Free We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

on an index card which he could carry around in his pocket for easy reference.
    a) Property is theft
    b) Property is impossible
    c) Property is despotism
    No one had lived there since the war and its ownership was in dispute. Ivan and his school friend Julian, who had been studying Taoism in Devon until he caught dysentery from drinking unsanitary water collected in a water butt, had broken in through the rotten rear windows and moved in their mattresses.
    These windows, cracked and grimy, were now shaded with striped Indian bedspreads and bare lightbulbs dimmed with Chinesepaper lanterns. Electricity came and went, periodically stolen by hot-wiring the supply to adjacent properties. Eleven young people were inhabiting the squat, each with varying talents and competing visions. Ivan’s round face and button eyes, his cherubic puffs of blond hair belied his ingenious ability to commandeer goods and services from the tremendous waste of the wealthy neighborhood. People threw things away, Ivan went and got them. He had what the rest of the house lacked, scuttling energy, disappearing for hours at a time, leading some critics of the regime to speculate that he might have crossed over to the other side, the dark side, and got a job. But if he had, he was not sharing his wages. Stephen liked Ivan more and more. He made everything happen.
    Stephen and Andrea lay in bed smoking joints under the wedding cake moldings of the high ceilings. Once, there had been a chandelier. Mice huddled behind a derelict chest of drawers no one dared open which smelt of mold and prewar newspapers, with the inky, smudged faces of old murderers and their shadowed victims.
    To both of them, the chaos of London was bewildering. It was a hideous city, its massed redbrick houses with their postage stamp front gardens and net curtains were full of peering furtive faces, as if behind those windows were dismal, uninteresting secrets. London’s railway lines were overgrown with wildflowers and saplings on the embankments, the bridges graffitied. All the pubs closed down in the middle of the afternoon, and woke dozily blinking in the early evening, they smelt of sodden beer mats and stale sandwiches. The lumbering double-decker buses deadlocked in the narrow streets, the dirty newspaper pages blown on a hot wind—the whole mess of London intimidated them.
    But Andrea was more resourceful; they could have done with a girl like her at sea, in more ways than one, Stephen thought, admiringly.
    After a few days, with an A-Z and a tube map, she went down to the Savoy, located the staff entrance and got herself a jobas a chambermaid. She knew hotels, how they functioned. She understood that they were a hive and that a hive always fed its drones. Her hair tied back, her body dampened under a white and blue checked maid’s uniform and apron, black lace-up shoes on her feet, she passed anonymously through the rooms, seeing the unmade beds, the stained sheets, the half-written letters on the desk, the condom in the wastebasket, the clothes in the wardrobes, the indentations made by the feet that inhabited the shoes left out each night for polishing. Every chamber in the hotel surrendered to her key.
    Andrea brought home from work soap, needles, thread, small bottles of shampoo. The hotel staff ate together in the basement; she secreted slices of bread and butter in a paper napkin in her pocket, ends of ham, sometimes a scotch egg and tomatoes. The couple consumed them in secret. She kept the rabbit jacket well hidden when she wasn’t wearing it. Stephen loved to see her walking quickly across the room, naked apart from the fur, which reached just below her waist, and the auburn triangle above her lovely white thighs and dimpled knees. He liked the little extra flesh on her. He could not stand gaunt women. One day he would have enough money to buy her a bottle of perfume so the jacket would be scented like the coats of the film stars.
    He wrote his father