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On Writing Novels by Hylda Sims
I wrote this poem, well song actually, a long time ago, about the school I went to when I was a kid. Well, actually it turned out to be about a school I didn’t go to, i.e. a boys’ public school.
The Ballad of William James
William James was sent to public school
Had to stand in line for assembly in the morning
A surly sea of grey, full of fidgeting and yawning
Buzzing round his brain went the telling off and warning
While somewhere in the sun
We kids were having fun
at Summerhill
William James would dream of girls in class
Passed a silly note with F-words as a feature
When he got found out said, It wasn’t only me, sir
Got beaten by his chums and a caning from his teacher
It’s not against the rule
To swim naked in the pool
at Summerhill
William James could never tell a soul
Couldn’t tell his pa, he’d be sure to get another
Had to be a man, not go blubbing to his mother
Hid it in his head, like a corpse inside a cupboard
There’s always people who
Will put their arms round you
at Summerhill
William James goes back to school today
Had a troubled night with dreams of blood and thunder
Had to take a pill to keep his breakfast under
Screwed his mouth up tight so he wouldn’t make a blunder
The first kids to arrive
Run shouting down the drive
at Summerhill
William James grew up to be a judge
Underneath his wig a pile of bones lay hidden
Screwed his mouth up tight as he sent boys off to prison
Got the OBE as a man of strength and vision
But every child of mine
Gets love passed down the line
from Summerhill
It turned out to be the prod for a novel.
When I first got serious about writing it didn’t seem to matter much to me which branch of the trade I took up. First, because it was there, I went to a playwriting workshop at Morley College and wrote several plays. After a while I realised that unless you could persuade someone to stage or broadcast the plays you had nothing but squiggles on paper which might never work when launched across the tongues of actors towards an audience in some darkened theatre or seated Royle-like on sofas arguing and calling out for cups of tea.
Next I went to a poetry course at Arvon, because it was there, and learned to arrange the words more graphically and sparingly on the page. What do you do with them now and does anybody really understand them? I asked myself.
When I went to a fiction-writing course, because it was there, I was asked to send some work to the tutor beforehand. Mindful of what I had learned and written so far, I sent the beginnings of a short radio play neatly arranged as a series of poetic monologues. The tutor said (as a fiction writer he was clearly biased) But, you have a novel here!
How do you set about turning two thousand words into eighty thousand? But I did as I was told - picking out the important details of the street where the man stood, describing the woman’s childhood and what she thought as she waited for the number seventy-seven bus on that fateful morning, describing the flats on the skyline and just beyond that... and so on... Lo and behold, before too long I had not eighty thousand but one-hundred and eight thousand and had to set about pruning. I had discovered what I truly wanted to write - not drama, not poetry, not fact, not autobiography, not reminiscence, nothing cathartic - just fiction.
Well, what is fiction and wherein does it differ, in its heart of hearts from poetry?
Big question and not one I mean to try and answer here and now. Defining poetry has been notoriously difficult ever since we gave up the notion of a poem as something to be learned by heart and recited and therefore memory-shaped. Perhaps the starting point for many, particularly women, writing poetry these days is the thrill of self-discovery. And this is truly addictive. Ah, but the thrill of writing fiction is the discovery not of the self but of someone else and this is like falling in love. To people a novel with characters is to find lovers and friends. And enemies too, if you need them. It is to find lovers you understand to the last fibre of their being for you are their only true begetter. You know exactly what they’re thinking. If you don’t like it you can make them think something else. And if it takes some time to get to know your lovers, friends and enemies completely then it will be a long novel. It will be a long love affair. So much the better.
The poem is a shaven-haired Manx cat, purring, mewling, shivering, stretching, beautiful, but always walking by itself. Ah, but the novel is a shaggy dog with a wagging, furry tale, begging for attention, something you can tangle with, cuddly, more warming in bed than a hot water bottle.
That the novel rests on character and plot is a cliché. To write a novel is to be a god - creating lives and visiting a fate upon them, kind and cruel, arbitrary and logical, violent and loving. You can create characters from recycled pieces of your friends, here a nose, there a mind, or a man you glimpsed sitting on a station platform; you can stir in little bits of yourself or start totally from scratch as if it were year zero and all the time you know that none of you will really come to any harm and you won’t really have to pick up the pieces. To write a novel is to commit the perfect crime.
Sometimes you need a poem to explain all this to yourself. After my first novel was finished I wrote a series of poems to help me get over the ending of the affair. They amounted to a précis of the story and an investigation of how it was written. I called it Reaching Peckham. Then I wrote a poem to send to prospective agents and publishers instead of a boring old letter, hoping it might spark more interest.
Dear Publisher
I haven’t used the word crepuscular
nobody’s knuckles showed white
no, I love you, Janet, in the moonlight
My fingers, purging the prose, were stilettos
adjectives defected, became diasporas
I bayoneted clichés, scalped paras
Characters tried to take over, steal the scene
I renamed them, re-styled their eyes, changed their sex
had them sectioned, deported them. Next
aliens landed in my plot from Genre
speaking Zodiac, faking coincidence
I held them in RAM, left nothing to chance
My oeuvre was totalitarian
thought cops, word perfecters, had powers
to knock one awake in the small hours.
To end the tyrant I had to stage a coup:
dawn; a bleep; a pale screen; a key clicks; while
I call back aliens into the file...
I’m told you dispose of this sort of corpus
arrange a stiff cover, sift through the ash
find it a niche... even pay cash...
This ploy was not in the least successful, for the publishers invariably wrote back (if at all) totally po-faced... Dear Ms Sims, Thankyou for your communication, but I’m afraid...
But to get back to William James. This song gave me an idea for my next book - it would be about Summerhill. But having been there as a child didn’t make me keen to do it, the thought of retracing my steps in writing did not appeal to me in the least. It had to be fictionalised. I started off with the last image from Lord of the Flies - a dishevelled child runs out of the jungle and looks up with relief at his saviour, a stern, very British naval officer... I should have thought that a pack of British boys... would have been able to put up a better show... I would subvert it and make it the first image in my novel and I would make the first image in Lord of the Flies, a boy jumping into a pool, the last image in my novel. As if I were the genie of the lamp, I decided to pick up the school from the flat farmlands of Suffolk and deposit it whole and undisturbed in the wilds of Northumbria. With a few penstrokes I brought back to life my old headmaster, A S Neill, gave him a new name and made him twenty years younger. I renamed the school Coralford after Ballantyne’s Coral Island. Golding’s stern British officer I turned into a school inspector (serves him right!). Pretty soon, just like William James had, he took over the scene, became the hero. I let him, for of course, as opposites often do, we had fallen in love.
Hylda Sims’ Summerhill novel Inspecting the Island is available by mail order from
Seven-Ply Yarns, 148 Crystal Palace Road, London SE229EP
You can read chapter one here
Then again…
On Not Writing My Novel
I get up, puzzle on a little poem
I eat a bowl of yoghurt, wash my clothes
then fetch the post and make the bed, too late
by now, I think, for getting down to prose
which can’t be dreamed up in the bath; deadlines
is what I need - exactly what I’ve got:
dead lines, espaliered, rootless, black on white
to rearrange in miles of well-turned plot
all bedded in and diligently pruned
with every branchlet tensioned on a string
meanwhile the sturdy poem grows and blooms
self-watering, an independent thing
not much to do but turn it to the sun,
its stems will straighten up, its petals sing
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On that Train and Gone by Hylda Sims
In the beginning was the milk bar, where, sitting on a high stool, we sucked on sickly strawberry shake through parchment straw. Sometimes we had a Knickerbocker Glory, its extravagant topping concealing a glassful of chopped up jelly. Maybe you could get a hot drink there made with rich Camp Coffee Essence and hot water but that was for the older generation. All plants lived out of doors.
A number of Josephs had been centre stage. Goebbels, who, if one should sing of him, had no balls at all, Senator Joe who’d forced us Commies to differentiate between good Yanks - Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger - and bad ones - Joe and his un-American activities committee and all those GI’s (overpaid, over-sexed and still over here) who came up from the East Anglian bases on a Saturday night and stole our girls by giving them fully-fashioned sheer nylons and tins of Spam. Go home Yankee Yankee go home, we sang and a girl I knew even spat at one as he got on a London bus. And then there was our adored Uncle Joe (Stalin, that is) who had really won the war. Joe Stalin was a mighty man, wrote Ewan McColl to commemorate his death in 1953 and didn’t bother to eat his words when in 1956 he turned out to be rather too mighty for his big Russian boots.
 Redd Sullivan, a merchant sailor, and therefore familiar with the American continent, brought me a pair of real Levi jeans back from Macy’s Department Store in New York. Tights replaced nylons and mine were black. Somebody brought me an unexpurgated copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn back from Paris. I bought myself records - Billie Holiday, Josh White and Burl Ives from Doug Dobell’s record shop in Charing Cross Road (and later Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Jesse Fuller). They kerchunged down on top of each other from among the stack of crooners and popular classics on the automatic record changer at my parents home. The LP and the EP would soon be invented. My parents had just bought a television, their first. Ivor Cutler, then a shy little Scottish schoolteacher, had bought me my first guitar in Weekes’ guitar shop for nine pounds. It wasn’t a very good one but he taught me to play my three chords and to sing along with The Skye Boatsong.
On Saturday night you might venture up to 100 Oxford Street to have a jive in Humphrey Lyttelton’s jazz club where, when the band would let him, a thin, pigeon-toed, thick-lipped young man called George Melly would do his dramatic version of Frankie and Johnny. This involved turning his back on the audience and smooching with himself (yes he could get both his arms right round his back in those days) and culminated in him staggering theatrically and crashing off the stage. The first time she shot him he staggered, the next time she shot him he fell...
And then came Gaggia (Giuseppe Gaggia?) a solid shiny beast with silver pipes who sat on the counter of the coffee bar seductively fizzing and steaming, delivering big plain mugs of real Italian coffee which you drank sitting comfortably on upholstered seats round clean wooden tables on which stood small bowls of real brown sugar. You could buy exotic food - paklava and spaghetti bolognaise. The plants had moved indoors and their elegant shiny leaves filtered the light coming from upstairs and together with the smoke (I affected a long green cigarette holder) made the place dim and mysterious. They let you sit there for hours and play the guitar. They even encouraged you to do it for it fetched in the punters. In Paris, until now the admired Mecca of all civililised behaviour and underground culture (oh the Maquis and the repeated screenings of Les Enfants du Paradis!) you may well at this time have found Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Louis Aragon still sitting outside Les Deux Magots discussing Existentialism but in London the coffee bar had arrived, pronto, from Italy to rescue us from its syrupy sons Mantovani and Mario Lanza and open the way to popular culture.
 There I go now, wearing my calf-length dirndl skirt and black top nipped sharply in place at the waist by a wide canvas belt with a big buckle at the front. My long black hair is caught up in a ponytail, I’m wearing my slip-on shoes and carrying my guitar in its new hard case. I come up out of Trafalgar Square underground and make my way up Charing Cross Road past the second-hand bookshops, pausing to gaze longingly at the Gibson guitars in the windows of the music stores. I hardly notice the duffle-coats and business suits who pass by me or Mac the Shakespearian Busker who is just starting his act, declaiming to the theatre queue in St Martin’s Court, Friends , Romans, Countrymen... for I am intent on reaching the new world...
...the old world, which had once been more or less uniformly spherical had now become universally square, apart from this section of Central London where the music-making, free-thinking, jump-jivin’, guitar-selling, star-making, Doug Dobelling globe had concentrated itself, the seismic epicentre of the real world, where Old Compton Street, Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, Cambridge Circus and their tributaries offered up rich moka fumes and the volcanic underthrumming of E major chords as every available cellar and stockroom revealed its commercial potential...
...once ensconced in the Nucleus Coffee Bar, down below Monmouth Street where a group of strummers are already assembled, I take out my guitar, struggle to put it in tune and take my turn to sing. The songs pass round, a hotch potch from Josh White, Burl Ives, Ewan McColl, red songs, love songs, chorus songs, ...Take this Hammer (whah!) Carry it to the Captain (whah!) Whah!? - the deep exhalation of breath as the chain gang swings its heavy implements in unison and brings them down on an unyielding pile of rocks so that the railroad can be built... American songs... English songs...
...English songs? The left, thinly disguised as the peace movement have been making an effort to get us to revive and sing our own songs, and many old and wonderful ballads are entering our repertoire, usually sung a cappella a la Ewan McColl and Bert Lloyd who are at the head of the thing, collecting and singing and publishing the old English and Scottish ballads - the ‘Big Ballads’ and making new, political songs, ‘in the tradition’. These days radio is still the preferred conduit of what is not yet quite mass culture and Ewan and Bert have it sewn up. And yes, it’s true, Leadbelly’s songs do sound extraordinarily unconvincing on our pale English lips, Oh lawdy, pick-a-bale-a cotton, but we love them, these exotic, harsh chants with their simple chord sequences. We add phoney Scottish accents to our phoney American accents and sing on, and it’s ah mun lie alane in the lang winter nichts…
By the mid-fifties a triumvirate of alliterating venues has defined the real world more precisely - the G’s, the I’s and the A’s - the Gyre and Gimble a smoky dive in John Adam Street down by the Villiers Street arches, the 2 I’s in Old Compton Street (named for its two Iranian owners who had never before been so anonymous and yet so famous) and a curious upstairs gambling den in Seven Dials, the A and A, a Cypriot place at the top of many flights of dark uncarpeted stairs. At the bend of the second flight an old woman, reputed to have once been a fashionable pre-war society beauty, slept clothed in newspapers. This was the place you hung out in from midnight till early morning along with the cabbies and jazzmen before wandering down to Covent Garden where the pubs opened at 5am to serve the porters.
 Meanwhile out of the big square world beyond, Bill Haley, cowlick curled over forehead, Comets in tow, zoomed into the Dominion Theatre. A crowd of Teddy Boys fingered their quiffs and hung onto their bootlace ties as they pushed and jostled and stopped the traffic in Tottenham Court Road for a sight of the first Rock n Roll man to make it across the Atlantic, Gonna rock rock rock around the clock tonight. Too homely to be a sex symbol, Bill Haley turned out to be the bland overture before the advent of lean-hipped, rhinestone-studded, hound-dog-crying, high-heeled-buffalo-hide-booted Elvis changed our lives forever and fathered a long dynasty of British rockers. We folkniks had to reject it all as unbearably commercial and American but we couldn’t resist jiving about to its rhythms all the same.
Ken Colyer and Chris Barber have been doing their homework on the origins of jazz and the first skiffle groups begin to appear in the upper rooms of pubs where the folk scene is already establishing itself. We love the Round House pub where Alexis Korner holds court and American, Jack Elliott, ex-travelling companion of Woody Guthrie has turned up with his Stetson hat, authentic guitar licks and picks and Woody’s talking blues... Ah was gonna coast as far as the curve, ah didn’t make it… Well that Ford took off like a flyin’ squirr’l, flew half-way around the world (whir’l)… Jazz clarinetist Bruce Turner calls everybody ‘dad’ even women, in his husky upper-class voice, perhaps after the fashion of his American mentor Johnny Dodds, but, being a Commie too, plays on the radio ballads which Ewan McColl is writing to glorify in song the life of the British working class as among many other strenuous tasks, they Hunt the bonny shoals of herring. Nobody else is making any money yet.
It is a time of musical factions and fractions. On the trad scene New Orleans, exemplified by Ken Collier, distinctly disapproves of Chicago while BeBop and so-called Modern jazz are completely beyond the pale. Ewan McColl and Bert Lloyd continue their anti-American stance but at parties, after a drink or two, McColl will give you an excellent rendition of Sixteen Tons and Bert will sing you the blues, hand over ear.
There I go again. I’ve moved into Waterloo with my lover, Jazz Painter and quattro & kazoo player Russell Quay. The house has been condemned for demolition and has no bathroom. We live there with Russell’s lodger, John Pilgrim and his highly destructive capuchin monkey, Saki. Saki chatters in his cage in the kitchen (let him out for more than five seconds and he is capable of decorating the entire flat with the contents of the kitchen cupboard - eggs, butter, milk - we have no fridge of course - and mulching them with monkey pee) while we three invent the City Ramblers Skiffle Group - Pilgrim will play washboard and we enlist a tub-bass player, one BoBo Bouquet. We begin to play under the Arches and outside Waterloo Station where Rosie, a friendly prostitute, moves along for us and declares, as does the all-night mobile coffee and saveloy stall, that we’re good for business.
We open a skiffle and folk club above The Princess Louise in Holborn.
And the coffee bars yield up their first rocky names - Tommy Steele works on the boats and hangs out in the G’s trying out his Rock n Roll routines. The jazz and folk faces down there are not impressed and direct him to the I’s, fast becoming the place to go and get talent spotted if ya wanna be a star. At the G’s, Diz Disley, who knows things none of us have ever heard of like Bb13th and F#augmented teaches Johnny Booker a minor chord up the neck resulting in the birth of the Vipers Skiffle Group
Nineteen fifty-six and here I go with the City Ramblers (minus Pilgrim who has joined the Vipers) on an odyssey to ‘The Continent’ (we being, as now, an off-shore island in those days) touring Belgium, Germany and Denmark in a beat-up ex-ambulance. When we don’t play in the jazz clubs we play in the streets. ‘The Continent’ is still parcelled up by the major powers and en route to Berlin our vehicle runs out of petrol in the East German corridor and we have to be rescued by the British Army. They give us bangers and baked beans which we haven’t had since we left England. We have been down and out in Hamburg and Dusseldorf, sharing one plate of pea soup strengthened with a large curved frankfurter sausage between two, eaten standing up at the counter to save the obligatory tip extracted by the management if you sit down. By the time we get back to Ostend our ambulance is so clapped-out we can’t even persuade it to roll onto the homebound ferry.
 It is Christmas 56 and Skiffle has arrived in our absence. All our fellow skifflers, including Pilgrim’s Vipers have turned pro. Prompted by music promoters, a number of tub-bassists and three-chorders have been jettisoned by self-proclaimed group leaders. Enterprising jazzmen have moved in here and there with their double basses and nimble fingers. Some groups even swap their washboards for drums - oh apostasy, but Pilgrim manages to hang in there. Ah got sheep, ah got cows... ah got horses, ah got all livestock... ah fooled you... ah got pigiron, ah got pigiron ah got a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ll pigiron! Nobody understands a word of it but Lonnie Donnegan is in the hit parade with a Leadbelly song, The Rock Island Line, done very fast. Even the Vipers have a hit. They haven’t heard us Ramblers yet but they want us - Tempo and Columbia are vying for a recording contract. Foolishly we choose Tempo because its an ‘authentic jazz label’ thus sealing our fate as skifflers’ skifflers rather than stars.
 Back at the I’s a small, slight young man called Charlie Harris sweeps the floor and empties the ash trays overflowing with Craven A and the occasional reefer in order to get a bed above the bar and play the piano after hours. ‘Fingers’ Harris does a convincing replay of Jerry Lee Lewis’s frantic piano style. Paul Lincoln, a promoter of variety shows and wrestling matches hears Fingers and thinks he’ll do - with a new name and a bit of sharpening up. Cut to the Odeon, Elephant and Castle where Nancy Whiskey’s Skiffle Group with sideman Diz Disley is topping the bill. New discovery Wee Willie Harris, Lincoln’s red band jacket sagging from his slender shoulders and flapping round his wobbling knees, hair dyed a sudden and ferocious crimson to match, is shrinking in the wings turning green with stagefright, clinging to the edge of the curtains and trying not to puke. The stage is empty too long and a suspicion of slow handclap can be heard from front of house and even a faint chant of why are we waiting? Ex-wrestler Paul Lincoln, six-foot four and built can see his investment dwindling before his acquisitive eyes. Only one thing to be done. Picking up the lad by his redundant shoulder-pads he throws him out into the lights with a muttered curse - get on there yer bastard! Time seems to stand horribly still for Wee Willie as he flies across the stage lofted on the wings of the red jacket and after what seems an age in the air lands almost perfectly on the piano stool. Bereft of all thought and not knowing what else to do he thrashes wildly at the keys for seven minutes, his red hair flames, his jacket settles around him, Great God all mighty, great balls of fire! and he stops playing. There is a moment’s stunned silence. Then the screams and cheers and shouts break out, even from the Teds. He strides confidently off stage. A star is born. Neither the first nor the last.
 Skifflers are taking to the boards everywhere, topping bills in variety shows at Moss Empires variety theatres, not only in Leicester Square and The Elephant, also in Wigan, Stoke-on-Trent and Huddersfield. We find a Soho tailor to make matching striped trousers for the boys. Our washboard player, Shirley Bland and I have matching pleated skirts and loose tops for there I go, four months pregnant, one of those new Japanese guitars resting lightly on my belly, belting out Down by the Riverside in some northern provincial town to a crowd of local teenagers whom I can’t see because I’m blinded by the footlights. Teenagers are in evidence everywhere. Their mums have taken in the side seams of their English jeans on the old treadle Singer so they can hardly bend down to get on their thick-crepe-soled blue suede shoes. Jointly topping our variety show with us is an American black man, a ‘spade’, called Li’l Abner who skids on stage horizontally, limbo-style, twice a night wearing first a purple jacket with red sequins then a yellow jacket covered in purple feathers, I found my thrill, on Blueberry Hill. Comedian Dickie Dawson (soon to marry, in alliterative style, Rank starlet Diana Dors) tells clever jokes to the mild boos of the teenagers and lower down the bill a couple of tap dancers with straw boaters tough it out. The Ramblers’ finale is The Banana Boat Song, accompanied by the pit orchestra which varies according to venue. Our respective tunings and timings don’t often mesh. Daylight come and I wanna go home...
 It seems that everybody under thirty is thrashing about on some kind of string, backed up by the thimbling of washboards. This produces a thick chuc-a-luca, chuc-a-luca sound - Freight train, Freight train, Going so fast, sings Nancy Whiskey, doing so. Maybe the heart of skiffle is a rhythmic anthem for the passing of steam - Let the midnight special, shine her ever-loving light on me. There’s Casey Jones now, shovelling in the coal and Railroad Bill (he never worked and he never will) ridin’ the rod.
The BBC has got the message for in March 57 it starts the first of its big pop music extravaganzas, ancestor of TOTP and Jools Holland. Everybody who’s anybody gets a go on it and sure enough behind its opening titles a steam train rattles round the bend - The 6.5 special coming down the line, the 6.5 special right on time...
Russell and I open the Skiffle Cellar in Greek Street, Soho just a few weeks later and there I am, missing the first night and staying at home to have the baby, a beautiful blue-eyed girl. But soon it’s summer, the Soho Fair - and there I go again with the Ramblers and the baby in the pram - we parade all around Soho - Old Compton Street, Frith Street, Greek Street and Soho Square, Momma don’t allow no skiffle playin’ round here... but she does... for a while...
...until it all shades off into something else - sixties, Yeah Yeah, baby... the Beatles, Fairport Convention, the pop festival and the folk festival and on, Punk, Funk, Ska, Hip Hop and everything’s gone electronic and that cramped little pad in Waterloo never got taken out but is now somebody else’s des res and must be worth half a million.
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City Ramblers repertoire 1957
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City Ramblers revival 2006
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A New Age Dawns for Townhead by Hylda Sims
Home is a four-letter word, an oath of obedience. Home sends you out to work for it five days a week, demands to be maintained, improved, scrubbed and polished, inhibits your deepest wishes and desires. It is the place where we are most likely to suffer manipulation, accident, abuse, rape, burglary and even murder. Going out is safer than staying in. Home is claustrophobia, conformity and sitting on settees opposite people who embarrass and annoy you but for whom you feel responsible.
Home is where the heartache is.
Most homes are habit and convention rather than choice and the late twentieth century nuclear family home is a particularly dangerous convention environmentally, socially, economically and above all psychologically.
One solution is to live in a larger unit, the so called commune or ‘intentional’ community where amenity, property, chores, ideas and celebrations can be shared among a larger and more diverse group of people whilst at the same time the individual, relieved of the constraints of life in a small family, can be more independent. Because of the possibilities offered by community living - more space, shared expemse, division of labour, a more varied interplay of personalities, the possibility exists of taking back powers which have been usurped by the state for its own manipulative purposes such as the education of children. Adult members can educate each other too, sharing their skills, interests and ideas - ideas which expand and flower from the practical experience of building and maintaining the community...
This was a debate much in vogue in the early seventies, a time of small deeds communism which imagined change being achieved through creating exemplary pockets of a better lifestyle inside the rubbery and unexpectedly resilient fabric of capitalism. Going into the commune stewpot along with the beans was respect for the environment, self-sufficiency, organic farming, shared use of energy, transport and childcare as well as concern for the individual psyche.
Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism had showed that fascism was nurtured in the authoritarian family, Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling had exposed our dis-education system and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful had outlined the wastefulness and destruction of macro-economics and the usefulness of intermediate technology. Feminists had written extensively about the constraints of the patriarchal family. Free schools and wholefood co-ops proliferated. The word alternative was heard in the land - Nicholas Saunders published a yearly listings, Alternative London, and Peace News a fund-raising suppliment the Companies Levy for Alternative Projects (CLAP) inviting established businesses to fund the social revolution. The seventies was a time of interregnum between the beautiful but doomed spring and summer of sixty-eight and the political amnesia of the Thatcher years...
Freer and I had both been pupils at A S Neill’s Summerhill, where every child had a vote in the general meeting, ran things for themselves and didn’t have to go to lessons unless they wanted to do so. We thought a kind of Summerhill for adults was what was needed, so when we heard about the village we set off up north to see if it would do.
We stood on the road and gazed at the awesome bleakness of Townhead. It consisted of nineteen blue-black houses (two terraces and a pair) each with its walled back yard and outside toilet. In Barnsley, Wigan or Manchester you would have expected snotty-nosed kids and women in pinnies to emerge in a pre-play of Coronation Street. But these houses sat round a hump of sturdy grass above a remote, windwracked and magnificent valley in the South Yorkshire moors. Below the village of Townhead flowed the River Don fed by streams and waterfalls which could be seen glistering among the crag and bracken on the other side of the valley. There was silence and emptiness but for the sound of wind racing across the treeless planes of the land. The houses had all been abandoned it seemed. Then out of number sixteen in the middle of the lower terrace came a man who proved to be Spencer Gaunt, a retired railwayman, followed by his wife Annie.
‘Are you going to buy t’place?’ Spencer asked while Annie put the soot-blackened
tin kettle on the stove, ‘we could do with a bit of company.’
The houses had been built in 1902 for railway workers at the marshalling yard nearby. The yard was closed sometime in the early sixties and the other families had gradually left.
Townhead was blue-black because it was made of strong engineering bricks, left over, one supposes from Victorian railway stations and tunnels. They had taken a battering from the wind and the rain but the houses in the middle of the lower terrace which was slightly more sheltered from the elements where more or less habitable.
In the summer of seventy-three we moved up there with a few friends and people who’d heard about the project and established base camp in number fifteen, next to Spencer and Annie. Lifespan was born.
An early discussion paper outlining its philosophy says optimistically:
We believe that the broader-based extended family could lead to more co- operative, loving and communicative people and from the example of our community, society, in the long run, could change for the better... and continues... We do not see this as being a drop-out community for we see the members continuing their involvement with society as a whole, through work, study and friendships. We believe that the community will provide the possibility for creative fulfilment which for many people cannot be obtained in the commercial world nor in the family unit. Children could be educated within the community in greater freedom; freedom from the conformity of state education and from the often stifling and restrictive attitudes of a small family. We posit the community as a practical framework for living. It goes on to suggest that The detail is dependent on finance and the siting of the community.
Many communities were founded in the seventies and a good handful of them survive, having made few or many accommodations to the changing world around them. They network and support each other. The differences between them are based as much on their physical siting and financial solvency as on philosophy and the character of members. No commuity, I believe, set out with so little money, in such spartan conditions and with such an open mix of people as Lifespan.The early period of Lifespan was almost entirely taken up with making our houses fit to live in. Building building building this is what we did - renovating, repairing and opening up the houses themselves and doing building work in the local area to earn money. It meant that the aristocrats of early Lifespan were manual workers: handymen, brickies, chippies, plumbers, electricians and plasterers. The intellectuals were the apprentices and we felt this was as it should be. We rarely emerged from our overalls, never discussed Marx, Kropotkin, Shakespeare or Beckett, being either too tired to talk at all or needing to arrange who was going to paint the local post office or how we might move a door or two to stop the wind raging through our newly knocked-through sitting room. (These houses were two up, two down, no-bathroom houses and much experimentation was needed to make larger communal spaces and more up-to-date amenities). The humdrum nature of our conversation at dinner was frequently noted by the journalists who turned up to find out what was going on. Notebooks and cassettes at the ready they were hoping for something more high-flown and, yes, alternative..
Nevertheless, as many communities have found, our first months were our most united
when everyone was working hard and experiencing the satisfaction of physical problems overcome and the bricks and mortar being shaped to our intentions.
Our diary entry for Friday 16th August 1974 reads as follows:
 Today was decided to be a holiday but some people decided to work anyway. Geoff wants to get his woodwork finished - he’s making shelves and a seat in the living room of number fifteen, Freer and Virginia are painting the kitchen, Michele and Johnny took off all our washing and did the shopping in Holmfirth. Rom (my daughter then aged eleven) John, Susan and I went for a walk down the valley, or rather, a scramble. John fell into a hole very suddenly without serious injury. Then we came upon a herd of grazing cows which Rom thought were bulls and got rather scared about... it’s amazing how well everyone works together and gets on with each other.
By the summer of 1975 we had fifteen adults at the village including Spencer and Annie plus three children. Most of them had come on short visits, then longer visits, then asked if they could join us. By that time also, rifts and schisms had formed, been resolved, reformed and been resolved again. In the course of these several people had left. These arguments were mostly about relatively minor things such as cleaning rotas, who should care for the several cats people had brought with them, and more importantly which of the visitors should be invited back or encouraged to join us. In general these arguments were positive for the development of Lifespan for in sorting out these issues we instituted regular meetings and procedures for dealing with day-to -day problems. It also made us more thoughtful about which visitors would be invited to join on a permanent basis.
As the long and icy Townhead winter gave way to late spring and an unusually hot summer we felt inspired and confident. A number of the houses in the lower terrace had been made quite comfortable, we had begun to diversify our money-making activities, running conferences and study weekends at the village, giving talks about ourselves to local organisations and being paid for a documentary made about us by Yorkshire Television. We began to organise classes and other activities for the children and planned a series of discussion groups for the adults inviting our outside contacts to take part. On June 20th, ‘75 I record:
A S Neill Trust had their weekend meeting here the weekend before last. As usual a great success with no fuss on the catering side. The weather turned into a brilliant heatwave which lasted for about six days. About fifty people came. Down in the valley we dammed up the river somewhat and made a paddling place. Idyllic scenes of people paddling, boating, sleeping out under the stars. The A S Neill people spent a long time sitting around in the sun marvelling at our way of life.
A month later in my next entry I write:
Re-reading the last entry is like reading about a different world never to be recaptured. Things seem to have changed so much, mostly in some strange atmospheric way hard to pinpoint.
Like many communities the second phase had been signalled by the loosening or breaking of ties between couples accompanied by many anxieties and jealousies. Couples had bust-ups and people took sides as to who should go and who should stay. Various sojourns at other communities were organised so that couples could have time apart from each other but mostly this further polarised things or created new liasons even more dangerous to the stability of the initial couple. People who had been living for years in tight nuclear families now felt this wasn’t good enough and wanted sexual freedom. The difficulties between a couple who had come to Lifespan with their two children now broke into open warfare, an event which polarised the community. All this seemed to affect other aspects of life at Townhead. Opinion also polarised as to whether we should do away with the cooking and cleaning rota (which had been working pretty well) and just let people do these chores ‘as the spirit moved them’ This led to mess as well as argument. Meantime we were inundated with visitors and the community itself was growing. We now had 4 children, 3 teenagers, chickens and ducks (looked after by Spencer and Annie - the latter also providing frequent bacon sandwiches and Daddy’s Sauce to non-vegetarians) goats, bees and a well-cultivated garden providing organic produce for the kitchen as well as lots of visitors. People were having fun but one felt the centre wasn’t holding. We decided not to have any visitors for a while and to do some group therapy. This was initiated by a friend of ours who was a therapist and consisted of a weekend of intense and personal discussion.
On the 8th January 76, I attempted to sum up our progress to date.
We have undoubtedly done a great deal of physical work here... we have learned a lot and are improving at these things... I know how to build a brick wall and can do simple plastering, though neither very well. Most of us can cater for up to fifty people without too much fuss. Our village still looks much the same from the outside - rather grim and dour. However inside, the comfort, and warmth compared to last year is noticeable. Everybody has a comfortable room mostly well and interestingly decorated and furnished. On the lower terrace we have just numbers eleven and eighteen left to finish.
In the time we’ve been here we’ve passed from obscurity to fame, especially in the local area, having had two major television programmes made about us as
well as much other media interest. Most of the locals seem to accept us as a
more or less respectable if unusual collection of people. Even the right-
wing admire our ‘pioneering spirit’.
A most important breakthrough is people’s attitude to money - everything is pooled and people just ask for what they need in so far as money is
available. We often go happily for weeks and weeks without a
personal penny in our pocket, nor are people up-tight about
fairness or one having more money than another.. The general
honesty and indifference to money is remarkable. Likewise
people are getting better at looking after communal property as
carefully as they would their own. Own rooms tend to be
personal palaces and property consciousness and ownership feelings
end there.
The most dramatic breakthrough has been in the area of
relationships and personal changes. The group therapy sessions initiated last
year have had much to do with this. Happily we don’t seem to have
looked back since then and people are solving and working through inter- personal feelings as they go along. There has been a great deal of honesty achieved on the sexual front with people sharing partners, sleeping freely with whom they wish. This contrasts strongly with the closed up almost monastic atmosphere of the early days.
We have seen our children and teenagers change a lot over this first year
developing their own attitudes, pursuits and lifestyles rather than being
the apprehensive appendages of their parents’ problems.
Danny, one of our original Lifespan members has just left - the first Lifespan graduate leaving from choice and strength. He has grown and changed a lot in the time he has been here, especially in articulacy, confidence and
tolerance.
All in all the ideas originally worked out by Freer and I seem to be happening in practice as a natural result of freedom from wage-slavery, establishment
life-styles and all they entail.
I left Lifespan about a year after this and Freer not long after me. There were many reasons to leave but perhaps the reality is that we are both starters rather than finishers, setter-uppers rather than carry-oners.
About the time we left a man joined Lifespan who was a printer and he brought with him his printing equipment. This led to Lifespan becoming printers for the alternative scene and gave it a regular, not too demanding source of income. For the first time it had financial stability.
Britain in the eighties, under Thatcher had little interest in community living. High unemployment made people less experimental and unprepared to risk a life outside the establishment. Communities became more inward looking and kept a low profile. With less and less people seeking the experience of the communal lifestyle especially at anywhere as muddy and cold as Townhead it was hard to maintain the population at a viable level. Nevertheless it was not until Nevil the printer left, some sixteen years after his arrival, taking his equipment with him, that Lifespan, loosing its main source of income as well as an experienced and influential Lifespanner, began to deteriorate to the point of collapse. In a 1982 Lifespan brochure, when there were just 9 people at Townhead including 2 children, Caroline writes:
Lifespan for me is many contrasting situations and feelings. Mealtimes with lots of people and children making an amazing amount of noise; sometimes I love that; the racket, the jokes, the big family feeling. Or peace and silence in my beautiful room, overlooking the moors. Sometimes I sit and dream for ages gazing at the clouds and sky or the colours of the hills. No one disturbs me... The thing I love about living here is that I can always find a challenge and I usually don’t have to look very hard to find several.
But by 1996 another member, John was writing retrospectively about Lifespan :
The core group of the eighties were long gone, Billy and Mggie had just left, boot marks on behinds, sowers of ill seeds and dispersers of members and visitors... cracks cleaved wider by Adam... chasms rifted courtesy Sarah and Rat...
and so on: a catalogue of ill-feeling and ill-intent which seemed to culminate somewhere towards the end of 97 in the entire village being left to the mercy of a disturbed, violent and dangerous individual who after ten days solitude there trashed the houses with the assistance of local hooligans and was finally re-housed by the council...
Does this mean we failed ? Did we become even more dangerous than the nuclear family?
But wait! In March ‘98 the Sheffield Star runs a headline ‘A New Age Dawns for Townhead’.
It seems a group of people have arrived at Townhead, unkempt, in a strange variety of old vans and rusting vehicles. There are many dogs and not a few children. They find 19 empty derelict houses, holes have been smashed in the roofs, some floors have been torn out, washbasins and baths smashed to pieces. It’s a mess. But these people are used to mud and dirt: they have lived in tunnels, up trees, in benders, in the path of JCBs and tractors, they have known Newbury and Twyford Down and Manchester Airport. In the kitchen of number 15 above the rusting remains of an old Aga they find a tree mosaic made from bits of broken green glass pressed into the roughly rendered wall. There are two signatures in the cement: Freer and Hylda, 1974.
 They move in, begin to clean up the mess, install windmills with which they light the houses and run a computer. They till the garden, keep goats. They are in love with Townhead and I am in love with them.
What you do and the spirit in which you do it leaves a trace, carries on being done in some way. Townhead is now a three times community: the original railwaymen and their families who first brought it to life and left us with the link of Annie and Spencer Gaunt (Spencer’s ashes are scattered on the roots of one of the trees we planted, now grown big and giving just a little pause to the wind) Lifespan itself and Townhead Collective - the third generation.
First published in Home, Katabasis 2000 ISBN0 904872 33 5
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