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:'''I never clicked with school. I mean I suppose you can consider me intelligent in quite a few ways, I mean with my writing, but I never clicked at school, I never had done. It was an absolute frustration -- I mean I must have been suspended about five times, which isn't expulsion, it's suspension. You know, I mean things like uniform, and the way you talk and the way you disagree violently with the lessons, the system, the way they talk to you, not as adults but as kids, the whole thing, um .... They thought ... well ... I was simply, you know, a bit of a long-haired moron and the rest of it. I was one of those people who just did not want to be taught and we just ... me and quite a few other kids'd go away and laugh at them and if they took you into their office and caned you, we'd still walk away and laugh, until with me in the end they didn't even cane me. '''
:'''Now my Dad doesn't want to know any more apparently I've shown the family up, the whole thing, I'm a disgrace, talk badly, you know because they sort of ... well let's face it they're snobs, I mean I can put them in that category, I don't like to but .... Well you know I thought: 'Cut yourself off from them -- right, mix with the people you ought to mix with, the people you're happy with,' and that's how I've ended up now. '''
:'''Now my Dad, he's um, he's like . . . quite a few people are like this: he simply can't accept that maybe you've had a bit of bother. He simply feels I'm holding out on him and he was saying something about going to my bedroom and selling my record player. I thought: 'Christ, I'm your son, you can't do that, you know ...' and mutter, mutter, mutter ... something about what I've turned out to be and how I've let him down again and again and again and off he went. So, oh dear! That record player means a lot to me, I'd better watch out. So we came back at 4 in the morning and shifted the whole thing. So either way there's nothing in my house for me now, and the piano was moved out this morning through arrangement between my Mum and me. So I drift towards the house, my thoughts have nothing to centre on, no place to centre on, so I wondered: 'Right, now what?' then suddenly just like that I thought; 'I'm going up North.' So I went home got some extra clothing from my cupboard upstairs, quick as possible nipped out again, no one was in anyway, --I've still got the key, and that was it. Off I went, I was certainly cold, not exactly happy, but I sung (sic) ... and that's how you found me, you know. I had pretty mixed feelings. '''
# dossing with friends, # riding underground trains during the day and sleeping in secret corners of the tube system at night, # hitching round the country.
:'''You might turn up at some house you don't know, and there's a girl living there and you mention something about Steve and she says: 'Yea, come in,' and you sleep in a corner there on the floor. I mean it might be a bit of a small brothel, whatever it is, you know, it might be a hang-out for addicts, or whatever it is, or whatever it is, you just take it for what it is and it's terrifically easy going and free and we like it that way, because there's absolutely no judgement at all. I mean if they ask you what you've done, you tell them, if you don't want to tell them you don't: right, that's it. They take you for what you are at that moment, and it's terrifically free, I really got on in that place. '''
:'''I could stay at my parents" place, it is terribly depressing, in fact it's got terribly psychological, I feel I can't even sleep there now. Yes, you see it's that bad .... There's just that constant sort of thing in the air and the bitterness. And so if I went there now, mmm: '''
:''''Hello,' and 'Where have you been?' and all the rest of it, have something to eat and go to bed, I don't feel I could sleep -- the place depresses me. It's got like that over the years. '''
:'''Steve's house is in a filthy mess; I mean if you stub a fag out on the carpet, there's no raised eyebrows. It's like that. The place is just one hell of a mess now. It's got to the stage where you'd have to pull it down to fix it up, because there's holes in the walls upstairs .... There's Steve's sister, Teresa. She's a bit of a fool, you know. She's um, you know, as filthy as they come -- there's one bastard living in the corner there, and ... well I mean they're all, they swear like hell at their mother and she might swear back and it's accepted, it's incredible. '''
:'''When I first started ... when pills first came in, when I was 13 this was, you know, the sort of big thing at the school ... just used to take, well, purple hearts it was at the time ... just one of those big things used to go around. That's why I was kicked out of home eventually. The old lady was going mad about it, fed up with me coming in stoned every night, 3 o'clock in the morning for a 15 year old. In fact I was 16 by then, getting a bit much, and my old man said: 'You'd better get out.' I was in one of them 'didn't want to be told' moods, told him where to get off and I went. I got a flat ... flat…'''
:Interviewer: '''You haven't been back home? '''
:George: '''No, won't go back neither. I'm too independent now, even if I was starving-well, I have been. I'd still never go. Pride I suppose. '''
:'''Mostly it's been hitch-hiking round London. Suppose I went, say, to Barnet and I got stuck, I'd hitch-hike it back. But it's hard hitching through London. I used to go down to Crawley a lot hitch-hiking, down the A.23, sort of to get to Croydon .... I've got friends down there, get a lot of junkies down there, mostly because there's a big drugs scene down there, same as Welwyn Garden City. '''
:Interviewer: '''Well how long did you stay down in Torquay when you went? '''
:George: '''Only about a week, I suppose, a fortnight. I wasn't there very long, but I do know that a lot of people I knew used to go down there. There's too many fuzz around there anyway. So I came back. The fuzz there? Oh they stop you all the time, pull you all the time, don't give you any peace at all. It's better up 'dilly. '''
:Interviewer: '''How do you mean? '''
:George: '''Well up Piccadilly there's plain clothes -- down there they're not so much plain clothes ... clothes… they just drive up behind you and jump out and pull you, sort of 'What you got?' and this, that and the other, 'Where are you living?' I mean 'You another of those bloody beatniks?' ... … and the rest of it. '''
:Interviewer: '''They say that quite openly do they? '''
:George: '''Yeh, more or less. They say to you ... you… but they give you the impression in so many words ... words… just the way they go about .... about… '''
:'''I certainly would not stop for them. I don't want those smelly, lousy, hermaphrodite beatniks in my car. '''
'''In as far as I respect the hitch-hiker he should respect me, the driver, and I wonder to what extent there is contempt for me on his part. There seem to be a number of young people who take advantage of the bourgeois as a matter of principle, well ... of the property owner, if you prefer, of the person who has a place in.the materialist system and who has accepted the society we live in. There is a whole group of people, call them beatniks if you like, though the term is vague, for whom it is a matter of principle to reject the society we live in but who at the same time take advantage of it.
no edit summary
'John', a 15 year old Londoner, had left school three months before giving the interview that follows:
John's father, a professional musician, had to pay a £30 fine because he and a group of friends had plugged a tape recorder into the amplifying system in a central London tube station and played pop music over the loudspeaker at 3 in the morning:
John went on to describe the circumstances leading to my giving him a lift on the Great North Road:
Like some of the people in the last chapter John was in conflict with his parents but unlike most of them he was halfway to contracting out of his community of origin. At the time of the interview he had got away from school and was in the process of breaking more and more with his father, to the extent of clearing his cherished possessions out of the house. He had three ways of living when away from home:
When I met him he was thumbing North, it didn't matter where. All he wanted was to get away from London and the home situation.
To return to John: he dossed a lot in the underground and ran into a crowd he liked there. Sometimes he would go and spend the night in the houses they did. He loved the freedom and escape from accountability he found in his new anti-community:
The anti-community contrasts dramatically with the dominant one, the basic unit of which, for John, is his family:
Though John can't stand either his authoritarian school where young adults are treated as 'kids', or his suffocating family, he isn't acceptant of the values of the tube dossing, drug taking society he has gravitated into. He likes their freedom but is shocked by some of the consequences:
John seems to be a person who has contracted out of his community of origin but has not been fully able to contract into the anti-community he has stumbled on. His decision to get a permanent job in a tape recorder shop suggests that he is likely to have in a way contracted back into the dominant community. One of the litmus tests for deciding whether a person has contracted out of the ordinary community is his attitude to regular work.
The drug addict 'George' is quite a different case. He has broken completely with his family, not having seen his father for 3 years and his mother only once in this period. Unlike John, he does not half-hanker to go home -- the only other person from his family he sees from time to time is his sister. This is how he describes the break:
For 3 years he's been a member of the drug-taking anti-community, on mainly heroin and methadrine. For him hitch-hiking is not part of symbolic escape from home -- the real escape is a matter of long established fact -- it is much more a way of ensuring mobility with almost no money, it is an essential part of the mechanics of this anti-community's life:
George was an active, integrated member of the drug anti-community in that he frequently pushed heroin, as well as obtaining supplies for his own personal use. He seems to have felt safest in certain 'drug territories' in central London where he could live within the drug scene, without his membership of an anti-community bringing him into direct conflict with the community at large. It is clear from his interview that he is happiest in places like St Martin's-in-the-Fields and in certain clubs and coffee bars round Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square. In the summer he sometimes goes South or West but his anti-community stands out much more in small seaside places like Torquay than in London, so there is more risk of clashes with the dominant society, especially as represented by the police. One can sense how comparatively exposed George feels when he leaves the London scene:
It is in places like Torquay that drug-takers and long haired people who find it hard to fit into the patterns of the dominant society are welded into real anti-communities by the hostility of the local host communities, which particularly in the West Country tend to be conservative particles of the dominant society. Methodist Devon and Cornwall already resent the tidal wave of tourists who are their living, the only alternative to total economic stagnation, so it is not surprising that they vent their bile on the long-haired. The hippies become the scapegoats for pent-up resentment against the economically necessary tourist invasion.
When someone like George goes to the West Country, hitch-hiking is one of the only forms of voluntary interaction he has with members of the dominant community. The raised thumb is a request by the contractor-out for cooperation from the community he has contracted out of. This rouses the wrath of 'ordinary citizens'. So this Aston Martin driver, interviewed on the Exeter by-pass and asked whether he would pick up hitch-hikers:
A French social worker gives more articulate expression to a parallel line of thought:
The contempt and hostility of West Country people for the hippies coagulate them into a clear and visible anti-community. Take a place like St Ives in Cornwall: the police do them for smoking pot, though drunken trippers are left in peace unless they try and drive a car; shop-keepers and cafe owners put up notices: 'No Beatniks here', with alI the overtones of: 'We like doggies but ...', 'Whites only'. In the mid sixties the local council appealed to the townspeople not to employ, accommodate or associate in any way with this 'undesirable element' (August 1963). There was talk of putting coping along the top of the harbour wall to deny it to sun-loving beatniks, of hiring an ex-policeman with an alsation to make sure they didn't sleep out on the beaches at night, and even of raising a vigilante group from the local rugby team. St Ives' welcome to long haired people throughout the sixties has been such that they inevitably coalesce into a psychologically self-defensive group. They have to.
