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london

1968

​I’m 18, you’re 23; both of us in London again after a gap (for me) of the four Derbyshire years.  I’m starting at UCL, living in College Hall in Malet Street.  You’re in Elgin Crescent, but your life takes you close to mine, and mine to yours.  We really might have met, threading our way through the traffic on Tottenham Court Road, taking a short cut along Drury Lane or Neal Street or brushing shoulders along the pavements of the Portobello market.  What would we have seen, as each looked over the other?  Would we have recognised something beneath the surface, the seed of a friendship which would shape our later years?  For all our geographical closeness, we were still in so many ways worlds apart.

I had fled to London, as many do, in search of some ill-defined something.  I knew, even before I failed the Oxbridge exams, that London was where I was headed.   I was desperate to escape suburbia, what I saw as a stifling and hypocritical middle-class mediocrity.  I knew before I left that my relationship with my first doting boyfriend would not last the year.  And I was looking for – what?  Excitement?  Anonymity?  That elusive freedom?  In these ways we were probably very similar.  Perhaps some of our pathways were similar too: I certainly felt myself to be part of an amorphous movement which defended our right to love, and sleep, where we chose, without ties or possession.  Now I look back, I see a different impulse afoot.  I had my first (horrible) sex in London after the Freshers’ Ball with a horrible snuffly man we nicknamed Philshippe, who blanked me completely afterwards and left me with crabs to boot.  The fact that, even so, I bought him a tiny bottle of whisky for his cold demonstrates what I was really about, though it took me another fifty years, near enough, to recognise: anxious to please, with some romantic notion that instant sex was a route to instant love, I thought that this would fix things, transform me into someone who was good enough.  In the way of such insights, it seems so obvious now.
​
And of course I was anything but liberated, anything but free.  My roommate was a real innocent from Whitehaven, in love with Henry V, a tee-total non-smoker, whilst I was well-practised in the art of Benson & Hedges or Peter Stuyvesant.  That we got on so well, remaining close friends ever since, demonstrates the superficial nature of my freedom games.  I did make it to an all-night gig (did we use the term then?) at the Roundhouse with Nick McGill, and saw The Who perform live for a handful of people.  I did try pot.  And I continued to explore the pleasures of sex, mostly with disappointing results.  But Linda’s influence led me towards the university church round the corner, and our first term at the tail end of 1968 was a mainly innocent affair of coffee in the Black Sheep, soup runs on Thursday nights, fresh pineapple and indifferent omelettes and barefoot trips to the ‘beach’ (our name for Russell Square), to the tune of the Beatles and John Peel’s ‘Night Ride.

1970...

Now I’m into my second year at UCL. I’m wedged into a long narrow cupboard of a room amongst the priests and nuns on the first floor in 111 Gower Street, the Catholic Chaplaincy. I’ve been squeezed in to the non-student wing as an afterthought by Bruce Kent, then chaplain, to honour a promise he’d made over a beer one evening and promptly forgot. Despite the religious aspect (or perhaps because of it?), this is an excellent place to live: an international flavour, bar and dartboard in the basement and free tea and cake every afternoon at four if you happen to be about. Also, remarkable freedom to come and go as I pleased. The only payback I recall: taking Monseigneur Kent’s Labrador out for a stroll occasionally (I never did quite figure out how to step aside fast enough when he cocked his leg; the dog, that is).

The one downside that I associate with 111 is Gilly. We’ve spoken her about her a little, you and I, in relation to Pete and your first encounters with ‘madness’ – your term. So I’m nineteen approaching twenty, with a social conscience and a concern for others that leads me to think I can fix anything with a little love and care. Probably, my efforts were counter-productive. Over the next year or so I made hospital visits, responded to midnight suicide threats, picked up the pieces after a particularly bruising episode for G. in the threesome in which she was embroiled, and literally picked her up out of the gutter. Eventually, after too many promises I couldn’t keep, I gave up and cut all contacts with her, which probably hurt more than I care to know.

Although you don’t have to be religious to live here, I’m still involved with the other team and, at the start of 1970, only a couple of months away from my confirmation. I go to classes with Sister Mary Ann in the vestry of Christ the King – we eat chocolate digestives and discuss minor points of faith – and arrange with Sarah Cullen, a hard-boiled undergraduate who became for a while an ITN newsreader, to borrow a smart navy and white coat to go over my white mini-dress for the occasion. I remember nothing of the ceremony itself, though I suspect there was a bishop. Afterwards, we lunch en famille in the Cora Hotel and then there’s a big celebratory tea on the top floor of 89, in Mrs Gonse’s flat.

89 is 89 Gower Street, a few doors down from 111 and one of the boundaries of my small world. Linda, my room-mate from my first year, has moved here with another Linda from Whitehaven, an old school friend. An earnest young Anglican chaplain nursing a broken heart, lodges in the basement and Phil Crockett somewhere above. There are others I know less well. And then there’s Richard; or Dick, in the days when that was a nickname rather than an insult. The house, four floors of gaunt Victorian terrace with the traffic thundering past outside, becomes a haven for me, Richard’s room in particular, long before we are an item. My brother remembers a kind of mobile he had set up there, a confection of sand and string which relied on weight and a through breeze (I think). I recall a worn carpet good for sitting on, a collection of modern jazz to listen to, a kettle and tea, a tree outside the window and hours spent holed up there, day-dreaming, while he flew in and flew out, who knows where. Sometimes I’d stay and listen to him practise the cello – I remember his concentration, and the rhythm of his inhaled breath. Or there were nights when Dick, Crockett and I would go out for a meal or a beer or two. And eventually, just Richard and I.

We dance coyly round each other for some months. I am in awe of him of course: he is nine years older, product of a different world, and seems both clever and indifferent to me. Nothing happens. And then one afternoon in May – it must be near his birthday, which is May 16th – he calls for me and we walk up Gower Street to Regents Park together. Perhaps we hold hands. We go straight to the rose garden and somehow – I’m not sure how this happens – we are lying on the grass between the trellises and kissing. I feel the earth tip sideways. It feels very public. Afterwards – what? We seemed to spend more time apart than together, often splitting up and then getting back together. Or he’d just disappear for weeks, and then I’d bump into him . a pub or on the street with Cathy or Penny or some other older, prettier, better woman. There was something, though: I remember one whole night, reading Auden aloud to him and then sleeping – literally sleeping, or dozing at any rate, fully clothed, lying together innocently under his red blanket. Lovely lady, he called me, or Fag Ash Lil. We tended to do things with a group rather than as a couple – his Boston friend Vicki, Crockett – along with another of the university chaplains.

 Around the corner from 89 and also part of the Anglican chaplaincy were Numbers 12 and 13 Woburn Square. The top floor flat of Number 12 becomes my home for my third year: I’m back sharing with Linda, now over Henry V and engaged to a red-haired Welsh LSE undergrad called John. Linda and I have the back room, single beds end to end just as in College Hall, and John shares with a film student called Geoff, a lovely funny and gentle guy from Wigan. I don’t know when we learnt that Geoff was gay and John more than a little homophobic or who made the decision to keep quiet but it remained a secret for as long as the four of us were together. Linda and John did marry but it didn’t last long and as far as I know he’s still in the dark. Sadly, Geoff died from AIDS in 1990. Back in our student days, we have an oddly innocent year together, sharing out the cleaning. There is a tiny kitchen full of daffodils, roast dinners on Sundays and a kitty for the shopping. Geoff makes a short film about Virginia Woolf, on location in Sussex and I get the starring role.  

I’m jumping ahead, though. It’s still 1970, early summer and I find a new friend. He’s older again, 14 years ahead of me in fact and, it seems now, of a type guaranteed to draw me: that is, he’s other, in background and age at least, professionally interested in things beyond the mundane, being a priest and in students, being a chaplain and, the big attraction I fear, technically unavailable. He’s also becoming part of my inward-looking, increasingly incestuous circle. It’s not just my naivety, though: in some way we are soulmates beneath the skin, both intense, both given to sudden passions and furies and despairs and irrational attachments; and, in another of life’s ironies, perhaps, both drawn to Richard. Of course I’m flattered to be taken into his confidence and his company, heading off on the back of his Honda 50, helmetless in those days and often barefoot too, or wobbling with him on the tandem through the Charing Cross Road traffic, weakened by his oddly intimate manner. And he represented a whole world opening up to me: records of ‘Façade’ and Mozart and – Britten, perhaps? Visits to Covent Garden, art galleries. Books, poetry – Larkin, Sitwell – and I sat at the feet of Kathleen Raine one evening in his wonderful front room. Or I’d call in for a late coffee or a brandy, or chew on the betel nuts from the box on the hearth, sit in front of his puttering gas fire, juggle with names and ideas I barely knew, listening, edging closer. Before long I was trying to decide between him & Richard, and Truffaut’s ‘Jules et Jim’ seemed to sum up my life at the time.  

My second year at UCL ended and I began a wretched few weeks working on the checkouts in Tesco’s on Goodge Street, camping out in the flat in Woburn Square, and then ‘looking after’ the vicarage in Burnt Oak, a favour for yet another priest I had a crush on, a blissful two weeks of sunshine and feeding cats and picking elderberries and baking, whilst ‘Jules and Jim’ went on a tour of America together. I had postcards and letters from both and tried to make up my mind.  Eventually I settled for Richard, a decision accepted by the other with a good grace:. ‘You’d have made a bloody marvellous vicar’s wife,’ he wrote to me once. Which just goes to show how little he knew me, how little I allowed myself to be known, or perhaps how little I knew myself. Some years later he married a woman very different from me, who I expect has been marvellous at the job. They have remained friends with Richard and Felicity over the years, and recently the priest, now retired, has been in touch a time or two. But he inhabits a different world: I was sobered by the extent of the change when we met again a couple of years ago. Or perhaps it’s I who have changed. I wasn’t surprised yesterday to find him listed in Debretts!

As for Richard, that summer as usual we were apart then together then apart. I still have a note from him stuck in the journal of that year. It appeared with a rose in a glass vase one evening after I got in from my struggles with Tesco: ‘A rose to smile you home’ it reads. ‘Hope you feel better.  I don’t.’ Now, we keep in touch, although the rediscovered intimacy (platonic of course) of a few years ago has given way to a more careful contact. Still, it’s something. ‘I can’t bear to lose you again,’ he said as he held on to my hand in Savino’s one snowy afternoon.  
​
I’m remembering I asked you, yesterday or the day before if, when you were looking back at 1970, you had any regrets. Your reply was very definite: of course not, we’re both happily married to other people, I have three children… And of course I agree, in a way. Neither of my big passions of that year would have led to a happy marriage, I’m sure. And how could we, any of us, have been anything other than the people we were then, for all our misjudgements and failings? I feel we were lucky to get away with it somehow – that our well-intentioned antics didn’t cause more hurt. And I do feel regret: that I didn’t pay more attention to what was going on politically or even academically, given that I was brushing shoulders with Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode and Gombrich; that I had such a massively confused idea of who I was and what I wanted; and that I had so little care for those I truly loved. 

...and the rest

​
​I wasn’t done with London by the end of 1970, of course. There was the final year at UCL and the results:  a mediocre degree and what felt to my rebellious self an irrelevant ceremony, at cross purposes with parents struggling to be proud of a daughter who refused to wear the cap or to curtsey to the Queen Mum. Afterwards I hung on in the capital for several years, somewhat adrift: there was the job as nanny for four-year-old Dan Sturgis in Gloucester Crescent, just a couple of hundred yards down Inverness Street from 221 Camden High Street and the Clutes – another possibility of our paths crossing. An idyllic few months for me of roses in the garden and nursery teas in their basement kitchen, a marked contrast with Oxford House in Bethnal Green, where I spent the next eighteen months and where I met Jud and the man who became her partner and eventually her husband, with an on-off liaison with me on the way. A sideways step to NCH and six months of boredom, holed up in a flat on Sotheby Road. It was during a week in Cyprus for a wedding that I discovered I was pregnant. An ill-starred move to Connaught Mews, Marble Arch and a termination in east London somewhere: the abiding memory painting the narrow kitchen deep brown then on to Shepherd’s Bush and Link on Wood Lane before the contract with Patchwork (see Section Two of ‘My Portobello Box’) followed by the flight to Primrose Hill and the sanctuary of Julie’s first floor flat: two large black New York cats, Ira and Howie and a mattress on the floor. I cleaned houses to save up the air fare to South Africa, a last attempt to heal a broken relationship which finally collapsed for good on my return – I recall howling my way round the perimeter of Regent’s Park Zoo – before I cut my teaching teeth in Shelburne Comprehensive in Hollway and left London for good, heading north, at the end of 1974.
 
In recent times, visits to London feel strangely like coming home as I slip through the familiar streets of WC1 or dodge the crowds of St Pancras.  I remember arriving with my dad at the station in a taxi one evening, at the front of what is now the grandly refurbished St Pancras Renaissance Hotel – and before that, the callow teenager that was me, walking along Euston Road with my huge suitcase in the dark on my way to College Hall for the first time. And Carluccio’s on the concourse of St Pancras International our regular meeting place, Di, in the days when travel was possible for us, looking out over the statue of The Kiss and, beyond, the trains to Paris: a journey we promised ourselves we would make together one day. So many memories of London mark a drawing together of our paths – the Tate galleries, Camden and Soho, the French pub, Jimmy’s Restaurant in Frith Street, now gone; the day when your knitting wool fell and stopped the traffic somewhere near Oxford Street; visits to Sadler’s Wells and the Brunswick Cinema; the madcap scheme to retrace our several youths in Wembley and Harrow from the top of the Number 18 (after an hour and a half in a traffic jam on Euston Road, we gave up in Willesden in the rain and took another bus back)…
Picture

1968 etc

Picture

​I’d already been married for two years, running a successful one-person fashion company, Dianne Lifton Ltd that I ran from home in Elgin Crescent since 1967.  As a founder member of the London New Arts Laboratory in Robert Street, I became involved in the alternative art ‘scene’. I needed to choose between that and the commercial world of fashion and start to employ more people other than my accountant etc. I chose the world of street happenings and experimental approach to art forms. My clothing designs had become unconventional and using materials developed for space exploration. I lectured part-time on experimental clothing design at the London College of Fashion.
​

 
before
 
                        
Picture Having always been in London – suburbia – since birth, when I studied fashion design at the London College of Fashion and Clothing Technology 1962-1964, I didn’t have to leave home for my studies. At college and at home I had already met some interesting boyfriends who introduced me into jazz and Bob Dylan, I was reading D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and even the Karma Sutra. My close student friend came to live in our house while her parents were away. So in my mother’s eyes why should I need to leave? Of course, and consequently, I was already becoming rebellious. Therefore, from choice, I left the parental 1950’s-style of bringing up and went to live in a flat in Golders’ Green with my student friend and another. I was then 19. Living in the centre of London was a very different lifestyle! I pursued my longtime beatnik image, beer-drinking, tight fitting denims etc. Married to my first husband in 1966, we shared living at first in Camden Town.

​
At the end of that year, during a New Year's Eve 'all night ball' at the Round House in Camden Town, featuring The Who, The Move, The Pink Floyd and The Cream, whilst the latter were playing, I drove a silver-sprayed Cadillac amongst the people standing and dancing near the stage. A friend sat in the passenger seat beside me. We were both dressed from head to foot in silver – soft ‘helmets’ (in vogue at the time), silver mini culottes and silver tights.
 
I brought the car to a standstill at the foot of the stage, and the passenger and I got out carrying large axes and began to smash the car with them. Gustav Metzger was projecting a liquid crystal slide show onto the band while it was performing.
 
Some artist friends stood round us, but were unable to hold back the crowds some of whom wanted to stop us destroying the car, whilst others wanted to help and took hold of the axes themselves. This all happened before security guards could get to us and stop the mayhem that had ensued. No arrests were made. I had been asked to participate in this action by Alan Dale and John Sleet. John Latham also presented a work during the evening. The only remnant I now possess is the silver garment that I wore.
 
We moved to our own flat in Notting Hill Gate. At last – our own home – no furniture – a home-made bed (wooden slat base and pieces of foam) that served as a main sitting area in the big room – three huge mirrors leaning side by side against the wall opposite the 'bed', a hi-fi system and wall to ceiling bookshelves along the wall opposite the two large sash windows that looked down on the street – a launderette on one corner and a pub on the other, most of Elgin Crescent looking to the left – to the right the crossroads where the continuation of Elgin Crescent led shortly into Portobello Road – all the local food shops necessary (I'd never seen fresh tuna before), fruit and veg stalls on most days to the left and uphill to the right the old antique and junk shops. So here was where we settled.
 
I was working for Roger Nelson Ltd at the time, John was an architect with Hackney Borough Council.  And then on a £50 gift from Ma, I started the clothing business – Dianne Lifton Ltd and for the next two years the flat was my base – using initially the small front room in which to construct a large work table in front of the window, and an old table (from childhood) with a drawer that held all the different coloured reels of cotton. For two years I ran my company, creating collections, taking them to posh boutiques in taxis, taking orders, delivering the pattens and materials to outworkers in the East End – delivering the finished garments – sizes 8-14 – to the boutiques, taking more orders... new collection, sourcing materials – wearing my designs always... Freedom and laid-back hard work – success – small-scale and all alongside the alternative life that was eventually to take over…  becoming founding members of the London New Arts Lab (Institute for Research into Art and Technology Robert Street where John and I developed our 'Cybernetic Theatre' – creating our performances, John using computer (analogue, of course) technology to translate movement into sound that in turn determined the way light moved around the space, which had a changing visual effect on the movement.

then the happenings

Picture
The first Touch Experiment that I initiated and organized was in Portobello Road and attracted substantial publicity and reviewed in New Society [August 1968]
Creating Computer Mime Scripts in the shared with husband studio space in the London New Arts Laboratory [see London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde, David Curtis, 2020]
Experimenting with pneumatic clothing for a mime script performance
I wrote ‘Leprosy’ – performance that included medieval music, mime script movement and touching the audience
Collaborating with a friend to create a magazine, ‘Redress’ to challenge women’s role in society, particularly in the clothing. An article of interview with a photograph of a model wearing one of my experimental clothing in STUDENT Magazine [Autumn 1969]
 

until

LSD – the first hallucinogen I'd taken – in the flat with John and Rich who'd supplied it for us and whom we trusted to be with us while we settled into the 'high' and through the stage of uncontrollable laughter – unforgettable images – those cotton reels! How could I feel that I was the tree in the communal garden outside the window? My head full of Zen Buddhist imagery – all those connections – never to see things in the same way again – the kaleidoscopic ‘coloured’ black trousers I was wearing – the heightened senses moving from the visual to sound to touch and sensuality to taste...

And so a period followed of drug-taking and throwing the I-Ching – dependent on its instructions before making those everyday decisions that felt so momentous – we grew a huge potted marijuana plant in front of the back window of the flat – its leaf then unrecognised by those 'straights', including the police, of course. …
 
​
and into 1969-70
 
Life became darker. And also at the same time - Pete – the horrendous realisation that he had had a serious mental breakdown from which he was never to fully recover before his death 39 years later – how it changed all our lives from then on. Another story to tell. Nevertheless, although on the surface – the crazy life went on
 
Despite John and I had decided to experiment with making our marriage more inclusive of other relationships, a time of complete emotional turmoil followed. Susie C became a trigger - John fell in love with her, she with me! With her experiences of therapy with R.D Laing, we had long get-togethers at no19 with the three of us trying to work things out. I didn’t feel threatened by this triangle – she became a friend. When John became close  with Carolee S, I no longer coped with inclusive relationships. I loved Bob H who lived around the corner of Elgin Crescent so we spent a lot of time together. Our lives centred on scoring and smoking with friends – getting stoned – listening to 'sounds' – eating rice and vegetables – the restaurant Seed where we sat cross-legged around low tables. I continued living in Elgin Crescent, John had moved permanently in Robert Street. It was late 1969 that when things began to unravel after the ‘heights’ of 1968.

Open-air rock concerts – camping in the back of my Morris Transit - I felt self-independent probably for the first time in my life. Then Nick happened – 1970 – life changed again …
 
John and I terminated the lease and I moved out of Elgin Crescent and I lived in Joan’s basement flat in Shepherds Bush. Joan had a Doberman and I had a kitten that I’d named as ‘Bless You’ on account of its frequent sneezing. Small enough to fit in the dog’s mouth they played together in this way while Bless You rolled round a bar of the chair.

My relationship with Bob continued and his calm and strong presence helped me through many of the crises through Pete’s psychotic episodes. He was determined, however, to get out of London and live self-sufficiently in the countryside.  He tried to persuade me to join him, I wasn’t ready to leave and he eventually left for Wales.
​
I had met Nick, Pete’s close friend at Cambridge. They had both continued to live there, Nick renting a room from Liz who was Pete’s partner at the time. It was in that room Pete, Nick and I spent a lot of time together, lying on the floor beside the flickering gas fire smoking dope, taking a trip to Amsterdam at some point. Eventually we became lovers, but for me not as yet with deep feelings. Strange fate – Nick caught Chicken Pox and went to stay with his parents. One evening in my Shepherds Bush basement room, when Pete and Liz were visiting, she said prophetically, 'All we need now is Nick'. It seemed only minutes later that we saw his legs appearing down the steps outside and, as I felt his strong, warm embrace, my face sinking into his chest and inhaling the smell of his donkey jacket, I fell in love.
 
So for me an impossibly happy ending to 1970. After a lot of chasing up and down the A10 to Cambridge, the relationship in a continually stormy on/off state during which time Cathy was conceived, I left Shepherds Bush and moved into 'the room' with Nick in March 1971 and lived there for 6 months before moving to Ipswich in September, in time for Cathy’s birth in November.
 


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  • HOME
  • THE EXHIBITION
  • ARCHIVE
    • THE BEGINNING
    • CHILDHOOD ARCHIVE
    • TEENS
    • LONDON ARCHIVE
    • PARIS ARCHIVE
    • MOTHERS ARCHIVE
    • SIMULTANEOUS WRITING
    • MAPS
    • WHERE ARE WE NOW?
  • Contact
  • PARTICIPATE