BOOKS
The time was out of joints
John Mortimer
HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE: THE DREAMS, THE TRIPS, THE TRIALS, THE LOVE-INS, . THE SCREW-UPS:
THE SIXTIES by Richard Neville Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 376 One of the silliest excuses of our present masters for the mess they have made of governing us is that it's all the fault of the Sixties. The Sixties, and Mr John Humphreys, are their staple alibi. Thirty-five years ago, it seems, when a con- siderable number of their constituents weren't born and some politicians were swinging students, the kingdom became infected by a horrible plague of Beatles songs, beads, Afghan waistcoats, joints, Bob Dylan, shopping bags with Union Jacks on them and largely illegible under- ground magazines printed in green ink on green paper. Sex was invented and half- drugged schoolteachers staggered around their classrooms teaching nothing but how to build a model kibbutz out of empty yoghurt pots. The future mothers of our, nation jumped around naked in the mud at pop festivals uttering the low, humming incantations of Buddhist monks. We were all very sick indeed.
And of course we have never recovered. The Sixties are responsible for all the ills we are heir to, including mass unemployment, inner-city crime, chaos in the National Health Service, the fact that MPs can't keep their hands off their researchers and the failure of Barings Bank. How fortunate those responsible for these disasters are to have, as a scapegoat, a period of our history which has vanished in the mists of time, and now seems a great deal more remote than the ruthless materi- alism and grimly puritanical attitudes of the 1860s.
The truth is that most people in the Sixties were hardly swinging at all. Instead of wearing Afghan waistcoats and smoking pot they wore Fairisle sweaters and smoked Capstan full strength. They cared far more for Julie Andrews than Germaine Greer and for Frankie Vaughan than Bob Dylan. They got on with life as they did in the Fifties and the Seventies, and were certain- ly less promiscuous than their parents had been in the heroic Forties, the war years having been, in my memory, an era of great sexual licence.
The Sixties saw a move towards a more tolerant and humane society; we stopped hanging people in 1965 and imprisoning Consenting adult homosexuals in 1967. It was a decade in which political ideals did not yet seem laughable and many impor- tant writers such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter emerged. It was also blessed with a certain jollity and not yet cursed With that dreadful seriousness which chills us today. Much of this mercifully flippant attitude to life, was due to the Australian invasion which brought us Clive James and Barry Humphries, Richard Neville and Germaine Greer. Having found the energy to get here from the other end of the world it seemed that their ambitions were endless. It also brought us Oz, a little Australian magazine of a mildly subversive nature which would have passed unnoticed had not the British legal system, in a dotty moment, decided to wheel out the huge sledge-hammer of a trial at the Old Bailey to crush this impertinent little nut.
I must declare every sort of interest. I defended James Anderson and Felix Den- nis, two of the Oz editors, while Richard Neville defended himself. They were accused of corrupting youth, a charge levelled against Soczates, and of publishing an obscene article. The trial which went on You have a very infectious laugh, Mr Willard. I'm afraid you'll have to be quarantined.' for several weeks had moments of high comedy. George Melly lectured the judge on a practice his Lordship insisted on call- ing `cunnilinctus'. The comedian Marty Feldman called the judge a 'boring old fart' and from the witness box whispered, 'Great to be working with you at last!' to me on his way out of court. Outside court young people demonstrated, carrying banners which bore the legend 'An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away', and the police inspector in charge of the case sat gazing up at the public gallery where his face, reproduced on a number of T-shirts, was stretched over the nubile breasts of young girls. It was all quite entertaining until the Oz editors were sentenced to prison. After a haircut and weekend we managed to get them out, thanks to a judge who thought the sentences foolish. In the end the Court of Appeal quashed all but one minor conviction and the shades of the prison house were removed. Throughout the trials Richard Neville, who is possessed of great charm, behaved with admirable courage, calm and good humour. He would clearly have succeeded in any society, although he achieved stardom at that time by choosing the alternative one.
Times changed and the Sixties passed. The young people who had contributed to that `Schoolltids Or' became accountants and rather old-fashioned parents. Felix Dennis, whom the judge had woundingly described as the least intelligent of the trio, made a fortune out of karate magazines and Richard Neville went back to Australia and became a devoted husband and father. Robert Hughes, who helped on Oz, became an important writer and the most effective critic of political correctness. And young John Birt, then a researcher on World in Action who stood bail for the Oz editors, now runs the BBC in a way that has appar- ently won the approval of a Conservative government.
It was a safe time, compared to today. If you were young you were certain of a job, there was less crime, less homelessness, less bankruptcy. We were free to worry about liberal issues such as censorship. Richard Neville has written a funny, enjoyable, live- ly portrait of the time and caught some of its glowing energy, optimism and refreshing irresponsibility. He also chronicles quite a lot of its silliness, the political naivety, and some of the discomfort, as well as the squalor, of the hippy trail. It's an important chronicle of how some people lived at the time, and quite lacking in the benefits of hindsight. In fact the Sixties were all this, and more than all this. We should stop using them as a rubbish dump for our guilt.
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