Girls and boys go out to play by Ian Walker (New Society 18/25 December 1980)

Girls and boys go out to play

At the Olympic opening ceremony, straight-backed young Soviet men carried the flags and looked noble. The girls, all got up like ballerinas, smiled and did the quickstep with Mischa the bear. Women dressed as geishas held out medals on plates and old men in suits dished them out. The rituals have not kept pace with the times, especially those being recorded by women. Performances got so good a while back, the authorities figured these women must be men (here, take a sex test). Someday the struggle for sexual supremacy will be fought out in the swimming pool and on the race track. This is a preview of the Big Match.

"Boy meets girl," a coach says to a mother down to collect her daughter from the week of training sponsored by Guinness at the Crystal Palace. "You lose 'em that way. Then a girl goes out to work, don't feel like training at night. You lose 'em that way too." Mother looks worried. She wants her daughter to be a star. Daley Thompson, whose first name then was Francis, was on this course in 1975.

Some of the present generation of teenage hopefuls, here in the cafe at Crystal Palace, are now listening to the managing director of Guinness drone on about enthusiasm and commitment, qualities necessary in both sport and business. Guinness is good for you. Sport is good for business. Henry Cooper and Barry Sheene, a tough guy and a daredevil, wield Brut phalluses on billboards nationwide. Don't worry. You can wear aftershave and still shape up to the guy eyeing your property in the bar on a Saturday night, "Here, mate. You clocking my bird?" Thwack. Smell sweet and be strong.

"I don't believe it," says Suzanne Powell, a young hurdler, when I ask if she thinks girls drop out of athletics more quickly than boys. "I intend to get married, but I shan't give up sport. That woman who won the gold in the 1500, she had a baby a couple of years ago. She broke four minutes."

Most of the young athletes on the Guinness course have now been taken away by their parents, but Suzanne is sitting here with Gary Pullen, both are from High Wycombe athletics club, watching an older male gymnast on the floor flex his muscles for the benefit of the young girl gymnasts sitting at his feet. Suzanne is doing A levels (psychology, human biology and sociology) and Gary left school last year to become a turner. They are both 17. They both think some young athletes are made to peak too early.

Suzanne is in the 400 metres hurdles squad. Gary, who has represented Britain in the long jump, says he can do 7m 22cm. "That's twenty three feet, eight and a quarter inches," he says. These two will be training five nights a week throughout the winter. "It's hard when you're soaking wet and all and it's snowing," says Gary. "Didn't get much snow last year though did we?" Behind us, the basketball players are saying goodbye with soul brother handshakes. (The three black Americans who stuck black leather fists in the air in '68 live out their middle age in poverty. Black football stars advertise Chevrolets on TV.)

I walk down from the gallery at Crystal Palace, sit watching the adolescent sex games in the swimming pool: fighting and splashing and tugging, and who knows what may happen when we both go underwater together? Sport is sexy and children learn fast, learn too the ways of life built round the heterosexual thrill. Girls make tea for their boyfriends playing rugby and football on Saturday mornings in school.

A teenage boy turning heads in the diving pool has also been on the Guinness coaching course. Evenly tanned, one earring, Mr Cool, he makes everyone else look all white and gangly. He bounces and somersaults, penetrates the water with scarcely a ripple. The other boy divers, third raters, look like they've had sand kicked in their face.

Winner of a bronze medal for diving in the 1960 Rome Olympics, Elizabeth Ferris has since become a doctor, a broadcaster and academic expert on the physiological and ideological aspects of sport and the sexes. Her sport, diving, she tells me in the kitchen at her Holland Park flat, doesn't disturb notions of femininity, "Graceful, balletic and so on. But if I look at some of the journalists' descriptions of me. Pretty, agile, elfin, blonde, blue eyed. Always those physical details. I didn't look as if I was about to expire or anything." Or perspire? "Or perspire. Whatever."

Dr Ferris became politicised through TV, "a very male-dominated industry," first working alongside Jimmy Hill ("who was terrific, not a bit sexist") at LWT and then at ATV, researching a documentary series on women, No Man's Land. She has since applied herself to demonstrating that physiology is not the main obstacle to women's progress in sport, "It became very interesting," she says, "to juxtapose what people thought women were capable of and what women were clearly showing themselves to be capable of."

Up to 1972, women weren't allowed to run further in the Olympics than 400 metres. Now it's going up to 1,500. But it is in stamina events like the marathon that women have made the most dramatic progress. In 1963 the percentage difference between the men's and women's world records in the marathon was 37.21; by 1979 it had gone down to 12.80. "The reason for women not doing the longer events is that it's too strenuous," she smiles. "No one ever asked a man to produce medico-scientific evidence he could do anything in sport." And no one ever asked a man to produce a sperm sample to prove he was a real man before he could compete.

"Women who fail the sex test," says Elizabeth Ferris, "can be perfectly developed in every way. It's just that they won't have ovaries and they'll be sterile."

Dr Ferris's expertise has, like her diving ability before, brought her travel and prestige. She stood in for Simone De Beauvoir, who was unable to give the opening address, at an International Congress on Women in Rome this July. Last October she told a conference in Dublin a story about eight women on an American expedition to Annapurna in the Himalayas, in 1978. The men, as ever, were concerned about the women: their ability to withstand altitudes and stress, their susceptibility to frostbite. Seven out of eight women reached the summit and none got frostbite. Five men got frostbite on the penis.

"Mario Andretti, he always used to grab hold of my jeans, I always wear baggy jeans like this," says Divina Galica, Britain's leading woman motor racer, 'I know you've got balls in there somewhere.' That's a Mario Andretti joke. He is quite amusing." We're sitting in the basement of her flat, in a street just behind Harrods. An ex-Olympic skier, Divina says she learned how to ski at a school in Switzerland. A finishing school? "Well, I didn't finish. I suppose you could get finished there." After a spell selling skiing kit in Lillywhites, she opened her own skiing boutique and then, in 1974, got a telephone call: did she want to take part in a charity race at Brands Hatch? In 1977 she became the first woman ever to drive in a Formula One race.

Possessing the glamour which attracts to the possibility of death, motor racing must be the ultimate machismo sport. Sport as war (this relationship was inverted in Apocalypse Now). How do the men drivers feel about her joining in the battle? "It did go on, the leg pulling," she says. "But now they realise . . . I love the sport and I'm quite good at it. They accept me as a driver. The flattering thing is they're usually quite chuffed to beat me."

A beneficiary, but not an advocate, of the women's liberation movement, Divina thinks that women must do whatever they believe they're best at. "If they think they're best at being mothers and helping their husbands to succeed . . . I'm not a women's libber as such. Some people don't actually want equality. I know stacks of very happy housewives. I mean, I know some very frustrated ones, too. After all, it's a free world, you know. Well, I shouldn't say it's a free world because half the world isn't free, is it?"

Balletic men
And if women want to be groupies, hang out at the grand prix? "They get what they want out of grand prix. I get what I want. You do get some incredibly beautiful girls at the grand prix. I'm not sure quite what it is that attracts them all." Divina being a racing driver is about as big a blow for liberation as Margaret Thatcher being Prime Minister. A hearty public school girl with a taste for excitement, she is well aware that what she's doing wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. "If you were single and over 30 then, they'd say, oh, she's bound to be queer and that kind of thing."

Homophobia is of course still rife in sport, journalists reach for inverted commas to describe East European "women" athletes. But if women have become more powerful, so men have become more graceful. Men's gymnastics are a sight more balletic these days, yet no one suggest these men are effeminate. The ice-skating gold medalist in the '76 Olympics, John Curry, was so beautifully camp it sometimes threw the interviewers. Rather than signing off with the usual manly, "Thanks David," John Curry would smile and say, "Bye bye."

Unlike people, horses have always run against each other, male and female, as equals . . . I'm thinking on the train to Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, to watch Ruth Armstrong ride La Fille in the 2.45 Novices Hurdle. Her sex was disguised by the purple and yellow silks, her hair swept back into a white jockey's cap. She came in fourth.

I talked to her afterwards in the bar, asked why was billed Ruth Armstrong on the jockeys' board where all the men riders had initials followed by surnames, B. Normal and so on. "That's so people can see I'm a girl," she says. "Can't say Miss or Mrs or Mr 'cos that means you're an amateur. They put that so people'll know I'm a girl, not a lad." Why do they need to know? "Don't know. Just for the public, I suppose."

Ruth is 18 and has been working in Jack Berry's stables in Cockerham near Blackpool, her home town, since she was 16. She isn't just a jockey. "I work at the yard as well. Look after four horses in the yard. Muck 'em out. Feed 'em. Ride 'em in the morning. Take them training." She starts at 7.30 in the morning and finishes around six. She gets £30 a week. This morning she drove the horse-box down from Cockerham and she'll drive it back tonight too.

As good as the lads
If she hadn't got the job at Jack Berry's she's have gone round the world, sailing with her father. He went anyway. She now has a dentist for a stepfather. Why is she into racing horses? "Oh, the danger I suppose. A challenge. Show you're as good as the lads, like."

"Are you a feminist?"

"What's one of them?"

"Someone who's in favour of women's liberation."

"All right them," she grins, sipping her Britvic orange.

I ask what her friends in Blackpool make of her job? "Most of them are horrified, I think," she says. "They're all working at offices and that. They think it's a bit unladylike and all the rest of it." Showjumping has always been eminently respectable for women. But racing> Flying around at speed with your arse in the air? Oh dear.

She looks at her watch. Time to get changed for the 4.45. "Can I have a copy of the magazine to show my boss?" she says. "Otherwise he'll just think I'm chatting someone up." She disappears. Further along the bar I see Emlyn Hughes, England international footballers and nicknamed Crazy Horse. He still calls his ex-manager Bill Shankly (deified in Hughes' autobiography this year) "the boss." Even the superstars know their place.

In the grandstand during the next race 200 pairs of binoculars pressed against faces move slowly in harmony. Bizarre. It reminds me of a situationist poster: a blown-up photograph of a 1950s cinema audience all wearing 3-D glasses. You want reality? Adjust the focus. You want a conclusion? At the end of the day it's goals that count.

18/25 December 1980

To Glasgow and back: the view from the road by Ian Walker (New Society 21 May 1981)

To Glasgow and back: the view from the road

 Ian Walker talked to the out-of-work, the students and the lorry men. Daniel Meadows took the pictures

The road begins at Brent Cross, gateway to the M1. Five people have got lifts in the last hour. There are twelve of us still waiting, this windy Monday. Mostly they are students. But there are two down-and-outs who say they don't mind where they go. One of them bums a cigarette off me. He says he left a whole carton on a French truck last night and now he's clean out.

A tall thin boy walks up to ask if I would mind him hitching in front of me? He is going back home to Sheffield after a weekend spent camping in the New Forest, an extended interview for a job as courier on a big camp site in the south of France. He has been out of work since Christmas. He says it's bad in Sheffield. And it rained a lot in the New Forest.

He worked in a travel agent's for two years. He learnt to speak French by listening to French radio stations, taping the news broadcasts and learning them off by heart. If he gest a left, he says, he'll ask if the driver will take me, too. I say I'll do the same.

A police Range-Rover pulls up, and we are all told to move down from the hard shoulder. This happens every 20 minutes or so. We pick up our bags and walk down to stand in a cluster right on the edge of the roundabout. When the police have gone, we walk back up again.

I've been here now an hour and a half. A red BMW stops for the boy from Sheffield and, after a ten-second conversation, he beckons me over. The driver, a fruit farmer from Kent, is going to Leeds and he can drop me at Watford gap services. I get in the back seat.

The fruit farmer has to be at Leeds market at five tomorrow morning. He hasn't got anything to sell, but he's going to chat up a few of the wholesalers who will maybe put a bit of business his way. The recession, he goes on, has hit the fruit business. He used to sell a lot of strawberries to Germany, but now the pound is so weak against the mark it just isn't worth the effort. He's avoided laying off any staff so far. He is, he tells us, a great believer in expansion.

It starts raining hard about ten miles from Watford Gap, by which time I know that the fruit farmer's daughter is doing sciences at Oxford, that he knows the editor of the Telegraph, that he is a governor of Wye College (the agricultural branch of London University down in Kent), and that he is very concerned about the cuts in higher education. The BMW drops me right outside the service station cafe.

"Is your back still playing up, love?" one of the cleaners inquires of another, moppig the floor here in the cafe. Travellers sit silent on the wet-look blue seats, and look out of the window at the premature grey afternoon. I walk out, past the exclamations of the Space Invaders, and find another cafe, for transport workers, round the back. Here they serve the tea in mugs, and with two spoons of sugar, unless you speak up fast.

Paul Smith, a truck driver from Bristol, is depressed. He flicks through the Sun, the Mirror and the Star in turn. "It's my birthday and my wedding anniversary today," he says. "You picked a good time to talk to me. I was just sitting about and trying to read these papers, and wondering what she's thinking."

He said goodbye to his wife and three children this morning at 4.15, and drove from Bristol to London, where he had to start work at eight. Paul only gets home at weekends. During the week he sleeps either in the cab, or in his London digs. Today he has to pick up a load in Northampton and drive it to Carlisle. He'll finish tonight at around nine.

"Thirty seven today," he says.

I talk to Paul for almost two hours. He always wanted to be a journalist when he was at school. He went to see the editor of the local paper, who told him to go away and write a composition.

"I wrote this fabulous composition on football, 'A Day at the Match.' I didn't hear anything; then a month later, it was the day we were moving house, a letter came saying. 'You got the job.' The old man wouldn't have it, wouldn't let me take the job. 'You're not stopping,' he said. I was 16 and this was 21 years ago. Wasn't the thing to leave home young. Time I did leave home I was 21. I needed a job, and I didn't have any qualifications. Here I am. A lorry driver. I get very angry when I think about it now."

He goes up for his second mug of tea, comes back, offers me a Woodbine. "I was talking about this with a bloke the other day," he says. "I mean I did English GCE, used to be great with pen and paper. But now . . . Other day I had to write a letter to a firm. Had a job to even put the letter together. I doubt if I write more than three letters a year, and you lose it."

It's getting dark outside, and busier in here. A continuous procession of drivers coming in and having a laugh with the women behind the counter, supping their tea and walking out. I ask Paul if he wants to get back on the road. He says not.

His kids bought him a pair of size eleven training shoes for his birthday. He takes size nine. He runs a hand through his thick brown hair. You got me on a bad day. Do you think I should be home?"

I suppose it would be nice. But these are hard times, and I expect he needs the money. He nods. Without overtime, the money's crap, 80 quid a week, and who can raise a family on that? He needs all the overtime he can get, he says, but there are so many regulations these days. He can only do 60 hours' driving a week; that is a ministry ruling. And not more than 281 miles in any one day.

By January next year, all trucks will have to be fitted with a tachograph (the equivalent of an aircraft's black box). It records time spent driving and idle, speeds kept, total mileage done. Tachographs will replace logbooks, which are too easy to cheat on. To Paul, the tachograph is a mechanical spy. "No trust," he says.

"It's to do with the EEC. Everything's to do with the EEC. Only thing that's not on a par with the EEC is the wages."

Two more teas, 19p a mug: all the drivers hate the motorway services. A big clock hangs from the cafe ceiling. Paul glances at it now and again.

"Where you going?" he asks me.

"Glasgow."

He winces, and tells ne about the juvenile protection rackets that operate in places like Glasgow and Liverpool. "Kids come up and say they'll look after your cab for a half a quid. If you say no, then you get your tyres slashed and everything. If you hand over the ten bob, it gets looked after okay. If it wasn't so funny, it'd be sad. Kids of nine and ten years of age."

I say I've heard stories, too, about prostitutes who operate on the road.

"I don't bother with 'em. It's as simple as that. On this firm you get sacked for carrying your wife in the cab."

His firm is Laing's, the builders. He drives an artic. "I don't like rigids. Can't drive the bloody things." He says he would like a job "driving continental," but they're few and far between. "The good jobs, there's a waiting list as long as your arm. And the cowboy jobs aren't worth a light anyway."

Paul keeps saying he has to go. It's almost 8 pm. But he carries on talking. He tells me about a bad accident he had once, involving a motorcyclist.

"He locked his front wheel and dived off. They say he was dead before he hit me. But I didn't want to drive then. I packed it in for about a month, looked for another job. But if you haven't got a skill, it's very hard. So I went back to work. You don't forget those sort of things. But it's things that happen. On the road all day. More chance of things happening."

He looks up at the big clock.

"Christ. It's gone eight. I'm stopping here now for something to eat." He returns with sausage, egg and chips. I sit with him till he's done. And then he has to go south, and me north. We shake hands and wish each other luck. I walk out, my hand going into the canvas bag for the M6 sign.

But it's too dark to use it. Drivers can hardly see me, let alone the pathetic sign. Three other men are hitching. Two of them, travelling together, carrying big rucksacks, don't look too friendly. The third works at the Walker's Crisps factory in Leicester. He comes from Luton, but he had to move a few months ago to find work. He's been back home for the weekend to see his parents. He couldn't afford the train.

I get the first lift, at about nine, in a rigid truck. I avoid the eyes of the other hitchers on the way out. This driver is short and fat and embittered. "Were those two blokes hitching together?" he asks me. I say they were.

"Fucking comedians."

Everyone on the road, apart from himself, is a "fucking comedian." He uses the phrase a dozen times in the first ten minutes. It's pouring with rain, and the "fucking wind" is blowing us all over the lanes like a bit of paper. The short fat driver from Woburn Sands, who hates driving nights and hates this stretch of the M6, bounces up and down in his seat, wrestling with the non-power-assisted steering.

It's an old truck. You have to shout to make yourself heard above the din of the engine and the trad folk music on Radio Two and the tea-making Primus rattling in the glove compartment. The Primus belongs to his mate, the driver says, who is "too fucking mean to buy his tea." He tells me to stuff a rag in there to muffle the noise.

He has to drop his load of rubber windscreen parts in Liverpool, doss down in the cab for a few hours, and drive home early tomorrow morning. He takes home 88 a week. I ask him what he thought of the budget?

"Not a fucking lot."

His head is already nodding a bit. He says he got no sleep today and watched the late film on TV. So I have to keep him talking. Hobbies? Crown-green bowling and darts and reading, he says. Reading what?

"Every fucking thing. Got millions of fucking books."

Unaccompanied warblings on Radio Two about tragic love and war and bright spring mornings. A strange soundtrack to this bumpy grind along a windswept M6 at night.

About ten miles before Sandbach in Cheshire, the driver suddenly looks almost content. "This is how I like the motorway," he says. "Nothing in front and nothing behind either."

At 9.45 in the Roadchef cafe, Sandbach services, 20 truck drivers sit watching a repeat of The Sweeney. It's a bad night for hitching now. I try it for ten minutes then call up an uncle who lives in nearby Congleton. He works as a rep for BP. He comes over to pick me up. At his home we drink half a bottle of scotch. We talk about the Social Democrats and nuclear war.

Day two

A nightmare. Get back to Sandbach at 10 am. Wander round the car park, trying to get a lift. A truck driver sits reading the Sun in his cab. I rap on his door, and shout that I'd like a quick chat. He stares at me pityingly, then a minute or so later he slides across his seat and slowly winds down the window. "Nothing left to say," he says, winding the window back up and returning to the Sun. It starts raining. I go inside, and gets a 28p cup of coffee.

I wait an hour and a half, thumb hanging out, till a lorry driver from West Bromwich pulls up. He is going to Bury to get loaded with Ford parts. He can take me as far as Knutsford, the next services up the M6. Anything for a change of scenery.

A big man with a big beard, this driver looks like a rock climber. He's been driving over 20 years, and he's had this Atkinson truck (he calls it "an Akky") for three. It's a modern cab. Sprung seats and large wrap-around windows.

"The British lorries only started getting comfortable, with decent seats and power steering, when the continentals came in, the Scanias and the Volvos and everything. If they hadn't, I'm sure British lorries would be the same as they always were. Cold and uncomfortable."

He asks me where I'm bound. I tell him. "I used to do the Scotland run twice a week," he says. "Very tedious." He tugs on his beard, his eyes swivelling from road to wing mirrors and back.

Knutsford is desolate. On a sunny day it's ugly enough. This grey Tuesday lunchtime I walk across the litter-strewn car park and join the ten other hitchers, who all look glazed, as if they've been standing here a week. I get my pitch, in front of the Fiat billboard, shiny and red. HANDBUILT BY ROBOTS.

A Rolls-Royce glides past, and the glazing breaks for a moment as the hitchers turn to smile at each other. Every hitchhiker has heard "The Day I Got a Lift in a Rolls" story. Not this time.

A man in a tartan scarf, carrying a red guitar case and a rucksack, arrives after an hour. He's a mature student at Kent University, and he is on a visit to his home in Glasgow. Kent has gone right downhill, he says. They've even got British Movement skinheads on the campus. And the union is dominated by the Federation of Conservative Students. "I don't go to student union meetings any more. Waste of time."

After two hours of thumbing, I need a break. The Quasar and Astro Wars machines are right there in the middle of the self-service. Ping. Crash. Shakooh. Pish. A fat middle-aged couple tuck into their microwave pizzas, beans and chips. Girls in white Top Rank dungarees and caps rush round clearing the formica tables.

Back on the road, the only people getting lifts are those men carrying red-and-white tradeplates. They deliver new cars. The deal is that they buy the truck drivers a meal. Or something. It's starting to get dark. I've been here four hours. The sweet smell of diesel, as the trucks rev up down the slip road, has got almost pleasant.

The boy who slouches across the car park to the slip road has scared eyes and carries no possessions. He looked about 15. He's wearing a dirty blue anorak. I try talking to him, but he runs off. I remember Paul Smith, at Watford Gap, telling me about kids you got on the road these days. They just live on the motorway, not going anywhere in particular. Bumming coffee, meals and cigarettes from the drivers. Paul said he'd given one of them a lift just last week.

A blue Transit, with a TRUCKS ARE BEAUTIFUL windscreen sticker, sweeps past. The Glaswegian student says he's had enough. He's going to cross over to the other side of the M6, try and get back to Sandbach services, and then see if he can catch a lift going up north from there. He says if either of us ever make it to Glasgow, he'll see me at a pub on North Street called the Bonne Accorde.

Half an hour later, a buddhist monk stops. But he's not going my way. I have been here nearly five hours when I get out of wretched Knutsford in a beaten-up Cortina. The driver is a Manchester University student, on his way home to Wigan after a job interview with a firm of financial investigators based in Yeovil. "Nice place to work," he says brightly.

He thinks the interview went pretty well, and the starting pay is six thousand something, so he's pretty pleased about it all. He used to be a regular at the Wigan Casino northern soul all-nighter. We talk about northern soul for the half hour or so it takes to get to Charnock Richard services, near Lancaster, where a big coach party of suntanned schoolchildren are all nicking stuff from the shop, and flirting with each other.

I get sausage, egg and chips in the transport cafe, and sit reading Truck magazine, which is a flashily designed job packed with full-colour pics of masculine new trucks.

Charnock Richard at 9 pm. I've been on the road all day, and so far I've travelled two service stations up the motorway, about 40 miles. There are a few other people wandering round the dark car parks, who look like hitch-hikers, wearing backpacks. But they don't seem to be bothering to try and hitch.

After ten minutes I'm joined by a British Rail guard called Justin, who works in Stratford-on-Avon and is going up to see his parents in Kendal. I thought British Rail staff got free travel?

"They do. But I lost my pass."

Justin wears John Lennon spectacles and baggy frayed jeans. He has a red star on a circular badge pinned to his navy greatcoat. It is a poorly-lit slip road. Drivers can hardly see us, and we can't see inside the vehicles either. But Justin can't understand why the truck drivers parked right next to us, who've watched us waiting here 20 minutes, don't take pity on us.

Finally, we both get a lift in a white Transit, driven by two students, who say they've just been down to the midlands and bought this van for 3,000 for Sunderland students. Their story sounds a bit odd. I say they can drop me at Buton West services, and five minutes later Justin says he'll get dropped there, too. When we get out, he says he didn't fancy being on his own with those two. You develop an instinct, or a paranoia, about these things when you're hitching, particularly at nighttime. 

"I never said it was scampi," says the woman behind the counter, in the small cafe at Buton West, just before Kendal. "I said it was like scampis. I don't know. I'm not sure what scampis are." The man taking his food back must be some kind of nut, to expect scampi in a late-night motorway cafe. Justin goes off to phone his mother.

Justin's mother was fed up, he says. She's watching When the Boat Comes In. She told him to try hitching for half an hour, and she'd come out if he had no luck. "It's pretty rainy and empty out there," he says. We have another coffee.

Two truck drivers sit talking on the next table. I ask if either of them are going to Scotland. "I've broken down, And he's finished for the night," the Cockney driver says, winking at his mate as he gets up to go. A French couple come in, and the serving woman speaks to them slow and loud. Blobs of rain are dripping down the windows, blurring the headlights.

Justin says he has been working on the railways for two years now, and he's had enough. He was very excited, he says, when he was made NUR branch secretary. But it was depressing because no one ever showed up to meetings. He thinks he might go to college, and try to get some A levels. I get a lift into Kendal with his mother, who runs an antique shop, and check into a hotel. I get a drink in the cocktail bar.

A Geordie businessman expounds his theory of life. "Only one reason I work. Is that." He rubs his thumb on his index finger to indicate money. "That's all there is, isn't there? It'd be a great society of it wasn't. But it will never be. So why bother?" The businessmen at the bar nod in stolid agreement, and pull on their pints. 

21 May 1981

The second part of Ian Walker's journey to Glasgow and back will appear next week

Out of the closet, onto the screen by Ian Walker (New Society 27 March 1980)

Out of the closet, onto the screen

 A gay ex-policeman stands on-screen by the common where, he says, police used to take delight in terrorising the gays who meet up there at night. This was a dramatic sequence in a programme on police and homosexuals, one of seven 30-minute shows that have gone ut so far in the first series of Gay Life, on London Weekend Television. A planned second series, though, is now in some doubt due to a confrontation between the programme makers and various gay groups for whom the series was, in part, intended.

The producer, Michael Attwell, was working on a series for young blacks called Babylon when he was approached to do gay life. "Being gay myself I was asked to do it," he says, adding that it is LWT's belief that as television matures it will move into more specialist areas, with increasing airtime for minorities: "Gays in London, for example, are a large minority excluded from the media."

But he says that right from the outset they decided the series should not be "ghetto television" and wanted it to appeal to both gays and straights. "Of course you exclude from your mind the possibility of talking to that section of the community which regards homosexuality as a sin, but we wanted to get to the broad uncommitted mass of straight people."

But at the expense of the committed minority of gays?

He replies that he gay community is very divided among itself: "Some gays have said to me, 'Whatever you do, don't make the programme gay libbish.' But you also have to listen to those gays who've thought carefully about our relation as homosexuals to the rest of society. In a sense they are the intellectual vanguard of the gay community. Many of the lesbians see TV rightly as a male dominated institution. TV companies are part of the system they're fighting to change."

Pam Isherwood, who is one of twelve women in the Lesbian Line collective, which runs a phone service for lesbians, says: "I don't think they ever really worked out whether the programme was about or for gays." Pam has been closely involved in recent discussions with LWT who contacted her, along with numerous other activists, because Gay Life wanted to do a programme on lesbians in the women's movement. After lengthy negotiation the two sides came to terms. There would be an all-female crew (the electrician apart), the programme would use a female voice-over and two of the lesbians would get to see the programme in the roughcut form. Wages Due Lesbians also insisted that everyone got paid for their cooperation. "You guys are pimping on us," Pam reports them saying.

But Gay Life had second thoughts. The team decided it couldn't sacrifice its male voice-over, which was the "house style." The lesbian groups couldn't agree to a man's voice telling women's stories. Impasse. There have been calls for a boycott of the programme by different gay groups.

Pam Isherwood still hopes the programme will somehow go ahead. Lesbian Line have a lot at stake. "The last time we went on TV, a talking heads studio discussion, Gay Switchboard and Lezzy Line got 400 calls in 20 hours."

In a café over her Spanish omelette Pam talks me through the radical lesbian criticisms of the programmes. "Like the one on gay nightlife, it was just about three current stereotypes, fashion, call it what you like. First there was the queens' scene, drag in a south London pub, then there was the leather macho thing, whips and spurs in a Kings Road shop, then it was the clones."

The clones? "Yeah," she chuckles. "That's what we call the disco guys who all look the same. You know, moustache, neat little check shirt, running shoes. All terribly male." Two women at the next table stare at us.

What really offended lesbians was the programme on child custody which dealt with the question of whether gay parents encourage children to be gay. "It didn't ask, so what?" she says. "That's the straight world's biggest fear, that if queers bring up children they'll grow up queer." And because of the difficulty in getting lesbian mothers to appear on camera, Gay Life interviewed two gay male couples who had adopted children.

"There was Graham Chapman and his clone boyfriend and the boy they'd adopted, I mean he was so camp," Pam raises her voice. "Then you had the super-pig white man, successful businessman, who'd taken custody of the eight year old nephew of his Filipino lover, who only looked about ten himself . . . Then the straight barrister saying that courts were interested in secure relationships. Just because queers can't get married. What's so stable about het [heterosexual] relationships anyways?" That programme finished with a voice-over which said more or less that the courts know best in these matters.

Pam admires the courage of the gay ex-policeman, but thinks that the programme on police left too much unanswered. "I mean, there's the whole thing about cottaging [meeting people in public toilets] that they didn't ask. What is this thing about jerking off a guy and going away without ever seeing him . . . That's something about male sexuality . . . " She shakes her head and the two women on the next table try and pretend they aren't listening.

"All the programmes were too biologically determinist," she continues. "You're either born gay or born straight. The woman teacher who said she chose to be gay, that's the first time it's been brought in. I mean it's not everyone's experience to be born het or queer. I chose to be lesbian. I chose to be lesbian rather than be bisexual certainly."

Although Pam understands why the series wanted to characterise gays as normal sort of people, she disagrees with that approach. "We're not normal. We're a threat. I am a threat," she says, jabbing herself. "That's where homophobia springs from. I'm a threat to the nuclear family."

The editor of the London Minorities Unit, which also produces Skin for ethnic minorities, is Jane Hewland. A feminist, a single mother, she regrets the clash with the lesbian groups, but feels her critics didn't really understand the problems the unit had putting programmes together. Two lesbian couples they'd hoped to film for the custody programme dropped out, one at the very last minute. Gay Life also researched a complete story on lesbians in the army, but then had to junk it after the army lesbians decided they couldn't go before the cameras.

The programmes anyway have had a good response, she says, with over 100 letters and lots of phone calls, and she's pleased that Gay Life has twice as many viewers as Weekend World, LWT's prestige (big-budget) current affairs show fronted by the ex-MP, Brian Walden: "We usually get a five or six rating. Weekend World gets a two or three." (One rating point means you reach 44,000 homes.)

Gay Life has also done well on the "audience appreciation indices," which gathers statistics on how people watch programmes, recording the percentage levels of approval. "Normally the audience appreciation indices is in the 50s and 60s," Jane says. "With gay life it's in the 70s."

It was in 1970 I first heard the word "sexist." Now you can look up its meaning in Collins English Dictionary. Today's extremists are tomorrow's cultural innovators. Have you see those lapel badges which say, "How dare you assume I'm heterosexual?"

27 March 1980

Discontent in Swindon by Ian Walker (New Society 13 August 1981)

Discontent in Swindon

Everyone else ran for shelter from the driving rain, but William just stood there on the end of platform 1 and pointed away to the sites of the old saw-mill, the eight platforms, the sidings, where the Swindon works once produced and repaired all rolling stock for the Great Western Railway.

"But now we ain't got such a thing as that. Now there's just two sidings and a bay," he said, staring across the tracks at the redbrick offices of Hambro Life, which have dominated Swindon station since it was modernised in 1972.

A railman for 30 years, William was a driver till steam engines were taken out of service. "I came off the footplate then. I said: that's it, it's no good to me," he said, walking back up the platform to the station buffet, waving at a workmate cycling home.

After he jacked in driving, William became a patrolman, going down the line looking for faults, he said over a pint of lager in the buffet bar, swearing whenever the station announcer's voice over the PA invaded his reminiscences.

Now, at 59, William is a "green card man." He pulled out the plastic-coated bill of bad health which has confined him to light cleaning work, and which has made him too embarrassed to talk about his current occupation. He'd rather remember how it was: he was young and string and all Britain travelled by train.

Across the leatherette and formica, in the corner of the buffet, two girls whooped and danced before the one-armed bandit spewing out tokens. William pulled a silver timepiece from his breast pocket. He started at seven this morning. He'll clock off at four. He works every weekend. "But some of them's going to be cut out," he said, getting down from the bar stool and pulling a nylon waterproof over his faded denim worksuit.

Will he be supporting the strike scheduled to go ahead on 31 August? Of course he will. "How would you like to get up at two in the morning to go out mending track?"

Before leaving the buffet William plucked a tiny diary out of his picket, thumbed through the pages. "Here it is," he said. "31 December, 1951. That's the day I started." Why did he want to remind himself, every year, of the day he started working on the railways? He just shrugged, walked out.

Another HST swept through the station at just gone 1.30 pm. Sitting on a platform bench, two teenage train-spotters complained it had been a lean day. Further up the platform, in the railmen's locker room, the main talking point was the tragedy of the old couple who would have won £700,000 if the coupon collector had sent off their entry.

Cyril and John, Swindon's two longest serving porters, were waiting to be relieved by the afternoon shift. A few weeks ago, Cyril said, there was a stupid article in the Daily Mail which claimed that porters earned £5,000 a year. "That's a hundred quid a week isn't it?" he said. "You won't find any porters here on that. You'd have to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. And there's not the overtime in these small places."

Every other Sunday, Cyril gets in three hours' overtime, that's all. And John, he doesn't bother with the overtime, his wife likes him home Sundays, so he makes do with £48.50 a week. Wouldn't that get bumped up  a bit with the tips? "Can't remember when I had my last," he replied.

"Tips are a thing of the past," explained Cyril. "All right, Roy?"

Another porter has just walked in, his blue shirt wet through. Roy said it was embarrassing, anyway, to be offered money, especially by people who he thought couldn't afford it. "Sometimes though, you can offend them if you refuse it . . . tips are embarrassing all round, I think."

Cyril and John, who both started working here in 1946, nodded in agreement. The Bristol train was running late, said the station announcer. All eyes jumped to the clock.

A poster pinned next to the NUR notice board explained how to lift heavy loads, "the modern way," without straining your back. Sitting down at the table strewn with empty mugs, Roy said he'd only been portering a year, but he much preferred it to his last job, which was in security, patrolling an empty factory at night.

"The railways must have something," he said. "For many blokes it was their first job, and they've been here 40 years . . . Nothing makes you happy like helping someone else. Even if you only think you are being a help, it's a great boost to the morale."

The thing that rankles, for all three porters, is the money. Not because they're greedy men, as the leader writers, who make in a day what porters make in a week, will suggest. But because they feel they've been taken for a ride, their goodwill sucked dry. Angry that strings were attached to the 11 per cent settlement, all three will support a strike.

"Definitely," said Cyril, who can still remember the last national rail strike. It was in 1926, when he was 14.

Everyone said hello to the teenage boy stashing his crash helmet and waterproofs in a locker. Time for Cyril and John to knock off. The whole station shuddered as another HST went hurtling by. Flinging open the door, the head porter, Ray, marched in and tore off his mac. He didn't look too happy.

"More storm on the way," he said, going on to explain that every time he had to take a parcel over the track to the Red Star office he got wet, that there were two lifts to go up and down, and that the lifts were always getting stuck. "People don't realise," he said, shaking his head.

What makes Ray laugh, he said, is that the press always talk to the railmen in London, who are on a higher grade due to the London weighting. Ray himself is on a higher grade than the other Swindon porters, but it's only worth a few quid a week extra. "Waste of time," he said, pulling out his pay slip for the week: £87.88 gross. £61 net. "And I worked the day of the royal wedding that week."

He didn't agree with the wedding. He'd heard that the grub alone cost a million. His mate, Jack, added that it was murder at the station the day Prince Michael came through. "Do this, do that. Clean this, clean that. We couldn't find the bloody red carpet," he said. "Bet the bugger doesn't pay for his first class fare either."

Jack looked at his watch and said that this time next week he'd be in Inverness, having caught the 7.37 from Swindon. "Don't go on strike till I've got the train back, for fuck's sake," he smiled.

Stroking his luxuriant sideburns, the head porter, Ray, ignored the joke. He wanted to pursue his them of low pay on the railways. It all went back to the war, he said. "So many had to go into the army and some had to stay back. Those that stayed back done all the hours in creation. They didn't bother about the rates. After the war everyone else in the factory got pay rises, but not on the railways: stick-in-the-muds."

When Ray started here at the age of 14, there was just one clerk and one stationmaster. Now, he said, there's a whole army of clerks and administrators. The other main problem, he thought, was that the Conservatives were set on destroying the nationalised industries. "Why else are they closing all them gas showrooms? Course, we're only a cog in the wheel," he said, pulling on his coat to take another parcel over the way to Red Star.

The station postman, a Tamla Motown fan called Gary, wearing a grey sweatshirt, sta-prest trousers and black Dr Martens, walked in carrying five cherry bakewells and mince tarts in cardboard boxes. It was his 19th birthday, he announced. Everyone sat down for tea.

Roy said it was only the postman who could afford to buy cakes, in this day and age. Marcus, the youngest porter here, said he was happy just to have a job. He'd been on the dole two years after he left school. Roy poured the tea from the big metal pot.

"I have a school-teacher friend, and he said that the thing that most upset him was that he was teaching children who would never work. That's the biggest problem, far as I can see," said Roy.

After tea a shunter, Chris, ran into the locker room , swearing about the rain. He pulled on his yellow leggings, slipped the arms of his donkey jacket through a dayglo orange jerkin. "I'm one of those silly buggers that gets underneath and does all the dirty work," he says.

His work, coupling and uncoupling trains, can be dangerous, too. Four years ago in Swindon a shunter was killed, squashed between two buffers. Shunters need their wits about them, he said. If you're trapped on the track with a train coming down you can survive by lying flat down.

"In the middle lane (main line) you can, providing they're not HSTS. With the HST you just get sucked up anyway. But with the BGS and the GUVS, they'll clear you with a few inches to spare," he said.

On a flat week Chris takes home £58. "Usually I get a Sunday in, so I average about £70," he said. "As firms go, it's a brilliant firm to work for. They do look after you. We've got our own welfare people, if anyone's in a spot of bother." He walked out to lie under trains.

As I left the locker-room, someone shouted after me. "What are you going to call it? Discontent in Swindon?"

13 August 1981

Walkerless

Sorry, but there's no Ian Walker article today. Been busy with other stuff.

Don't worry, there will definitely be one posted on the blog on Friday.

America's angry heroes by Ian Walker (New Society 13 December 1979)

Bobby Muller is still around - and still fighting - but the cautious optimism contained within the piece from 1979 was sadly misplaced.

America's angry heroes

On 29 April 1969, Bobby Muller led a battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers up a hill defended by a suicide squad left behind by the Vietcong. When the South Vietnamese came under fire, they ran, as they always did. Bobby was blown four feet up in the air. A bullet through his chest severed the spinal cord on its way out.

Ten years later, Bobby leans forward in his wheelchair to speak into the microphone. "The majority of people consider the Vietnamese veteran to be a sucker for having served. Veterans returned from the war and never discussed it. The idea went that GIs were crazed psychopaths, drug addicts, or whatever. So if you're socially polite, you don't bring up Vietnam."

This is the Sherry Henry Show on New York's WOR Radio, going out live. Bobby Muller, the main spokesman for the Vietnam veterans, is telling Sherry Henry what he has told many TV, radio and newspaper journalists recently. That one quarter of the three million who served in Vietnam suffer from psychological disorders which make it impossible for them to live normally, that one quarter of all married GIs got divorced in the first year they were home and that half of all the disabled veterans are unemployed. Worst of all, psychologists report, the returned soldiers just couldn't talk about Vietnam. How do you explain over a few beers how, and why, you killed people with an M16? Especially when everyone knows the war was a mistake?

President Carter not long ago designated a specific week to be "Veterans Week." At last, people are talking about the war, says Bobby, but he wants to see more action. He lists the Vietnam veterans' demands: an employment assistance programme, additional health care, an extension of the time limit on the GI bill granting veterans a college education.

After Bobby's injury in 1969, he was a prime mover in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement. Before that, he was a high school athlete turned business student who was told future employers would want to see military experience on his curriculum vitae. "I was very gung ho in the career track and, if you'd been in the Marines, especially with combat experience, it's like a brotherhood down in Wall Street."

Bobby went into the Marines in 1967. He was told that infantry was the place to be as an officer, "to be put in a direct management and leadership role." So that's where he went. At first, he had no particular enthusiasm for the cause, but his military training changed all that" "You gotta picture this. You got a big parade deck with these very big impressive drill instructors up front. 'What is the code of the bayonet?' They holler, 'Kill.' 'Who do we kill?' 'Luke the gook.' 'Who do we kill?' 'Link the chink.' It really got you excited. At the end of the whole thing, I was quite an aggressive guy who was eager to go to Vietnam, repel communist invading forces and preserve liberty and freedom and democracy for the people of the south."

The problems for Bobby started when he went into the refugee camps in the northern part of Vietnam. "That was a very confusing period. All the people I had gone over there for, with this vision of being a saviour, looked at me with fear and suspicion. What the hell's going on here?"

Also, the three South Vietnamese battalions that Bobby was adviser to had a poor appetite for the war. And on 29 April 1969, the reluctant South Vietnamese soldiers were Bobby Muller's undoing.

"I had 500 South Vietnamese soldiers. I had ten US Marine tanks and I had a hilltop that I had to take which was being defended by a Vietcong suicide squad. I spent all day with heavy artillery pounding the hill, jet strikes pounding the hill. Every time the South Vietnamese would go up, they'd take sporadic fire and fall back. End of the day I got this colonel. He was saying, 'Take that hill. Take it. Take it." He was really jumping on my case.

"I got the tank commander and said, "Give me three tanks. We'll walk these guys up, walk the Vietnamese up. I led the assault, tried to get the Vietnamese to come up. They split. I caught a bullet."

Because American lives were saved in Vietnam which could have been lost in other wars, it placed a stress on the hospitals which the administration was unable (or unwilling) to deal with. Bobby first got involved in agitating on behalf of the veterans when his hospital was on the cover of Life magazine:

"It was a symbol of the conditions vets had to come home to. There were pictures of rats and overcrowding and filth. At the same time, Nixon was vetoing legislation that provided money for vets, on the grounds that it was fiscally irresponsible and inflationary. I was on all the networked news shows round the country by virtue of saying: 'Look, as an infantry officer in Vietnam, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars many times over in air strikes and artillery in order to kill people. And now we're talking about a few dollars to provide additional staff in the clinics, some parallel bars, graduated steps, new wheelchairs and not the antiquated stuff that'd been there. C'mon, who are kidding?'"

Bobby Muller is 33, the average age of Vietnam veterans. He came of age, he says, with the words of John Kennedy. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country." And also with the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King (correspondents recorded how his assassination had more impact on GIs out in Vietnam than any other news from home before that), drugs, rock 'n' roll and the sexual revolutions of the sixties. The young Americans who went to Vietnam were not so different from those who didn't. But when the GIs came home they were rejected by their friends.

Bobby, like others in the veterans movement, is not interested in sympathy. In the short term he wants jobs and health care but in the long term he sees the veterans as being a powerful political force. Apart from the three million who served in Vietnam there are another six million who are called "Vietnam era veterans," who were in the army sometime between August 1964 to May 1975. Those nine million, Bobby believes, will be the basis of a political movement which, through Vietnam, will pose questions like: "How has Vietnam affected our foreign policy? Do we have a foreign policy?"

I point out to him that some people believe caring about America to be a dangerous activity, a precursor of the kind of flag-waving which sends armies into foreign territories. I say that I can't take the bit at the end of the Deer Hunter where the group mourning the loss of their friend start singing God Bless America.

"You know what my impression was with that scene?" says Bobby. "And this is one of the reasons I thought it was an OK movie. Here you have real down-and-out poor slobs. Working class hard-life steel town Pennsylvania. It's a rough existence. These people, with the incredible pain of having to bury the kid who went to Vietnam, how are they going to deal with the anguish? Other than to say, I guess that's the price we've got to pay," and here Bobby mimics a Voice of America broadcaster, "to keep America free."

13 December 1979

A snow job by Ian Walker (New Society 16 October 1980)

Think of all the great music that's been made under the influence of (some) drugs. Now subtract from that all the self-indulgent wankish follow ups albums that have been made whilst your once favourite group were nose-deep in Bolivian marching powder. Gutting, isn't it?

A snow job 

"Never buy coke off a man with no nose." Joe chuckles at this one-liner delivered from the stage at the Alternative Cabaret in the backroom of the Pegasus, in north London. He started snorting cocaine about two years ago, when it cost £30 a gram. Now it's around £60 and he's heard of it going up to £80 soon. "You can work and still feel OK on it," says Joe, a sociologist, aged 29, who gets through about a gram a month. "It's a soft drug as far as I'm concerned."

This alkaloid cocaine was first isolated from the coca leaf, chewed by South American Indians since at least the 6th century, in 1857. Freud commended its therapeutic value in 1884, the year cocaine was introduced into ophthalmology as a local anaesthetic. Dr Conan Doyle, an eye specialist, began placing references to Sherlock Holmes's cocaine habit as early as 1886. James Joyce was taking cocaine as a pain reliever when he revised the final chapter of Ulysses in July 1921. A chic drug in the 1920s and 1930s, the white powder is once again back in fashion. What's the attraction?

"You're not looking for an alternative state of consciousness," replies Joe. "It makes things clear and it puts you in a good mood, but without the depressive effects of dope or amphetamines. And whereas with alcohol you're going to become more blurred in your speech and thought, with coke you become clearer. I like that sense of control. But it won't give you  a great uplift in itself. You can't be in some state of depression and expect to get out of it. It doesn't work with snow (cocaine)."

Joe also admits to enjoying the ritual: taking the cocaine out the fridge, spending about five minutes chopping it up with a razor blade on a small mirror to make it very fine, arranging it into neat lines and then snorting, usually through a biro tube, but sometimes through a plastic straw. A rolled-up pound note will also do the trick.

"After it goes up it takes about five minutes before you can feel it trickling down the back of your throat and your tongue starts licking a bit. But then all that goes as it starts going through the body and hits the brain."

Too expensive to be an opium of the people, cocaine is not the kind of pleasure to share with strangers, even for a marxist like Joe. "Just one line can be a fiver," he says. "It's not like buying a round of drinks or passing a joint around." Cocaine, like heroin, is a class A drug, and pushing or possessing it carries stiff sentences.

"Not many people on the left are into it." Joe smiles. "Unacceptable decadence. It's like old-hat politics, you know, an unnecessary deviation. But that seems to have eased a bit recently, so you can be a part-time revolutionary as well as a full-time one, and mix a bit of hedonism in with it." No one still clings to the 1960s desire for drugs and politics to coalesce in some subversive delight. Elitist, anti-social, non-hallucinogenic, coke is the perfect drug for the pessimistic no-illusions 1980s.

Clean and white, it gets you high and leaves you sane for the working week. Bob Nightingale, on the Release switchboard, says they never get any calls from people messed up on cocaine. "The clinics don't consider coke addiction a problem," he says. Not many people earn enough to take an overdose of cocaine.

An ex-cocaine dealer, Alan, says he used to earn on average £600 a week. He has recently returned from a nine-month tour of South America. "I used coke for the high altitudes, up in the Andes. I climbed to 5,600 metres without oxygen on coke," he says, rolling some Lebanese into a post-breakfast joint. His experience in the Andes is supported by the evidence of Sir Robert Christison, the78 year old President of the British Medical Association who, in 1876, claimed that coca-leaf chewing enabled him to take 16 mile walks and climb mountains. No trouble.

Alan paid between five and six dollars a gram for cocaine in Bolivia, one of the main exporters, along with Columbia, Peru and Brazil in the coke police state belt. Those who do the actual importing, he says, are anything from air stewardesses to hippies returning from holiday. The stuff sold in Britain is anything from 10 to 50 per cent pure. "It's cut with anything, procaine, or any chemical synthesis, sulphates or other stimulants, even down to chalk powder and such things," he says. "If it's cut with amphetamines, which is quite common, it's no good. You get an instant speed rush and then a gradual decline into a soporific depression."

What sort of people were his customers?

"Artists, creative people, or anyone very into their work. managing directors. Anyone who wanted to maintain a certain level of activity for long periods . . . Mostly they were in their late 20s, although I had one 55 year old explorer. And my grandfather, he takes coke occasionally. He's an Austrian Alpinist."

Anna, an Argentinian exile, who is also sitting round this breakfast table, interrupts. "I think it's the most decadent drug going," she says. "It's just sort of nice, nothing special. And you pay all this money for this tiny pleasure."

"The price is inflated because of the risk," replies Alan. "It's always been a class A drug in the eyes of the law." He once shared a train compartment with three drugs squad cops. He chatted to them about their work. He had three ounces of cocaine on him at the time. Was it close escapes like that which made him give up dealing? "It just seemed the time to stop," he says, slowly. "Things were coming down. People around me were getting busted. Time to call a halt." So dealing isn't addictive? "No. Only to a young egoist who finds himself with lots of friends all of a sudden." Alan, who is 27, painstakingly prepares the third joint. He didn't bring any cocaine with him.

No one is too sure how or why this or that powder or liquid (why do the fashion conscious swig Pils?) becomes a thing to do. One theory is that the widespread availability a few years ago of amphetamine sulphate, a form of speed which is snorted, created the taste for white powders. That is anyway how Richard, a 29 year old magazine designer, first developed his nose for a buzz, in 1975. "I was working on this magazine three years ago and cocaine was around then," he says. "Used to go clubbing and you'd be there, ogling ladies. Sometimes you were with a lady and sometimes you weren't. If you weren't, the idea was to get some Charlie (cocaine)."

He tells me the white powder is everywhere in his line of work. "All these people are wired all the time, wired at work, got to keep their front up. Been trying all day to be Mr Big. Then you think, this is a bit silly. Have a nice meal, nice time, nice snort. Wake up next morning and feel good." Richard thinks cocaine dissolves all his aggression, even when he's in his car.

"Drive home at night after the pubs have shut and the roads are full of loonies. The other guy sitting in the other car, he's revving up to pull away from you at the lights. Then he goes and you don't. He hates you next lights. But you don't care. You don't always want competition. Don't want to be like that."

Richard was using up to three or four grams of cocaine a weel at one time. After leaving one job he landed a £7,000 settlement and reckons he spent about £2,000 of that on the drug, which he didn't always consume in the Gents at clubs: "We'd all go round to someone's place. A guy's cooking the food. Nice wine, nice food, like mussels and legs of lamb. Have a good rap, a couple of reefers, a few glasses of wine. You get out of your tree. Then you have a couple of brandies, coffee, real proper stuff. And then, later in the evening, you have some coke. It's like an After Eight . . .  But you don't do that all the time. Other times just take the odd reefer, watch telly, get through the night."

Unlike any of the other coke users I talked to, Richard had for a short while the time and the money to go over the top, to punish his brain too hard. "You've smoked a few reefers, maybe had a few (magic) mushrooms in a quiche, had some Charlie. Suddenly you open your eyes and no one's there. It's like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Your eyes feel like ballbearings and you feel there's this extra coating, this film, between your skin and your hair. You think, 'Oh fuck it, I've overdone it.' Don't know whether to go home, take a bus, take a train. You get palpitations. Can't sleep. You know it's crazy."

His descriptions get more manic the more we drink, and the more he tells ne about how it feels to lose complete control, walking to the edge  . . .  but drugs have always had that kind of masochistic appeal. Reject official sanity and, instead, explore the character of madness. When Richard first used drugs in 1968, he was 17, his favourite group was The Doors.

He tell this one story about a friend of his, he says, but I think he experienced it himself. "A mate of mine took two grams to himself one night. His heart started thumping. He was anxious, nervous, depressed. His doctor said, 'It's your own stupid fault. Just drink Perrier water till you feel OK.' He spent £100 in one evening alone. His eyes were staring out their sockets."

He draws circles on his glass of beer. "You don't feel physical sickness. It's more anxiety because you brain's working overtime and it's got no material to work on. There's nothing new happening. You start regressing into the past. You can't eat. Your jaw's really sore. Front teeth protrude. Your saliva goes all thin and horrible. You feel you've got a piece of cellophane in your mouth, slightly damp, and you don't know what to do with it."

Heaven then is when it's all over.

16 October 1980

The people's PR by Ian Walker (New Society 14 May 1981)

Today's Ian Walker article dates from May '81 and is a report from the TUC's People March for Jobs, which was a march from Liverpool to London in protest against then rising unemployment in Britain. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, I guess. I was hoping a google search would reveal some good links that would provide more info and history on the march and its background, but to no avail. However, I did find some marvelous pictures of the march instead. Check them out here, here and here. The first link leads you to a selection of Martin Jenkinson pictures, who was the official photographer of the march. Sadly, my internet search reveals that he just passed away this past month. More info on this interesting man is provided at the following link.

The people's PR

It is a protest march 1981-style, a PR procession with the thematic logo on the green banner up front repeated on the green anoraks of the marchers behind.

We are waiting for the late-risers, still shifting their rucksacks from the gym of Salford technical college to the two trucks loading up outside. We move off towards Manchester at just gone eleven, after the march leader, who looks like a scoutmaster in his army surplus jumper, has offered up three cheers for the overnight hosts.

Four hundred symbols of the two and a half million unemployed walk out, on day five of the march, past squares of rubble and medium-rise council blocks and a building labelled Co-op Funeral Services.

"What's that?" says one of the marchers.

"Don't know. Socialist burials I suppose."

Two old women standing by a zebra crossing put down their shopping to clap the marchers, who return the compliment. A punk behind me in the march says he hopes there's a riot or something, sometime, to liven things up.

The sun is out. Paul has tied his anorak round his waist. He is 16, from Halewood, and was in town with his mother when he saw the march come through on May Day. His mother said how nice it would have been if Paul could have been on it. When he got home, he started packing. "She nearly died," Paul says. But she couldn't stop him.

He arrived without credentials, without sponsorship from a union, but somehow managed to join up - got given the papers and the T-shirt and the anorak. Paul only left school six weeks ago. "My feet are killing me. New boots. Apart from that, it's been great."

A small crowd has gathered on the edge of Salford. Showing above the well-wishers is a red banner which says that 6,553 are unemployed in the borough. More ritual chants of "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie (out, out, out)" as the march stops for a quickie speech from Stan Orme, the MP for Salford West. Paul is telling me that the marchers are given ten or 20 fags a day.

" . . . And a return to full employment. Thank you very much." Stan Orme has finished. The march crosses the border into Manchester. Phil, who finally got sponsored by NALGO, is one of the Socialist Workers' Party contingent here. He says that a short time before the march was due to start, the TUC had still had only 70 applications. And so they came to the SWP, veterans of the Right to Work marches, for help. The march has, it seems, depended on the local contacts of the SWP, the Workers' Revolutionary Party and the Labour Party Young Socialists.

Phil studied philosophy for three years at the North London poly, then dropped out before taking his finals. He thinks Nietzsche is under-rated.

Because the march is ahead of time, it stops at a T-junction, over the road from a pub called the Jollies, for 20 minutes. A couple of marchers fall asleep on the pavement. A Scouser, an electrician who works in the Barbican during the week and goes home at weekends, says his union sent him up because they thought the employed should be solid with the unemployed. He stays at the Barbican YMCA.

"You can only get digs in the Barbican YMCA if you work in the City," he says. "And you can only work in the City if you're in the upper classes. So I said I was a dentist. My mate said he was an electrician. He didn't get in."

First reception in Manchester is in a pedestrian precinct. A delegation of old age pensioners hold up a DIGNITY IN RETIREMENT banner. The marchers, as always, return the applause and recite a few more Maggie chants. Local worthies queue up to speak into a megaphone which isn't powerful enough to reach more than 50 or so marchers clustered round the front of the steps in this square, which is planted with young trees.

"Some of you may well belong to churches," begins the Bishop of Manchester, hopefully.

Walking to Manchester town hall, I talk to a young woman who also did a stint (two years) at a polytechnic before jacking it in. She thinks the stewards, many of them Communist Party members, are sexist and authoritarian. She has thrown away her green anorak in disgust. There are only 30 women officially on this march, and they aren't allowed to walk at the front. The final straw for her was this morning when she was told that she could only wear her black PVC armband, in honour of Bobby Sands, underneath her anorak.

The right to lurk

Up the street named after John Dalton, the man who defined colour blindness, past Rational House, the march shuffles up the steps of Manchester town hall.

"We're marching for the right to lurk," says a punk in dirty red jeans, dog collar round his neck. "Brilliant place to lurk," he adds, taking in his gothic surrounds: the high arches and the stained-glass windows, the tableaux celebrating famous Mancunians.

More speeches and more statistics: there is 14.5 per cent unemployment in Manchester, and 40 per cent of the workless are under 25. A rep for the Bishop (who had to go catch a train) says, to loud applause, that he was on the Jarrow march. He then spoils it a bit by saying he wasn't on it for that long, and he didn't walk that far.

I sit on a table watching the marchers eating their pork pies and baps. A man who used to work at Dunlop in Speke, before it closed down, sits down beside me. He's been on the dole two years, hasn't been able to take his wife and two children away on holiday for three years.

At 3 pm, the march moves off to the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, where everyone is being put up in the building named after Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb. I talk to a pensioner, who went to live in Llangollen after he retired. He used to be a building worker. Why did he come on the march?

"Because I recollect the thirties and those terrible things," he says.

There is a vigil for Bobby Sands in the town at 4.30, and a delegation is going down. About 30 of us troop out, checked at the revolving doors by a steward who makes sure no one is wearing their People's March anorak.

I walk down to Piccadilly Gardens with a man in a brown donkey jacket. From Liverpool, he says he's self-educated working class. "Least I was working class. Now I'm one of the outs. If you know what I mean."

Standing in the rain outside Chelsea Girl, the black PVC armband protesters chant, "Bobby Sands was murdered. Political status now,"and hand out yellow roneo'd leaflets to the people rushing for buses. Some passers-by look angry. Most just look confused. The rain gets harder and, after an hour, the protesters file back to UMIST.

Over at the New Century Hall in the CWS building, there is a People's March entertainment organised by War on Want. The Houghton Weavers do a medley of protest numbers, including We shall overcome and Blowing in the wind, followed by a song written specially for the march, entitled, We want work. Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Ardwick, joins in the conga round a huge dance-floor.

"All the way from Moss Side," says the compere, with just a soupcon of racism, introducing the steel band, Tropical Heatwave. When they've finished their set the bass guitarist, Ken, walks to the back of the hall to talk to a girlfriend. She says that he wasn't up there for long.

"Yeah. Get it over nice and quick," says Ken. "Then you don't have so much work to do. Who wants work?  . . .  Well, this lot do."

Next morning at nine, some people are still fast asleep in their bags at Barnes Wallis. Plates of beans and fried-eggs lie around half-eaten.

Today is a rest day. Most are taking it easy. But the politicos are splitting up into delegations, taking their message to the factory gates. I join a group of twelve going out to an occupation at Holman Michell lead works in St Helens.

Men stand above the barbed wire they have stretched across the blue gates of Holman Michell. The marchers, all wearing their anoraks on this expedition, are let through the door and invited into the canteen for a cup of tea.

Ron Dickson, pouring out the tea, says they occupied the factory on 22 April, after management announced they were making 15 redundancies. And now all 28 of the occupation force have been sacked. Ron says they've got nothing to lose. He adds that he has had 18 weeks off sick in the last nine months because of high lead levels in his blood.

Ray Harper, a fitter, says he thinks it's good that the marchers have come along this morning. "Great. It gives you a lift. Been a fortnight now. You tend to flag a bit." The men here do 16 hours a day, on average, at the occupation. A bell rings. Ray looks at his watch. It's 11.45. "That's for dinner-time."

One of Ray's son is leaving school at Whitsun. "There's nothing for him," he says. "He's applied for at least 15 jobs that I know of. He's studying now for his exams and that. I tell him they're important. But he says to me, "What's the point, when there's nothing when I leave?'"

An unemployed boilermaker on the march, Dave Huyton, joins in our conversation. He says that the idea of the march is to stir people from their television sets. Ray says he is a Tony Benn supporter. Dave is in the middle of the usual spiel about the People's March being above politics, when we're all summoned outside for the pictures.

The four photographers want the workers and marchers lined up by the blue gates, underneath the barbed wire. "Can we get a couple of placards?" one of the photographers asks. The placards are fetched. One says: "Fighting to save jobs. Fighting to save St Helens." Another" "Enter here and walk back in time/" They get propped up. A few fists point skywards.

The pictures done, the marchers file out the gates towards their orange Transit. One more routine Maggie-out chant, and it is on to the picket line at nearby United Glass. Everyone says goodbye with clenched fists.

14 May 1981

Up in court by Ian Walker (New Society 30 April 1981)

Up in court

Regulars, the dossers and the hookers, chat to each other and ignore the NO SMOKING signs. A worried mother sits next to her teenage son on the wooden bench. Lawyers bearing important briefcases rush into the waiting room and shout out the name of their client. The warrant officer stands there in his shirtsleeves, ticking off the names. "Guilty is it? Ta," he says. All pretty routine, this Monday morning at Clerkenwell magistrates' court.

"I never shouted sieg heil," says the skinhead to the magistrate in court No. 1. "I was shouting things out, but not sieg heil."

"You are a very lucky man that you are not before me for something worse," says the magistrate, obscurely. He has balding white hair, and spectacles perched on a suspicious nose. He sits up there in front of the coat of arms, Dieu et Mon Droit. I wonder how many of these defendants know what that means?

A dosser now stands on the platform surrounded by wrought iron, in the dock on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. O'Brien is of no fixed abode, the clerk informs the magistrate. He sometimes lives in the hotel, where he sometimes works. The magistrate asks O'Brien when he can pay his £100 fine. The defendant replies he takes home £56 a week and he has to pay £7 of that back to the hotel.

"Well, O'Brien. That leaves you £49 for your food. Ten pounds a week. Stand down."

Six men who have been in custody seven months without trial are remanded, again, without bail. A lawyer stands up to say it is scandalous that his client has still not been charged. "Your use of the word scandalous is not really justified," replies the magistrate. This case involves £23 million and 17 defendants.

The next case involves a few bob. William Liddell was found begging at Southampton Row by an off-duty policeman, who gives evidence: "I told him I was arresting him for begging. He said, 'Give me a chance. I've been at Bow Street for the last three days. Saturday's a good day for me. I make a few bob'."

Liddell is asked if he has anything to say and he shakes his head. "Can't you find some way of getting your cider other than by begging for it?" asks the magistrate, fining him a tenner. I didn't even realise begging was against the law.

A woman being prosecuted for soliciting  - she has been done three times before - says in her defence that she has since given up prostitution and gone to live in a hostel, Kelly House. She is discharged. "Now try hard, try hard," says the magistrate, as the woman is led out of the dock.

Another skinhead is put on conditional bail and another dosser, guilty of inciting two girls under 14 to commit an act of gross indecency, is given the choice of a £50 fine or 14 days inside. It is a pathetic procession.

Court No. 2, next door, is adjourned at 11.15 am because the defendant, a prostitute who hasn't paid previous fines imposed by this court, can't get here till twelve. Her friend, Joe, is waiting to lend moral support in the public gallery. We go out for a cup of tea in a cafe over the road.

Joe is 22. He came to London from Nigeria eleven years ago. His girlfriend, he says, is writing a book on hookers and he is kind of helping her with her research. He spends a lot of time hanging out in Kings Cross, the downmarket red light zone where an orgasm can be had for a tenner.

The woman Joe is waiting to see in court is the girlfriend, he says, of a mate of his in prison. I ask him what his mate's inside for? "I don't know. Think he's a thief."

Joe has done time himself, in Brixton and the Scrubs. "I swore at the judge," he says. "I just wanted to know what it was like in prison." And what was it like? "Same as being outside. Except you can't go to disco, can't have girls."

I ask Joe what he made of the Brixton riots? He chews on his ham sandwich, takes a swig of tea. "The police down there, they're bad with them, you know," he says. "I used to live in Brixton." Once he got picked up on SUS and spent twelve hours at the Brixton cop shop, he says, before getting released. Doesn't it worry Joe at all, coming along to a magistrates court, surrounded by all this law?

Why should it? he says. He's clean.

"But sometimes when I'm in there I see the cops and they're looking at me. A couple of times I've been followed. A big cop, the one with glasses, he's followed me a couple of ties. But I just come into a cafe, sit down, and after 15 or 20 minutes he'll go away."

He's out of work and it can be hard sometimes, he says, to stay straight when friends come up with money-making plans. "You can get £100 one day dipping [pick-pocketing] and then it's gone the next day. You need some more. You get catch once, twice. Spend all your life in prison. Not worth it, is it?"

It's almost twelve. Walking back to the court, Joe says his friend asked him to come along because she is really worried about not paying the fine. "Do you think she'll get bird, or what?" he asks. I say I doubt it.

Short and thin, she has red hair and pale skin. She smiles nervously at Joe as she takes her place in the dock, and the clerk tells the magistrate she owes the court £117.

He seems a more sympathetic sort of bloke, this magistrate in court two. He'll give her another 28 days in which to pay.

The next defendant, dandruff on his raincoat, advertised Spanish chalet homes in the local paper. "No chalets have in fact ever been put there," says the detective giving evidence. "Everyone has lost their deposit." Defendant is remanded.

Another crowd gathers in the waiting room just before 2 pm, for the afternoon session. A boy is lying full length on one of the wooden benches. A motorbike cop, crash helmet under his arm, stomps past in his black leather boots, then turns and stops, tells the boy to sit up straight. The boy obeys him, but slowly enough not to lose face.

On the next bench, a pinstripe lawyer talks to his client, who looks about 15. The boy has a slack mouth, is slightly cross-eyed and rubs his face all the time. "How are you going to plead?" the lawyer asks him. The boy rolls down his lower lip, shrugs twice. "Guilty?" he says.

"But you aren't guilty," replies the lawyer. "You can't plead guilty if you aren't guilty." (Later this afternoon the lawyer will stand up in court to say that he is waiting on psychiatric reports on his client, accused of aiding and abetting a robbery at a youth club. The magistrate in court one will peer over the top of his spectacles, disbelieving as ever, but he will finally agree to wait and see what the report says.)

After the magistrate in court one has signed a load of warrants for detectives, he deals, yawning periodically, with a long stream of motoring offences, Third of the afternoon is disqualified for a year for dangerous driving and has £86.30 to pay in fines. The magistrate asks if the dangerous driver has a job. No, he replies, I'm unemployed. And what does he do when he is in employment?

"I'm a removal driver."

"Can't you get any job at all?" says the magistrate.

The defendant in the next case is the first one all day to plead not guilty. He is accused of going through lights on red. The policeman giving evidence is in the Special Patrol Group, he has the CO mark on his shoulder. The defendant, a man of around 20, says he saw the police transit van parked by the lights as he was coming up. "I'd seen the van. And I'd hardly go through on red if I'd seen the van, would I? The lights were green, and changed to amber as I went through."

"There is a corroborator too," the SPG man says to the magistrate, who shakes his head. That won't be necessary. "If I'd seen the van why am I going to go through the lights on red?" continues the defendant, throwing his arms round in exasperation. "You're saying I was ten yards away when the light was red?"

"Have you any witnesses to call?" asks the magistrate.

"Wouldn't do much good if I had, would it?"

He gets fined, his licence endorsed, and is led from the dock. A sniggering old man in a stale grey suit, who thinks courts are a spectator sport, nudges me and points.

The sniggerer spends a lot of time in the public gallery. All afternoon he is trying to involve me in his game. Laughing at the magistrate's put-downs, and the inarticulate attempts of the defendants to scrape together some mitigating circumstance. I tell him to shut up. The cases continue.

30 April 1981