Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to...

Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to a protest march of one kind or another, against South Africa, against the government, against nuclear bombs, against racism, against cuts, against the deregulation of the banks or in support of the teachers' union, the GLC or the IRA. The purpose of all this was hard for me to grasp, given the nature of our enemy. I saw her on television most days-rigid handbag, rigid hair, unturned, unturnable-and always unmoved by however many people my mother and her cronies had managed to gather to march, the previous Saturday morning, through Trafalgar Square and right up to her shiny black front door. I remember marching for the preservation of the Greater London Council, a year earlier, walking for what felt like days-half a mile behind my mother, who was up at the front, deep in conversation with Red Ken-carrying a placard above my head, and then, after that got too heavy, carrying it over my shoulder, like Jesus at the Crucifixion, lugging it down Whitehall, until finally, we got the bus home, collapsed in the lounge, switched on the TV and learned that the GLC had been abolished earlier that same day. Still I was told there was "no time for dancing" or, in a variation, that "this was not the time for dancing," as if the historical moment itself forbade it. I had "responsibilities," they were tied to my "intelligence," which had been recently confirmed by a young supply teacher up at the school who had thought to ask our class to bring in "whatever we were reading at home." It

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