Free We Had It So Good by Linda Grant Page A

a thank-you letter, and enclosed a photograph of Andrea sitting by the window, the light of London on those veiled eyes and parted lips.
    In the house Julian cooked, and was investigating the principles of macrobiotic eating. A row broke out in the kitchen when one of the girls stole (or rather liberated from their capitalist oppressors in a corner shop) a packet of chocolate biscuits. A house meeting was convened to discuss their presence in the kitchen. Julian wanted them thrown out, the sugar in them was poison. Ivan thought theyshould be fairly distributed, while Elaine believed that they should be given as a prize to the commune member who was considered to have made the greatest contribution to the general well-being and maintenance of the collective. Thus introducing the notion of meritocracy, which was howled down.
    Stephen sidelined the debate by going out to the shop and buying his own packet of chocolate biscuits, which he ate at night, in bed with Andrea. He did not mention this act of bourgeois individualism. He wanted Andrea to lick the melting chocolate from his fingers.
    When Ivan was on a prolonged absence of several days, the squatters painted a mural across the stuccoed surface of the house depicting an idyllic land of large-breasted chicks harvesting marijuana leaves from an endless garden while the face of Karl Marx beamed down from a bearded sun. “We’re not bloody Marxists,” Ivan said when he returned. “We’re anarchists.”
    â€œThis must be Marx in his anarchist phase,” said Stephen, pointing to the marijuana plantation. He had enjoyed painting his beard.
    â€œI’ve decided we’re going to share everything,” Ivan said, “even clothes. Every night we’ll take off whatever we’re wearing and put it in the clothes stash, then next morning people can just come and take whatever they like. It will be amazing.”
    â€œI don’t want to wear your smelly jeans.”
    â€œAnd no one’s wearing my fur jacket,” said Andrea.
    The girls in the house set up the clothes stash but the boys refused to take part. Andrea noticed they did not like the idea of someone else’s shirt or shoes touching their own skin, which was curious, a sign, she thought, of their fear of intimacy. While Stephen slept she slit the outside seams of his jeans from the hem to the knee and cut triangles from the green velvet dress and sewed them in. His Levi’s had turned into flares. In the morning he awoke and stumbled into his trousers. He looked down and saw his feetdisappearing below the flapping fabric. Was there something a little faggoty about wearing parts of a girl’s dress in your pants? Men with long hair were often taken for girls or pansies, but not him, not with his beard and his black Afro. In the end he decided he liked the altered jeans. Something of his wife, his old lady, was next to his skin. She belonged to him. The thought was agreeable.
    â€œWe were poor for so long,” Stephen told his children, “but, man, it was a great kind of poor to be. We didn’t miss money, not at all. You could always get what you needed, and you didn’t really need much. The summers were wonderful. We used to walk down through Regent’s Park and go to the art museums because the pictures were free and there were parties all the time, and happenings. You don’t seem to have those anymore. A happening was an anarchist kind of thing. That was it, it just happened, despite all the reasons why it shouldn’t. I liked the anarchists. The other stuff, the Marxist bullshit, I could take it or leave it.”
    Under Ivan’s energetic direction, the squatters did what they could to reverse the dereliction of the house; they painted the walls and covered up the mouse holes. They restored the toilets to working order and paid a chimney sweep to unblock the fireplaces. Andrea planted sunflower seeds and vegetables in the garden, and