It was the early eighties and I was living in a squat in Brixton on the south side of the Thames. I had fallen in with a bunch of anarchists and I liked they way they thought. I had come from Toronto with no money in my pocket and had taken up squatting on the suggestion from a penniless friend. I went native pretty quickly, helping out with the local anarchist bookshop, making communal meals, writing lists of empty properties, editing the local squatter’s newspaper, and teaching people the rudiments of housebreaking, lock-changing and dodgy gas hook-ups.

I worked a couple of days a week at a radical print-shop in Aldgate. I learned to make negatives in the darkroom, how to expose plates and to use the offset presses. I was stuck on a little Ryobi A4 machine and I was not particularly good at it. I often came unstuck when it came to guillotine the finished pages, terrified of the large, chubby blade that could take your fingers off. The shop had a big A2 Heidelberg press, hugely superior to my little Ryobi, all cast iron parts, black paint and precision German engineering. I had no chance to manage the large sheets of paper that needed to be shuffled in order to flow freely and evenly through the thousand rollers and cogs, perfectly registered for four different layers of colours.

Frank from New Zealand worked the Heidelberg. He was a lovely bloke, down to earth in manner and stature. He was married to fellow Kiwi Mary, just as short as him and the both were anarchists as well.

We hung around a bit in our free time and one evening they introduced me to a some friends of theirs, a couple visiting from New Zealand. Skinheads. He was gruff, she was even gruffer, wearing bleached jeans with turn-ups, a Fred Perry shirt, red braces and oxblood Doctor Martens with 14 hole lace-ups. Her face was covered in small scars and her close cropped hair was dyed blonde. We didn’t talk much.

Late in the evening we all went out to a disco in the crypt of a church in Brixton. We danced to reggae. Suddenly and out of nowhere, skinhead woman started to hit me. Unsure of how to react I reversed into a brick column, my back to the wall. As she continued to try and hit me, I blocked the blows with my arms. I had been practicing a little bit of Tae Kwondo at the time and had learned just about enough to be useful.

She eventually gave up and stomped off. I was left feeling confused. Had I done anything to provoke her? Not as far as I could think. I shrugged it off, no big deal. But some hours later the thought came to me that at no point had I been scared of her. No rush of adrenaline, no fight or flight, just puzzlement. Had it been a man, even the smallest, scrappiest specimen, I would have been terrified. But this woman, even in the most aggressive and masculine of costumes, didn’t frighten me. I was 25, skinny, no big threat to anyone, but just the fortune of being male gave me a huge advantage over half of the population.

I never saw her again.

Photo: Agnethe Brun.