Anarchy 51/The catchers in the Right

157

The catchers
in the Right

PETER WILLIS

THE UN­ATTACHED by Mary Morse.  (Pelican 3s. 6d.)

One of the basic tenets of anar­chist evan­gelism (if they aren’t mu­tu­ally ex­clus­ive terms) is, com­mon with that of the church or any other body, to catch ’em young. In the anar­chist case this ap­plies more in prac­tice than in the­ory, simply be­cause anar­chist char­ac­ter­ist­ics—open-minded ques­tion­ing, dis­like of au­thor­ity, a ca­pa­city for hon­esty—are es­sen­tially youth­ful qual­it­ies. Not all the young pos­sess them, alack, but they tend to be lost rather than ac­quired with age. They are a bit more com­mon, though, than a dis­cour­aged anar­chist might think; it’s just that those who pos­sess them have a heal­thy sus­pi­cion of any or­gan­isa­tion and are, lo­gic­ally, un­likely to form them­selves into that no­tori­ous para­dox, an anar­chist or­gan­isa­tion.

  There are, how­ever, other hunt­ers out. In 1960, three in­cog­nito so­cial work­ers were sent to three dif­fer­ent towns “to make con­tact with un­at­tached young people, to dis­cover their in­ter­ests and leis­ure-time ac­tiv­it­ies and, fol­low­ing this, to help in what­ever way seems ap­pro­pri­ate”. The pro­ject was or­gan­ised by the Na­tional As­so­ci­a­tion of Youth Clubs, and the un­at­tached is an ac­count of these people (“un­at­tached”, as might be ex­pec­ted in a NAYC pro­ject, meant un­at­tached to any of­fi­cial or­gan­isa­tion; no­body seems to have ex­pec­ted that the un­at­tached might be per­fectly hap­pily at­tached to each other), and how the work­ers fared in “Sea­gate”, “North­town” and “Mid­ford”, find­ing, and es­tab­lish­ing re­la­tion­ships with, the un­at­tached in, mainly, cof­fee bars (an apt sub­title might have been: “With Net and Note­book Through Dark­est Gaggia-land”). The prin­cipal value and de­light of the book is that it is an amaz­ingly real piece of evid­ence (about the un­at­tached and the work­ers); almost as good as a novel—if not bet­ter in parts; the bald sketch­ing-in of char­ac­ters which never­the­less re­veals very clearly the real people be­hind them, and the in-spite-of-itself mov­ing de­scrip­tion—writ­ten in best case­book man­ner, not un­sym­path­etic but asym­path­etic—of the sad and in­evit­able dis­in­teg­ra­tion of the Sea­gate group.