1976 or 1977 Love in the Mist at Broadmoor Hospital

 

I’m living in Reading with my partner and we’ve been invited to attend a performance in the theatre at Broadmoor by someone working there. Broadmoor is a high-security hospital whose inmates are those who have been deemed criminally insane after committing some very serious crime or crimes or those  whose psychotic mental health problems cannot be managed in regular mental hospitals, let alone everyday contexts.

But some inmates or patients will be rehabilitated, in stages. I don’t know how many. Broadmoor has separate wings for males and females - many of the males will have committed offences against women - but those who are moving towards release are allowed to mix under supervision. One of the places they mix is the theatre, apparently famous and certainly large, where inmates of the asylum at Broadmoor perform for invited audiences.

We are going to see Love in the Mist, a romantic comedy, which definitely allows for mixing of the sexes. In fact, as it turns out, rather too much: there are clearly moments where an on-stage theatrical  kiss on the sofa turns into a  very real kiss. The off-stage director (a member of staff not an inmate) has to call out from the wings for the actors to get on with the play.

And I suppose it does get on because there is an interval and trustee inmates from the theatre cast and production team are allowed, under close supervision, to mix in the foyer with guests. If I recall correctly, there are soft drinks but no alcohol. The Broadmoor patients do not wear name badges and so my partner and I leave the show not knowing whether we have been talking to arsonists, murderers, rapists, or whatever else it is that can earn you a place in Broadmoor. But it’s not easy to gain admittance, that we know

1997 Taking a Photograph in Kyiv's Besarabsky Market

 

I was in Kyiv for a week in 1997, hosted by a local family living in the suburbs. I had come as a stamp dealer, hoping to buy material at the weekly meeting of the collectors' club.To get to the local Metro station by the shortest route, you walked along the tracks of the main overground railway line and simply stepped to one side when you saw a train approaching or heard one behind you. I always carried a Pentax SLR back then and took many black and white photographs in the city streets but also inside the central covered market in Kyiv, the Besarabsky.

 An old man who could have been a war veteran or just someone with a hard life came up and pointed to himself to indicate that he wanted his photograph taken.  I moved close and raised my camera but he gestured with a line across his waist - he wanted a half-portrait. I moved back and knelt on the ground. He crossed his hands in front, shopping bag dangling. My student interpreter asked for his address so that he could be sent a print but he waved the request aside and walked off. He hangs now in the hallway of my flat, the first photograph on the walls as you enter.

1976 Discos at South Reading Youth Club

 

In January 1976 I began work as a Grade something-or-other (Four?) Youth and Community Worker attached to the South Reading Youth and Community Centre. The Centre was a 1930s affair built at the same time as the Whitley council estate and now reserved for adults; I was in charge of the adjacent Youth Club housed in a war-time, breeze-block former British Restaurant over-ripe for demolition. I lasted nine months in what was the last job-but-one which I sought from a sense of social commitment or obligation. (A little over a decade later I put up my hand to direct the University of Sussex’s secondary PGCE course, a post to which negative academic kudos attached. South Reading successfully killed off perverse choices in the interim).

At first interview I got the support of the paid council officer in charge of Reading’s youth work but was objected to by the local Labour councillor on the panel. But somehow she was persuaded to interview again and this time I was accepted. Throughout my nine months I was well-supported both by that officer and by my immediate boss who ran the Community centre, both mid-career male professionals. The Centre employed two caretakers, older local men who did things, including their time-sheets, as they liked to do them and I was later told had taken bets on how long it would be before I got beaten up. It’s plausible. The Whitley Estate was almost-all white and  old-style working class; it provided the local newspaper with most of its copy for the Your Neighbour in Court page.

My chief responsibility was to “run” the Youth Club in the evenings, a task more simply described as opening the doors to all comers. For some unknown-to-me reason the upper age limit for admission was set at 21 which meant that those who came through the door included those who had been banned from local pubs which admitted at 18 or, in practice, whatever you self-identified as.

Equipment was in short supply, sometimes vandalised or stolen. There were no organised activities. It seemed to me that girls were completely marginalised and I persuaded the neighbouring secondary school to offer girls’ gymnastics one evening per week. It worked. Gymnastics was popular, a popularity enhanced by Nadia Comaneci’s “Perfect 10” at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Over time, I organised other activities: visits to the town-centre swimming pool, coach trips to pop concerts.

There were repeated request for discos. Why can’t we have them? So I asked my boss,Why can’t they have them? Well, he said, they evade paying admission, they bring in alcohol, fights break out, and equipment gets stolen. And, he might have added, they won’t take a blind bit of notice of you. Do you think you could  pick any of them up by the scruff of the neck?

That gave me an idea. Clearly, all I needed was a Bouncer. Someone who was large, strong, and able to command respect. There was someone who fitted the bill. I was picking up local knowledge and had heard his name mentioned by boys in the club; they were clearly in awe  of him because he had once led a local gang (named after a road on the estate so I don’t give it in case I cause reputational damage). But when I met him - I think he looked into the Club one evening to appraise me - I found him likeable and thoughtful. I also discovered that he was retired from his previous role terrorising the neighbourhood. He was going steady with a girl and was very keen that it should work out. I guess he was in his early or mid-twenties.

I approached him to ask if he was interested, He was. And he proved an excellent choice. As a result of his Presence (and he really was very tall and very broad) admission money was paid, everyone behaved and if, occasionally, they didn’t he was firm but completely unflustered in dealing with it. I paid him cash in hand out of the door money and it’s possible that I did not explain this arrangement to my boss. But he was pleased that I was satisfying local demand.

I googled but couldn’t find the Bouncer, though I may have found his son in Your Neighbour in Court.

1971-72 The Seminar of Dr Lacan

 

An “O” level in French dated 1962 and no subsequent study of the language would hardly equip me for graduate studies in Paris ten years’ later and so, after being awarded a Leverhulme studentship for study there, I spent the summer of 1971 attending full-time at the Alliance Française on the Boulevard Raspail. The teaching methods were traditional and effective but I was hardly fluent by the end, either as speaker or writer..

Nonetheless, I composed a letter to Jacques Lacan. It was handwritten and I don’t have a copy, though I recall writing about my interest in Althussser, oblivious of Lacan’s own connections.

I had bought a collection of Lacan’s writings and had heard of his seminar. But I understood “seminar” in the English sense as something which at most twenty people might attend, so I wrote seeking permission to be one of them. In reply, I got a hand-written letter ( in front of me now and dated 14 XI 71) giving me the details of the seminar which would re-commence on the 8^th December in Amphitheatre II of the old Law faculty in the Place du Panthéon. In addition, he was to give a one-off lecture in the chapel of Saint Anne on 4^th December at 21 heures 15 - arrive early, he added, because it will be crowded. Finally, should I wish to meet, he had alerted his secretary - the letter gave a telephone number.

I made my way to Saint Anne for the crowded lecture and a few days later to the first, equally crowded “seminar”. There were hundreds of us. A little late, Lacan entered stage left in full-length fur coat, behind him a young woman who assisted with the coat, draped it over her arm, and left. I was sitting next to an American student and I think it was she who pointed to the front row of the lecture theatre which was populated by stylishly and indeed flamboyantly dressed young women. It’s rumoured that they are paid to sit there.

I duly noted that fact and on my way to the second “seminar” the following week paused to buy two buttonhole flowers. I sat next to the American once again and presented her with an orchid to match my own. We should join in the spirit of the thing.

Early 1970s GCHQ Old Style Recruitment Methods

 

In retrospect, it looks like desperation. Living near Exeter with no affiliation to the university, I have somehow got myself an interview with its Careers Adviser - the exact job-title escapes me. I’m a bit at a loss. I’m taking jobs out of a sense of social obligation and/or political commitment and I’m quitting them at an alarming rate: between autumn 1972 and year-end 1975 I go through three jobs with illness (hepatitis), casual employment as a waiter, and signing on for benefits in between. I need to get my act together though it’s true that in summer 1975 I do self-publish a book (Language, Truth ad Politics) which is widely reviewed and sells well. Still…

I present the Careers Adviser with my rather alarming CV and answer questions. He pauses. Have you got time to sit a little examination? Basically, it’s an IQ test and you will have thirty minutes to complete. You can do it in that room over there - he points to the corner of the room. Well, I suppose it has to be In for a Penny, In for a Pound so I oblige, emerging from the room before the thirty minutes are up to hand in my work. The Adviser scores it in front of me and it seems I pass  - and for the first time since the 11+  though I have never been told my IQ or sought to find out. I’m sure it’s lower than I like to think.

Then he reaches down to one of his drawers and pulls out a little pamphlet and hands it to me, Might this interest you? I read the words GCHQ Cheltenham - Government Communications Headquarters and browse through to give myself time to find an answer. There is a very small temptation to say O, yes, golly! and a larger sense of embarrassment. I don’t want to make this man who has been generous with his time look foolish. As far as I can imagine (based on the one friend I have who did try to join the Intelligence services) I would be weeded out at a very early stage.It's not on my CV that I'm some kind of student or ex-student radical or anarchist who has been present at demonstrations etc etc and not only that (which might be forgiven) but also omitted is the fact that my friendship or comradeship circle includes or has in the very recent past included people who have been or soon will be on the front page of newspapers, starting I suppose with Dr Rose Dugdale. I acted as her MacKenzie Friend ( her lay legal adviser) during her 1973 trial at Exeter Crown Court of which maybe more some other time. 

So I make an excuse and leave. From reading in later years, I learnt that Careers Advisers in provincial universities with a conservative and rather public school ethos (Bristol, Durham, Exeter) were often sought out by the Intelligence services as potential recruiters. Perhaps even more so after some of those recruited by the old methods from Oxford and Cambridge had let down their country so spectacularly. Nowadays, the Services advertise openly which seems a much more sensible approach. 

In the end, after one more disastrous attempt at socially engaged work as a Youth Worker on an old-style white working class council estate in Reading, I make the decision to get myself  a graduate degree and squeeze my way back into university life. 

1975 Free Speech in a Cornish Comprehensive School

 

The school leaving age has been raised to sixteen and across England there are some rather aggrieved pupils who started secondary school in expectation of leaving at fifteen. I’ve accepted a job to teach them, starting January 1975, but at least the school is in deepest Cornwall where everyone is supposedly more genial than in the big cities. I teach some History up to GCSE level but my main task is to engage the reluctant fifteen to sixteen year olds to whom I offer recently-invented Social Studies. Unfortunately, the raising of the  leaving age has obliged schools to erect portable and supposedly temporary cabins for use as overflow classrooms and I spend a lot of time in one.

It’s a wet cold day and the windows of the temporary classroom are steamed up. Today’s topic is Free Speech and Toleration - the latter a word which I soon discover is unknown to my pupils to whom I am trying to explain the basic ideas of John Stuart Mill,  that you should be free to say what you like so long as it does not harm others.

Roy has outgrown being a boy and school takes him away from the job he wants to be doing. Large and genial but occasionally disruptive, he is sitting by the window, seemingly interested in what is happening on the other of the condensation. But then I realise he is writing something and the words are clear enough

ALL TEACHERS ARE WANKERS

Other pupils have now followed the line of my gaze and await my response. I see a perfect opportunity: this is a test case for John Stuart Mill’s ideas. It’s an expression of an opinion but it doesn’t harm anyone and so there is no good case for banning it or punishing Roy. What do you think?

Roy shifts in his seat, rubs out the word ALL and above it writes into the condensation SOME.

1971 Roland Barthes Gets Heckled

 

For the academic year 1971 – 72, Roland Barthes offered a lecture series on the history of semiology. The École Pratique des Hautes Études, aware of his popularity, assigned him a public theatre. There was an evening production running and the static set on stage included a sign with the words “Le Petit Cirque”.

Rather than stand at the front of the stage and lecture, Barthes installed himself behind a plain desk and sat on a hard chair. During the second or third lecture, someone in the gallery audience got up and denounced him for still thinking in Binary terms when the world had move on to Ternary, etc etc. Ludicrous, of course, but not so for Barthes who never returned to the theatre. He moved himself to an ordinary seminar room, kept semi-secret so that the audience size dwindled down from a couple of hundred to twenty or thirty. He was my director of studies, so I was one of those who kept going.

[ This anecdote also appears in my book The Best I Can Do (2016) ]

1990s Sir William McCrea FRS

 

A doctor’s waiting room, the 1990s.  A very elderly gentleman, small and stooped but nonetheless well presented, enters and makes his way to reception. What’s your name? says the large receptionist in that loud voice designed for the elderly deaf. McCrea, replies a very soft voice. First name? - the receptionist is studying her list. Very softly, barely audible but I hear it: Sir William. Without looking up, Take a seat William.

I’m no enthusiast for titles, but I want to call out, He’s Sir William McCrea and a very distinguished man! And he was: Sir Willam McCrea FRS, astronomer and mathematician, 1904-1999.  I had never spoken to him, knew him only by sight, had probably read of his achievements in some university bulletin. It was not so much his distinction that mattered to me, but the fact that he was still an adult, compos mentis, someone who still caught the bus to his office on campus. He had used his title, perhaps as a prop against his own frailty - who knows - and there was no reason to deny him. Of course, the receptionist may simply not have heard or registered the title; it’s not every day that someone walks in and claims to be Sir William. But I hear it from the other side of the room.

1967 George Lichtheim and a Ten Bob Note

 

It’s probably because he committed suicide in 1973 at the age of sixty one that I made myself keep in memory an encounter with George Lichtheim. In the summer term of 1967 I was the Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club. That job carried the privilege of inviting seven or eight speakers whose names would grace what was always a printed programme of the club’s weekly events. I had committed myself to trying to give a more intellectual turn to the club talks, reducing the number of Labour MPs and increasing the presence of those who were making an impression with their ideas. E P Thompson came to launch the original 1967 version of the May Day Manifesto. I wrote to Herbert Marcuse in California who was coming to England for the Dialectics of Liberation congress in London, but he was not going to arrive until after our term had ended. It would have been a coup to bring him to Oxford. And I wrote to George Lichtheim who had become well-known thanks to his 1961 book Marxism, part textbook but part more than that, and which had become a must-read.

After his talk, of which I have no memory, I walked with him to the railway station and joined him on the platform while he waited. In talking about the activities of the club, I must have mentioned that we were raising money for some strike fund. Under the Labour government of Harold Wilson, there were always strikes and we were always supporting them – I did not begin to have doubts until the 1980s. As his train approached Lichtheim extracted a ten bob note from his wallet and handed it over for the strike fund. He wanted to make it clear that he was still on the same side. That’s what he said.

1966 Hitch Hiking in Italy

 

In the summer vacation following my first year at university I spent a month hitch hiking to Italy and back. My travelling companion, with whom I had a chaste relationship, had a name so unusual that it is unknown to Google so I shan’t name her. I don’t know if she is still alive: she probably escaped her unique name through marriage but since her original surname does not google there is no way to link from the past to any future. But the shorts she wore did much more to secure us lifts than my long hair.

We came in over the Brenner pass and then travelled down the east coast of Italy and into the heel – Bari and Lecce. On a rocky beach one day, I watched a brown as a berry old man, shirtless in tattered shorts, head down to the sea carrying a plastic bucket in each hand. He filled the buckets with water and then made his way slowly back up the beach until he reached a rock pool, where he emptied the buckets. Then he repeated the trip and I continued to watch. Eventually, he broke off from his work and came over to us. He looked at me and laughed, pointed at my long curly hair, pulled at the ends. His first hippy, though I was no hippy - just a boy with long hair.

He was evaporating water in the rock pools to make sea salt. Maybe he made a living from it. I had some Italian then (I had taken an “O” level at school) but I don’t recall if I asked him about his work or tried to justify my long hair.

We crossed over to Napoli and then made our way up to Firenze where I spent my nineteenth birthday in the Uffizi gallery, buying an illustrated guide and recording the date inside, 19 July 1966.

1966 Lord Longford Asks Where Do You Come From?

 

 

Over a very long lifetime - he died at the age of ninety five in 2001 - Frank Pakenham, Earl of Longford, became a figure of fun, derision and some anger. He campaigned against pornography alongside the derided Mary Whitehouse; attracted anger for his friendship with the Moors murderer, Myra Hindley; and from being a supporter of gay rights when male homosexuality was still criminalised became an outspoken Roman Catholic opponent.

But in the 1960s he was also known as a prison reformer and as Leader of the House of Lords in Harold Wilson’s Labour government. As such, he was invited to speak at the Oxford University Labour Club and was, as usual, offered dinner beforehand at the Union. The year, 1966.

Unusually, among those standing around in the group assembled for pre-dinner drinks, there was a black student, rather tall and beautiful, who I hadn’t seen before and didn’t know. Lord Longford made a beeline for her, offered his hand, and asked, Where do you come from?

There was a slight pause and then, with a broad smile, she replied, Buckinghamshire.

1967 A Czech Student and a Visit to Robert Maxwell in Headington Hall

 

We wait in a hall which displays a large and prominent harp, housed upright. When we go into the dining room there’s the biggest and most highly polished table I have ever seen; maybe it only seats sixteen or eighteen but there is nothing on it and it gleams. Robert Maxwell, owner of Headington Hall and Labour MP for Buckingham, sits down in the middle of one long side, gestures to me to sit opposite and gestures to the Czech student to sit at one end.

I introduce the situation: I’m chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club; the Czech student (who is about my age) has fled to England, is lodging in Oxford, and is seeking political asylum. He would be grateful for any assistance and so would I.

Maxwell begins to question the student but his English isn’t so good and Maxwell pauses to tell me he’s going to switch to Czech. A lengthy interrogation ensues, conducted by this former British army captain (Military Cross), former member of the Czech Army in exile, former Czechoslovak citizen Ján Hoch born 1923 in some Orthodox Jewish back-of-beyond, now successful entrepreneur and owner of Pergamon Press, headquartered in Oxford.

I forget if Maxwell asked the student to leave the room at the end of the interrogation but, with or without the student present, he turned to me and explained that he had large printing contracts in Czechoslovakia and was afraid that, in the current unsettled state of the country, the student might be some kind of provocateur.

*

I had met the student in a house on the Banbury Road, living in a large cupboard with an English girlfriend he had somehow acquired and with whom, in the cupboard, he seemed to have a very domestic existence. Maybe he had come to England on some legitimate cultural exchange and then jumped ship when the time came to return. I don’t know; I forget. But why was I asked to go to the house? I think because of the Chairmanship of the Labour Club and perhaps because someone had maybe already had the idea of approaching Maxwell as a Labour MP. A Labour government was in power. Even if I had the idea myself, how did I make contact with him? That could only have been through Maxwell’s son, Philip, who was my age and also an Oxford undergraduate at Balliol but not involved in any local politics.

But of the details and of what happened next, I have no memory

1967 An appointment at All Souls with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

 

It’s an enviable room; I don’t think I’ve ever been in one quite like it. Book lined walls, desks and small tables, photographs, deep armchairs with loose floral coverings in one of which Sir Isaiah Berlin is sitting, listening to our pitch.

If you are students and want to set up any kind of club or publish anything, then your activities must be supervised, at least nominally, by what is called a “Senior Member”, someone who must be on the faculty of  Oxford University. Phillip Hodson and I, now in our second undergraduate year, want to publish a magazine, a journal of ideas which we will call Approach.  Sir Isaiah Berlin, quite apart from anything else, is a terrific public speaker and every week his hall in the Examination Schools, just across the road from where we are sitting, is full to overflowing not least because the entire Oxford Left turns out for the best show in town. It’s irrelevant that we don’t agree with much of what he has to say. Phillip and I want Professor Berlin as our senior member. We would also quite like a donation to enable our project. We get both and leave with a cheque for fifty quid, just ten pounds short of the annual value of my college scholarship. And the cheque is handed over accompanied by the encouraging words, “And if your magazine doesn’t come off, you can spend it on champagne”.

1970 A Conversation with Laszlo Heltay

 

In the autumn of 1970 I moved to Brighton to take up my first full-time job and found accommodation in the basement at 8 Pelham Square at the bottom of Trafalgar Street, on the right if you are short-walking down from Brighton station.

Number 8 is a semi-detached Georgian house in the far left corner of the square. The ground floor is shared; upstairs, Rod Snell has the first floor, and Laszlo Heltay the top. Rod is an electronics engineer, currently inventing a needle arm which will float right to left across a record disc rather than pivoting from the usual fixed point which has the built-in defect that it wears away the sides of record grooves.

Laszlo is a choirmaster and recently founded the Brighton Festival Chorus. He invites me to his room and, answering my curiosity, explains how he prepares for rehearsals by listening to recordings of the relevant music on the very basic gramophone to which he points. Simple and maybe obvious, but not to me.

He talks about Hungary. At the end of the Second World War - he would have been fourteen or fifteen - he was enlisted into a team clearing roadside ditches of the dead, heaving bodies onto a cart, an experience which still haunts him. (He is fastidious in his habits and maybe this is by way of explanation). 

A dozen years later, at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he’s working as a producer for Radio Budapest, selecting records to be played live on air. He is on duty the final evening of the revolt. A message comes through that Soviet troops are entering the city and will, of course, seek to take immediate control of the radio station. All those in the building should now evacuate. It falls to Laszlo to select the final recording by which Radio Free Budapest might be remembered. He isn’t a religious man, but chooses Schubert’s Ave Maria. Then he sets out to escape, across the Austrian border.

 Laszlo Heltay died in 2019.