NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
Needless to say, I made full use of the growing team of dedicated student volunteers, in cleaning up and preparing 105 Islingward Road for its illegal role as a 'hostel' for dossers. As I have already explained in earlier chapters, it was never going to be a hostel at all, in any conventional sense. The word had been used purely to make it easier to raise money. It was really going to be a self-supporting community of 'inadequates' - but only those able, in my judgment, to take part successfully in such a project.
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| However, I was in no hurry to start recruiting the participants for the project. My priority was to sort out a decent room for myself. I had the vulunteers decorate the largest room, behind the shop itself, in all‑out late sixties vogue - each wall a different colour, the colours being all in the range from dark purple to pink. The doors were done in 'psychedelic' style. I instructed the jumble volunteers that when out collecting, they were no longer to refuse, as a matter of course, items impractical for jumble sales, such as beds, desks and dining-room suites. One particularly good specimen of each was to be accepted - for my room. They soon came up with the goods, even a carpet. I remember the excitement of having a telephone installed - the first I had had. It was yellow, which was a cause of wonder in itself, as all telephones available to the general public had for decades been black.
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| I soon decided to keep the front room as a shop, without alteration except for the removal of the paraffin pumps. I got the volunteers to decorate it, then restored the display lighting in the window. In addition to the items of furniture for my own use, I ordered that anything cropping up in the jumble that looked at all interesting or valuable, was to be siphoned off and put on sale in the shop. This was also to apply to books, of which a good many were collected during the fortnightly trawls of the best neighbourhoods of Brighton and Hove. |
| Opening a shop and inviting the local people to come in and browse may appear foolish in the extreme, given the fact that I had been forced to run for my life from those very same people only nine months earlier. Also, of course, they were under the impression that they had won hands down when the Corporation refused planning permission for a hostel - and it was certainly going to be regarded as a hostel, whatever I might choose to call it. I suppose I felt I could keep a low profile and persuade the dossers to do the same, the shop being run by some of the more respectable-looking volunteers, posing as the proprietors. Things didn't quite work out that way, as we shall see. Nevertheless, there was remarkably little trouble or even comment from the locals, and some even became well-disposed towards us, for reasons that will be clear later. |
| The method I chose for the selection of the residents was not the best way of keeping the project a secret. I put it about among dossers in the town that we provided a free meal every Sunday afternoon at two o'clock, for the first ten people to turn up. It didn't occur to me that they would start queuing outside about two hours beforehand, to make sure of being among the first ten. In fact far more than ten always queued. The additional applicants imagined they could cajole or bully us into providing the extra meals. I was physically threatened once or twice, but used the skills I was gradually acquiring to calm the offenders before sending them away with nothing. |
| The fare on offer, which was dished up in the shop area, was enough of an improvement on the slops of the church hall experiment (see Chapter 60) to ensure that there was no rapid falling-off of the number waiting each week. In fact, it gradually increased. Even so, the meals were pretty dire, as I remember. A fairly constant ingredient was the brains of sheep that had been experimented on in the biology department of the university. We were provided with the whole heads by Carolyn Holland who was, you may remember, a secretary in the department. It wasn't much fun for the Sunday volunteers, having to scoop the brains out of the skulls. It's not easy. Tins of very cheap meat balls and mashed potato featured, too. The mashed potato came ready-made in huge catering tins stolen by a porter at the General Hospital. He had heard about us while distributing other stolen food to dossers in the street. We couldn't get through these tins fast enough, and were occasionally obliged to skim the beautiful red and blue moulds off the top before heating up the contents. |
| To our surprise and annoyance, large numbers of Dutch and Swedish students on day trips to Brighton began to turn up for the free meal they had somehow heard about. They were often quite belligerent when turned away and caused more commotion than the dossers. We were worried enough already about upsetting the local people, so we were forced to end the Sunday afternoon meal sessions after about three months. In fact, I was probably on the point of ending them anyway, as I had gradually been able to select about eight residents from the many people who had arrived early enough for the meal over the weeks (it was by no means the same ten who were first in the queue each week). I would take someone discreetly to one side afterwards and invite him or her to stay. The offer was never turned down. |
| There had been three or four Sundays in July when no-one was selected, for the simple reason that I wasn't there. The reason for my absence is the subject of the next chapter. I had by that stage selected only three residents. There was Sid, his girlfriend Carol, and Ken. I will describe them more fully, along with the other five, selected when I returned, in a later chapter. For the moment, I will just say that Sid and Carol were very young, probably about twenty, and that Sid was fairly bright while Carol was decidedly dim. Ken was a somewhat morose middle-aged man with a powerful physique and craggy face who wore a remarkably clean suit and a tie. I sensed (accurately, as it turned out) that he would respond to a position of trust with hard work, diligence and honesty, so I gave him the shop to run, on ten per cent commission, leaving all the pricing and haggling with customers to him. I was, however, slightly worried by what I perceived to be a constant anger seething not too far below the surface of this man. Sid and Carol I put in charge of domestic arrangements, which included being my servants, in effect. There is a lot more to come about 'Brighton Hostel' as it was still being called by the volunteers, but I have to go off at a bit of a tangent first, since that is exactly what I did at the time. |