WHILE WE WERE enjoying our traditional seaside holiday in a small unfashionable French resort, a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco to create a ‘Summer of Love’, and the singer/songwriter Scott McKenzie urged everyone planning to visit the city to wear flowers in their hair, in a pop song which has been called the unofficial anthem of the 1960s counterculture movement’. The Sixties as a cultural phenomenon did not of course begin in 1960, and it would be hard to say when exactly it did begin, but by 1967 it was in full spate. This revolution, or rebellion, against the established order of things in Western society was led by the young, though inspired by certain older sages and heroes; and it had two aspects, the sexual and the political. As a monogamous married Catholic of liberal principles, suspicious of ideological extremes and over the age of thirty, when according to a popular slogan of the day you should never be trusted by those younger, I was not likely to get personally involved, but I observed what was going on with a novelist’s interest.
At first it was the sexual revolution that was most striking, especially in universities. The strict code of sexual behaviour that had long been enforced in colleges and university halls of residence, and had resulted in many young men being ‘sent down’ for having women in their rooms, or being in women’s rooms, after the permitted hours, collapsed under pressure from the increasing permissiveness of society at large, which was driven by the lifting of taboos on the representation and discussion of sexuality in the arts and media, and facilitated by the availability of the contraceptive pill. In the third volume of his memoirs, An Imagined Life (1992), Richard Hoggart describes two incidents, one historic, one in his own experience, which exemplified the change. He learned that in 1962 the barber who worked in a small shop on the Birmingham campus was asked to leave because he had been selling condoms to customers. Five years later, when Richard was standing at the reception desk of the University’s Health Centre:
I noticed a box of what looked like packeted pills on the right-hand side, placed in much the way supermarkets put sweets near their tills to tempt impulse buyers . . . Were those packets of The Pill, which I’d heard of but never seen? Yes, said the nurse-receptionist. Are they available to anyone? Not quite; they have to be having a serious relationship. How do you discover it’s serious? We take their word for it.
Although Richard welcomed the greater openness about sexual relationships, he was aware that there were losses as well as gains in this new freedom. I believe it is now generally accepted that it was mainly young women not young men who paid a price for it, emotionally and physically, but it was hard for them to swim against the tide of the time. As a tutor one saw some of them grow up and change with astonishing rapidity, from shy innocent schoolgirls to young women conscious and confident of their sexual allure, dressing and behaving accordingly. Across the Faculty and the University there were stories and rumours of relationships between staff and students, and staff and staff, leading in due course to the break-up of some marriages, though the Birmingham English Department was less licentious (or liberated, according to your point of view) than some others, to judge from what we heard about UEA from the Bradburys.
Relations between staff and students also became more relaxed in less controversial ways. Most staff stopped wearing gowns to lecture and began to address students by their first names in tutorials and seminars. I did so myself, though I stopped short of inviting them to call me by my first name, as some younger colleagues did. In the English Department we initiated an annual Reading Party for first-year students in the Reading Week halfway through the autumn term, which was highly successful as a bonding experience. It was held at Spode Priory and lasted several days, consisting of talks, tasks and small-group discussions on a theme. Some members of staff went for one or two days, and some for the duration, the latter returning home completely knackered. The Priory’s somewhat austere dormitories discouraged sexual activity, but people stayed up late talking, and the event ended with a party, skits and a disco in the galleried theological library, its desks and chairs moved back against the walls by permission of the tolerant Prior. Although the new-style dancing entailed no physical contact, or even partners necessarily, its body language was sexual in a primitive, promiscuous kind of way. It had by now displaced ballroom dancing in youth culture, and older folk had to join in or look like fogies. I enjoyed opportunities to join in. It became customary to have a departmental party after the Finals examiners’ meeting at the end of the academic year, held by permission of Terence Spencer at the Shakespeare Institute in Westmere. The postgraduate students set up a bar and a buffet, to which staff contributed dishes, in the spacious hall, and the largest teaching room was cleared for a disco. Some of the bolder finalists would also come to this event by unofficial invitation, get drunk and covertly smoke cannabis. I remember seeing the supine bodies of several of them stretched out on the carpet of a darkened room on my way home from one of these occasions, which Spencer himself spent closeted in his comfortably furnished, wood-panelled office with selected young admirers, mostly female, thus both exploiting and distancing himself from a cultural revolution which was alien to him.
The nascent Free Speech movement at Berkeley whose demonstrations and teach-ins I had witnessed in the summer of 1965 had grown more militant as the Vietnam War escalated, and spread to other American campuses. But that wasn’t in the forefront of my mind in the autumn of 1967 when I decided to accept an invitation from Berkeley, prompted by Stanley Fish, to be a visiting associate professor there from January to June 1969. I hoped to recover the sense of well-being I associated with our Harkness year, and finally throw off the depression that had followed the Cambridge episode. Mary was willing, and we thought in more than a year’s time Julia and Stephen would be old enough to get something valuable and memorable out of the experience. Accordingly I applied for six months’ unpaid leave of absence from Birmingham to teach the first two ‘quarters’ of 1969 at Berkeley, where the academic year was divided into four equal segments. I had recently acquired the normal American qualification for this position by submitting Language of Fiction for a Birmingham ‘official degree’, a very convenient procedure available to academic staff of some years’ standing, whereby you could submit published work in lieu of a thesis. This was read by an external assessor who awarded the level of degree it merited, in my case deemed to be a PhD.
Meanwhile Park’s letters expressed an increasingly urgent desire to move to England. Towards the end of 1967 Martin Green, who had spent so much of his life shuttling restlessly between England and America, announced that he had decided to return to Tufts and would leave us at the end of the academic year. That would create a vacancy for someone to teach American literature at Birmingham. After sounding out Richard Hoggart, who had met Park on one of his flying visits to the States and had formed a favourable impression of him, I asked Park if he would be interested in an appointment that was partly dedicated to American lit. Revising his earlier attitude, he said yes, if it was not more than a third of his teaching load, and stated the very reasonable minimum salary he would require. The matter was under discussion into the New Year, and became quite exciting when Warwick entered the fray and offered Park an equivalent post, subject to an interview for which they would pay the return air fare. Birmingham couldn’t, or wouldn’t, afford that, but Richard persuaded the higher levels of the university administration that his personal acquaintance with Park was sufficient to support the latter’s impressive CV, and he was appointed in March, with effect from September. I believe the post was advertised, but I do not recall that anyone was interviewed. Park and Jeannette were delighted, though well aware of the problems the family would face in making the transition, and Jeannette came to England ahead of him with the children, to arrange their schooling and settle into a university-owned flat that was fortunately available while they looked for a house. Park stayed behind to clear their Providence home and arrange the shipping of their possessions to England. He sent his books to be stored in the Department, in 117 parcels.
I’m conscious that many of the appointments I have mentioned in this narrative, including my own, were determined by the personal influence of individuals in the appointing department, without strict observance of the normal procedures, which may seem scandalous by today’s standards. The fact is, however, that the ‘normal procedures’ of that time were defective, as I would discover later when I served on appointment committees. The process usually consisted simply of a small committee taking references from the most promising of those who applied, sampling the publications they might have produced, making a shortlist and interviewing the candidates for thirty to forty minutes each. The references were often unreliable and sometimes deceitful, and the interviews too brief to really test the candidates. It was almost impossible to gauge how effective they might be as teachers. Yet on that evidence we appointed people who, given the perfunctory nature of ‘probation’ which obtained in those days, might be colleagues for life. It is not surprising that we made some unfortunate appointments over the years, and I was involved in one or two of them. Nowadays, following the American practice, shortlisted candidates usually visit the appointing department well ahead of the final interview, meet people in various constituencies within the Department who feed back their views to the committee, and may be invited to give a lecture or seminar paper. That is obviously a better and fairer system, though time-consuming and not infallible. I don’t think any of the ‘irregular’ appointments I have mentioned turned out badly.
In the spring of 1968 there were demonstrations in many countries by young protestors, mainly but not exclusively against the Vietnam War. In March a large crowd surrounding the US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square clashed with police and people were hurt. There were similar events in West Germany, and in April an assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the student movement, triggered more protests and violent responses which I watched on the TV news with particular interest and concern, because I was due to go to West Germany shortly on another British Council lecture tour. I did go, without encountering any trouble, speaking at universities in Aachen, Cologne, West Berlin and Freiburg, and deviating from my itinerary to refresh my memory of Baden-Baden for Out of the Shelter. West Berlin by this time was a lively, confident, increasingly hedonistic city that had recovered from the war, but someone at the British Council took me through Checkpoint Charlie one day and showed me a completely different place. It reminded me a little of London at the end of the war, but more of the London George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with drab, badly maintained buildings, vacant bomb sites, no colourful advertisements, no goods worth buying in the shops, goose-stepping soldiers guarding official buildings, and a cowed, sullen-looking population, some of whom stared hostilely at us when we entered a bleak café to buy the black tea that seemed to be the only available drink.
The baton of student protest passed from West Germany to France with ‘les événements’ of May in Paris, when students occupied their university buildings, erected barricades and marched alongside militant workers to such effect that de Gaulle’s government was seriously threatened. The revolution did not happen, but the revolutionary impulse crossed the Channel. In the first term of the new academic year there were organised student demonstrations and occupations at several British universities, notably the London School of Economics, where the gates of the institution were knocked down with symbolic effect, and the University of Essex, where something like siege conditions existed for a time. The Birmingham manifestation of the Zeitgeist was a comparatively mild and short-lived affair. The Guild demanded student participation in university government by representation on committees and subcommittees at various levels of administration from departments to Senate. This was brusquely rejected by the new Vice-Chancellor, Robert Hunter, who had just taken over from the retiring Sir Robert Aitken, and lacked his predecessor’s executive finesse. On 27th November several hundred students occupied the VC’s office and other offices in the Aston Webb Building, allegedly breaking into filing cabinets, then spilled into the Great Hall, where they heard speeches and eventually held a disco before settling down for the night on the floor. The occupation continued for some days, adroitly led by a temporary assistant lecturer in the Sociology Department, Dick Atkinson, who had experience of radical action at LSE. After some concessions and promises of further discussion of the issues had been offered by the administration, on the advice of liberal professors like Richard Hoggart, the occupation was called off at a mass meeting of students held outside the Library on 5th December. Campus life returned to something like normality, though many older professors, including Terence Spencer, were profoundly shocked by what had happened, realising that their power and authority would never again be quite the same.
Meanwhile the publication of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae at the end of July, reaffirming the traditional teaching on birth control, had precipitated something like a Catholic equivalent to the secular revolt of youth in America and Europe. Leaks from the Vatican had previously indicated that the commission set up by John XXIII to investigate the issue, and enlarged by his successor with qualified laymen and -women, had given the Pope a report recommending, by a very large majority, a change in the rules in the light of modern knowledge. There was widespread disappointment and disillusionment among the laity, which would lead eventually to many of them leaving the Church, and an increasing number of priests leaving the priesthood. As the authorial narrator of How Far Can You Go? comments:
Of course, if the Pope had come down on the other side of the argument, there would no doubt have been an equally loud chorus of protest and complaint from the millions of Catholics who had loyally followed the traditional teaching at the cost of having many more children and much less sex than they would have liked, and were now too old, or too worn-out by parenthood, to benefit from a change in the rules – not to mention the priests who had sternly kept them toeing the line by threats of eternal punishment if they didn’t. The Pope, in short, was in a no-win situation.
But he had got himself into it. More leaks revealed that the argument of the small minority on the commission, all clerics, which had prevailed with Paul, was simply that the Church could not admit to having been wrong about this important moral issue without losing its authority. But the commission had been set up on the basis that there might be new reasons for change, and this was an old reason for no change, which made the whole exercise seem futile. Humanae Vitae triggered a crisis in the Church which has still not been resolved. Since it was agreed, even by supporters of the Pope, that he was not speaking ex cathedra (i.e. infallibly) there was still some room for conscientious dissent, and Mary and I were not in the least deterred from continuing with the decision we had made. I signed an ‘Appeal to the Pope and Bishops of the Catholic Church’, which was organised from the Catholic University of Louvain and signed by some 100 academics from ten countries, pointing out the flaws in the arguments of the encyclical and calling for a more flexible pastoral response to the issue.
The crisis was widely discussed in the media, and invested The British Museum is Falling Down with a certain topicality. Panther decided to reissue their paperback edition and I wrote a brief authorial note for it, saying that if I were writing the novel in 1968 I would not leave the two principal characters with their dilemma unresolved, and that: ‘there is of course only one possible resolution that would be consistent with the realities of their situation, with reason, with modern Christian thought, and with the demands of a comic literary structure’. My editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Joe Cunneen, who had been disappointed by the lack of interest in the paperback rights of the novel in the USA, wrote to me jubilantly to say he had sold them to a small New York publisher called Lancer. They wanted to rename the novel Vatican Roulette, and had already printed the cover with that title in their haste to get the book out, and he had agreed, ‘since I was not in a mood to stop them from cashing in on an immediate sale’. I objected strongly to this cavalier treatment for several reasons, and Joe was contrite, but there was nothing to be done. My mood was not improved when I saw the actual book, a cheap-looking object which didn’t even earn me much in royalties. I didn’t like the new Panther edition either, which had a sensational cover depicting a woman taking a pill while dangling a rosary with crucifix over her open mouth. I felt my novel was being vulgarised and misrepresented.
I finished Out of the Shelter in time to deliver two copies of the bulky typescript to Graham Watson in late December before we departed for California, travelling this time by air. Martin and Carol Green had invited us to break our journey in Boston and stay with them at Christmas, and it seemed a better idea than taking three young children on a twelve-hour economy flight over the pole, so we accepted gratefully. The Greens made us welcome, but the journey proved taxing. The BA flight to Boston from Heathrow was delayed for some hours for technical reasons, and the packed United DC8 that took us to San Francisco seemed to have something wrong with the quality of the air in the cabin, for we all felt increasingly ill as the flight went on, Mary particularly. That we all had colds didn’t help. We were scarcely able to walk off the plane and through the airport on arrival.
Stanley and Adrienne had kindly found us accommodation to rent in an area a few miles from Berkeley called El Cerrito. It was a three-bedroom house built into the hillside, with a large and habitable semi-basement, big picture windows overlooking the Bay, a garden at the rear and a pond with a waterfall which you could turn on and off by pressing a button in the kitchen. It belonged to a retired couple called Weede (pronounced Weedy) who had gone to Europe for six months. El Cerrito was in fact popular with middle-income retirees, and therefore parsimonious in voting money for the local junior school where we enrolled Julia and Stephen, so its curriculum and facilities were fairly limited. But it did its best for our children, who were comfortably ahead of their age group in ability and were contented there. Julia did a successful science project growing a sweet potato, which may have inspired her eventual decision to become a biologist. Mary found a playschool for young children with various kinds of disability that was mainly staffed by their mothers and found it rewarding to participate with Chris. A helpful couple lived across the street from us, with children about the same age as ours who soon became regular visitors, fascinated by our different accents and manners. El Cerrito was a rather dull little suburb, but it was friendly and safe, and a better place for us than volatile Berkeley. We needed a car, and for a few hundred dollars I bought a second-hand Ford Falcon with an alarming number of miles on the clock and shock absorbers that barely absorbed, which nevertheless served us for the duration of our stay without breakdowns or accidents.
Berkeley is one of several campuses in the federal University of California, which is governed by a board of Regents. The Governor of the State is a Regent ex officio, and at this time he was a right-wing Republican and ex-Hollywood film star soon to be President of the whole country, Ronald Reagan. My arrival at Berkeley coincided with an organised strike by students belonging to ethnic minorities who were demanding the establishment of a Black Studies Department or Third World College. Governor Reagan predictably rejected these demands and authorised the use of some force by the police against demonstrators. The usual battleground for such confrontations was the Sather Gate entrance to the campus leading to Sproul Plaza, where the Free Speech movement was born, and the steps of Sproul Hall, where many a revolutionary speech was made. One day police broke up student pickets there and chased them through the campus, and I could hear the yelling and popping of tear gas grenades from my office in the English Department. The strike was called off before the end of the quarter, when the University put forward plans for a new Department of Ethnic Studies, but it had disturbed the educational functioning of the institution. One had the feeling that many students had become addicted to the excitement and drama of protest and would soon be looking for another issue.
I was teaching two courses, mainly with my novelist’s rather than my critic’s hat on, by my own choice, as a change from Birmingham where I kept my novel-writing in a private compartment separate from my academic work. One course was a workshop in novel-writing for a small group of senior students, which met once a week for two hours or more and stretched over two quarters; and the other was a larger class of sophomores which combined creative writing exercises with critical analysis of model texts, meeting three times a week for ninety minutes. I knew how to run that one, but the creative writing course was more of a challenge. Most of the dozen students had a novel in progress which they had worked on for some time previously in other courses. I didn’t think any of them were likely to become published writers, though that was their aspiration. They were easily upset by criticism of a technical kind, and preferred to talk about their lives and their feelings, so it always threatened to turn into a kind of encounter group. The keenest member was a black student (as he called himself in the latest approved terminology, though he was a very pale brown) who had taken refuge in my office when police were rampaging through the campus, but he was not conspicuously talented. Decades later when he was in England, he looked me up and kindly invited me to lunch at Claridge’s, where he was staying; he had become a wealthy lawyer specialising in medical litigation, but still hankered after writing a bestseller.
In addition to these classes I kept office hours when students could see me individually about their work. Courses were assessed by the teacher at the end of the quarter, and counted for credit towards the student’s final degree. This modular course system resulted in a rather patchy education in the student’s ‘major’ subject, but it struck me as a much more efficient way of managing large numbers of students and courses than the British system, and eventually we would adopt something very like it. From the teacher’s point of view, it allowed time to cover a few subjects in some detail, instead of dealing hurriedly and superficially with many different ones in the course of a single week in one-hour tutorials, seminars and lectures. But the biggest difference, and the most surprising to me, was that the teacher’s performance was assessed by the students at the end of each course – twice: once on official forms which were distributed and collected by the teacher and passed to the relevant Dean’s office, and once in a guide compiled and published by the student body, which pulled no punches and had a large readership. This was something even the most extreme student activists at home had not thought of demanding, though student assessment of teaching is now common practice in the UK.
Stanley showed me the ropes, answered my questions, and introduced me to his friends and colleagues – not identical categories, though Leonard Michaels, who taught creative writing and Romantic literature, belonged to both. Lenny was a Jewish New Yorker, about my age, who specialised in short stories which were funny, shocking, arresting and written in a style all his own – urgent, fragmented, unpredictable and honed to a sharp edge. His first collection, called Going Places, was about to be published. This is how one of the stories, ‘A Green Thought’, starts:
I yelled; she ran in; I pointed. ‘Why is it green?’ She clapped her mouth; I shrieked, ‘Why is it green?’ She answered . . . I shrieked, ‘Vatchinol infection!’ She whispered . . . ‘Green medicine!’ I wouldn’t let her mitigate; shoved her aside. ‘No mitigations!’ She picked up a wash cloth. I wouldn’t let her wash it. ‘No washing it!’ I lunged into my clothes, laughed ironically, slammed out . . . subway steps, downtown express, eighty miles an hour. Hot, cold, nauseated. Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless.
It was writing absolutely antithetical to mine, especially to the novel I had just finished, but I responded to its energy, mainlined into the reader’s brain. I discovered several other American novelists during those six months whose work surprised and stimulated me – Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, among others. It was a great period for innovative fiction writing in America, but in Lenny’s case the impact was increased by his personality. Perhaps it was because we belonged to such different literary cultures that we became friends so quickly, because he viewed the American one as a snakepit full of jealous rivals and malevolent reviewers, and sometimes he was right. He had a lean, angular frame, a long mobile Jewish face that creased and uncreased as he laughed and lamented, and a mop of curly black hair. His wife Priscilla was his opposite in every way: pale, blonde, willowy, quietly spoken. Mary and I liked Priscilla, but there were tensions between her and Lenny, who had been married before and would be married again – twice. He fell in love very easily. We saw a good deal of this couple.
Soon after we settled in El Cerrito I began to get bad news about Out of the Shelter. In mid-January Joe Cunneen explained in a long letter why Holt, Rinehart & Winston were rejecting it: basically it wasn’t interesting enough. The central character ‘is a nice guy, we wish him well, but he is not Stephen Dedalus’. Shortly afterwards Graham wrote to say that after speaking to Tim O’Keeffe he thought MacGibbon & Kee would also pass on the novel, and confessed that he had been holding back his own negative opinion: ‘it just doesn’t seem to me to work on any count . . . This is a “grey book” whereas I think the British Museum proves that your fictional forte lies in humour.’ I was devastated by these reactions, which I described in reply to Graham as ‘a major crisis in my writing career’. Tim O’Keeffe confirmed Graham’s prediction by writing a rather stilted letter mixing regret with disappointment and concluding, ‘it seems to me that it might be time for a change of publisher’. Not long afterwards I heard that he had left MacGibbon & Kee involuntarily and with some bitterness; within a year or two the firm was swallowed up by Granada’s publishing company and the imprint expired. Meanwhile Graham undertook to seek another publisher for Out of the Shelter, though without inspiring much confidence in me, and I glumly left the book’s future in his hands. Weeks went by and I heard nothing.
Soon there was more bad news of a different kind. Mary got a cable from her brother Brian to tell her that her father was seriously ill and not likely to live much longer. This presented her with a painfully difficult decision: whether to fly home. It would mean taking Christopher with her, because I couldn’t manage all three children on my own and do my teaching. The memory of the ghastly flight from Boston was still vivid to her and, as I discovered, all flights from San Francisco to London at that time went via Los Angeles, extending the journey by a couple of hours and entailing a second landing and take-off, which she always found the most stressful part of flying. While we were deliberating, a second telegram arrived to say that Frank Jacob had died. Mary could not face the ordeal of the journey to England and back to attend his funeral. It was some consolation that her father, in hospital and aware of his condition, had written to say she was to stay with her family in America. But inevitably she felt upset and self-reproachful, knowing that her mother and siblings were gathered in Hoddesdon and conscious that some of our American friends, to whom long-haul flights were routine, would not understand her reluctance to join them. Perhaps for the first and last time in her life, she suffered depression (she is discontented at times, and angry, but not depressed) and with typical decisiveness, she sought help.
A condition of my appointment at Berkeley was that I and the family had health insurance covered by contributions split between myself and the University. This entitled us to treatment at a Kaiser clinic that included psychiatry, and Mary was lucky to find a psychiatrist who took a counselling, not a pharmaceutical, approach to her problem. He seems in retrospect to have used something like what we later came to know as cognitive behavioural therapy, challenging her negative views of herself and prompting her to take a more proactive attitude to her situation. The result was a renegotiation of our marriage, though I did not immediately see it as such. I promised to support her, when we returned to England, in pursuing a fulfilling career by paying for whatever assistance with Christopher she needed, and to take a bigger share in domestic chores (mainly by learning to cook). Mary did not wish to return to ordinary teaching, but to train as a school counsellor. She had done some voluntary work in Birmingham on behalf of the organisation Mencap, visiting parents who had just had a baby with a mental handicap to give them practical advice and encouragement, and had found it rewarding. She wanted to pursue this kind of interpersonal work in an educational context, and she had heard of a course in Birmingham which led to a qualification in school counselling. With this aim in view for our return to England, her spirits improved quickly.
So did my own spirits when I received a Western Union telegram from Graham Watson: ‘OUT OF THE SHELTER MACMILLANS WRITING DIRECT MAKING EDITORIAL SUGGESTIONS STOP WILL UNDERTAKE PUBLICATION GIVEN YOUR ACCEPTANCE SUCH SUGGESTIONS STOP WILL NEGOTIATE CONTRACT SUBSEQUENTLY.’ What relief! At last a publisher who wanted the novel. I had always expected to do more work on it, and looked forward to doing so in collaboration with an editor. Shortly afterwards I got a letter from Kevin Crossley-Holland, a young editor at Macmillan who was also at the beginning of a productive career as poet, novelist and translator. He said he and his colleagues thought the novel was ‘a sharply observed and endearing study of how a protected small boy grows and develops . . . but is really far, far too long’. He concluded by saying that if I could see my way to cutting the novel ‘by as much as a third’ Macmillan would be pleased to publish it. A third was an awful lot of words. I didn’t see how I could cut that much and not end up with a very different and much slighter work. Perhaps I could manage a quarter. I offered to cut it by a quarter, and Macmillan accepted this compromise.
With this anxiety resolved, I was able to enjoy more fully the pleasures of being back in the Bay Area. The weather helped: our first couple of months had been cool and rainy, but then the sun came out, and stayed out. Christopher learned to walk in our garden, to his great delight, and was happy to be floated in an inflatable jacket in El Cerrito’s open-air swimming pool. My mother and her brother John took our presence in California as an encouragement to make a trip to Hawaii to visit Eileen, breaking their journey to stay with us for a few days. It was the first time that Mum had travelled by air and it was a testing initiation, but she stood up to it very well, and looked as if she was enjoying herself in the few snaps we have of the visit. They stayed with Eileen in Waikiki for a couple of weeks and (I gathered) the three of them talked their heads off and laughed and cried and quarrelled as they always did when they got together. I was quite sure Mum wouldn’t have made such an epic journey if we hadn’t provided a staging post, and I was glad to have given her the incentive to see something of the big wide world beyond England and Belgium.
My taste in music began to change with the times. Mary and I went one evening to an open-air arena in Berkeley for what was advertised as a jazz concert. The first half featured Dizzy Gillespie and his band, the second half the gifted singer/songwriter/composer of eclectic jazz-based music, Nina Simone, followed by the Northern California State Youth Choir, who were currently high in the pop charts with a funky gospel arrangement of the eighteenth-century hymn ‘Oh Happy Day’. Dizzy Gillespie, one of the giants of early modern jazz, second in fame only to Charlie Parker, was the support act! Nothing could have told me more clearly that vocal music, drawing on and combining various sources – folk song, blues, gospel, country and western, rock and roll, Latin American, Caribbean – was displacing instrumental jazz in Sixties culture. The cool music of the decade was that of Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, and the ever-surprising Beatles. I bought albums by some of these and similar artists to play on the Weedes’ record player.
Stanley and Adrienne led us to see the movie of the moment, Bullitt, a police thriller located in and around San Francisco, with a famous and much-imitated car chase filmed on the very streets, hills and freeways that we had driven on ourselves. Another film that derived a special impact from being viewed in that place, at that time, was the British director Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . ., in which a group of public-school boys rebel against the sadistic and repressive ethos of their school by massacring a crowd of teachers, pupils and parents with machine guns from the school’s neo-Gothic battlements. At this savage climax the youthful Berkeley audience rose to its feet and cheered. The Living Theatre came to Berkeley and we queued up to see this venerable experimental troupe, who had been presenting anarchic avant-garde drama influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty for decades, but had found an enthusiastic new audience in the Age of Aquarius with an ensemble piece called Paradise Now. As you went into the theatre you were accosted by actors who uttered bitter complaints like ‘I am not allowed to smoke marijuana . . .’ or ‘I am not allowed to take my clothes off . . .’ and during the show they were apt to jump from the stage and walk through the auditorium, stepping on the backs of the seats between the ducking members of the audience, some of whom invaded the stage to participate in the Dionysian climax of the performance.
People who were allowed to take their clothes off were the go-go dancers in the bars on Columbus Avenue in the North Beach district of San Francisco. It so happened that our residence in the Bay Area coincided with a licensed replacement of topless performers with totally nude ones, provoking some controversy in the local press. Lenny and I sampled – purely for the purpose of cultural research, of course – one of the small ‘Topless and Bottomless’ bars which had proliferated to exploit this development, before going on to a rock concert at Fillmore West. The ambience was quite unlike a sleazy strip club: the patrons included women with their dates, and there was no stripping. The girls, who looked like nice young women working their way through college, danced to recorded disco music in turn, solo and quite naked, in a pool of coloured light on a tiny stage, and in a decorous style that was more akin to exercise than eroticism. There were, I gathered, raunchier venues, but we didn’t look for them.
It was not long before bared female breasts acquired a different significance – as a motif in the iconography of political protest in Berkeley. The new casus belli was a park, the ‘People’s Park’, as it was called by those who created it on a vacant lot a few blocks from the campus, which was owned by the University and intended for use as a playing field, but had been left undeveloped for two years and was something of an eyesore. On 20th April about 200 students and hippies, or ‘street people’ as they were known locally, occupied the land and began to lay down grass and plant flowers. The concept of the park appealed to several different sections of the community: students, hippies, environmentalists, left-wing radicals and ordinary families. They all worked together voluntarily on the Park and frequented it. The Regents put pressure on the moderate but weak-willed Chancellor of Berkeley, Roger Heyns, to suppress this project, and on 30th April the University’s Public Relations office announced that work would begin on the playing field in July, pointing out ‘the disutility of any additional labour’ on the site. The Park people carried on regardless. On 13th May Chancellor Heyns commented: ‘Most people are worried about a confrontation, although some people are afraid there might not be one . . . [They] have the perfect issue: the people versus the heartless University, creativity versus bureaucracy.’ Having shrewdly defined the trap, he proceeded to walk into it. At dawn on 15th May, police surrounded the Park, evicted all, and arrested some, of those who had spent the night there and stood guard while the San Jose Steel Company rapidly erected a chain-link fence around it. At noon there was a rally in Sproul Plaza and the crowd marched off to demonstrate at the Park, where they were met by a large body of police. Stones were thrown and the police retaliated with clubs, tear gas and, for the first time, shotguns loaded with birdshot and in some cases buckshot. A colleague and I heard the distant hubbub, climbed to a balcony of the Union building and watched as the police rolled the crowd back along Telegraph Avenue and chased them through the campus.
Over the next few weeks violent confrontations between demonstrators and police on and around the campus escalated. One apparently innocent person was killed, another blinded, and many injured, by police firing shotguns. Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. An army helicopter sprayed tear gas over the campus: it drifted into offices, into the Cowell hospital, and into the Strawberry Canyon Recreation Center where faculty wives and children were swimming. Five hundred people were arrested on the street one morning for defying the ban on public gatherings and made to lie face down on the asphalt of the County Prison compound for two hours. The conflict had its lighter aspects. The National Guard (somewhat like the British Territorial Army) was largely composed of young men who had joined it to avoid being sent to Vietnam, and many were sympathetic to the demonstrators. The young women protestors embarrassed them by stripping off their tops, opposing bare breasts to the soldiers’ weaponry and putting flowers in the barrels of their rifles, a photo opportunity that student and underground newspapers found irresistible. But the methods of law enforcement used by the authorities provoked shock and horror in the community and radicalised many people previously detached from the struggle, including academic staff. An ‘ad hoc’ assembly of 250 faculty passed a series of motions censuring the authorities and declaring their inability to continue teaching while the campus was occupied by police and military. I joined a large number of them holding a vigil of protest on the steps of Sproul Plaza. Though I shared their views, I felt more like a war correspondent reporting in a foreign country and collected documentary souvenirs of the unfolding story – newspaper cuttings, photographs, flyers, manifestos, and personal experiences that were written up and circulated in the University. I knew I would use this bit of history in a novel one day, though not exactly how.
The climax of this sequence of events was as dramatic as any novelist could invent. A compromise solution to the main issue was proposed: that the Park should be taken over by Berkeley City Council. Its nine elected members were divided on the matter, and a meeting was scheduled for the evening of 5th June, when they would hear opinions from citizens. Meanwhile the Park supporters planned a huge rally and march through the streets to be held on Memorial Day, 6th June. As many as 50,000 supporters from all over the country were expected to attend, and local people viewed the prospect with foreboding. The first issue discussed at the Council meeting was whether the march should be permitted to take place the next day. The proceedings were covered live on local television, and I was enthralled and moved as I watched, for it was a demonstration of American democracy at its best. The Berkeley Police Chief was confronted by the organiser of the march and accused of bad faith over permits. Sensationally, the charge was supported by one of the City Council’s officials, and the permit was granted. The proposal that the Council should take over the Park was passed by a single vote, one member having changed his mind on the issue, and the meeting broke up amid liberal rejoicing. The great march next day passed off peacefully in a carnival atmosphere. The Park, I believe, is still in place.
That was really the climax of our six months’ stay, but there was time for a restful week’s holiday at beautiful Stinson Beach, in a rented house which we shared with Lenny and Priscilla and their boys. It was situated on a narrow spit of land with the beach on one side and on the other a lagoon, which unlike the ocean was calm and warm enough to swim in. Then it was time to return home. This time we flew over the pole, in a Pan Am Boeing 707. I booked our journey for the 4th of July, Independence Day, guessing that the flight would have fewer passengers than usual. Indeed the plane was almost empty: we each stretched out across several seats, slept peacefully for hours, and were waited on solicitously by the underemployed cabin crew. It was the most comfortable long-haul economy flight I ever experienced.