A State of Mind by Steve Moss

Post date: 28-May-2020 22:14:33

The Witches was a state of mind - A place to remember.

It's a mistake to think of the "Witches" just as a place. Of course it was a place, an undistinguished coffee bar in a drab part of Belsize Park in North London. Paul's website recalls the physical aspect right down to its menu and immediate surroundings.

But the Witches was much more. It was a focus of frenetic social activity for the 60's cohort of young Brits in post-war North London. And, for a while, during each weekend, it became the centre of their world. It was their home, their barracks, their radar, the crux of their social web. It was how they self-identified. They were, proudly, "the Witches lot"

Teenagers pass through a stage of social self-identification and intense peer sensitivity that feels charged with electricity. But for those fortunate enough to connect with the Witches, this was super-charged. The experience was powered by a fusion of ideas, politics and drugs layered over normal peer awareness, all made possible by circumstances of time and history in a corner of the city that attracted a special mix of people: Hampstead.

Hampstead was more of an idea than a place. After Hitler's war, what mattered most to most people was freedom. Political, social, cultural and ideological freedom. People had had enough of dictators and wars and privation. They felt that there had to be something better that their government could, and should, do for everyone, and that everyone had a right to share in it. It was a time of social equality. People wanted a reset of the social structure.

There were many different influences. There were academics of all kinds, in an age and time where most left school at 15. There were those grown up in privilege in Hamstead's leafy avenues who sought out more than the staid, rule-bound culture on offer. There were working class families, from the Hampstead "fringes" of Kilburn, Somers Town and Gospel Oak, as ever concerned mainly with their own survival, but now curious about their schooled Hampstead neighbors. There were jews and half-jews, themselves children of immigrants, who had come through the Holocaust, or felt the impact of it. There were Left-leaning unionists and Labour militants, communists and anarchists and rule-breakers in general. Hamstead had always attracted artists and intellectuals and free thinkers who rejected convention and were interested in a new society. Its coffee bars, book shops, art workshops, libraries,theatres and cinemas were full of people who wanted more than conservative, nationalist little England could ever offer. These were unionists and globalists. Labour Party activists, Fabians, Psychologists and psychiatrists and those attracted to experiential rebellion. And they had a lot of children...

We of the Witches were those children, a generation with two advantages over our parents: We had a bit of time to ourselves and a bit of money. There was a national health service, free education and the possibility of travel. Our parents wanted a new world and we were the beneficiaries.

For most of us, at that time, hanging out at the Witches was more important and more meaningful than anything else we did. It was how we clued in, how we grew into ourselves, how we made sense of the life stream we had entered. Each entry into the place, each glance or acknowledgement from those inside, each networked piece of information about what was happening was priceless. Everything meant something, every wave, nod and moment. When you were there, you were connected, you belonged. When you left, it was with a sense of being part of something very important.

At the heart of Hampstead there is the Heath. And around the Heath are the schools and shops and street scenes that give the place meaning. The Heath is more than an urban park, it is one of the largest semi-wilded areas within London. It has meadows and hills and lakes. There were places to swim, woods where you can almost get lost and vantage points where you could see over London. For many of us, our schools were actually located right at the Heath. So getting to and from school meant entering or crossing the Heath. And the Witches was always just a few minutes away, ever beckoning.

Most of us were still school kids living with parents, during the Witches era. Witches time meant the weekend. School dragged through the week. The sense of something urgent coming, building day by day. By Thursday night a few would have already made it to Witches, but the majority would have to wait one more day. Then finally the weekend started...and we were there.

It was many intersecting circles. You would know everyone in your own circle well. Then there were circles where you knew some people directly, and others by name or reputation. Then, there were circles further out with no direct contact, but a usually a sense of who they were and what they did. In all, you were connected with perhaps hundreds of people who one way or another were part of the same scene. You could go into the Witches, or the pub across the road, The Belsize, and maybe connect with fifty faces in a night. It was an electrifying experience.

It could be a Friday night and the word would come down of a party somewhere in Hampstead or beyond. Maybe several parties on the same night. There was a filtration of news, always current, about what was happening, right now. We would drift off in long lines with intention to meet up later, at the night's destinations, each with it's own promise of the exotic and unique. Most parties never delivered on the promise. But then there were those that did, giving rise to mythical stories about things done, conquests achieved, experiences unveiled.

Through it all, it being the 60's in London, there were drugs. Drugs from mild to overpowering. And a drug culture that drove itself through music, introspection and blind rave. So that much of what happened was filtered through the drug vogue of the day. That meant, in the case of hard drugs, that for many, much detail and many possibilities were lost to straight doping. But then there were psychedelics, which blended better with peer awareness to produce a kind of existential cocktail. Ego-loss became a part of the mix and a strange new land opened up around the Witches. There were Romilar patrols around now not so familiar parts of Hampstead. There were days of madness and schizophrenic panic. There was an awareness that this intense sense of "I" connected to a fixed and known universe, simply didn't exist. There were days of floating from Saturn to Kilburn without even knowing the Witches was there.

But the Witches was there, even when we were somewhere else. It was the only constant in a shifting and moving world. In those days kids like us could travel during long school holidays across Europe and into Asia. We would recreate the Witches in Istanbul, Amman, Teheran, Kabul. Places we could go in safety by hitch-hiking if necessary, all war zones today.

So that was the Witches. A state of mind, more than a coffee shop. A place of much ado about a lot of stuff. A place to remember.