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:'''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.'''
Like some of the people in the [[Hitch-Hiking_by_Mario_Rinvolucri/chapter-1|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:
# dossing with friends,
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.
Except for hermits and the insane it is impossible to permanently contract out of one community without joining or forming another. The sort of community a rebel like John is attracted to is likely to be in conflict with the society at large, either directly in breaking the law, or through its attitudes and assumptions. Groups like London tube dossers, drug addicts, beats, flower people, skinheads etc.... are sometimes referred to as 'sub-cultures'. This is an intensely biased term, since the prefix 'sub', even if not intended to when originally used this way, has strong pejorative overtones. In fact these groups are made up for the most part of people who are in some way ''reacting '' against aspects of the dominant culture. Not being happy with the side implications of the adjective ''reactive '' in phrases like 'reactive community', or 'reactive culture', I shall use the term 'anti community' to describe, for instance, the Picadilly drug addicts. ''Anti '' here is short for 'antidrastic', simply a Creek forebear of the Latin adjective 'reactive'. The implication is that these communities spring from their members' perception or intuition of things wrong with the dominant community.
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:
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.
John is an example of a person in a halfway house between the rebellious teenagers of the [[Hitch-Hiking_by_Mario_Rinvolucri/chapter-1|last chapter ]] and the total contractors out. The pressures are too strong for him to carry on his liberation struggle within the setting of the home, so he cuts out. Hitch-hiking away from the home area is one of the forms of flight and revolt he adopts. But the 'Steve' anti-community he joins for a time is one into which he cannot fully melt -- in many ways it shocks him. So in the long run John's 'contracting out' is likely to have been simply a necessary episode between leaving school and taking a permanent job.
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:
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.
[[File:Mario-hitchhiking picture1.gif|right]]
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:
:'''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.
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.
One of the things that probably most riles the puritan mind is that the long haired seem to live without labour. They lounge around alI day like Aesop's grass-hopper, instead of earning the 'right to leisure' by hard work. Local people wonder suspiciously how they manage to get enough food to stay alive, for even though the beatnik needs no money in summer for shelter or travel, he does need a bit for drugs and food. The four main ways of guaranteeing minimum subsistence are:
West Country people are quite right in thinking that hippies are opposed to a certain idea of work. According to Mr Polkinghorne, probation officer for the area round Torquay in 1969, a lot of the boys who get in trouble tell him they have come down from the North of England: '''because I didn't want to go into the mill'''. He feels that they came South because of dreary home surroundings and because of the legend of easy drugs, easy sex and a mild climate. Beatniks interviewed by an Exeter ''Express and Echo '' reporter in 1965 said they didn't mind living rough:
The report goes on: '''This was a common outlook among the dozen or so beatniks I met: 'We can work for £12 a week and be making a profit of £60 a week for the boss. Why bother when we can get by like this?' said 18 year old Mick Goodwin from Stockport. '''
Taken all in all it is not surprising that West Country people with dour Methodist roots and traditions should dislike long-haired young people who take the sun instead of working, who take pot instead of alcohol, who sleep on beaches instead of in cramped boarding house beds, who travel by 'begging' instead of paying their fares, and who, in a small number of cases, can be triumphantly convicted of robbing doorsteps of the odd bottle of milk. Hostility in the socially backward South West is no great surprise to the investigator, but it is striking that the vast majority of the items in my file on contractors-out are either derisory or condemnatory. Most of the people writing about contractors-out take absolutely for granted that the values of the dominant society are unquestionably right and that those who feel differently are sick, wicked or odd. It seems to rarely occur to anybody that if a young person gets to the psychological point of contracting out of his society there must be violent pressures on him to have driven him into it. It is not an easy or happy development, but in certain situations it may be a sanity saving one. I would say that this was probably so in the case of 'John', discussed at the beginning of the chapter. He was almost certainly right to rebel against the authoritarianism of his school, the irrelevance of much of the subject matter taught and the attitudes of many of the teachers. He was almost certainly right to react against the closeness of his home. Many people don't manage to actively react against psychologically intolerable situations and this inability is overcrowding our mental hospitals. If children are brought up in the Dickensian slums of the Northern cotton towns is it unhealthy that they should want to avoid going into the mill?