NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
As soon as I had my own bedsit and no longer had to rely on Leo Jego, I deserted my post as government spy in Arch 167. I didn't tell the Social Security, however, and continued to collect my already illicit weekly payments from them (see previous chapter). I found that I was now living in a time which was quite comfortable for the natural rebel, such as myself. The shockers-by-nature were somehow on an equal footing with the shocked, not that shocking was any longer an easy task. It was in some strange way permissible, even respectable, to try to disgust, but it was difficult to succeed. The two sides were still there, but less well-defined, and the less scrupulous of us could nip to and fro from one side to the other as many times as suited our purposes, without even the necessity of having to trim an inch off our flowing locks or untamed beards. It was in this heady atmosphere that I began to enjoy a period of unprecedented self-confidence, optimism and assertiveness. |
| My thoughts turned towards the idea of setting up a Simon Community style chain of 'units' for dossers (of which there were a great many in Brighton). As you will know from the Simon chapters, I had little time for Wallich-Clifford or his work, but the great merit of his principle of building a self-contained community of 'inadequates', in several segregated tiers, from rock-bottom hopeless to near-capable neurotics, was that it had considerable potential to shock and annoy the social work establishment. It would also give me a chance of out-gunning Wallich-Clifford. Even though it was six months or more since I had last seen him, I retained a strong desire to rise above him. |
| I was greatly encouraged in this aim by two new acquaintances. They were to have significant and lasting influences, in very different ways. The first was Vic Robinson. He was a former milkman who had given up the job in order to set himself up as a freelance psychiatric social worker. (Although you could certainly not call yourself a psychiatrist without the appropriate qualifications, anyone could call themselves a PSW). He had the gift of persuading people like Barrie Biven and Jo Klein that he could fine tune their heads to the point where they could achieve anything. He became their guru, and they insisted that all Archways volunteers, including myself, should have a session with him once a week, paid for out of Archways funds. Although the first session took place at about the same time as I stopped bothering to turn up at 167, I continued to make the weekly trek to his council house in Portslade. It took the Archways a long time to get round to cancelling their payments for my visits, but no time at all for Robinson to stop the visits when the payments dried up. |
| Robinson was certainly a great help to me - he showed me the oldest, easiest and still the most effective tricks for making people in a delicate emotional state feel that you are helping them. You must remain calm, however excited they are getting, fix them with an intense gaze while they are talking, with a hint of an indulgent smile to give the impression that you understand them much better that they understand themselves and, most importantly, you must only ever speak in order to toss back at them any questions they may fire at you regarding what the hell they are to do about such-and-such. This tossing-back will usually take the form: "Well, Sharon, put it this way - what do you think you ought to do? " Whether she is able to answer her own question or not, Sharon bounces off down the street afterwards on a great high of self-understanding, which lasts for a couple of hours. The following week she is back for another fix. Of course, not everyone can pull this off. You have to have a certain deceptive guru-like air about you. I had it, made use of it for a while and have done so, sparingly, as needs have dictated, ever since. In general though, these are skills I haven't much time for, so I keep them up my sleeve for rare emergencies. |
| The other, perhaps greater influence on me was Mike Taylor. Mike had come into Arch 167 one day out of curiosity and we got talking. He was only two or three years older than I but was so self-assured and apparently intelligent that I was soon to some extent in awe of him, as though he were very much older and wiser. Having gained an MA at Oxford, he had joined MI5, who taught him Russian and sent him on a spying course in Cambridge (those of you too young to remember the Cold War will wonder why). His spying career never got off the ground, because he fell in love with the Russian people and even became a communist of sorts. He took a flat in Brighton in order to embark on a massive philosophical work (did you ever finish it Mike?). To earn a living he got a job as a labourer at CBR Jersey Mill. However, he was appalled by the pay and conditions there and joined the Hosiery and Knitwear Workers' Union. Typically of very many small firms in the South-East of England at that time, trade union membership was not allowed, so he was sacked. He then managed to persuade all the other workers there to join the union, so everyone was sacked. He organised them into a mass picket (illegal since Thatcher, I believe) in order to prevent any non-union workers from being taken on. This lockout lasted for nine months, became nationally famous and resulted in the demise of CBR Jersey Mill. Impressed by his powers of leadership and organisation, the union offered Mike a fairly senior post, which he accepted. |
| Despite his outwardly very respectable (or 'straight' as we used to say) appearance, Mike shared my compulsion to shock. This meant that, against his Marxist instinct to oppose any form of voluntary social work, which he felt only served to patch up capitalism, he became fascinated by my ambition to start a series of units for dossers, along lines guaranteed to excite the animosity of the local establishment.
He asked me to "produce a paper" on dossing. I did so, in the privacy of my Buckingham Road bedsit, and took it round to his gloomy Spartan flat in Sillwood Street. He ridiculed my florid style and set about re-writing my work, to form the basis of a prospectus to present to likely donors in Brighton, Hove and Portslade. I was to spend many hours in his flat, having my writings on the subject of homelessness turned into cold, flat and efficient English for a variety of leaflets and pamphlets, which we produced on his hand duplicating gadget. This was just a curved sheet of metal, over which stencils, cut on Mike's typewriter, were stretched and held in place by elastic bands. You dipped this rudimentary device in ink and rocked it to and fro over a sheet of paper. You could do several hundred single-sheet copies or thirty to forty pamphlets if you worked at it all night. The quality was atrocious. |
| Despite the amount of work we put into the production of this literature, Mike said that stunts to attract the attention of the media were the most important form of publicity and they had to be followed up by visits to likely local donors. He set about researching and drawing up a list of the latter. He also dreamed up some stunts. It became clear, though, that the execution of the stunts and the following up of them were going to be my department. |