Old Stuff…

A long time ago i started randomly writing down my memories of early childhood. It struck me at the time that i had an almost unique upbringing and as the years went by my memories of it were fading so i bunged some of it down. Since i did this my writing has drastically improved, mostly just because i remembered i loved it. So forgive me if what im about to post isnt up to my usual standard…. Whatever that may be. Ill post them in the order i wrote them, youll see the gradual improvement as start to turn them into actual bits rather than random thoughts.

Communal Living.

When I tell people I was brought up in a commune I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are thinking one of two things.  Either they are picturing a secure compound with a charismatic leader and brainwashed minions doing his every bidding, or, they are picturing lots of sixties flower power hippies eating tofu and smoking dope.

Its not like that.  Or rather, it wasn’t for me. The commune I lived in was at best a dodge.  A scam to save on bills and rent.  Ok, yes, we had our dodgy hippies in the house and I now realise, upon reflection, that a LOT of dope was getting smoked.  But this was the seventies, not really much else to do.

Dad moved us in when I was four.  But dad wasn’t a hippy.  A better description of him would be beatnik, but even that’s not really very accurate.  He moved us into the commune for, im guessing, two reasons.

Firstly, he was fighting for custody of me. He’d already rigged it so that he had me during the case and the commune was an opportunity he couldn’t resist. By joining the commune he became a home owner as his name went on the deeds to the house.  And being a home owner was one more tick in the box for him in the court.  As for that matter was his girlfriend at the time who was a primary school teacher, id like to think that was a coincidence, perhaps it was. 

Secondly, and again I suspect this was a fringe benefit, it was an excellent place to meet good looking hippy chicks.  From my perspective however things were a bit different.

 My earliest memory is in fact of my first day in the commune.  I was out the front of the house and a four year old Asian kid was playing in his garden.  My dad, ever the good neighbor, went to talk to the kids parents, just a hello how are you kinda thing, while I went straight to the kid and we started playing together.  Don’t remember what, just kid stuff. But from that moment there cant have been a day, excepting holidays, that I didn’t see Yasser. 

 I was the only white kid on the street, and a hippy kid to boot, and Yasser, for reasons I never understood, was the outcast of the street.  It was being an outcast, I think, that made him skip prayers from time to time rather than the other way round.  All he ever really wanted to do with his life was join the army and get away from his dad. 

Actually, upon consideration it could well have been Yassers dad that was the reason he was an outcast.  Mr Khan was an English teacher, among other things, and it was him that said the most liberal thing ive ever heard a Muslim say.

‘Its not important who you pray to, its not Important how you pray, its only important that you pray.’   Didn’t think much about it at the time but in these days of heightened religious tension, pretty cool.

So that was us.  Me and Yasser.  Two kids with no one else to play with and nothing to do.  Things did change as we got older.  The other kids on the street treated me fairly well and it was my friendship with Yasser that they didn’t understand.  He really was that disliked.  But by the time the colour of my skin ceased to be an issue  our loyalty to each other was established.

But back to the commune for a moment.

Lots of images flash through my head as I think of that place.  When we first moved in there was a flush of DIY.  The kitchen was ripped out and hand built.  Storage space was created out of nowhere, mainly by suspending things from the huge Victorian roofs.  Art covered the walls and every room was furnished either by dumpster diving or from the castoffs from Rabies the Auctioneers where all the male members of the household worked cash in hand.

The building itself was huge.  A terraced house with three rooms in the cellar, kitchen, dining room and massive living room on the ground floor.  An offshoot semi floor at the back over the kitchen that housed a small room and the bathroom.  Two bedrooms on the first floor, two more in what was probably servants quarters once and finally the attic.

 Dad and Fiona (his then girlfriend) moved into the best room in the house which was then converted into a sort of shag pad come living room affair and I had a single bed in what was basically the cupboard under the stairs.  Over time I was moved to the attic and then gradually as the commune emptied I upgraded from room to room.  There was even a point, when only me, dad, my uncle mark and dads latest girlfriend lived there, that I was able to simply move to another room when I fancied a change.

 But in those early days the house was packed to the gills.  We had me dad and Fi, James and Rob on first floor, Ellie and her partner on the top floor, there must have been someone else up there but damned if I can remember who and a tortured musician in the dining room which had been converted into his bedroom.  He did a lot to that room but by the time I was really aware of it Gideon (pronounced Gidon) the enormous Israeli had moved in there.  So at peak eight.  But that doesn’t include the various partners that came and went.  Or for that matter the random hippys that almost constantly turned up in the living room.

Under the influence of James  (a classic hippie in every respect.  Picture the Viz comic strip modern parents, the father is a dead ringer for him both visually and in his hopeless attempts to be hipper than thou.  It was James who joined me up to Greenpeace when I was seven.)   We attended protests and assisted with the publication of a paper called ‘Communes Network’ and generally stuck the houses oar in wherever a cause could be found.  I remember protesting against cfcs around this time.  Oddly nobody listened to us.

We travelled to other communes, most notably Laurieston Hall, which was (and is) amazing and The House of the Rising sun which wasnt.  I have a very clear recollection of being told the name of the latter and my dad clamping his hand over my mouth before I could say anything about how tacky it was.  He then pointed out to me that these people were serious and it wouldn’t be polite to take the piss.

We visited an amazingly odd man in London who had fish in his cistern, a papier mache’d bedroom that had been converted to look like the inside of an egg, I wasn’t allowed in that, and his living room was on the roof of the building looking out over a rooftop garden.  The garden had a pool in it that came up to and under the main window so the pond extended into the living room.  When it rained the ducks on the pool would duck under the glass and sit in the living room.

And through all of that I remember my dad, laughing.