Dominic hardly ever finished a painting. Occasionally, despite his avowed rejection of the capitalist economy, he tried to sell one, but he couldn’t even give his art away. Viola wondered if one day they would be found buried beneath a mound of his canvases. The result was that they had no money. Dominic refused to ask his family for anything. “It’s very noble of him, sticking to his principles like that,” she told her father. “Very,” Teddy agreed.
Squatting was the logical thing to do, she explained to her father. “Regarding the earth as a commodity that you can own when it’s something that we all share in common…” The argument—someone else’s, not hers—ran out. She hadn’t slept properly in weeks. Sunny caterwauled through the small hours as if in paroxysms of grief for his lost clouds of glory. (He never would truly recover from this theft.) Her father turned up on the doorstep of the squat one day, saying, “I didn’t wait for an invitation. Otherwise I didn’t know when I would get introduced to the little chap,” which was obviously a criticism of her for not hauling the baby and his retinue of stuff on to a train when she could hardly put one foot in front of the other.
Teddy had brought a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates and a pack of Babygros. “Mothercare,” he said. “It’s new, have you been? I wish we’d had clothes like this when you were a baby. It was all fiddly matinée jackets and bootees. A layette, that’s what we used to call it. Are you going to keep me on the doorstep?
“So this is a ‘squat,’ eh?” he said as they squeezed their way past bicycles, mostly broken, and cardboard boxes in the hallway. (“Oh, I was a radical, an anarchist even,” Viola declared in later years. “Lived in a squat in London—exciting times,” when in fact she was cold and miserable and lonely a lot of the time, not to mention being paralysed by motherhood.)
Teddy took the train back north the same day and lay awake all night worrying about his only child and her only child. Viola had been a lovely baby, just perfect. But then all babies were perfect, he supposed. Even Hitler.
A rural commune?” Teddy said, when Viola had told him about the next arrangement.
“Yes. Communal living. That means avoiding the destructive effects of the capitalist system and trying to find a new way of being,” she said, parroting Dominic. “And anti-establishmentarianism,” she added for good measure. It was the longest word she knew and she had heard it bandied around at university, although its meaning remained vague to her. (“The Church?” Teddy puzzled.) “Straight society is morally and financially bankrupt. We live off the land,” she said proudly.
“ ‘True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth,’ ” Teddy said.
“What?” (Pardon, Teddy thought. That was what she had been taught as a child.) “Gerrard Winstanley,” he said. “The True Levellers. The Diggers. No?”
He wondered what else Viola had managed not to learn. Teddy was intrigued by all those radical idealistic movements that sprang up around the Civil War, wondered if he would have joined one if he’d been alive then. You see the world turned upside down. (“A lament, not a rejoicing,” Ursula had chided him, long ago.) They probably all spouted the same kind of nonsense that Viola did. The Kibbo Kift were their natural heirs, he supposed. “The peaceable kingdom and all that,” he said to Viola. “The desire for the restoration of paradise on earth,” he persisted. “Millenarianism.”
“Oh, that,” she said, finally hearing something she recognized. She had seen The Pursuit of the Millennium on someone’s bookshelf. She resented how much stuff her father knew. “We’re interested in cosmic evolutionary development,” she said airily. She had no idea what that meant.
“But you’ve never liked the countryside,” Teddy puzzled.
“I still don’t,” Viola said. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about these new living arrangements, but then anything had to be better than the shambles that was the squat.
The commune occupied a rambling old farmhouse in Devon, most of the acreage sold off but enough left for them to grow their own food and keep goats and chickens. That was the theory anyway. Since the Middle Ages it had been called Long Grove Farm, but when Dorothy bought it at auction, “for a song,” mainly because that remaining acreage was swamp, the good land having been bought by a neighbouring farmer (yes, he of the Morris Minor and the yard full of geese), Dorothy renamed it Adam’s Acre. A hand-painted sign in rainbow colours declaring this new name was nailed to the gate at the entrance to the farmyard. No one, not one single person in the locality, used this new title.
The commune had been going for five years when they arrived, joining three other couples all in their twenties—Hilary and Matthew, Thelma and Dave (Scottish) and Theresa and Wilhelm (Dutch). Viola had trouble remembering their names. As well as Dorothy there were three other single people—an American woman in her thirties called Jeanette and Brian, a teenager who seemed to have run away from home. (“Cool,” Dominic said.)