Ella found it difficult to remember how the Family Game first started.  Lots of things to do with the cottage were confusing. She and James and Ian and his sister Martha had discussed the idea of a 'commune' during a long London winter.  When the found the small white cottage with a small amount of attached land it seemed they could fulfil this dream.  But in practice it was often messy and crowded.  Sometimes five people were in residence but sometimes there were as many as fifteen.  People moved back and forth between the cottage and London, depending on whether they were working for a short time or studying. Ella stayed there all the time, as did a couple of other girls, Jane and Martha, and Martha’s chap Jay, a Canadian she had met going overland to India.  They had all given up work, just collected their Social Security.  They were happy with the quiet pace of the country life, the round of planting and picking and slow cooking of vegetable stews.  

She could remember who had had the idea of the Game.  It was Adam, a chap who’d been to the Esalen Institute.  Ian had met him on the train to Gloucester and brought him down to the cottage, on the little rural bus through Midgeley and Cinderford.  Adam seemed really nice.  He had bought some strong dope in London and the eight who were there that night sat round smoking, after eating the lentil curry and brown rice.  He was interested in what they were trying to do there at the cottage: living communally, sharing all the jobs like growing the herbs and vegetables and cooking and fixing up the building.  James had explained how they were trying to break out of conservative patterns of behaviour and transform traditional family relationships.  Adam asked if they ever experienced bad feelings or jealousy.  He offered to show them some of the techniques he’d learnt in the States at Esalen, how you expressed your deepest angers, sorted it all out, that sort of thing.  Everyone was interested, keen that he stay and work with them.  He slept upstairs with them that night, in the big sleeping loft.

   Next morning Ella was sitting quietly in the meditation room, saying her mantra over and over again.  This upstairs room had been the old 'master' bedroom.  When they first found the cottage Ian had joked that James and Ella should have it, as they were the married couple.  But they weren’t into all of that exclusivity.  At a house meeting during the weekend when the group first moved in, they agreed that it wasn’t fair to have one big bedroom and two poky smaller ones.  They moved the big old-fashioned bed out into the barn and knocked out the walls between the two smaller rooms to make a shared sleeping loft.  The old bedroom became a room for quiet thought.  It looked much bigger without the heavy bedroom furniture, peaceful with green carpet and white walls.  Ella pinned up an Indian hanging.  She often used to go there just to get away, have a bit of peace, just as she did the morning after Adam's arrival.

   James and Adam were laughing when they came into the room.  James was inhaling from a small damp joint.  

   ‘Wow. This room would be great.  It’s certainly big enough for the few of us doing the exercises today.’  Adam looked around rubbing his hands.  His eyes glittered.  ‘Perhaps we could bring up some big floor cushions and have them in the corner.’

   The first exercises started that morning.  Everyone staying at the farm took part, except Margaret who was going into Cinderford to the Co-op for some shopping.  She never liked to be the first to do things anyway, so silent and controlled.  Ella often wondered how she and Chris ever got together, since he was so adventurous and ready to try things.

   The seven commune dwellers, led by Adam, circled the room slowly, stopping every so often to blow out the air in their lungs and then breathe in again deeply.  They swung their arms above their heads and ran a couple of times round the room, sometimes with eyes shut so they collided with each other.  They did a trust game, falling with closed eyes towards the floor, but ending in the arms of their friends.  Ella found herself near tears as she opened her eyes and saw everyone else there above her, the tight circle of faces.  Her friends, her family.

  Adam left at the end of the week, going to Wales to a new job.  They had learnt more exercises from him and were feeling much more able to express their feelings.  In the morning sessions one by one they would use the floor cushions, punching them, crying, remembering painful things that had happened.

   They called it the Game, the Family Game.  

   As the weather got hotter they sometimes moved outside to the grass patch near the kitchen door.  They ran around the grass, then around the cottage until they were panting and exhausted, their hearts beating.  Then they practised Adam's trust exercises.  There was one where you looked for people through the whole group, your eyes tight shut.  In another, called The Deep Inside Exercise, you focused on remembering things that had happened to you long ago.

   Ella noticed that all of her friends could let go in these games.  Ian worked on what Adam called primal screaming, getting in touch with old hurts, things his parents had done, his drunk father, his mother taking no notice of him.  His screams echoed around the valley.  Others in the group began to try it too.  Chris, whose father had been in the navy, cried about his parents breaking up, sending him away from Singapore to a harsh boarding school.  Everyone agreed it was very releasing.  

   But people at the shops in Cinderford looked at them even more strangely now.  The farmer at the end of the valley said the screaming put his cows off their milk.

   Ella found she couldn’t release her feelings so freely.  Her parents, owners of a drycleaning shop in Wigan, had always been kind to her.  They’d been upset when she moved to London for the secretarial job, but understood that they couldn’t expect her to live in a northern town forever.  They’d not been too happy when they found out she was living with James, who worked as a trainee surveyor in the same office.  He wanted to be an artist.  Ella loved his whirling drawings, the birds and flowers he reproduced.  He loved taking dope, it freed his mind he said.  He liked acid too when he tried it with Ian, a school friend who was now studying film.  After their ‘trip’ James’ drawings became more intense, shimmering with extraordinary colours.

   Ella’s parents offered them money to get married, to 'set them up'.  It was a lot for her parents to save a thousand pounds.  When James and Ella used it to buy the farm, her parents weren’t too happy, worrying about ‘the investment’, since there were other people involved.  They didn’t know quite how many people had put in money to purchase – not just Ian and Martha but Jane, Jay, Chris, Margaret – anyone who wanted to.  Ella had to agree with James when he said her parents were conservative.  He said the cared about nothing but the need to protect the money, not how it could be used to help people, to build a new life.

   Secretly Ella thought she was probably too much like her parents.  During the Game she was rather quiet compared to the others.  She hoped people didn’t think she was repressed.  The others were getting in touch with more and more feelings.  Often sessions in the meditation room would end with someone sobbing on the cushion in the corner, feeling bereft, having dragged out so much hate for things that had been done.  Sometimes they cried about cruel things past lovers had done, or about school bullies.  But usually it was about their families, their brothers or sisters, but mostly their parents.  Everyone would gather round then, stroke the people who were upset, pat their long hair.

   Ella remembered one awful day.  Ian’s girlfriend Helen had arrived down for a long stay, on holidays from her London job.  She was a big woman, with long red hair.  She threw herself into the Game, expressing her feelings.  One afternoon she grabbed a cushion and flung it at the wall, shrieking.  ‘Bloody Ella.  Bloody silent po-faced little bitch.  How dare you.  How dare you snivel around my man.’  She’d found out that Ella and Ian had slept together a few times.

   Ella was embarrassed.  At the cottage everyone said you shouldn’t own people, shouldn’t be exclusive.  In fact, most people were in pairs, even for a short time.  The weekend she had slept with Ian, James had been away.  Ian had been insistent, saying how attractive he found her.  

   James stared at Helen, then at Ian and Ella.  He breathed hard, muttering, ‘I can’t believe this.  I’m furious, really jealous.  God, these feelings are so violent.  I could choke you both.’  He leapt at Ian and they had a fight on the green carpet in the meditation room.  Everyone was disturbed by it, but they all agreed it showed how much you had to break down, how strong possessive feelings were.  Ian and James went off to the pub at Cinderford for a few beers, to re-establish things.  When James came home he was very passionate with Ella.  His secretive little darling he called her.  She’d pushed the boundaries.  ‘Little Ella.  Who would have thought it!’

   The fight brought the group closer together somehow, though Ella thought she wouldn’t sleep with Ian again, not if it was upsetting Helen.  Ella started to cry during the next session of the Game.  At the end she found herself on the floor, clutching the cushions, sobbing.  She closed her eyes so tight that they were stinging behind her lashes.  She could hear Ian whispering beside her.  ‘What's happened Ella?  What’s the matter?  Tell us about it.’  And suddenly she saw her brother.  He held her favourite doll above his head, threatening to throw it down and rub its face in the mud.  Ella felt her face go red.  Suddenly she was pummelling the cushion, shouting you beast, you rotter, give it to me.  She saw her brother’s face in front of her on the cushion and punched again and again. 

   James took some of his paintings down to a London gallery, small, radical.  He arrived back at the cottage with Maria, whom he’d met at one of the Islington squats, and with an idea.  The owner of the gallery in the East End had been interested in his description of the Game and had asked whether the cottage people would like to build it up to a performance.  Groups such as the Living Theatre did this sort of experimental theatre and had become very popular.  

 

   At the house meeting that night, people discussed the proposal.  They talked about how they could involve a much bigger audience.  Through performances they could get people thinking about the stultification of feeling in our society, the need to express more and the importance of destroying the repression of the family.

   They began working on the Game, taking some of the exercises, focusing on individuals in the group as they broke down and said what they were suffering.  Ella found herself drawn more into it now, crying more easily, shrieking her feelings of loss and bitterness.  She was more wretched.  James was distant, sleeping with Maria, going off with her on long walks.  He was totally involved in pulling together ideas for the show.  Margaret had left the farm, Chris had started sleeping with Jane.  Ella felt very alone.  Perhaps she was too traditional for all of this, too like her parents.  The drycleaner’s daughter.  Little wonder James had got bored with her.  He was such an exciting thinker, an artist.  Perhaps it had been too radical of her to think she could leave Wigan and find a more exciting life.  She couldn’t go back to her parents now.  She would feel guilty, stupid, throwing all that money away, money they’d scrimped so hard to save.  She moaned as she flailed around on the cushions, flinging one away from her, squashing the other into the floor.  It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.  Why was she so unhappy?

   In the Game, they were pushing things further.  They found that smoking dope after sessions relaxed them all and often gave them new ideas.  James and Ian and some of the others all took acid one day up in the copse of trees above the house and raved.  Helen, who’d stayed with them as watcher, wrote down things that people had cried out and they incorporated some of them into performance.  It was evolving into a clear shape, the story of a child growing up.  But they always encouraged people to interrupt when certain things came up for them.  James said it would be good if people from the audience felt that they could interrupt too, bring in their experiences, their ‘hang-ups’ and join in the group expression.

   Much of the Game now related to parents and how constrained they felt by their parents’ examples.  

   At one point, the focus of attention was on Ella as she repeated some things she had cried out spontaneously one day.

   ‘Why oh why did you not open me to love?  Why was it always clean your hands, dress neatly, speak politely, eat carefully, watch your manners, what will the neighbours say?  Listen to ME.  What can I say? How can I reveal what is in my heart? What are my deepest desires?  I want to be free.'  

   In every session of the Game she came to the front of the circle and called this out. She always cried.  It made her so sad to think of the chilly streets of Wigan, her parents’ neat little house, their spotless shop.  She felt so alone, so far away, here in the grey Gloucester countryside, leaves beginning to drop from the trees.  After she had spoken, however, everyone would gather around, kiss her and draw her into a hug.  Helen usually walked her to the side of the circle, her arms around her shoulder, while someone else took up the chant,  ‘Why?  Why?  Why am I not open to love?  How can I break the chains round my feelings.’ 

   James suggested they should have two big figures watching over the Game, two great shapes around which they circled, puppets of a mother and father.  

   It was fun making the huge puppets. Chris twisted cane into body shapes, and they spent a couple of days with glue simmering in the copper in the washing shed, dipping newspaper before slapping it on the mould, shaping the figures and finally painting the faces and hands.  Ella and Martha went to the Oxfam shop in Cinderford and bought clothes - for the man, striped trousers and a blue shirt, worn with Ian’s big jumper, for the mother, a flowered cotton dress and hat.

   They’d been working on the performance one day, when Geoff, who’d recently come down from a college at Oxford, got carried away.  As the Game neared its end, he jumped up at the big mother puppet and tore at her rosy face.

   ‘Get out of my life,’ he shouted, ‘just get away.’

   ‘That’s incredible,’ Ian said, breathing heavily.  He turned to the father puppet.  ‘Stop it you bastard,’ he yelled.  ‘I’m as big as you now.  Just stop hitting me.  I'll really thump you!’

   Jane screamed with excitement.  ‘I can’t stand it,’ she shrieked.  ‘Its awful.  Let’s kill them.’  She was panting, her blouse sticking to her back.  Tension rose.  James moved first. ‘Kill the mother,’ he roared.  He leapt up and tore the faded cotton dress from collar to hem.  ‘Kill the mother,’ Jay shouted shrilly, and punched a hole in the papier mache face.

   With a chilling scream Ian lashed at the male puppet, pulling it from the pole that held it in the ground.  He jumped on the red face, the mottled drinker’s nose Ella had painted so carefully.  The paper scrunched into a heap.  

   Suddenly they were all on the figures

   ‘Kill the mother. Kill the father,’ they shouted, falling on the figures, destroying them

   There was a pause.

   ‘God it’s fantastic,’ James was breathing heavily, a dusting of sweat across his brow.  ‘It gets it all out, doesn’t it?’

   ‘It’s very dramatic too,’ Helen said.  ‘I know we don’t want to do a play, following all those theatrical conventions, but this is an incredible way to build it to a climax.’

   ‘But what about the puppets?’ said Ella.  She fell silent as everyone looked at her.  Her face flushed.

   ‘I mean how many will we need if we’re going to destroy them every time.’  Why did she always think of such boring things?

   ‘Well,’ said Ian.  ‘It’s not as if we’re doing so many performances.  We only need to get puppets and clothes together for five.  And we can do rough bodies for rehearsals.’

   ‘There’s a lot more clothes down in Cinderford,’ giggled Martha.  ‘And now we know how to make the puppets it will be a lot quicker.’

   The whole show now built to the killing of the puppets.  The boys in particular seemed to get more and more involved in finding violent ways to destroy them, pulling the breast area of the mother, snapping the father's arms. 

   James fantasised about bringing people from the audience up on the stage at the end and involving them in the attacks.  

   ‘It’d be good,’ Helen said. ‘It'd break down the boundaries between us and them.  Like it’s everyone’s story.’

   ‘Perhaps it’d be better if we went out among them.  We could try to bring some hope.’ Maria spoke quietly.  ‘I mean it’s pretty savage ending the play on killing the parents.  Don’t we want to show that is a way to move on, to rebuild ourselves.’

   ‘Nice idea,’ James nodded approvingly.  ‘So we smash the parents and then rise up and show warmth and love for each other, perhaps even forgiveness for them.’

   So they built that in, hugging those who had crashed to the floor among the tangle of cane and paper, pulling them to their feet, wiping their tears.  Then they turned to the imaginary audience and moved forward, embracing, loving.  

   One day Helen let slip her loose smock.  It dropped to her feet and she moved quietly forward, her eyes closed, her rounded breasts bobbing softly, her face gently smiling, her hands reaching forward.

   ‘Fantastic,’ James breathed.  ‘It shows such trust’.

   ‘As if we’re springing newly born,’ Chris nodded.

   Helen turned towards him, blushing, her arms shielding her body.  ‘It just felt right.’ 

   ‘And why not, if we feel like it,’ James turned to them all.  ‘If it feels good at that moment.’  Ella flinched backwards. She couldn’t imagine it ever feeling right for her.

   Late in September they locked the doors of the small farmhouse for the first time since they had bought it in the spring of the year before and piled into cars to go to London.  The convoy of four battered vehicles drove through the farm gates with their painted signs.  Property is theft, James had written on one gatepost and on the other, He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.  Ella clutched a soft bag of clothes on her lap. 

   Altogether fourteen people were in the performance and they had arranged to stay in the North London squats.  Ella was in a house down the street from the one where James and Maria stayed.  She was sharing a room with Jane, Chris, Martha and Jay.

   The performances were to take place in two weeks.  They planned to rehearse in the gallery and put the separate heads, bodies and limbs of the puppets together there. 

   In the bare open spaces of the East End gallery, sitting on the rough floorboards, Ella felt as if the play had moved onto a different plane.  It wasn’t any more just the Game they had started playing at the beginning of summer, even if the cushions, the groups moving in circles, the tears, the warm embraces seemed the same.  Different groupings seemed to be emerging.  James, Ian, Helen, Chris, little Geoff, seemed to be coming more to the fore, taking risks, pouring forth emotions of increasing intensity.

   There were moments when Ella still felt swept up.  But she wasn’t able to involve herself in destroying the puppets and always fell back.  Not that she was noticed by anyone else in the flurry of bodies.  In part she was nervous of being squashed when others released such violence.  But she wondered whether she drew back because she was so involved in making the puppets, dressing them up.  Her two great dolls.

   She was aware that Maria also drew back at the killing.  Maria was normally quiet and reserved.  In fact she and Ella had never had a conversation just between themselves.  One night, after the show, they found themselves sitting together at the back of the gallery.  Maria drew back on the soft end of a joint then passed it to Ella.  ‘I can’t get into it,’ she said. 'And I notice you can't either.  She grinned at Ella. ‘It just seems we're always blaming someone else.  It doesn’t solve anything.  We’re just left with a set of tattered puppets.’  Ella nodded and shyly grinned back.  She hadn’t thought of it like that.  She had assumed she was just being cautious again.

   The five performances of The Family Game drew emotional responses from the audiences.  They were enthusiastically reviewed in The Guardian and Time Out magazine and rapidly sold out.  The gallery was so crowded that many sat on the bare wooden boards.  When Helen, James, Ian and the others went naked into the audience people wept and embraced them.  Some stripped off their own tops to press their flesh against the actors.  On a couple of nights people broke out from the audience and dashed to the stage to help destroy the puppets.  Many stayed behind for long discussion sessions after the hour-long ‘play’, looking for things to do, guidance for the future.  They would often go off to the pub in a large group, bearded men, long-haired girls, and chat into the night.  James was always in the centre of the throng, laughing, talking non-stop, his eyes bright, his hand often straying to Helen’s.  Ella had come across them tightly embracing one night by the toilet door.  James’s eyes grazed over her as if she scarcely existed.  Her heart lurched.  What was going on?  How much more could she bear?

   One night she lay in bed, Martha and Jay moving as silently as they could in their sleeping bag at the other end of the room.  Suddenly she realised that she didn’t care about James and Maria, James and Helen.  She had once so loved him and been so proud that he liked her.  But now she had quite withdrawn.  And there was more.  She was sick of living with other people, of having no place, not even a little space, of her own.  What was it all for, all this breaking down the family, as he called it, if she was left, alone but not on her own, solitary within the great crowd.

   At the pub following their last London performance, she tried to talk to James about these raw ideas.  She started to explain that she was thinking of not going back to the farm, but of finding somewhere else to live.

   ‘God isn’t that bloody typical.’  James snorted.  ‘We just get to a point where the communal idea is beginning to work, we meet all these new people who share our ideals and you’re wanting to run away, withdraw the money, I suppose, and get off on your own selfish little trip.  Well it’s just not possible, no-one can afford to buy you out.’

   Ella protested.  'I don't want to pull out the money.'  In fact when she thought about it, it would be good to know that at some point in the future she could get something from the farm.  She had worked so hard, painting, planting the garden.

   She swallowed her tears.  It wasn’t fair, she thought.  She just wanted to get out of London, away from the south, back up to Wigan for even just a few weeks, to see her family.  Her parents would be cross of course.  No marriage, no money, no house to show for it.  But she knew their anger wouldn’t last.  She was their baby, after all. 

   Looking up, she realised Maria was looking at her from the other side of the table.  They moved to the end.  Ella found herself explaining how much she wanted to get away, how squashed she felt by the group.  Maria listened quietly.

   Awkwardly Ella mentioned James apparent interest in Helen.  She had never discussed Maria's involvement with James.  Now it seemed Maria was losing him as well.

   ‘Yeah, that’s right.  Not that I’m too cut up,’ Maria’s grin was wry.  ‘He just couldn’t handle any commitment.  And when I told him about the baby...well.’

   Ella stared.

   ‘Oh yes, be the third to know, Ella.  It’s his of course, but he claims it mightn't be.  Oh grow up I thought.'  She sipped her beer.  'But it’s funny, you know.  I’d never thought about kids, never seen it as something I'd want in my life.  But now it's happened I don’t want to get rid of it.  I suddenly realised that here was something I could do, someone I could love.  I could get out of London, go back home, even though my parents travelled so often with the army I don’t know quite where home is.  But I could settle down, get a place of my own, a little job.’

   Ella nodded.  ‘I can see what you mean.  I’m thinking of heading off as well, going north, back to Wigan, seeing my folks.  And then I'll think quietly what I’ll do next.’

   Both fell silent.  After a moment or so, Ella quietly looked sideways at Maria.  ‘What about going north together?  Cheaper living up there, bigger places, no need to squat.’

   Maria looked back cautiously.  ‘We could give it a try.’  

   ‘We could even take turns with jobs and minding the baby.  I’m sure my Mam’d would be rapt.’ Ella suddenly grinned.  ‘Better not mention who the father is.  That’d be straining the bounds of her tolerance too much.’  

   A thick smell of dope rose from Chris at the corner of the table.  James flung his brown curls back as he laughed at a joke made by one of the newcomers to the group. 'Oppressive! You don't know how bloody right you are.'  The two girls exchanged glances, rose from the table, swung their bags over their shoulders and waved farewells.  After all, leaving the family is part of growing up.