly rooms where we heated tins of baked beans directly on the gas ring, blistering our fingerprints as we took them off. The only glimmer
of enlightenment came from a comprehensive modern art collection, from which undergraduates were invited to take loans for a term. So few were interested, let alone excited, that during most of my three years at Jesus I worked with a bronze Barbara Hepworth maquette on my desk. On my wall I hung a Giacometti, which I stared at while listening, day after day, to The Band, Procol Harum and Tom Lehrer.