Page 22 - C.A.L.L. #38 - Summer 2014

then got in touch with the household to let us all know where it had gone. Much to
everyone's surprise, we started receiving weekly postcards from Mike's Hair, which
had apparently gone on a round-the-world trip, and was having a particularly groovy time
in Phuket.

Then there was the posh Tory who used to leave his wife and kids at home and come
round and sleep with his secret boyfriend, who lived in the commune. How he loved to
hector us for our silly leftwing politics. Looking back, I'm not sure why nobody punched
him. But nobody punched anyone – that was the point.

Actually that's not exactly true – not everyone was a total pacifist. I remember being a
bit surprised when one communard, on discovering that his ex-wife and child had been
robbed, refused to ring the police, and instead got all his mates to pick him up in a car
instead. Off they headed with baseball bats to solve things their own way, rather giving
the lie to the myth that we were all twee, middle-class lentil-munchers.

Inside the commune, one conflict raged so long that an extraordinary meeting had to
be called in addition to our bimonthly general meetings. This Relationship Meeting was
because I and somebody else had fallen out over the fact I didn't fulfil my jobs on the
cleaning rota. Various passive-aggressive notes had been stuck to the kitchen table
listing each other's shortcomings such as it being "MORE IMPORTANT TO CHEER UP
THAN CLEAR UP". (Shamefaced to admit that one was mine.)

At the time, fairly oblivious to what a spoiled brat I was being, I was just amazed that
I had managed to get on so well with the other 15 people. I mean, a one-out-of-16
strike rate really didn't seem bad as far as I was concerned. That was, until I found

out that the person whom I had driven into a war of attrition via Post-it notes had been
nominated for a Nobel peace prize just the year before. The actual Nobel peace prize.

"Bloody pacifists," I remember muttering to myself. "Always fighting for something."

While living there, I dropped out of university and went to work in Red or Dead in
Covent Garden. It was sometimes hard to explain to colleagues, when recalling what

we'd got up to the night before, why I had 16 flatmates, so I usually didn't bother. Like
anyone with an awkward secret at home, you got used to not mentioning it. Although
this could be problematic too, because if I made it sound like I only had a few
flatmates, like any normal person working in a fashion shop in Covent Garden did, and
then I let slip that one of them was an 80-year-old German woman with whom I'd been
dancing on the kitchen table to the Spice Girls video at four o'clock that morning,
because I was stoned and hadn't yet gone to bed, and she had just risen from hers to
salute the sun, and there in the midpoint between our lives we met quite joyfully …

You know, the more I think about living in a commune, the more I think I'd do it all
again in a heartbeat.

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