Anarchy in Maidstone

It was 1986 or maybe 1987, a date left unrecorded in diaries which I usually managed to keep going up until about June, at which point I would tire of writing the same introspective crap every fucking evening and take six months off. I was a student at Maidstone College of Art and lived in an old farmhouse with four others in the village of Otham in Kent. It was seven in the morning, which was an unusual time for someone's fist to be hammering quite so hard at the door, and none of us really knew anyone with fists that size. The fist was hammering at the door of the middle room, adjacent to my bedroom on the ground floor, specifically the door which opened onto Otham Street. This suggested that the owner of the fist was either a stranger, or someone who had never before visited any of us at our student accommodation because the door which opened onto Otham Street actually didn't open at all, serving instead as an oversized frame to our letterbox. I rolled across the bed to the window side and peered through dusty glass into strong morning sunlight of the kind seen on the covers of early seventies folk albums. I could see a cop at the door, and it was his fist which had woken me. He had a few friends with him and a police car was parked on the grass verge a little further down the road. I waved an uneasy wave and then jabbed a finger, pointing towards the side of the house, the universal sign language for use the other door.

I pulled on my dressing gown and went through a mental Rolodex of possible reasons as to why the forces of law and order could be at my home at seven on a Sunday morning. The most obvious possibility was that they had the wrong place. I went through to the kitchen and opened the door to ID badges, search warrants and all the stuff you see on the telly, at least I think I did. It's difficult to be sure of the sequence of events, to separate what happened from that which I've since seen in cop shows. Had there been no search warrant - which is also a possibility - I probably would have invited them in regardless on the grounds of it making me appear less suspicious, and less likely to have committed crimes.

Holy shit, I thought, wondering if I could have murdered anyone and then found the incident so traumatic as to have completely blanked it from memory. I'd been raised to feel guilty about any number of indeterminate crimes and I let them in, understanding that whatever I had done wrong, slamming the door and telling them to piss off probably wasn't going to help the situation even had I been capable of such a demonstration. I recall the senior officer as having resembled Warren Clarke in the role of Detective Superintendent Dalziel from Dalziel and Pascoe, a television series which wouldn't be made until 1996, and which I would never watch because I find it irritating when the spelling and the pronunciation of a proper noun have no letters in common. His resemblance to Warren Clarke should accordingly be taken as indicative of the accuracy of my memory, or not as the case may be.

'We're investigating an act of vandalism,' Mr. Dalziel probably said. 'Mind if we take a look around?'

'Of course not,' I responded with a huge smile, a huge and casual smile, the smile of somebody with nothing to hide.

They came into the house, these four massive cops, or at least I remember the count as having been four. I returned to my bedroom. It was Sunday morning and only Gill and myself were at home. Gill had heard me answer the door and some of the subsequent conversation. Our three housemates were away and this was a problem because this visit was apparently something to do with Yellow Hair Woman, or at least the police saw it as a problem. They really wanted to speak to her. They were reluctant to explain quite why, but this being seven on a Sunday morning suggested that it probably wasn't a fine on an overdue library book.

Yellow Hair Woman worked at some pizza place in town on Saturday evenings and usually stayed in Maidstone at her boyfriend's place; so I said no, I had no idea where she was.

Would Gill or I mind if they had a look around Yellow Hair Woman's room in her absence?

I didn't really get this, having already seen a search warrant, or at least seeming to recall having seen a search warrant; but there obviously wasn't much to be gained from suggesting they go fuck themselves. Gill and myself felt we knew Yellow Hair Woman well enough to know she probably wouldn't have either a gun or a Sainsbury's carrier bag full of heroin stuffed behind her bookshelf, and she'd never been particularly keen on the old space fags. On the other hand, Yellow Hair Woman had spent some time at the women's peace camp at Greenham Common protesting the presence of cruise missiles at the RAF base, which somewhat placed her political sympathies in opposition to certain aspects of government policy; and while it wasn't that I didn't believe in that sinister knock on the door at seven in the morning or secretive government agencies who might resort to Orwellian tactics, I genuinely didn't see how they could be interested in us. Yellow Hair Woman hadn't said much about Greenham, but I was fairly sure that she hadn't blown anyone up or anything.

Tap tap tap.

The knock was on my bedroom door, just a knuckle rather than the entire fist. 'Mind if I come in and take a look around?' Warren Clarke asked, coming in and taking a look around.

My room was fairly tidy for a room in an old house occupied by someone with a heavy comic book and record album habit. Warren Clarke's eyes widened a little, doubtless impressed by my record collection, and his eyes scanned the posters I'd blutacked to the wall. They came to rest on one which had been sent to me by Andy Martin of the Apostles, a non-anarchist and not especially punky band associated with certain London counter-cultural types. The poster showed a stylised police officer handing money to a female figure whose profession is identified by the slogun Social Workers: Paid to Grass. The design satirised the sort of information leaflets handed out at dole offices and medical centres. The implication, for anyone missing the reference, was that government workers assigned to assist the unemployed or otherwise disadvantaged will happily relay your supposedly confidential information to the forces of law and order for money. It wasn't that I felt strongly about social workers or their allegedly flapping mouths - although I liked the general message of  distrust for authority - but mainly I had it on my wall because I thought it was funny.

I found it less funny as Warren Clarke glared at the image and gruffly observed, 'well, I'm not sure what I think about that.'

I knew I was doomed, and that this was the moment described on all those Crass albums in which the system would reveal its true face unto me. This time tomorrow I would be found dead in a cell, found in possession of something which had been planted in my room, resisting arrest blah blah blah...

Warren Clarke sniffed my ash tray, peered under the bed, and then left. The cops gathered in the kitchen and apologised for the inconvenience, at last deigning to tell us what they had been looking for. A cashpoint at one of the banks in town had been vandalised during the early hours of the morning. Yellow Hair Woman's card had been used to raise the perspex security screen, and then someone had gone at it with emulsion paint, screwdrivers, hammers and the like. We told them it really didn't sound like the sort of thing Yellow Hair Woman would do, because it really didn't.

Days later, the fugitive from justice reappeared. She knew all about the investigation and had already been interviewed and released without charge. She told the police she had lost the card, which was true in so much as she had given it to Revolutionary Mollusc Man. His name wasn't really Revolutionary Mollusc Man any more than her name was Yellow Hair Woman, and she had given him the card because it was expired and he had asked for it. Revolutionary Mollusc Man was an anarchist engaged in a one-cephalopod war against the forces of capitalism.

'So he used your card to smash up the cashpoint?'

'Yes.' Yellow Hair Woman had the sort of brow which leant itself to an impressive frown, not unlike Little My from Tove Jansson's Moomintroll books - small and fierce but inherently likeable. She frowned impressively as we sat in the pub smoking our roll-ups, taking stock. 'It was stupid of me. I wish I hadn't done it now.'

'Well, you didn't really do anything. Not if it was him, I mean.'

'I knew why he wanted the card, but I didn't think about it. I feel pretty rotten about the police searching our house. You and Gill—'

'Oh don't worry. I suppose it was a bit of an adventure, if anything. There was no harm done.'

I'd known Revolutionary Mollusc Man for most of the three years of my course. He'd started an anarchist group at the college and I'd joined, not because I was an anarchist but because I was incredibly lonely. We met every so often around his house to discuss a fanzine he produced on his own personal spirit duplicator, or to plan attendance of marches and protests going on in London or elsewhere. I agreed with the spirit of the enterprise, if not always with its purported aims, whatever they were. I wrote a couple of short, self-involved, and probably barely literate articles for the fanzine, but my heart wasn't really in it. I didn't really know what I thought of anarchy as an ideology but it sounded a little dubious to me, and my distrust of authority was not then so well formed as to be rubbed in people's faces; and whilst I really didn't like to say anything, this seemed to be mainly what Revolutionary Mollusc Man was about, or it looked that way from where I was stood.

He could be generous, funny, and was often great company, but at other times his company became exhausting. To be at his side was to be on trial, inevitably to be found lacking sufficient anger in regard to this political outrage or that fiasco perpetrated by an oppressive capitalist society. He presented himself as a moral beacon, something to which the rest of us might aspire. I never understood how anyone could be quite that angry about matters of which they seemingly had little direct experience, or the need for that anger to be acknowledged as a mark of character.

Either the Revolutionary Mollusc Man fanzine or an issue of Class War he had taken to distributing had featured an article calling for the head of PC Keith Blakelock to be paraded in some undefined capacity upon a spike in general celebration of class anger. Blakelock had been killed during the Broadwater Farm riots on a housing estate in north London following the death of a black woman whose house he had searched. Aside from the fact of Blakelock already being dead, I tend to find calls for heads impaled on spikes uncivilised, unnecessary, and unhelpful regardless of which side of the fence you happen to be stood upon. Revolutionary Mollusc Man was very much with the heads impaled on spikes camp in regard to this issue, which apparently made me either a bleeding heart middle class liberal with no experience of just how tough it can be out on the mean streets, or a Nazi sympathiser. Personally I preferred to see myself as simply someone not actively seeking causes upon which to pin my angry slurping noises in an effort to make everyone else feel bad about themselves.

Revolutionary Mollusc Man turned up on facebook many years later, as everyone does in the end. I'm still causing trouble, he told me, the neutral black and white text on the screen seeming to communicate something like glee. I congratulated him because I suppose that was what he wanted to hear - or rather to read - and I recalled Revolutionary Mollusc Man discovering me stuffing a cheeseburger into my face outside McDonalds one afternoon, and then I recalled my friend Carl catching him eating a sausage in the kitchen of the student house in Terrace Road.

'You can't eat that,' observed Carl. 'I thought you were a vegetarian!'

'No-one tells me what to do,' Revolutionary Mollusc Man explained testily.

After about a week he began setting me straight regarding my facebook posts, pointing out that what I had said was bollocks, as I would surely realise had I been right there on the picket line fighting off hordes of EDL thugs. I wrote piss off, and deleted him from my friends list, which felt good but also a little sad because I genuinely like to think the best of people.

Despite a cashpoint getting knackered thirty years ago, capitalism is still with us, now more voracious than ever and busily transforming the opposition into smaller versions of itself. I don't know if one broken cashpoint achieved anything, whether it made some worthwhile point about the nature of the beast, or even caused anyone to question anything which needed questioning. That act of nocturnal sabotage may well have achieved some of this, but it also dropped one of my housemates in the shit, and probably further galvanised the authoritarian resolve of some men in suits who tend to regard anyone not in a suit as a potentially dangerous anarchist. So whichever way you look at this one, there was never really anything much to look at.

Announcements in the Grating Monotone of a Happy Dalek

'Remember how when you were at school, everybody wanted to be one of the black kids because they always seemed the coolest?'

I didn't because the population of my school had been almost exclusively white, of which there was not one individual whom I had regarded as cool or had wished to emulate in any way. Nevertheless, I'd seen Grange Hill so I understood the general principle, and I saw where this was going.

'How come we ended up with that pair of clowns?'

Rodney and myself looked over to where Toyan was once again collapsed with laughter, and to the sorting frame a little further along at which Joe stood grinning to himself, making some grating announcement to no-one in particular regarding Frankie Dettori.

We sighed in unison.

I'd recently transferred from Catford sorting office, an office which had been blessed with a higher percentage of black staff. I say blessed because in my experience ethnically diverse offices tend to be better places to work for the simple reason that black people - meaning those of African or Caribbean descent - tend to be less tolerant of bullshit. It's a generalisation of course, but during my time at Royal Mail I usually found that when unrealistic or unfair amendments to established working practice were imposed from above, black people seemed more inclined to stand up for themselves, whilst whitey would usually grumble, and then just get on with it as best he or she could whilst whining about others not pulling their weight as a cover for his or her having caved in like a wanker.

Members of Royal Mail management often found themselves under pressure from higher up, specifically pressure to achieve effectively impossible goals in terms of productivity; and so, themselves brainwashed into believing that the word impossible simply signified a lack of can do attitude, would, for example, ask an already overworked van driver to incorporate the work of another's route into his own without payment of due overtime. By way of example, this was roughly what was asked of a driver named Bobby Duncan, or at least named Bobby Duncan for the sake of this essay. Bobby had declined on the grounds that what he'd been asked to do could not be achieved in the time available, but the manager had refused to back down, and so it had gone back and forth all morning, drawing the usual snide and mocking comments about black people being scared of a bit of hard work from those who really should have known better. Eventually, threatened with disciplinary action, Bobby found himself overcome by a mighty and righteous fury. The manager, sensing that he had perhaps misjudged the situation, retired to his office and locked the door, obliging Bobby to take up a broom that had been left against the wall and proceed to batter the toughened glass by which those in the office were able to observe the shop floor.

'Come out of there,' Bobby ordered with quite a lot more swearing. 'Come out of there right now!'

It particularly impressed me that although Bobby spoke with a loud, commanding voice, he didn't exactly sound angry. It was simply that he felt his frustrations would be most eloquently expressed by forcibly introducing the broom to the manager's bottom, and this simply wasn't going to happen whilst the cowardly man had locked himself in.

'Calm down. Look, I'm calling the police!'

I could see him dialling through the glass, wide-eyed at the ongoing assault.

Bang bang bang.

'Come out of there and face me.'

Another postman, another black guy as it happens, came along and reminded Bobby that whatever the deal might be, it probably wasn't worth a night in the cells. Bobby conceded that this was a well-made point and they both went outside for a ciggie.

Sadly Bobby was suspended, although the event was later memorialised in an adaptation of the Harry Roberts song heard echoing amongst the sorting frames whenever we were having a bad day:

Bobby Duncan is our mate, is our mate, is our mate,
Bobby Duncan is our mate. He smacks guv'nors.

In 1993 I transferred to East Dulwich sorting office and was surprised to find myself surrounded almost entirely by white people. I had no explanation for this, given that East Dulwich itself was not lacking in ethnic diversity, but there it was, and despite my being entirely Caucasian, it made me uneasy. At this point it wasn't even that I valued the company of any one racial group over another, or that - as I have said - ethnically diverse work environments tend to have fewer persons inclined to just roll over and swallow whatever foolishness is foisted upon them from above; but simply, if you're white, and everyone around you is white, the higher the chance of your encountering someone who regards this as an ideal state, and who assumes that you too would very much like to stick them in a boat and send them all back; and as such people tend to be idiots, their presence reduces your chance of being able to find anyone with whom to have a decent conversation. I always imagined this might be just me, but my wife has expressed a similar sense of unease when we find ourselves driving through areas which seem just a little bit more white than can be considered healthy. This doubtless makes us sound like we're trying too hard, but that's just how it is, and any stance which probably annoys Richard Littlejohn cannot be without some merit.

Joe came first and then Toyan, two young black guys at East Dulwich. Toyan had somehow picked up the nickname Love Daddy, and although he was good at pulling the frowny rap face that best suited his new title, he didn't seem able to go five seconds without collapsing into hysterical laughter at the slightest provocation. He was a nice guy, but he was the opposite of cool, and Rodney and I sought the company of someone who said funny shit which would make sense when repeated to people we knew outside of work.

On the other hand, Joe seemed to be entirely his own phenomenon. He shuffled around like some weird Caribbean Womble, always grinning, always wearing full uniform at all times, including the dayglo waterproof jacket. He smiled and moved his head in the manner of a gnu seeking water when he spoke, never once appearing without his sunglasses. He seemed to represent some halfway developmental stage between Bingo from the Banana Splits and Stevie Wonder, but for words delivered like announcements in the grating monotone of a happy Dalek.

'Hello Lawrence,' he announced with excessive volume as I took my seat in the canteen. It was his first day and he extended a hand in a woolly glove, having presumably already been told who I was. 'My name is Joe. I like The Sweeney, but not because of the swearing!'

He laughed to himself. I imagined some private joke, something from a home in which he had been chastised for bad language. The unprompted declaration of love for a notoriously violent 1970s cop show was peculiar, but seemed like a distant relative of the conversational small talk with which Joe had not quite got to grips.

I shook his hand, and made no further contribution to the conversation because I was eating my breakfast, and I didn't really need to say anything as Joe droned away about his favourite television shows and Frankie Dettori, the Italian horse racing jockey. He seemed to be enjoying his own testimony.

Over the next couple of weeks, it wasn't so much that we learned to avoid Joe, but that we learned to resign ourselves to the inevitable in the event of working next to him. He was patently not all there, but harmless and sufficiently able to do as he was told as to do the job well enough to keep from being sacked. It would be annoying to find oneself stationed at the next frame, subjected to whatever was uppermost in Joe's thoughts that week, but so long as you could keep in sight that really he was just trying to be friendly, it wasn't so bad.

'You know, Lawrence, I only have another six weeks of my classes and then I can get a better job than this one.'

He'd been droning on for a full two hours, something about evening classes at an adult education centre, and my patience was wearing thin. 'Maybe you could become a brain surgeon, Joe?'

He laughed. 'I doubt I could do that, Lawrence. I'm not intelligent enough to be a brain surgeon,' and he said it with that same fixed smile as always.

I felt terrible. I gritted my teeth and mentally gave myself a kick up the arse for being such a tosser. Joe hadn't picked up on my sarcasm, or at least it didn't seem that way. He wandered off towards the registered letter office chortling to himself, chuckles interspersed with the name of Frankie Dettori invoked for reasons best known to himself.

George Stone, a postman who often popped into The Foresters around midday upon completion of his delivery, once gave an account of the week that Joe had been assigned to deliver mail to East Dulwich Grove. George had been sat in the pub from around one until four during which time he'd watched Joe chaining a delivery trolley to the street sign on the other side of the road, then alternate bundles of mail with returning to spend an hour or so in the betting shop next door, over and over until George went home, and presumably after as it had begun to get dark. Joe was clearly a gambling man and fond of the horses, so that explained that.

He drove us nuts at times, not least because of how it was impossible to be angry with him without feeling guilty, although on the positive side, he seemed more or less impervious to the occasional cutting remark; at least until we began to notice that his ceaselessly droning testimony had begun to include unsettling references to enemies.

'Enemies, Joe? What do you mean?'

'There are a lot of sharks in this office, Lawrence!' He emphasised the word sharks as though trying to scare me. It sort of worked, and more terrible insight was gleaned a few weeks later when we heard he'd been attacked whilst delivering to the flats on Dog Kennel Hill. He was back at work next day, a black eye, but still sounding as incongruously cheery as ever. It took some time but we eventually got the story.

It was hot, the middle of summer, and Joe was as always walking around in full uniform, waterproof coat zipped up to the neck.

'You must be sweating your bollocks off, mate,' some passing stranger had quipped in jovial fashion.

'Go to hell!' Joe had declared in the voice of Davros vowing the destruction of all non-Dalek lifeforms.

Whatever the deal was, it wasn't so much that he was ill-equipped to cope with daily life, but that he did better if you just let him get on with it in his own way. We all sat in our line sorting large flat envelopes into the frame, chunk chunk chunk as each one hit the metal at the back of its allotted cubby hole. Joe was sat at the end of the line, waterproof coat, black eye, chuckling away to himself.

'Frankie Dettori... hur hur hur...'

'Why is he wearing those?'

I looked and noticed he wore a pair of tight fitting white gloves. It made me think of Mickey Mouse.

Someone sighed, and began an account which explained why I had earlier noticed Joe leaping around at the back of the sorting frame, doing jumping jacks. Tom and Darren had told Joe he needed to do a series of special sorting exercises each morning before getting down to work. It was a directive issued from on high and everyone had to do it. The man said so.

Now they had given him a pair of gloves that somebody had found. Someone told him that he had to wear these special sorting gloves to prevent the spread of disease.

Joe either hadn't noticed that only he wore the magic gloves, or  he was happy just to know that he wouldn't be catching AIDs from any of the letters sorted that morning.

Lloyd sighed and shook his head. 'Joe,' he said, not unkindly. 'Take the gloves off, man.'

We watched their conversation, Joe incongruously smiling as the truth of the prank was revealed, as two more names were added to his list of sharks. We shook our heads and felt bad because it was still funny, despite everything.