We Had It So Good (9 page)

“We were poor for so long,” Stephen told his children, “but, man, it was a great kind of poor to be. We didn't miss money, not at all. You could always get what you needed, and you didn't really need much. The summers were wonderful. We used to walk down through Regent's Park and go to the art museums because the pictures were free and there were parties all the time, and happenings. You don't seem to have those anymore. A happening was an anarchist kind of thing. That was it, it just happened, despite all the reasons why it shouldn't. I liked the anarchists. The other stuff, the Marxist bullshit, I could take it or leave it.”

Under Ivan's energetic direction, the squatters did what they could to reverse the dereliction of the house; they painted the walls and covered up the mouse holes. They restored the toilets to working order and paid a chimney sweep to unblock the fireplaces. Andrea planted sunflower seeds and vegetables in the garden, and they grew. They had a crop of tiny finger-shaped carrots and sour white onions. The sunflowers reared up, waving overgrown heads and dense, pollen-heavy hearts around which radiated hectic yellow petals, held up on hairy thick stems. Stephen was amazed at his wife's numerous gifts.

When Andrea had first gone to Kent to stay with Grace in the holidays, after the failure of the hotel, she had strayed out beneath the wisteria bower and down an Alice in Wonderland path which twisted back upon itself and took you into a maze made of box hedge, and instead of getting lost she found her way out of there,
down to the scented roses, and stood watching Grace's mother, who silently handed her a hoe and nodded at the green heads of weeds which needed to be amputated. This is how she learned to garden, a skill Grace had refused to acquire, but Andrea, Stephen slowly observed, was a homemaker, a fixer-up of things untidy or even derelict. She made things better, she would make him better if he gave her half a chance.

Andrea taught Stephen how to grow all kinds of things and built him a simple lean-to shelter to cover the traces of his marijuana crop. He had thoroughly digested the 1964 landmark paper of Mechoulam, Gaoni and Edery, which isolated a delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol as the main psychoactive substance in dope, and asked his wife to advise on how to maximize growing conditions to produce grade-A grass. This was for the private consumption of the house.

The acid factory at Oxford had been covered in the underground press and its closure by the university authorities, the fascist pigs, had led to a sudden supply shortage of highgrade hallucinogens. The lesson was that quality drugs, produced by ethical manufacturers, non-bread-heads, not out to serve the interests of the Man, gave quality trips with no unwanted side effects involving demonic visitations, extreme paranoia and lengthy stays in psychiatric wards.

“You know a lot about drugs, Stephen,” Andrea said one night. “You know more than anyone else. Why don't you write a book about it?”

“I can barely write a letter,” he said.

“Well, you could write something.”

“What could I write?”

Ivan came in from his secret travels. “Andrea thinks I should write a book about drugs,” Stephen said.

“Funny you should say that because one of the underground mags is looking for someone to write about drugs. They want
someone who knows what's safe to take and what isn't, what the effects are, that kind of thing.”

“Wow,” he said. “I could do that. Thanks.”

So Stephen Newman was famously, for a few months in 1971, “Doc California,” explaining the chemical makeup of various legal and illegal substances. Why Dexedrine made you hustle and why hash made you want to sit still. His column featured grainy photographs of drugs currently available and came with a disclaimer that the author did not, of course, endorse the purchase or taking of these drugs. His mug shot at the top, photocopied, reduced him to contrasty black and white, and his eyes to burning coals of intense, staring knowledge.

Winter arrived. Their room, with views across London to the cloud-shrouded revolving restaurant of the Post Office Tower, the city borne down under the weight of brown skies, was heated by a twobar electric fire when the power was on. Stephen knew nothing at all about cold. The ice tormented him. The chill was in their bones. The damp was in their internal organs. He feared waking to find a frozen drop of semen at the end of his penis. Would it hurt? Would it damage his precious cock? The last thing they did at night before they put their bodies gingerly down onto the frosty sheets was to lay their clothes out on the floor around the electric fire. Waking in the morning, hugging each other to exchange the heat of their bodies, they watched their breath freeze in the icy air and dared each other to jump up and run a few feet across the icy floorboards to flick the switch to turn it on. Then come back to bed and wait for their jeans, dresses, T-shirts and shoes to warm up a little, to take the intense cold off the fibers before they could wear them.

The communal meals, the ritual nightly eating of brown rice seasoned with tamari sauce, the half-cooked soybean croquettes which induced sudden attacks of flatulence, had been turned by
Julian into a strict macrobiotic experiment based on the principles of yin and yang. Which Stephen said were simply acids and alkalines.

Macrobiotics, said Julian, made you placid, an army could never go to war on a macrobiotic diet (but you could fart your enemies into submission, Stephen thought). “In Tibet…” Julian said. In Tibet he would be happy. His skin was even whiter than Andrea's and his watery eyes peered out from beneath a fringe of poker-straight yellow hair. He did not make a move without studying the Tarot cards, whose old figures sat complacently looking back at him with their determined outcomes. With trembling fingers he dealt and redealt the deck searching for an acceptable future, but always drawing such figures as the Hanged Man.

“I really can't stand that stuff,” Stephen said to Ivan. “Why does he do it?”

“Poor Julian.”

“What's his problem?”

“I think he's queer. He sucked me at school, everyone sucked everyone else, there wasn't much else on offer at boarding school, but he was the one who liked it. We never refer to it now.”

There were a few pansies on board ship, you knew how to deal with them or you got someone else to do it for you.

“There's nothing wrong with being a faggot,” said Stephen. “I mean, they can't help it, can they? As long as they stick to their own kind.”

“Yes, but he's starting to bring them home.”

“Here?”

“He goes out at night to Hampstead Heath and asks them to come back for a cup of tea and a bite to eat and they're not our type at all.”

“What type are they?”

“Well, they look like builders. Or lorry drivers.”

“And he makes them soybean croquettes?”

“Exactly. Then they start getting nasty. They want a fry-up or at
least a bacon sandwich and he starts lecturing them about yin and yang.”

One day Julian disappeared, his stuff emptied from his room, vanishing into a dying era, without a trace (decades later, Stephen googled him and came up with nothing, assuming that he really had gone to Tibet and almost certainly died there of some illness to which his Western system had no immunity, or else he had worked his way across to San Francisco and taken part in the great carnival of human flesh in the late seventies and died of that instead).

A different type took his place, Les, a feral boy who had grown up in poverty with too little calcium in his diet. His fingernails peeled and his teeth were tiny, sharp and pointed like a cat's. He made a living begging on the bridge that led over the Thames to the South Bank. “I am hungry” read his sign. And he looked hungry. Ivan brought him home, but later regretted it.

Les in turn introduced Scotch Dave to the commune. He wore the regulation jeans, T-shirt, beads and bells, and his hair and beard were a matted brown tangle.

Andrea was the thing that hadn't yet been invented: a cash machine. She was a lassie with a pay packet and a fur coat. Winter was cold, he had his eye on that bunny.

“I need money,” he said to her, in the kitchen. “I need it quick. Come on. Don't waste my time.”

She opened her purse and handed him the change. He looked at the coins in his hand, picked out the brown pennies and threw them in her face. “You don't insult me,” he said. “Next time, you'll give me a note.”

“The problem was,” Stephen told Max and Marianne, “the experiment was constantly being subverted by people who didn't have a higher consciousness, just an eye for a free space and a free meal.”

The children didn't believe in the squat. In 2004, the house in Chalk Farm would go on the market for two and a half million pounds, bought by a couple who worked for Goldman Sachs. Max said, “These are just stories they tell us to make us think that once upon a time they were interesting. I mean, can you really see Mum in a squat? Or Dad with his food fads eating anything without a nutrition label?”

“They had to have been young once,” said Marianne. “Grace says they were.” But they had not seen Grace for years, she was a legend.

Ivan confirmed that everything they had told the children about the squat was true, but nothing Uncle Ivan said was credible. Everyone knew that people who work in advertising are professional liars.

R
alph had been having a nap on the camp bed in his office. These after-lunch naps were his sole pleasure now, when he could return for twenty minutes to a dream world in which images better than the cinema—for often he was part of the action—were lit with flattering clarity. They were about boys. In real life he would not have dared even to look too closely at a boy. And these boys were nothing like the one who stood on the step, with a black unattractive beard and the slightly chubby ginger-haired girl next to him. The boys in his dreams were clean-shaven, short-haired and wore simple white singlets. They smelt of soap. He believed he could smell the soap in his dreams, though he understood this was not possible.

“We've come about the rooms,” Stephen said. “We sent you a letter.”

“Hippies, good, you won't need the bathroom much.”

“Don't be ridiculous, we wash.”

They climbed the stairs to the top of the house. The first room was almost entirely taken up by a double bed, they had to sidle their way around it to reach the wardrobe.

“And here's your lounge. All this furniture was made during the war, top quality. Government issue. It'll last a lifetime. And you've got a view. You can see the Post Office Tower over there. I should charge extra for that.”

“We could see it where we were before,” Andrea said.

“How much?” said Stephen.

“Eight pound a week, but that's all in. There's a television room downstairs for use of all the tenants and a hot plate out in the hall where you can make a bit of dinner if you know how to juggle the pans about. The bathroom's on the floor below.”

They walked down to his office, a cupboard on the second floor where he kept his rent books and his camp bed. They were made to sign a contract expressly forbidding them from many activities, such as playing musical instruments, “But apart from all that,” Ralph said, “it's Liberty Hall, you can come and go as you please, you've got your own front door key. I can also give you a ten percent discount on anything you buy at my shop.”

“What do you sell?”

“Haberdashery. Tea towels, linens, nighties, ladies' corsets. Come and have a look, it's just on Upper Street. I used to be in show business but you get more pleasure out of selling a woman a reasonably priced girdle. At least you receive some appreciation.”

“What did you do when you were in show business?” Andrea asked.

“I had a conjuring act. One time I had a chance of a spot at the Palladium, but it didn't quite come off.”

“You should show us some tricks sometime. Can you saw a lady in half?”

“I know how it's done. I can draw you a diagram. But the fittings are very expensive.”

Looking out of the window of their flat Stephen saw the roofs, the chimneys, the birds alighting on fences, the leaves browning and burnishing in the mild autumn sun, the pungent burning of bonfires, evenings drawing in and, inside their room, a fireplace where Andrea toasted bread on a long fork and they ate it, with slices of strong yellow cheese. They had been in London for a year. She had been promoted to trainee receptionist at the Savoy and was
taking part-time courses at the Tavistock Clinic, learning how to be what Stephen called a shrink.

Ralph's shop was halfway along Upper Street with the corsets in the window, pink, boned like fish, with suspenders hanging off them. Everything in the neighborhood was flyblown, old, decayed, moldy, dusty, unkempt and, apart from the houses, very small. The air in north London smelt of grease, blown on the wind from the chip shop. If, in a pub, you asked for ice, they would lift the lid of a leather-covered barrel and with tongs remove a single cube, too sluggish even to slip around, melting in a puddle of tepid water. This would be plopped ceremoniously into the glass, where it vanished on impact.

“Oh, stop moaning,” said Andrea. “In the hotel we reused the water left in the guests' glasses to make ice.”

She mocked his standards of hygiene, the minutes he spent brushing his teeth and drawing lengths of string between them, as he had been taught by the family dentist back home. He was, she said, an unduly clean person.

“Don't do that,” he replied. “Don't analyze me.”

The tenants of the house were a mixture of elderly widowers and spinsters who shuffled up and down stairs with their shopping in string bags, and a few new arrivals in London. The old people died and their coffins were carried off down the narrow stairs by men with black ribbons tied to their hats to a pauper's grave somewhere in Essex. Stephen did not understand how a life could be lived and end so forlornly, without the press of relations, of uncles and cousins and sisters, and crowded rooms and raised voices. He had never spoken to them. They did not answer when he said a polite hello. He did not understand that his Afro and messy beard frightened them.