Chapter 15 - The Alien Goes To Glastonbury

Over forty years since it was broadcast I can still remember the television documentary that persuaded me that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the way it regulated the non-use of nuclear weapons was not as secure as the public were told that it was. That programme was a BBC science programme called 'Horizon'. 

What I don't remember at all was how long the time was between the broadcast of the programme  and when the first advert about a CND meeting appeared in the local paper. Nor do I remember who else attended that first meeting. Though I can remember The Quaker Meeting House in which that first, and every early meeting of CND, was held. It was one of the few working historic buildings in the town, but given that it's work was the contemplation of God it was quiet work. The room reflected the two centuries of prayer and seeking God that it had been used for. A few Quakers attended that first meeting, along with some members of the local Labour Party, and the self elect of the local counter-culture who were mostly on the dole and quietly leading double lives. I was with the counterculture up to a point, like them I was happily on the dole. But where they used to be on the dole to create a respectable front for a double life of dealing and using soft drugs, I wanted to be on the dole to catch up with my lost education. They all lived apart from their parents, I was stuck with mine. Publicly they were anti-hunting and held quite the range of broad left wing and feminist opinions that the more the detail behind the beliefs were examined, the harder they were to compare with the small c social conservatism of the town. I was sure that I was the only closeted gay man among them. But given that closeted gay men present themselves, as pretend heterosexuals, if there were any other pretend heterosexuals at the first meeting then they pretended remarkably well. 

One of the aspects of the local social conservatism that frustrated me was how natural it made itself seem. When people knew all the subjects that they did not want to discuss then they mentally made a list of the subjects they never discussed and then denied the existence of the subjects by denying that they had made a list. Admitting to the list might lead to the subjects on the list having to be mentioned. With small c social conservatism 'argument' meant disagreement rather than the logical presentation of a set of linked ideas. Because 'argument' meant disagreement rather than presentation then social conservatism became anti-ideas, for fear of feeling verbally coerced into agreeing with something the social conservative had no interest in. I remember before I joined CND how slow my realisation was of how much I disagreed with the socially conservative view of how much all language was political and the retreat from any fixed idea or proposal was more agreeably apolitical. The politics around nuclear bombs were both abstract enough and horrifying enough that they were the shock that woke me up from socially conservative sleep walking that I saw my parents generation had fallen into, from which they showed no signs of waking up.

It was both possible and positive to have different motives for wanting to campaign against nuclear weapons. The use of nuclear weapons by any country was as absurd as it was obscene. The stockpiling and non-use of them took up capital and diverted the economy of any nation that did that. The ownership of nuclear weapons made the cold war colder and lengthened the sense of deadlock between the pure propaganda put out by the two so-called superpowers. One of the long term effects of 'cold war' propaganda was to divide different peoples from each other when the people on both sides of the propaganda divide had a lot more in common than they knew.

In the meanwhile, with the levels of relative poverty outside of London in England, the purchase of nuclear weapons left the people paying for the weapons that would never be used that they could ill afford to pay for through their taxes. The Quakers even had a campaign of not paying the proportion of their taxes that they estimated went to pay for Nuclear Weapons. It was one of their more striking campaigns of civil disobedience. They even had posters made and put up outside their premises advocating the non-payment of the proportion of tax that was estimated to be paid for nuclear missiles. 

For the early meetings no officers were elected, and whilst some notes were kept of each meeting, different people kept notes and the latest note keeper kept all the previous notes. We were indecisive at best. Some meetings felt like the times Grace Slick described in her aphorism re the disorienting effect of being one of Jefferson Airplane, 'If you can remember it then you weren't there.'. It was surely because when note taking fell to me and I took taking notes more seriously than previous note takers had that I was seen as a shoe-in for being the first secretary of the local CND.  I was among the youngest to join. I was the only one who was at college, and the only one who did not have any romantic or domestic attachments. I did not have children, a spouse, or a house to look after, which nearly everyone else in the meeting room did have. The women who were interested in CND were clearly the most able organisers in the room, but they had enough of organising others in the home that they returned to after the meeting. I had so few commitments because I was living with my parents, but anyone who saw my few commitments and thought 'he has it easy' did not know what my parents were like to live with and knew nothing of their effect on my personal history. 

In fact, what made me a shoe-in for the role of CND secretary was how I was misread as a person. I had become used to seeking to be useful to create friendships outside the parental house, the same way Mother shopped for some pensioners she knew. It was easy for other people to unobservantly mistake my keenness to help as competence when what I was trying to do was gain experience. CND was the first organisation I had joined where there was no catch 22 barrier of 'must have experience' to activity and membership.

I was formally accepted as secretary because on my second sequential meeting as note taker I tried to chair the meeting at the same time, because I thought that combining both roles made me take better notes. This led the meeting towards thinking more clearly about what having officers and fixed structures meant. After that I was accepted as CND's first secretary and a chairperson was adopted too. Nobody volunteered to be treasurer but that role did not need to be filled yet, since the secretary could record the small sums that the meetings had raised for future meetings.

I as a secretary I was a beginner, I was better than us having no secretary. More importantly I was the right secretary for the right time. If anyone with a lot more experience and drive had been secretary then with the chairperson they would have tried to lead the organisation from the loose agreement stage it was at towards some programme of activities, or a much tighter agenda, that it was not ready for. So the chairing of meetings had to be light also. And with no treasurer we could not have a bank account or cheque book etc, the choice of treasurer would be the sign of us tightening up, advancing. The first thing the chairperson had to do each meeting was to advise couples who talked to each other as if they were only talking to each other to both people in the couple to address the meeting first, and each other second. 

The major difference in membership that the chairperson and secretary had to apply themselves to was the natural split between those who were in work and those who were unemployed, not least in keeping meetings short and coherent so that the workers could go home early enough to prepare for work the next day. Those in work were naturally disciplined by their work and expected more to happen sooner. The lack of money and having time of their own was what shaped the lives of the unemployed CND members who with the 'manana' mentality and delays in responses they got from government inaction lived by delay in their own lives. With my being unemployed but being in education I was half way between the two groups,

Up to a point I coveted the laissez faire approach to life of the one-time-hippies who lived rent paid by the state in their own council houses, on state benefits. It was from them that I inferred a philosophy to life that has held me in good stead ever since. Life is a matter of time vs money. If you have little money then time will be your currency. You will still have aims, but your aims will be met through the use of your time, and the self discipline you have with the small amount of money you have got. Well paid work was always for the few. It was never for everybody, however universally attractive it is. With less money and doing the double, dealing soft drugs on the side, they became the quieter advert for the different way of working out life, where low pay and inequality ruled in employment.

Unlike some who were quite straight laced and family oriented who were part of CND, when I was invited out for a drink after meetings by the one-time-hippies I accepted. I was fine with what I did not know about, and had yet to discover. When I discovered the little I did about how much soft drugs were part of the shadow economy that by it's nature resisted being estimated or accounted for I thought 'Okay'. On thinking it through it seemed no different to my dad taking to underage drinking at the age of fourteen, in 1947. If the secrecy seemed similar then it was proof that secrecy, taboo, had always gone on around mood changing substances. That one substance was legal over the age of eighteen, and other substances had never been legalised was hardly worth worrying about. How the substance changed the individual's moods was what mattered most, what to get moral about if morality mattered at all.

Every cause needs it's annual celebration as part of its calendar, an AGM, a conference, or something like Easter for Christians, or The Hajj for Muslims, as each sits in the world calendar. CND also worked with that rule. Glastonbury had not run from 1972 to 1978. It returned in 79 and supported the diffuse counter culture causes known at that time but it's finances were unstable. There was no Glastonbury in 1980. In 1981 Michael Eavis, the farmer who owned the land on which the event was held, revived Glastonbury. He enlisted the promotional support of CND and made it an annual happening. Eavis ran it as a CND festival and dedicated the profits from the event to CND, in doing so he raised the profile of CND and revived the festival for years to come. He also raised the public profile of the counterculture that CND typified amongst the young who had outgrown punk and sought a more enduring rebellion against the passivity of socially conservative government values. 

In this first year of its revival a group of five of us, Lynne, Tiff, John, Rob and me, were all up for going to Glastonbury. Tickets were a snip at £8 when dole money £20 a week. Getting there and back on a budget dictated by our benefits was going to be a much harder slog. Before we planned this trip the furthest I had ever been anywhere was either the annual family day trip to Skegness which was paid for by dad's Liberal Club, or the odd excursions put on by the boarding school/care home/boarding school. Such as a week camping in the lake district, where I enjoyed the scenery but did not gel with who I travelled with. None of the five of us had a car, though one of us could drive. We had to get to the event by public transport and walking alone, whilst carrying our food, camping equipment and cooking equipment with us.

Weetabix to the rescue! In the spring of 1981 Weetabix ran an offer of two train tickets on British Rail for the price of one if we sent them a certain number of tokens off the sides of the packet. It could be a set return journey of any length across the UK. We worked out the price of Weetabix that we had to buy to get enough tokens vs the money we would save on return train tickets from the East Midlands to Shepton Mallet via Bristol, averaged it out by the five of us if Weetabix paid for two tickets, was a bargain. It was partly because of the allure of going to Glastonbury that at the first CND AGM of April 1981 I stayed on as secretary. Lynne became the new chairperson and she dedicated herself to organising our trip to Glastonbury.

The biggest problem with getting to Glastonbury was with the train schedule that we had to follow. We left late in the morning for the first of several connecting trains. After a five hours journey on the longest connection we got into Bristol train station at 2 am and had to stay there overnight to catch the first daylight train that went to Shepton Mallet in the morning. At Shepton Mallet we got our last train, to Castle Cary, which brought us to about three miles from the event. I would swear that the carriages for the last part of the journey were first put into service in the 1940's, they had the wooden beading below the windows. it was as if the travel arrangements were unwinding us with their slowness and impression of being from another era. Life felt sweet in that carriage, so far from all the routines and people that hemmed in our lives 'back home'. Life was slightly less sweet when, tired from lack of sleep, we carried our tents, spare clothes, food and cooking equipment the three miles from the railway station to the campsite. We had packed right because Lynne had organised us well, but what none of us could calculate before trying it out was how best to carry the weight of what we had brought any distance on foot.

When we arrived what we saw most was the new pyramid stage, the outer metal sheeting for which we did not know at time was ex Ministry of Defence stock, which was an interesting take on the idea of 'swords into ploughshares' when added to how the pyramid stage doubled as a food store for the cows when the stage was unoccupied by musicians, their equipment and the lighting rigs. It all looked very plain in the light of day. The second thing to observe on the site was where the camping was in relation to the stage, we arrived and set up well before a lot of other people did. Because of this there was nothing we could do as the gap between our tents and other people's tents narrowed. One of the few items we forgot to bring was a flag or identifying banner that we could put aloft one of our tents that would make it easier to find among the sea of tents that was accumulating around us. From years of having no light to see by on the final flight of stairs up to my bedroom/the store room in the parental house I had good night vision and I soon got used to being able to find our tents in the dark.

My memory for the acts and musical sets that were played over those three days has faded with the decades, and merged rather with my stronger memory of that acts that played the following year. All the poverty of memory I have now is not helped by how 1981 was one of the years that I did not keep a diary. Add to that how little live music I had seen up to that time, maybe two rather undistinguished gigs and I am left with little to say. But one observation of the three days is clear. When everything went smoothly it naturally seemed less memorable than when there was conflict. Thus the end of the Friday night electric set with political folkie Roy Harper was memorable for the way he over-ran his time slot and we heard, rather than saw, Ginger Baker, who was on next. Baker came on stage, tried to interrupt Harper whilst he was playing and tried to physically eject Harper's equipment from the stage where they both were. Harper sounded like his staying there was all too enjoyable for him. It was the first time I saw Harper live. He made the few records that I had heard by him seem polite and tame by comparison. It was the first of about half a dozen times of seeing him that decade. 

As I watched Roy I was surely more taken with feeling how far I was from where I had grown up than absorbed by where I was. The second to last and last performers on the main stage on the Saturday were equally different, New Order played before Hawkwind, and distinguished themselves by the bassist clearly being drunk whilst performing. In a way it was impressive that they finished their set as chilled as they did. When Hawkwind headlined they were helped by their laser show which projected the immersive effect of their music further out into the night and onto the audience more than any ordinary light show would have done.

The afternoon musical acts that came along covered every genre of music, the blues with Taj Mahal and Stan Webb's Chicken Shack, who sounded tired. The reggae groups, Aswad and Matumbi, who were scheduled for the early evening slots and were generally warmly received and the sax led R&B of Supercharge whose bearded/bald singer Albie Donnelly I was quite taken with the appearance of. Judie Tzuke was a weak headliner who I could not engage with. Also there were a lot of now rather middle aged men with acoustic guitars who had scaled only the lower heights of success in the music business throughout the early 1970's. Gordon Giltrap was the best of them. He was good because he was the most musical accomplished of them all. Manchester speed poet John Cooper Clarke proved a sharp antidote to those middle aged men with guitars with his sharp dress sense, Bob Dylan style bouffant, and speed delivery of punk poetry. That said he probably provoked the greatest response when he swore in rhyming couplets in a mid-afternoon slot, as if that was a clever thing to do. Gong played on Sunday afternoon, in the bright sun. Their playing was good but did not project very far from the stage, and the sleepy sunny atmosphere into which they played they rather put a lot of people to sleep.

One point I liked was how when several events were on simultaneously in different places we had to plan our day. Film tent? Open air theatre? Political speaker tent? Or the main stage? Whichever one we attended we missed the rest and would only hear about what we missed later if one of our party attended it. It was surely unintentional when I missed Robert Hunter. He was one of the middle aged men with guitars. I should have seen him because he was lyricist for The Grateful Dead and the nearest that the band would ever get to appearing at Glastonbury, but as their lyricist he had a very low profile. 

I was on my way to becoming a deadhead, follower of The Grateful Dead, but I was not all the way there yet. But that first experience of being in the audience for seeing different bands playing live sequentially over those three days got me nearer becoming a deadhead. At Graham's house I had been impressed by their live broadcast on the BBC that spring. The Grateful Dead had broadcast live from Germany to the whole of Europe via the television and radio networks of different European countries. The BBC was one of many to carry the broadcast. Their live sound on that tour was amazing on Graham's hi-fi that spring night. It would follow me down the decades, one way and another.

Glastonbury 1981 was my first attendance of any festival and it was a time out of time for all of us. The time away that resembled normal life the most was cooking and eating together. As sole female Lynne organised the four men so that in an understated, casual, way we acted as a team. One point that puzzled me was Lynne's feminism. When she asserted herself against us four soft males she seemed more like the masculinity she asserted herself against, than she seemed feminine. But then again the passive example of Mother when presented with dad was a much deeper and more corrosive mystery than I could understand by comparison. I half understood the mix of friendship and assertiveness that Lynne aimed for, but I did not understand why the male assertiveness that she borrowed from had to be the way it was in the first place. But I was a male among men, where I of the four us present most sought a different way of being male than what I saw in the masculinity I was supposed to admire. One reason that I was secretary and attempted chairperson was that I sought to be inclusive. Lynne would have been much better at making CND both inclusive and efficient than me, but as a mother, partner, and a daughter she was already doing that with her own family.

I liked the commercial village on the site because it was quite small and easy to get around. Some stalls sold beads and wrist bands, other stalls sold pottery, other stalls sweet and savoury vegetarian food, other stalls promoted radical causes with leaflets and a clip board where people could leave contact details. The stalls at which I lingered longest were the few stalls that sold records and cassettes. I enjoyed a lot of the live music, but between sets I thought to myself 'what can I take back to the parental house and enjoy after the live music is gone?' I bought some bootleg cassettes of the earliest BBC Pink Floyd and Cream sessions, among other music. Years later the original tapes on which these recordings were made were cleaned up and the same material as I bought on cassette became released officially by the bands concerned. That weekend I was ahead of the trend, in my own way.

If the music at Glastonbury was meant to be rock and roll, then random sex and drugs might surely have followed for some. Except that those three days were actually chaste and fairly sober for me. There might have been the odd joint shared where I was included but it was nothing serious. Also, like the small town I came from, there was no mention of sexuality at the event, much less any mention of homosexuality. As far as the audience knew all the performers projected a solid heterosexuality too, that was a given. It was just as well that I took so few drugs when I was offered them. The conflicted sexuality I carried around as part of me might well have wanted to find expression when actions would have seemed 'inappropriate' and words would have created a conflict later, when I returned to the parental house. 

To compare those three days with what I knew before; what we were returning to, we had had the choice of probably twenty five hours of live music, much of it, though not all, very loud by home standards and some of which had been a blast. Back home, whatever musical content, it was all much more pre-digested and played at volumes that would not annoy the neighbours. The numbers of those attending the festival were 20,000, the same number as the small town, where for our beliefs CND were a minority of thirty among all those people. At the festival our reason for being there was to be part of some great majority where everyone was there by choice for the three days, rather than being held in place by some backward looking family. The three days of the sense of shared intent with everyone around us were a great fillip for our idealism. 

For us staying up late and getting up early every day to soak up as much of the event as we could, it was inevitable that we were subdued with each other and very tired when we left the campsite early on the Monday morning for Castle Cary Station. Some of us slept on the long train journey up north, out of Bristol. There was still plenty of the glow we had gained from the event when we arrived back 'home'. My tiredness was a very helpful filter when Mother asked me what the event was like. What I missed out for my being tired she would probably have been falsely alarmed about if I had told her.

The energy levels were higher when we all met at the Quaker Meeting House for the next CND meeting, after resting. It felt to me that events away were part of what CND was for. The point was less  'Any excuse to get away' and more a general urge to import the energy and drive we found in other places to give more life to our activities around the town. The politics of banning nuclear weapons remained the reason for our meeting, the higher energy levels from other places was part of how we served that reason. I remained secretary. For now at least it was the volunteer job that would not let go of me.

We went about our summer activities, including commemorating the nuclear bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August the 6th and 9th 1945 with more enthusiasm than finesse. But refinement was something bigger organisations could afford more because of their size and how much they fashioned themselves as part of the local social order.

We were the highly sociably disordered, and would remain ragged but right.

Please find Chapter 16 here.