I read an interesting article in The Guardian today in which well-known, highly regarded writers recalled elections when they were growing up. The article is here:
I wrote my own (spontaneous) recollections as a result and posted it to the comments site linked to the article. Who knows why? It’s vanity probably or a need (mine) to assert that I too passed this way. Here is what I wrote.
Funny old world. My father (who died in 1974 - the year Jackie Kay, with whom I shared a year or two at Stirling University, recalls) was a friend of Alick Buchanan-Smith. I was 2 years old when Ian Jack answered the door in Fife. Our family lived in a single-end in Glasgow. Hell would have frozen over before my parents or their parents voted for a man like my dad's friend Mr Buchanan-Smith. But he did call him a friend.
By 1974, my grandmother had been moved from her room and kitchen (60 years without an inside toilet) in Glasgow's East End ... they called it de-canting as I recall ... to the 'new flats' in the Gorbals. My older brother and I helped her move her old, large wardrobes and dressing table ... too large to fit properly into her municipal shoe box in a soulless tower block that has subsequently been demolished. The horror of that all mod-cons Council flat in the wasteland of neglect that was inner city Glasgow reduced my grandmother to tears. That was the one and only time I saw her cry. Despite her distress and circumstances, however, my grandmother would have faced the hounds of Hell rather than vote Communist. She would have had the same disregard, by the way, for Tories and that numptie Teddy Taylor.
Oddly enough (in more ways than one, now I think on it) I joined the Communist Party at Stirling University (my mother still believes it was a phase I was going through ... like acne, perhaps) and got to know Jackie's father a little. I was later (82-83) a full time employee in the CP head office in London, reporting to Ian McKay who was, at the time, National Organiser. THERE was a period ... in the lead up to Thatcher's second election victory ... when to be a Communist Party member was to be insane, irredeemably optimistic and hopeful, just plain daft or all of the above. Nevertheless, if the Party hadn’t take the profoundly mistaken decision to wind itself up, I’d probably still be a member; believing as I do that our politics needs a non-Labour, non-Trot, non-Tankie strand of Left thinking that behaves like a Party, not a think-tank.
I lived in Tower Hamlets at the time. It was a desolate, neglected Hell hole made worse by the excesses of Thatcher and Tebbitt. (I couldn’t get on my bike Norman … someone nicked it … literally.) In 1983, there was nothing uplifting about distributing election leaflets to the armour-plated doors of ghastly Council flats inhabited by people who felt scared of their neighbours and abandoned by a political system that must have seemed irrelevant and pointless. But we were ever optimistic that someone somewhere would buy the Morning Star from us even though, as Eurocoms, we didn't care very much for its 'Tankie' fundamentalism.
Which brings me ... at last you must saying, if anyone has made it this far ... to Margaret Drabble's evocative comments in an excellent collection of evocative writing. Ms Drabble perfectly identifies the difficulty and problem of the Left, it seems to me, when she writes "Now I don't know who 'we' are anymore ..."
One could bet one's house on the fact that David Cameron and his ridiculous, dishonest crew know exactly who they mean when they think about "we". All I can do down here is hope that the rest of us don't get fooled again. That and hope that the Left works out again what our "we" means then builds again a broad democratic alliance (sorry, couldn't resist that piece of British Road
(Sorry to go on so. In my defence, I'm obviously inspired by the good writing of your contributors)
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