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Vivienne wanted to hold on to her man. On numerous occasions McLaren attempted to end the relationship. Since they were no longer lovers, he argued, and were not living together, surely it was a sham; and anyway, he wanted ‘to fall in love with a student – any student’, with whom he could live the free student life in London, rather than be shackled to a working-class single mother living in the country. But within an hour of arriving Vivienne would change his mind, partly because Joseph looked so content, and partly because McLaren could not find another lover: ‘It just didn’t happen, perhaps because I was rather odd, so the relationship carried on.’ Occasionally he got the better of Grandmother Rose and Vivienne would stay for the odd weekend with him at her flat.

      In October 1968, while Vivienne cared for her two sons in Oxfordshire and read Thomas Hardy novels, McLaren moved on to Goldsmith’s College of Art in South London to study film and photography. There he met Helen Mininberg (later Wellington-Lloyd), a wealthy South African Jewess who became a soldier in his campaign to create havoc through art. Partly to escape Vivienne’s clutches, and partly because he was attracted by the fact that Helen was a dwarf, he began an affair with her. He relished aggravating Vivienne by insisting that, although Helen was plain, at least she was more interesting than she was, and taunted her with tales of other infidelities, claiming that, as an artist, he needed to experiment and be free. Neither their relationship nor their child should stand in the way of his destiny.

      McLaren’s flaming hair and his anti-authoritarian actions at art school had won him the sobriquet ‘Red Malcolm’. His behaviour finally attracted the attention of the police, who attempted to arrest him but were barred from entering the college premises by school authorities.

      Ben was now six and Joseph nearly two. Sharing the cramped Oxfordshire cottage with her parents became impossible for Vivienne, and so in the autumn of 1969, encouraged by McLaren, she took the children to live in her aunt’s caravan at the Tan-y-Rogo Farm caravan park, near Prestatyn on the north coast of Wales, for eight months. McLaren was delighted that Vivienne was removed from her mother’s influence, and for the next ten years her formerly close ties with Dora were weakened. It was not until McLaren’s final departure that mother and daughter were to be reconciled.

      In Vivienne’s absence McLaren married Jocelyn Hakim, a Turkish-French Jewish student he knew who wanted to remain in Britain, and who paid him £50 to marry her at a register office in Lewisham (it was to cost Grandmother Rose £2,000 to secure a divorce). The £50 he earned for his troubles was invested in his student project, a loosely situationist film entitled Oxford Street. The unfinished film highlighted the dehumanising absurdities of consumerism and fashion.

      Vivienne’s aunt’s caravan was sited in a caravan park two miles from the town of Prestatyn, at the foot of the Clwydian hills. Without work, Vivienne was virtually penniless, save for meagre family allowance payments, and Ben recalls her feeding herself and her sons on ‘dandelion roots’ and simple fare. Much to Ben’s delight, he did not attend the local school, but was given an informal education by his mother, who conducted history and geography lessons in museums and markets and taught botany, geography and art along the beaches and hedgerows, nourishing his and Joe’s imaginations and sense of wonder. ‘She thought I’d get more from that than {from} a classroom of children. It was legal – she was a teacher,’ says Ben.

      Released from the interference of Vivienne’s parents, McLaren was more inclined to visit Vivienne in north Wales. Here the countrywoman led the town-man and the boys on nature rambles up into the Clwydian hills, where McLaren would sit and sketch while Vivienne played with and watched her children. Away from the distractions of student life, McLaren felt at ease. But for Ben it was ‘an awful holiday’ as he began to realise the depth of McLaren’s antipathy towards him. McLaren had persuaded Vivienne that her first-born was retarded, and referred to him as ‘that snivelling little brat who’s always holding onto his mum’s apron strings’. McLaren also undermined Ben’s regard for his natural father, dismissing him as the offspring of a ‘no-hoper’: ‘Joseph’s part of me, and Ben’s part of someone she never had any respect for.’ Vivienne’s lack of confidence in her own genes and in her ability to nurture Ben demonstrated how fundamentally unsure she was about her talents and background.

      Despite McLaren’s behaviour, Vivienne optimistically believed that by sharing a child, at least she had a hold over him. In fact her real hold on him was not his paternity of Joe, but her loyalty and the stable love, denied him in childhood, that she offered. She gradually weaned him from the suffocating hold of Grandmother Rose with steadfast and understanding love, and McLaren came to see that although she was more in love with him than he was with her, she did not pressurise him to make the commitment of marriage: ‘I don’t remember her ever discussing such matters.’ Despite her occasional outbursts of desperation, she gave him a free rein.

      McLaren found a flat just around the corner from his grandmother in Nightingale Lane. Vivienne and her sons moved back to London and temporarily into a room McLaren found for them in Balham. After he and his friends had decorated Nightingale Lane, he summoned her, Joseph and Ben to move in. According to Helen Wellington-Lloyd, although McLaren found Vivienne extremely difficult to live with, ‘he was concerned to be around for the kid, so he wouldn’t be brought up in such a narrow, working-class way, like her family.’

      Entering the flat, on the first floor of a thirties council block, was like boarding a train. A long, narrow, windowless corridor, made virtually impassable by stacked bikes, boxes and paraphernalia, led straight ahead. Off this lay a tiny galley kitchen, a primitive bathroom, a boxroom where the children slept in bunk beds, and a reasonably sized bedsitting room. One of the sources of tension between Vivienne and McLaren was household cleanliness. Vivienne was not only messy, but downright dirty – ‘The toilets, you know, filthy,’ says Helen Wellington-Lloyd. McLaren, by contrast, was almost fanatically orderly: ‘He’d fastidiously take off his clothes when getting into bed, fold them up – the routine was perfect.’ Still, McLaren and Vivienne were to live together in Nightingale Lane, with the exception of a few breaks, until he finally moved out in 1980. Vivienne chose to remain, and despite her affluence in recent years, she is still living there in 1998.

      On returning to London, Vivienne enrolled in another teacher training course, at Goldsmith’s College. She was remembered by a fellow student, Peter Silverstone, as a ‘star pupil … potentially the greatest primary school teacher of her generation’. While his mother studied, Joseph was left at a local nursery and Ben joined a primary school. McLaren was still a student, so when Vivienne graduated she became the breadwinner of the household. She shouldered the burden of the £3.105. a week rent and most of the household expenses – McLaren spent the bulk of his grant on himself and his art. At one point domestic finances were so strained that Ben was sent off to live with his father, now remarried and living in Ashby de la Zouch, which he remembers as a bitter blow. Vivienne’s stoic practicality kept the family fed and clothed: ‘Vivienne comes from the Pennines, and she is one of those English hard-rock people with the ability to survive in the woods,’ says McLaren. She scoured neighbourhood gardens, Clapham Common and the local market gutters for herbs, fruit and vegetables: ‘I cooked macrobiotically, just rice, vegetables and a few nuts,’ she remembered.

      As a mother, Vivienne was something of an old-fashioned disciplinarian. McLaren, however, claimed allegiance to the progressive teaching ideology developed by left-leaning educationalists in the 1960s and modelled on the theories of one of his heroes, A.S. Neill, who in 1921 had founded the famous Summerhill in Suffolk. Let down by his mother and mollycoddled by his grandmother, McLaren argued that a mother’s influence on a child could only be stifling and detrimental. He preferred a creative environment of chaos, which he believed would break down preconceptions about family life and instil self-reliance and independence from an early age. Dismissing Vivienne’s views as puritan, he was rarely around to care for the children or to deal with the consequences of his radical parenting theories.

      Joseph was extremely close to his mother, and this affection would manifest itself in gallant gestures: ‘He used to want to go shopping for me when he was three,’ Vivienne remembered. ‘I let him go, but followed him surreptitiously a few paces behind. He was so careful that after a while I let him go by himself.’ The following year, Joseph and Ben were dispatched to boarding school.

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