Get Up, Stand Up, Stand Up For Your Rights

This is a short autobiographical piece centred on a specific day, the thirtieth of April nineteen seventy-eight. I was seventeen years old attending the first Rock Against Racism march and concert in Victoria Park, London. Come April I’d had a year of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the best part of a year of punk and reggae music and a lifetime of hating bullies. I saw life through very idealistic glasses and was obsessed with music. The various forces that have shaped my life were already running through and beyond. Looking back down the years it is the ghosts of other lives that might have been. Then it was the vibrancy of future possibilities, lives to live, skins to be climbed into, all waiting. I regarded myself as an individual indifferent to colour, religion, nationality and someone who revelled in the differences of humanity so where else could I be? It all came together with the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism and the stand against the rise of the National Front.
I am reliant almost exclusively on my memory supplemented with some research of the time. I have no diary, no letters, no photographs of the period. I am in touch with none of the friends I had at the time or those from the years around it. Even though I still live in the same town, where I lived at that time, the schools I went to, the shops I used to use, the factory I worked in, the surrounding countryside, are virtually all gone. My past is a series of holes connected only by my memories. This is disorienting, there is a lot of nothingness behind me, where do I exist? This nothingness is tangible pushing up behind me relentlessly, waiting to roll over me, erase me from my own consciousness. My reality has been corroded by it’s own form of Alzheimer’s.
So there I was with three friends bussed into London with thousands of others. Donkey jacket, combat trousers, Doc Marten boots, loads of badges, thick black glasses, thick black hair. Apart from the glasses and the hair my friends were similar. Mark shorter than my five-nine, with enough manic energy to power a small town, was the real activist among us. Paul was his, probably more explosive, younger brother, although most of their energies went into fighting each other. Then there was Les, with a blonde flat-top, there for the bands mostly and looking cute.
There are three incidents during the day that have resonated with me down the years. There are also fleeting feelings that come back as I dig into my memories and read accounts of the day, mostly memories, I have to say, of boredom and suspicion. It was the first time I realised how uncomfortable I was in crowds, people stop thinking, become unquestioningly compliant, that happy herd mentality still scares the life out of me.
The first incident found us on the march in Brick Lane. We were much consumed chanting ‘the National Front is a Nazi Front smash the National Front’ and ‘I’m not a robot I’m only doing me job’ that we failed to realise we were detached from the march both in front and behind. In a march of eighty thousand strong there we were a hundred yards one way, a hundred yards the other, alone. The isolation was not a problem the location was. The atmosphere was little short of rabid, either side were, it seemed to me, ranks of alarmingly big skinheads with NF accoutrements. The politics of confrontation began to look more hazardous than my comic book imagination had prepared me for. I was going to be beaten to a pulp. I was surprised it wasn’t happening already. As we quickened our step a little and went on our very quiet way we passed two side streets one on either side both full to bursting with police,some on horses, with riot shields, helmets, and truncheons. The stony look on their faces led me to think that these ‘robots’ would probably not have stepped in too smartly should we have been attacked. My sense is that the NF began to feel this too. We ran like hell, squealing like five year olds, and caught up with the main demonstration. The irony is until I wrote this,I’ve been beating myself up over the years for lacking the courage to stand my ground and fight the bastards even though running away was the sensible but undignified option.
Mark carried a considerable quantity of Newcastle Brown Ale in cans in a flourescent newspaper delivery bag. We were still doing paper rounds. We were drinking, standing in the crowd at the concert watching the second act Patrik Fitzgerald. Labelled a punk poet, his claim to fame was a song/poem called ‘I’ve Got A Safety Pin In My Heart For You’ I thought he was utter crap. During the aforementioned song/poem Mark and I who had stopped paying attention to Patrik were suddenly aware of a large thoroughly disgruntled skinhead next to us. He had the obligatory shaven head, Harrington jacket, tight jeans, 16 eye Doc Martens and was like a thousand others that day. I wouldn’t have recognised him five minutes after the incident. With words to the effect of ‘I’ve had enough of this’ he reached into Mark’s bag pulled out a can, threw it and felled Patrik Fitzgerald with a blow between the eyes. Rather like someone who rushes to the aid of a victim and is caught picking up the murder weapon covered in blood, Mark and his fluorescent bag were bang-to-rights. We ran, and in that crowd, we quickly separated. I caught up with him sometime later, the bag had gone he was hoping to get back to it and reclaim the beer, he never did. Briefly The Clash had scolded everyone and threatened not to play, but of course they did. We were fearful for the rest of the day waiting for the cry of ‘That’s them!’ Memory does play tricks, there was a lot of stuff being thrown but it did seem like Mark's can (not mine officer!) that hit him.
On the Routemaster bus on the way home we sat at the back. By now we were politically stuffed couldn’t take any more speeches, slogans or right on jargon. We had reverted to kids and were mucking about. It is at this point and I can’t recall what prompted it but I called Les ‘you woman!’ From somewhere nearby came back ‘so woman is a term of abuse now!’ Apart from the sound of the bus, there was no other sound, no conversation. Condemned from my own mouth my career in political activism had died before it started. For the next few indescribably excruciating minutes I received a lecture from, I later found out, the SWP matriarch. She was playing to the captive audience on the bus and subserviently they tutted and nodded at the appropriate moments. Whatever her reasons woman ‘as a term of abuse’ has never again passed my lips, the hairs on my arms stand on end when I think about the lecture and I console myself with the thought that she was an uptight purse-lipped old dragon.
This period of my life is a problem. I believe it was a highly formative period for me and yet so much of it is intangible. I am torn between the need to find out more and the warning voice saying live for the now live for the future. What if that creeping nothingness erasing my past gets me first?