Activism

Christmas 1981, England

Mr Oldfield heard a noise outside in the garden, and glanced out of the window. There were three lads coming out of the big house, laughing and shoving each other. He knew who they were: they’d been tenants of his in another part of town at one time. What had they been doing in the big house? He was pretty certain they’d been up to no good. They were a rough crowd – racist thugs, as he’d discovered too late when he originally rented a flat to them, and certainly no friends of any of us tenants in the big house.

But they were no friends of his, either, and rough. They seemed to be leaving anyway, and while he wasn’t a coward, nor was he a fool. He certainly wasn’t going to confront them.

When they’d gone, he went into the big house to see if he could see what they’d been up to. They’d let themselves out through the front door, which could be opened from the inside even when it was locked. Either someone had left it unlocked – unusual – or they’d got in somewhere else. A window left open, perhaps? Or had they broken in somewhere?

It didn’t take him long to find out. The door of Flat One, my flat, was swinging open, and inside was a complete mess. They’d broken a window at the back of the house to get in. It looked to him as though their main objective was to trash the place rather than to steal anything, but he couldn’t tell – he didn’t know what should have been there, and he knew that I was in India at my cousin’s wedding, out of contact completely.

The other three flats were untouched.

He rang the police, who came and had a good look, took fingerprints and all sorts. He told them precisely who’d done it. With their permission, he cleaned up the shit (literally) and got a chap to come and repair the window.

I arrived back a couple of weeks later. I was rather upset about some of the things that had been ruined – books, LPs, and photographs particularly – but quite philosophical about it. They’d had it in for me for a while, but that’s another story. At least they’d not attacked me bodily.

Somehow the police failed to trace the culprits, although we knew they were around – both Mr Oldfield and I saw them in town from time to time afterwards.

That other story? Since my undergraduate days, I’ve always been an outspoken opponent of racism.

Well, much earlier than that, really. I spent my first seven years in a poor, puritanical, white protestant Christian community in a small town in India, where the text of the Bible was believed to be literally true in every word. From a very early age I found this idea perfectly unconvincing, despite my being – as far as I knew then – wholly alone in this scepticism.

Most of the community had an unwarranted sense of superiority over their Indian neighbours. Even at six or seven, I was aware of that sense of superiority and how unwarranted it was. That was probably due to Uncle John’s influence, although I don’t think I was conscious of that at the time. I didn’t have any inhibitions about expressing my opinions – at least, not when it was my beloved Ayah who was being abused.

Not that most of the white community thought they were racist. They thought they were virtuously helping the poor Indians by being there, not realizing that their patronizing, condescending attitude was itself racist. But if someone implied that my Ayah would need help with something because she wasn’t a clever white person like them, there was a small girl who would loudly and firmly correct their mistake.

Of course Ayah would wisely hush me.

I’m not sure at what stage I learnt to keep my mouth shut, but it might have been on the voyage to London. Maybe it was something the engineer said – he was certainly a big influence on me – but I don’t remember. Certainly by the time I went to school in Whitechapel I’d learnt not to speak out unless I was confident of doing more good than harm, and at that stage I wasn’t generally very confident.

But as an undergraduate, I found my voice again. I found that I was a bit of an orator, and able to influence my fellow students. I think it helped that I looked, and sounded, like a rather loud eleven year old – and then expressed myself like the articulate young adult that I was.

Almost all the student body was white, but a substantial proportion of the town’s population was of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, or West Indian origin. The National Front were active in the town. Bill, Ben – who is Jewish, albeit not in the least religious – and I stirred up quite a strong opposition to them amongst the students. I was one of the speakers at a lot of meetings, not only in the university, but also in the town.

I received threatening letters, and was shouted at in the street several times, but luckily no-one ever actually attacked me.

We three became friends with the leaders of a mainly Bangladeshi group who’d set up a youth club. Racist thugs had smashed their windows a couple of times. Bill and Ben, who had the necessary tools and skills, replaced the windows for them. The second time, they fitted steel shutters that could be closed every night.

As they were tidying up when they’d finished the job, an old banger passed slowly on the opposite side of the road. The driver opened his window and shouted, “We’ll get you!”

Happily this was also a threat that was never carried out, possibly because Bill and Ben are both big, solid chaps, and they were almost always together.

Other people we knew weren’t always so lucky.

Some of our friends ran a bookshop. They sold all kinds of books, but specialized in left-wing politics, anarchism, feminism and pacifism. They had an upstairs room that they used as an office, and which they allowed all kinds of radical groups to use for meetings.

Late one evening after a meeting, Mary shut up the shop. We all headed off to our various homes, some on bicycles, many on foot. Bill and Ben lived a little further in the same direction as me, and walked with me as far as my place. Mary lived in the opposite direction, and headed off with a small group who lived that way. Mary’s flat was the furthest, but she never got there.

Luckily she was found by a late night dog walker later the same evening; she’d almost certainly have been dead by the morning. She’d been hit over the head, then knifed in the chest and stomach, and left for dead. She was in hospital for six weeks, the first three in intensive care.

Her attackers were never caught.

While she was still in hospital, there was an arson attempt on the shop late one night. Serendipitously, it was foiled when a policeman just happened to pass as a young man was pouring petrol through the letterbox. For once, a known National Front supporter was successfully prosecuted and jailed for three years.

Just a few months later, somebody stole a lorry and reversed it fast into the front of the shop in the middle of the night. The shop was completely demolished. This time the culprits were, as usual, not caught.

Jim and Jane, who’d set up the shop with Mary, were in the process of splitting up by this time. The three of them considered getting new premises, then Mary and Jane considered finding a new partner or two to start a new shop, but nothing ever came of it. I lost touch with all of them after I moved.

October 1972

There’s another story about Jim, after he and Jane split up but before I left the area.

He was cycling home late one evening. He could hear the noise of fireworks – bangers – and someone laughing, and a child whimpering. The wall on his left angled back sharply away from the road, with a row of derelict shops a few feet further back from the road, waiting to be demolished. As he came past the end of the wall, he saw what was going on. There was a little brown girl cowering in the corner by the last shop, and a scruffy white youth was throwing bangers at her, and laughing.

Jim rode up a low bit of the kerb, and over to them. Neither of them noticed him approaching. He stopped, and put his hand on the lad’s arm. The lad turned towards him – and pulled a knife.

Jim couldn’t run – he was astride his bicycle. He couldn’t cycle off quickly enough, either. He didn’t have any time to think, he just reacted. He’d never punched anyone since he was a small child, but he punched that lad – really hard, right under the point of his chin. A lucky instinct, as it turned out.

The lad was a little taller than Jim, but very slightly built. Jim’s only medium height, but he’s very solidly built – not fat, just solid. As he remembers it – and he admits one’s memories of such things can be tricksy, it all happens so fast – the lad lifted right off his feet. He certainly went down like a felled tree, and hit his head on the pavement. He just lay there.

The little girl didn’t wait to thank Jim, and he doesn’t blame her in the slightest for that. She just ran off.

Jim got on his bike and cycled off, too.

Half a mile down the road, he thought, “I hope I’ve not killed him.” Then he thought, “The street light was behind me. He can’t have seen my face at all.” Finally, “I’d better go and see if he needs an ambulance. I’ll be on my bike, I can leave him behind easily enough if he’s up and about and tries to attack me.”

By the time Jim got back to the scene, the lad had disappeared, so Jim presumed he’d recovered consciousness pretty quickly and got up with a sore head.

Jim saw him in the centre of town a few days later. Fortunately he didn’t show any sign of recognizing Jim.

I know Jim had hit him pretty hard, because he split the skin on his knuckles. I saw it.

Jim never reported the incident to the police. The way the local police force was in those days, he’d probably have ended up being prosecuted for assault.

There was another thing about the time my flat was trashed. Mr Oldfield had told the police who’d done it, and the culprits weren’t the kind to have taken great care to avoid leaving fingerprints or other clues. The only possible conclusion I could come to was that the police didn’t want to catch them. But if that was the case, why had they taken so much care taking fingerprints, and looking for clues?

Some of my friends concluded instantly that what the police were really after was my fingerprints, and those of my friends. I thought at the time that they were being paranoid, and that the police had probably originally intended to catch the culprits, and only later decided not to bother.

I’m now not so sure. Too many other things have happened to make me much less sanguine about the motivations and behaviour of some parts of the police force. One episode in particular made me think my friends were in fact on more or less the right track. It was actually rather amusing.

Some of my friends were suspicious that the bookshop telephone was being tapped by the police. I was present at the meeting where they decided on a plan, and although I was sceptical, I thought it was a harmless scheme, and went along with it. We prepared an elaborate timetable of telephone calls over a period of a few days, pretending to organize a demonstration that we’d no intention of actually mounting.

It was all very carefully worked out, as though the bookshop was – as it typically was – the hub of the organization, but other telephone calls between third parties were implied by some of the things that were said in the calls to and from the bookshop. The location for this imaginary demonstration was carefully chosen to be within view from the window of Jacob’s flat in a tower block, albeit from a considerable distance. We had a couple of pairs of binoculars between us, but we reckoned we’d probably be able to see well enough anyway.

On the appointed day, the police turned up in force. Umm.

Were we guilty of wasting police time? They were scarcely likely to prosecute us for it. On the other hand, it undoubtedly didn’t endear us to them, which might not have been the wisest thing we ever did.

But then, wisdom isn’t necessarily about maximizing one’s own comfort, even one’s own long-term comfort.

There was an area of rough ground opposite the bookshop, where an old warehouse had been demolished but nothing had yet been built. It had been levelled, to minimize the risk of injury to children playing there, but it had simply been growing weeds for several years. Then someone bought it and surfaced it and turned it into a car park, charging small sums for people to park there.

One time, the Army booked half of it for a couple of days, for a recruitment drive. They had a few artillery pieces, all nicely polished up, that visitors could actually put their hands on, a caravan covered in camouflage netting, with a recruiting sergeant (or whatever the proper title is) sitting at a desk inside, with leaflets and what-have-you.

The centrepiece of the show was a scaffolding tower supporting a climbing wall, with ropes over pulleys at the top, and big burly soldiers at the bottom. The public were invited to come and climb their climbing wall – or have a go, anyway – with a harness and a nice safe top rope.

We hatched a plot in the bookshop. We had a load of Troops Out Now posters, opposing the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland.

Neither Bill nor Ben was available on either of the days this was running, but I was. No-one else in the group of friends involved was a rock climber, and didn’t fancy it, although we’d seen plenty of other novices trying it out.

So it was my job. I took off my jumper. Mary pinned a Troops Out Now poster on the back of my tee-shirt, and I put my jumper back on. I was ready.

“Can I have a go?”

Harnessed up. Up I went, trying to look as though I wasn’t as practiced a rock climber as I really was. Halfway up, there was a gap in the wall where it was fastened to the scaffold tower behind it. I undid the rope from my harness, passed it through the gap, round a scaffold pole, and then reattached it to my harness. Thus safely anchored onto the wall, I calmly removed my jumper, revealing, halfway up the Army’s recruitment drive climbing wall, my brightly coloured Troops Out Now poster.

Needless to say, the recruiting sergeant had apoplexy. But it took them over an hour to get me down – they couldn’t risk doing anything dangerous, so much in the public eye, and of course I wasn’t exactly co-operative.

Wise? I’m still not sure. Fun, certainly. Whether it actually influenced anyone, who knows? And if so, in what direction? It hasn’t, as far as I can tell, done my career or liberty any harm, which is some consolation. I don’t think I’d committed any actual crime that they could charge me with. I guess they didn’t think so either, since I was never charged.

The other idea that was bandied about in the bookshop would definitely not have been wise, and fortunately that was recognized by all present at the time. But we had a good laugh talking about it.

One of us was teaching electronics at the local technical college, and his students were making printed circuit boards, using ferric chloride to etch away the copper where it wasn’t protected with photoresist. We thought of several ways that a millilitre or two of wet ferric chloride could be introduced into the barrels of the artillery pieces, with minimal risk of the culprit being noticed.

Ferric chloride corrodes steel pretty rapidly (even stainless steel, although that wasn’t relevant in this case). It wouldn’t make holes right through a gun barrel, but it would wreck the surface of the bore. What fun! But minimal risk isn’t zero risk, and this was after 1971 and the passage of the Criminal Damage Act.

I’m pretty sure the damage would have been noticed before anyone attempted to fire the guns, but if not, I’m not sure what the consequences would have been. Whether it would be enough to cause a barrel burst, either by obstructing the bore with corrosion products, or by weakening the barrel, or both, I don’t know. A barrel burst in a substantial artillery gun would very likely be fatal for those close to it.

And all to what end? It certainly wouldn’t stop any fighting.

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On to India 1990