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

Up at five with the cleaners by Ian Walker (New Society 4 September 1980)

Up at five with the cleaners

It is five in the morning and dark as hell when the N47 bus, standing room only, pulls up opposite the National Westminster Building, London's highest, and disgorges its load on to the empty streets. These women are cleaners. They come into the City from the east End every morning to clean up the banks and insurance companies and government buildings. A kind of invisible workforce, they ghost in at night or in the half-light and then get swallowed up in the busy streets on their way home.

A tiny woman of 72 who has just been cleaning in Old Jury, just past the Bank of England, stands talking to me in the rain. She looks embarrassed when I ask her how much she makes. "Oh, it's not a lot," she says. "Fifteen pound eight pence for ten hours." It's no strain getting up at four? "No, I'm used to it. Don't take no notice. Do you mind if I go now? I like to get in early." A lot of the women are too rushed or too scared to talk. Some aren't paying tax, some aren't declaring all their jobs. Some are just scared, with reason, of anyone who stops them on the street. It start getting light at 5.20.

Of three West Indian women on their way to clean Chartered House, only one doesn't mind being questioned. Her name is Patsy Trotman. A single mother, she lives in Hackney Down with her two children, 13 and 16, and travels here on a night train. She gets £14 for a ten hour week and has been doing it for five years. Why did she start? "Hardships," is all she says. Her friends look anxious. She rejoins them.

Three white women, here to clean the thrity-eighth floor of the Nat West Building, step out of a yellow Escort. The oldest woman, Pearl, has been cleaning at Nat West for 21 years. When she started, she was on £3 7s 6d a week. Now she gets £2.19½p an hour, the top rate for cleaning and double what some cleaners make. Pearl's patch is the director's suite, she says. "Oh, it's lovely. All the wallpaper's suede. It's got a spiral staircase and that."

For young mothers, like the other two, Liz and Diane, this kind of work means they can get home in time to look after the children during the day. Then, at five, they leave home again for the evening cleaning shift. They only go to bed early, they all say, if there's nothing good on television. "We keep going," says Pearl.

I'm joined outside the Nat West skyscraper by Helen Eadie of the General and Municipal Workers Union. Along with the Transport and General, the GMWU is trying to recruit workers in this desperately disorganised and low-paid sector. An ACAS report on contract cleaning is due out later this month. Meanwhile, the only way she can glean any information about wages and conditions is to hang about on the street, and talk to the women on their way to work. She hands out a few leaflets, then later resorts to telling people that she's a journalist, "No one wants to know if you say you're from the union."

Two black women stop long enough to say they work for Office Cleaning Services, the biggest contract cleaners in the country. This started life in 1900 as New Century Window-Cleaning, until the firm realised that windows only need doing once a month whereas offices have to be done daily. It became the OCS in 1930 and now has a turnover of some £70 million a year, having branched out into security, factory cleaning, chemicals, laundries. Of its 25,000 employees, 20,000 are cleaners.

By six o'clock the buses are arriving half-empty. All the cleaners are at work now. It's raining hard. A black woman pops out of the Nat West reception. "Have you got any cleaning work starting today?" she asks. Some employers, it seems, solicit their cleaning staff on the street. In a few hours the office workers will sit down at their clean desks and moan about the rain.

Lola has no time to moan. She is a cleaner at the House of Commons during the day and at the Department of Environment at night. She's Jamaican; her husband died young, in his thirties; and she's brought up her five children on her own. I meet her for lunch in the House of Commons canteen. She is wearing a smart yellow dress with black polka dots, a black bow round her neck. Her hair is straightened, her lipstick and nail varnish are cherry red.

'Tell it to the union'
Until two years ago, Lola was doing nightcleaning at the Post Office in Old Street, starting at ten and finishing at six in the morning. She, as a supervisor, got £45. Ordinary cleaners got £40. Since then she's worked at ITN House, numerous banks, Andmarc Cleaning and the Top Rank disco.

"Work's become a second nature to me," she says. "And I need money to keep my family. You couldn't get any other job to fit in with the kids. They never miss me. Always able to get home at meal times. If I can't fit the job in, I pack it in and get something else."

A member of the GMWU, Lola tries to get women interested in the union wherever she works. She says there's always a lot of petty fighting and niggling, because everyone suspects everyone else is on better money. "Oh, girls, girls, I say, don't make a fight. The union would like to know it all. Tell it to the union."

She is full of stories about cleaners' lockers being rummaged through by managers; about wages not turning up, because the man who was supposed to deliver them had gone and got drunk instead; about a friend of hers who was followed by car all over London to her different cleaning jobs: and about how she would get a few women interested in the union and then find they had been sent off to different offices throughout London. She picks half-heartedly at her ham salad, she tells me she's slimming. "My son likes me fat. He likes to play with me, pinch me." Her youngest son is 13, the eldest daughter is 22.

Lola has a deep calm. She has lived through hard times, doing right by her family and never giving in. She works 53 hours a week at the House of Commons doing the peers' cloakroom and 12½ hours at the Department of the Environment, before she's even started looking after her children.

But it's been like that ever since she came to London from Kingston in September 1961. Married when she was 16, Lola remains undefeated. She laughs when I ask her how old she is? "That's a secret. That's not polite. I'm very old. But for my kids I'm not and for myself I'm not, only when I'm tired." She escorts me from the canteen as far as the gates.

I've often watched the women who clean Thomson House, over the road from where I live, starting at around five in the morning. You see them there, bent down under long strips of fluorescent light in the empty offices, the homes of magazines like Family Circle and Living. Unexpectedly, the doorman said, sure, I could speak to the cleaners, why not? - at 5.30 one morning.

Mopping up in a ground-floor storeroom at Thomson House is Michael. He used to  be a street trader in Lambeth till the market closed down about ten years ago. "It's a shame for a business that died a natural death," he says. "It was the supermarkets that finished it." Still, he reckons this work isn't too bad, "Jovial, you know. Bit of a laugh with various things. Very, very seldom there's a bad word." Michael is 64 but he says he has no plans to retire.

His family came over from Cork in the 1800s and worked as street traders from that time. "One family life," he muses, sitting on a red plastic chair on the floor he was cleaning. "From street traders to cleaners." We move next door to the tea-room.

"I was wounded at Alamein, you know, a fragment of shell on the second night," he licks his finger, sticks it in the sugar. "Terrific bombardment. We was all amongst it in the open ground, wasn't we?"

Another man in the tea-room, Benjamin, objects to being called a cleaner. "We're not cleaners. We're general assistants. We do everything. We're handymen." Benjamin is the deputy shop steward (this being press, all the cleaning staff, men and women, are in NATSOPA). He says that they've just got a 60 per cent pay rise, taking them from £74.96 basic to £123. "It's the biggest increase in the print," brags Steve, the shop steward, who's just come in for a cup of tea. The women's basic pay went up from around £30 to £38.

Michael brings in the Sporting Life for Benjamin. "Got more chance of picking his nose," says Steve. Men drink tea while women work: Thomson House is like some vast household.

On the seventh floor, a harrassed-looking West Indian woman is flying around with a pink duster, complaining that the lead on her Hoover doesn't stretch far enough to do all the floor space here. "I've told Steve about it. I don't know," she says. "Hard work and no pay. I do foster-mothering, work in stores. Before I do this, my real job was clothing machinist. I like that. It's more creative. You finish, pick it up, and look at what you do. But this . . . "

She has four children of her own and used to foster three others. "All ages. Fussing and fighting. It's too much since I started this. It knocks me out." I am talking to her in a magazine art department. "I work and I work, and I don't get no pay, and I don't feel happy about it."

She gets here every morning at 5.15. She won't tell me her name or where she lives. She talks fast and angrily, whipping herself up into a frenzy as she careers round the room. "Cleaning's a very hard job, something you do all your life. Emptying, flicking, polishing telephones, cleaning, dusting, flicking, hoovering. Hoovers are heavy things. Some men leave their office that bad. Some ladies are worse. A lot of heavy lifting and flicking."

Not looking up from her work once while she vents her spleen in speech as staccato as her movements, bending and shaking, she says she would love to leave this job, but can't. "Used to be two people on one floor. Now there's only one. Only eight pound a week for extra work. Do two people's work, get eight pound," she spits, then pauses for breath. "You're always disappointed, that's it. The more you do, the less you get." Pinned to the door of this office is the poster for the television version of Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger, "An epic of life, love and family conflict."

The three white women sipping tea on a lower floor (white and black cleaners choose to have separate tea-rooms) do not have to swim against the tide as hard as their black workmate. All working to supplement their husband's wage, and not forced to do another paid job, they can afford to be more relaxed and stoical about life.

Rose and Julia, both in their fifties now, say they started cleaning 30 years ago when they had young children. "We wanted a few bob and, with this, you're back in for the kids, that's it. Then your children grow up, and you've got the day to yourself. It's something to do at the back end of the night," says Rose.

So do they all put their feet up when they get home? "You must be joking. Don't think a woman ever really rests, do you? If I come back again, I'm coming back as a man."

After their rise, these women will take home about £5 a day. They say it's all right, although the cleaners round the corner at The Times get about £10 a day. "We're low-paid to them," Julia says. But at least they all have a job. One of her friends, who cleans a local police station, is about to be laid off: "A cleaning company is going to take over." This happens because contract cleaning is, for employers, preferable to keeping on their own cleaning staff. It means that they avoid the administrative hassle of direct employment, and it removes the need to buy and store cleaning gear. It also tends to work out cheaper.

A nice cup of tea
Julia and Rose both live locally, Marie lives "over the water" in Waterloo. She is younger, 42, and more upwardly aspiring. She went to Miami for her holidays. Julia went to Canvey Island and Rose is due, tomorrow, to go to Margate. "Got a nice break for two weeks now," Rose says, polishing a table top. "Remember to take me galoshes and an umbrella." Rose and Julia say they could never go abroad: they're scared of flying.

Sometime after 9 am, they all start making to go. "This won't get us done will it," says Julia. "Do like a cup of tea, though."

"That's it, innit, like a nice cup of tea," adds Rose.

Office machinery gets shinier and more technical, but the places still get cleaned up with brooms and hoovers. These women make in a week what a shorthand typist can make in a day.

Later that day, early evening, I walked down to the river to Waterloo Bridge. A jazz band was playing to some kids sitting on the steps before the South Bank concert hall. Smart-looking couples were out on the terrace cafe. The late summer light made the Thames look bluer than it really is. To the east of Waterloo Bridge, on the skyline, were all the office blocks that will, this evening or tonight or sometime in the early morning, get cleaned up by the women who'll come in on the night buses and trains.

4 September 1980

The Underground Life by Ian Walker (New Society 5 February 1981)

It's been a while since I posted any of Ian Walker's New Society articles on the blog, but I recently realised that I still have a couple on my hard drive that I've not previously posted on the blog. I'll post them on the blog when I have the time.

The Underground Life

If you kill someone, you get three days on stand-by. This motorman has had three suicides and one attempted in his 24 years driving tube stations on the Northern line. Today he starts at two and finishes at 7.40pm. "One of the best turns on the roster," he says, licking the gum on his cigarette paper.

Dave Hurman started working for London Transport when he was 27, after he came out of the army. He started off as a porter, then served time as a ticket collector before qualifying to be a guard. In those days it took around seven years to get made up to motorman. His guard, Fred Leeson, has been in the job for three years. He is reading for an Open University degree. He rolls his own cigarettes, too.

Formica tables and chairs in the mess room at East Finchley are all empty. A relief guard, Vasco d'Gama, is playing darts. There is a tea urn in the corner. Through the steel-framed windows the trainmen can look out north and south along this overground section of track, and wait for their train to arrive before leaving the mess. The station was opened on 3 July 1939, and originally it was called East End.

"Hello, Charlie." The bearded man in an LT cap, who's just walked into the mess, smiles back. "Awright?" he says. Charlie Lewis started working on the underground in the summer of 1967. He transferred from the Metropolitan line to the Northern in 1975. "The blokes there couldn't believe it when I said I was leaving the Met. Fancy going back there, the said. The Northern. Toy trains."

The Metropolitan and District lines are the most prestigious to work for. These are years-long waiting lists. The trains are bigger, and the track is all overground or "cut-and-cover" (deep trenches covered over), rather than tube. But Charlie grew up on the Northern.

"The underground's a sort of hobby of mine," he says. "I still belong to the London Underground Railway Society, write in the occasional letter. I've been interested since I was a youngster. Used to live at Tufnell Park and the relations were at Malden. So since the day I was born, I've been travelling the Northern line."

"And that's how it starts. You've nothing much else to do on the tube, but look at the tunnel segments and everything and you start wondering about how it was built and that, you start getting interested . . . It's sometimes a bit of a drag getting up in the morning."

Charlie hasn't had a suicide yet. But he's only a boy, he says. You have to do 25 years here before you stop being a boy and the way things are going, "if they have their way we'll all be out on the cobbles. Mr Maxwell [managing director of LT railways] is talking about driverless trains from 1990 . . .  Get rid of all the bastards."

Dave Harman and Fred Leeson are looking out for their train. Vasco d'Gama is still in and around the 20s on the dartboard. Charlie won't be working again till this evening. He is in the middle of a split shift. Work the morning and evening rush hours, when one million come in and out of central London on the tube, with a four-hour break in the middle.

"I think that's ours. Coming down on the south," says Fred. I walk down to the platform with him and Dave, who points out the tv tower on Alexandra Palace, sticking up into a hard blue sky.

I stand next to Dave, who kills the light in the cab so that we can see better as we leave East Finchley and go underground. Your eyes get used to the dark, and it starts to make sense: the dim outlines of cables and track and tunnel winding ahead. And when Dave picks up speed to 40, it's more exhilarating than the ghost train.

On old 1959 trains, like this one, there are two controls, one for the brake and one for the power. Newer trains have both functions on one control. The motormen prefer the old ones.

All the time he's driving, Dave presses down the "dead man's handle." If the hand is removed, the train will automatically do an emergency stop. It is possible to centre the key on the handle, neutralising it, so that you can give your hand a rest while the train is stopped at a station. If you're found centring the key while the train is moving, you get fired. After all the inquiries into the Moorgate disaster (in which 35 people were killed in 1975) the most plausible theory is still, that the motorman just flipped and deliberately drove that train into the wall.

The sullen passengers
We slow down to 14 mph as we run across a section of track being rebuilt. Work on this, and on all the track being repaired and rebuilt along the 260 miles of the underground, is done between one and five in the morning. It's tough work, Dave says. "Even in the winter, when you see them, they're stripped off." We pull into Warren Street. Sullen heads on the platform turn up to face the train, stare dumbly like cows watching the feed arrive.

Past giant packs of cigarettes, giant stockinged legs, giant sausages on the billboards, we move out the station. It's a soulless place, the tube. The only time probably that people were friendly down here was in the wars. The tube was first used as a shelter during the Zeppelin raids in 1917, and again in the second world war. It won't be any good in a nuclear war. Dave says he'll show me how the dead man's handle works.

Great gasps of air as he removes his hand and the train jerks to a halt. We stop at Leicester Square.

It's been a long time since Dave had a suicide and he doesn't mind talking about it now. "Last one was six or seven years ago, that was the attempted. Two days after Christmas it was. Bloke walking to the edge of the platform and he just carried on walking. I was able to stop in time.

"Last suicide was a young woman. Colliers Wood. She just jumped on to the line, put her head on the negative and looked up at me. Colliers Wood." He sighs. "A strange thing how suicides always come in spates of three. Have you noticed that? You get one, then always two more in a short space of time." Between 40 and 50 people a year, on average, die under London tube trains.

The train clatters into Charing Cross. You can see how people steal a quick backward glance as they move over the platform towards the approaching train, just to make sure there's no psychopath standing behind who's going to give them a shove. Hard cases, young men mostly, stand as close to the edge as they can without getting knocked over by the train. The guard dings, and we move off.

One way and another, the underground eats up Dave's life. He is chairman of the local ASLEF branch (London's 3,902 motormen and guards are all in either ASLEF or the NUR), and sits on the committee of the London Transport Benevolent Fund. His son and one son-in-law are motormen. "Family concern," he says. "Surprising how many family concerns you find in this job."

He works every other Sunday. So the only regular time he has to spend in his three allotments is the Saturday rest-day, which he never works. If it's assigned to him on the roster, he swaps duties with one of the younger men with families and mortgages, someone who needs to put in a lot of overtime to get by.

A motorman's basic pay is £93.85, and a guard's £73.09. On top of that, they get a London weighting of £11.08 a week, Dave says that, with overtime, he made £6,225 gross last year, and this year he expects to make £7,000. We're right under the Oval cricket ground, driving round the Kennington loop to go back up north.

At Waterloo, I get out of the motorman's cab and go to the back to join the guard. Another guard, a young Glaswegian, is sitting with Fred Leeson, travelling back to the canteen and reading an explorer's biography. He's only been in the job 18 months.  When I ask him what he thinks of it, he looks at me as if I'm the company spy. No comment.

Officially, guards aren't allowed to read. They are meant to stare all the time at the pink light on the control panel, which tells them that all the doors are shut.

Passengers all round us are sitting down, reading papers, pretending they aren't listening to our conversation. Guards are supposed to travel half to two thirds of the platform with their heads hanging out the door, looking out for trouble, as the train leaves the station. Mostly, of course, they just poke their head out for ten yards or so, before, getting back to whatever it is they're reading.

What happens if someone pulls the emergency cord? "You see who did it and why," says Fred, "and use your judgement. If it was a bunch of kids, you just give 'em a good telling off and get on with the job. Because calling the police means a lot of extra hassle, hanging around, delay. So you tend not to bother." Guards don't get a lot of trouble, according to Fred. It's the ticket collectors more than anyone who have to deal with the violence.

Only once has he had to call the police. "Someone had punched someone else in the face, and one of the other passengers happened to be a policeman. No big deal." He gets up, and stands hair-blown in the doorway as we leave Mornington Crescent.

The trainmen's canteen at Camden Town has been newly renovated to look like a 1960s milk bar, ble leatherette and formica. One man has fallen asleep in his chair, his yellow torch on the table next to a cup of cold tea and a copy of Sir, You Bastard by G. F. Newman. Three black women serve behind the counter.

A Scouse accent on the table next to the one occupied by Dave, Fred and me is complaining about a meal he's just paid a quid for. "Free uniforms, canteen, that's what they say in the publicity, isn't it?" he says. "The food's crap. Terrible."

Everyone ignores him. Another motorman walks up and Dave asks him what number won the draw this week? "Thirty seven," says Bob Camm, who runs the draw to raise money for the Richard Cloudesley School for Handicapped Children. It makes £100 every ten weeks.

"Look at the rubbish they serve you. I paid a pound for that steak," continues the Liverpudlian, jerking his head at a pile of uneaten food.

I haven't yet seen any women working as guards or motormen. But Dave says they've got three or four women guards on this line, and there is one woman driver on the District line. Everyone sups their tea. Bob Camm makes his own in a tea can he carries round with him. He says that he has been in the job ten years. "Before that, I was a computer checker, a nine to five job. Couldn't stand it. Spent all the time looking at me watch. I like it here."

Bob is just about to start the second half of his duty. It's 4.25 now. He gets his next break at seven.

Upstairs is "the institute," which has table tennis, billiards and three full-size snooker tables. A shout tells us to shut the door as we walk in. In the bar is a one-armed bandit and a broken Space Invader. Dave says that, of course, the bar is only for off-duty trainmen.

Dave looks at his watch, standing in front of a "dare to be free" graffitti on the white-tiled platform wall. It already seems a long time I saw natural light. Dave enjoys taking a train overground when he's been entombed for a while. "Especially in summer," he says. "The tunnels get very hot. So when you get overground you open up the cab window and get a blast of that fresh air. Lovely."

He's standing there, upright, surveying the platform and the tunnel as if it's one of his allotments. Tube workers, I suppose, are the one part of the tube population that doesn't have a secret dread of the tension and fear breaking out into something bad down here, where city laws get silently enforced, and subverted too. Strangers' bodies pressed against each other and whispered "sorries" rippling through the cars in the rush hour.

I get a train to Tottenham Court Road, walk out through the tunnels past two buskers. One is singing "I'm a smoker, I'm a joker, I'm a midnight toker, playing my music is the sun." The other is sucking a drunken version of Argentina (don't cry for me) from a cheap mouth organ.

5 February 1981

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

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