It is July and we have packed up our house. We are what is called a Single Parent Family. It is 1978, and being a Single Parent Family is not good; we are the only children like this in our classes at school. We’re leaving behind our climbing frame and our garden, and our guinea pigs, Victoria and Albert, and we’re going to live in a mansion. We slide on the sweaty back seat of the car for hours. At the bottom of the drive, Mum pulls open the car doors and we fly outside, landing on a gravelled courtyard. A giant house rises up like a fairy castle, so big we cannot see where it begins or ends. We scramble up stone steps – me, my sister, Claire, and our little brother. I am six years old.
After we arrive in our utopia, sun charges through our days. It sends rays through the 100 grimy sash windows and around an 18th-century monumental staircase. In this house we move from the “we” of a family to a “we” that is collective. There is rupture and upheaval, cutting and pasting. Those first weeks, there are meetings about everything. The world must be made up: the house, the people, the language.
“What shall we do with this space?” a woman says, when she goes to find her inner child in the kitchen. “The house,” a red-haired man insists to an eager crowd, “is an egalitarian cake to be sliced into equal parts.” “We must radicalise domestic space,” an Indian woman, Tripti, declares at another gathering, “to control irrational and potentially subversive domestic behaviours.” Alfredo explains we should be “inspired by Soviet housing experiments to abolish the family”.
Often, Alfredo has a pipe in his mouth, and clouds puff from a blackened hole. He is what is known as a Marxist. In the meetings, Alfredo weaves our dreams together, to create a new domestic world. He gathers the words from the adults’ paperbacks on socialism, leaflets on kibbutzim, yoga, rebirthing, ecology and feminism.
Soon it is agreed that all the ground floor – kitchen, lounge, yoga room, dining room, laundry, toilets and storerooms – will be communal; the second and third floors will be divided into communal bathrooms and private living spaces. These are to be called “Units”. Our first Unit, just off the second-floor landing, has bedrooms for my sister, brother and me, and a rundown bathroom (with no hot water). Each of our rooms connects to a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is where Mum sleeps. Her bedroom is also our living room; as well as a bed and a sofa, there’s a table with a kettle, and in the corner a fridge. In the mansion, not a single door is locked, and I never own a key.
The adults move stuff in and take stuff out. “Can you give us a hand please?” says a sweaty woman pushing a bed. She says her name is Firefly. Tripti says, “It’s going to be radical here. Kids and adults working as equals. It is tabula rasa! In this home, everything will change!” She catches my eye, and I feel the tremulous power of her dream.
Alfredo arrives dressed in a kaftan. He drifts around the house, like a winged thing, a fairy. “Let’s do a radical gesture. Kids!” He lifts his arm and clenches his fist. We imitate him and raise our arms. This is a radical gesture, and we shout, “Power to the People.”
Earlier, Alfredo called the outside of the house “the Estate”, and yesterday Sunshine took me round. In the garden, a topless white woman was doing yoga, her nipples like purple wine gums. There was also a brown man with no clothes on, and his willy dangled as he whispered, “Salute the sun.” I wanted to stare at the willy, but when we giggled, the man yelled, “Bloody kids!” Then we became horses in an ancient apple orchard, cantered past sequoias as tall as the sky and into the woods.
The Estate is 31 acres, a number to remember. These figures and words measure our world. The number of rooms is 60; the length of the drive is one-quarter of a mile. The drive separates us from the world outside. Our house is utopian and revolutionary, and that means politics sticks its fingers into the intimacy of our lives. In a meeting, a tall American woman with thick dark hair stands up, dressed in a shirt, jeans and a belt with a silver buckle. Barbara says, “Language is a mechanism of male supremacy. We must change it!”
Influenced by the adults’ hodgepodge of textbook utopias, we undergo linguistic enculturation. It is strange to say new things, but it feels powerful when new words are in my mouth. The word “commune” is forbidden now. We must always say “community”. Our image to the outside world is controlled, and our house swings between hippiedom and the New Left, flower power and puritanical Marxism.
Mum must also now be called Alison, freeing her from the patriarchy. At first it feels funny to say her first name. But many of the adults, mainly women, also change their names. They put Cynthia, Mary and Doreen in the rubbish bin, and call themselves Walker, Firefly and Eagle. Eagle tells me, “I am called Eagle because the Eagle eats the seed, the Eagle shits the seed. The Eagle is the seed.”
We are now “individuals”, yet two distinct social groups are formed. Mum becomes one of the Adults, a powerhouse in dungarees. The other social group is the Kids. “Oh look, it’s the Kids,” they say when they see us: a mass, a gang, a horde. Bedraggled and free, we climb trees, build camps, fight and wrestle. Right from the start, it is rough. On the front lawn, the Kids play British bulldog. I must get across the grass. Brandy and I run fast, and she gets there, but Jason catches me and he pushes me hard. I fall. My breath is cut short. Jason holds me down, and it hurts. I have tears in my eyes. Mum comes running. “You shouldn’t do that,” Mum says. Jason smiles at her mockingly; he lets go of my wrist and walks back to his base, laughing.
Mum is left standing because Jason’s mum is Barbara, and Barbara is more powerful than Mum. Barbara rises early, digs the garden, and organises the weekly Friday Meeting. Her father – Jason’s grandpa – works on Wall Street, and as Barbara tells Eagle, “buys our plane tickets fucking business-class”. In the community, parents’ power affects Kids’ power. As Jason leaves, Mum sighs and goes back to the kitchen to make a roast dinner, peel 100 potatoes, and line the sky with hope.
Jason walks back towards me. “You need your mummy, don’t you? You can’t stand up for yourself!” He laughs, and his laughter travels across the lawn, climbs up the front of the house. It gets louder and louder. I stammer, “I don’t need Mummy – I mean Alison.” The Kids surround me and begin chanting, “Mummy! Mummy!” and Brandy joins in, and my face goes red. Jason is triumphant, a god of war.
“Kids are equal to Adults,” I begin to spout precociously to anyone who will listen, and I make sure I never say “Mum”, and even tease Sunshine when she uses that word. Slowly, Alison stops trying to defend us, and I am relieved because I know that in the community a parent can’t protect you even if they try. Tripti tells me, “You’re equal to me. Kids deserve rights!” and I drink up her words.
Troy, Michael, Jason, Sunshine, Brandy, Jake, Rainbow, Tina, Saskia and me. We are the Kids, and we form a utopian platoon, eating, playing, sleeping, sharing clothes and shoes, bullying and fighting. Sometimes, the Adults wash us together. Line us up naked and laughing in a bath. We are neighbours, best friends, enemies, cousins, family, brothers and sisters. We are none of these words and we are all of them, and none of this is defined.
The Kids always make their own breakfasts. Knives heavy against our growing hands, we grip handles, saw bread, scoop lumps of oily peanut butter from white plastic catering-size vats. From the fridge, we grab large brown plastic jugs. Inside, the raw milk from our cows is topped with heavy cream. Precariously, we tip milk into brown glass mugs, trying to avoid the inch of yellow. If the cream gets in the cup, it is sludge inside your mouth. Paste coats your tongue.
Our diet is organic before the word exists, and food is ordered in bulk from health food co-ops. We eat vegetables from our garden. We try to be self-sufficient and it is good for the planet. Meat, dairy and eggs come from our smallholding. Mealtimes are busy: 50 people, 13 families, single people – mainly men – and what they call “multiple parenting”.
Few Adults have the skill to cook for 40-plus mouths. Yet eating the communal food, and not caring if it is disgusting, is seen as a sign of strength. People sit wherever they want, Adults next to Kids, nobody sits with their family. In the house, at the beginning, nearly all of us are from Single Parent Families. But, when the Adults arrive, they often hitch up with someone new and we scramble between these different men and women.
In the rhythm of the community, every Friday evening brings the Friday Meeting. In the living room, we sit in a circle. Alison takes notes, using the shorthand from her secretarial training. Despite what they call “consensus”, I begin to notice that certain voices rule the roost. Power is grabbed by the domineering, the scary, by those who claim to do the most communal work and are on the Dole. Group dynamics create a de facto elite, like the Eastern Bloc nomenklatura or the western Establishment. There is an informal and unspoken, yet steely, hierarchy.
As that summer draws to a close, the Adults have more meetings about the roof, sewage, the boiler. In winter the house is freezing. For years, we sleep in hats, scarves and gloves. The toilet water freezes over. Having discarded tights, dresses, makeup, shirts, ties, ironed trousers, hairdryers, perfume and shaved faces, in meetings they sit cross-legged, or sprawl on old sofas. They place dirty shoes on furniture, and do not often wash or brush their hair.
Sometimes they decide the Kids should have meetings too. “I need to talk to you all.” Barbara pushes us into the Kids’ Room and barricades the door. “Today, you have to decide what you want.” We giggle and jostle, unsure why we are here. She shouts, “It’s not a joke.” I stop laughing. Barbara can be weird. I want to give her the right answer.
Recently, she took me into the kitchen and pointed to a freshly plucked chicken. “This is a dead bird. You need to know how this stuff works. These are intestines.” Barbara stuck her fingers into pink tubes, held them to my face, and her fingers travelled towards a hole. “We shouldn’t pretend just because you’re a Kid. This is the anus. Shit happens.”
Now, Barbara puts us in a circle. “Today, you get to decide about this community, your life. I’ve fought for civil rights, and now I fight for children’s liberation. You have the power to become anything, rather than being protected and controlled by Adults. You aren’t going to be bank managers or shave your legs. You are free from intervention, manipulation. What do you want?”
We search for the correct reaction. For despite this being freedom, there is right and wrong. Don’t mention money, telly, Dallas, dresses, God, central heating or discos. Don’t say you want Barbies, to be pretty, fall in love or get a job. Do not be ambitious. Kids must veer between pastoral Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and rigorous Workers’ Rights. If we were buildings, we would be a blend of fantasy sci-fi constructions and functional, brutalist concrete tower blocks. Saskia says, “I think people should be free.” Barbara smiles. I say, “I think there should be the same rules for women and men.” Michael shouts, “They should ban the Queen. All she does every day is ride around in a carriage.”
Barbara laughs, and we all start laughing. We Kids laugh as loud as we can. We laugh like this on the lawn, where crocuses are planted in a Ban the Bomb peace sign, shouting at army planes in the sky, laughing at Miss World, the idea of women staying at home, the thought of anyone wanting to make money, or a Kid wanting a mum.
Barbara keeps us in the room for over an hour. Before releasing us, she exclaims, “You are lucky. You are Rousseau’s revolutionary Kids, born good, left wild. You are pioneers.”
In the 31 acres and the 60 rooms, it is easy to break a leg or an arm. Tina loses half her finger in the sausage mixer. An Adult wasn’t looking and turned the handle too fast. Little Helen caught on fire from the circle of candles we lit in her room. Her pyjamas burned bright in a polyester blaze. Seven or eight of us quivered when the ambulances came. We were shepherded away, taken back to our Units. Everyone hushed to bed.
Babies arrive like falling rain. Women grow round stomachs, have home births and breastfeed everywhere. In our house, there is no difference between private and public conversations. No euphemisms. Vaginas are discussed over breakfast alongside domestic violence and nuclear bombs.
Women learn to drive tractors, cut hay and muck out stalls. They are Second Wave feminists, inspired by Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem. Fields are fenced and chickens slaughtered. Women hoe and dig gardens, repair roofs. Most of them are middle-class and were privately educated. Some have a comfortable “outside” income, and some, like us, barely have enough. They are women dressed as 70s men dressed as hippy peasants dressed as a Marxist feminist democracy.
People appear and stay for a few days, 18 months, or years. When they arrive, we are joined at the hip, fused like metals, welded into bonds: we eat, sleep and live collectively. The Adults cuddle us, shout at us, cook us food and hold our hands. Then, one day, there is a random crack. A snap. People leave. Men, women and children flitter through our lives.
Little Harry has gone; his mummy had bulging eyes, and talked too loudly. Often, she cried, and once she pulled me into a corner, weeping and whispering, “They are all plotting to get me.” The Adults said, “She has to go.” John (the Australian) and Dee (the Ghanaian) took their three children to live in the Australian outback. The twins, Charlotte and Sarah, moved down to Devon to live with their dad. They left after the girls found a razor in the communal bathroom. They tried to shave their little faces, and cut their skin into ribbons of red.
On weekdays, we head off to school. Our VW van is always broken. It is a communal vehicle, and we have to push it down the hill to start the engine. The community has another vehicle, a black London taxi, but we don’t all fit inside. Even though I attend school, sometimes I miss classes for days, because I have a tummy ache, or when our teacher gets ill and her replacement is boring. Alison says, “I think you know more than the teacher.”
During community days, the Adults’ time is marked by work, but includes breaks for tea, instant coffee and talk. Hours and minutes lull because, as Eagle says while she lies on the lawn and watches the blades of grass grow: “It is more about being than doing.” Time is not a thing to be kept, but experienced. Things drift.
In comparison, the Kids’ time is structured by school, because unlike the Adults we go outside and must be on time with all the people in society. While the Adults are cut off from the outside world, we are in a unique limbo, moving daily between alternative and mainstream time zones. Sometimes, it gives me jet lag.
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At school I become friends with a girl called Mary, and invite her to play and stay over. When she arrives, Mary is wearing a pretty dress, and I wish that I had one. Alison often tells us, “We have no money.” Claire, our brother and I are not allowed and must not want white sliced bread, Mr Kipling’s pastel French Fancies fondant cakes, a purple ruffled rah-rah skirt. Inside the community, our poorness is seen as good. We’re told the working class are good and they are poor.
Outside the community, at school they laugh at us for the way we are dressed. Our clothes are from jumble sales. I do not bath or shower regularly. The feel of dirt is cosy. A warm protective layer like a coat: mire on my skin, last week’s clothes, furry unbrushed teeth. At one point, when we were small, all the Kids caught ringworm and the infection meant one of the Canadian twins began to lose their hair. The communal dirt was a mixture of Marxist ideology, the glorification of physical labour, and a hippy back-to-nature fantasy.
In my bedroom, I say to Mary, “Let’s play babies.” She nods her head and I am pleased. Normally, I only play with Dolly on my own; you can’t play with dollies with the Kids. We play boy games because that is equality. I get my Dolly and Mary says, “Let’s change her nappy,” and I try to unplug a floor lamp so we can lay her down. The lamp is in our way, but the plug is stuck. Seeing a thin crack between the socket and the plug, I decide the best solution is a knife and fetch one from our kitchenette.
I say to Mary, “This will work,” and stick the metal blade into the socket. There is a thud. A bang. Mary and Dolly watch. Their blue eyes open and close, while the electricity travels from the socket, through the knife, to me. It is like being shaken by a giant hand. When it stops, Mary is crying, and I cry too.
We go to find Alison in the kitchen. In the industrial mixer, wholemeal dough turns. Mum is making bread, and her face creases into worry when I tell her what has happened. “Poor thing. You electrocuted yourself. The electricity must have been stopped by your new shoes.” I smile and say, “My new boys’ shoes,” because I am proud they came from the boys’ section of the shoe shop. Then Barbara arrives, talking about the Friday Meeting agenda, and Alison grabs a notebook and writes things down. It is often like this in the community. Other things are more important than us.
I take Mary back to my Unit and as we walk up the stairs, we hear wails and screams. “It’s Tripti’s baby being born,” I explain, because Barbara said it would be today. Mary says nothing. That night, I am sick in my sink – “from the electric shock”, according to Alison. Eventually, when it is time to go to sleep, Mary and I whisper, “Goodnight.” The next time I see Mary at school, she says clearly, “I am not allowed to come and stay, or play at your house, ever again.”
Most days in the community, when I am a preteen, I sit on the laps of doppelganger dads. I am drawn to these men. My dad is far away, but there is always one of these men willing to spend time with me. I seek out the nurses, the carpenters, the travellers, the computer scientists, the therapists, the musicians, the media wannabes, the dropouts, the academics, earnest socialists, and the unruly performance artist who spent 24 hours in a gallery smashing panes of glass. I make them gifts, stick 200 lentils on to a birthday card, draw a picture of the woods, and bake them chocolate cakes. Some of them are kind, and some are not.
One day in the kitchen, a man, Lionel, grabs me and pulls me on to his lap. We are special friends. His long hair tickles my face, gentle as a corn sheaf plucked from a field. He is dry and warm, safe as summer. Lionel is a new member. He says, “Do you want to come and stay in my Unit tonight? I’ll give you a massage.”
I nod, excited and thrilled. It’s like going to Sunshine’s Unit for a sleepover, or a tuck-box party at a boarding school (I read about these in my books) – jolly girls munching on currant buns. Lionel is a nearly 40-year-old man, a father and a husband. His wife is away for the weekend with their daughter. Lionel will be alone.
In the Cowshed I ask Alison, “Can I sleep at Lionel’s tonight? He wants to give me a massage?” Alison is milking a cow while telling a joke to a visiting miner’s wife. Currently hundreds of miners in Britain are on strike, and we are providing relief for the families. They stay for weeks and weekends in our country home. Alison says absent-mindedly, “Yes, yes. Don’t forget your sleeping bag.” Kids often sleep overnight in other Units in the community.
That night, I gallop up flights of stairs and down corridors, skipping past different doors. Corridors were introduced to the homes of Britain’s upper class in the 18th century, and allowed them to avoid seeing servants, but were also an important feature in French philosopher Charles Fourier’s utopian dream. His “street gallery”, or communal corridors, would smash the bourgeois family and eliminate privacy. As I run along to the end of a corridor, I think about how I have never slept in Lionel’s Unit before. I am alone. In the community, intimacy is a rare flower, harvested by hand like a saffron thread – a thin orange strand plucked at dawn. At the door, Lionel greets me, his brown eyes deep with promise, his face patterned with a smile.
“Hello.”
“Hi,” I answer.
“Put your sleeping bag next door.” I do so, and when I return, Lionel says, “I’ll give you the massage now.”
“Take your top off,” Lionel says with a smile.
His floor is rough. He puts a towel down. I don’t want to undress, and I do not know why I cannot take off my clothes.
“Take your top off,” Lionel repeats. I blush, obey and undress. “Sorry.” I go to lie on my stomach, stumble slightly, place my half-naked form on the towel. Head to the ground, my cheek is in floor dust, and Lionel straddles my little body, drips oil on to my back. His hands slide up and down. We are alone, and it is late, and I feel something bad happening. It is like sickness.
He says, “Turn over now.” I turn and look up. But it is impossible to watch him. I now know I should not be here, in this Unit alone, in this community. I should not be anywhere on this planet. I am 11.
“This is our secret.” Lionel’s mouth is by my ear. “This will be our secret. Don’t tell anyone.”
Our eyes meet for an instant, and I have nowhere to look when his hands move down my body. I wait, and later when he stops there is no relief. “You can get dressed and go to bed now,” Lionel says, and I get dressed and walk towards the door. In the other room, I put on my pyjamas and get into my sleeping bag. In the darkness, I hear a clock. Even now I remember the sound. I am terrified Lionel will rape me. The clock keeps ticking, and I want time to stop, to abolish all cuckoo clocks, watches, sundials and Big Ben, to erase time from here, erase what has happened, and stop what is to come, stop the past, the present and the future.
The next morning, I return to my Unit undone, and it feels as if I sleep through the following weeks. When I walk down the wooden stairs, my body is clunky and heavy, and I am terrified I’ll cross paths with Lionel and terrified I won’t. It is such an effort to get through each morning, each afternoon, each evening, each day and each night.
“Don’t you love me any more?” he whispers, catching me alone in the Washing-Up Room. I bump into Lionel again in the Dining Room when we celebrate saying goodbye to Lawrence and Tripti, who are moving away. “Be free,” Tripti tells me, when I cry as I wish her goodbye, and she strokes my cheek. In the garden, Lionel applauds when Sunshine and Brandy rollerskate. I see him watching me; his smile tightens and my body contracts. I am elongated, stretched until I might snap.
There are over 40 people in the house, but I am alone, and I wonder – if we have broken down the nuclear family and Lionel is a parental figure – is what happened a form of incest because I am inside my home?
Over the years, I have understood that I didn’t grow up in a cult, but a utopian experiment, a revolution inside a bubble. And unlike other people, my stay in the community was not simply a short adventure, followed by a period of life with parents in a normal home. The community was the only childhood I knew.
It seems to me that the problem with the utopian model is not the desire for change, for feminism or equality, for these are my own battle cries. But when people withdraw from society, the revolutionary stance becomes inward-looking and almost stilled, because it is hermetically sealed. In utopias it seems like something often becomes trapped in the attempt for perfection: as Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality”.
It has taken me years, after leaving the house – and not until I had my own children – to confront what happened there, to question what went on inside our home, and ask why and how? When I take decisions for my own children, I realise their care comes before politics – or perhaps that care, in all its shapes and forms, is one of the most fundamental forms of political activity.
As an adult, I rarely mention my upbringing, attempting to tame these 15 years of my life. Make them normal, just like everyone else. But it is difficult to run from the house, the woods, the Kids and Adults. When people ask about my childhood, I beg my wild beasts: shut up and behave. I change the subject, time passes and the dust grows thick. When the subject cannot be avoided, I cast off the line, “Oh, it was a little rock’n’roll.”
This is an edited extract from Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman, published by Penguin on 15 August, priced at £18.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Names, dates and places have been changed.
