VT Coughtrey - Headrow Clothes (4)

NOTES	By the Spring I had already become very fed up with my pokey little bedsit in Harehills. To some extent this was due to an irritating problem with the couple in an adjacent bedsit. Almost every night until two or three in the morning, the man would be giving his woman loud and detailed instructions for whatever sexual practice he had decided upon for that night. That in itself would not have been so bad were it not for the inevitability of his rising temper and frustration as she failed to carry out his orders satisfactorily. The power of his voice ensured that I was never left in any doubt as to what exactly it was she was doing wrong. Once or twice he tried beating the lessons in, but without much success, apparently. Some time after I had moved out of there, I met him in the street. He told with with perfect Yorkshire bluntness that he'd been obliged to kick her out because she was totally useless in bed .
	There was certainly no shortage of rented accommodation. I decided I could afford as much as £3 a week for rent and for this I got a smart little self-contained and nicely furnished attic flat at 8 Avenue Hill, on the edge of the delightful Potternewton Park ('Potty Park'). The rest of the house was occupied by the landlady and her son. These were two very pleasant people, but I got off to a rather bad start with them. The reason for this was rather odd. It was just before the General Election and, despite the rekindling, as described in the previous chapter, of my Marxist/anarchist/whatever revolutionary fervour, I still decided to support Labour in the election. This may seem doubly strange, given that they had not even begun to live up to the absurdly naïve hopes I had entertained when they replaced the Tories two years earlier (see chapter 22). I told myself that this was due to their tiny parliamentary majority. The true colour of the Cabinet left-wingers would show if only the majority could be increased. I therefore wore a red scarf ostentatiously and put a 'vote Labour' sticker in a window of my flat. The landlady asked me to remove it, then let it be known, while gesturing contemptuously at my scarf, that she and her son were staunch Tory supporters. Taking it in turns with the sentences in their usual fashion (they agreed with each other on everything) mother and son gave me the reason for their political stance. "My husband was a Labour councillor." "Yes, Dad was on the council for twenty years." "He served the party faithfully all his adult life." "When Dad died nobody of any consequence in the constituency party came to the funeral, but the leader of the Conservative group on the council came." "What do you think of that?" "Those Labour people are totally despicable." "We've campaigned for the Conservatives ever since." As an example of loyalty to a dead husband and father, this struck me as poignantly flawed. Labour won with an increased majority. Although they brought in some fairly radical legislation by today's standards, it seemed nothing to me in my politically excited state.
	Initially, I took pride in the flat, buying many knick-knacks and baubles (mostly showing appalling taste as I remember) from the extensive stall markets of Leeds. I also began cooking for myself and got quite good at it. My interest in aircraft returned and I bought a lot of Airfix kits and hung the resulting models from the ceiling until it was quite difficult to walk about. I rented a television (I'd not seen any tv at all for over a year).
	At the same time, I developed a longing to be on the move again, but this was largely satisfied by making Sunday my coach day. Nearly every Sunday throughout that Summer, I got a coach to somewhere new - Scarborough, Bridlington, Blackpool, Harrogate, Manchester, York etc. I went to my first couple of air shows since childhood - at RAF Church Fenton and RAF Finningly, where I had my first flight. It was in a 1930s de Havilland Dragon.
That was the last time I saw Colyer, who died in 1988. I'd already lost my taste for his take on New Orleans Jazz.	I went for two or three long walks on Ilkley Moor. After one of these I was astonished to find Ken Colyer doing a gig in a pub in Ilkley town. He and other members of the band kept giving me puzzled looks. They knew they'd seen me somewhere before!
	All this meant, of course, that I was suddenly spending a lot less time in pubs and curry houses. Even the coach trips were more for exploration than boozing, although a fair amount of the latter still went on. These summer excursions were also a temporary distraction from politics, but only to a certain extent. I still spent occasional evenings in the Packhorse and Eldon, getting tanked up with revolution, not just ale. Even such an apparently passive pastime as television was capable of inflaming righteous rage with its new fashion for social-realist drama and establishment-bashing humour. An occasional trip to one of the tiny street-corner 'flea-pits' that still existed in Leeds at that time could be even more effective. Coming out of one such place after seeing Lord of the Flies I was so shaken and enraged that I nearly got run over.
	I began to take revolutionary action at last by writing to the many groups whose leaflets I had acquired in the two student pubs. The big problem, my predisposition to which you may already have spotted, was that I was excited by just about any leftist, anarchistic or nihilistic propaganda. It was not a question of being convinced, but of being ready to suspend disbelief as long as the stuff looked angry enough, subversive enough and dangerous enough. I began to take part in local demonstrations, small‑scale, student‑only affairs, mainly about Vietnam. Leeds people were mightily offended by this sort of activity being inflicted on their city by outsiders. Vietnam, of course, was gradually becoming the binding agent for the many disparate elements of the growing 'smash-the-system' scene.
Myrtle Soloman was General Secretary of the PPU from 1965-73 and Chair of War Resistors International from 1973-86. She died in 1987. She seems to have been highly regarded even by the fiercest critics of her beliefs.	Curously enough, the leaflet which finally persuaded me to travel to London one weekend to take part in a a big Vietnam march was from the Peace Pledge Union. I had never really thought about pacifism before. It sounded about as boring as you could get, but it had one great asset - it still seemed to shock people almost more than the idea of violent revolution. I struck up a correspondence with the General Secretary, Myrtle Soloman, in which I was careful to toe the PPU line while sounding suitably enraged about Vietnam. I promised to go to London, sign the Peace Pledge and go on the demo. The PPU and other pacifist organisations were the driving force of the early Vietnam demos. This, of course, was to change dramatically over the next couple of years. Myrtle said she was so impressed by my ideas (which of course were really her ideas, not mine) that she proposed I should ride with her in the cab of the lorry that was to lead the march.
	So it was that I paid my first visit to London for over a year. I travelled by steam train on the weekend of the demo (I was surprised to find that there were still steam trains in service). I went to the PPU office, signed the pledge never to fight in any war whatever the cause (actually, I've never been invited), then joined the march. I located myrtle's lorry, introduced myself and reminded her of her invitation to ride with her. She looked shocked and snapped "Certainly not !". I picked up a PPU placard bearing the legend PEACE and joined the rest of the PPU contingent following the lorry. I soon decided I didn't much like these pacifists - they seemed haughty, disdainful, humourless types.
	As we approached Downing Street, I became aware of a big commotion involving a lot of police, some of whose helmets were flying through the air. Anarchist flags were fluttering above the melée and I was thrilled by the sight of them. It became apparent that members of the London Federation of Anarchists had joined the march and were trying to force their way to Number Ten (there were no gates across the entrance of the street then). They were chanting "Kill the Pigs! Kill the Pigs!" and pitching enthusiastically into the police. This was it ! This was the revolution ! No more fantasizing - time to get real! In full view of my fellow pacifists I leapt into the fray and started wildly belabouring policemen with my peace placard, screaming "Kill the Pigs!" louder than anyone else. As soon as the enraged police started to make a serious fight of it, dragging people off and giving them a good kicking as they went, I realised it was time to get on with the march. A PPU person came up to me and asked with icy calm "Could we have our placard back, please?". But it was broken.