Decent trousers

I spent the day reading Wilson’s The Occult, pleasant inaction before the fire in the unaccustomed comforts of the dining room, understanding that I need to digest and come back to what I’m reading before its full import can be properly realized.

Dad is angry that the familiar dark blue of Easterby City buses is being changed to the standardized red and white of Yorkshire Metro, which he sees as an erosion of the ‘individuality’ of the identity of the old city of Easterby. When not in daily contact with him it’s easy to forget, but I realise now how utterly reactionary he is.

Mum too keeps making her customary digs and hints about my appearance and my ‘career’ after I’ve graduated. “You’ll have to buy a pair of decent trousers when you’re looking for work. Both Andrew and Robert have realised that you have to conform eventually.” She says she was tempted to buy me a pair of “decent trousers”—presumably jeans—before I came home and today mentioned, with contrived nonchalance, that Andrew had commented on my suitability as an editor at a big publishing firm like Longman’s.

I refuse to respond to any of these hints and nudges.

Pure and perfect expression of reality

Dad gave me a lift into Easterby at one and I wandered around town, feeling strangely uneasy and self-conscious. I feel more at home in Watermouth anymore. Why should this be? Lee’s not coming back for a fortnight and I rang both Grant and Jeremy but neither were in.

I went to Erikson’s to get a film for the Minolta ciné camera but was irked to discover that no black and white film cartridge for a Minolta XL Sound-84 has been made for a while now. Not only that, but the existing Ektachrome 160 cartridge costs nearly five pounds. So, at a loss after my fruitless disillusioning hours in town, I bought a 12” by Test Department.

Lee called and told me about a method he’s devised for pinhole ciné filming. He’s had to rebuild the insides of an old Standard 8 camera he got for a fiver and he’s made several turrets of differing focal lengths, each with a tiny pinhole at one end. He’s going to have to calibrate the film, frame by frame, exposing ten frames at each exposure time (making each up to ten minutes in length) in order to produce a standard result, and he’ll crank the camera mechanism by hand. So with each frame exposed for ten minutes, it would take twenty days of solid filming to produce the average three minutes of film—that’s sixty days working eight hours a day. '

Lee doesn’t think anyone else has thought of this before and I can’t wait to see what the finished product will look like. It’s taken him several weeks to work out the mechanics of the process: he had to take apart the camera and then put it together again, a feat of practical skill well beyond me. Gav says he always thinks of Lee as a “tank mechanic.”

Later, I was treated to a fatherly tirade against “left-wingers” and homosexuals, which was more amusing than annoying: “We pander to queer people who live queer lives.” I almost burst out laughing at this. Dad’s safe secure world of blindness and gross oversimplifications is being dismantled bit-by-bit.

There are now twelve aquariums in my room, each with various aquatic and semi-aquatic inhabitants such as toads, frog tadpoles, newts, salamanders and hordes of juvenile axolotols, some no longer than a few millimetres but all exhibiting the familiar broad bland facial features in miniature. Dad plans to sell the majority of them to a pet shop for £1 each.

Statement of the problem: Prose as a medium of communication is imperfect. Words dissemble. Self consciousness, no spontaneity, a lack of creativity, a ‘Pure and Perfect expression of Reality’ never achieved by the arbitrary nature of word-sound and word-structure. All words convey idea/sensation/representation in a rudimentary manner.

Mysteries

Mum and Dad went to Mr. Tillotson’s funeral at Egley Cemetery at one today, and came home at four in understandably morbid frame of mind. Mum said the funeral service had made her think about death, a subject she says she’s “thought deeply about more than most who are fifty.” This she attributes to the death of her sister Mary in 1958 when Mum was twenty four. She was sceptical about the “Joseph-Tillotson-is-now-in-heaven-having-a-wonderful-time” approach of the officiating priest:

“I think you only live after death in the minds of others” . . .

We human beings will always find it difficult to accept the physical reality of death. Joseph lived, and now he doesn’t: his body was incinerated in the Crematorium down in Egley Cemetery, ten minutes walk from his home of fifty years. This passing of people into memory fascinates and appalls me. My journal, my obsession with improving life and searching for meaning, all spring from this passage.

When Dad came home from work last night he gave me three books, two by Colin Wilson (The Occult and its sequel, Mysteries) and a paperback copy of The Golden Bough. The Wilson books look to be interesting. I hadn’t the heart to tell Dad I’d already bought a copy of The Golden Bough.

Goodbye to all that

A boring coach journey up to Easterby, which I reached at five minutes-to-three after setting off from Watermouth at eight-thirty. The house was silent and empty, workmen digging up the garden path which is being re-laid.

A note from Dad told me that one egg and one sausage was in the fridge (“Mum restricts you to this as we are economising”) and that he would see me when he got home later. The note also said that they've had a “black weekend” (Dad’s words) because Mr. Tillotson, from across the road, died last Friday night: this immediately set up all sorts of echoes and reflections kaleidoscoping through my mind and left me feeling rather gloomy.

I got the full story when they both got home. Mr. Tillotson’s illness had been a protracted one, and he’d never really recovered from a stroke he suffered a few years back, but the final conflict came upon him suddenly, and a few days were all that elapsed between illness and death, which happened so quickly that his brother didn’t even have time to get to the hospital. Dad has to check the cold and empty house opposite every night, a task which leaves him in a morbid state of mind.

He can’t rid himself of the recurrent image of Mr. Tillotson’s long-dead wife, captured forever in an instant of smiling black-and-white happiness on the dressing table in Mr. Tillotson’s bedroom. They’re both dead now and the house they proudly moved into before the war is empty. I won’t ever see him again and this is a strange thought: I bid him goodbye at Christmas, shook his hand as he wished me “all the best” in frail tones, never knowing, never being able to know, that that would be it.

In our minds we live forever and there’s no 'time', yet our bodies weaken and the lights go out one-by-one, then we too die, and the morning comes and the living wake. . . .

Cage

I spent the day at Jervis Terrace. Met Gareth and he bought food at the shops across the street so I went back to Westdorgan Road with him; Shawn was there. Gareth cooked us a curry, Shelley turned up, and we all went to the pub.

Back at the vicarage, I packed while Alex and Gav listened to a Cage tape downstairs and Lee tried to decide whether or not to go and break into a deserted palmist’s shop on the seafront. I continued to pack; I hung the portrait of Christ’s head I got from the Church across the road above my fire place, and went to bed.

Goodbye Watermouth, for two weeks at least.

Directive from head office

I was going to go back to Easterby today but delayed my homecoming one more day as there’s much to be sorted out at Jervis Terrace.

I hitched in to the University and saw Derek Firth of Link-Up, who had the agreed upon £90 gas deposit money, but I had to tell him that the gas board is now demanding £150 (“directive from head office”). They must know about the squat.

So we’ve decided not to bother with any gas at all and we’ll ask Link-Up for a loan towards plumbing and roof repairs instead. I was going to go back to Jervis Terrace to give Pete a hand with the clean up but by the time I got away it was four in the afternoon, so I didn’t bother. He ended up staying until nine p.m., painting doors and skirting boards to cover Lee’s axe marks, dart holes and lighter fuel burns. According to Gav he was angry when he finally showed up, but I missed him again as Lee and I were out on a ‘blag.’

Lee had come back at teatime, exciting me with prospects of Easterby’s derelict mills and houses. He told me about a factory which has been gutted, where the roof hangs in twisted tortured forms. We found an empty pub, The Regency, across the road from the Oasis and near the Planning Department offices, with four stories of a one-time crummy hotel built atop.

We scaled a low wall, ran across a garage roof and dropped the ten feet or so into the back yard. There was a door open, so the crow bar wasn’t needed for once. We found yards of electrical cable, adapters and plugs, but all the rooms were empty save for one, which had been used to store all the furniture, which included finely made chairs, tables and wardrobes and even a couple of typewriters too. After an extensive tour of the building we took two electric fires and the electrical cable away with us. Another smooth operation.

Later we found out that Alex had told Gav that two Oculus executives had been round to tell us that a letter would be arriving Wednesday, but Alex couldn’t remember exactly what they’d said and gave conflicting accounts, telling Gav that they were serving us with a court order but then denying this to us later.

Overdrawn

We finally discovered what it was that Barry’s Dad was after.

Barry sat glumly in front of the TV wrapped in his sleeping bag watching the Milk Cup Final and told us that the bank had sent a letter to his home address telling him he's £500 overdrawn. His parents opened it and, outraged, contacted Watermouth police to tell him to get in touch immediately. When he did they told him that has to sell his synthesizer, bass, amps and effects, and that he'd get no more money from home until he’d paid the bank debt. He also got a letter from the University saying that he wouldn’t get a grant next year unless his marks improve dramatically. His parents were outraged about that too.

Pete and I walked to Jervis Terrace and made a start on the tidying, packing and washing up. Barry promised to help but never appeared so we spent the afternoon talking about his aimlessness since he threw over the RCP, his six months with several hundred quidsworth of decent equipment and not one ‘song’ actually completed by the much vaunted “band,” his wild rounds of socialising. . . . To get his grant next year he’ll have to work really hard from now until June, and I can’t see him doing it. I think that he’ll get thrown out.

Pete and I slogged all afternoon, but seemed to make little impression on the filth and chaos, so we went up to Westdorgan Road. Only Lindsey was in: we caught the bus into town to Castle Mount Court to meet Mo, and the four of us went to an Italian restaurant and spent £10 each on food and wine. I got pleasantly drunk in the pleasantly agreeable surroundings, and got home at one thirty to find Alex and Gav cold and hungry.

Aquaseal

Heavy rain all night, Alex’s room awash, the water dripping through the gaping hole in the ceiling into Pete’s room below and even managing to penetrate as far down as Ben’s room on the ground floor. By morning a patch of damp had appeared on my wall. The roof is our most pressing concern at the moment.

The weather broke in the afternoon, and while it was sunny, Alex, Ben and I filled the gaps between the lats on the inside of the roof (through which streamed sunlight) with pieces of plastic bags, painting over the lot with Aquaseal. We also made a temporary repair job on the roof above Alex’s room.

But when the darkness came and with it sheets of rain and wind, steady drips of water could again be seen all over the house. I worry about the possible effects on the electrics. Pete’s ceiling is a mess, paper hanging off in strips and the entire surface stained with black spots and discolourations, but at least the small but ominous patch of wet on the wall of my room seems to be drying out.

Ade came round this afternoon and later Pete turned up breathless with the news that a policeman had called at Jervis Terrace with an urgent request from Barry’s Dad that he ring home immediately. So Ade spent an hour driving round Watermouth trying to get hold of Barry. His Mum is already ill and immediately we could only think the worst.

Any attempt to marshal a coherent pattern of thought or the thread of a dominant idea seems impossible at present. I’m in a useless, non-productive frame of mind. Words come slowly and indistinctly, a grammatical nightmare. Chaos. Boredom and triviality seem to be the two “ultimate truths” which regulate my mind at present, and everyday preoccupations snuff out any chance of meditation towards a specific end.

Cake and biscuits

We didn’t appear as expected on TVS yesterday or today which is a bit disappointing. Oculus haven’t said anything yet about their plans.

Alex and I went to Lindsey’s and she gave us cakes and biscuits, confirming in Alex’s mind the already firmly established notion that Lindsey reciprocates his desire for her. I’m past caring.

I’m struggling for something—anything—to say, trapped in a web of inhibitions, trapped by preconceptions and prejudices.

Conception

Another warm day. Spring is here, rat poison to buy, the plumbing to get fixed up, numerous small but pressing jobs which must be done before I leave Watermouth in five days time. Gav seems to be taking the death of his dad well, and apart from a couple of nights and an afternoon of drunkenness and the occasional gloomy turn he’s much as he was before.

I trailed round Watermouth most of the afternoon looking for wicks and paraffin for a heater I bought for 50 pence from Ron’s junk shop in Andrew Street on Tuesday. Paraffin £1.50 a gallon, wicks £2.90 each. . . .

Alex said last night that he couldn’t imagine me taking drugs and he seemed surprised when I told him that I used to do speed. My two-month abstinence has given Gav, Alex, Ben—people who’ve only recently met me—a false conception of what I’m usually like. I haven’t been drunk or drugged in the two-and-a-half months since January 1st.

Last night Ade and Gareth drove onto the Teacher Training College campus with the intention of buying drugs. They found the dealer’s door locked and his window open, so while A. waited with the car, lights off, engine idling, Gareth crept in through the window and stole £155, and bought everyone drinks and food at the L.A.

Heavy contrivance

A TVS camera crew arrived this afternoon at about three-thirty, a front-man, camera- and lighting men. Morris was here too, no doubt to make sure we didn’t ruin his cherished public image. He was interviewed sitting on Ben’s window sill, the Oculus building in the background, and he'd smartened himself up. This involved tying his hair back into a ponytail and donning a several-sizes-too-small waistcoat . . .

The TV crew asked us to act out various ‘typical squatter activities’ – walking in with shopping, sitting on Gav’s bed having a chat (heavy contrivance here), or carrying boxes to and fro. I dread to think what it’ll look like on the TV. Hopefully the presence of cameras will spur Oculus into giving us their decision soon.

After the cameras had left, a member of the South Piddington squat dropped in to see the place. That squat has been open for a year but is closing on April 5th, and I could sense the depth of his weariness at Morris’s incessant advice and admonishment. Morris is power-mad. Before he left he instructed us not to answer any questions from the press but to refer them instead to him at the W.H.A., as though we are tactless imbeciles incapable of exercising discretion!

Ade is back in Watermouth with a new car bought for him by his mum. He brought round Barry’s synth and amplifiers and a few of my records.

Lee caught the eight-thirty a.m. bus to London this morning and hitched home for a few days. He's gone back primarily to collect his Eumig projector.

I’m looking forward to going home.

Black flag

I got up at a quarter to eight with Alex: he and Ben began their jobs today working with Harry, an ex-Special Branch cop, the same Harry who fixed up our single outside tap. They’re working three days a week, plastering walls and doing building repairs.

I walked to the bank, drew out £7 and bought myself a breakfast at Bunyan’s Snack Bar before going into University and getting a promised loan of £90 from the Link-Up offices. We’re getting the money in order to connect the gas and we’ll have five weeks to repay it. The day developed into one of those hazy muggy afternoons, no wind and a bleached out sun, everyone moving slowly in the warmth. I felt tired for some reason.

When I got back I found Gav, Barry, Pete and Lee waiting the arrival of TVS cameras, but Morris rolled up later to tell us it had been postponed a day. The piece on Radio Watermouth was broadcast at eight minutes past eight this morning and took the expected ‘squatting-isn’t-all-dirty-hippies-and-irresponsible-druggies’ angle. Morris said in his interview that all prospective squatters are screened “at least half-a-dozen times in pub, office abd café situations” (!). Nathalie’s exit was mentioned obliquely with reference to “one resident whose behaviour wasn’t up to scratch.”

She seems to have recovered her composure since we threw her out and even smiled at Lee when she saw him on the bus. It’s all coming together very well.

Two members of an anarchist squat who dropped by unexpectedly seemed taken aback at the organisation of this place and couldn’t believe it when they heard that councillors, an MP and even a Bishop may be rallied to our defence. They told us were kicked out of one house a day after announcing their arrival by hoisting black flags, and they have just 48 hours to leave their current place. I’d met one of them as I hitched back from University and he said they’re going to squat Watermouth Planning Dept. offices tonight, so I told him how to get in through the open toilet window. As I climbed out of the car he said to me, by way of farewell, “if you see a big black anarchist flag hanging from one of the windows you’ll know it’s us.”

They’ll get kicked out every time.

I rang Mum in the evening. She said that Robert is depressed that he’s thirty and that he only got three cards for his birthday. Luckily I remembered to send him one.

Starfish

A reporter from Radio Watermouth turned up at the house today with Morris and asked the most contrived and offensive questions: to Ben, “I see the soap and tissues on your bed, so obviously you wash . . . what sort of lifestyle do you lead? . . . what is it like living in a squat?” and so on, through half-a-dozen clichéd topics.

I avoided any contact with him or his questions. Ian and Gav appeared half way through the ‘interview’ and the latter answered a few questions while Ian rushed to and fro, drunkenly giggling at the inane line of questioning and revealing an inebriated openness I’d never noticed before.

Then he and Gav and Alex locked themselves in Gav’s room for drugs and I went out for another walk, to second hand bookshops and the sea front, the sea flat calm, the tide out, a couple of dead starfish stranded in the sand. I was suddenly reminded of seaside holidays with Mum and Dad, lifetimes away, and this memory in the grey of dusk made me feel a little sad.

Dear friends . . .

Two Labour councilors called round this morning but no one heard them knocking. They left a note that started “Dear Friends . . .” and gave us a number to get back in touch.

There’s a malignancy in this house. A strange mood afflicts us. In the afternoon I sat in Gav’s room in front of the electric fire, the daily bind of chopping and gathering wood already too much, listening to the all-consuming quietness of the enormous rooms, emphasized by the steady tick of the clock and occasional bird song. No one, nothing stirred.

Barry, Alex and one of Alex’s friends Lucinda had returned the night before after spending the night in countless cafes on speed and Barry lay on a mattress by my side recovering slowly from the after effects. Ben was still in bed. I didn’t know about Lee. Alex was gone to Lucinda’s to pick up a carpet she was lending him, Gav away in Oxford for the weekend, Pete round at Mo’s . . . such a stagnant day.

So, while everyone else degenerated into sleep in Gav’s room, I was forced out into the cold. I walked all the way to Crookgreave Cemetery, afterwards climbing Treadwell Road up to the race course, Watermouth unfolding in a grey hazy panorama behind me. I dropped down through the sprawling council estates of Blackswarth, the houses with no gardens, just grass to the front door and concrete pavements, all the while a putrid orange sun slipping towards the horizon. My mind was full of conflicted thoughts. . . .

I need the strength to throw off the hindrances of habit and ways of thought that stop me from seeing the road ahead. I need the strength to consolidate and to keep from being dragged forever back into the stream. How is it we live out our lives, senselessly and unmindfully immersed in others? I have no real desire to see Guy or Del or John Turney ever again. They’ve been typically cynical about the prospects for this place. I simply want to retreat into myself and learn to live on my own, relying on my books and my own mind.

When I got back Lee answered the door, and suggested we go down into town for something to eat. We gorged ourselves on pizzas and ice cream and he said he thought he “was going mad” yesterday and agreed with me about the pervasive atmosphere in the house: “It seems most intense in my room.”

Back at the vicarage Alex, Ben, Lee and I got a fire going and ate Ben’s food (chicken, rice, peaches and rice pudding and biscuits to follow) in front of the portable TV in Lee’s room. Gav returned drunk from his weekend at home and immediately announced that his father had died of pneumonia the previous evening. He was in a fragile, cheerful mood, as though he was forcing himself into a mold of normality.

Malignant

Tonight Lee was acting funnily, just sitting in a chair in his room in the dark, facing the window. He said he was trying to see if he could spin round, like he used to be able to . . . then he asked me to leave, and refused to answer my insistent questions, so I left him to his own devices in the sparse cavern of his room while I shivered upstairs, unwilling to make a fire, thinking that this house has a nighttime atmosphere that affects us all and puts us under its spell. Malignant.

Tonight too Alex simply walked out of the house and hasn’t come back. Maybe Lee is having a breakdown?

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

I get premonitions that this household is going to be a strain, verging on the intense. Alex often drifts off into moods, and whenever Ian appears, he falls silent, hinting at some undisclosed friction between the two (Ian’s comment on Alex: “He’s like cancer – once contracted, difficult to get rid of”).

Ben Beresford has turned out better than Lee and I’d expected him to be. Apart from the Dali posters, the multicoloured string disco vests and the fixation with dope, he’s OK.

Fluent to glib

Alex and Ben have both got jobs working with the Housing Association for £42 a week.

Term is over for me. I missed the last two tutorials although my reports were fairly good, Colin Pasmore even going so far as to say I “will do well.” Ian Pugh gave me a 2/3 for Conflict and Consensus with the comment, “essay style fluent to glib” . . . (!!). I didn’t have my heart to heart with Don Carwardine as I’d promised myself. I was in and out of his office in minutes and felt too weary to say anything much.

Stranglehold

Today we finally finished removing boards from the windows. Morris has been busy motivating support for our case among local councilors and he even promises us visits from Watermouth’s sitting MP Desmond Ardingly and the Bishop of Watermouth. He says we have Oculus “in a stranglehold,” and he thinks they may give us a lease if they are forced into it, which would be perfect.

Lee, Gav, and Alex ran into Nathalie in the Art College and she called them “fucking bastards,” and later she rang up Morris and called him a fascist, but that’s been the extent of her anger.

Most of us sleep in our own rooms now, and we have done since yesterday: Alex and I share the top floor, Barry and Pete the first, and on the ground floor live Lee, Gav and Ben. I’ve got a bed and a chair in my room and little else, and the fireplace is open so I can have roaring fires when I can be bothered to build one. I might buy an electric one to cut out the hassle of chopping wood and waiting for flames to take hold.

No one has any money. I’ve got £17 left in the bank, although Alex owes me £10.

Blue glass

A coloumn appeared in today’s Herald about the squat and Oculus Bancorp’s quoted response was taciturn and careful. The vast majority of the neighbours appear to be behind us because of their ill-feeling against Oculus and the way in which the company’s buying up all the land round-about with a view to creating acres of car parks.

At first we thought there was a Preservation Order on this place, but there isn’t. The neighbours think Oculus wanted the vicarage to fall down of its own accord, and a vicar apparently tried to buy it a couple of years ago but the company wouldn’t sell. Their HQ sits sinisterly behind us, its windows darkened during the day but blazing with light after dark, and sometimes we can glimpse anonymous, sexless figures moving in the depths of the high tech jungle behind the glass. It’s hard to imagine them as real people with lives beyond their jobs.

I wonder what it’s like behind that dark blue glass?

Let there be more light

Now there are seven of us instead of eight. Ben went round to Nathalie's flat today to tell her our unanimous decision. She cried and raged and waved coffee she said she’d bought for us all in his face, but he didn’t budge and when he came back tonight we all felt a twinge of uncertainty and doubt.

The electricity was switched on without any fuss at all this morning. The man came, hammered and banged for a bit, and then went away and we had lights. We ran from room to room shouting and shrieking at the success of it all.

Larry, a Watermouth Housing Association employee, turned up on his moped this afternoon and fixed us up with running water from a tap in an outside shed. He also gave us a list of things to buy if we want a toilet fixed up. The gas will cost £90 deposit to have connected, because they know we’re squatters.

Six angry men

The French girl Veronique claimed one of the big ground floor rooms and this relegated Ben Beresford to the damp basement. Her presence has added an uneasy air to our otherwise successful mix of people; no one likes her and Ben wants her room. She's also made it clear she's opposed to any form of joint kitty for bills etc. (“I have my own rules”).

Indicative of her attitude to the venture is the way in which, within hours of us moving in, she’d spray-painted the walls of ‘her’ room and written all over them in felt pen (‘MUTO’, and her nickname ‘Eukino’).

The solution seems simple. We arrived at a decision as we lay on our mattresses in the one room, after two hours of fluctuating opinions, six Angry Men (Pete wasn’t here). We've decided to kick her out.

Occupy

We moved into the squat today. I stayed behind at 44A with our packed and parceled belongings waiting for ‘John the Van’ to call and pick it up while Barry and Lee met Morris and Keith and the other Watermouth Housing Association volunteers in the Pembroke Arms at noon. Then, the “25-strong group” (according to the Herald) trooped up to the Vicarage and gained entry through the hole in the basement door.

By the time I arrived in the van the house was the scene of great activity.

Morris and Keith and others stood around in the debris-strewn hall talking while the rest of us explored the house, shouting to one another with child-like enthusiasm. I saw a few neighbours with mouths agape as we removed boards from the windows and came and went on crucial errands. Keith called the police and the bespectacled and quietly polite policeman took our names. Our small army of WHA volunteers and Art College friends set to sweeping the rooms, removing the litter and deposits of four years of dereliction, and by the end of the day we’d swept most of the rooms clean and taken the boards off most of the windows.

The police returned twice more, apparently at the behest of a few outraged neighbours, and when they came back they were aggressive. One of their number railed at us through the basement door, threatening us with the nick if we weren’t out in five minutes, before it was revealed to him that one of his colleagues had been round earlier and OK’d our occupation. Oculus Bancorp security made an appearance too, but loss of face for them also. Morris gave a discreet wink in our direction as he fended them off.

Mattresses were unloaded from the van and we hauled them up to the topmost room (which will be my room). Barry went into town to buy a camping stove and Gav and I took two letters round to the Oculus building on Astlow Road, one from the “Movement for Fair Housing for Watermouth,” the other from us, ‘The Occupiers’, in which we declared our intentions. More neighbours came over to offer support and look around. Even the press arrived.

Morris came back late and is spending the night in case Oculus “tries any funny business.” He produced some dope from a small bag he’d tied around his bollocks (!), and is going to bed still clad in his snorkel parka.

I wonder how it will work out?

Threshold

In the last week we’ve done a lot of trailing round Watermouth, and at last we’re on the brink of moving in to the vicarage. We’ve set tomorrow at twelve noon as the date. Eight of us are going to live there; me, Lee, Barry, Pete, Alex, Gav Heppell, Ben Beresford (a friend of Alex’s who “knows a lot of people and can get a lot of drugs”), and Nathalie.

She’s lived in squats in London and expects this one to be run along similar lines—no paying for electricity or water etc.—and the £3-a-week we’ve all agreed to pay for bills she deems “too expensive.” Perhaps there will be trouble.

Ben Beresford (“a good old English name”) is one of the only other clouds on the horizon: he reminded Lee and I of Vic Banasiak with his crude attempts at dominating conversations. He’s going to be a real bellyful of laughs.

A van is coming round to pick up all our stuff tomorrow morning; we’re meeting in the Pembroke at noon and, within the hour we hope, all should be finished.

Keith and Morris very keen on a conservative, offend no one policy and we agreed to this just because it would be suicidal not to at this stage. Morris says he’s on first name terms with most of the Watermouth town councilors and is proud of what he’s achieved here in the heart of the Tory South (again the editorial in the Herald was waved about). He’s no doubt a good ally to have in our battle to stay put in the vicarage. Both of them have too much knowledge and experience to ignore, but I’ve had mixed feelings about agreeing to go in with them.

I was put in charge of the money which is about as far as I want to take the idea of communal living. I hate the idea of rotas and the entire ‘community’ thing, so hopefully there won’t be too many hassles over money or people not wanting to pay up. Keith and Morris are strong on this idea.The more people are involved the more mixed my feelings become. I want it to be just like living alone, but   inevitably it won’t be, and I dread to think of myself getting irrevocably immersed in the communality of the venture. This term has seem me existing in other people, even though I’ve made a brief go of cutting myself off. All this has produced is a purely financial benefit—I’ve spent only £40 in five weeks. 


Alex has been sleeping at Jervis Terrace for the last week and we’ve all become very friendly. I like him; he’s easy to get on with and he’s a good bloke. I’ve also got to talk to Gav more than I have before, and he too strikes me as an OK bloke, very straightforward and in control of things. Ian is as mysterious as ever.

In my new role as treasurer I bought locks & bolts today. I pocketed a £16 mortice deadlock in Tesco’s. Too easy. One day I’m going to get caught.

Nathalie

Nathalie, a French girl, turned up at our final meeting, which we again held at the Pembroke Arms, She speaks English well, and has a certain air of Continental confidence about her and has squatted before.

Our meeting went well, and for a change, everyone turned up (even Pete), and there was much laughter and a hardly restrained excitement. We agreed on a plan of action and Keith and Morris promised a dozen volunteers from the Housing Association to help us tidy up the place. We’ll telephone the police immediately and inform them of our intentions (and before the neighbours do). The boards on the windows will have to be removed, and there’s a lot of cleaning out and repairing to be done. 


I can’t believe how quickly things have moved. This time last week it was all still pie in the sky.

Inventory

In the evening, Alex and I took an inventory of the vicarage. It has twenty two rooms altogether, eleven large bedrooms/living rooms, eleven pantries, washrooms, bath rooms, etc. Four floors in all.

Squatting not rotting

We had a meeting with Morris of the Watermouth Housing Association at the Pembroke Arms next door to the Art College.

Morris first came to Watermouth in the ‘60s as a mod and says he only planned on staying for the weekend—this much I gained from snatches of overheard conversation. He talks very rapidly and with a slight impediment. It’s taken ten years to build up a respectable image for the Watermouth squatting movement and he proudly showed us the leader from a recent copy of the Herald titled “Squatting, Not Rotting,” which tacitly supported squatting (horrible word—occupation sounds better).

Stag night

Perhaps it’s just me, but everyone else at University seems satisfied to plough through three years of repetition, three years of the same nights getting drunk in the same noisy clubs with the same people, three years of unthinking toil on assigned tasks, three years of wacky behavior before the Party ends and they’re thrown out into the world. Alex described University as a “three year long stag-night,” and it’s a depressingly accurate description. I’ve felt all this very strongly on two or three occasions, so strongly at one time that I had the urge to go and tell my personal tutor everything I felt, but I’ll wait until the reports are discussed.

I finished my essay on Williams. It was twelve sides long.

Not constructivism

The second half of term has been a slow steady slide into mindless living, hence the lack of reading, writing, and thought.

Universities exist to provide their patrons with better qualified employees and this motive is why governments support them. Art Colleges seem to be there just to stimulate the imaginative and intellectual faculties. Example: Lee’s doing a course on Russian Modernism and Modern music, and for the Modernist course he can either submit an essay or a piece of imaginative work based on Constructivist ideas, which seems a far preferable way to understand Constructivism than this eternal struggle with books, books and more books. The imaginative faculties are not stimulated at University. Far from it.

Oscilloscope

My moods seem to fluctuate between extremes: more often than not they are of the wearying, unendurable variety. Only occasionally do I feel OK, and by that I mean truly OK. There is something caught up inside me which is trying to escape and I can’t find a way to release it. Voiceless. I speak with the whine of sober routine on these pages.

About nine p.m., Barry, Alex, Lee and I raided an empty block of offices off the Wickbourne Road and stole tools, calculators and an oscilloscope from a downstairs workshop. We had to climb ladders and scaffolding to reach a third floor window. I was shitting myself, nothing but a bar of steel between me and death. It was the fear of my own fear that was the problem, knowing that through fear I could make a stupid mistake and kill myself. We should get a £100 or so for the oscilloscope.

A doss around and a good laugh

Alex spent the night last night, and at eleven o’clock this morning he and I walked down to 38 Gaunt’s Hill View and the offices of Watermouth Housing Association. We’d been given the address by Gav Heppell so we could find out about squatting, an idea that’s taken shape out of softly focused dream/fantasy and now stands hard and solid at the brink of realisation. The vicarage of Sacred Heart near the Art College seems our best bet, as the wiring appears to be in good order and the building sound. Gav owes rent on his current place and is due to be thrown out any time and Alex is sick of sleeping on peoples’ floors, so they’re motivated by necessity and have given the scheme added impetus.

We met Keith, a bloke in his thirties, a ‘60s survivor, who told us quietly but forcefully—interested—that if we were serious about wanting to squat and finding somewhere to live for a reasonable length of time we should prepare the ground thoroughly. He gave us a list of empty properties to use as a back-up in case the Vicarage didn’t work out and seemed impressed when we told him we’d been inside and sussed it out already.

It’s owned by Oculus Bancorp and the Housing Association tried to get a license from them a while ago to occupy it but were told it was “structurally unsound,” a lie if ever there was one, for if it was there’d surely be more evidence of cracks, broken ceilings, etc. He again impressed upon us the seriousness of our venture: “I don’t want to know if all you’re interested in is a doss around and a good laugh.” I felt a little guilty at our lie about having nowhere to live; there are surely more desperate cases than us on the WHA’s books . . .

Alex and I left to hang uselessly about at the Art College. We’d arranged a five thirty meeting at the Pembroke pub, near Maynard Gardens, and Ian, Lee, Alex and I turned up. Keith showed up with his ‘assistant’ from the Housing Association, an overweight, long-haired hippy by the name of Morris Knott, who’s well known in Watermouth as a champion of squatters’ rights and associated causes. We said we wanted to move in to the Vicarage and Keith agreed to check it out over the weekend. He once more emphasised the seriousness of what we’re about to attempt. We left in high spirits knowing that at last we’ve done something to get the ball rolling.

Machinations

Walking home from the Art College through Watermouth at one-thirty p.m., the weather calm, warm sun on my back, spring rushing down and the air filled with its smells and tempers—fish and chips with vinegar, warm stale beer, fruit on the stalls of St. Stephen’s market and the flat drone of the bookies' tannoy.

I passed an old lady on the street, her blue eyes piercing me as we came across one another on the pavement, her wrinkled face powdered, a pathetic vanity fooling no one. She spied my unlovely form, our eyes met, and I could see in them a look of hard, brittle coldness. She couldn’t know the quiet acceptance with which I viewed the world and her and everything that I passed—she just looked for a moment and saw the broad criminality of my face and the shabbiness of my coat and clothes.

I walked on, engrossed in reveries and words that wouldn’t come, and my mind with all its aches and pinpricks of vanity and self-aggrandisement dissolved away into the warm breeze.

Called in at 12 Westdorgan Rd. on my way home and Lindsey gave me a cup of coffee and some toast before she departed, to the station, to collect a consignment of RCP newspapers under the pseudonym Lindsey Black. She was sheepish when she told me this last bit. A man from the Irish Freedom Movement is coming down today from London but there’s no meeting organised for him to attend. Stu roused himself later: he and Pete had done the acid last night, and he had stayed home while Gareth and Pete went to the Flamingo. I saw Pete briefly and he enthusiastically described the trip to me. . . .

I realised fully today, and with a depth of understanding not present before, the magnitude of my blunder in choosing a University degree course. I can’t believe my mind worked as it did. All I can think of is the two years I’ve wasted, yet I’m bogged down two-thirds of the way through a course which means exactly nothing to me. I felt the urge to go to see my personal tutor and tell him everything, knowing it futile yet needing the emotional relief a confession would bring. My position can’t change and therefore my dismal machinations are useless. I even went to see the Fine Arts Secretary to ask her about extra-curricular courses run by the Poly, and although she gave me another room number to follow up I didn’t—somehow it all felt like a feeble attempt to rectify a lost position. My opinion on this has to change, and I know it probably will, but this is how I feel.

At six p.m. Pete and I met up with Lee, Alex, Ian and Gav at room 312 in the Art College. We returned to the offices of the Planning Dept. and, one by one, scaled the wall, ran silently across the low roof to the small toilet window (the only point of access) and slithered through, feet first. Much to Lee and Gav’s chagrin, the plastic bags of photographic paper had been disturbed. A few boxes were empty, and others seemed to have been deliberately opened and the paper exposed. Nine boxes of a hundred sheets each were gone.

So, after angry whisperings and theories and flittings to-and-fro, in single file we moved all the bags through the dark, derelict corridors and offices, down into the cellars, into an adjacent boathouse, and out onto the beach . . . I had a brief vision of us, like some well organised band of big-time crooks with our flashlights and gloves, as we efficiently carried off the loot.

From then on it was a simple (if risky) task to take all the stuff back up to Maynard Gardens and to Lee’s new room in studio 207, a tiny cupboard-like workspace with desk, sink and toilet that he’s very pleased with. Ian vanished, as only Ian can do and didn’t seem to view events with too kindly an eye I don’t think. Pete returned to Castle Mount Court and Mo, and Gav hurried off somewhere too, so Lee, Alex and I came home to Jervis Terrace.

I’ve inhibited myself by assembling loose, unstructured thoughts and word-fragments into a book form. There’s no freedom of expression here. Self-consciousness is not the way. Words dissemble, hence my yearning for other forms. No matter how much I might explore an idea or a thought or a physical object, it’s impossible to capture in words its totality as a pure and perfect expression of Reality. I could amass a library of adjectives to describe its structure and surface characteristics such as colour, texture, shape etc., but the essence of my subjects will never come across as they are i.e., simply, and with swift and incontrovertible awareness and acceptance.

The mechanics of reader comprehension inhibit the usefulness of prose as a descriptive tool and this I suppose is the reason behind poetry’s appeal. Poetry attempts to paint a picture in words and achieve an acceptable representation of existing ‘wholeness’, but prose is altogether more aloof and laborious. This is why I’m attracted to the visual arts, for they transmit awareness instantly, or at least as swiftly as the eye and brain can engage. This journal-script is ponderous because orthodox prose conventions are ponderous, and they at best gives the dimmest and crudest representation of my mental and physical experience.