Free Loving Monsters by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

had rather an erotic life.
    – Very well, then. No, I told you: my father threw me out. –
    For not being in sympathy with the Protestant work ethic? His son of eighteen? I don’t believe that. Or else you’ve deliberately misled me about your father, whom I take to have been a mild man with a badly repressed streak of romanticism. Very English, in fact.
    – Well, all right, perhaps it was a bit more complicated. Certainly his Englishness extended to the matter of Protestantism. Like many decent Englishmen he fully endorsed the Christian ethic and had not the slightest interest in Christ. I never remember him showing the least sign of spirituality or churchgoing, not even as an occasional act of solidarity with his wife. I think he was both baffled and embarrassed by her sudden conversion to that bustling low-churchery. All those hymns and prayers and tracts and meetings and exhortations and generally spreading the Gospel: they jarred on his retiring sense of the proper. So no, he might never have been clear in his own mind about a pilgrim’s upward progress, but he did feel to his fingertips the idea of a person’s self-betterment. Where I was concerned he was not unreasonably put out that all his hard work and self-sacrifice at Lloyds in order to give me a decent education was being repaid by a son who showed little interest in study and even less in ‘playing the game’: that numinous British concept which, if you had to have it explained to you, meant that you weren’t properly British.
    – Fact is, I’d got into what they called bad company at school and very soon I myself became the bad company about which other boys were warned. There was a lad there named Michael who was a year older than me and to whom I was extremely attracted. It was partly because he was a rebel, but then most boys of seventeen have a streak of that. In Michael’s case, though, it was backed up by real ideological fervour. He used to go to political meetings at weekends instead of playing rugger. Imagine cutting a school sport in order to listen to Harry Pollitt, who by then was Secretary of the British Communist Party, haranguing the faithful in some draughty hall. Mind you, there always was a smallelement of radicalism in the school, but it was of a politically unthreatening kind. Some of those missionary households still had strong working-class connections and a certain brand of socialism went very happily with evangelism. For instance I remember our kitchen dresser always had saucers full of Co-op tokens on it. They were the equivalent of today’s box-top discount credits, only made of tin. They were the size of coins and came in various shapes and denominations: penny, threepence, sixpence, that sort of thing. Our local co-operative was the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society and my mother was a loyal RACS shopper. Those bits of tin represented her dividends as a shareholder. Joint ownership, social equality, the community. So if you’re thinking of Eltham and Eltham College as just being stuffy and reactionary, I’ve misled you. They certainly had that element in abundance, but they also contained a small degree of old-fashioned working-class radicalism which I suppose had roots going back to the eighteenth-century peasant movements. Did you ever read Mark Rutherford’s The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane ? Very much that sort of milieu.
    – So Michael’s political enthusiasm might not have been as outré then as it now sounds. Of course you could have gone into many a house in Beechill Road and found nothing in the way of improving literature other than a Hymns A & M , a Bradshaw’s railway guide and a Whitaker’s Almanack. But plenty of other houses had considerable fireside libraries which often included those yellow-jacketed books Gollancz published with the serious-minded autodidact in mind, or Penguin Specials by people like the Duchess of Atholl. Women and Politics was one of hers, I remember. So were Conscription of