By Pam Isherwood
From an interview which Pam Isherwood and Jill Nicholls did with John L Williams as background for his book Heatwave – the Summer of 1976.
I got involved in feminism in 1975 or 76. Before that I’d been a wife, very much a wife, in a hippy commune In Swindon for a few years. Then that whole setup fell apart and in 75, 76 I moved to London for a week, and stayed forever.
I lived with some friends in their house in Leytonstone and then I moved across to South London because I was doing teacher training there. I happened upon a bookshop called Village Books in Streatham, and walked in. Not to buy because I had too many books already, but to see. And the guy who was working in the shop looked interesting. So I said, Oh, I’m looking for work. You know anyone who wants work? and he said, yeah, sit down, start tomorrow. I haven’t made many big decisions in my life and that was one really.
So I started working in this bookshop and I was presumably good enough at it to keep going. It was a sort of community-based style bookshop although he very much owned it. Everything local that was happening.
came through the bookshop. Like any radical bookshop then, it became a real centre of information. I learned an enormous amount just by sitting there.
The whole idea that if you wanted something to happen, you just did it, was new to me. I didn’t grow up in any kind of a political household. So I was having to make it all up as I went along. Having to negotiate the insider/outsider feeling – that is, feeling an outsider to begin with, thinking everyone else was inside.
Gradually finding out how things worked. I was 25 then.
I kept my Swindon connections going because I had a one day a week job there, as an educational psychologist, which fitted neatly with working in a bookshop – it was like that then, easier. And meanwhile, I was starting to dip my toes into what was happening with the women’s movement in London.
It was really burgeoning at that point – the beginning of all the consciousness raising groups being set up, and lots of local women’s groups. So I got involved in what became the South East London Women’s Liberation group. Also everything was kicking off like the big anti-fascist marches, Rock Against Racism, lots of gigs.
Meanwhile I was this newly single heterosexual. I was quite enjoying the fact that as a woman I was able to make passes at men, which was transformational really: I enjoyed having that power. I had a boyfriend, Brian, at home. He was a builder, a roofer in fact which is like gold dust, so everyone wanted to be my friend.
Then that summer of 76, I started going to the Women’s Liberation Workshop at 38 Earlham Street in Covent Garden, this big huge room on the first floor, because I was quite intrigued with what they were doing. All these brilliant active women all getting on with stuff and making things happen. They had a little bookshop so I said I could come and help with that, which was a way to get in and show I could be useful. That rapidly escalated into a massive Involvement, being part of the very loose collective that was running this Workshop – perhaps a dozen women, from whom I learned a lot – just being around all these women who really knew what they were doing and how to do it and knew a lot of the history – I had no idea of socialist or feminist history at all.
Brian would hop round every now and again, but he more or less disappeared. I think he had a new wife or pregnant girlfriend by then. He moved on.
So I was meeting all these actual lesbians in real life which I’d only ever heard of before. I certainly didn’t grow up with any idea that this was a possibility. If I had any latent lesbian potential when I was in my teens it didn’t ever show because there was no such thing. The only lesbian in the world was Nancy Spain on the tele. So I’d just got on with being heterosexual.. And then, suddenly having all these women around, that started to set things moving in my brain.
That summer of 76, because I was In a paid job in the community bookshop, they insisted I took a proper holiday, which I’d not done before. So I borrowed my mum’s nice car and put in a sleeping bag, a tent, a jar of yoghurt which I could keep adding milk to, and drove 2,000 miles round the country. All the time with all this stuff going on in my head, where I was having to totally readjust who I was. No phones of course, so no ongoing connection with people at all. During that summer when it was absolutely scorching hot. I just kept going. Kept going, kept going.
And then I came back. And one of the people who had been coming into the bookshop was this absolutely gorgeous woman, really, really interesting. We were in a group together called CISSY, against sex stereotyping in children’s books. And I was very slowly realising that what I was feeling for this woman was more than friendship, it was desire. Before I set off on my road trip I had arranged to pick her up from where she was holidaying in Wales. We drove back that last 200 miles in the blistering heat, then around Oxford the weather broke. One huge thunderstorm with lightning hitting the road in front of us. Frightening and exhilarating.
It never came to anything but it was enough of a trigger to think, oh, that’s what I’m feeling. Then in my consciousness raising group, we were starting to touch on some of these things. I proceeded to break the rules by having a relationship with one of the women in our group of six, which you are absolutely not supposed to do, because it can ruin the group. In fact it was all very easy and no bad reactions – but it was certainly a transformational year.
I remember two conferences that summer of 76 – one was the national one, held in London that year, the other was a London Regional. There are probably women still looking for me to this day because I poisoned them. How did you feed a conference? You just made masses of lentils. So I made saucepan after saucepan of lentil stew, bought a nice new white dustbin and tipped them in….in that heat…It tasted fine. But apparently there were consequences… there were quite a few casualties….
The bookshop was doing well and expanded into a second shop. We kept the small one as a children’s bookshop, Village Children, which I ran for a few years. We forget how important these bookshops were – as meeting places as well.
We sold Spare Ribs, I used to look forward to it coming in. I remember the Shirley McLean one.
We used to have 30 copies every month and that was the first one that ever sold out. It had a red cover which I think helped. So I phoned them up to tell them – I spoke to Janie Prince (see Janie’s story on HOWL). I don’t know if they were happy to have this random woman from a bookshop ringing up but I wanted to let them know,
I was also just starting to take photographs, I did one of the first Gay Pride marches, 1978, and have done them all ever since. But I didn’t really have much to do with gay men – they were there and I was quite grateful but I wasn’t involved with things. They did a very few mixed events. But this is what women don’t know nowadays: there was a massive, established, lesbian culture. Lesbian / women / feminist. They weren’t so separate at all. There were women’s bars which were used by loads of lesbians; there was something going on every night of the week. And there was art and all the cultural stuff, coming from the States as well. I was involved with Lesbian Line – a telephone help line for lesbians. That was all volunteers. I changed my job, this time working for Publications Distribution Coop, distributing radical magazines and books. That included bringing 30 000 copies of Spare Rib up the stairs every month and then splitting them into packets to send to bookshops. A massive huge straightforward physical job.
I’m actually on the cover of a Spare Rib. I have a copy. It says ’Taking action’ written in spray paint and there are four or five little cutout ladies, pretending to do the spray painting, And I was one of those ladies. It was when I still had all me hair. That went a couple of years later. Long hair wasn’t the thing then. It is now. My nieces, four years old, with waist length hair. It’s heresy for me to suggest they cut it off. We thought we’d come through all that stuff, but now the policing is much more rigorous, despite what we thought we’d done in 1976!