Recognizing in the Inferno That Which is Not: Reflections on Writing a Memoir

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)

This essay reflects on the experience of writing a memoir, Reading Room Only (published on www.historyworkshop.org.uk, March 2011),¹ and is thus a retrospection on a text that is itself a retrospection. It is not though so much about having second thoughts as trying to understand more about the processes that are set in motion when we start to fashion, in however schematic a way, some public account of our past.

The idea for the memoir came from hearing about an oral-history project that had been organized in the aftermath of the closure of the British Museum Reading Room, requesting readers' memories of the place. As I had been a regular user of the 'BM' for over thirty years, I thought that perhaps I could contribute a short piece describing its peculiar etiquettes, some of the characters I had met there, and its changing culture of research. However I soon came to realize that my attachment to the BM and its Reading Room had deeper and far more personal roots. The place was a lot more to me than a beautiful environment in which to study, or a congenial social club. It had been a significant, if somewhat enigmatic, presence in my childhood landscape, growing up as I did in Bloomsbury during the late 1940s and '50s; later, in my mid twenties, after I dropped out of university, the reading room provided a continuing link with the academy as well as a safe haven from the storm in a political teacup created by the media around my activities with the London Street Commune squatters movement in 1968/9.

I had for some time been thinking about writing a memoir to settle accounts with this aspect of my past, prompted partly by renewed media interest in these events forty years on from 1969. I was approached in 2006 by a TV company hoping to interview me for a programme they wanted to make about the street commune squat at 144 Piccadilly in September 1969.² This was to be broadcast as part of a series entitled 'The Way We Were Then', in which people who had been directly involved in recent historical events were asked to talk about their experiences, the interviews being inter-cut with archive film footage of the scenes being described. It was a neat, if somewhat simplistic formula, based on the notion that the testimony of direct participants or eye-witnesses would provide a 'human angle' or 'inside story' otherwise missing from the public record.

At first, I was reluctant to take part. I was dubious about the programme's premise and did not know if they could treat the subject in a non-sensational way. I was also not entirely sure I wanted to revisit such a chaotic period in my life. All the same there might be something to be gained. The accounts of sixties radicalism that were beginning to appear focused almost exclusively on what was happening in the universities, largely because the people writing them were left-wing academics who had been active in the student movement and inevitably privileged their own involvements.³ Even if the squatting movement was only a footnote to that history, I felt it was still a distinct and unique moment, and deserved to be remembered as such. It also occurred to me that making the programme might be a way of contacting ex-street-communards, and doing some interviews...