The Sixties (4 page)
Authors: Jenny Diski
Along with anger and style, mockery was another way to identify who we were and who we were not. Satire revived, and even
those who considered themselves the majority sat down every Saturday night to watch
That Was the Week That Was
, either to huff and puff about the loss of respect or to cheer on the biting opposition to the abominable, reactionary Tory
Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, the Cold War and the new Labour government’s collusion in the American war in Vietnam. Astonishing
things had happened in the US. Over there, people of our age had grown up with nuclear drill, learning how to crouch under
their desks in case of a nuclear attack. America became a synonym for violence and structural racism. Kennedy was killed,
then Martin Luther King, another Kennedy and Malcolm X as the struggle for civil rights began to gather momentum, and radical
student movements of the Left both in America and in Europe started to make themselves known. The Vietnam war drafted people
of our age into a monstrous and unjust battle. Less violently but just as angrily, Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, and the
early skirmishes commenced between the pure and the down and dirty of popular music. America was the beginning of all things
new and forthcoming to parochial Britain, swinging as it might have been, and it seemed, looking across the Atlantic, as if
the world was wobbling on its axis. It was dangerous, but it was exciting. It felt as if it was not just our time, my time
as a young person, but that it was like no time ever before. A snowball had started its progress and had rolled hugely towards
the generation born after the Second World War. Us, me. It was full of promise, and we developed an increasing sense of responsibility
to use our time of being young – to indulge ourselves, golden generation that we were, but also to give warning that when
our lot grew to be old enough to take charge, things were going to be radically,
radically
different.
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Though Barbara Hulanicki herself, the actual Biba, imagined that ‘everyone’ was as thin as a stick because of being the
generation born into post-war food shortages. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that fat girls wouldn’t have wanted
to suffer the humiliation of not finding anything to fit, or the shame of the communal dressing rooms.
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all...
Jefferson Airplane, ‘White Rabbit’
Drugs: my mother in the 1950s standing at the window of our fifth-floor flat clutching a huge white cardboard box of soluble
codeine and aspirin tablets. She got them from the doctor on prescription, 100 at a time. Headaches. Later, early in 1962,
when I was fifteen, I ran away from my father to her bedsitting room in Hove, where she had a much smaller box containing
Nembutal on the chest of drawers. Insomnia. There were eight left in it when I swallowed them a couple of days later, certain
that we couldn’t survive each other in the tiny room, and that there was and never would be anywhere else to go. Not enough
to kill me, but sufficient, it turned out, to get me out of the room, into the care of a hospital and away from both parents
for good.
Before that I had been in Banbury with my father, working in a series of shops on the high street, not allowed to go back
to school as punishment for my expulsion. At first I’d stolen the ether from the school chemistry lab, then bought it in bottles
from local chemists, telling them it was for killing butterflies. I can’t remember how I knew about sniffing ether – the only
prohibited drug used at the school in those days was tobacco – but when I tried it I was entranced – precisely – by the immensity
of the time I seemed to have been unconscious in a fathomless and dreameasy world. I liked the aeons away from
real
it gave me, though in reality it was only minutes. But it wasn’t very long before the endless nether ether-world became inhabited
by monsters. An eternity of bad dreams was not what I was after at all.
Five years later, and in another hospital, not the one in Hove they sent me to after the Nembutal overdose, I discovered methylamphetamine
– Methedrine. I was nineteen or twenty and a fellow patient shared a glass ampoule of it with me and showed me how to use
a syringe to skin-pop into a muscle. Time stretched out again, marvellously, though now without a loss of consciousness. Thoughts
paraded in front of me like actors taking their bows on stage, stopping for a time to be considered and then passing on. I
watched them while I sat back, my favourite way of being in the world, as audience to my own but autonomous mind. A time-traveller’s
way of inhabiting my own interior. I liked that very much. A lot better than the coal gas we bubbled through milk in the patients’
kitchen to get a cheap and available high.
A year later, in a third psychiatric hospital, the Maudsley, I was admitted by the dour Dr Krapl Taylor, who told me that
I was a typical addictive personality, and (in a strange non-sequitur) that he would treat my depressed, disordered personality
with – I couldn’t believe my luck – Methedrine therapy. Twice a week I saw his crew-cut houseman, who injected Methedrine
directly into my vein and then set about trying to get me to ‘abreact’. The idea was to make me distressed enough to have
a crisis, which, magically, like a fever breaking, was supposed to relieve me of my depression. ‘You’re worthless,’ he would
tell me. ‘I know,’ I’d say. ‘Can I have some more Methedrine, please?’
Eventually, I left the Maudsley in a rage (abreacting, you might say) and found my way to the much-talked-of Arts Lab in Drury
Lane. Upstairs in the café, above the exhibition space (Yoko Ono, I think, a little-known avant-garde artist), I turned around
in my chair and said to the man who happened to be behind me, ‘Do you know where I can get some Methedrine?’ He did. I had
found one of the speed kings of central London, it turned out, and for a while (until the Methedrine high got very much worse
than the ether horrors) I mainlined the stuff. I moved into a flat in Long Acre in Covent Garden in which friends of my dealer
lived and found myself my first home, at home as I had never experienced it before. Even as a small child with my parents,
I had felt like I was in the wrong place with the wrong people. Now, I sat cross-legged on the floor with my back to the wall
and watched the thoughts dancing across my brain, in a smoky room of stoned strangers or friends I’d known for only weeks,
and in a way that was completely new to me, I was at last where I really belonged.
Of course, I smoked dope, too. I always had a joint ready-rolled by the bed for first thing in the morning, and couldn’t imagine
a time – when I tried to picture a future – when I would not smoke cannabis. It seemed ridiculous to choose not to be stoned.
I also dropped acid, though with much more trepidation than any of the other drugs I used. I was sure, the first time I sucked
on an LSD-soaked sugar cube, that it would be the end of me. I knew my depressive tendencies. I had had bad trips even on
cannabis. The ether and the Methedrine had turned nasty. I was certain that my chances of becoming irredeemably psychotic
on acid were very high. I said a serious goodbye to myself as I put the sugar cube on my tongue.
Nonetheless, I took it. Was it because taking a risk was worth the marvellous insights I believed I would get if the trip
happened to go the other way? Or, more likely, because risk was by definition good, or at any rate necessary? There was no
choice but to take whatever risk was on offer. Or perhaps it was because I really didn’t care whether I was mad or sane, or
more accurately, alive or dead? It’s hard to say, but during that time I was also taking Seconal capsules (a barbiturate,
like Nembutal) all day and night, a high dose, prescribed, every four hours. I had discovered another way with Seconal, and
sometimes injected myself with it in solution, the effect of which was instant and vacant unconsciousness. There was no other
pleasure to be had out of shooting it, except the rush of blankness that filled me up the instant the Seconal hit my brain.
I was after exactly that blankness, and also as importantly that millisecond of knowledge that I was becoming unconscious.
It certainly wasn’t the permanent madness that a bad trip threatened. But apparently even the risk of madness was preferable
to being on nothing at all.
No one thought of the drug-taking as ‘ recreational’. That was a later concept. Even if my particular bent for self-negation
was untypical, the drug-taking young of the Sixties I lived with and met also took their drugs very seriously. Not that we
didn’t have fun, but having fun wasn’t recreational. We didn’t do recreation. Well, we didn’t do work very much. At our most
pompous we told ourselves that we worked at finding out how best or better to be alive. But however we justified it, we really
didn’t make the distinction between work and recreation that shaped our parents’ daily existence. We didn’t have to, because,
to reiterate, one way or another the State was paying for us to study or take paid work (waitressing in the café in the Arts
Lab, dealing hash, bookshop assistant, selling the
International Times
) very lightly. There was no need to worry, as our parents did on our behalf, about ‘getting on’, because we had no plan to
live in a world in which getting on was of any importance. If there was a plan at all, it was precisely to prevent such a
world from structuring our future. We were brainstorming ways of destructuring everything to suit ourselves. We were almost
grown-ups, it was inevitable that the world would become fully ours eventually, and therefore, with ourselves in charge, it
would be completely different.
We were certainly not in the majority, not even in our own generation. There were far more ‘straight’ young people than those
of us living self-consciously outside the law, dotted about London as well as most other towns and cities in the country.
There were enough of us to produce underground papers to pass the news around, to fill the Roundhouse so that we could celebrate
the crowd we made, to keep headshops selling pipes and joint papers, and bookshops like Indica and Compendium, busy if not
in profit. But, of course, most people took on the world as it was offered to them. This is always the case. Possibly apart
from the generations that came to adulthood around the start of the First and Second World Wars, most people aren’t actively
engaged in what any given era is later characterised by. Not everyone in France was fomenting revolution in 1789; only a tiny
proportion of the new generation were Bright Young Things of the 1920s. What may have been different by 1967 was how easy
it was to opt out of the world of adults and yet find ready-made social networks to support our dissent. That the majority
chose not to, made them, in our eyes, wilfully blind. The world was in fact going on as it always had, but it seemed to me
and the people I knew that it had no idea what it was in for.
The Stones’ two-and-a-half-minute sneer, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, accurately reflected the way in which we turned our backs
on the ‘straights’. We didn’t take drugs to get by, we took drugs to see the world entirely differently. The straight world
had our contempt. It wasn’t drugs as such that separated us and them. It was the kind of drugs and the reason for taking them.
The Valium-popping wives isolated from reality, trying to keep up with phantom materialism in their suburban villas on Acacia
Road or any of the other suitably pastorally referenced streets. The differently isolated working-class women who were also
being dished out prescription tranquillisers, to help them cope with their children on the twentieth floor of the high-rise
council blocks that were springing up everywhere. Those who colluded with stasis brought about their own doom. We were doing
something with drugs, they were just surviving the intolerable world that they had either created or acquiesced in.
Our youthful cruelty was boundless. Youth does cruelty quite easily, not having the accretions of time to deal with, but I
remember a glaring clarity as I looked at the bourgeois life and its compromises, the working life and its compliance, and
what seemed the direct consequences of both, that may have demanded cruelty to reassure ourselves that we could stay clear
of it. Some of the generation that had come to their young adulthood in the Fifties had seen it too and hit the road. It’s
a kind of laser-guided vision, a pure beam of light in a crepuscular landscape, that is available to the young when they look
at the world that has been made ready for them, which they are about to step out into. You see it in your children when they
get that pitying, disdainful smile on their face and don’t bother to argue with you because you can’t possibly grasp what
they know. Which is, simply, that they are new and you are old, and that what they see is being seen accurately for the first
time ever. And they are right. The compromises that adults make cause much of the suffering in the world, or, at best, fail
to deal with the suffering. Acceptance of one’s lot, maintaining a silence about what can’t be said, lowering your expectations
for your own life and for others, and understanding that nothing about the way the world works will ever change, is the very
marrow of maturity, and no wonder the newly-fledged children look at it with horror and know that it won’t happen to them
– or turn their backs on it for fear it will. They know it’s too late for you to ‘get it’, so they smile and leave the room,
away from your reasoning, well, actually, increasingly shrill voice. It’s unnerving – especially if you remember that same
smile on your own face when you were young. Not everyone, of course not everyone, but that terrible clarity of vision is available
to the young of every generation, and those who look become the trouble-makers, the difficult ones, that the elders complain
about eternally.
In the second half of the Sixties, if you were of the party that chose to look, you were either hell-bent on getting out of
that world, as I perhaps was, or you were going to re-vision it and live the vision. Drugs were just one means, like a spaceship
or a spell, of getting through the fog of what ‘they’ called reality. A presently available technology for bypassing what
they assumed was the ineluctable way of the world. It seemed pellucidly obvious that it could, with a bit of effort, become
our way of our world, of a kind we chose to live the rest of our lives in, not theirs. It was necessary, therefore, like explorers
through the centuries who mapped routes to new worlds, to make extreme, ill-considered efforts to find it. I say this with
a slight smile aged sixty in 2008. There were, in fact, many moments when it felt exactly like that in the flat in Covent
Garden in 1968. Smiling gently on your younger self is one way of dealing with the astonishing lack of change. Timothy Leary
describes the knowledge we had that the time had come ‘for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy,
that a new, empirical, tangible metaphysics was desperately needed, knowing in our hearts that the old mechanical myths had
died at Hiroshima, that the past was over, that politics could not fill the spiritual vacuum...Politics, religion, economics,
social structure are based on shared states of consciousness. The cause of social conflict is usually neurological. The cure
is biochemical.’
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