He maintained the charade of fuddy-duddy. He was getting out of breath, but still he managed to generate a little bubble of personalised heckling within the ideological fervour of the event. ‘You are being exploited. Your companions do not have your interests at heart. If you oblige me in this matter it will greatly strengthen our working relationship — I should say, our connection …’
He didn’t need to spell out what he meant by that. He would approve the installation of a telephone in my room, despite his heel-dragging in the past.
‘I’m not a child, Dr Beamish,’ I said sternly, as I was wheeled willy-nilly towards the Senate House in my pram. ‘There are political matters at stake here.’ Still, it was an astute choice of bribe.
‘I’m sure there are, John, and I’m also sure there are better ways to resolve them than rash action. At least give me your word that you won’t go through those doors. I must insist on extracting your promise. Nothing else will satisfy me.’
‘Very well. I promise not to go through the Senate House doors.’
‘Very good, John. I’m glad we understand each other.’ He peeled off from the group at that, saying, ‘I’ll be speaking to you soon.’ He made a fleeting gesture with his hand by his head which could have represented the holding of a telephone receiver, before he changed it into a genial wave with no specific meaning.
It cost me nothing to make my promise. My party was visiting the Senate House more or less in a tourist capacity. It seemed possible that a few acrobatic activists might breach the defences of the university’s symbolic centre, but the rest of us would entertain ourselves, as was the way with student politics, by chanting and shouting catch-phrases about our vast power and the imminent collapse of the establishment.
The revolution awaited our next move
When the Senate House came into view we saw that this was not going to happen. An occupation was in full swing. It turned out, as a barrage of murmurs instantly informed us, that the authorities had forestalled destruction of property by leaving the doors open. They had borrowed drastic tactics that might be thought of as historically Russian, evacuating their capital city and leaving it hollowly in the possession of the invading hordes.
We were actually singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as we rounded the corner. The song died in our throats when we saw that there was a real chance that we would. It was a terrific disappointment. We had banked on being thwarted, and being back in our rooms in time for tea, seething with a gratified discontent. Now the revolution we had pressed for so blindly was awaiting our next move.
It’s true that one functionary had been left behind, but his rôle wasn’t to fall under bayonets but to ask us politely not to walk on the grass. Most of us obeyed, but I didn’t, or rather the person pushing the wheelchair didn’t. I was familiar with the way those handles could sometimes transmit a subtle libertine impulse.
Now there was nothing to stop me entering the Senate House except the promise I had given only minutes before. It had cost me nothing to make that promise, but now it would cost me something to keep it. I was very much caught up in Maya at this point, unwilling to go down in history as someone unworthy of the moment, someone who had missed the storming of the Bastille by popping into the shop for a pastry. Dramatic events like this were rare in any case, and normally excluded me as a matter of course.
I put the brakes on — not literally. I called out ‘Wait!’ and our little cavalry charge pulled up short while I pondered the options. How was I going to reconcile conscience with the need to satisfy my curiosity?
Easy. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a Jesuit or a diplomat to wriggle out of commitments that don’t suit you. I had given my word that I wouldn’t pass through the doors of the Senate House. I would use the windows instead. Not a very elaborate bit of wriggling, as wriggling goes.
My party took no persuading. A scout went into the building to prepare the way. Soon a window was opened from inside and I was hoisted up bodily and passed in. It wasn’t a relaxing experience, since the windows of such a grand ceremonial building were large and high off the ground. Even on the way up I wasn’t sure that there were reliable hands ready to receive me. I had a long moment of queasiness suspended over the window-sill, being transferred between teams of supporters. Then the thing was done. I had kept my narrow promise while disregarding its broader meaning.
While I was teetering over the sill I experienced a biblical twinge. The whole scene was full of New Testament echoes. Was it when one meeting was so crowded that Christ had to enter by this unorthodox route? Or did a sick man’s family resort to extreme measures to get their kinsman to the top of the queue? Either way, I was a bit shaken by the parallel, once I’d detected it. If your initials are J and C, it’s just the sort of thing you need to be on your guard against.
Inside, there was an atmosphere of celebration. People smoked dope and played guitars in the academic holy of holies, where students were admitted only for rites of passage, matriculation and graduation. But there was also an earnest side to the occupation. I remember a board being put up with a list of teach-ins and debates, from ‘By Any Means Necessary — How to Make a Molotov Cocktail Without Blowing Yourself Up’ to ‘Sister Power — The Lessons of Radical Feminism’. A crèche was signposted, though there wasn’t a child in sight.
There was also a tremendous sense of anticlimax and loss of purpose. We had made our point, hadn’t we? Whatever it was. Couldn’t we go now? No, we had to stay put indefinitely, or the whole event would fizzle.
Perhaps I was a mascot, but I was also a nuisance, bleating for veggie food when there were other priorities. I said I couldn’t be expected to live on chips indefinitely. The idea seemed to be that it was a privilege to make sacrifices for the Revolution, and mine was eating Wimpys. I wished I had a book with me, and wondered if I could come up with a medical excuse for leaving in the morning. I could say there was medicine in my room which I needed to take (but what if someone offered to fetch it?).
Early the next morning the proctors arrived and drove us from the building. We hadn’t done much to barricade doors that had been left open in the first place, and were dazed by sleep and cheap wine. It was a textbook bit of tactics — wait until the enemy is off his guard, and then scour him from the city you have pretended to cede to him. I do seriously wonder if the Vice-Chancellor at the time wasn’t in fact a military historian, seizing the chance to demonstrate the eternal relevance of his speciality.
I was asleep on the floor in the library, with someone’s coat as a mattress, when the cry went up of ‘It’s the pigs!’ Someone blearily picked me up and ran with me. Neither of us had time to put on our shoes. It didn’t matter that I was barefoot. It mattered rather a lot that he was wearing only socks, since he slipped on the staircase and dropped me.
This time there was no human providential mattress to break my fall, as at Burnham, no stoutly built Marion Wilding to absorb the impact as at Vulcan. I gave up the effort of constructing the illusion of time and space. I dropped my knitting needles, and the skein of consciousness bounced softly across a cold hard floor, unwinding as it went.