The longest story in my collection Violent Homosexual Men, available via PayPal for £3 to iancusack@blueyonder.co.uk
Cairnsy asked me and Denver to join The Organisation, upstairs on the 58 heading to Leam Lane Baths, one piss-wet Sunday afternoon in late summer 1981. The look on Denver’s face. Oh man, I thought he was going to burst out crying. Never seen him so happy. After two decades of utter anonymity, this offer meant he had finally become someone. In his eyes at any rate.
From that moment on, Denver changed from being the sort of non-entity who would have failed a personality test, to fanatically embracing the role of the most loyal and obedient of all converts. He rapidly learned and efficiently parroted the special language of The Organisation, ferociously guarding the structural secrets revealed to him. In his new mode of speech, ordinary members were Comrades. Professional organisers were Full Timers who generally worked at The Centre in London. Potential recruits were Contacts. Other lefties whose programme varied one scintilla from The Organisation’s were Sectarians. All monies raised went to The Fighting Fund, apparently. Those with jobs were Workers. Those under 30 were The Youth. Anybody who dared suggest that racism and sexism were bad things and that Comrades ought not to make jokes about such subjects was Undialectical. Worst of all, if you asked about gay rights, you were Bourgeois, as apparently sexuality was related to your class orientation. Workers were straight. Undialectical Sectarians were queer.
The Organisation’s catechism was summed up in a document, helpfully printed on one side of A4; called What We Believe In. Denver already knew the contents off by heart. He even believed it. “Somebody’s got to be right,” he reckoned. Emotionally, he’d already signed up for The Organisation and all that involved, no questions asked.
I must admit I was flattered by Cairnsy’s offer, as I’d already developed an instinctive left-wing philosophical standpoint, based on implacable teenage opposition to Thatcher, Tories and the Royal Family. But I wasn’t a joiner when it came to anything regimented. Was never in the Boys’ Brigade, unlike Denver; protestant paramilitaries I called them. Heard the phrase on Panorama once. Conformity and uniformity scared the shit out of me. Always knew I was different. That’s why I loved cricket. A common goal, but a variety of methods and talents working symbiotically, not hierarchically, to achieve it. I mumbled something indistinct to Cairnsy about wanting to concentrate on my A Levels, meaning I’d be too busy to take up ideological arms in the Class War. Saw the contempt in Denver’s eyes and felt what it was like to be doubly branded a dilettante and a puff. Unsuitable material for The Organisation. No such thing as a camp Comrade.
Years later, long after he became Joseph Andrew Cairns MP for South Tyne, Cairnsy confided over a post-match pint in The Shamrock Club that he’d been felt obliged to extend the invite for me to dine at the Captain’s Table during the imminent transformation of society, not on account of my inherent political qualities or revolutionary spirit, but simply because I was there. “It would have been rude not so,” he explained. “Mind I got a bollocking for going off message when the top brass found out.” Then he got the beers in.
Ironic how things happen. I never was the biggest fan of swimming. While the changing rooms and showers were great wank bank material for a three-quarter’s closeted teenage mincer, the pool itself was less enjoyable. The chlorine stung my psoriasis. Made my eyes run and vision blur. Only tagged along because I was at a loose end after the cricket was rained off. I’d been enjoying a decent season turning my left arm over with a few orthodox slow ones, coming in down the order and trying to hang around, making a nuisance of myself with bat and ball, for High Fell 3rd XI. Realistically, I was a bit more Matthew Engel than Friedrich Engels, though I really wanted to be Phil Edmonds. Have to admit, Botham’s Ashes was getting a higher media profile than my career best 3-13 and 26 not out against Kibblesworth when we won the D & P Garages Trophy. Still have that little Man of the Match trophy on the bookcase in the study after all these years. A happy memory.
Seeing the weather, Denver had called round with his bathers and a towel on the off chance, telling me I’d quarter of an hour to decide if I was going or not. I’d have been happy to lie on the settee watching Weekend World (loved the theme tune; Nantucket Sleighride by Mountain), impersonating Brian Walden’s speech defect, but Denver started shouting and bawling at the telly, as usual. Cut through the calm of Sunday late morning. I needed to get us out the house, before he started an argument about politics or religion with my old man, who was always ready for a verbal scrap; or even Nanna when she pitched up for Sunday dinner. Consequently, the idea of doing a few lengths, blinking out halogenic tears and grabbing a hot Ribena in the snack bar afterwards had a certain allure. We were through the front door and at the bus stop in 5 minutes max.
When Cairnsy offered us a walk-on part in the class struggle, as the almost deserted bus came down Whitehills and hung a right at The Ship, we all knew Denver was the one The Organisation really wanted. He possessed the essential qualities needed to make the step up from being merely a Contact, to playing the part of a fully-fledged revolutionary. Obsequiously deferential to figures of authority, indefatigable to the point of fanaticism, prepared to transform hobbies and pastimes into obsessions, incapable of independent thought, political or otherwise, utterly devoid of any sense of humour and virtually unemployable. In the opinion of Ray Whelan, The Organisation’s top dog in the region, Denver had successfully served his apprenticeship, hanging on to the coat-tails of Cairnsy and Sue Byrne, who ran The Organisation’s student section at the Uni. Pretty ironic as Denver had just bombed his A Levels for the second year running, but at least he was starting to understand how the lines between personal and political could get blurred. I read a thing in The Guardian about cults around then; Americans mainly, of course. Sue fluttering her eyelids at him was part of a process called flirty fishing, apparently. Would have been funny if she tried that on me, but she probably never even knew my name at first. I wasn’t important, or malleable, enough to be groomed the way Denver was.
Looking back, I never fancied anyone in The Organisation, the way I daily lusted after and fantasised about David Gower, Imran Khan, Julian Cope or Robert Smith in the privacy of my room. The Comrades were always trying too hard to be tough, hard and manly. There wasn’t a gentle side on show. Abrasive and tough, never soft or kind. Compassion an alien concept. No love, only control.
Denver’s whole body immersion into The Organisation had seen him chalk up 100% attendance at every scheduled meeting and impromptu paper sale since Cairnsy first spoke to him at the start of the year. His rapid progress and exceptional plasticity came to the notice of National Co-ordinator Peter Goodison. Now The Central Committee had decreed it was time to upgrade him to Comrade. Somehow I’d ended up in the slipstream; a fellow traveller on the top deck, being schooled on the finer points of the revolutionary socialist scion that was The Organisation. Despite him being that bit older, I’d always seen it as my duty to keep an eye on pitiful, socially inept Denver. The way to do that was to be satisfied with the role of a semi-detached and unreliable Contact. For all his insecurities and failings, Denver was a pal in those days. Clumsy, maladroit and intense, he needed an angel at his shoulder. After that day, he shrugged me off and made his own way, head over heels in love with The Organisation’s structure and certainty.
My pusillanimous response to Cairnsy’s ultimatum provided the get out clause I needed to decline a post-swim invite for coffee and dialectics round at Ray Whelan’s gaffe with the other two. Instead, while Denver went through his initiation rites, I wandered back alone instead of getting the 58 as the rain had stopped. Saw steam rise from drying tarmac on Swards Road. Ran into some of the lads in the Square: Kev, full of it after his first driving lesson, and Davy home on leave from the Navy; Butlins he called it, grimacing.
I’ll never forget that sensation I felt when I saw Davy’d got home. Overwhelmed me. Stood around talking shite until the wind whipped up and it got cold about opening time. They were for The Crown, thinking about maybe hitting the town, but no doubt ended up playing pool all night. Skint, I headed in and caught this documentary about Picasso on The South Bank Show, then read a few chapters of Eyeless in Gaza by Huxley. Wasn’t enjoying it, but some new band on Cherry Red had called themselves after the book, so I gave it a go out of curiosity. It filled my mind and stopped me thinking about the missed opportunity to speak to Davy as well.
About a dozen of us hung about together back then. We’d met when we were at school. Denver was the oldest and I was second youngest in the gang, but as we lived on the same street, age wasn’t really an issue for us pair. Fact was; the whole squad of us had been mates for years. Growing up and knocking around since we were at Infants in most cases. The usual stuff. Minor acts of senseless vandalism, repeated attempts at underage drinking and underage sexual activity with variable levels of success. Obsessed with football. Obsessed with music. All devotees of John Peel. Took to calling ourselves The Felling Punks, sometime in late 78. Same weekend I bought Damaged Goods by Gang of Four and Denver got Hurry up Harry. Shortened our name to FPXa year or so later, partly because it was quicker to spraypaint that fucker all over the shop, but mainly, in my eyes, on account of the fact punk was becoming an embarrassment.
The Buzzcocks were still Denver’s favourites, probably because the lyrics echoed his problems with talking to the opposite sex, but I thought they’d gone mainstream. The Damned, third rate glam rockers, whatever Kev said. The Clash, coked up Rolling Stones wannabes. Davy adored them. Would go ape with anyone who slagged them off. Cracked Mossa’s front tooth for saying Aint Got a Clue was better than White Man in Hammersmith Palais. As for the rest, UK Subs and that lot. Do me a fucking favour.
I was listening to a diverse range of stuff. Eclectic was the word I’d found in a dictionary. The Cure (Robert Smith was a real honey with those gorgeous black lips) and Factory Records. A Certain Ratio especially, while still grieving for Ian Curtis. Slo-mo self-abuse to Winter’s Hill when the house was empty. Daydreaming the touch of Robert Smith’s lips on my dick. Also embracing Postcard releases from Orange Juice (Edwin Collins so bashfully sweet in his Fair Isle sweater) and Josef K. Still educated by Peel, naturally. Liverpool bands like The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes (McCulloch was cute, but Julian Cope was fucking gorgeous) were popular among our crowd, likewise Killing Joke and Bauhaus. Clock DVA. Cabaret Voltaire. Years had passed and things had changed. Tastes matured. Borstal Breakout and Alternative Ulster were the soundtrack to a kids’ cartoon we’d never watch again. Manufactured rebellion. Held in as much contempt by FPX as the New Romantic shite by Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. Songs for swinging Tories. We didn’t realise it at the time, but escapism and consumerism were swallowing half our generation whole. The ones who’d go dancing over the town on the bus. The ones who were doing alright for themselves in the evolving post-industrial 80s. It didn’t work on us though. Hatred. Fury. Rebellion. Our touchstones. No compromise. No sell out. We never took shit from no one. We weren’t fools.
What kept the lads together was attitude. We bonded over a shared hatred of authority. Not just Kill the Bill either. School had been bad enough. The teachers called us worse than shit, when we were pissing around in the classroom. A dozen years of getting told to shut up and sit down, otherwise we’d wind up with a dead-end job. As if. Half of us were on the fucking dole, a couple at college, with zero fucking income bar a few quid pocket money in my case, and the rest despising work, whether it was a scheme or on the tools. Impotent and frustrated, we’d sit in the Square, planning our next moves. Daydreaming aloud about moving to London, being in bands on Rough Trade or of travelling the world, becoming a writer.
Nothing changed. We stayed where we were. Depressed to fuck at the prospect of half a century of being pushed around doing something even more mindless than homework, for fuck all money. Some of us shrugged their shoulders and dealt with reality by conforming. Not me though. I always saw exams as the escape route. Many disagreed. Instinctively suspicious of posh student wankers.
Davy had been the one who shocked us all. Ignored everything Joe Strummer had taught him. Reckoned his only way out was to join up. Adamant. Opting to wear a uniform and carry a gun, in a tank or on a ship, should have meant he was out the gang for good. If Crass wanted anarchy and peace, that seemed good enough for us. Fight War, not Wars, as the graffiti on the side of the Welfare pointed out. The thing was; Davy and I were almost lovers. Confused, guilty, gauche, we’d probed and explored each other’s bodies, but not our minds. Lonely, desperate teenage boys, breaking the law by caressing and stroking each other under moonlight.
A silent series of fixed, unblinking gazes that had passed between us for as long as I’d known exactly what I was, were consummated on a cold Tuesday round the back of Shipcote TA Centre, between the hedge and the wall of the Housing Office next door. Serendipity. Kismet. Me, mooching around alone, looking for company. Penniless as ever, killing time between homework and the Peel Show. Davy, exiting from Cadets in full battle dress as I walked past. Monosyllabic greeting. Falling into step as a parody of square bashing. An unacknowledged halt when darkness clothed us in the deserted car park. A panicked charge behind screening foliage. Wordless consummation. The first pair of button flies I’d ever opened, and they weren’t even mine.
It became our weekly routine. I’d hide in the bushes, waiting to hear his scrunching boots step rapidly across tarmac. Secluded, we’d kiss passionately, anxiously tear at each other’s clothing. Stroke chests, flanks, inner thighs. Knead buttocks. Flesh grey under thin moonlight. Mutual jack offs or furtive blow jobs. I’ll never forget the pleading smile on my face afterwards, trying to show gratitude while unpicking gravel from the knees of my jeans. But Davy, he’d look away, say nothing. Smoke menthols. Wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. Clear his throat. Spit. Depart alone, as my inadequate hand reached out to brush his fleeing shoulders and neck. I yearned to take him inside me. I ached to feel his lean chest and ribs pressing me down on the bed. Loving me. Instead he hated me and hated himself as he wanted exactly the same thing. Davy believed the way to escape from me, and himself, was to pledge allegiance to Elizabeth Windsor.
We never spoke of our desire. Meeting with the rest of the lads in the Square, his guilty eyes darted from my imploring stares and conversation between us was strained. Even after I came out to the FPX at the Gang of Four and Pere Ubu gig in March 81, still demanding secrecy and loyalty from the whole squad, Davy kept his mouth and heart closed. His papers had arrived. He left without much fuss. Started basic training the week after Easter. I didn’t go to his leaving party. Stayed home and listened to Faith twice through, crying face down into my pillow. The Cure soundtracked a sad spring, until cricket took over my weekends, while Robert Smith and Davy populated my private moments.
Everywhere else in the country, while Davy marched and trained in uniform and I assiduously sent down trundlers at Tuesday night nets, brutal youths were fighting back in a way we could only dream of. Riots in St Paul’s and Toxteth. Young’uns on a nicking spree, hitting wrong’uns in Brixton. It always made me laugh to see the bad guys losing fights. The collective FPX position was those lobbing petrol bombs and looting shops were the business. Cheering the news each night. The Provos as well. Hunger strikers dying for their beliefs. Bobby Sands MP. I wore a badge celebrating his election, sharing space on a lapel with a proud pink triangle. Some Septic took a pot shot at Ronnie Reagan. Over here, a kid with a pistol had a pop at the Queen on Horseguards’ Parade. Brilliant. In your own home, parents, siblings, laid off or paid off. Everyone angry. Waiting in expectation for news of a spontaneous uprising or the assassination of Thatcher. The English Civil War.
In the FPX, most of the lads, claimed they were anarchists, without really knowing what that meant, though I reckoned I was a Communist Pacifist. An archetypal big soft puff. To us, the term Anarchy summed up exactly what we thought we were doing, standing up to anyone who tried to tell us what to do or what to think, be they boss, parent or teacher. We believed in the power of music, the truth to be found in pints of snakebite in The Crown, that Imre Varadi would score the goals to get The Mags promoted and that Mike Brearley was the captain to win back The Ashes. Above all, we knew best. No cunt could tell us what to do.
But it wasn’t the coppers or the church who tried to take over our lives. It was a gang of self-titled professional revolutionaries. Leninists, who sold this weekly magazine called Vanguard. They referred to it as The Paper. Claimed they were using the Labour Party as a Trojan horse to bring about the revolution. Chancers. Insidiously, this shower attempted to brainwash, control and exploit us. Tried to swamp the place. Now we’d come across lefties before at May Day marches, Troops Out rallies and meetings demanding free abortion on demand. Most of them were harmless. Old hippies or soft students in velvet jackets and Gong t-shirts. History teachers on their day off. Some of the lads used to take the piss or try and argue for anarchy, but I never gave the lunatic fringe any grief. Used to buy The Morning Star and stuff like that off them, badges and posters. The old man stopped calling me Fred Fart the Punk Rocker about then and started up with Stalin as my nickname instead, which I thought was a bit of a compliment actually. These days I’d have asked him to call me C. L. R. James I suppose.
Vanguard were different from any political group we’d come across before. Identikit. Clones. Robotic. They called themselves The Organisation. Carrying armfuls of The Paper, they descended on Felling Square one Saturday morning at the start of the year. Freezing day. No snow on the ground, but it was in the air. A load of us hanging about as usual. Killing time. Some of that lot were students, but they didn’t sound or look like they were. Blokes dressed as if they had jobs in factories or down the pit. The trademark conformist veneration of workerism by weak and inadequate men. Short hair. DMs. Harringtons. A knot of lasses as well. Not tagging along with their lads either. Independent. Confident. Vaguely alternative in a charity shop way. Everything overseen by a couple of fat middle aged blokes in thick specs and bad facial hair, stepping back into the shadows. Observing us. Strangers, nearly all with Cockney or Scouse accents, engaging us in conversation. Asking questions about Thatcher and current affairs. Jabbing their fingers to make points when they talked. Telling us Shirley Williams and David Owen leaving the Labour Party would mean nothing in the long run. All repeating exactly the same thing to different audiences using the set phrases they’d had drilled into them. Hare Krishnas who’d read What is to be Done? Inviting us to meetings. Giving us leaflets. Selling papers. Asking for donations. Did we want to be in their gang?
One of them with a broad Geordie accent, in a proper Crombie and oxblood DMs. We recognised him. Leading the singing from atop a barrier in the Gallowgate every home game, always with his back to the pitch. Cairnsy. Charismatic in the way only proper hard men are, but wise with it. He knew the fucking score. And everyone knew Cairnsy. Apart from Denver, who never went to the football. So, we listened. And what Cairnsy said actually made sense. Hated Thatcher and bosses as much as we did. Wanted change. Told us the only way to get rid of the bastards was get organised and get involved. Plausible stuff. Almost convincing.
About half of us went along to a meeting in The Ship the following Thursday, expecting a timetable for the imminent insurrection they had planned. It wasn’t like that. In fact, it was dull as fuck. We all filled in application forms to join the Labour Party, but nobody handed out any weapons. Cairnsy was value for money as the MC of course, introducing the speakers, making clever cracks that included serious points. Far more entertaining than the keynote comrades. Tachey long hair with tinted geps, droning in pit yakka monotone, Ray Whelan. Podgy, red faced, speccy; sweating like fuck and going on about British perspectives, The Organisation’s chief theoretician and overall boss, Peter Goodison. Lass with a black bob. Hiding a middle-class Home Counties accent underneath a nasal faux Cockney twang, Sue Byrne. She welcomed all the contacts to the meeting, stressed the need for a clear structure among revolutionaries, firmly repeated requests for donations for The Fighting Fund and invited us back the next week. Denver was smitten by them all and the whole ambience. The rest of us were a tad more agnostic.
“I’m not missing Top of the Pops for this shite,” cracked Davy and we all sniggered, as if he’d read our minds. We almost got thrown out, but he was right. Especially as The Passions and Teardrop Explodes had been on that night. No videos to record the show back then either. Every time I see the promo film for Reward, I know instinctively its debut on British television coincided with the definitive moment Denver when started to go mad.
The problem The Organisation had with their contacts in the FPX was, you just couldn’t tell us what to do, what to think or how to spend our precious time and money. We wouldn’t listen to anyone who thought they had any right to lecture us on what was best. FPX had no leaders. Sure, we hated society and would have burned it fucking down to a cinder, given half a chance. But always there was the fact we were independent; we’d move in any way we wanted to. The Organisation, which loved a clear and authoritative hierarchy, never understood that. Even Cairnsy believed we could be converted and controlled back then. The fact was; we couldn’t. One size didn’t fit all. Giving up a night a week to listen to losers going on about the need for class struggle and paying for the privilege was a complete non-starter. It was as bad as Davy, off playing with a sailor’s hornpipe; signing up for mind control in our spare time was not in the FPX’s collective DNA, except for Denver. Maybe he didn’t have a choice.
A couple of months shy of his twentieth birthday, Denver was a scrapheap statistic of Thatcher’s Britain. Never mind the A Level disaster, he’d just got laid off from the only job he’d ever known, as the world’s oldest paper lad at Ralphie Dixon’s newsagents (“I had a wife and a bairn on the way when I was your age”). Too old for a YOP and too young for a Manpower Services scheme, this meant the Dole. Consequently, Denver was always on the lookout for a solution to his problems, probably because his background had been unstable to say the least. His old man, a notorious plonky who slunk from bar to bookies, poncing pints and tabs. His mam, a textbook example of the phrase “bad with her nerves,” perennially on the verge of hysterics, sacked from Godfrey’s Shoes for fiddling the till. Feckless. Slatternly. A pair of twin sisters, never at school and out all night with blokes in Cortinas ten years their senior. The house was a shithole. No chance of a proper meal. This is why Denver craved order. Not having role models indoors, he’d desperately sought them elsewhere.
For a while, my punk singles collection provided him with a sliver of solace and stability. Dropping in once he’d done his after-school papers on the pretence of checking out my new purchases by Wire or The Raincoats, he always managed to be round ours at tea time. Mam would plate him up a load, which he ate ravenously. The old man put a stop to the informal soup kitchen, when Denver began to give The Organisation’s viewpoint on every news item.
Meeting Cairnsy at the paper sale and then attending that one meeting back in January had been enough to convince Denver he had found his niche. He’d outgrown the Boys’ Brigade, where he’d honed his conformist streak to perfection so then he abandoned playing the cornet in the Heworth Colliery Silver Band; opting instead to sell The Paper every Saturday in Felling Square. I mean, it wasn’t as if he had work or football to distract him from the shining path to the Leninist Revolution.
The Organisation gave him a whole new family. Proper, deep emotional bonds with people he could rely on. People to respect. People who would nurture and protect him from reality. Ideological insulation. Ray Whelan, a leader to worship, Cairnsy, a mentor to emulate and Sue Byrne, a woman who actually listened to him. For a while at least. Unblinkingly and unthinkingly, Denver had fallen immediately into step with the demands made of potential recruits. Without doubt, he hoped he’d be the rising star Bolshevik cadre among the advanced section of the working class that The Organisation claimed to be.
Fair play to Denver like. He did what Ray, Sue and Cairnsy expected of him. Never gave up trying to convert the FPX, relentlessly banged on about politics, invited us to meetings, tried to sell us The Paper or donate to the Fighting Fund. Quotations from Lenin, Trotsky and Peter Goodison that he’d been taught were endlessly parroted, seemingly without awareness of context, audience or subject. I felt a bit sorry for him as he was becoming even more of a joke among the lads.
Beer, books, bands, football and fucking were what we believed in. Me being gay was something half the gang tolerated and the rest sort of admired me for, but playing cricket; well, that just made me weird. The lads knew the score though; I never put faith in anything before FPX. Meantimes, Denver was going off the scale. When he explained in The Crown that The Organisation contended that supporting rioters or the Provos was Undialectical because “individual acts alienate the masses,” we fell about the place. Nobody talked like that. But he did.
In time, all we ever heard was Denver’s voice repeating other people’s words. He seemed to lose the ability to construct his own sentences or hear other people when they tried to have a conversation with him. It was like going for a pint with a talking Trotsky mannequin or Peter Goodison’s glove puppet. He was turning into an autistic robot. His habits were as predictable as the Rent Man’s. Meetings every Monday and Thursday, selling The Paper in the Square on Saturday and outside the Dole on Tuesdays. We got to see him Friday nights and sometimes Sundays, but it was near impossible to talk about anything other than politics with him. Regardless of the subject, he’d just press his internal on switch and give a speech, ignore any responses and deliver another little monologue. The words and phrases weren’t his, but the squeaky, lisping whine was all his own.
Sometimes he turned up with Cairnsy and that was better, because at least you’d get a laugh and a bit chat over a beer. Other times he brought Ray with him and that was terrible. No fucker wanted to say anything, for fear of Ray launching into one of his orations. He made Denver seem like Dave Allen.
One time, just before Christmas, Denver landed in the bar on a Friday night with Sue. All over each other. Her drinking pints. Making a point like. The first we knew of it. The FPX consensus was that if they hadn’t both been in The Organisation, Denver would only have got a hold of her at knife point. Now, here the two of them were, announcing they were moving in together straight after the New Year. She’d two terms left of her degree and Denver had discovered an escape route from his fucked-up family. Sue had introduced him to filter coffee and pasta. And that had to be better than the drunken, domestic fist fights and endless post pub chip pan blaze near misses he’d known all his life. If meeting Cairnsy had been the first step on the road to dependence for Denver and becoming a Comrade was the second, this was the most crucial one so far. The Organisation didn’t do arranged marriages (so they reckoned), but if they had done, here’s one that was made in Heaven. Or Felling.
Denver was the oldest of the gang and now he’d grown up. It was a sign, as life suddenly became real for everyone in 1982. Geoff was courting strong with Debs. Trev got engaged to Karen. Rob and Moira had a bairn. Kev passed his test, finished his time and took a job in Canada. Brave, brilliant bastard. Davy ended up in The Falklands (Las Malvinas siempre habrá de Argentina got painted on the side of the Welfare that April), which was another one of those terrible things that wrecked his head forever. I did my A Levels and accepted a place at Leeds Poly. History and Politics, just so I could argue the toss with Denver, or so most of the lads reckoned. I kept quiet about the fact I was more excited by the proximity of Headingley test ground to my new place.
In mid-September, we all chipped in to organise a special celebration for the official end of the FPX. It was over. Booked the upstairs room of The Crown. Hired a proper DJ to play our sort of music and put a spread on for a combined stag night, wetting the baby’s head, congratulations, farewell, graduation, coming out and 21st birthday bash. Drew 1-1 home to Chelsea in the afternoon, then straight on the lash. All bases covered, apart from Davy, still on a floating hell in the South Atlantic, and Denver. Him showing up knocked most of us for six. He’d been that busy with the class struggle we’d hardly seen him for months.
The Organisation were big news. Recruiting thousands all over the country. 81’s riots had been replaced by 82’s marches and rallies. Tony Benn losing the Deputy Leadership election wasn’t a setback. It was a chance for The Organisation to take steps forward. Huge ones. The youth and workers, Comrades and Contacts, waving placards and chanting slogans in numerous cities across the country each weekend. Seemed that Denver and Cairnsy and Sue and Ray and Peter Goodison and everyone else in The Organisation were right after all. If you wanted to change the world, you had to do it properly. Discipline, obedience and unthinking devotion to the truths that The Organisation told you were the essential prerequisites to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But nobody was bothered about the FPX any longer. We were yesterday’s Contacts. Our brief time under The Organisation’s microscope had passed. They’d recruited Denver from our ranks. If that 10% success rate could be repeated across the country, the revolution was a certainty, or so they hoped. There were other places than Felling to recruit the Youth and more opportunities to spend the money new Comrades brought with them. Liverpool was The Organisation’s El Dorado. Loads of full timers taking holidays in Greece back then. Reckoning they were networking with PASOK, instead of ODing on Retsina and Ouzo.
Me and Kev weren’t the only ones saying goodbye at that party. Sue had got her degree and was off to do a postgrad teaching course at East London Poly, handy for The Centre of course, and Denver was going with her. Peter Goodison had upgraded him to a full timer, editing the newly launched companion to The Paper; Young Socialist. Not a bad promotion, considering his only ever paid job had been delivering Daily Mirrors for Ralphie Dixon.
The leaving do was near perfect. No scrapping. No speeches. Drunken sobbing. Hugs. Bad dancing and singing along to classics from the previous half decade. A lock-in until the early hours. The concluding coda to the symphony of our youth. Up late the next day, with a filthy headache. Taxi to the bus station. National Express to West Yorkshire and time to become an adult. Well sort of. Three years of spliffs, pints and vegetarian chilli slop to a soundtrack of dub reggae, free jazz and obscure indie, with a few books, lectures and lashings of casual, unprotected sex in the LS4 and LS6 postal areas thrown in. Saw New Zealand win the Headingley test July 83, their first victory in England, from beneath a duvet in Meanwood, in the company of a well hung off duty copper I’d picked up in The New Penny night before.
I rarely came home. The FPX had disbanded. There was no reformation planned. Started turning out for Castro Casuals, the only openly gay cricket team in the West Yorkshire League, midweek and Sundays. My batting gradually improved, while my politics became more personal than organised. I let my Labour Party membership lapse. The Miners’ Strike just passed me by; an exhaled fug of Red Leb obscuring news footage of Orgreave and Cortonwood. The savage jaws of 1984. Violent heterosexual men. The summer after King Arthur was dethroned, I got my degree. Then decided on a career. Diploma in post-compulsory education. An excuse to stay in the Headingley, Woodhouse and Hyde Park pink triangle for another twelve months. Just like the 3 previous years, but with more early mornings and fewer late nights. And then, I needed an income.
Call it maturity or just a survival instinct, but I had to get away from the routine and habits of the previous 4 years if I was ever going to hold down a proper job. Didn’t want to move south, best option was head home to assess my options. I wasn’t sure what was up there for me any longer. A few of us did our very best to write. For a while at least. Brief, drunken postcards, covered with insults, in-jokes and greatest hits of the Welfare graffiti; my favourites being Keep off my wife, Johnson and Klitoris, the name of Stu Miller’s theoretical synthpop band that never had a practice, never mind a synth. We didn’t have phones or computers of course and after a while, we didn’t have the urge. People’s parents stayed in the same house for life. Drop in on them when you were back, and they’d give you the updates and an address or contact number. You couldn’t even trust heading to The Crown at 6.30 on a Friday any longer. Some of the FPX had married. Some of them had divorced. Most of them had kids, except me.
Everyone’s lives had moved on, for better or for worse, except for Davy. He was stuck. Drowning. The time after the Falklands had been tough for him. Demons. Darkness. Drink. Discharged on medical grounds after a pissed pub fight too many. Glassings were his signature assault. A full-time basket case, in the days before post-traumatic stress disorder had been invented. Civvy Street was no picnic either. Boozing away the sympathy pay-off he’d been given. His anti-social tendencies put him beyond the reach of work or normal society, preserved in a bubble of alcohol and pills. Couldn’t care less in the community. A pain in the arse to social workers, probation officers and job centre employees. But at least he had an explanation. I was a natural layabout who enjoyed being pissed and stoned, who was trying to rein my excesses in.
Called round to see him in the flat the council had sorted him in Wellington Court. Housed alongside other “substance abusers” and “problem families,” in the years before nonces on licence and jittery Kosovans filled the place. His parody of home was a predictable shit hole. The centre piece of the living room a piss and jizz stained mattress. Empties on every surface. Overflowing ashtrays. Telly on deafeningly loud. No curtains. A mongrel dog running wild, shitting in the passage. He’d graffitied the walls with meaningless slogans and symbols. Angry. Drunk. Frightened. Mad. Muttering to himself. He was my first love, but beyond salvation now. I let myself out. He didn’t notice. I shut my mind to him when the front door closed behind me, forever separating the present from the past. I couldn’t look back on my youth ever again.
My current circumstances were better than Davy’s, but not perfect. I’d landed back at my mam and dad’s in the summer of 86, determined to find gainful employment. My sexuality was an unspoken breach between us. Someone must have talked. Denver’s mam I guessed. Their silent disappointment a constant ache. I found solace from casual pick-ups in the gardens behind Central Station. Valour rather than discretion when I was aroused. I desperately needed my own place, which brought back the question of employment.
The jobs section of The Chronicle had grown from a single, broadsheet column to a tabloid pull-out. In the long run-up to the 87 election, the economy was apparently booming. On the Thursday that Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson, I spotted a vacancy for a History, Politics and Sociology lecturer at Jarrow College. Letters of application had to be addressed to the Chair of the Governors; Councillor J.A. Cairns. I nearly wet myself. Five years before when Big Ears had married Diana Spencer, Cairnsy had booked a minibus and we all took a huge carry-out up the coast for a Stuff the Royal Wedding picnic, with all monies raised from bingo cards, raffles and a tombola, going to the Fighting Fund. That was ten days before the trip to Leam Lane baths when Cairnsy had broached the subject of The Organisation to me and Denver.
The positive result of all that time wasted at boring meetings and cash pissed down the drain in the shape of forced donations to The Organisation back in my Contact days half a decade earlier was that I got the job. Attired in a flash Next suit, but still with the trademark Oxblood DMs, Cairnsy shook my hand warmly before the interview had even started, announcing “congratulations Comrade,” with a trademark wink. An hour later, we were on our third pint in the Iona Club and I was filling out a form to re-join the Labour Party, as Cairnsy briefed me on the things I’d missed while I’d been away.
Turns out “the pressures of bourgeois society” had caused a load of grief. The Organisation had purged and haemorrhaged a load of members after the Miners got beat, mainly for speaking their minds about tactics and policies. Famously inflexible and pathologically cruel, Peter Goodison was ruthless in his public censure of those who’d dared to question his authority. Ray Whelan had survived the cull but was off to be a Full Timer in Liverpool where The Organisation was driving the whole city over the Pier Head like a flock of Leninist lemmings. Denver and Sue were still in London; she was doing well in teaching and he was still unblinkingly faithful to the latest version of What We Believe In. They’d had a rough patch when Denver came up here for a couple of months late 85 while his old man checked out, courtesy of the payback from a steady diet of Regal King Size and McEwan’s Export for the best part of 50 years, but they were trying to “work things through.”
Cairnsy was the one who’d come out of it best. Free from the confines of The Organisation’s ideological straitjacket, he was still a lefty, but no longer just a councillor. He’d been selected as prospective parliamentary candidate for South Tyne. “The revolution still starts at closing time,” he announced when shouting up a pair of triple Irish to go with the pints.
The job was great. Gave me a purpose and the cash to buy my own place. It was no sinecure mind. Most nights I was in bed by 10; keeping cash and energy for the weekend. All-day opening hours, and the sudden explosion of pills that took your head right off, meant that Fridays and Saturdays were to be cherished. Three-quarters battered and tripping on the Gallowgate while we drew 3-3 with Southampton, then a night getting fucked and sucked down the newly developed Tyneside Pink Triangle. Ecstasy, in every sense. I’d always been a hedonist, rather than a stoner; it just took me until I was 25 to learn the word.
Meanwhile, the real world was carrying on. Thatcher was still there, the fucking witch. The big idea for the third term, which had taken a bit of the gloss off Cairnsy’s 17k majority, was The Poll Tax. Trialled in Scotland first, the Jocks went off it, even the Huns. Revolution was in the air and Denver was on a National Express. Sent to Glasgow by The Organisation, he was on the ground, ready to lead the Scotch Revolution. You had to hand it to the Tartan Terrors, they never gave up. Laced the poliss up and down Argyll Street. All the windows went in on George Square. Hatchback bonfires all over the shop. Class stuff. The good guys still lost and the cunts introduced the Poll Tax, though no fucker paid. Then it came down here and the same thing happened. Denver back on the Megabus to help Peter Goodison lead the English revolution from a terraced house in Walton Breck Road. Shuttling back and forth, agitating the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne. A hundred thousand from Cornwall to Carlisle joining him in Trafalgar Square, hoying rocks and petrol bombs outside Parliament the weekend before it became law. Full scale rioting. It looked absolutely brilliant on the telly.
I wasn’t there like. Cairnsy had got corporate hospitality for the Brighton game same day and he took me along. No jeans like, but it was worth it for the free bait and bevvy in the executive box. Strangely enough, another guest of his that afternoon was Sue Byrne. Not sure if I was more amazed at her being at the football or not being at the Poll Tax demo. Turned out she’d sacked off The Organisation and rediscovered her Sussex roots, as well as getting the job as Primary Education Advisor at South Tyneside Council that started the week after. We won 2-0. John Gallagher and Micky Quinn. Then we went to see The House of Love at the Poly. Not that great, other than the singles. No stage presence, but enough of a distraction to stop me staring at Sue and Cairnsy snogging the faces off each other all night.
Turned out that when Cairnsy got elected in 87, he’d initially crashed at Denver and Sue’s place until he sorted his own gaffe. Once The Organisation had made Denver take the High Road, to Liverpool or Glasgow or even both, it seemed Cairnsy and Sue had succumbed to the inevitable. After all, they went way back, predating Denver and, crucially, they’d both sacked The Organisation off once they’d grown up. Gave them a post-coital sack conversation topic I suppose.
One weekend in October 89, with Denver away on a publicity tour, advertising The Organisation’s 25th birthday, Sue acted. She moved out. Left Denver a note, telling him “I need to be free.” Denver kept calling, kept writing, but she wouldn’t reply, wouldn’t talk to him. It was the past. Being honest though, Sue had always known she came a long way behind The Organisation in Denver’s affections. She didn’t shack up with Cairnsy right away, took the spare room in a colleague’s flat instead. She was never there of course. Her and Cairnsy at it like rabbits when the division bell wasn’t tolling. Six months of searching for a route back up north, the Advisor job was the perfect opportunity for them to start over, away from the gaze of vengeful former Comrades, still pathetically loyal to The Organisation.
According to some, growing older means that your existence gets less interesting. I’m not buying that though. Admittedly, I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be saddled with a family, burdened down by all the life-limitations and horizon-restrictions that straight folk had imposed on them by the presence of kids and a wife. Just having a job and a mortgage kept me yoked by responsibility. But then, finally, I met someone. My darling Richard. After a decade of one-night stands, encounters in public bogs and in bars. Safe sex in a grimy cubicle, reading the graffiti and contact numbers as an anonymous stranger went down on you. Anonymity on first dates, nom de plumes on the second. Physical release, emotional disengagement because of the fear of exposure. Then I found companionship and real love, bowled off my pads in a pre-season net by the floppy haired trainee solicitor from Bristol. He didn’t do football, but you can’t have the whole world. Mind, our first proper date was The Wedding Present in Feb 92 and the Cricket World Cup on Sky late that night, so it came pretty close.
As my twenties hurtled to their close, it was a relief that things were working out on a personal level, because politically our world was falling apart. The Tories somehow won a fourth term and we were all in despair. Late that summer Denver showed up in the Felling again. His mam was moving into some sheltered accommodation bungalow, so he had an excuse to gain partial closure and collect his remaining stuff, as one or other of his sisters and her flock were about to take the place over, sending the old neighbourhood further downhill.
He hated Kinnock, but he was as devastated as the Welsh Windbag had been post-election. Broken. Still mourning over Sue’s defection three years back, he’d just got the hammer blow that The Organisation were on their uppers. The Poll Tax and John Major were crippling body blows, so they’d decided to quit Labour and go it alone. He put a loyal spin on it, claiming that “an independent workers’ party will grow rapidly,” but every fucker could have told him it was like turkeys voting for an early Christmas. I wonder if he even understood what he was saying, never mind believed in it. Active membership had plummeted, as most who remained were staying loyal to Labour. Consequently, cash reserves disappeared, and income stalled. No more Comrade funded jollies to Kefalonia on the back of the Fighting Fund’s capacious coffers. Times were tight. He’d been told Young Socialist was closing down and the only role they had for him, nominal and off the pay roll, was in Spain. Not handing out ideologically correct bar flyers in Magaluf either, but the Basque Country. An hour outside San Sebastien. Take it or leave it. He’d decided to take it. What else could he do? Not many jobs for a 30-something unemployable former revolutionary. We had a few silent pints in The Crown, before he headed to the airport. Never mentioned Sue, or Cairnsy, and neither did I. No looking back as he climbed in a taxi. I never saw him again for years.
Denver wasn’t the first of the FPX to go overseas of course. Kev had never been back here even semi-permanently since he’d left for Canada. At home he felt like a tourist. Forever exploring new worlds, he’d eventually settled in New Zealand, running his own interior design business. Took a month off each year and headed back. At first by himself, then with his lass, then an expanding clutch of bairns. If somebody had to be right, it had to be Kev, suntanned, grinning and content, not The Organisation or the Navy. Travel had broadened Kev’s mind, but it destroyed Davy’s. Dead in a mountain of his own shit and puke before he turned 33. The autopsy was inconclusive. Toxicology tests showed an alcohol level five times the limit for driving, together with dope, coke and temazapam in his system. No smack though. Chances were, he’d either choked or his ticker had given up. Open verdict.
‘A Military hero,’ The Chronicle called him. The MoD paid for his funeral. No flag on the coffin, but a poignant photo of him at his passing out parade all those years before. The boy I’d loved; prematurely forced into a world that killed him. Stay Free echoed round a three-quarter’s empty St. Patrick’s. This had been his song… go easy…step lightly…stay free… I buried my face in my palms and roared.
Davy’s death had been in the post for years, but the very fact of his continued precarious existence had kept memories of our FPX days real and alive. Now he was gone. With Denver and Kev away forever, my world contracted. Richard and I were happy; we still are. We worked hard and enjoyed our rest. Holidays abroad; winter tests in the Caribbean and Down Under. Nice house. Gigs and theatre every week. Playing in tandem for the second XI every Sunday from May to September. Sometimes midweek as well. Football with Cairnsy in the winter. Strange how my new best pal had been someone so inextricably linked to the workerist, institutional homophobia of The Organisation. Like Denver, Cairnsy knew that someone had to be right, but it hadn’t been Vanguard; ‘The Organisation was full of shit’ was how he candidly put it whenever their name was mentioned.
After the 1997 landslide, it seemed everything was possible; it was 1981 for grown-ups and we all got carried away. Reform was in the air. Cairnsy giddier than most. I think that’s probably why he suggested I become a councillor. It took until the Millennium for the democratic process to catch up with his wishes, but guilt and connections smoothed my passage to the safe seat of North Leam; a 1,000 majority in a ward election is pretty emphatic. Not bad for the first ever openly gay elected representative on South Tyne council. Labour, always in power, took every seat bar one. Sue, also arriving by political parachute in Hebburn Riverside, became Leader of the Council. The borough was our oyster. The region a string of personal pearls when I got a job as regional organiser for the union. Our day had come.
Like Denver, when he first got with Sue as part of an Organisation sanctioned shack-up, I saw how the personal and the political were Siamese twins. After the 2001 election and then 2005; we believed we were untouchable. Nobody could harm or hurt us. Niches had been carved in tablets of stone. This belief in our infallibility probably helped Cairnsy and Sue decide to get married. Enough tears and blood had flowed under the bridge since they’d severed connections with The Organisation. They decided on October 22nd; front page news in The Chronicle when they announced it. Cairnsy’s comment was that when Sky moved the Mackems game to the Sunday, they reckoned it was as good a time as any to get hitched; otherwise they’d have “nowt to do” on the Saturday.
It was a decent gathering. Cairnsy and Sue decided against a South Tyne coronation and just had an almost intimate do at the Civic Centre; it was just like the old days in The Crown, with a lot of the old crew. You didn’t need an invite to get in, just an up to date party membership, or so the joke went. Kev made it back from New Zealand, while a load of the old comrades came out of the woodwork. Some bitter eccentrics still carrying a torch for The Organisation, but mostly middle aged and well-adjusted non-conformists, struggling to remember what it was like to sell The Paper and believe in The Organisation. Revolutionaries still in spirit if not in deed, blocking out bad memories, relaxing over pints, reminiscing over good times and daft days, waiting for the speeches.
Door bursts open at the back and in charges a half-remembered figure. Shouting and roaring. Incoherent and fat. Denver. Bald and old. Angry. A vicious parody of his former self. Announces he’s here for “revenge.” Place is silent apart from his bile spitting antics on the dancefloor. Kev’s up and over to calm him down; palms open, pacifying gestures, smiling. Denver’s lost it. Never known to lay a glove on anyone previously, he cracks Kev in the face, who goes down. Burgundy fountain on polished wood floor and clean white shirt. Without impediment, Denver’s up to the top table now, demanding “retribution” on those who “betrayed” him and The Organisation. Makes it clear it’s not Sue who’s accountable though. She made her bed and lay in it. Instead, Denver wants Cairnsy’s head on a spike, for backing out on The Organisation.
Cairnsy, the showman, the diplomat, the Paul Smith suit and trademark oxblood DMs, takes the heat out of things. Effortlessly glides across the floor, puts an arm around Denver’s shoulder, suggests they go for a pint and a chat. Tries to lead him away, James Brown Please Please Please style. No dice.
A scuffle. A glint. A cry. The unhappy couple’s Danse Macabre ends as crouching figures sprint to intervene. Cairnsy falls. Shock on his face. More blood. Screams in the air. The floor is deepest red, stained by a fallen comrade. Denver hysterical, repeating the mantra “someone has to be right” as he’s pinioned to the deck. Cops and ambulance. Blue lights flashing. Cairnsy’s carried away on a gurney, still wisecracking through the pain, while Denver’s dragged off. Cuffs bite into podgy wrists. Unintelligible ranting.
It took a while, but Cairnsy recovered. Lost a lot of blood, but no organ damage. On the local news within three days. Interviewed from his hospital bed, calling for a 20% wage increase for all NHS staff. Said his biggest regret was missing Emre’s winner against the Mackems next day. I took Richard to that one on Sue’s ticket; he quite enjoyed it, sat in the Platinum Club on those heated airplane seats. Complimentary snacks and refreshments before, during and after the game.
Denver. Well it was quite a process. Initially charged with attempted murder, a load of interviews with shrinks and other services got to the root of his illness. Judge decided he’d gone off his head years before. Ask any of us and we’ve have pointed the finger as much at his family as The Organisation, but nobody consulted us. There was talk of a failed marriage to some young one over there. A houseful of bairns, none of them his own. Mitigating circumstances. Background checks. Financial insolvency and eating disorders. Detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Treatment. Chemical rather than physical cosh. Best result all round. In a while, he was forgotten about. Same as everyone else seemed to have forgotten Davy, except me and Kev during our Sunday Skype sessions. Sadly, most times all I told Kev was who had died and who had retired.
Denver’s mam checked out when he’d been away a few years. They let him out for the funeral. Not even handcuffed. A glassy-eyed egg sculptured in lard. It was over for him. Eventually, they let him out on licence and sorted a sheltered accommodation bungalow with a warden on site. Same place she’d seen through her final years, or so it turned out. Denver; as much a victim as a perpetrator in the eyes of a society that generally preferred to condemn rather than understand.
Spring 2015. Cairnsy, selected unanimously as candidate for South Tyne, announced to a full constituency meeting that he would be standing down in 2020. Sue had the cushy number as the local MEP; coffee and pastries in Benelux boulangeries on a six-figure salary. Maybe he fancied some of that. Being honest, Cairnsy and her had always done their best though. Alright so none of us had changed anything on a global scale, but we’d tried our fucking best, and we’d managed to help people at a more modest level. Perhaps, that’s the best you can hope for. I don’t know any more. Age brings uncertainty where youth embraced fanaticism.
When the nominations closed, we got a good laugh once the other candidates were announced. The usual Tory and Lib Dem clowns, some far right bonehead and a candidate from Socialist Parties Against Capitalism Alliance, which was The Organisation’s latest ruse. Fair play to them. A paid-up hundred members when once they’d had 10,000, but they stood in dozens of seats, losing deposits hand over fist.
Their candidate in South Tyne? It could only be Denver. He never campaigned, produced leaflets or had a profile of any description. I’d drive past his bungalow, the address he gave on his candidate’s form, but the curtains were always tight shut and no lights shone within. The silent would-be assassin. The papers didn’t even latch on to the back story. Cairnsy was cool about it. Borrowed a copper’s Kevlar vest for a giggle when out canvassing top end of the Felling.
Back to the Civic Centre for the results, the evening’s unfolding events recalled the 92 defeat, inverse in proportion to the 97 landslide. Stunned by news from elsewhere, it felt like the closing scene of a five-act tragicomedy. The candidates called to the podium for the declaration, not 20 yards from where Denver had plunged a blade into Cairnsy a decade before. This time, Denver was helped unsteadily on stage by his agent; an elderly, decrepit Peter Goodison. The years and medication had taken even more of a toll on Denver; the Trotskyist Paul Gascoigne.
J. A. Cairns (Labour): 27,112
F. H. Anderson (Liberal Democrat): 6,163
H. Scott (Conservative): 3,716
K. Walton (UKIP):1,787
A. Godfrey (Green): 1,103
J.T.H. Denver (SPACA): 66
Numbers and speeches baffled him. Uncomprehending, his large body was led away, in a sympathetic shuffle. The lights were going out all over Felling. Someone had to be right. It had never been the Navy, who ruined Davy. It had never been The Organisation. It had never been Denver. Perhaps, it had never been any of us.
gilipollez 