Free We Had It So Good by Linda Grant Page B

they grew. They had a crop of tiny finger-shaped carrots and sour white onions. The sunflowers reared up, waving overgrown heads and dense, pollen-heavy hearts around which radiated hectic yellow petals, held up on hairy thick stems. Stephen was amazed at his wife’s numerous gifts.
    When Andrea had first gone to Kent to stay with Grace in the holidays, after the failure of the hotel, she had strayed out beneath the wisteria bower and down an Alice in Wonderland path which twisted back upon itself and took you into a maze made of box hedge, and instead of getting lost she found her way out of there,down to the scented roses, and stood watching Grace’s mother, who silently handed her a hoe and nodded at the green heads of weeds which needed to be amputated. This is how she learned to garden, a skill Grace had refused to acquire, but Andrea, Stephen slowly observed, was a homemaker, a fixer-up of things untidy or even derelict. She made things better, she would make him better if he gave her half a chance.
    Andrea taught Stephen how to grow all kinds of things and built him a simple lean-to shelter to cover the traces of his marijuana crop. He had thoroughly digested the 1964 landmark paper of Mechoulam, Gaoni and Edery, which isolated a delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol as the main psychoactive substance in dope, and asked his wife to advise on how to maximize growing conditions to produce grade-A grass. This was for the private consumption of the house.
    The acid factory at Oxford had been covered in the underground press and its closure by the university authorities, the fascist pigs, had led to a sudden supply shortage of highgrade hallucinogens. The lesson was that quality drugs, produced by ethical manufacturers, non-bread-heads, not out to serve the interests of the Man, gave quality trips with no unwanted side effects involving demonic visitations, extreme paranoia and lengthy stays in psychiatric wards.
    â€œYou know a lot about drugs, Stephen,” Andrea said one night. “You know more than anyone else. Why don’t you write a book about it?”
    â€œI can barely write a letter,” he said.
    â€œWell, you could write something.”
    â€œWhat could I write?”
    Ivan came in from his secret travels. “Andrea thinks I should write a book about drugs,” Stephen said.
    â€œFunny you should say that because one of the underground mags is looking for someone to write about drugs. They wantsomeone who knows what’s safe to take and what isn’t, what the effects are, that kind of thing.”
    â€œWow,” he said. “I could do that. Thanks.”
    So Stephen Newman was famously, for a few months in 1971, “Doc California,” explaining the chemical makeup of various legal and illegal substances. Why Dexedrine made you hustle and why hash made you want to sit still. His column featured grainy photographs of drugs currently available and came with a disclaimer that the author did not, of course, endorse the purchase or taking of these drugs. His mug shot at the top, photocopied, reduced him to contrasty black and white, and his eyes to burning coals of intense, staring knowledge.
    Winter arrived. Their room, with views across London to the cloud-shrouded revolving restaurant of the Post Office Tower, the city borne down under the weight of brown skies, was heated by a twobar electric fire when the power was on. Stephen knew nothing at all about cold. The ice tormented him. The chill was in their bones. The damp was in their internal organs. He feared waking to find a frozen drop of semen at the end of his penis. Would it hurt? Would it damage his precious cock? The last thing they did at night before they put their bodies gingerly down onto the frosty sheets was to lay their clothes out on the floor around the electric fire. Waking in the morning, hugging each other to exchange the heat of their bodies, they watched their breath freeze in the icy air and dared each