Hey Jude

1940

I was idly surfing the Web when I came across the arresting news that an old friend, Jude Woodward, had died earlier this year. Jude was only a "friend", however, in the highly-qualified sense of "someone I used to hang out with in my student days, but haven't seen or heard from since". It sometimes troubles me that I seem to have more friends of that sort than of the more conventional variety, but in that regard I don't think I'm unusual. Enforced proximity and common causes and concerns do seem to generate a special kind of closeness that doesn't often survive exposure to normal life: school friends, university friends, and work colleagues would be the typical time-limited comradeships that most of us experience. The intensity and the longevity of friendships might even appear to exist in inverse proportion. My father endured five precious youthful years, the entirety of WW2 from Dunkirk via the Western Desert to Burma, with the same small group of pals – a unit of despatch riders, all motorcycling enthusiasts – but none of them kept in touch once they had returned to civilian life. Which struck me as strange, and not a little sad, when I was young man, rich in friends, but now seems entirely normal.

If you took the trouble to follow the link in that first sentence, you'll have seen that Jude led a left-wing activist's life, and in the process accumulated a lot more "friends" of varying degrees of intimacy and – inevitably, in a political life – instrumentality than most of us can boast. Certainly, I don't expect any such effusion of public mourning when the time comes (not least because I intend to outlive everyone). When I first knew her, in 1974, she was installed as half of a couple known to all as "Toff 'n' Jude" in a room in a decrepit student house in Hurst Street, Oxford, a pair of Afghan-coated hippie-anarchists who held open court, often from their bed, like Lennon and Ono. Winters were cold in those days, and the only heating in those crumbling houses came from inadequate electric bar-heaters, or whatever could be scavenged to burn in the open fireplace. I remember long winter evenings sat on their threadbare carpet with a circle of those intensely temporary friends, rolling and passing joints, listening to music, and trying out personalities and opinions for size, as you do at that age. Bizarrely, Jude liked to call me "Ed", as for some unfathomable reason she thought I resembled Ed Marimba from Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (which I don't, and never have done [1]). Most notably, it was in that very house that I began a relationship with the young woman who occupied the room at the back, overlooking the enclosed rectangle of gardens behind the houses, and whose voice I can hear coming from the room upstairs in this house, fully 45 years later, as she conducts some Zoom meeting with colleagues from work.

Those were happy times, and for a while I thought I might have "found my tribe", as people say. As it turned out, it was less a tribe than an ephemeral gathering of nomads and transients; a few shared shining nights before moving on to our very different destinations. It wasn't obvious at the time that we were merely living out the fag-end (the roach?) of the "long sixties"[2], and that things were about to take a turn for the worse; and, as it now seems, might never turn back. At least, it wasn't obvious to me. As the disillusion of the 1970s progressed people's views began to harden and polarize and Jude, to the surprise of many, cast her lot with one of the more austere brands of the Trotskyist and Leninist left that dominated student politics at the time.

Personally, I found those self-regarding, self-styled revolutionary groups uncongenial, despite the amount of time I spent in the company of their members, and they in turn found me puzzling, I think, so any friendships I made there were distinctly short-lived. As so many of them had come from privately-educated, metropolitan, upper middle-class backgrounds, I think they couldn't square the things an actual, unreconstructed small-town headbanger like me thought and said [3] with their idealised notions of the revolution-ready proletarian masses they hoped soon to be leading in class struggle. Quite apart from what even I would now regard as the crude and unexamined attitudes I brought with me to university – a hardly untypical sample of my tribe of origin in those days, it has to be said – I have never been a joiner, am constitutionally resistant to "group think", and gravitate to the role of skeptical observer on the fringes of things, where true friends are sparse, but highly valued. My own subsequent activism took the form of two decades of trade union work, something regarded with more than a degree of suspicion by the more stiff-backed, doctrinaire Trots [4].

Unlike so many student politicians of the far left, Jude stuck by her youthful ideals and principles, and became something of an "influencer": not so much an éminence grise as an éminence rouge, perhaps. She was part of Ken Livingstone's core team as London Mayor, and developed an interest in China that may even – I'm guessing here – have had its roots in the Taoist texts and the Tibetan thangka posters I recall from that long-ago room in Hurst Street. To be honest, I doubt that she would even have remembered my name in latter years, unless it were perhaps as that teller of tall tales and dubious jokes, "Ed". But the death of yet another contemporary and sometime friend does concentrate the mind, doesn't it? Doubtless there will have been others, whose lives were lived less publicly, and whose passing has gone unremarked. Sadly, like land (or distant cousins) there's a limited supply, and they're not going to be making any more.

2004

1. You may recall that I have also been known as "Roy", for much the same reason. But you can call me "Al".
2. The "long sixties" in Britain are regarded as running from 1954, the end of rationing and the year of my birth, to 1973, the Oil Crisis, and my first year at university.
3. It took me a while to adjust to what would now be called the "woke" view of things... ("It is considered unwoke to laugh incredulously when the subject of veganism arises in conversation"; "However hilarious, a joke is not to be considered funny, if it is racist, sexist, or relies on lazy national stereotypes: probably safest to avoid telling jokes altogether"; "The Sun is not a newspaper", etc.).
4. The reluctance of professional academic Marxists to get involved in campus trade unions has always been a source of bemusement to me.