Four Gated City (96 page)

I begin with the moment when we and our friends left London to live in the country.

Towards the end of the ‘sixties, about thirty of us left London for Wiltshire: our friends, or Paul Coldridge’s friends, or friends of these. We had nothing in common, not even an expressed desire to ‘live simply’ or ‘drop out’ - or any of the other reasons why similar groups or movements of young people left conventional society to set up communities of one kind or another. When we did it, we did not have motives, or reasons, or rationalizations: we did it because it seemed sensible. Now, looking back, I am struck at how it happened. For one thing, not so many years later it was these people and their friends and families who were among the not so very many who escaped. (How may do
you
think? I’ve just seen the amended figures. All figures so far released by the Controls have been very wrong, even by my personal experience-half or less what I, and Check, think are likely. From this I estimate that very many people must have already been destroyed as unrehabilitatable.)

Now I wonder about things that were not important then, trying to isolate what might be significant. One is that, of our people (at the most five or six hundred when our ‘community’ was at its height), very few would have been chosen by currently acceptable yardsticks as ‘good human material’ - to use the phrase so much in use by authority during the last phase. Few were anywhere near what would be classed as ‘average’ or ‘normal’ or even ‘desirable’. Of course, as that decade went on, and the general madness deepened, even they were using such terms more carefully; but it is certain that the people who were attracted to us were by definition those who were ‘eccentric’, or slightly ill. or damaged, or simply unable to cope with the demands of that society. For one reason or another all were unwilling or unable to live according to the norms of the time-which were the more savagely defended as norms, as society got crazier and crazier.

I repeat: these are thoughts I have now, the last I or any of us had then. On the contrary, what was remarkable about us was that we were
not self-conscious. This was perhaps because so many of us had had contact with psychiatry in one or another of its forms: it was perhaps an over-violent reaction. And most of us had had some kind of contact with politics: our teeth had been set on edge. Whatever the reason, it was not until the middle of the ‘seventies that we realized, because of other people’s interest in us, that our chief characteristic was that we had no ideology, plan, constitution, or philosophy. We had grown as a community. People had started to live together. Others joined us. We moved to the country because it was cheaper and easier to live there with the children. Typical of how someone might join us was the way Martha came to visit us, offered to stay and housekeep while I and your mother took you children for a holiday, and then moved down from London altogether to help in the nursery school. (Incidentally, if you have not already received this information in material sent off a year ago, I believe Martha to be alive: she was certainly alive fairly recently. She is on an island somewhere, but would not give whereabouts
for fear of being rescued
. I’ve heard her several times, but receiving was bad

To begin with we had a farm of about a hundred acres, with some farm buildings. These we made habitable, and we grew vegetables and fruit and kept some cows. Some of us had money. Others had none. Some worked very hard; others did not. Yet there was no feeling of mine or thine, or resentment because some were less useful than others. (Not at the beginning, nor for some time: this is because we hadn’t formulated anything, hardly understood what was happening.) We did not all live in one place either, for we soon expanded. For instance, when Nanny Butts died we took over their cottage and land, and Gwen and her husband who had always wanted to garden, continued his work: growing plants for sale and advising on gardens. Other places were bought. Yet a feeling of community remained even when we lived apart. This was not expressed in any formal way, such as meetings or discussions. Not to begin with: later there was a monthly discussion, but it didn’t bind anyone to anything. I repeat: this did not then strike us as extraordinary. Now I wonder about it. In all the histories of the many utopias or ideal communities has there been one without any kind of religious political or theoretical basis? I don’t think so. And they all grew, prospered or faded-conformed to the laws of change. So did ours, of course. If we hadn’t had the sharp shock of having to move when we did, I’m pretty sure we would have come to grief-split by quarrelling, then disintegrated. But of that later. It has been asked since (as they asked on that unfortunate television programme): ‘How do you account for this harmony? ’ I don’t know. Perhaps it was that no one was ever asked for anything: they offered. But now I put forward what I wouldn’t have been capable of thinking then; nor have said publicly if I had thought it: I believe that unconsciously we knew what was going to happen, that a shadow of fore-knowledge was in us; and
that this put ordinary laws out of action, or at least forestalled them. And that this shadow from the future was in everyone, affected everyone: accounted for the fantastic character of that decade. But some people it quietened and sobered; made them grow fast, developed them

But let’s put aside this possibility. Here is another thought. I once read of an ‘ideal community’ set up by some Viennese doctor in the early days of psycho-analysis. This group outlawed jealousy, property feeling, and envy-by, as it were, an act of communal will. When this small community fell apart, it was said that it was because the couples who composed it began to marry for the sake of the children. ‘We could survive sexual jealousy but not property feeling about the children.’ Now, this could have been said about our people too. That is, if our ‘family’ had been set up on such lines, we might have said: we were threatened with discord and disintegration at the time we had most small children. But supposing our formulation had been: we are pacifist and outlaw violence. We might then have said: our danger time was when we were threatened by violence, and had to form a private militia to guard ourselves.

This is why I don’t want to say that a spirit of irritable dissension set in at that time when people began asking us questions about our philosophic or religious basis, and we began to wonder what
did
hold us together.

I make this point because theories about the rise, existence and reasons for the collapse of, Utopian communities, have always been prolific; and when the human race has recovered enough energy for such luxuries, will doubtless again be prolific.

For a couple of years at the beginning it was a time when we were all very busy and very happy. (Personally very happy: your sister was born, our fifth child, and your cousin, Gwen’s second child, and your mother was finding that kind of simple work around the farm very much to her taste.) But our hard work and our pleasure did rather blind us to what was going on outside. I have said that we were over-reacting. We went on doing this-as Martha warned us. So did my father, either by letters, or when he visited us. They said we were naive, and foolish not to be prepared. But we were so happy to be out of London. When we visited it, we came back saying it was awful: it was increasingly frightening and awful; so we stayed away from it. Then things began to change in the towns and villages of the countryside. How? Well, it means conveying an atmosphere! At first it was an atmosphere. I can only suggest that a Memory should try and ‘gather’ an atmosphere-first let’s say from 1970, then from 1975, and try and transmit a feeling of the change. Looking back I see that ever since 1 was born to my knowledge, and the old people say before that, there has been an obsession with dates, decades, periods, times. It is because the ‘flavour’ of living changed so much from decade to decade, even from year to
year. And it kept speeding up. We felt as if we were in the grip of some frightful acceleration. But it is just this I don’t know how to convey. You must pick it up. And perhaps it will be hard for you: you and the other children say those years were all bliss and you remember them as a sort of pre-eating-of-the-apple Golden Age.

In 1969 and 1970 there was a worsening of the economic crisis, masked (as by then had become the norm) by large loans from the international bodies whose insistence on ‘stability’ led to the National Government of the early ‘seventies. This crisis did not affect us immediately: not economically. The people affected were those already affected, the working people, old people, everyone on fixed and low incomes. But what did affect us. what affected everyone immediately, was the tightening of the atmosphere away from the ‘everything goes’ of the ‘sixties. The new government stood for order, self-discipline, formal religion, conformity, authority. In America the new age of piety and iron’ (foretold by a Dr Spock on being sentenced for unconformity in 1968) began in 1969. In Britain it got into its stride a couple of years later. This was a government which got the British to swallow what no government before had ever dared suggest, or-rather-admit. For what had been previously considered unfortunate necessities, to be played down and apologized for, now became civil and national virtues. As early as the ‘fifties the regimentation of human beings by tapping telephones, opening letters, informal spying of all kinds had been established. In the seventies these were taken for granted, even approved of. (Anything that conduced to the expansion of business and ‘the recovery of the nation’ was good; everything that did not, was bad: these devices were supposed to help an atmosphere of discipline and order and were good.) Also good was the most sinister development of all: the docketing of every kind of information on citizens, not by government and police, but by business firms (on centralized computers) which information was used by police and government. It was a logical development in a society where the needs of industry came before anything else.

But it was a government full of paradox. It stood for a national campaign against corruption and decadence; but in practice this meant the forms of behaviour which had been approved of in the late ‘fifties and the ‘sixties-that is, there was a swing towards puritanism, first of all in sex, followed by a reaction against the obsessions with food, clothes, furniture and so on. (This was partly out of fear, because of the threatening resentment expressed by the half of the world that was hungry or starving.) It was not that we thought less about food, décor, clothes and so on: a newspaper might campaign for ‘simplicity and sacrifice’ but changing one’s style would involve heavy expenditure in money and time. But while we were paying all this attention to surface problems, the basic structure of the economy remained unchanged: it had done since it was consolidated after the Second World War in a
balance where it received continuous handouts from International Funds (really American) in return for being an obedient part of the American military machine. The working classes were sullen and rebellious. But they worked, on the whole: every pressure of public opinion, backed by police and army, was used to make them work longer hours and for less money

I see that what I have written is misleading: the last part of what I’ve written describes any ‘fascist’ régime anywhere-this was what its enemies called it. But this time of bland, insular conformity, with its nasty amalgam of church, royalty, industry, the respectable arts, and the formerly unrespectable arts (every variety of ‘pop’), together with official science and official medicine, was also an age of anarchy which grew worse every month. It was as if while a ship was sinking, captain and officers stood to attention on the bridge saluting the flag, while the crew and the passengers danced and drank, rioted, though from time to time they went into a drunken parody of a salute to please the po-faced self-hypnotized officers. But how to convey the atmosphere? Tell a Memory to try and ‘catch’ one of those ‘appeals’ on television when a symposium consisting of a Duke, a senior partner from a national chain store, a visiting banker from Switzerland, a General from the Second World War, and a representative from the Federation of Trade Unions ‘talked to the nation’ on national recovery. Afterwards banks of pop singers and popular idols of all kinds would stand to attention to sing
Land of Hope and Glory
, and
Jerusalem
. Outside in the streets was a curfew because of the rioting over something like the cancellation of a football match or because it was a very hot day, or because a street fight had started between the private armed guards of two big businessmen. For this combination of a smiling, deprecating, velvet-gloved ‘establishment’ with a continually erupting violence, was the ‘feeling’ or ‘air’ of that time before the catastrophe, like a man making a speech about civic virtues to a well-dressed audience; but he turns to reach for a glass of water on the platform table, and he has exposed a monkey’s flamingly indecent bottom.

But I’m writing all this from the view you get of things afterwards: capsuled, speeded up, less frightening, because understood. We understood only very slowly what was happening, because we stayed on the farms, and we were people who did not want to be interested in politics.

The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one:
nothing worked
. I remember my father’s study (your grandfather, Mark) just before the house was vacated: he stripped the material from the walls, except for one thing. (The contents of this study, its facts, its arrangement, has been projected: this key is in the possession of 7X40 who ought to have arrived by now-she started four months ago from Mombasa.) This thing was a model of a space rocket, a miracle of precision engineering, and pioneering precision engineering at that: it
killed the astronauts in it because of the failure of minor electrical equipment on the level of an ordinary household’s room switch. This fact, or event, ended my father’s summing up of
his
time. I see no reason to disagree with it.

Things did not work. That a car for which two thousand pounds had been paid went dull in colour because of poor quality paint; that it might take two days to buy a screw which could fit a newly-acquired bit of household equipment; that a newly-laid road went into ruts three months after it was opened; that the service one got was not what one had paid for-it seemed that nothing could be done about such things, and soon they were pressed into service as signs of national integrity. We believed we preferred to suffer hardship and inconvenience to further the interests of the nation. We on our farms and in our villages began early to do without the unnecessary, though this was never decided as a policy. Our lives were simple, though they did not have to be, since there were sources of money: we did not ‘choose poverty’. It was that quite soon machinery and gadgets became more trouble than they were worth; and the ordinary organization of life became so complicated, because everything was so inefficient, that it was simplified.