The Last Kiss Goodbye

‘I think the photo speaks for me,’ she said, taking off her glasses and putting them in her pocket ready to leave. ‘It tells you about the power and the powerlessness of love.’

Chapter Six

February 1961

‘This is outrageous!’ said Rosamund, throwing the magazine down on the cluttered desk. Across the room, a pretty girl pushed the horn-rimmed glasses up her long nose and peered at the cover.

‘Capital? I don’t know why you bother reading that rag. It’s the mouthpiece of the establishment.’

‘Exactly,’ said Rosamund. ‘That’s why we have to read it, Sam – every week, religiously. How else are we going to understand what the enemy is thinking?’

There was a snort from behind her. Brian was tall and thin and dressed in the beatnik uniform of drainpipe denims and a baggy, slightly careworn oatmeal jumper.

‘The enemy?’ he sneered, pushing his long fringe from his narrow face and casting a cynical eye around the office. ‘If this is a war, then I’d have to say we’re losing.’

Rosamund was about to object, but frankly, it was true. The Direct Action Group occupied a small room at the top of two flights of stairs behind a peeling door on Brewer Street in London’s Soho. The room itself hovered between intimate and dispiriting, depending on your mood, the four overflowing desks illuminated by one yellow-filmed window and a single naked light bulb hanging from a partially stripped wire. The filing cabinet could not be opened because every foot of floor space was taken up with piles of books, newspapers, and boxes of posters and handbills for protests, benefits and gatherings of support for various causes. Even more depressingly, whatever pretensions the DAG had towards respectability or professionalism were somewhat undermined by the fact that they had to share the front door with the ‘models’ who worked on the floor below.

Brian had put up a poster in the stairwell declaring the DAG’s support for ‘workers in the erotic arts’, and had taken the girls’ silence on the matter as ironic confirmation of his theory that ‘we’re all getting fucked, one way or another’.

‘What’s got your blood boiling this time, Ros?’ asked Sam, reaching for the magazine. Her plummy voice betrayed her time at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, but she was earnestly committed to each and every cause the group held to be worth fighting for – so much so that she was paying the rent on the office with a twenty-first birthday inheritance.

‘That opinion piece on page fifteen,’ said Rosamund. ‘The one entitled “An End of Sense”.’

‘What’s it say?’ asked Brian.

‘Oh, nothing new. Just more patronising twaddle about how the race question can be answered by sending immigrants back to their homelands.’

Brian clucked his tongue. ‘Typical right-wing rubbish. Why can’t they see that the Empire died with Victoria?’

‘Exactly,’ said Ros, warming to her subject. ‘He has the temerity to say that Indians are happier where they are. I mean, why shouldn’t they be allowed to make their own choices? If they want to come to the UK to seek a better life, who are we to deny them a decent standard of living?’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Sam.

‘Who wrote the piece?’ asked Brian.

Sam lifted her glasses. ‘Dominic Blake,’ she confirmed, scanning the text.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘The editor, apparently.’

‘Fashioning a magazine out of his privileged bourgeois views,’ said Brian sourly.

‘Well, whoever he is, we shouldn’t let him get away with it,’ said Sam fiercely. ‘We should write to the letters page immediately.’

‘Like they’d print it.’

‘You’re right,’ said Ros, snatching the magazine back from Sam. ‘We’re the Direct Action Group. Let’s take direct action.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as going down to the Capital offices in . . .’ she flicked through the pages quickly, ‘in Holborn and shaming them into a retraction.’

Brian gave one of his bitter laughs.

‘You really think they’ll change their minds because we turn up?’

Rosamund turned to him, exasperated. Sometimes she wondered why she paid Brian, and then she remembered she didn’t. The DAG funds couldn’t stretch as far as their own telephone, and salaries were a distant fantasy. The staff were therefore made up of people like Sam who brought money for the office and contacts to the table, and people like Brian, who was so rabid with commitment, the lack of funds was considered part of the struggle.