Dining on Popstar 4: Broad Street, 1973

All of Oxford was out. Five, six hundred people, stood in the sunshine. Dozens of banners rode the breeze, maroon, red, black, yellow. Above, the poetry of our discontent. 'London, Paris and Berlin, we will fight, we will win'. Another, 'Beneath the streets, there are beaches'. Others banners were more prosaic. 'Corpus Christi: no war.' Balliol and Lincoln banners, Pembroke. 'Sorbonne 1968, Oxford 1973.' A women stood holding her guitar. The air hang with the sweet, sticky smells of a crowd moving as one. Someone had dug up two dozen black lollipops, twenty or so of the old Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament placards from the 1950s. There were no words on them, but the peace symbol. Patrick could see a woman wearing Oxford's exam rags, the mortar board, the white shirt and the black ribbon tie. More people were wearing denim jackets, sheepskin coats, jeans, beards, scarves. Jim stood near the front, holding out the megaphone, while Rachel from OUSU the students' union spoke into the tannoy, addressing the crowd.

'We want a peaceful sit-down protest.' Her instructions rippled through the crowd producing so many echoes. Sit down, come on all of you sit down. You man, sit down. Rachel continued, 'We aren't going to have any violence on this march. We won't give the university that excuse. The Americans continues their war in Asia. Our government can encourage them as much as they like. But we're going to show them that there's another way, a peaceful way in which all people can live. We want to put our needs, the needs of people in Vietnam and Cambodia, before the bosses, and the politicians.' There was loud applause when she finished.

Two men in their early thirties were handing out their own leaflets, Rover Shop Stewards Committee Supports the Anti-War Protests. The one with the sideburns, was he with the weasels, the WSL? Thornbush was handing out leaflets with them. Joe was there as well, the IS car-worker. Beyond him, Patrick could see Gareth and Shaun, council workers stood with their old Vietnam Solidarity placards. Sharon was holding the banner with one hand, selling papers with the other. In front of him, Jim was on the megaphone now, 'One-two-three-four, we don't want your bloody war.' Everywhere there was a sea of faces, Joel from New College with their white banner, then St. Cat's, a red sheet with an anchor on it, 'Five-six-seven-eight, occupy and demonstrate.' Gay soc, the women's lib group, the Communist Party, Labour, the IMG were all there. Was that Sheri, the trust-fund Tory wanker from St. John's? When you had Conservatives showing up on the protest, well, then you knew that something really was moving.

Behind Jim someone let off a red flare, and he and Patrick were briefly covered by the wisps of its smoke. Now Jim could hear Rachel again on the megaphone, 'What do we want? No more war! When do we want it? Now.' Sue was taking photos for one of the student papers, Luis was there as well, moving his weight nervously from foot to foot, hoping that nobody from the embassy was keeping tabs on the crowd. Behind the two hundred or so people sat down at the front, more were showing up all the time. There were longhairs on the cobbled street, in blue drainpipe jeans, T-shirts, miniskirts, others more awkward. You could see younger faces scrubbed clean, people out for their first ever protest. Katia was there. People Jim didn't know in blue tops, red shirts, a woman with striped flares and matching rainbow-coloured hair. 'What do we want?' Jim wanted the moment to last, he wanted the energy of the protest to continue, he wanted us to stop all the bastards, not just Nixon, but Heath as well and Wilson. All of them

Cat-calls and whistles announced the first signs of the police arriving in numbers. Truncheons were drawn, as the began the inevitable process of clearing the square. Jim wondered if Sharon would be able to hold herself back, and avoid wading in. Rachel was still shouting to people to keep calm, 'we have permission to be here, we are not breaking any law.' Jim could see two officers in uniform extract Dom struggling from the front of the crowd. As they pulled him away, Jim could see Dom's face and the PC's hand both slick with blood. Christ, either they'd cut Dom, or worse, had Dom bitten the fucker? Slowly, calmly, and with no sense of surprise on either side, the crowd turned to face the officers who were attacking them, and prepared for a fight. The press the next day would denounce the troublemakers, bussed in as always from 'outside'.

So who were they, what were all these students doing there? Every troublemaker in the whole town was there. All of them. Huggy Bear, who'd have guessed where he'd be now? Crony who spent most of his time telling us that there was no point in protesting, 'because the state's going to get us all anyway'. The one who turned up on demos, if he did make it, with a portrait of Chairman Mao, and leaflets in small green Xeroxed type which you could hardly read. Even Crony was there. Sure they we were all reds, call them any name under the sun, you could find a dozen idiots who wanted to throw themselves in front of the train of capitalism, dynamite first. But if you'd met them, if you'd had that chance to speak to one, even for a moment, you'd know what a people they were.

REBELS SPIED ON BY BOSSES AND UNIVERSITY

One of Jim's first memories was of walking through Sheffield. Near the bombed-out junction, which they still hadn't filled in. There were buses everywhere on the roads. A hundred people, legs reaching above his eyes. His dad's warm hand, lead him where he should go. They took the tram out to Hillsborough Junction. Where they came out, there was snow on the streets. His dad had made a present for him, that he'd left with one of the lads from work. The three of them met up in the woods by Birley Edge. A sled, they clobbered the parts together out of metal left at the plant. The irons were made from proper work steel, half an inch thick. Boots still two sizes to big for him, a woollen top that scratched Jim in the evenings and left him feeling like he was halfway on fire. The snow melted by day, and fell by night. His dad picked up the mitt Jim dropped pulling the sled up the slope. The house was beaming, the fire warm when they got home.

JOIN THE OBSERVER AND PEE IN THE LIFT

I came to Oxford from America in 1960, to St. Peter's. It seemed a strange place to me. England was so dangerous, with a welfare state and a national health service, god, we thought it was half way to Communism! England was wild, Liverpool, London, clubs and pot and drinking at eighteen. But if London was dangerous, Oxford was quite. What's your word? Sedate. In the course of six years, I only dined in twice. Monday to Friday was London, the weekend was any other city that moved. People tell me, I was unknown in the college. The first time I appeared in the college was in 1963, for the Junior Common Room annual raffle. It was known that I was writing a thesis on telepathy, and you should have seen the commotion when I won the raffle: 'The Yank won it! It's a fix.'

One day, two tall men came round to ask questions. Jim's mum let them in and offered them tea. They kept asking Jim about how he and his Mum were getting on. Did he have enough to eat? Did he like it in the house, would he like to move? Did he miss his pa? What time did he go to bed? The two tall men said nothing to Jim when they left, he felt only relief that they were gone. Jim's mum had to work more, after, there wasn't much spare. At times she would take him to her work, the Bassetts' site, where they used to make gums and sweets, jelly babies. Up along the river, by the football ground on Penistone Road, you could smell the boiling sugar half a mile away when you came home on the bus from town. Inside, it wasn't anything like the books said it should be. There weren't any pigmies running about around. It was just machines, a line that went round and round, fast as anything. And the women's arms would go up and down, up and down. Just watching them, always the same movements. It used to send Jim to sleep. It stopped him from running around like a mad thing like he did and driving his mum wild.

Jim learned books at ten. One term the entire class was set a competition. Each time that any of them borrowed a book from the library, they'd have their names ticked off. At the end of the year, who'd ever read the most books would win a prize. That day and for the rest of the year, Jim took out every book he could. Enid Blyton, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, names that meant a lot to him, and others that didn't mean anything at all. Thirty weeks of pure books, every single one that he could find. Last of all, number fifty on his list was The Hobbit. The best part was the dwarves that worked with metal, Jim saw them at work or front of the fires at home, working in gold, forging with iron and steel. And at the end of the year, when he'd won the prize (a book token!), he bought himself The Lord of the Rings, in a single boxed set. It took him out of Sheffield, out of their home and the mills. It made him live and see things anew, like a good book should.

The first time Jim kissed a girl was 1965. He was 13. Edith was a year older and worked Saturdays in a shop in town. It was supposed to be her brother Chris that was Jim's mate. 'Let's play a game', Edith volunteered, 'friends showed me how it's done'. 'Pass a piece of paper between us, and each time you take a line off.' Jim passed the paper in his mouth to hers. A corner was torn off. The paper came back. And soon they were kissing. Lips touching lips, and then tongues. For a whole week after, Jim was convinced he was in love, protecting Edith on her way to school and back. He went bright red at the sheer sight of her, and looked after Edith like she was something fragile, something that should never be harmed.

He took up running, proper long-distance racing in the fells. He ran for the school. It no longer hurt behind his eyes, the pain subsided for a moment. Jim was the fastest the school had seen. He passed the junior 1500 metres record, the steeplechase record, the 3000 metres and ran for the South Yorkshire team. His mum was proud when she saw him. Jim even had a coach in the town, Jack Gibson who had used to run for Yorkshire county,. The school did not approve of anything as professional as a coach. The pupils were not supposed to mingle with ordinary people who hadn't passed their 11 plus. To the shame of his teachers, Jim passed the intermediate record running for South Yorkshire and not for his school. Questions were asked in the staff common room.

THE BARRICADES MUST STAY UP

You in the suits, we know you. You are the people who call concentration camps 'strategic hamlets' and tell us that supporting the oil sheikhs is 'protecting the status quo'. 'Democratic breakthroughs' are things like letting workers at Fairfields actually talk to their boss or stopping students from having to bow when their teachers enter the room. In your hands, politics becomes the business of managing discontent, rewarding the rich while we the people barely get a look in. The sad joke at Westminster represents the people, and together with the bankers and the bosses becomes something called 'The National Interest'. So what have you got hidden beneath your suits?

At the age of fifteen, Jim took up with Rosie, who lived half a town away in Darnall. She was tall for a girl, six foot and taller than Jim, loose-limbed. Jim called her his Amazon. On Sundays, the two of them would run through town along the banks of the Don. Jack Gibson had thoughts that maybe Rosie could be a proper runner, with the national squad, even, but there wasn't much help or back-up for girls, and Rosie's parents approved of Jim and Rosie running together about as little as the teachers did at Jim's.

The two of them fought like tigers in their running, neither one letting the other go ahead, Jim leaning in to cut the corners, Rosie pulling away with her longer stride where the path was straight. She preferred to run on the road, when they could, he on the single inch of flattened ground between the river-bank and the wet. One time, she let him pull away, fifty yards away, by Middlewood Grange, only to catch Jim up at Hillfoot bridge. He was so bright red when she passed him, that he pulled up on the spot, fixing her back with the angriest stare, as she disappeared past, gliding without weight.

1968

5 January          Wilson informs TUC of maximum wage rise of 3.5%.

30 January          Vietnam: Start of the Tet offensive.

17 March          Grosvenor Square demonstration by 20,000 outside US Embassy.

20 April          Enoch Powell makes racist attack on immigrants.

3 May           France: Students occupying the Sorbonne attacked by riot police.

13 May          One million workers march through Paris.

22 May          France: ten million workers on general strike.

The one story which left Jim transfixed was the last. 'Ten million workers', he read that. What could that feel like? There weren't ten million people in the ground to watch football on Saturday, though that seemed large enough, the way every street round about was packed with folk. There weren't ten million workers in Sheffield, there weren't even ten million people in all of Yorkshire, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford included. What changed? What happened to the men in the factories, and the people who went canvassing for Labour? What changed for the bosses, the short men in their moustaches and Sunday best suits? What would change for Jim's mum, and ten thousand other women like her working in the mills, so that someone else could live their lives for them? Ten million workers. You could change so many things with ten million people.

MILITANT WOMEN HAMMER OUT CAMPAIGN OF ACTION

In summer 1968, Oxford witnessed Britain's first sit-in against the colour bar. Oxford Town, the England version. The hairdressers' Arnie's refused to serve black customers. Twenty students, including Michael Robson, afterwards a well-known poet and children's broadcaster, and Alastair Marr, later a leading commentator on American life, forced their way into the hairdresser's, where they were eventually attacked and dragged off by the police. As these twenty were arrested, another hundred took their place, and another hundred after them, until the owner of Arnie's was forced to concede. The leader of the protests was a Jamaican scholar by the name of Danny Matouma. A well-read advocate of Black Marxism, a charismatic defender of Malcolm X, Franz Fanon and Stokeley Carmichael, Danny was briefly featured on the pages of the Times and the other mainstream press. They called him, 'One to watch', that meant one for the fashionable people on the other pages of the Sunday supplements to discover and avoid. For weeks his friends were up to their eyeballs in Daniel's ideas. His vision of a different life spoke to them in their dreams.

Dear James,

Thanks for your letter, which I have read with great care. I am aware of the injustice of life and would have to spend many hours of thought before I could devise any serious solution to any of the problems you care about. Please be mature enough to understand that when you refer to the market, this eternal competitiveness of man, the humanity you care about, I do know about those who work long and hard for a pittance and yes I do care. I do know about those who have laboured for years acquiring skills, which in the modern world are suddenly and unexpectedly obsolete. The world is not a fair place. People are definitely not born equal. Look, money, brains, health, education are not distributed evenly and that is a fact of this world. I love you and care for you always,

JACK: You want to beat your opponent? Good! But to chase them down, to really defeat the lads you're running against, you must hate them. Never let them past, never let them through. One time I was running for the county, there was one lad, he'd been in the team for years. If I wanted to keep my place, if I wanted to show everyone that I was worth choosing as first race in, race out, I'd have to teach him. It was a fifteen hundred. After two laps, that bastard was five yards up on me. So I put on a burst, caught up with him, and I dragged my right shoe down the front of his leg. The useless bastard fell over then, rolled around like he was down with the pox, and the others never caught me either. I've never looked back, me. Hate them. You've got to want to lap them every time you run. I've kept the place even now. You've got to hate them, like you want to kill the bastards.

STOP THE WAR!

Every decade this century has seen men and women shattered by the effects of war, from disease, famine and mass migration of refugees. Each time the warmongers present their goals in the most honourable way. The claim to be fighting against evil, for liberty and justice. The motives change, one war is to prepare the people of that country for self-government, another (we are told) is to prevent the spread of Communism. The most important thing is to stop another domino from falling to the Reds. But in every war, the rich and the powerful send ordinary soldiers to die for their sake.

Running palled. The school with the Latin motto didn't approve of him being away on weekends. His mum thought he was mad. Rosie's family moved so that her dad could find better-paid work in Brum. Jack Gibson's psyched-up Tyke nonsense decisively lost its charm. Jim didn't want to win, or not that badly, and running didn't seem so much fun when he'd beaten half the lads in Yorkshire as well as the kids from school. Jim stopped running at the age of sixteen.

ANAEMIC ACTIVISM, DOWN WITH!

Having been so shocking and so new, it is then sad to see how quickly most students acquire that regulation haze of sentimental mush through which to view their own tiny word, and thus to avoid the basic reality that they are willing participants in the system of capitalist consumerism. Keep fighting, keep fighting. Each student quickly acquires the same new interests, the same coat-hanger personality as his predecessors. The same air of studied detachment. We are supposed to be the vanguard of the revolution, they tell me. The student acquires his new garb, clothing which he considers daringly novel, but any witness could tell them that they were a clown.

In place of running, there were exams. Three exams a term, three terms a year. You always knew where you came, fifth out of twelve, third out of twenty, first in the whole year. The Mister Men teachers Jim had to live with had it in their heads that Jim should take the scholarship exam and leave Sheffield for Cambridge or London. He would have told them were to get off. But for that image he had in his head of the students in Paris throwing paving stones at the French riot police. Ten million workers. A new kind of book appeared on the shelves of Jim's upstairs' room. Marx's this and Lenin's that, bought from Central books in town. You could find Peking editions (six for a pound), cheaply put-together paperbacks, red writing on off-white covers. He bought a 1940s edition of the Communist Manifesto with a preface by Harold Laski. The rich had been expropriated, the mill-owners were gone, and the state had withered away. Jed told Jim straight up that he was insane wasting his time on the books, even Patrick thought he was mad.

STRIKE WAVE ROCKS ITALY

1968 was a dramatic year in Oxford. The spirit of the times was reflected in slogans that appeared on the walls of Balliol College: 'Positivism Out! Dialectics In!' and 'Aphorism is the Death Rattle of Revolution'. There was a rallies to remember the black Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, and Jan Palach, the Prague student who burned himself to death in protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Exchange students playing Oxford University at rugby launched into the Internationale. For the twenty who were there, another hundred claimed to have witnesses the sight. The city repudiated Enoch Powell. And a Communist Party-backed Oxford Committee for Democracy in Northern Ireland organised an expedition to Belfast, 'Come to Northern Ireland and lose your vote!'

Things were mad at King Edward's. A paper started, the NO Angst Review, which Jim helped to edit, insisting that the first issue should show a cover photo of two feet streaming into the sky. The end of year exams ended in a riot, when the school prefects attempted to stop one of the students from smoking. 'A riot's coming', the word went round for days. One of the teachers was pelted with mud, leaving him swishing around blind and pointlessly with his cane, while the man's broken glasses lay at his feet. Twenty of the students met to establish a school council. Three hundred students from every form in the school came to the second meeting. Then to their shock and anger, the school authorities announced that both council and magazine were banned, and anyone taking part in either again would be expelled. The delirious bubble of school student power burst in an instant and within a day everything was back to the quiet normal.

We wanted to fight, Jim said, but nobody ever taught us how organise. Nobody taught us anything useful, and then there was no time to learn.

NIXON'S DESERT

The town of Phan-lok is lost under the holocaust. Napalm tears the ground, high-explosives from an armada of a thousand B-52s. Full employment, the factory system. From the legitimate needs of the American people, come the system that wages mass genocide in the air. Four thousand corpses, most of them probably innocent Cambodians, have all been dutifully classified as 'enemy troops'. If their families were not Communists to begin with, they will be now. The killings continue. The desert in Vietnam has begun to eat the fields of Cambodia.

In summer 1970, Oxford witnessed its first full occupation. A meeting was called in solidarity with the students occupying Warwick University, and to discuss the way in which the university authorities there had been spying on students. Two hundred files had been discovered, on lecturers and student activists. And if the authorities could get away with such behaviour there, then who was to say that the same tricks were not being tried even in Oxford? First six hundred and then seven hundred students met to demand the withdrawal of proposed new disciplinary procedures. A genuine students' union was proposed, 'unlike the sham so-called Oxford Union over the road'. The motion was passed, and the occupation began. There was singing and guitar music. Isaiah Biggin, the very Conservative Treasurer of the Student Council, was spotted taking full part in the discussions. Regular mass meetings voted on all items of policy. All direct democracy, all spontaneity, was encouraged. Meetings were businesslike, the votes mattered.

NEW CAMPUS WRITING, VOLUME FOUR

The problem with these stupid lefties is that they are so bloody earnest. I mean one of them was telling me about nineteen-sixty-bloody-eight, and he had that stupid goofy expression on, when they think it really matters, and they stare into the distance, like they can't tell you the truth, because it's not the truth any more, but faith that motivates them. So he was telling me about this mythical year '68, which as far as I can see they were only kids through, I mean most of them are still kids now. So I said, well I remember 1968. My parents had a rather nice house in London, and they had great parties.

Well I thought you know, he would be happy to hear about what '68 was really like. I was an adult then, he wasn't. But not one bit! The lefty starts leaping up and down in the air, and shouting about the Paris workers. I had to explain, the poor chap, it's not Paris, it's Oxford, and we're in charge here. They've just got no sense of humour. I despair of them all, I really do. God knows what would happen if they started to get organised. God knows what would happen to that poor fellow if he got in here. Stand around, feeling miserable and righteous with the world. I'd give him three months, at the most.

UCS, BANKRUPT

The directors of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders profoundly regret to announce that in view of the present financial position of the company, disclosed in the most recent review of its affairs, they have been obliged to instruct an application to be made to the courts for the appointment of a provisional liquidator.

PAY REVOLT HITS SCHOOLS

I am a bird without wings, clipped. Lost from the beauty of flight, the intense wonder of speech. Take it from me, these aren't my words, the clipped base notes of my youth. I can't even think in those sounds now, they have been taken away from me. Go to school, to college. I went there, and a part of me was lost. My speech at home was the language of my friends, of a people. My different sound now is the language of a new, worse, people. I am changed and wonder why.

Often, I would return home and walk through the city. Alone, I could observe places that I once knew and loved. The grime of the Wicker, the hills around Darnall. Early on, nothing was changed but the people. My friends had scattered, most looking for work, and only my parents' generation remained. Later, old haunts had been knocked down or filled in. Even the bombed-out junction is gone. I no longer meet friends there, and at night, the train is my bed home.

The top 14% of society provides 62% of Oxford entrants,

the middle 22% makes up 24% of Oxford students,

the bottom 64% provides just 14% of Oxford entrants.

PENTAGON '67

From the station, Jim followed a group of students making their way along the shops of the Cornmarket. Although he couldn't know it, they were headed towards Pembroke, at the south end of the University. Jim's first sight of old Oxford was the High, the long street of shops that ended with Magdalen tower at the end. There were tourists in the shops, and Merton college to his right looked like medieval castle, or perhaps a museum-home for out of date stuffed wax dummies.