Free The Sixties by Jenny Diski

liked appearing to belong with. The gaiety was powerful and beguiling, the
     uniform of denim, long hair and beards reassuring. We were the beatniks and weirdies the popular press wrote about and our
     parents worried so much about. I was marching with a group of people in their late twenties, who met regularly at the Highlander
     and the French pubs in Dean Street, and the Partisan café round the corner, where the New Left congregated. One of them was
     the son of a friend of the woman I was staying with, and they had been charged with my care.
    It was a moment when I felt I might be in the right place, among these like-minded, humanist, socialist, hard-drinking, fast-talking,
     clever people who treated me not as if they were looking after me but as one of their group. But there were moments, as I
     put one foot in front of another through the towns of Reading and Slough, when the point of what we were doing vividly came
     back to me. I really did believe that sooner or later the bombs would explode in Washington and Moscow, Paris and London.
     I was quite sure that I would have to live part of my life, perhaps most of my life, in a post-nuclear devastated world. If
     I lived at all. I knew it in the way that children suddenly come to know that one day inescapably they will die, and try to
     understand it by rehearsing the catastrophe as they lie in bed at night, while their parents believe they are dreaming fairy
     tales. Much of the time, of course, like the children, I forgot, and behaved like a young person with their whole life in
     front of them, but that knowing place would intermittently reassert itself, making me almost dizzy with the fact of it. So
     I looked around sometimes during the three-day march at all of us having such a good time, comrades, conversationalists, drinking
     pals, and flirting the promise of all kind of pleasures to come, while nonetheless feeling fervently opposed to a politics
     based on mortal fear, and I wondered if everyone really believed that the worst would actually happen, in the way I did in
     those moments of certainty. Perhaps everyone thinks that they are the only ones who believe the worst. Or perhaps all fifteen-year-olds
     think they are the only ones who really know the truth. Anyway, I couldn’t quite imagine that my companions and the other
     thousands on the march, some of them quite militant for those early days, truly believed they were going to go up in or die
     slowly from the forthcoming planetary explosion.
    What went with that feeling of being sole keeper of the truth was astonishment, a complete inability to comprehend how those
     who were in charge of the world could operate as they did. Not just their building of nuclear weapons, and the creation of
     fear, but their acceptance of, let alone their complicity in the interrelated wicked-nesses of social and educational inequality,
     racism and poverty. I had the flashing sense that it was a kind of dream world I inhabited, that I would wake up and, of course , none of those unthinkable ills were permitted by rational, educated, responsible people. I knew a little about the required
     intricacies and compromises of realpolitik , inasmuch as I’d studied European history for A level, but what was more real than the fact of hungry, sick and dispossessed human beings living on the same planet as the well-fed, highly schooled and
     skilled people in charge who could do something about it? I was not, to put it another way, political. I paid attention to
     the world and saw suffering being tolerated for political and economic reasons, or greed, or laziness, and, being somewhat
     new on the planet, it shocked me.
    Five years later, I hadn’t grown any more sophisticated. The American invasion of Vietnam wasn’t a British war, not even a
     blunder of the British empire, but the Wilson government publicly supported the Americans, though it did manage to avoid –
     that time – sending troops as proof of their support.