Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground

This is a sample chapter from my book Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground. If you would like a signed copy, send me an email via HubPages and I'll tell you what to do. Meanwhile: enjoy the chapter.

It's like a Wild West Town. The streets are brimming with drunken squaddies, lolling over each other and shouting, the pubs are heaving, loud music is spilling out onto the road like an amphetamine heartbeat, and there's military police in full uniform posted on the street corners watching the proceedings with stern, manly expressions, weapons at the ready. You could get killed in a town like this.

Amesbury in Wiltshire, the nearest town to the Stonehenge monument. Somehow that fact explains the frontier atmosphere. Maybe there is a war on.

I drove in at about 10.30, parked up in a huge sprawling car park, and walked into the town centre. You can tell a squaddie a mile off, even in their civvies. Maybe it's the uncompromising haircut, or the obscenely muscle-bound physique. It could be the air they give off of slightly dangerous schoolboys on the rampage. But it's not. It's the moustaches. They've all got moustaches. And it makes you wonder what devious motivations they have lurking in the back-passageways of their unconscious that makes them all want to look like Freddie Mercury. They're swaggering about and playing manly games with each other, play-fighting, wrapping their arms around each other's necks and slobbering in each other's ears, slapping each other on the back, wrestling, play-punching just this side of a ruptured spleen, ruffling hair and pinching cheeks, obviously in love.

Amesbury is the town where Wally Hope was busted. Actually I'm on my way to West Wales to visit the Tepee people. They have Wally's box over there, and I've been promised a meeting with one of the original Wallies. I just thought I'd stop off here on the way. Check it out. There are deep roots here in the Wally Hope story, and it's connection with the great festival is obvious. A lot of the festival-goers must have shopped here, and I'm certain the Off-License did a roaring trade. I don't know what I expected to find. A sleepy little country town. A place steeped in ancient myths and atavistic customs. Who knows? Instead of which I end up in Dodge City.

I was dying for a drink. I pushed my way past a bunch of people gathered in the doorway of a pub. The men were as muscle-bound as the squaddies, but clearly local. They had long feather-cut hair, and wore cap-sleeved tee shirts.

After my pint I negotiated a bed and breakfast, and then went for a walk about the town. I soon decided it was far too dangerous. Squaddies are notoriously tribal, and I was clearly not one of them. Why else would it be that even the locals have to sport mounds of muscle-fibre, and military police look on sternly from every street corner? The smell of testosterone and after-shave oozes from every pub. I went back to the hotel.

I started chatting to a man leaning against the bar. I was trying to work out what drink to buy. I wanted something local. He offered advice, and then asked me what I was doing there. "I'm looking for Wally Hope," I said.

"Wally who?"

"Hope," I repeated, and then went on to tell him what I was up to.

"Oh, the festival," he said. "It was the worst thing that ever happened to this town... the festival being closed down."

I was surprised at this statement. "I'd've thought you locals would have hated it."

"Not at all," he slurred - he was very drunk - "lot's of money." And he told me that his Dad had run an Ice-Cream van there for the full ten years the festival was going. "He used to get all sorts. People coming up to him bollock-naked, buying an Ice lolly. Didn't bother him in the slightest. They were all nice people. Best little tax-free earner he ever had that Ice Cream van. He's still got it. It's rusting away in his back-yard now."

The people around the bar began to join in. Opinions were divided. You had to protect the monument, some of them said. Otherwise some little oiks might try to carve their initials into it. And there was a degree of thieving in the town, too, during the festival period. Apparently the Co-op was at the head of the anti-festival lobby, while the Off-License wanted it to stay. "So what," said the Ice Cream Man's son. "The Co-op lost a bit of stock. But think of the money the rest of the town made. As for the damage," he added: "I've got a bit of the monument myself. Strangest thing. No matter how hot the weather is, that stone is always ice-cold. One of the security guards sold it me."

I asked about the underpass the DoT were planning to build. Wouldn't that damage the monument too? What were people scared of?

"That's the most dangerous stretch of road in the country," someone said. "People are belting down the dual carriageway at eighty mile an hour when at the self-same moment they hit a single lane road, and catch sight of Stonehenge. And of course they just look at it. Drive along craning their necks and braking, saying, 'Oo look, it's Stonehenge!' And people wonder why they crash. Something has to be done about it."

The conversation went on for hours. Everyone had something to say on the subject. The Landlady of the hotel said she'd bought the place in '86, after the festival was banned. But every year the Solstice was a running battle. '88 was the worst. There were so many police, it was like a prison camp. The locals all had to carry ID cards. Road-blocks everywhere. Cars were stopped coming into and going out of the town. It was a Nightmare, she said. And although everyone agreed that there had been some problems associated with the festival, particularly in its later years, when there was a lot of Heroin going about, they were all in agreement that the police reaction was excessive. "You couldn't hope to meet a nicer bunch of people," said the Landlady. "They may have been scruffy, but they were always polite."

The following morning I went looking for the site of the squat where Wally Hope had been busted. It was on London Road, up a hill, I was told. I cruised about the town trying to find it, but ended up on the road to Stonehenge. "Oh well," I thought, "maybe Stonehenge is calling."

When I got there I tried to walk in but a security guard stopped me. There were already people in there, shuffling about amongst the stones, carrying posies of flowers and polished brass bowls and a range of other incomprehensible implements. "It doesn't open until 9.30," the security man said.

"I'm on my way to Wales," I said. "I haven't got time to wait. Anyway, there are already people in there."

"It's been booked," he told me. "It's the Sahaja Yoga people doing a ceremony for Peace," he added, with a faint smirk.

So I got a cup of coffee instead. There was a heat haze rising up over the bleak, strange plain, and a dirigible ambling about in the still air like some Heath Robinson flying saucer. Families sat around on the benches eating sandwiches and drinking tea from flasks. Children played. Everyone was dressed in smart casual gear. Not a hippy smock or a nose ring in sight.

The Sahaja Yoga lot were floating out in twos and threes by now, wafting their posies about and looking smug. One couple passed me and gave me this look of complete contempt. "They just don't understand," one of them said, smiling like one who did. "What do they think this place is? A cafeteria?" Sahaja Yoga people don't drink coffee. They drink raspberry leaf tea.

Despite all the efforts at normality - the visitor centre, the car park, the wire fencing, the atmosphere they've tried to create of a some sort of an historical theme-park - Stonehenge continues to exert a fascination. There's a wildness in the stones, a presence. You really sense that each of the stones carries a personality, and you know that you are face to face with something ancient and mysterious. They draw you to them. They call out to you. You feel that you are truly on the threshold of another kind of space - the dreamtime - as if the monument was a stepping stone across the dimensions. Giants doze here, murmuring and stirring in their sleep.

I arrived in Tepee Valley around 2.30 in the afternoon. I'd been given instructions of how to get there, and the further I'd pushed into this landscape, the thinner and windier the roads became, the more entangled the tree-cover, the wilder the outlook, the greener and sweeter the view over the rolling hills, so that I really began to feel like an explorer in a new territory. The final instructions were very detailed indeed: "Follow road down hill to next track on right. Drive up track to the end and park car. Follow track to end, through gate and over stream." And there was a little sketch-map with the gate and the stream drawn in, and a little rectangle with a triangle to represent the Tepee, which was marked "Jim's garden." Fortunately I didn't have to follow any of this. By the time I'd arrived at the track it was clear I was in Tepee Valley. There were ramshackle buses scattered about behind makeshift fences, and vans and cars and trucks. Barefoot kids grubbed about on the dusty tracks, and you could see the tepees pegged out along the valley, peeping through the tree cover like weird sculptures. I pulled up and asked if anyone knew Jim. And sure enough, there he was, just emerging from a car. He'd just returned from shopping in the nearest town. He got into my car and we followed the rutted track down to the parking place.

Jim's garden was a revelation. Another little Paradise. Neat vegetable plots laid out in reassuring squares. A gurgling stream skipping beneath the overhanging trees. A few well-built structures like garden sheds and workshops. And two tepees, standing like inverted ice-cream cones, across from one another.

Actually that image isn't quite right. Certainly they are shaped like ice-cream cones, but the picture lacks dignity. There is a sentinel-like quality to these creatures. They seem almost alive. And the spread of poles at the top, ranged like antennae, with the canvas smoke flap fixed like a satellite dish, gives the impression of a giant receiver of some kind. GCHQ for the New Age. Earth funnels, as Jim calls them.

Jim and I sit on logs by the fire, in a dusty patch crowded with pots and pans, and buckets and bowls, and plates and cutlery and chopping boards, all sheltered with a loose canvas covering secured by ropes. The kitchen. Jim is preparing lunch. He's in his forties, with short, greying hair and a thin beard. Lunch is salad and chips. The chips are fried in a heavy, cast iron frying pan, blackened by smoke, and after they're cooked Jim throws the oil into the fire, which sizzles and leaps. Much care is taken over the fire. It is clearly the living heart of the garden. Three logs with glowing charcoal ends are placed around a skillet made of horseshoes, under which the fire dances. Dry sticks are fed into it from the side in a constant stream, and the bubbling, hissing frying pan is periodically turned to get an even spread of heat. The complexities of open fire cookery engender a kind of meditative concentration: Jim's movements are practiced and concise, a domesticated T'ai Chi, as he snatches one hot pan from the fire and replaces it with another, and then feeds more wood into the flames, and stirs the ashes with a stick. Kitchen Yoga, as ancient as these hills. We eat lunch from wooden bowls, served with pan-baked bread tasting of yeast and smoke and grain. Absolutely delicious.

By this time Jim's lover has arrived to share lunch with us. She's like some strange pixie, diminutive and hunched, with her front teeth missing. She's wearing only an orange vest and a pair of wellies. Every time she bends down I get a view of her fanny, like some pink, winking eye through dark, bushy brows. I'm starting to have trouble knowing where to look. She gives me these sidelong, mischievous glances and there's something unfathomable and disturbing about her. Not that she's unpleasant in any way. It's just that I have a sense of an ancient, almost mythic way of life manifesting itself here. She's like a creature from some Scandinavian saga: not quite human. A witch, a wild fairy-creature. I feel certain that she casts spells.

She tells me her name, but asks me not to use it. I can call her "Black Pearl" she says. At first I thought it was some sort of sexual innuendo (which only goes to show how my mind works). It's not. It's the name of a particularly powerful strain of skunk-weed. They smoke dope here almost constantly. It has almost universally replaced alcohol as the social drug. There's a lesson here, I feel. Currently most of the people in Tepee valley have to sign on. But given their dedication to Hashish as a sacrament, and their skills at gardening, I feel sure that, if Hash was legal, they could easily become self-sufficient.

It's strange how comfortable I feel here. I'm a townie at heart, more at ease with the hiss of traffic than the twittering of birds, more in tune to the romance of the supermarket than the rhythms of nature. I like the sight of decaying factories, the smell of carbon monoxide, the sparkle of streetlamps on wet pavements. The Great Outdoors is too disordered for my punctuated mind. But here I am, crouched over an open fire in Jim's garden paradise, beneath the shade of a flapping tarpaulin, and I am: I'm happy.

There's a steady stream of visitors, lured as much by the smell of fresh coffee, no doubt, as by the prospect of passing the time of day with some townie journalist. I remember the faces, but not always the names. There's a guy in a sarong with a nervous voice and long dreadlocks snaking down his back. He's in his late 40s at least. His shin is wrapped in a handkerchief which he takes off to reveal a deep, yellow wound. He burnt it while attending a sweat-lodge, a matter that was to attain great significance for me later. I advise him to see a doctor. I'm none-too sure if these people ever see conventional doctors. There's something endearingly child-like about the man, a kind of innocence. And it's no exaggeration to compare Tepee valley to Eden before the Fall. Lot's of Adams and Eves wandering about, naked, tending their vegetable plots in the sunshine.

I met a woman who took an instant dislike to me because I am a journalist. She said she'd been interviewed by a Guardian journalist last year who'd described her as having blackened teeth and matted hair. It was an entirely gratuitous description. She'd been deeply hurt and insulted by the article.

There's another bloke who insists on being called Finn, after a character in 2,000 AD. Tight, thin body and jet-black dreads. Army boots. This one has the air of a latter-day crusty traveller rather than the hippy crew that mainly inhabit the valley. Which is what he is. He joined the movement after the Battle of the Beanfield. He's ex-army, like a significant number of travellers. He says he left the army after an incident in Northern Ireland. A kid pointed a toy gun at him and said, "Bang, you're dead!" Only he meant it. Finn could see the hatred in the child's eyes, like a nuclear-tipped, armour piercing shell, sluicing it's way through his defences. In that moment he knew he was on the wrong side. He cried. There and then, a British soldier on the streets of Belfast: he cried. And, in a sense, you feel, he's been crying ever since.

Finn is boiling over with the mythology of the movement. He says that Stonehenge was originally a Moon-temple, orientated towards significant lunar events, before the heel-stone was shifted to its present site. It is its transformation into a Sun-temple that is at the root of the current malaise. The shift from goddess worship to god-worship is at the heart of the shift in consciousness that marks us out as modern men, and that, also, explains our dislocation from the world around us, our fundamental lack. He says that the power of Stonehenge exists only at dawn on the 23rd of June: the Summer Solstice. Then the energies whirling round the monument bend matter. At other times it is inert. This explains why English Heritage have placed a ban on Stonehenge only at that precise time.

He says that he has always been a soldier. Throughout time, through countless lifetimes, he has lived and died by the sword. He says that he has never lived beyond the age of 21. This is the first time (he looks to be in his late twenties or early thirties) -this is the first lifetime- that he has ever survived beyond that age.

As he talks -almost oblivious to the people gathered about him- sipping coffee and smoking spliffs, you get the sensation of some deep wound. Like the other bloke's leg, but far more painful. The subjects are spilling out of his mouth with unsystematised abandon. It really is as if he's boiling over. He's in a state of excited reverie, not really caring who is there with him. Maybe he cares, maybe he doesn't. But that catch in his voice, that faint warble of emotion, indicates a kind of generalised love. He does love. He is love, though a peculiarly lost and abandoned kind of love.

He's talking about his wife and children and life on the road. He'd been going mad. Too many people in too small a space. His wife had literally packed his stuff and told him to get out for a while, to get himself back together.

He's talking about that time in 1988, just after he'd left the army, when he was leading the campaign to organise the festival, cutting fences and securing site after site all over Salisbury Plain. Small festivals here and there, niggling the authorities. People gathering and moving on. And always pursued by the police and the army. He says that they knew who he was. He says they always keep a track on "their" boys. He was using his specialised survival skills -given to him by the army- to another end. A spiritual end. He describes the travelling community as his tribe.

I cannot remember the order. There was no order. He talked, as if talk was his only defence against a reeling, mad Universe, on and on and on. And all of it was fascinating and weird (in the original Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word): fatalistic and fated, tempered in a strange mythic fire.

He talked about being in the army. He says that the essence of army-life is love. I recognise this. I've noticed that emotional timbre in the voice of soldiers before. The root of all relationships in the army is not the battalion or the squadron or the company, or any of the other levels of organisation the army groups its recruits into: it is the "buddy-system". The word "mate" comes from army life. It used by working class men to denote work-fellows or friends or men they like. And yet -of course- it root meaning is a sexual partner. Your buddy, your mate, is like your lover in all but that one sense. You are absolutely dependent upon him. On the streets of Northern Ireland until recently - as in any combat situation - one soldier walked forward while his mate walked backward. They "watched each other's backs." They placed their lives in each other's hands. Total readiness. And each is willing to die to save the other. This is indeed love. A poisonous love, a strange love. A psychologically crippled love: love attained through fear and oppression. This is the secret at the heart of the army. Not the weapons. Not the strategies. That they have psychologically stripped the human being to his base-components, and that they use these raw emotions to power their particular ends. Love. Love more total - and more disturbed - than any known in civvie life.

I've said before that a significant number of travellers are ex-servicemen. I cannot give you exact figures on this, but in my experience this is true. They represent the reverse -the Underground- of the establishment. Men whose contact with war has twisted and maimed them. The functional essence of the State is war. War is its meaning, its purpose, its very heart. These men - these soldiers - have come face-to-face with the coercive nature of the establishment machine. As a rogue soldier - as a soldier who would no longer obey orders, who thrashed around in his pain and confusion, hitting out blindly at the figures that taunted him and had power over him, the sergeants, the senior officers - Finn was locked up, bullied, beaten, tortured and humiliated and, finally, cast out.

All armies depend on brutality. They depend on force, and on obedience. They strip away all symptoms of individuality. They deconstruct the human machine, paring away the sense of personal identity, removing all rogue elements, until the fleshy exterior is no more than a seething bag of raw instinct. And then they reconstruct him again: as an instrument of war. They work on what is most primitive, most basic in the human psyche. And if, in the process of creating these psychological monsters, these lunatics inured to evil and to the evils of war, there are also times when they create the opposite, then that is but a psychological side-affect. At the heart of the human process, perhaps, lies the struggle between Good and Evil. If evil arises, so too does good, to answer it.

I came to Tepee valley looking for Counter-Culture, for the Underground. The Underground is not the same as trendiness, which alternates from generation to generation (flairs-drainpipes-flairs); nor is it rock'n'roll rebellion, so easily absorbed into the Establishment; it is not the same as youth culture, which simply disappears with age. The Underground encompasses a range of ideologies. From free parties to road-protests to hunt sabs. From hippies to punks to ravers. From violent anarchism to non-violent direct action. From primitivism to high-tech sound-systems. From travellers in trucks to travellers in horse-drawn carriages to travellers on filthy, mud-slimed sites, off their heads on Special Brew and Heroin. From occultists to cultists to followers of Earth lore magic. From atheists to monotheists to polytheists. From computer-generated music and fractal imagery to penny-whistles and drums around an open fire. What distinguishes it from the establishment is that it also absorbs all the suppressed elements from above. We all take drugs. But only pharmaceutical and commercial drugs are allowed in the overground. So the Underground is crowded with those whose chemical inclinations are different - the dope-smokers as well as the heroin dealers.

Here in Finn I felt I was closer to the heart of what is meant by underground than ever before. The underground is like the unconscious: the repository of failure, and a well-spring of creativity. Finn typified this for me. A failed soldier (what else can you call a soldier who cries when a child points a toy gun at him?) -deeply wounded by his contact with the inhuman force at the heart of the system- yet born again, enlightened as it were, by his contact with the tribe. The travelling tribe, not allowed to travel anymore. Skills that are of no use in civvie life become extraordinarily important on the road. Camping skills. Survival skills. Evasion. Love and loyalty. What use are they in a city?

And his initial statement about what is wrong with the Earth -about the Moon-temple Stonehenge being turned into a Sun-temple- provides the other key to what motivates the underground. The overground worships power, authority, masculinity. It worships Jehovah. The underground worships the goddess. It is the revival of that most suppressed of all religions: worship of the female principle. Shekhinah. It doesn't matter what you call her - Gaia. Mother Earth - she is the missing element in the equation. And the reason why the establishment god is mad with grief.

In the afternoon I met Chris Wally. He'd been one of the Wally Tribe. He was very drunk. Chris Wally doesn't live in a Tepee (he doesn't even call himself Chris Wally anymore): he lives in the only house in the entire valley, a grim, grey cottage, devoid of light. He talked a little about Wally Hope. He thought it was no wonder that Phil had been certified back then. He must have sounded mad with all his strange declarations: "I am the Son of the Sun. Acid is the Sacrament." All that stuff. And he pooh-poohed the idea of any kind of conspiracy. The powers-that-be, they're just greedy. You don't need any of that conspiracy theory stuff to explain their motivations. Their motivation is profit, that's all. They don't need to get together in secret meetings. They share the same motivation. It's a kind of understanding. Events like Wally Hope's death are the accidental side-effect of this. Not intentional: a conspiracy of accidents. His death was brought on as much by his own intransigence - and by their failure to understand what he was trying to say - as by any dark conspiracy.

He was talking very loudly. It was a declamation not a conversation. He wouldn't answer any questions. He was impenetrable in his drunken armour. I had the feeling of a cover-up. Not a conspiracy, you understand: a kind of understanding with himself. He was one of the people who had been in the house when Wally Hope was busted. He was one of those who'd got on with the '75 festival oblivious to Phil Russell's fate. Of course he'd never meant him to die. He wasn't guilty in any way. He'd have been very young at the time. All that was gone now. If he'd ever believed in Wally Hope's miracles, it had no meaning for him now. He was sticking doggedly to the facts. Too old for youthful fantasies. Too old for any wild talk of conspiracies and the rest. He was just trying to get on with his life. What else was there to do?

I recognised a bitterness in his tone. It wasn't that I disagreed with his analysis (personally I'm both drawn to and suspicious of conspiracy theory): it's just that he seemed too forceful in his argument, too quick in his rejection of what has come to be a mythology of the movement. How did Wally Hope die? Well, he died. And he left all of his friends behind.

While we were talking I noticed a scurrying in the hedgerow. It was a muscular brown rat with an obscene, pink, naked tail, slipping into a hole beneath the bank. Jim told me that he was planning to kill it. He believed it was already breeding. Despite his vegetarianism, despite his pacifism, despite his back-to-naturism, he still saw the need to kill a creature he recognised as an enemy of humankind.

In the evening I went and got some beer. I was feeling left out as the rest of them were rolling spliffs constantly, and I don't smoke. Everyone to his own poison, I say. Dope just makes me feel self-conscious.

We sat around the fire and chatted as the sun went down. They told me of their continuing battle with the authorities. Apparently no one had planning permission for any of these structures, and the local council were trying to remove them. This land was designated as arable land, it wasn't meant to be lived on. It struck me as revealing how the planning laws always seem to be used to stop poor people doing what they like. Who's ever heard of a road-programme or a supermarket being stopped? It's relatively rare. Apparently, though, the valley had been occupied once, up until the '60s. The farmers had left for some obscure reason, and were all living in council estates now. Jim told me that it cost £200 a year to build and maintain a Tepee. How much does it cost to live in a council house?

I had one surprise during this conversation. It seems that everyone does the lottery. I couldn't understand it, mainly because I'll have nothing to do with it myself. I think the whole thing is an exploitative con. But these hippies, for all their alternative lifestyle, their goddess worship, and their temporary housing, they all did the lottery. They were talking about what they'd do if they won. Like everyone does on a Saturday night in the British Isles. Finn said that he'd buy some land for all the travellers to settle down on.

And then peopled drifted off to bed. I felt very calm, very peaceful. Finn and I retired to the spare Tepee, where a fire had been lit in a little wood burner in the centre of the circular room. It was warm and comfortable. The floor was covered in reeds and scattered with sheepskins. The walls flapped slightly in the breeze. The atmosphere in there was one of calm meditation. Finn continued talking about army life until I asked him to leave. And as I lay down to sleep I could feel the Earth shifting beneath me, rumbling on some sub-atomic level, stirring to its depths.

I was in Tepee Valley for two days. Initially I was going to stay for a third, but something happened which made me change my mind. Jim told me he was going to build a sweat-lodge. The following day we started preparing for it.

What's a sweat-lodge? Well, basically it's a kind of out-door sauna. They heat limestone blocks in a huge fire, and then they take the blocks into an insulated bender, and everyone sits around in the darkness while they sprinkle water on the stones, and sweats.

I'd confided to Finn that I was a bit nervous about the sweat-lodge. And he'd said, "yes, it's the place where you confront all your fears."

Ulp!

Black Pearl and I had gone to cut some reeds for the floor. She was still dressed in her orange vest and her wellies. As we drove by she was calling to everyone: "Sweat-lodge tonight."

"Trying to fill it up with men, eh Pearl?" someone replied, looking pointedly at me.

I asked Jim what exactly a sweat-lodge entailed. He said: "Well we all sit around by the fire chanting and drumming while the rocks are heating up. Then we carry the rocks into the lodge using poles. After that we all enter in a procession, chanting. But it's all right. If you have to get out, all you need to do is shout 'door' and the flap will open and you can leave."

Me and Pearl built the sweat-lodge between us. The framework for the bender was already there, a network of hazel coppice secured in the ground, and bent and lashed into the shape of an upturned bowl. It was about 6ft in diameter, and four foot high. We took blankets and duvets and wrapped them over the frame, and then covered the whole thing in tarpaulin. Layers and layers and layers. We were passing by each other as I brought wheelbarrows full of material down from the shed to the bender. She said, "Sweat-lodge tonight," with a strange little snicker, and one of her unsettling, side-long glances. It sounded like a threat.

We went to visit someone further down the valley. When we arrived he was in his garden dressed only in a headband. His whole body was pinkish-brown. He was squatting in his vegetable patch, plucking out weeds. He was accompanied by his 17 year old daughter.

He turned out to be the son of a South Wales Miner. In the early days he'd been a revolutionary, he told me. Now he was content to dig his garden.

He turned on a small transistor radio. It was Gardener's Question Time. A familiar Radio 4 voice was saying: "I think you should chant over the plants at full moon wearing only a loincloth."

Later we went to see Rick the Vic, an ex-Church of England Vicar turned hippy. He had Wally's Box tucked away. That's the box that Pen had made for Wally's ashes, which Pen had wanted burned. I looked it over. It was just a box. It smelt of damp and age. Rick asked me if I wanted to attend a dance-camp that summer.

"What's a dance camp?"

"It's a place where we all gather to camp and dance. All kinds of dance: African, Thai, Tibetan..."

I had this sudden realisation. I could picture them there at their camp, all these fey, twee folk, practising their African dance movements with concentrated looks on their faces. I could imagine them in serious conversation: "I just can't quite get the hang of that twirl, you know." It wasn't dance they were on about, it was therapy. These were the people the punks had called Boring Old Farts. Meeting Rick the Vic opened up an ancient wound for me, the memory of the precious, middle-class hippies with their crystals and their drums and their chants and their therapies and their philosophy of personal growth. Well I was a working class lad back in the '70s. I licked my spoon. I had no grace. I liked pie and chips. That philosophy had damaged me at the time. And I was going to have to sit round a fire with them, naked, and...chant.

I bottled out. I drank some beer and fell asleep in the afternoon, and when I woke up it was to the clear realisation that I really didn't want to sit around a fire with a bunch of naked hippies drumming and chanting. Nor did I want to enter a confined space with them with red-hot flesh-sizzling rocks in the middle, in utter darkness, and sweat. I just wasn't ready for that yet.

I left as soon as we'd eaten dinner. I drove off into the sunset with a huge sensation of relief.

But I thought about them all as I slid along the dusky motorway in the deepening evening, the Sun like a huge, raw wound slashed across the sky in my rear-view mirror. Jim and Pearl, and the woman who hated journalists. The man with the wounded leg. Finn, Chris Wally, the ex-revolutionary and his daughter. Rick the Vic. Was it a cop-out, I thought? Hiding out in this gorgeous piece of countryside playing Adam and Eve? Is this the way to change the world? Well, no: obviously not. They are just getting on with their lives the way the rest of us do. Not doing any harm -doing a great deal less harm than the majority- trying to do good by example.

I thought about the council estate where I live. The people there share something in common with the Tepee Valley residents: that everyone signs on. There's a major difference though. The people in Tepee Valley are happy. I'd mentioned this to Jim and he'd said, "yes. We have everything we want here. We eat well. We work hard. We sleep like logs. It's the perfect life."

The way they dealt with their own shit was a revelation. They compost it. There are four compost bins. The first is filled with a mixture of shit and organic matter from the hills and the garden: bracken and leaves and reeds from the sweat-lodge floor. The second is filled with worms. As the decaying matter goes down the line, it breaks down more and more until it is pure, clean compost. You could pick up the rich, loamy, crumbling humus in the last bin and smell it.

Jim said: "The way we deal with shit is to grow food from it. It's natural. Lead into gold. No alchemist could do better."

‘Wry, acute, and sometimes hellishly entertaining essays in squalor and rebellion.' Herald

'If you think an alternative lifestyle means free-range eggs from the supermarket and lead-free petrol for the company car, read this book. Read it anyway. A paperback original, it costs a fraction of the price of a Glastonbury Festival ticket and will pass the time waiting for your case for obstruction to come up in the Newbury magistrates' court. It is an abuser's guide to what might once have counted as the Counter Culture and can now be summarised as A Bunch of Crusties Who Get Up Late. C J Stone (make that C J Stoned, to take account of his mental state while conducting his researches) is the best guide to the Underground since Charon ferried dead souls across the Styx ... He's unbeatable when he walks the walk and talks the talk with some loopy conversationalists. They open up to him over a beer, joint or tab ... Stone joins enthusiastically in their road protests, free festivals, anti-Criminal Justice Act demos and pow-wows in tepees. He dances in woods to illicit sound systems ... Each chapter has a wonderful life of its own with a terrific cast of characters. Even when he does not go out auditioning for them, his raw material knocks on his door. The man who comes to repair his computer turns out to have encountered an angel in Glastonbury Abbey.' Independent on Sunday

'If you are looking for coming cultures of resistance, you'll find them here ... C J Stone has written a painfully honest account of life on the other side of a workaday consumer society. He is an unashamed old hippie - a commune-dweller in the early 1970s, possessor of a Mondragon-type goatee - yet has raved and eckied with the youngest of them in search of continuity between undergrounds then and now.' New Statesman and Society

'This book is one of the few records of what life in the counterculture is like, and, more importantly, demonstrates that its supporters did not come from nowhere ... brilliantly written ... provides a rare historical insight into the unbroken development of alternative culture.' Q Magazine

'The book has the ferocity and passion of a clenched fist, yet still manages insights into the human condition, beautifully observed theories on existence, and some laugh out loud moments of humour taken straight from real life situations... The most topical depiction of protest and alternative living you are likely to read this decade. A chapter entitled 'Beanfield' is described as 'the dark heart of the book', it illustrates police brutality and Establishment intervention on the premise that whatever they can't control is out of control. It is a heart wrenching chapter ... A book like Fierce Dancing should cause revolution ... An exhilarating reminder of the state of Britain today.' City Life