Clays Lane: A Beautiful Failure

At night, lit-up and standing squarely on its pedestal of poisoned earth, Clays Lane Housing Cooperative resembled Staasi HQ or that Nazi holiday camp on the Baltic Sea. It looked more like a jerry-built ‘institution’ than a socialist experiment. Newham Council had obviously gone to the trouble of finding the least commercially plausible land under their remit, an ex-rubbish dump on the Leyton/Stratford border next to a railway marshalling yard. This was also the vicinity they’d allowed the ‘Caravan Dwellers’ to stay. A rough and ready bunch of Gypsy-types and angry dogs that would bite your arse as soon as look at you.

Ten courtyards all named after one of The Rochdale Pioneers, those C19th devisers of cooperative principles and a main office block cum meetings room cum community centre (also containing two worker’s cooperatives: a launderette and a general groceries shop). Five hundred tenants in total all paying (or, too often, not paying) a rent set low for the area. Thus, it attracted students, folk on benefits and an array and assortment of otherwise itinerants, Rastafarians, punks and an alarmingly large volume of Celts, many of whom seemed to view the whole thing as one big party venue.

There were meant to be rigid ‘selection’ procedures both at the application stage and when being interviewed by ‘house members’ but these were not always adhered to. Having passed the application stage new house members were often accepted almost ‘on the nod’ depending on the human make-up of that particular house. Not everyone took much interest or even attended such events. “Do you drink?” “Aye, you’ll do”. The more middle-class households however would have pertinent questions to ask and discuss to ensure prospective house-sharers ‘fitted in’ with their values, way of life, etc. In other words, they wanted people pretty much like themselves.

The less conforming households were a right old rag-tag of individuals, often the stuff of social experiments. A trainee chef from Hong Kong could find himself sharing with an Australian party-animal and a born-again Christian from Derry. Some households had political dimensions such as a six-person household being occupied by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and quite honestly, if you’d ever spent any time at all with such an intense and humourless bunch, you’d be glad that they all stuck together.

Whatever they were in terms of theory, in effect, they seemed to put off any possibility of ordinary working-class people joining their cause. They were caucus and cabal and clique of middle-class angst, guilt and bitterness toward their own class which they could safely run home to when things got a bit iffy. A factory worker would be far more likely to join the Moonies than this bunch of cheerless drips. Nowadays their leading lights can be found at Conservative Party HQ formulating policy of anything but a left-wing nature. Spurned by the common man they seem now to have chosen to help squash him.

All the courtyards were split into different sized homesteads: a mixture of ten-bed, six, four, two and two bungalows, the latter two being for couples. In one of these in Howarth Court lived Elwyn Flowers. I mention this because he was a notable figure around the co-op, involved as he was in many of its schemes and aspirations (he was the brains behind the worker’s co-ops and many of the other committees and manoeuvres).

A ramshackle figure who dressed in clothes the local charity shops would refuse if offered, it was his room that provided much mystery and rumour. Was it really such a messy shambles that some had reported? Were there really dead canaries buried beneath all the tins, soiled toilet paper and cider bottles strewn about his floor? Nobody really wanted to find out for sure.

The origins of Elwyn Flowers were steeped in mystery too. He seemed to speak in the English tongue, but this notion came into question when he was drunk which he often was. Then it was all ‘whae’ and ‘fit’ and ‘ach’ leading the confused listener to wonder if he was either in some sort of pain, was suffering an epileptic fit or maybe just from some place up north where they communicated in a simplistic manner.

He sort of roamed around the place expressing ideas as he went. “Have you ever tried to grill an egg?” he’d ask you just out of the blue then wander off to leave you non-plussed and strangely agitated.

There was a disused bike-track to the east of the estate, it’s route now weeded and scarred with graffiti. One Saturday morning I wake up hung-over, mouth dry and head mildly pounding. I am in my mid-twenties and playing the Scot in London stereotype for all it is worth ie every activity must in some major way involve getting hammered. Going on a train journey? Hammered! Starting a new job? Hammered! A visit to the clap clinic? Double hammered. Thon wee cotton-bud thing stings. Any man would be due a drink before, after and even during such a procedure.

Thing is, though, that I’m sharing a bed with the original English Rose, and she’s not ever-so enamoured with me getting hammered.

 I hear the sound of bagpipes wafting their skirl across the summer breeze. Have I died through the night and gone to Scottish heaven? Maybe that fourteenth pint and the half-bottle carry-out was the final straw and I am now in the world, however ironically, of the spirits.

 This calling from Caledonia seems to be coming from the general vicinity of the cycle track.

“Can you hear bagpipes?”

"Sorry?" She can't understand what I'm saying at the best of times let alone while half-asleep and having to deal with bagpipe chat.

“Bagpipes. I hear bagpipes from over at the bike track”.

It is not easy being Mick Ryan and it shows. Mick Ryan mooches about like it is somewhat of a burden being Mick Ryan at all. Yes, there is definitely something wryly humorous about being Mick Ryan as if God has made rather a pithy joke. In fact, if God appeared, Mick would have rather a humorous conversation with him on the subject of being Mick Ryan along the lines of ‘What the hell were you thinking lumbering me with this?’

Mick Ryan didn’t view God as being worthy of any greater respect than he gave everyone else. In this he was a true socialist. Mick would view God lugubriously the same as he would a rainy day.

Mick had a racing bike although no-one ever saw him ride it. Mick had a souped-up sound system, yet he only ever played one tune on it: Weather Report’s Nubian Sundance. No-one could ever remember anything Mick ever said (at least, not for very long).

Mick was Mick and if you didn’t like it then you could just as easily render yourself Mickless than share his company at all.

If Mick Ryan had any ambitions or dreams, then he kept them very much to himself and showed not the slightest evidence of ever pursuing them.

He’d taken a fancy, perhaps through economic necessity, to possibly the cheapest beer available on the UK market. It came in brown plastic two-litre containers and when you’d drank from it sufficiently the ‘bottle’ buckled into a distorted shape and no matter how you fashioned and squeezed it wouldn’t return to its original shape. So, you found yourself getting slightly pie-eyed while drinking from this increasingly Picasso-esque vessel. To accompany this delightful beverage, Mick would roll cigarettes thin enough to shame the most miserly Pentonville detainee.

Individuals like Mick seemed to arrive in Clays Lane as if out of nowhere and as if it was somehow ordained by some saint of the itinerant that they should dwell there. They became part of the fabric of the place as if that was their only role in life.

Old hippies, proto-new-agers, renegades from times past shunted out to the far reaches to semi-exist.

 

Steve Murray, an Iggy Pop from Edinburgh asked me if I’d heard the bagpipes and I told him I had. He looked worried, sharing my unspoken notion that this was a portent of doom. Maybe all the Scots in Clays Lane were due for extinction, and this was the sign. Like elephants we were to cross over to the disused bike track, lie down and die.

Steve dressed like Eddie Cochran had he lived and gone to seed from too much speed and ale. Scuffed biker’s jacket and boots and trews that were once denim but were now matted from too many uncarpeted floors and the spillage of fluids varied. His trousers were a calendar of his life with all the dates muddled. He probably didn’t even take them fully off to fornicate with the long-suffering Linda or any other of his drunken conquests.

Steve liked his music loud and not very tuneful. The Butthole Surfers. The Cramps. He busked with me once down Stratford tubeway and folk started taking their money back. A whirling dervish that frightened their kids he swooped and whooped like David Johannsson with nippy piles.

‘Talkin’ bout ma babyuuuuuu. She cumin after youuuuuuuu’.

What he didn’t realise was that I was actually playing Donovan’s Mellow Yellow at the time!

“It was definitely bagpipes though, Davie, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, Steve. I’m afraid it was.

Together we walked into the ever-setting sun.

 

The problem with Clays Lane was one of consciousness. Many of its inhabitants over the years may never have understood the word ‘Cooperative’ in its political or social sense. There should have been induction classes right from the off where folk would be introduced to the concept and its principles, and an attempt should have been made for these to be followed more devotedly than they ever were. There were those like Elwyn Flowers who promoted the cause but few others. Clays Lane was a beautiful anarchy that shone briefly but, like the sun itself, one day the fuel would run out.

It succumbed in the end to commercial forces and became part of the 2012 Olympic infrastructure. I couldn't help hoping at the time when watching the opening ceremony that the Olympic flame would somehow connect with one of those ancient methane bubbles beneath the scheme. A fitting way for Clays Lane to express its last irreverent goodbye.

 

 

 

What’s Left Behind?

Thankfully it was only really a couple of weeks my auld da lay there in the hospice. Must have seemed a lifetime to him.

“Turned his face to the wall.” Was how my mum put it and she was right. To my da there’d be nae point to this type of existence at all. Ill, turned as yella as Homer Simpson, surrounded by strangers (for all his activism my da was a shy man) there was nothing in this for him. Even his family visiting, me, my ma, my brother, well, ye wurnae even sure he wanted us there. For him to engage with us at all would be to be faced fully with the fact that he was leaving us, and he couldn’t handle that. So, metaphorically speaking, he died pretty much alone even though me and Alan each held a hand  on that stormy summer night in June 2006 with the thunder roaring in the skies and the lightning crackling. A sort of Wagnerian ending for this dramatic, sensitive man.

It seemed to come out of nowhere, my immediate grief. Once he’d taken that last laboured breath I just fell apart like a wee lassie. For weeks we aw knew it was the end for him efter he’d refused the chemo but somehow the fact he was actually gone hit me like a train. Maybe we were kidding ourselves that, somehow, he’d survive even this. We were aw so used to my da and his illnesses that there was some sort of unreality at play. My da had something of the Munchausen about him. He had an emotional need to be ailing in some way. It was likely a need to garner the attention he’d so craved as a child but didn’t get. Or maybe it was a trait he had learned and/or inherited from his mother. She was the same. Aye something wrong with her: her way of gaining control of those around her.

She was a strange, shrewd ould duck.

A week from now there will be my dad’s funeral. All my life I seem to have been dreading his demise and now it had finally happened. I loved and admired him so much as a child and became almost superstitious about his continuing presence on the earth (OCD they’d call it these days). I had to close doors three times, touch every third railing, say things out loud three times. That kind of thing and always ‘three’s’. ‘Fours’ were a definite no-no. Six was OK cos it was a multiple of three, but I’d have to add another three to make it nine which was of course three times three. It got very complicated but if a voice in my head tormented me with ‘you didn’t touch that third railing properly’ then, even I had to walk all the way back and be late for school, it had to be done because the consequences would be the death of my father. 

I think it was really this wee boy in me that was crying at my father’s bedside.

Somehow, ye just couldn’t associate my da with something as conventional as a funeral. All his life he’d spurned convention even at a cost to himself and, by extension, his family. For many years he appeared to be actively downwardly mobile as he sought to shed his relatively posh background of a semi-detached with a garden in Garrowhill, a good part of Glasgow that his parents had aspired to. This would have made him the posh boy at his school in neighbouring Shettleston, a not-so-good part of the city.

I see a picture of him as a youngster, and he looks a well-scrubbed, timid-looking wee boy in his school uniform. A wee boy going through a private hell. A wee boy that dreads every school day.

My da’s cancer was borne from the years of stress and tension. He had his own personal knife-edge that he lived on, and it was this that fed his disease. That perpetual sore stomach through his adult life finally revealed itself in what killed him. Even on his death-bed on the final day his toes are ninety degrees and tensed against his final fall.

Some of the jobs he took on were jobs that no one else, quite frankly, would touch with a bargepole. Builder of a Homeless Families Unit in Springburn that had been run almost like a prison, or, at best some sort of poorhouse, he was the guy that was tasked to transform it into something more humanitarian. The first social worker assigned to a housing department in London, maybe in England, they hadn’t even an office ready for him when he started so much was he ‘stepping on their toes'. As a retired man in Kilmarnock (on medical grounds) he pissed the Labour council off so much with all his activism and volunteer schemes that someone threatened to report him to the medical authorities as being ‘fit for work’. They were really saying don’t embarrass us with all your socialism, we’re the socialists around here.

A furniture scheme in Kilmarnock long before they proliferated.  For each according to his need from each who's just about to fling out a perfectly good sofa. An advocacy centre in the town. Wasn’t it he that approached the local Marks and Sparks asking for left-over food for the needy and they told him to sod off? Now it is common practice. A man ahead of his time just practising his socialist ideals.

My da’s idea of ‘Men’s Groups’ differed fundamentally from the expensively chino’d living in Byers Rd in one important dynamic. They meant ‘Men’s Groups’ for those like themselves who’d read the Robert Bly book and were ready to venture up The Campsie’s and pretend to be primal while my father wanted to venture into the very worst estates and sort out men who wanted to stop bevvying and hitting their wives. The be-chino’s crowd weren’t too keen on his idea and let him know as they showed him the way out of their ‘Wally’ closes.

What's left behind is simply to be inspired by such a man and his life and a fascination about the mystery of human beings and their contradictions and dualities.