The Ned Wood Archive

Sweet Moderation, Heart of this Nation

I’d see Nick sitting in the Coffee Bar, propped up against the Juke Box, reading.  Always reading.  No matter whether it was Paint it Black or Just My Imagination, he wasn’t listening, he was reading.  It’s like he doesn’t know the difference between Maggie May and Lola, he just sits there reading.  And he’s always reading the same book.  Capital by Marx.  In fact, whenever I saw him, he was always stuck on Commodity and Money.  Maybe he was posing not reading.

So, I’d sit down next to him and ask him what he was doing.  It got to be a standard greeting to which he’d answer lightly such as “Know Your Enemy” or seriously “I came here to learn and that’s just what I’m doing.”  Or flippantly, swinging the ox-stunner above his head “This is just my means of self-defence”.  Or with a question: “So, would you nationalise the Banks or the Newspapers first?”

Like I say, he didn’t listen to music, it just didn’t affect him.  Nor did he watch football.  In fact, apart from a few shared acquaintances, the only thing we had in common was the Coffee Bar.  I don’t know why, but he’d use me to sound off about stuff.  Maybe it was because he thought my mind was like a blank sheet of paper.  Sometimes I’d wonder what he really thought, cos he’d ask me questions from different angles as if he was trying to work stuff out for himself.  Some days it seemed whatever he was reading he took the opposite view.  Other days, he’d read something and then try to prove it to himself or to me.  Maybe he’d decided to work out political theory from scratch.  He was like a scientist, trying to analyse every thought that presented itself to him, thinking through everything from first principles.  What I never worked out, though was why he was doing English.  Socialism and the English Genius huh?

So, one day during a break halfway through Sedimentary Petrology I sat down with a cup of tea and a Topic and was listening to the riff off Paperback Writer which is one of the Beatles songs that you don’t hear enough, unlike something like Lady Madonna which is played far too often.  And Nick sits down next to me and asks me if I think it’s working.

“You what?”

“Do You Think It’s Working?”

“What?”

“Capitalism?”

Capitalism and the Coffee Bar.  Probably some essay he has to write.

“Listen mate.  This is the best place you could hope to have,” I said pointing around.  “Rods tables, cool Juke Box, a drink and some chocolate.  I don’t see what capitalism has got to do with it”

“I was thinking about the country, but now you come to mention it, you could argue to what extent this coffee bar is a capitalist enterprise.”

“Is it?  I thought capitalism was where factory owners forced kids to work all day like up in the cotton mills.  Didn’t we get rid of that.”

“We have restricted capitalism by imposing conditions on it such as reasonable working practices, but the prevailing system of this country is capitalism.  I just wondered whether you thought it was working.”

“Yeah – it’s OK isn’t it.  What’s the alternative?”  I was going to say Russia, but I was still a bit puzzled about the conversation I’d heard that last weekend and thought that maybe there was something else.  Something that was neither like Russia nor Britain.

“Is it OK?” asked Nick.  He sounded sceptical.  “Look around you.”

I looked at the brick wall of the gym.  “Well that’s pretty ugly if that’s what you mean.”  OK it was a flippant thing to say, but you know I’m naturally optimistic and I always look on things as being kind of rosy.  I wasn’t about to bear my soul or anything.  That is, if I had one then.

“It’s OK for you and me.  We’re comfortable.  My dad drives round the country selling stuff – I bet your old man does something similar.  We don’t really need anything.  But some people aren’t so lucky”

“You mean like that Monty Python sketch `Hole in the ground – we got evicted from our ‘ole in the ground’” (I tried to put on the accent) “`God we were poor.’” I paused.  How serious was he?  “I don’t know Nick.  Are people in this country still that hard up?  I don’t think so.”

I’d met people that were poorer than us.  When I was at school, I’d been to a couple of houses that were pretty small.  And then our mate Harry was probably the poorest guy I’d met.  He was OK.  He just didn’t have as many clothes as me brother or Alex or me.  Usually, he came round to our place.  One day we went to his, but it was too small to do anything.  There was just one room downstairs and his dad was watching the TV so we couldn’t talk or anything.  At our place you could use the dining room or the kitchen if our kid was watching the other TV.  But OK, so we had more than they did, but that was just life.

“Well, think about Africa if you want to.  Biafra.  Or Bangladesh.  That’s poor.”

“So, we should give them more money,” I said.  “I always give to Save the Children and that sort of stuff.  What else would we do?”

He sat back against the wall and parted his long, girlish hair.  I came to recognise that as his preparation for a speech.  More like a soliloquy.   

“I think if you are going to start trying to change the world, the first thing you have to decide is whether the world needs changing.  Some folk round here are just rebelling for the sake of rebelling or rebelling against their parents.  That won’t get you anywhere.  But if you can forget yourself for an instant and look at a wider area, your community, your country, or the world, then you can make a judgement as to whether everything is working.  And, to me, the only boundary you can set is the planet.  You can’t dismiss other countries, because we are actually to blame for a lot of the problems, either through colonialism or exploitation through multi-national corporations.

“And then there are degrees of ‘working’,” he went on.  “I don’t think anyone can claim that the world is ‘working’ because of all the starvation we keep hearing about.  Like the places in Africa you mention.  But some people like Greenpeace go further and rabbit on about Whales being exploited too, as if people weren’t enough.

“No mate, the World is not working.  What we have to do now is decide if it is not working because the present political scheme of things is wrong or if it’s not being implemented properly.”

I think that, in those days, I used to put third world poverty, corruption, and civil strife down to the fact that those countries had just not matured as much as we had in Europe.  Blaming us for their problems was a novel approach.  He used to rib me a bit about Greenpeace too.  Like, he’d ask if I thought capitalism was killing the whales which seemed a bit harsh blaming capitalism for a few greedy whalers who were all foreigners anyway.  I was probably wearing my Greenpeace Save the Whale badge which I’d got a the Stones gig the previous summer.  I’d gone up to London to see them at Earls’ Court and tried to get this girl on the Greenpeace stall to sell me four badges at a discount.  Well she wouldn’t because she said I’d be ripping off the charity and she had a point.  Anyway it meant I got to talk to her for a bit longer and she was quite nice.

Nick had finished his speech, even though we hadn’t decided anything.  I was sat there thinking about the new bunch of mates I’d got myself.  The guys I’d met at the hall and over at Glen.  Some of them were a bit scary, because they were sprouting revolutionary stuff I’d never thought I’d hear close at hand.  This was the stuff our parents warned us about – the Labour Party and all that.  Nick was different in that he was so logical about it.  He started me thinking that it wasn’t all automatic what your all dears told you.  Yeah Nick was OK.  I liked him a lot and learned from him.  But I never got him to listen to any decent music.