Chapter 9

Marriage and a monkey on the nose

It was 1976. I had worked at Friends of the Earth since 1971. I was a founding member. My Deptford friends thought I had lost the plot. I had to wonder too. What drove me to cycle from Deptford to the West End every day to work with these Oxbridge types? (And back most evenings, unless I ended up in a pub with Graham in which case I’d inevitably stay at his Walthamstow, Hoe Street house). It was clear that I was not going to be given the sorts of opportunities I thought I deserved. I didn’t have the right accent, or the right education pedigree. Even Richard Sandbrook acknowledged the existence of a classist glass ceiling at FoE and while that admission was depressing, it did not dampen my enthusiasm for environmental campaigning. I just thought it could have been done with more panache and in a manner which appealed to ordinary people more.

The topical anecdote doing the rounds was: question – ‘What is an environmentalist?’ Answer – ‘A bearded man on TV.’ Question – ‘What is an environmental disaster?’ Answer – ‘Two bearded men on TV.’ I thought that was not very far from the truth. But I enjoyed the banter and the disrespect that people at FoE had for authority and their willingness to articulate it. It was so refreshing to be enveloped in this culture of cynicism on a daily basis as opposed to being engaged in it sparingly when Don Gardner, John Morton and I got together; an increasingly rare event as time progressed.

I felt like a round peg in a square hole at Friends of the Earth and it was clear that my departure would be a relief to the board as well as myself. In five years, I had not been asked to run a campaign, act as a spokesperson or graduate to the board. I was a working class former lorry driver and the class system thrived at FoE: clearly, opposition to classism didn’t come within the remit of ‘being green’.

As the time of my departure approached, I became friends with a journalist from a London newspaper who, like me, had the occasional dabble on the horses. One day, he suggested that I might want to back a particular horse which won at a canter. I made a couple of pounds profit and when I next saw my contact I thanked him, only to have him offer me another tip, this time in more hushed and conspiratorial tones. I was informed it was a ‘stable tip’ which meant nothing to me at the time, but I backed the horse, this time a little more generously. It won. I made more money. Over the course of the next few months my contact gave me a further three tips, all of which won. One horse won at very long odds and I was beginning to build up a nice cash balance.

One Saturday afternoon, I was about to leave my mother’s flat when the phone rang and a breathless voice said, ‘Phantom Freddie, 4 o’clock, Brighton’ and hung up. With just a few minutes to go before the ‘off’, I rushed to the betting shop and put a tenner on the horse against which, I noticed as I studied the betting, odds were not even posted. It romped home, winning by several lengths. I waited for the price. I swooned when I heard, ‘The winner of the 4 o’clock Brighton is Phantom Freddie, starting price 50 to 1.’ The betting shop erupted. Despite being told to keep these tips secret, I told everyone I could so that they could share in these highly accurate and clearly well informed tips, regardless of their origin. I collected £510, a sum I had never seen before.

Three weeks later, I lost the lot. My tipster and I went to an evening meeting at Windsor, feeling so flush that we hired a chauffeur driven car. I asked my wife-to-be, Annette, to bring a friend to make up a foursome. We walked into the members bar where many of the then Chelsea football team – Peter Osgood and Allan Hudson I remember seeing - were having a drink. The rest of this story you can write yourself. The tipped horse on which I put my shirt – having first borrowed £100 to make my bet up to a monkey (£500) came stone last, bursting my bubble and reducing me, after what was a memorable and exciting few months, to my customary penury.

It was around this time that Dad started to complain of pains in his chest and back. He and Mum had finally arranged a holiday to the Scillies, after I had routinely and regularly told them how much they would love it there among the peace and quiet of the tranquil islands and the tropical gardens of Tresco, washed by the warm Gulf Stream. They went to the Scillies that summer but had to return earlier than planned because Dad was in pain. He found it impossible to walk more than a few hundred yards before back pain stopped him in his tracks and chest pains followed. Mum and Dad came home to find Annette and I planning our wedding.

What on earth could I do to start a ‘real’ career while at the same time indulging my desire and flair for expressing my outrage at environmental and social skulduggery? After talking it through, Annette and I hit on what seemed like a masterly plan. In retrospect, it is a wonder how we ever agreed it in theory let alone went through with it in practice. In essence, it was this: I would get a ‘straight’ job and use the stable base that would give me to consider a career in politics. I applied to join the Post Office and was soon inducted into the course for aspiring counter clerks at the Post Office HQ in Chippenham, Wiltshire. We decided that, after we were married, we would live in Somerset, an ideal setting for a romantic rural idyll if ever there was one, although the digs in Bristol we ended up in were the very antithesis of romance.

Our weekly search for houses in Somerset found us looking at a tiny hamstone cottage in a small village called Kingsbury Episcopi. Immediately opposite the cottage, on the village’s handkerchief-sized green, was a medieval lock up, a small round building big enough for one noisy drunk. Soon after the wedding which took place in Swanley, Kent, we moved to our house and I found a job as a postal clerk in the Yeovil Central Post Office having qualified after the course in Chippenham. From day one, the relationship between me and the Post Office was rocky, to say the least. I had moved from the relatively liberal atmosphere and philosophy of a non-governmental organisation into an atmosphere and work environment worthy of a Dickensian novel.

By now, Dad was undergoing endless tests at the hospital and had been forced to give up work. It was a time of constant and nagging worry about his health during which we feared the worse but refrained from voicing our views, always ‘looking on the bright side’ and hoping against hope that the doctors would identify the problem and find a cure. Every time I saw Dad, he seemed worse. The analgesic tablets he was taking gave him scant relief from the pain and he took to aspirin as his favourite pain relief tablet. I didn’t know it, but two massive events were about to converge in a period of time which would fundamentally alter the entire course and shape of my life.

As Dad’s condition declined, I realised that I would have to move closer to London. Living in Somerset, I was feeling very much geographically and politically isolated from what was going on in London. In addition, the locals in Kingsbury were not exactly gushing in their welcome for us ‘incomers’ and I had already crossed swords with the hunting fraternity who would regularly hold up traffic on the minor roads between Kingsbury and Yeovil in order to ensure their hounds and horses – not to mention the utterly ridiculously-attired and mounted aristocracy – were allowed unhindered access to the beleaguered quarry.

I recall telling one officious blue-rinsed snob sitting on her jittery charger as she held her arm across the line of traffic, ‘You’re the sort of person who’d create merry hell if you got to the Post Office and couldn’t be served because postal clerks were being held up by the poxy hunt! You don’t see the connection, do you?’

Her response said it all: ‘Piss orf!’

I was also itching to be politically and environmentally active again but didn’t really want to spend too much energy on the pursuit of a political career in the boonies as I saw them. So we began to think about moving closer to London. In the meantime, having attended a few Labour Party meetings in Yeovil, I was courted heavily by the Labour Party officials who began schooling me as their candidate in the upcoming district elections. Somerset in the 70s had barely heard of the Labour Party and as a Labour Party candidate on the hustings, I was given very short shrift, being told in one shop to ‘clear off’ and take my communist manifesto with me. Choice.

As predicted, I lost the election but the experience was electrifying and I wanted more. Within a year, I had joined the ‘B’ List of prospective Labour Party candidates and underwent a selection process for the nomination at Taunton which I sadly lost, although I lost to a fine competitor who argued not for worker participation as I had, but for worker’s control. The natives, although few in number on the left, were far more revolutionary in attitude than I gave them credit for.

Tony Benn endeared himself to me then (and even more so later when we attended Labour Party compositing meetings together when I was with Greenpeace) by coming to our tiny Labour Party meeting in Yeovil and giving a speech which was as rousing and as impassioned as if he were addressing ten thousand at a rally in Trafalgar Square. Never before or since have I been exposed in such a stirring manner to the links between the Labour movement and those early and often persecuted pioneers as the Levellers and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It is a heritage which today’s Labour movement, to its eternal shame, attempts to hide and rarely mentions as it seeks to emulate and accelerate the move to the right which modern life and the cult of celebrity demands.

Clear of political encumbrances for now, Annette and I looked around at the options we had for moving closer to London and my increasingly sick dad. I would go and see Dad as often as I could and he would do his best to put on a brave face and play down the suffering he was undergoing. He was very ill and yet the doctors would not, or could not, give us a clear diagnosis. We heard about lesions and a shadow on his lung, but what was clear was that Dad secretly felt he had cancer and that he was dying. Often I would walk past his bedroom to find him kneeling on the floor, body bent at the waist, his torso prostrate across the bed, half-sleeping and moaning in pain. It was a sight which broke my heart and, Mum, living with him day after day, was worn down with worry and angst.

After a few false starts, Annette and I managed to sell the cottage in Kingsbury for £10,000 making a clear £2,000 profit which we put as a deposit on a secluded semi-detached cottage at Sussex Cottages, Fir Tree Lane, Haughley Green, just outside Stowmarket in Suffolk. Still clinging to my shaky Post Office job, I sought and was given a transfer to a post office in Halstead, in Essex. I determined to leave the post office at the earliest opportunity. An event at my new place of work made that happen quicker than I had bargained for.