Chapter 14: Purity

By the fifth day, everything was becoming smaller, including the helicopter. That looked like a toy. The house suddenly seemed more modest after a few days there, and all of the big things in it were shrinking. You gradually adjust your mind to the space. There is no point to acquisition in the end, I was thinking. Size is not everything. I had an almost Buddhist reaction to it.

After being told that Gerard did not want a washing line on camera because it looked too working class, we immediately hung our clothes out in the garden. Our array of Punk t-shirts alone turned a few heads, but one in particular made a very synchronistic impression.

Franko, one of the other cameramen, who is mixed race and he was from the area of Hamburg called St. Pauli, which he pronounced 'Zankt Pow-Lee'. He was an anarchist. I did not know any of this until I got my St. Pauli tee-shirt ready, with the skull and crossbones on it, purposely so I could wear it on horseback.

'You can't be serious?' Franko said. 'That's my team! That's my football team! Did you know that the manager is an open homosexual? And that is the reason they can't get into any major leagues. Isn't that fantastic, Craig. You have my football team's shirt.'

'It's the only decent football shirt there is,' I said, 'it's got a skull and crossbones on it!'

I did not realise the history of St. Pauli - but he told me. They were an anarchist football team that had existed since before the Third Reich. They represented an area that had been rich in the past but is now the centre of Hamburg's artistic communities. The St. Pauli team still exists and they continue to thrash capitalist teams but none of this goes down in the record books. He could not believe it, so there is another strange coincidence. How have I ended up with a cameraman from that place and have that particular tee-shirt with me?

I was meant to have polo training with Redman most days that week, but it was not an easy matter dealing with him first thing in the mornings. I found him so blocked in his thinking and so unable to see outside of the visceral life he led. I find it is that way when people look at you with that pained expression because they have completely lost what you are saying. Now, I know that happens to me more than to most people, but not because I am clever, but rather because I can't stick to the same subject for more than two minutes. So, as a result, I spend a lot of my life biting my lip so as not to offend people and I did it with Redman a lot too, until the end, when it all came spilling out at once.

I mean, bless him, he did get my kid on horseback and it was a very special moment for her. I am not going to undervalue these things. He could not get my wife on horseback. He desperately wanted her to and so did I because I can't deny there is a very romantic aspect to that because she comes from Sikh tradition and they know a lot more about horses than the British.

Anyway, he got my daughter up on a horse, which was nice, but then he kept going on about racial purity. It was not in any overt fascistic sense but in terms of horse breeding, in terms of families' abilities to do things, there'd been all kinds of 'people are bred to do this, people are bred to do that.'

So he got my daughter up on a lovely old horse called Henry.

'This is good,' I said, 'This will please my mother-in-law, her grand-daughter on a horse. It's a shame we can't get Kiran up on a horse, because that would, you know, mean something to her mum and dad.'

She was not having it! She was angry with him. I was not usually there at the time, but I heard about it from the production crew. We were split up, because my life-swappee does not spend a lot of time with his partner. As far as I can see, she is like one of his possessions. She stays in the house and, obviously, spends money with impunity. She comes from an even wealthier family than he does. You see, a bloke like him would marry someone richer. You immediately assume he is the one with the money but this is, in fact, a multi-corporate marriage. This is a marriage of companies, not just two people. In fact, not until right this moment have I thought about it like that but that is exactly how the aristocrats have always behaved. You are never dealing with individuals, but with empires, whether they be corporate or national or religious, it matters little.

Anyway, my daughter got up on a horse.

'It's interesting isn't it, about racial purity,' I said.

'How so?'

'Well, here you have a little toddler and she instantly did it!'

'She's a natural,' he said, a bit surprised.

'She would be,' I said, 'because she's got four main races in her and probably a lot more subsidiary ones. She is a true mongrel and I think there might be something in the fact that this is the way the human race has to go, to get over certain inherited ailments and illnesses, more fusing between races. She's got Celtic blood, Middle Eastern blood, Northern Indian blood, Anglo-Saxon blood... I mean, think on it, of course she's going to be a natural with a horse! She ain't kicking it, or worried by it, or scared of it. She's got so much genetic memory of relationships with horses. I mean, she's got four times the amount you and I have got.'

That did not go down well. Neither did this.

'We're struggling,' I said, 'us Anglo-Saxons. We're going, "ugh, ugh, horse, do this! I impel you! Christ compels you!" It's like trying to exorcise the poor thing more than ride it. Not for someone with four bloods like that. If you believe in inherited skills and information as much as you say you do then bow before my blessed daughter!'

He was amused by my humour, then, because I was being as heavy with him as he was with me. You do not tell me you have a bear and beaver skin top hat and you go on hunts with the Royal Family and expect me to let you off lightly. And he was surprised, she was a natural. She just looked like Lee Van Cleef on a good day in a Spaghetti Western. She could have travelled from one end of America to the other and it would not have bothered her. It would not have bothered the horse, either. Redman and I have a more aggressive strain of genetic information because it has been honed down and simplified over thousands of years of warfare, between races and the only way we are going to get over that in the long term is a lot of interracial shagging. Quite contrary to the fascists' concern that we will all look 'the same' everybody will then truly become an individual. There will be no racial stereotyping, no national boundaries, and no two people will look the same. It is very much what we do that makes us what we are.

I cannot deny I did enjoy seeing my daughter on a horse, and I was very grateful to him and everybody around. It was a very emotional moment & so we have this constant succession of paradoxical events, which are both fuelled with anger and hatred and also laced with rather larger doses of respect than I was expecting, on both sides. I was more respectful to him than I thought I would be were I ever to meet a man like that and I knew well he was far more respectful to me. I made all sorts of comments.

'Isn't it interesting,' I said, 'that the likes of you and I would really only have met in any other part of society either shooting at one another or I would have been hurling eggs at you whilst you were on horseback, depending on how severe the situation had become, but here we are being pushed into one another's company and forced to be pleasant and I think, essentially, every human being is naturally pleasant, regardless of how they screen themselves psychologically from the horrors they cause.'

On a one-to-one level, you will meet no-one more polite and more pleasant than a Tory MP. I know, I have met many, but I would far rather someone called me a piece of shit to my face if they thought I was a piece of shit. I do not like being stabbed in the back. I think it is important for someone to know who is trying to kill them. It is fairer that way.

Redman had already been really rude and quite confrontational, with some of the things he said about hunting and endangered species, but the rift between he and I was not as strong as the rift between he and Kiran. This was mostly because she is a woman, and to his mind women are not expected to talk to men the way she does. Secondly, she is black and, in particular, Asian, and we seem to be on the twelfth crusade at the moment.

So, I thought, it would be nice to swap at least one phase of this week with her to give her a greater opportunity to air her views in front of our 'adversaries'.

Kiran was not given a lot to do, since women in that position in society are things rather than individuals. They are not expected to be creative or have any input, but we were not having that. She was going off the edge. She had already wanted to go home a few times by the middle of the week.

'This is bollocks,' she said, 'I want to be back in Wales.'

'No,' I said, 'there's a bigger picture.'

'Stuff it! Let's walk out and give our reasons. That's a good enough ending, don't end when they want it to.'

'Oh, no, no, no,' I said, and I admit it was because I wanted to go on a horse and I wanted to be the head of the procession and I wanted to tell the fuckers what I thought of them.

'If there was any way I could swap with you,' I said, 'I'd far rather you were sitting on the horse giving them what for. What? An Asian woman telling a lot of military imperialists all from the top end of the ladder that they're a bunch of child-murdering scum? What could be better? But they won't let you do it! I've got to do that, but we've got to do this, this whole thing, together.'

We had some rows that the camera crew purposely didn't film. To their credit, they could have filmed it and made us look like the couple from hell, because there were door slammings. They went and stood in the garden because it was too scary at one point.

'You are an utter, utter, utter, utter, self-seeking, miserable bastard!' That was her to me. 'We're going home'.

'It's not about me,' I said, 'it's about everybody we represent, it's about all of it. Are you stupid? Are you a moron?'

'Don't call me a moron!' Slam! 'Bastard! Bastard!' Then there was a lot of running up and down corridors and screaming.

'Where's she gone now? Where's she gone now? Where the hell's she gone now?'

I could not believe it. They could have made a story just out of that, but they deliberately turned the cameras off. I think they thought that their equipment might have been trodden underfoot had they filmed it so maybe it was a more instinctive urge than simple politeness. Kiran can be very scary. I almost had to catch a few of the ornaments in the place. It is a good job I can juggle. However, I actually liked the fact that she was far angrier than I was and far less willing to be pleasant to our hosts. After all, that has been the accusation levelled at me by her in the past, that I cannot hold my temper, I cannot just sit and take that television programme without jumping up and down and swearing. Now here I was, in a prime opportunity to do it for real and I was being Mr Nice particularly to Redman. He forged the rift with Kiran because not only was he not referring to her by her name, which is a very traditionally racist thing to do, but it was 'she', 'her', 'your wife', all the time, and this upset Kiran. We were only given one door key, because Gerard's wife does not have a door key, only he does, because it's his house. Well, we left them two door keys, as we have; two whole door keys, one for the woman and one for the man. You both live there. We were only given one door key. For me. So, I gave it to Kiran. Even though I ended up getting locked out of my own manor on one occasion, I decided Kiran had got to be more proactive. We did not live like 'husband & property' at home. It was ridiculous.

I had nothing to eat or drink. All I had in a two hour wait for anybody to turn up was the milk that the milkman had left. I had to take it like a sneak thief out of the ma indoor. I had no access to any building, no keys, and all I could think of doing was sitting on the grass, drinking some milk and catching some rays. I did not even have pen and paper. All my things were inside. The reason I was locked out was because that day there was a social function in the afternoon that I was expected to go to and I was really hoping that for her family's sake and their Sikh tradition, that there could be footage of my wife on horseback.

'You go,' I said to Kiran, 'instead of me. Go and ride a horse along the beach.'

But Kiran hated Redman with such a vengeance that she was not getting on any of his horses. She does not even agree with people getting on horses at all. Like me, she feels it is all wrong. She did not play ball and I know that when she does not play ball it can be horrible. It is fucking horrible. I actually felt sorry for him after that morning. I had been sitting drinking milk for two hours because I did not have the key to the house. I'd been dropped off by half of our film crew after one of our epic ventures & Kiran & the other half of the crew were still at this beach function. When their whole party entourage came back to the manor I thought it should have been a lovely time. I imagined they would have discussed a few political issues, had some wine on the beach, and it would all have been very enjoyable and our daughter would have seen her mother on a horse, because she had been on a horse and I had been on a horse. I had thought that it would have provided a perfect opportunity for this quintessentially English gentleman, with his Triumph Spitfire and his close links to the RAF, who was the rugby coach at Rugby School, who had stood up for Queen and country and the Church of England, who had studied as a lay priest, to be chivalrous to my wife. But no. No, no, no, no, no. All I know about it is that it is on film. I have not seen what transpired, but I have heard that she would not get up on the horse. Redman accused her of looking sullen, disinterested, and delinquent. She would not get involved. When she was interviewed she said that he was 'a sod'.

'This is a typical example of a modern primary school teacher,' he said. 'They're not only lazy, but they're unwilling to participate in the system as it exists or even bother. And that's why they have too much holidays and they get paid too much for the lackadaisical.'

Now, just for the record, I know she works a lot harder than he does because he is a polo trainer and he works about three hours a day and gets paid something like fifty quid for each of those hours, and that does not even include what he charges to put on events. And even that is not the whole truth, because that was for the benefit of the cameras & the taxman. He did not want the taxman to know exactly how much he does get. When Kiran was in full-time work she earnt around fifteen pounds an hour {before tax} for working from around 8am until 5pm. This money did not even account for the fact that, in reality, with preparatory work & paper marking she actually worked six days a week from dawn till bloody dusk. She also had masses of preparatory work over the summer and winter breaks and yet he was calling her lazy? He should try teaching twenty-eight seven & eight year olds in one class-room. His jobs were all one on one.

Well, she hit the roof. The cameras went onto her again.

'He's a fascist. He's a Nazi fascist!' Well, words to that effect. I have seen none of this footage. When she got back, she would not even discuss it with me.

I was on the edge anyway by the time they turned up. I had charge of five hundred acres and no-one was there. I had not got a key to anywhere. 'I'm homeless,' I thought to myself. 'How ironic.'

Anyway, they turned up, and she was fuming.

'He's a bastard! I'm not having this!'

I hit the roof too, and it was a typical working class scenario, this was because I had got my shirt off and I was naked to the waist because I had been lying in the sun, overheating. I was storming about.

'He did what? He did fucking what? He said what? He said this? He said that? Oh, the fucker!'

I was aware that these few minutes could be taken out of context! This did not look good, and I knew it, but I could not help myself.

We went storming inside.

'Look,' I said, 'are you still prepared to have a dialogue with the bloke?'

It was a waste of time. The rift between Redman and Kiran was, by now, terminal. Unfortunately, an Asian woman and an upper class, white supremacist are never going to meet half way. It is the war to end all wars. Hopefully, because I do not want any more wars. Ragnarök as quickly as possible, please. Let's get it over with. You see this is the difference between me and a geezer like Redman. He thinks there is a war between men and women. Even though he cannot put that into words and does not even like to admit it in his head. I think the war is over and men have lost and that is as it should be.

I was trying my best to mediate here but I was backing the black female partisan with the sten gun. Should Kiran, my mother, her mother and my grandmother, ever all meet in one space, I am out of there. I am having nothing to do with it. My levels of panic would just go off the scale. 'Sorry, Redman,' I thought, 'but it's "game over". You mate, you are dead meat. My missus is angrier than you and I know who I want to be standing behind when it gets nasty, so you have got no chance, mate! You're going home in a Luis Vuiton body-bag!'

There was no way we could bridge that gap, although at this point I was still trying. This led to a lot of disagreement between me and Kiran who, strangely, when she has had a long history of calming me down, stopping me being an ogre and a thug, stopping me from shouting and scaring people, was now turning it the other way around.

'Go now!' she screamed. 'Do it now! The on button! Now fire the gun! You've been aiming at the wrong targets. This one's okay. Hit him, punch him, head-butt him! Completely humiliate him, destroy the man! And if you don't, this could mean a serious upset to your marriage.'

That doesn't happen often in a bloke's life, does it? It was almost like we were regressing into being the worst skinhead couple we could ever hope to meet. I was trying to be Gandhi and Kiran has got a lot of issues with an Oxbridge student like Gandhi, so she sees Gandhi as closer to Redman than she is! I mean, he had no chance, did he? I think it was brought up as well in front of him that the courtesans who were persecuted, raped and butchered by British soldiers took up arms against the British army and in Northern India particularly it was women with shawls and sten guns who drove the British out, it was not passive resistance at all. I have got a photo at home from that period in history and it shows a line of women, in traditional Indian costume, holding Sterling sub machine-guns, waiting for a British convoy to come up the hill. I cannot deny that it is one of the most exciting photos I have ever seen. It draws everything in, the partisan thing together with the military thing that I am infected with, and it is put into the hands of the women, dressed in a way that the West has seen to be subordinate but they had completely got the wrong end of the stick about that. It was these same women who wrote the erotic poetry that Queen Victoria tried to destroy. So, this was Kiran's heritage and she wanted pay-back.

It even upset some of the staff.

The housemaid took Redman into the middle of a field one afternoon and I saw, and heard, from a distance, how she lectured him.

'Do you know that Kiran is under the impression that you're a misogynistic, racist scumbag who doesn't have the manners to even acknowledge her as an individual? Do you know she's said to me that if this was what the British class system was all about then the sooner it was decapitated the better? Are all the stories I've been hearing about your behaviour towards her true?'

She, having been in service to all kinds of aristocrats for many years, had not, in all of her time, been aware that this was how somebody like him would treat an Asian, working class woman who was also an atheist, anarchist, Punk Rocker, even if she did speak to blokes like they were shit. She thought he would be polite at the very least. I think, on the quiet, she saw a lot of herself in Kiran. Like a lot of the women in these houses, they are in control, they run the show, even though their control is merely the upper classes using them as an instrument to add extra discipline to what they do. They are the nanny but the nanny is a very important concept. I understood this. So she went and did a nanny on Redman. It looked like he was going through hell, head bowed. I saw the two silhouettes on the horizon and she was wagging her finger in his face. From that moment on, he tried to avoid Kiran, was even deferential to her, but he still would not call her by her name. It caused a rift between him and the housemaid that will never be healed. He was no longer a gentleman any more in her eyes. So that is why the rift between him and Kiran was so very, very extraordinary, because she was really unsettling his power. Not least of all she was so friendly with his wife. We went and got them milk and made sure they had that because they had a three-week-old baby and Kiran was always asking after her to see if she was all right. From what I saw, Redman had her shut out of our way, so that she could not forge a link with my wife, perhaps so Kiran would not 'infect' her with any modern ideas.

Curiously, in spite of all this, we did manage to have a laugh. It is a shame that what I'm about to discuss never came to pass but he kept equating riding a horse with dance.

'I gather you're a dancer,' he said.

'Yeah,' I said, 'I wonder if fifteen hour blasts on ecstasy pills at all-night raves has prepared me well enough for this, because you keep mentioning moving just the upper part of my body and the body's natural rhythm.'

'Really people who ride horses,' he said, 'they've got more natural rhythm than most people and maybe you might be able to be nearly as good as us because you have danced.'

He didn't half talk bollocks at times.

'Have you danced?' I asked him.

He just chuckled. All the stable girls started laughing.

'Redman? Dancing?'

'Doesn't he dance?' I said. Well, never a step. A bloke like that would never dance. That's what girls do!

'Redman, Redman,' I said, 'at the Polo club ball, this is the deal.' And he looked at me.

'What?'

'I'm to ride a horse for the first time,' I said, 'and you are to dance on camera for the first time.'

He looked really panicked.

'Yes! Yes!' all of the stable girls were going.

'I reckon I can teach you the Twist,' I said. 'It's not a popular dance at the moment, but I like doing it in environments where it's not expected because it always raises a laugh. That's the dance for you.'

'Brilliant,' the stable girls giggled. 'Redman's going to do the Twist!'

'All right then,' he said, because it's all about the playing of the game. So here we had Redman, who thought, oh that's a terribly bad idea, but, you know, we were going to Ummagumma, we were going to do the 'go-do-that-voodoo-that-you-do-so-well!' stuff together on the dance floor, under the flash-lights of the paparazzi. Sadly, it never came to pass because on the evening concerned all we really wanted to do was 'kill' one another. He could not think how to get out of it and nor could I? I think we were both glad that it never came to pass. People might say I am evil to find humour in this terrible, tragic thing, but I cannot help it. If I did not laugh, I would cry.