It’s more than half a century since I first set foot in Heathrow from Sydney, in my mid-20s, clutching my 14-month-old baby in one hand and what little remained of my luggage in the other. My large suitcase, stuffed with books and clothes, had vanished at a stopover at Colombo airport in Sri Lanka, where I narrowly avoided arrest as my infant son had startlingly managed to push an empty trolley into the glass duty-free shop, smashing part of it. I was surrounded by a hubbub of people and noise, and one man in khaki uniform who kept sidling up to me saying quietly, “Get on to the plane.” Slowly, I separated myself from those surrounding me and did just that. Twelve hours later, I landed in London, exhausted and bewildered.
Within a year, I had moved into my four-storey house in Highbury, north London, which has been my one and only home for more than 50 years. However, during those years it has also been a commune, a feminist stronghold, a frequent meeting house. Here people have lived and loved, experimenting with new ways of relating, leading me into a life and politics that have remained remarkably consistent ever since.
It’s said that in her 80s, the writer Rebecca West joked: “Once you reach my age, everyone claims they’ve slept with you.” Reaching my 80s, that’s not my boast, despite a promiscuous youth among the Sydney Libertarians proudly proclaiming “free love” to challenge the postwar domestic hypocrisy of the 1950s. Instead, I might jest: “Once you reach my age, everyone says they’ve lived with you.” Certainly, I’ve heard many suggest they once lived in my house whom I’m pretty sure never did. However, I would guess that about 40 people have lived under its roof, for shorter or longer periods, with hundreds staying for a night or two.
* * *
I bought this shabby, unrenovated Victorian property with my sister, Barbara, and her partner, Bill, in 1971, when its value was 200 times less than today and mortgages were easy to come by. Barbara and Bill left a few years later, and for much of the 1970s I was living in a household of passionate young women’s liberationists, all connected to the local women’s centre we had opened nearby. This included two other single mothers, and we ranged from our late 20s into our early 30s, each caring for one child then in primary school. There were always a few men as well from the local libertarian left who shared our feminist politics. The mothers included the then budding writer and poet Alison (Ali) Fell, who depicted the house in her first novel, Every Move You Make (1984): “a tall, crooked house which sucked in draughts”, adding a sketch of me, “up to her neck in local politics”. Ali, with her energy, determination and emotional passion, was a powerful presence in the house.
With a perpetual churn of people coming and going, my home remained a hub of feminist and community activism in this heyday of women’s liberation. Housemates did not pay rent, but in those days mortgage repayments, which I paid, were low. Most of the rooms, including the basement and attic, were always filled with bodies, chat and arguments, plus regular visitors, some of whom remain friends to this day, including the then budding writers Marsha Rowe, who founded Spare Rib with Rosie Boycott, and Michèle Roberts. We were all busy launching feminist and related battles on every front, trying to build a movement that would be inclusive while also battling to create a women-friendly, broader left culture and activism.
We supported our women’s centre, but some of us also worked alongside men at our community press, helping to produce and distribute our free alternative paper, the Islington Gutter Press. I still recall with pleasure visiting the dense network of resource centres, housing co-ops, tenants’ organisations and antiracist groups in our patch when not taking to the streets to distribute the paper. Together we were trying, not always successfully, to combat sexism and men’s taken-for-granted domination. “We don’t compete, but we win anyway,” was one self-mocking reflection from two of the men at a Christmas party in response to our criticism that they remained dominant in our shared spaces. Mostly, however, we were battling sexism in the community, such as when we picketed our local newspaper, the Islington Gazette, which then still carried female pin-ups. One of the male journalists, a union rep called Clive, came out to support us, and the paper soon changed its policy.
We were busy, but one thing was sacred: we had strict household rotas for the six or seven adults who lived for several years in the house. There was a rigid rota for cooking, cleaning and childminding, which enabled everyone, mothers or not, to engage with the political excitement of those days. Each day, one person was responsible for getting up, making breakfast, taking the children to school on weekdays and collecting them afterwards, as well as making their evening meal. Another took charge of putting the children to bed, reading to them and childminding for the evening. Other tasks included cooking an evening meal for the adults and doing the weekly shop, which was always a favourite, using the few pounds we all put into the kitty. Since the adults often ate together, sometimes bringing along a friend, our small kitchen could get very crowded, and our casseroles or bean stews only just sufficed. I remember Ali’s cheesy potatoes being a favourite. However, I recall little disagreement, with those who lived in the house for any length of time usually pulling their weight.
Some adults stayed only briefly, before moving on when they changed workplaces or to couple up with partners elsewhere, but a stable core always remained. Our collective domestic situation was possible then, I now realise, because it meshed with the ethos of the feminist counterculture, which stressed the value of care and mutuality, and opposed the power imbalances and gender divisions of conventional families. Another thing we shared, with perilous exuberance, was a politics of hope. We really believed our collective outlook and activism just might one day change things for the better. In the meantime, we would try to live as if that future had arrived, as best we could.
Household decorations and repairs were funded by a shared account into which we all paid £2 every week. I still have the big red book in which one member, Chris Whitbread, kept a careful tally of all expenses. I see for instance that our annual gas bill in 1977 was £40 (about £225 in today’s money). This generated lengthy discussions at monthly house meetings over how best to organise and pay for domestic maintenance. As the homeowner, I knew I must be careful not to “display my privilege”, in today’s jargon, by simply paying for everything myself. Some of the other residents lived off social security, while busily involved in alternative community work or radical publications.
Other local activists lived collectively in squatted housing. This was a time when empty property – sometimes council-owned, or long neglected by absent owners – remained plentiful. Squatters suggested they were preserving their homes from further disrepair, a claim that went awry if accidents happened – perhaps a stray cigarette igniting a wastebin, as cannabis spliffs circulated. My job as a lecturer at Middlesex Polytechnic was not then the bureaucratised existence of academics today, and enabled me to contribute as much as I wanted and help to enrich community life and activism. Indeed, administrators at work knew they could often find me at my “other job” at the community press, and much of my actual teaching was in the evening. No one expressed surprise at my alternative lifestyle, except once when I was apparently outed as a lesbian when I was pictured outside my home for the cover of Spare Rib in September 1976, with the headline: “Why could one of these mothers lose custody of her child? LESBIAN MOTHERS IN COURT”. In fact, none of us depicted with our children were then lesbian, since lesbian mothers feared being outed at that time.
* * *
In our homes, anything secondhand, recycled or homemade was preferred to buying something new. It’s amazing how much could be acquired from local skips. Bookcases, antique chairs and other objects were regularly hauled in by gleeful rummagers, and sometimes remained in my house for decades. Well before our knowledge of the climate crisis, or any surge in green politics, anti-consumerism was an elementary expression of our anti-capitalist politics.
Meanwhile, regular fundraising jumble sales for one cause or another could keep us adorned in the latest Biba T-shirts or long floral tops, though any hankering for designer labels was disdained. Some housemates even practised their barbering skills on each other and the children. With my long, curly hair, I had less to fear from these home cuts, although one boyfriend commented that, on first inspection, he thought I looked like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards.
It was not always peaceful. In particular, sexual rivalries emerged in what remained relatively spontaneous, free-loving times. Things deteriorated rapidly between the two other mothers in my household, formerly the best of friends, when one of them became romantically involved with a man we all knew, shortly after he had ended his relationship with the other. The resulting rupture led to us all gathering for a disastrous group session with Susie Orbach from the recently opened Women’s Therapy Centre in Islington. One of the women, who had each been seeing Susie privately, thought her feelings were being treated as less important and felt abandoned. It apparently led to the centre resolving never to repeat such a hazardous form of mediation. Nevertheless, most of us, including me, thought we could benefit from the support feminist therapy might provide, hoping it would help us to grow more confident and self-aware, rejecting old patterns of female deference.
* * *
Our modes of childcare sometimes differed, but there was room for compromise. Probably rightly, I was sometimes scolded by housemates for being too permissive, perhaps inattentive when the children talked long into the night or left behind even more mess than usual. However, I recall little serious rebellion, as mostly the children did as we asked with minimal squabbling. The youngest, then around six, a girl called Amy, was the naughtiest, in my memory, screaming loudest if denied anything.
Between the ages of seven and 10, my son, Zim, and Alison’s son, Ivan, were almost inseparable, night and day. For a while they slept together on a single bunk bed, until the other adults decided they had grown too old for that – despite Ivan’s fierce protests: “It’s no good saying Zim can’t sleep with me – you might as well say I must be dead.” However, soon Zim quietly moved up to the top bunk with no further protest or denting of the closeness between them.
Today, it’s hard for me to sum up the diverse benefits and possible limitations of those years of collective living. Now middle-aged, Zim will still tell anyone who asks that he had a “wonderful” childhood. He certainly enjoyed the permissive openness of the house, with its large, wild garden, which meant he could, and did, always have other friends (mostly boys) around. The children were always racing in and out, and up and down the stairs, finding spaces to play or watch TV together. The supervision they received had a very light touch. Happily, I also hear from some of Zim’s childhood friends that their near-daily visits to our house were hugely important to them, even life-changing, especially as they moved into their teenage years.
I am far too aware of the challenges of parenting ever to suggest ideal ways of doing it. What I can say of my solution is that, as an unprepared mother, it seemed to work for me and my son to have domestic support from partners and friends who believed in the idea of collective care. It certainly created a household that was much more relaxed than my own childhood home.
Nevertheless, collective living has its complications and constraints. There were not only adult tensions to be surmounted, but also some children raised in communes later expressed ambivalence. In what scant research there is, but mainly from discussions with those I’ve known, some former commune children suggest they felt neglected due to the instability of their collective homes or interactions of the adults. Others report the opposite, suggesting they received too much attention and were expected to join in and account for everything they did in household meetings.
I certainly made mistakes, especially (as he often tells me) that I raised my son for a different world, the gentle world of our dreams – uncompetitive, laid-back, tolerant. Instead, he left home to find a culture and workforce that was its antithesis – Thatcher’s competitive, acquisitive, judgmental world. Never very ambitious, my son had little idea of what he wanted to do after university, falling into jobs in the expanding IT industry, where he still works without much enthusiasm. In hindsight, I know that, had I done things differently, I might have prepared him better for the world he entered, encouraging a more aspiring outlook. It would have meant far more focused attention from me, and less indulgence in leaving my son to his own resources to find his way in adulthood. Today, he mostly tells me that he is happy with the still laid-back life he leads, and that I worry too much that his world is so different from my own continued political existence.
I also know that how we lived relied on access to the sort of housing that is now impossible for most to acquire, given the obscenity of house prices, the horrors of renting, and new laws against residential squatting. And the work we did, paid or unpaid, was usually less pressurised, with easier access to social benefits. Despite divisions among us, female activists then still hoped to push the direction of history towards a kinder, more egalitarian outcome. Little did any of us realise the battering to near annihilation such collective optimism was about to receive.
The buoyancy of women’s participation in the making of history was deflated in the 1980s. Feminists had indeed made changes, on personal and other fronts, often gaining more control over their home and working lives – and feminism had pushed a diversity of unspoken issues firmly into the political mainstream. But it was soon clear that no change is permanent, whether little or large. Women had learned they could win some battles, but also that victories may be snatched away, sometimes rather quickly. We had won more funding for nurseries and other community resources, which were now disappearing before our eyes.
* * *
Today, five of us live here, including Steve Skaith – a musician and former member of the left-feminist group Big Flame, in which I was active, who joined us in the 80s – as well his wife, Claudia, and their 18-year-old son, Danny, plus Nick, who was also once in Big Flame and has lived here for two decades. A much younger friend, Tanya, whom I’ve known since her childhood, lives in the attic when not on her boat. We still have many visitors to stay, and share a looser domestic arrangement, often eating together, while trying our best to support and care for each other. The mortgage is paid off, and those who can afford it now pay a low rent. The vibrancy of former times sometimes reappears in the annual summer party, held here for more than 40 years (excluding Covid peaks), in our now cultivated, colourful garden. Sadly, though, each year I lose some of its old visiting stalwarts, looking wistfully at the bench where the much-loved scholar Stuart Hall always sat as people buzzed around him eager to chat.
I may have no blueprint for ideal living, but I’m shocked by the levels of distress reported today by so many parents, mainly mothers, who are routinely pressed for time, money and resources. Apparently hardly anyone feels they are doing an adequate job of parenting. Even affluent stay-at-home mums mention constant anxieties about raising children in today’s ultra-competitive world, while admitting to that same sense of isolation and exclusion 1950s mothers once felt. One in five British mothers have mental health problems before or after giving birth, nearly half of new mothers report chronic loneliness, and suicide is a leading cause of death for mothers during their baby’s first year.
There is a desperate need to expand social infrastructures to support carers and to find fresh ways to confront domestic isolation. Now there are plenty of calls for greater collectivity, including forms of shared living, driven by our dire housing crisis and the prevalence of loneliness. In particular, there’s a rise in the number of older people, especially women, wanting to avoid isolation through more collective housing arrangements. New forms of community housing for older women have already been established in north London, Leeds and Cambridge. Even property companies have begun advertising houses with more space for co-living and multiple occupancy, though these remain far distant from the commune movement.
Who knows, perhaps aspects of 70s communality will return, hopefully with battles for a kinder, more caring world, renewing that old anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist outlook. Nowadays, I find more people in my life and neighbourhood committed to some of that vision, whether they’re volunteering in food banks, supporting asylum seekers or offering other forms of mutual aid. Yet it’s more challenging today to hold on to hopes of social transformation, so systematically annihilated by decades of welfare cuts, the deepening grip of unregulated financial corporations, and now knowledge of climate calamities. It means forms of catastrophic pessimism routinely threaten to overwhelm any transformative optimism.
But never entirely. I may be in my eighth decade, but with age-mates and younger friends, I still join others calling for better lives for everyone, whether on picket lines or marching the streets against global conflicts and injustice. However fragile, some spirit of resistance and hope can always be found somewhere. Most Fridays, I walk down to support the nearby Second Chance Cafe in Stoke Newington, which offers free food and sociality to any who pop in.
I have no desire to ever leave my Highbury home, and am always on the lookout for new ways to ensure it has the necessary resources for those within it to keep caring for each other as much as we can. I know the hazards of very old age, but still cling to hopes that I may be lucky enough to remain part of some form of caring domestic collectivity, supported by friendships across the generations. I know this is surely a utopian vision, and only time will tell whether my home can remain the shared haven of shelter I still find it today. I also know it’s now more important than ever that we try to share our resources and whatever joys we can find in our lives to encourage any dreams for better futures for all.
• Lean on Me: The Politics of Radical Care by Lynne Segal is published by Verso on 14 November, at £17.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
