Claire, Sean’s new chick, was a pale, rather sepulchral blonde with long hands and an oval face that made her resemble a figure in an early medieval painting. It was a look she emphasized with shawls and long, flowing dresses. Anna quickly went to war against her, criticizing her for various social and political faults in the long and often bruising group arguments that were becoming a regular
Lansdowne Road ritual. To my surprise, Claire didn’t buckle, but often gave as good as she got. She cut her hair and started to wear work clothes. Anna backed down. Anna’s own hair was now very short, almost shaved to her scalp. I’d watched her do it, rolling myself a joint at the kitchen table as she leaned over some sheets of newspaper and hacked away with a pair of scissors. Now she looked like one of the mod girls you saw down in Shepherd’s Bush, smoking cigarettes and waiting for their boyfriends.
Everyone from Lansdowne Road was up on that roof, lying on their stomachs and looking over the parapet. There were people from Pat Ellis’s committee, whatever it was called, from three or four east London communes and activist groups. Miles was there with his camera, showing off to one of his teenage Guineveres. Uther, the usher from Free Pictures, was there too, waving a wand at Hackney Marshes, trying to chant the gas towers down. It’s amazing to think Pat Ellis could ever have been part of the same enterprise as Uther Pendragon.
For the site of our next action we chose a boarded-up terraced house near the overpass in Ladbroke Grove, one of a row that had been forcibly purchased by the council when the street was cut in two to build the road. Connections were growing. Our nameless Lansdowne Road group was now part of a spidery network. A lot of people seemed to be thinking as we did.
We worked on the house like maniacs. In the approach to Christmas Eve we spent more than a week replacing rotten floorboards, painting walls, and reconnecting the water and electricity. I wired up lights. A plumber friend installed a bath and toilet salvaged from a bombsite near Free Pictures. With Anna I traveled round in Rosa, skip-raiding and picking up donated furniture. By the time we’d finished, the house looked great. Not luxurious, but spick and span. A home for a homeless family.
Once we had the renovation under way, the big question was who should live there. We wanted to do something that was practical as well as symbolic and for that we needed a family that was indisputably in need. At the time local-government hostels were
more like barracks than homes. They were run along the lines of Victorian poor houses and the people staying in them were treated like morally dubious dirt. They were grim, overcrowded and overregulated. Many only admitted women and children, husbands having to fend for themselves. Families who complained or “misbehaved” would be summarily evicted, at which point social workers would often take the children into care. They were cruel and coercive. We saw them as a tool the state used to discipline the poor.
We found a couple called the Castles, who’d been in a shelter for a year. They had three young children, the oldest of whom was seven. Bill Castle had been laid off from a bed factory; he was a sallow Brummie with a persistent cough and an air of utter defeat. His wife, Ivy, was visibly the stronger of the two. Anna took me to meet her in a caff somewhere up near Wormwood Scrubs. As she talked, her two little boys played with the salt and pepper, opening sugar packets and tugging at her coat as she tried to manage the baby and concentrate on what we were asking her to do. As far as she was concerned, she told us warily, anything would be better than where they were.
I got to know the Castles much better when the occupation started. Early in the morning on Christmas Eve, we picked up Ivy and the kids from the hostel, bursting through the front door past the warden and the woman from the welfare office. We were deliberately confrontational, swarming through the building and making lots of noise, trying to break down the oppressive air of the place. The warden was furious, telephoning his bosses as soon as we were inside. One or two of the staff tried to block our way. Nevertheless, I remember the action as a festive affair. Jay was dressed as Santa Claus. I gave sweets out to the kids. It was like a kidnap in reverse. The two little Castle boys had a great time, chattering and making pow-pow fingers out of the window.
We calculated that if we raised enough fuss, the council would be shamed into rehousing the Castles. Even if they didn’t, we were determined to occupy the place at least until the new year. Since
we weren’t certain how the authorities would react, we kept the boards on the downstairs windows and barricaded the front door. We draped a banner across the front, Pat Ellis rang the press, and by lunchtime we had a crowd of supporters on the street outside, singing carols and waving banners and giving interviews to newspaper hacks while photographers snapped pictures of masked protesters waving from the upstairs windows. We’d written a statement informing people that we’d housed a homeless family in protest at the council’s policy of keeping usable buildings empty, their inaction on social problems and the inhumanity of government hostels. We demanded that the Castles should either be immediately rehoused or allowed to remain in the place we’d found for them.
After lunch a pair of council officials turned up, along with a vanload of workmen from the housing department and about a dozen police constables, who positioned themselves on the far side of the road and did a little shuffling dance in the cold. The council officials demanded that we let them in. We refused. They threatened us with legal consequences. We asked them whether they were ashamed of what they did for a living. In the middle of this, Ivy Castle leaned out of the bedroom window and gave them a piece of her mind. It was, in the end, Ivy’s towering rage that carried the day. She told them she’d had enough. She told them she wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. The men from the council couldn’t take the pressure for very long. They got back into their van and left.
On Christmas morning we celebrated with the Castle children. Someone had donated a tree. Ivy cried and hugged people indiscriminately. The standoff continued into the new year. While her husband retreated into the background, smoking roll-ups and moaning that the house was cold, Ivy found a vocation. Everyone who stood in front of her, whether journalist, councillor, or pompous local MP, received the same full-in-the-face torrent of indignation. Sometimes we had to restrain her, nervous that years of pent-up frustration were leading the stabbing cigarette too close
to an official face, or tempting the right hand into an administrative slap. I saw in 1969 in the boarded-up living room. Three days later someone pushed a rent book through the letterbox. The Castles could stay put. We’d won.
Late that night, after a riotous victory party, Anna dragged me into the deserted street outside the Castles’ house. We were drunk. The overpass loomed above us. Her normal reserve had dissolved completely, replaced with a fierce libidinal intensity. “Come on, Chrissy-boy,” she told me. “Now’s your chance.” Pressed into a doorway like a couple of teenagers, we mashed our faces together and fumbled at each other’s clothes, icy fingers digging under coats and sweaters, our breath misting in the freezing night air.
That night we slept together on her mattress at Lansdowne Road, in the room she’d painted white and emptied of every possession but a battered metal trunk of clothes and books. The room was cold and we were high and sometimes I’d briefly hallucinate that we were statues or corpses, an instant of lost time before I was jolted back to the slick panting tangle of our fucking, her mouth on my cock, my tongue lapping and sucking at her breasts, her cunt. It was these words she wanted to say and for me to say to her, cunt, spunk, asshole, as if to scrape the act bare, purify it of sentiment.