Kenny the Red
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
'Use the police when they're on your side—it's standard revolutionary practice.' Mr Kenneth Tynan, demanding the removal by the police of a Times correspondent during a gather- ing of revolutionary students in London last week.
Flames licked hungrily up the chimney, cast- ing their blood-red glow shifting and flickering over the moulded ceiling of Lady Arabella Scrim's Chester Square drawing-room again last night as the British Union of Mature Students (BUMS) continued its week-long loll-in in sup- port of worldwide student violence. Dressed in a Chinese silk kaftan and a double rope of jade worry-beads, Kenneth 'Kenny the Red' Tynan held his listeners spellbound with his accounts of experiments in left-wing practice at the Playboy Mansion, and uncompromisingly lucid expositions of Herr Heffner's political philosophy. Among his listeners were Clive Goodwin, formerly literary editor of Armchair Defective, Christopher Logue, known to his friends as the Grey Dwarf, and 'Little Pauli,' the carrot-headed darling of the committed upper-class left.
Words can scarce express the exhilaration that crackled in the smoke-filled air like static electricity. Bliss was it in that drawing-room to be alive, and to be middle-aged was very unchic. On every side outmoded values and last season's fashionable attitudes were radically re-examined, and there was frank, uninhibited discussion of sex, morals, who was sleeping with whom, and Lavinia Ponsonby's new thigh- hugging satin bloomers and see-through voile shift from the Guevara Boutique. Here a group of dedicated dibutante thinkers laughed musi- cally as they practised the clenched-fist salute, mercilessly criticising the Hon Venetia Plumley (forty-one) for persistently presenting an open palm and invoking the name of the former Nazi dictator: there Little Pauli himself looked brightly up at a circle of corpulent multi- millionaires, demonstrating his now famous jumping up and down act and giving vent to strident cries of 'Yaroo, yaroo, I know the head waiter, let's go and burn down the Ritz!'
Lady Arabella herself is modest about her
role in establishing this centre of revolutionary activity in the heart of fashionable London. `It's absolute bliss,' she said last night, smiling encouragement to the thinkers and graciously distributing champagne, 'dinner parties were getting too too boring. The Flower Power thing rather withered away last winter, the Hippies are too dreary and vieux chapeau for words, so as you can imagine this was a positive god- send. And I mean, without being the least whit patronising, they are such sweet little men.' Her daughter, Mercy (twenty), speaks of them with an awe that verges on the imbecile. 'I know it sounds crazy, but when Kenny or Clive or the Dwarf comes into the room and starts saying all those wonderful things about insurrections and violence I just go all gooey inside.'
The Mature Students clearly appeal to the young, too. Lady Arabella's twelve year old son, Piers, himself a keen student, is serious when he talks about them. 'I think it's very easy,' he explained, lying among a heap of velvet cushions in a flame-coloured kimono, `to think of them as a lot of silly old men mincing about in trendy gear, but actually when you meet some of them they're rather tragic. Obviously they have very real grievances : if you or I were as old as that I imagine we might be tempted to become violent. But it would be madness for the young not to listen to them and try to assess seriously what their problem is. For one thing, they do lean on us so dread- fully for their ideas and fashions and so forth, and for another, the prospect of a lot of hooli- gan middle-aged freaks running wild in the streets is not one I personally cherish, if you take my meaning.'
Whatever the reaction of others may be, the Mature Students themselves treat their move- ment with a seriousness that comes close to the piety of the Seventh Day Adventists or the Holy Rollers. Grahame Twitt (forty-nine), an ardent supporter of BUMS and designer of the new Tariq All summerweight casual range, was ejected from last night's meeting for sniggering during the singing of the 'Inter- nationale.' One 'bourgeois satirist,' Bootsie Long- bottom (fifty-three), who is now appearing in Babes in the Nude at the Essoldo Stripperama, Frith Street, overheard mimicking Kenny the Red's unique delivery behind his back, was seized by the throat and carried to Christopher 'Grey Dwarf' Logue. He would, the Dwarf hissed menacingly, come to regret his irrever- ence when their machine-gun bullets ripped thudding into his pallid flesh. Mr Longbottom took offence at this, lifted Mr Logue on to the mantelpiece, and left the room in a huff.
But beneath the shouting, the flamboyant publicity in the gossip columns of the national press, the gay clothing and clink of champagne glasses, what are the Mature Students really on about? Mercy Scrim, one of the movement's most earnest apologists, put it to me like this: 'What Kenny believes is that this outworn myth about people getting old and dying is ,just unacceptable to today's new generation Tve been doing a little fast calculating: by the mid-1970s we'll have taken over the world!' of thinking middle-aged men. He just believes things can't go on happening like they're going on happening at the moment. It will be death. You know, boring. So in keeping with his demands for decreased middle-aged participa- tion in the running of our intellectual life he just believes that we've got to learn from those who are learning themselves, and that's the students.' Kenny the Red himself seems un- deterred by recent student rebuffs. He dismisses as 'counter-revolutionary propaganda' the pro- longed raspberry blown into a microphone when his name was mentioned recently at the London School of Economics.
The climax to last night's meeting came when Kenny rose to his feet to announce that what he called 'the long night of solitary con- templation' was over. Messages of solidarity had been received from a group of ex-workers and layabouts on the Embankment, who wished to join BUMS in 'Their courageous struggle for survival, free booze and slap-up nosh.' Unfor- tunately, Lady Arabella had not been able to see her way to admitting them to the meeting as they 'smelt,' but he assured them of the • Mature Students' fraternal greetings as they lay wrapped in copies of their three-shilling newspaper The Red Midget in the gutter beyond Lady Arabella's lighted windows. He then called for the party to rise to its feet and perform a conga to the singing of the 'Inter- nationale.' The dancing, cheering human snake had reached halfway up the back stairs when aggressive tapping on the wall by next-door neighbour Miss Ethel Wraith (eighty-five) with the butt-end of her lorgnette caused Mr Tynan to go to the telephone and to summon police protection.
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