I am in a sunny corridor, of which one side is all glass, overlooking a grass courtyard. I have been allowed to take my pick from a dressing-up hamper and I have chosen a Red Indian brave’s outfit with long brown cotton trousers, a colourful sleeveless jerkin, and a headband. My sister, two years older than my three, wears the squaw’s dress. We are visiting the school where my aunt is a teacher.
When we go to school, it will be in a very different kind of building from this modern one with its emphasis on fresh air and light: ours will be a redbrick Victorian affair with Boys’ and Girls’ entrances, unpolished pine floorboards and in the assembly hall, a free-standing black stove surrounded by a high fireguard. At midday, steaming aluminium containers, reeking of carrot and stewed meat, are carried in from a van and lined up along the edge of the stage at the end of the hall. We get up from our forms and go up in turn to the stage to be served the food, then return to eat at the trestle tables. This for me is luckily not the norm. We live barely ten minutes walk from school and Mother is normally at home to give us dinner. Not many years later I will learn to call it lunch. I am as anxious as anyone in England when “U and Non-U” becomes a topic of wide discussion in the mid 1950s; I discover that many of our usages are non-U and, unaware of irony, lacking in common sense, I deliberately make changes which will stick for decades. No more will I use a ‘serviette’ or go to the ‘toilet’; no more ‘sweet’ to follow the main course. I am NEVER however allowed to get away with the U ‘What?” in place of non-U ‘Pardon?” Though my mother undoubtedly aspires to high standards, she considers the former to be very common. She sends my sister every Saturday morning to Miss Hope, the elocution teacher. I am rather interested in the slim paperback book bearing a black and white engraving of Shakespeare on the front, one of the plays, which Mary has to carry with her. Looking back, Hope seems an appropriate name for one trying to instil the habit of fine diction in the rock’n’roll era. Miss Hope’s house is on one of Wokingham’s architectural highlights The Terrace, a few doors along from Margot’s café. Margot, who we understand is properly Miss Aubrey, lives with her ancient father above the shop, in a flat with beamed ceilings so low that tall elegant Margot has to stoop a little. Mother has befriended Margot and we are frequent visitors to both café and flat. In the café we will have coffee with diamond-shaped home-made oatmeal biscuits, the recipe for which Mother will obtain; at home she will make batches of ‘Margot’s biscuits’ regularly over the next 50 years. We go into the kitchen to see the dog, a white Staffordshire bull terrier with a very pink nose. I am always rather scared of the dog, and of the austere Mr Aubrey. They are Catholics (except possibly the dog), who, I am led to believe, are an exotic kind of people. The women, I understand, must cover their heads with lacy shawls in church and the service is conducted in Latin, of which I know nothing until I come across the anarchic public schoolboy Molesworth in the magazine ‘Young Elizabethan”. This for a while is delivered along with the Eagle and I learn a lot about what will be on offer later on in my ‘skool’ life. Although I am fascinated by the doings of Molesworth, and of Jennings and Billy Bunter too, I have a nagging fear of being sent away to boarding school. Happily it never happens.
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Margot was Mother’s best friend, after her beloved Grace and then Wyn died in middle age. Margot too has now been dead for many years, but Mother lives on in her 90s, as does the teacher aunt – my mother’s older sister. Mother and Father each had a single sibling, a sister, and each sister was unmarried and lived with her mother – my Nana and Granny respectively. Aunty Betty, who at some point we conspired to call just Betty, we thought wonderfully young and glamorous. Her mother, our Nana, had been widowed by the Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1918, when her daughters were toddlers, She dressed in smart modern clothes, had permed pink wispy hair, and since Betty became head of a school in Chichester, they lived in a large bright modern house in that gracious city. There was a long living room with entrances from the hall and the kitchen, so that we could run round and round from room to room, to Nana’s consternation. In contrast, Granny and Aunty Elsie lived in the ground floor of a massive and gloomy Victorian house in Isleworth, west London, with an outside loo and a never-used dining room at the front, although we were allowed in to get the wooden box of chessmen out of the great oak sideboard. Like the path to the front door, the hall was floored in a pattern of coloured tiles. On these stood a grand hall-stand with coat hooks, a mirror, a drawer containing clothes brushes and shoe horns, and a brass cylinder holding a selection of walking sticks, some of which were good for a game of fencing. Down a dark passage beside the stairs was the door into the back parlour where we sat round a table covered in a thick bottle green velvet cloth, on whose tall pile crockery would never stay quite still. Up in the corner of the parlour was a galvanised water tank which would glug and clank. It was presumably to do with the supply of hot water to the sink in the scullery beyond. If I was delegated to wash up after a meal I was reminded to take the knives out into the garden and stab them into the soil – good fun if you imagined you were a Red Indian. This mysterious practice was perhaps required only when we had eaten fish. To complicate matters further, the table knives of both grandmothers had bone handles which were not to be immersed in hot water.
Granny, with her soft Scots brogue, was also long a widow, and always wore black, in striking contrast to her white hair coiled in a bun. Not exactly white, as she and her daughter Elsie smoked many cigarettes. Elsie was tiny and wiry, with short dark hair and elegant, though usually black, clothes. She was like Piaf, though I don’t remember her ever singing; she had a deep and somewhat hoarse voice, so her singing might have been a cabaret sensation. I remember my father bringing them a smart new radio for one birthday or Christmas, and installing it on the velvet cloth. When we visited, we would have tea with Granny, and later Elsie and our father would arrive from their respective offices, and have a different meal before Father would drive us home to Berkshire. Elsie worked for a Hatton Garden diamond merchant and would sometimes bring home a roll of cloth which she would open on the parlour table, revealing a pile of glittering marguerites.
Granny was a seamstress and I loved to go into the bedroom and see move the tall dress-maker’s dummy standing in the corner, with its fascinating adjusting screws, as well as the colossal brass bedstead. The dummy must have been there when I went in years later to see her confined to the great bed, sitting up in a Victorian white cotton nightgown, with her hair released and streaming down to the sheets. She died shortly afterwards, and Elsie moved into a modern flat nearby. But she took as much of the old furniture as she could cram in, whether from thrift or preference I don’t know. The chaise longue which I took when we cleared her flat reeked of cigarette smoke. I intended to remedy this by re-uphostering, but never got round to it.
Father worked for Fluidrive, an engineering firm a few streets away from Granny’s house, and next door to Mogden sewage treatment works, origin of the eponymous trade effluent charging formula known all over the world in sewerage circles. Mother had worked at Fluidrive too, as a secretary, until they married. They and their families were in London throughout the war. Bomb damage was a fact of life for them, but when they recounted their recollections to us children the horror of it made our hair stand on end. They belonged a local choral society which had that most moving of singers, Kathleen Ferrier, as a soloist on several occasions. The firm opened a second factory in Bracknell new town in 1950 and, understanding that he would be working there, Father moved us to the nearby town of Wokingham. But, after all, he continued to work in London, driving there every day from Berkshire, until he retired 25 years later. Neither Mother or Father sang in a choir again. Perhaps there wasn’t one in the area at that time, or at any rate not one of the standard they’d been used to. But I joined the church choir when about 7, attracted by the pay of threepence a service, and have rarely since not been in one choir or another.
My first home was in Richmond, Surrey and the pagoda in Kew Gardens was a striking presence beyond the end of our street. I have an abiding memory of a baker’s where we would be taken into the bakery itself and the baker would put sugar in my coat pocket. In my recollection it is soft brown sugar but Mother tells me it was lump sugar, a much more sensible proposition, but I’m not convinced. As we moved to Berkshire when I was four, I only really remember the area from later visits to my grandmothers who both lived in St Margaret’s Road until Nana moved to Chichester. One of my favourite outings was across the complex barrage and footbridge at Richmond Lock to the Old Deer Park and on to Richmond Green. Putting a penny in the slot and passing through the brass turnstile into Kew Gardens was another adventure. Wokingham and Twickenham were on the same railway line, although it was sometimes necessary to change at Staines onto a stopping train. The many stations were close together and the journey seemed to take a long time, especially if homeward bound. At one station, Longcross Halt, a strange lonely place where no-one ever got on or off the train, the name was spelled out in white stones on a bank. I always looked out for that curiosity.
Our house in Wokingham was a timber-framed building with a large garden and ‘the cottage’ as we called it. The lower level of the ‘cottage’ was a large open space used as a garage, with along one side open coal bunkers – one for coal for the living room fire, one for coke for the central heating boiler. When the coalman came I would be deputed to count the sacks discharged. I liked it when the bunkers were full as then I didn’t have to shovel the fuel into the hods – instead, I could use the top of the hod itself as a shovel and fill it with one or two scoops. On the upper level was a series of three rooms, one behind the other; the first was used as the garden shed, the second had little in it but a window over the garden, and we used it for play. Each of these two rooms had a little door in the right hand wall which gave access to a large storage area under the sloping roof. The last room was Father’s darkroom, which was not divided off from the roof space, but just got lower and lower at one end. In one of the storage areas we found a gas mask and a tin helmet which were very useful for our games. The stale smell of their webbing straps was only a little off-putting. Before I went off to university we had a party in the cottage, decorating all the walls by sticking up pictures from the colour supplements, with jokey captions or comments.
The five-bar gate to our house’s drive had to be closed after he had gone in the morning and opened before he arrived back. Woe betide us if he could not drive straight in. A honk of the horn would bring us scurrying out to swing back the wide gate. In deference to his instructions we did not dare just to leave the gate open all day. He probably would have found out from one of his pals at the pub where he went every evening and every Saturday and Sunday lunchtime for several pints.
On his return from the office, by way of conversation, Mother would remark on the day’s weather. But in Isleworth the weather had always been the opposite of whatever we had enjoyed or suffered in Wokingham, as he’d point out indignantly.
Behind our house was that of Mrs Weight and her sister ‘Auntie’ May. Mrs Weight was a kindly piano teacher who regrettably could get nowhere with me, but my sister made steady progress. The grand piano was in a large living room with many armchairs and sofas in assorted chintzes. At Christmas this would be the setting for a decorous party, at which we children would enjoy being in the company of many adults. Then Auntie May died at home in bed, after which it was a terrific thrill to look into her bedroom when you went upstairs to the bathroom.
At these parties, a box of small instruments would be produced from which we would all choose something to sound at appropriate points in Haydn’s Toy Symphony, which played from a record. Everyone liked to play the bird warbler, which had to be filled with water before you blew. One of the guests was always ‘Hairy Mary’, whose legs were covered in dark hair flattened inside her stockings. When I went to the grammar school I discovered that she was the daughter of Wally, the headmaster. Although Wally was hardly ever seen outside his smoke-filled study at school – we believed, perhaps rightly, that he was scared of the pupils en masse – I sometimes used to spy on him and Mary playing tennis at the private club behind our house. It amazed me that he could run around the court, given the likely state of his lungs. His flapping shorts and stocky white legs were hilarious to me and these observations were naturally recounted at school.
The boys’ grammar school was only two years old when I went there, so had no traditions consecrated by time. I was happy to go there rather that the coeducational alternative as I was to that extent following in Molesworth’s footsteps. Also as at the legendary St Custard’s, there were Hist, Geog, English Lit, Latin and of course rugby (chiz chiz). Carrying the long goal posts down the lane to the distant playing field, always in drizzling rain, was bad enough but being flung repeatedly in the mud was worse. Road-running and its occasional big brother cross-country were much more to my taste than field games. I was never bothered to try to be first, but enjoyed getting into a steady rhythm and letting my thoughts wander as my feet sprang off the pavement or slapped through streams. Circuit training in the gym was quite fun, too, and best of all was the end-of term treat involving rushing up and down the wall-bars and swinging on the ropes trying to avoid capture in a riotous game whose name I can’t recall – Pirates perhaps?
For most of my grammar school life we frequently had to sell raffle tickets to raise money for a swimming pool. This was eventually built, outdoor and freezing, but a preferable alternative to cricket. I took the Elementary swimming test, having passed Beginners many years before at primary school. As I kept my eyes screwed shut in the water I wandered all over the pool and was awarded a repeat of the Beginners, much to my shame. Shortly after that I was banned from the pool for the rest of the summer, for jumping in from the side. I never got a higher swimming qualification, but I still have my Beginner certificates.
Looking back at my days at the Forest School (not to be confused with the Forest School), I’m appalled to remember how we of the A and B streams looked down in contempt on those idiots in the C,D and E streams. Yet those ‘idiots’ were all in the 20% that had passed the 11-plus exam. What did we then think of those who hadn’t, who went to St Crispin’s, the secondary modern school? We didn’t think of them at all. They were beneath notice. Even within the streams, we were graded in every subject from top to bottom of the class, and no doubt had lots of fun at the expense of those who were habitually at the bottom. I was usually at or near the top and took advantage of this cachet by constantly fooling about. As a result I was always in detention, but somehow managed to avoid ever being caned.
I used to enjoy the comics Beano and Dandy, especially Desperate Dan, the Bash Street Kids and General Jumbo. Mary and I used to get Swift, and later Girl and Eagle respectively, delivered each week. Eagle had Dan Dare, with the terribly green Mekon on his floating throne. I kept my copies of Eagle on top of the tall cupboard in my bedroom and the pile nearly reached the ceiling by the time I gave them up in favour of the magazines Flight and Air Pictorial. This was the same cupboard as was involved in an incident involving a threepenny rocket. I lit it in my bedroom, intending to let the touchpaper burn a little before putting it out. Needless to say that wasn’t possible and the rocket shot off round the room. Father was in the garden below and asked whatever the noise was, but I acted the innocent. Later I moved the cupboard and saw that the rocket had scorched a mark down the wallpaper. Maybe my parents only discovered it when they moved house. It didn’t stop me having other adventures with fireworks. I burnt my hand setting light to a pile of powder emptied out of a banger, up on the ‘rec'(recreation ground). On another occasion, in a friend’s back garden, we lit a banger and put it in a fizzy drinks bottle with a toggle top, then waited behind trees. There was a tremendous explosion and flying glass cut my knee; it could easily have been much worse.
I also acquired some comic books, several of which made such an impact that I can still see some details. In Kidnapped, the scene where the boy is sent to the top of the tower during a storm and nearly falls as the top of the tower has been struck by lightning, was terrifying. In Hamlet, when he says ‘Nymph in thy orisons be all my sins remembered’, there was an asterisk leading to a footnote
‘ *orisons = prayers’. Never to be forgotten! The story of the origin of the Lone Ranger was very hair-raising as I believe that it told – and of course illustrated – how when he was a small boy, his family were all slaughtered. But I’ve a feeling that perhaps it was not by ‘red indians’. I always preferred to be an indian when playing cowboys and indians, as we often did. I also had a comic book of the early life of Churchill, in which when at Harrow he recited for some reason the poem ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium…’ many lines of which I still remember from the comic.
As for proper books, I worked my way through the library’s collections of Biggles, Jennings, Billy Bunter and Just William. The last of course are comic masterpieces which haven’t gone out of fashion. I also discovered Dornford Yates books on our home bookshelves. These are rip-roaring adventures in which young rich and glamorous people jump into their open-topped Bentley to motor down to the south of France, thwarting the evil machinations of swarthy hook-nosed criminals on the way.
The narrow road up to the tennis club ran the the length of our back garden and was divided from it by a privet hedge which I used to get the job of cutting every summer. Rising above the hedge was a wooden fence and below it in our garden a bench. One year I stood on this bench, leaned over and chalked on the other side of the fence something rude about the lady who lived in the next house and whose kitchen window looked over the drive; ‘Mrs X is a Y’, but I can’t remember what X or Y were. Did I really think that no-one would suspect me? Within hours I was marched round by Mother and made to apologise.
You don’t hear the expression “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, young man (/lady)” these days, but in my youth I probably was on the receiving end of it most days. What had I done or omitted to do this time?
At age 12 I fell in love – with a handsome, suave young English teacher who arrived that September. I had plenty of competition; he charmed a whole crowd of us into a devotion to language and literature. When he first arrived he had lodgings in the house next to my best friend’s, which afforded plenty of swooning excitement when we saw him in the street. We would call after him ‘Hello Sir!”. Later he took up residence in a caravan at the edge of the school’s rugby field, and amazing as it seems nowadays, he used to hold court there, giving tea and buns to half a dozen devotees. Did we talk about the latest productions at the theatre in Reading, or was it in relation to some school play that we’d been invited there? Whichever it was, we were all taking the opportunity to have a good look at his domestic arrangements.
No breath of scandal touched Mr Wright – ‘Wilbur’ to us – in the couple of years he was there. Another teacher, a forbidding figure with fierce red face, and not one who ever taught me, went to prison. It was said that he had had boys running around his house naked. I don’t think I actually read the newspaper reports, so how much was invented I don’t know.
How devastated we were when the wonderful Wilbur moved on, leaving us to a dreary, uncomfortable fellow behind whose back we laughed at mercilessly. With ‘Harry’ we studied Twelfth Night. I will never forget the way he pronounced ‘Count Orseeeenoww’. But I loved the play, and acting the part of silly Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I enjoyed taking part in school theatricals, the camaraderie of the dressing room and the complexity of putting together the technical and acting sides. I was always aware that my performances were not such as would spellbind the audience. My finest moment was perhaps when playing a waitress, I had to drop a tray of tea-things on my second entrance. I got confused and dropped it on my first entrance. That was somehow worked into the scene by quick thinking on the part of the other actors. Of course I had to bring on another tray of crockery and drop that, as per the script, in the second scene. It got a great reaction from the audience. They would have liked to see even more of the same.
After Wilbur, the next object of my devotion was Martine, a French girl who stayed with us on an exchange. My sister presumably went to France in turn. Anyway, Martine was with us one hot summer and I was love-struck, not that I was going to do anything about it. One day we went in the car to the south coast and spent the day on the beach, where my mind dwelled on how I was going to get a bit close to Martine in the back of the car on the way home. By the time we set off home, however, I was raw red from sunburn, and could not bear to touch anything, so leaned away rather than towards the lovely Martine. I can still conjure up the pain of my deeply burnt shoulders. For years afterwards I kept well covered up in the sun, and the first time I went to the Mediterranean – Greece, aged 42 – I was extremely nervous. But over the years my skin had apparently hardened up, and with adequate sun cream I found that I could take my shirt off to enjoy the heat and the luxury of warm water in which to practise swimming with eyes open.
We probably took Martine to West Wittering, a long-time favourite beach near Chichester, where we stayed for most of every summer holiday with Nana and Betty. After getting off the bus from Chichester you had to walk a mile along a straight access road. Behind the beach was a row of beach huts and further along, sand dunes. The beach was long and, when the tide was out, very deep. Once when I must have been only 6 or 7 I lost my bearings and wandered from family to family along the beach, looking for mine. Eventually someone must have called the police and I remember sitting in the back of a police car in my swimming trunks, and my Dad appearing at the police station to reclaim me.
Mother and Betty made friends with another family that had one of the huts, and thereafter we would always be welcome to share it. The memory of it always involves the smell of methylated spirits heating up the kettle. One year in my teens I cycled to Chichester, a 50 mile trip, so I would have my bike there for the summer.
Mother and Father had some local friends with whom they would socialise – George and Molly Hoare, Arthur and Flossie Badger, and Carl whose wife died, presumably of cancer, which in those days was not mentioned, leaving him to look after a small daughter – he seemed old and rather sinister. Arthur and Flossie’s Birmingham accents were fascinating. Mary and I were particularly fond of ‘Uncle’ George and ‘Auntie’ Molly; they were good fun and George would always play with us, do tricks, and tell jokes. I remember him and Father marching up and down the garden like soldiers on parade with pretend rifles on their shoulders, singing some jaunty song. In my early teens he paid me to do some work in their garden. Their bungalow was behind a high hedge and when I cycled up the drive I saw for a fleeting moment Molly’s white naked figure standing in the picture window, which was rather a revelation.
In my youth I became very keen on aeroplanes, perhaps as a result of my father taking me to the thrilling Farnborough Airshow, although it might have been vice-versa. I certainly went several years running. The highlights for me were the tremendous bang when the Lightning flew over at just a few feet high, and you looked straight into its flaming afterburner; and the fly-past of three V-bombers, the ungainly Victor, unremarkable Valiant, and beautiful paper-dart shaped Vulcan. Also collecting piles of brochures and catalogues from the exhibition stands, to drool over on the train home. But my main interest was spotting civil aircraft, Ian Allan’s list of registration marks in hand, with the ones seen underlined and annotated. Ah, plane-spotting! No dull train-spotting for me! I would cycle to nearby White Waltham and Woodley aerodromes, even to Heathrow twenty miles away which involving cycling through the long tunnel under the runways. I cannot recall where one left one’s bike. I picture it leaning against the wall beside the entrance the Terminal building – there was only one then – while I was on the spectating platform, watching the BEA and BOAC planes taxi-ing and heaving themselves into the air.
Other than at Heathrow, one could always wander unchallenged around airfields and into hangars, where exciting discoveries might be made. For some reason I dragged Mother along with me to Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, where we were visiting old friends of hers. It was a hot sunny day, as usual in those childhood summers. She looked on bemused as I ran in and out of the sheds. The annual Biggin Hill air fair in Kent was a bonanza for lovers of light aircraft as hundreds would come there and the spotters walked along the lines of planes, scribbling away in ecstasy.
Security and health and safety were regarded rather differently then from now. Considering what I used to get up to on the short journey home from junior school it’s a wonder that I’m here to tell the tale. First, close to the school was a blacksmith’s forge – now part of the next door pub. The smith would not mind at all that we would come in and watch him making horseshoes or scrolls for wrought iron gates, beating the red hot metal as we leaned over the anvil to look. We’d pick up small lumps of metal that looked like promising playthings. But these iron nails and such were innocuous compared with what was available a bit farther on. There was a metal fabricating factory opposite the station. Outside beside the pavement was an area where waste was thrown. I would pick my way through the sharp scraps of metal looking for the discs that had been punched out of steel plate to make holes. I’d come out reeking of the lubricating and cooling oil that coated the scrap.
The next hazard was of a quite different kind, not really presenting any danger, but seen from today’s perspective it seems strange that schoolchildren, far from running away, would accept an old man’s invitation to come into his house. He had been a watchmaker. Blind, he lived alone in some squalor, and apparently subsisted on Jacob’s Cream Crackers. He’d stand at the front door as we passed by from school, a ragged grey cardigan over his pinstriped waistcoat and trousers, and ask us to go and buy him these biscuits. We’d go through to the musty kitchen with him to be given the money. The table was always covered in a heap of the orange packets of crackers. Perhaps he didn’t live on them at all, but just used them as an excuse to have a little company. We would return from the grocer’s with yet another packet and he’d give us a few pence for our trouble, which is probably why we did it. He was scary but fascinating, just as was another Wokingham character, John, who rode a bicycle that he thought was a horse. He wore colourful tweed hacking jackets, a silk handerchief in the breast pocket, and jodhpurs, and carried a crop that he’d beat his rear wheel with. He had a livid mark on his forehead and we always supposed that he’d suffered a bang on the head which had made him mad. And mad he certainly was. He’d sit astride the bike at the station railway crossing, and shout fierce commands to the bike/horse and at us, who would stand as near as we dared, wide-eyed with excitement. There was another bike eccentric in the district, who appeared at fêtes and shows each summer. He wore a tall top hat and a long mac, and his bike and clothes were covered in enigmatic little signs and labels. A tall pole rising from the back of the bike carried flapping scraps of cloth. At first sight he seemed to be an entertainer, but he didn’t do any more than cycle slowly around, and never solicited money.
Other probably dangerous activities involved trespassing in various industrial locations, such as the sewage ‘farm’ just up the road from our house, where I recall hiding from the attendant as I playing around the filter beds which clearly provided an inspiration in later life. Another was an abandoned brickworks that we’d cycle to, and explore the vaulted ovens. Then there was the sand quarry in Sandy Lane, where we used to burrow caves into the sides, and best of all, the rambling old Tannery with which our house had once been associated. My friend and I used to break in and roam all over. Upstairs was a broad and high room with rotten floorboards and a high window in a gable which overlooked Mrs Weight’s garden. One day one of us – I don’t remember which – threw a stick at this window from the inside, and shattered it. Later my mother asked me if I knew anything about an incident when Auntie May had narrowly missed being decapitated by falling glass. I don’t know if she really believed my flat denials.
My father liked to take us for drives on a summer Sunday afternoon and The Ridgeway and White Horse Hill on the Berkshire Downs were favourites. One of my favourite toys was an old electrical instrument that I think my father had brought home from work. It was a heavy black wooden box about 1 foot cube with the top full of dials and knobs. I remember being on top of the Downs with this box slung round my neck on its worn leather strap, twiddling the knobs in order, as I imagined, to signal to accomplices in the villages far below. On another visit to the Downs I found a dead mole, loved its black velvety coat, and brought it home and kept it in a tin for a while.
Trains in those days still had steam locos. Halfway between school and home lay the station with a footbridge crossing the line beside the level crossing. I would lie on the wooden planks of the bridge waiting for a train pass under, listening to it approach. Then for a thrilling few seconds the atmosphere would be full of choking smoke.
I was in St Paul’s Church choir until my voice broke, after which I trained as a server and served at the altar as one of the two acolytes, who each carry a candle. I never graduated to thurifer, the one who swings the thurible or censer. Some servers, particularly one called Malcolm, did this super-theatrically, swinging it alarmingly high, if not right round. I found Malcolm superior and sarcastic and was relieved when he and a couple of others ‘went to Rome’ – defected to the Roman Catholics when a new rector arrived who didn’t like a very High Church style of service. But many years later Malcolm returned to St Pauls, and he and his partner David became great friends of Mother (‘they have lovely houses’) and Betty, and we enjoyed their company on several occasions, including after Betty’s death, as she left money specifically for us to go out for a meal with them and Mother.
While I was a server, a group of us teens used to repair to the Hope and Anchor pub after the Sunday morning service. It was a Brakespear’s pub where instead of the more famous colas, they served Kitty Cola, a horrible drink tasting of burnt sugar. I never attempted to buy myself beer, but if I went for a drink with Father he would buy me a pint when I was 16 or 17.
At this time, Gill Adams took over St Pauls Choir and caused quite a stir. I hadn’t known her when she was growing up in Wokingham. She’d been off to music college at the Guildhall and had come back to live with her widower father. She’d brough Bill Cheffers back with her from the Guildhall, they got married and honeymooned in Egypt – Gill’s image with her long glossy black hair and dramatic eye makeup was part Cleopatra, part Juliet Greco. She and Bill were terrific fun, kept open house and threw elaborate fancy dress parties.
In my teens, once I had graduated from short trousers – at 13 or 14?! – I became very mildly interested in clothes, particularly I think when my friend Graham would show me his latest trendy gear. I was never successful in getting Mother to accommodate such vanity. Everyone was wearing a short lightweight belted mac in off-white – but I was only allowed to come close, with a similar coloured mac but full length and in heavy garbadine.
St Paul’s Church ran a Youth Club at the Parish Room – the same hall where I had occasionally had primary school dinners. At some point I became treasurer and remember totting up a pile of threepenny bits in my bedroom after each week’s session. We used to put a billiard table out on trestles. One night some yobs came in, knocked it off the trestles and the slate table split in two.
Another memorable night, someone came in and said ‘Have you heard? Kennedy’s dead’. I assumed they were talking about some local boy I didn’t know. But when it became clear they were talking about President Kennedy, that was a terrible shock. He projected such an exciting, glamorous, young and progressive image.
A stalwart of the Youth Club was a chap who seemed much older than most of us, although he could I suppose have been as young as 18. He worked in a bank, always wore a pinstripe suit, and had a large car, in the boot of which was a battery-powered record player and heaps of 45rpm single records, mainly exciting R&B imports from the USA. This was a great draw, but there was more; he would drive me and another couple of younger boys to various airfields at the weekend, for plane-spotting.
He lived with his parents in a crumbling bungalow, allegedly with no electric light, and on the few occasions when I went there to get a lift, it did certainly look gloomy and secretive. Naturally there was some suspicion about this eccentric looking man who befriended 14 and 15 year-old boys, and we did think of him as very weird, but useful. I never had or heard of any untoward experiences.
Through the Youth Club I became part of the sensational pop group The Yokels. I had been practising hard on guitar for some time. My second one, a fixed-bridge acoustic, newly purchased from a music shop in Reading, was lying beside me on the grass of the ‘rec’ when a cricket ball hit it and splintered it at the wide end. It didn’t affect the guitar’s performance and I just patched it over with some stickers from the Farnborough Air Show which remained there until it was stolen in a burglary from Grove Lane some 20 years later. This was the guitar that I deployed as rhythm guitarist of the Yokels. On lead guitar was the one with proper equipment – Julian? -, and the electric bass was learnt in a flash by Dave Greenoff, already an impressive pianist, I think self-taught. The diminutive Mick Mustow was on drums, a nasty piece of work who later punched me in the face for no reason as I walked over the railway bridge one evening when home from uni. We played mainly Shadows and early Beatles numbers and gave at least two gigs, one in the Parish Room, and one in a church hall in Henley. My sister and her friends would come along and scream loyally, but our flame hardly flickered before dying.
It must have been around this time that my sister Mary ‘fixed me up’ with her friend Tina’s younger sister Tricia. They were daughters of the landlord of the Plough pub. He was rather military and unwelcoming on the few occasions when I cycled over to visit her. I may have taken her to a party or two, but my only recollection of parties at that time is of a crowd of teenage boys listening to Shadows LPs.
In my early teens I harboured the ambition of becoming an airline pilot. I devoured the brochure from the Air Training School at Hamble and imagined striding across their campus in a pilot’s uniform. But things moved on. Father introduced me to a chemical engineer who drank in his favourite pub and this sounded an excellent career combining my then enjoyment of maths, chemistry and physics.
I had had interviews at four universities – Sheffield, UMIST (Manchester), Imperial College London and Birmingham. It must have been a considerable surprise to me that my parents arranged for me to travel to Manchester by plane – I must have gone from Heathrow and returned the same day. Did my dad take me to and collect me from Heathrow? At Imperial, I sat alone waiting outside an office until called in for the interview, and after it I was dismissed – not even a look round the department. Birmingham made the best impression as all the candidates met and were taken round the department by students, and in a coach up to the halls of residence. So it was easy to select Birmingham as my first choice.
It was about 80 miles from home and my parents drove me there for the freshers’ conference in September 1965. I met Pete Spencer while queing up for something in that first week and we hit it off straight away.
I went home for the weekend halfway through the first term – I expect many of the UK students did – but receiving a lot of aggravation about the length of my hair, I never went home mid-term again.
I lived in that first year in digs in the suburb of King’s Heath, a big Victorian red-brick semi in Mount Pleasant, which I believe had villas on three sides with a shared garden in the middle. Ours also had a garden at the side beyond which the land dropped sharply into a small valley with a factory immediately below. Mrs White, the lard-faced landlady and her insignificant husband inhabited a living room on the ground floor and the kitchen regions at the back, while we lodgers shared a sitting room alongside the garden, where we must have had our breakfast and Sunday lunch and tea. What I do remember vividly is the supper that would be waiting for us when we came in at night – white bread sandwiches, often ham. These were often so repulsive that we threw them out but we didn’t want Mrs White to know. We would throw them out of the bedroom window across the garden and into the factory below. Once one fell short and was there in the garden the next morning. Another time I hid some in a box under my bed and forgot about them until I discovered the remains when I came back at the beginning of the next term. Looking at Mount Pleasant on Google maps now I can’t see a house alongside the valley, but maybe some have been demolished – like the home of a multiple murderer….
I shared a bedroom with another first year student, Dave, a very tall, very thin chap with a wispy beard, who studied French and played French horn – he would sit on his bed and play bits of Richard Strauss. Another first-year was a good-looking Action Man sort of guy who studied Geography and went rock-climbing at every opportunity. The fourth lodger was a quiet second year who had been at Mount Pleasant the year before and stayed on. It seemed very odd to have returned to Mount Pleasant – the street was pleasant certainly, but not Mrs White’s regime or cooking.
Dave bought a scooter, and let me have a go at riding it around the central garden – I fell off after a few yards and have never ridden a scooter or motorbike again, except as a passenger a couple of times. One of these was when I went to a wedding somewhere near Daventry and had to wear top hat and tails. I remember being given a ride on a motorbike the morning after, holding my hatbox under one arm and suitcase under the other – so no hand to hold on with.
On my first Sunday in Brum, I went to the parish church in King’s Heath. As I neared the entrance, two students came to greet me, which had the opposite effect to their intention – I never went again.
Another long-standing habit that bit the dust in Brum was plane spotting. As a keen spotter, particularly of civil aircraft, I intended to visit Birmingham (Elmdon) Airport as soon as possible, but I never did. Other interests took over abruptly. However, it is easy to remember one significant plane registration – G-ACSS, which was the race-winning de Havilland Comet racer, an elegant aeroplane. I don’t remember actually seeing it, but it was one of the many Airfix models that stood on special shelves on the wall and hung by threads from the ceiling of my bedfroom at home. They now had lost their magic and in the holidays I took them to Wokingham’s Oxfam shop where it was kind of them to accept them, considering that they must have had no chance of selling any. I have never yet visited Birmingham’s airport.
It must have been in this first year at Brum that I stopped away from Uni for a few days with flu. When I was beginning to recover, I went into the King’s Heath High Street to find some lunch. I went to a a pub restaurant where the waitresses were in black with white aprons and menu was all meat and two veg. But on the other hand, King’s Heath was notable for having a Sainsburys supermarket – the most northerly one at that time.
In our first term, the chem eng students had the opportunity to visit the Shell oil refinery at Rotterdam. It certainly was an eye-opener, being so big that we drove around the huge site in a coach. After that, we visited Delft and Leiden – possibly all in the same day – and then stayed a couple of nights in Amsterdam. I remember enjoying wiener schnitzel and beer in Cafe Centrum, at the corner of a big square, but we couldn’t find it when we went again in 2019.
At the beginning and end of term I often got a lift home from a fellow chem-enger Mick Gibbs who lived beyond Wokingham. He had a grey Austin van but ‘souped it up’ with a bigger engine so that it went like a rocket and was quite terrifying. He also entered for saloon car races, a gang of us went to Silverstone and to Brand’s Hatch in Kent to watch.
Pete Spencer was devoted to his girlfriend Mandy at home in Bolton and wrote to her every day, with drawings. He bought a little car and took me home with him one weekend, my first time staying in the north. His family were lovely, but it was a bit uncomfortable being the wallflower while he visited Mandy.
I can’t remember how I got involved, but one weekend I went on a working party to decorate a house in Oxford which was to be some sort of refuge. In the evenings we sang rounds and campfire songs, very wholesome.
Another memory from our first year – we were shown a heat exchanger in the chem eng department corridor, with the outer tube cut away to show the many tubes on the inside – then told we had to take measurements and make an engineering drawing of it. I was surprised to find that I really enjoyed spending hours over a drawing board, sharpening the pencils on sandpaper and painstakingly developing the drawing in plan, elevation, side views and cross-sections on double-elephant paper.
Now able to buy my own clothes, starting of course with a Uni scarf (with Birmingham uni colours on one side and BU Chem Eng on the other – where is it now?), I adopted the popular donkey jacket and jeans look. Safari jackets came later, for some reason with a chiffon scarf ties round the neck. My first safari jacket was in a coarse material from an Army Surplus shop, but my second was a safari suit in soft cotton, as if I were a film director. At some point I had a pair of purple velvet hipster trousers – for parties I suppose, not that I often got invited to one. I did gatecrash quite a few – one went to the Union on a Saturday night and somehow got the address of a likely do.
Jim Hiley was a flamboyant second-year Drama student who was promoting ‘popular theatre’ and trying to get non-arts students involved in GTG, the Guild Theatre Group. I signed up and had a couple of small parts, and later when we formed the Arcadian Society we designed and printed posters and flyers for productions. My poster for Waiting for Godot won a prize in a university art exhibition, which also included Dave Ruddlesden’s sculpture made of lots of Park Drive fag packets stuck together. The Arcadian Society appeared on stage in a Victorian Music Hall show singing (sort of) Oklahoma and Riding along on the Crest of a Wave. I was the King of Denmark in Brecht’s Life of Galileo, but this is a carnival king and not even a speaking part. I was carried on in a litter by revellers, and had to crack an egg on some poor chap’s head each night. I can’t now find it in the list of characters, so perhaps Jim ‘wrote’ it specially for me! We took this production to the National Student Drama Festival in Cardiff in December 1967. I met Tricia Ellison through GTG where she did make-up, and I took part in plays with several drama students who later became well-known, especially Tim Curry and Patrick Barlow, but also Keith Drinkel, Judy Loe and Barry Kyle.
We formed the Arcadian Society in our first year, to promote our interest in graphic art, which I imagine was sparked, and was certainly fuelled, by the frequent illustrated articles in the Sunday Times and Observer colour supplements which started in the early 1960s. Spike Milligan agreed to be our President. We had a stall at the 1966 Freshers Conference to advertise the society, but wouldn’t tell anyone how to join. I learnt to use screen-printing equipment in the Guild (union), and once went to a printer’s workshop in the city to choose from their amazing collection of Victorian type for the music hall poster. For a while we liked to do pavement art in coloured chalks – I’d particularly do a copy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant at the Ambassadeurs. We painted a whole wall in Patrick Barlow’s flat with a copy of Lichtenstein’s Wham! Later I did Lichtenstein’s Hopeless over the fireplace in Ross Gregory’s living room in Henley, when I lodged with him after starting work at WRA. I wonder if either survive?!
In those days we often used to hitch-hike. If you were going to London you usually took the bus to a particular place on the outskirts of Brum where you might wait your turn in a queue of hitchers – and if you were one of two boys, you would have less chance than a single boy or any number of girls. However, we usually got wherever we were going in the end. Mick Jiggins and I hitched to Exeter to visit some friend of his at the university there. We stayed in a hall of residence and even managed to get breakfast there. But on the way down we were dropped in in the middle of nowhere late at night, and as there was no more traffic we just walked, until we flagged down a bus and got to Worcester bus station. That night we slept on a building site, where I remember trying to make myself comfortable lying on a radiator. This was before the days of Health and Safety and site security!
Dave Hurd and I decided to hitch to the south of France in the summer of 1967, but it was a bit of a disaster. It took ages to get a lift to Paris, where we camped in the Bois de Boulogne for a couple of nights. Then we did get a good lift as far as Avignon – the driver stopped overnight in Lyon but let us sleep (or try to) in his car. I remember stopping in the centre of Montelimar, the shops festooned with sweets. We camped beside the river in Avignon, a very pleasant place, and didn’t venture any further south. We went one day to Nimes and wandered around looking for the river, but couldn’t find it – I’d got mixed up with Arles. I was shocked to see the bullring – only from the outside.
It’s amazing that we weren’t aware of the nearby Pont du Gard so didn’t attempt to visit it. The journey back was a nightmare. After hitching all day without success we got a train to Orange and then, I think, gave up and travelled all the way back by train. I had to go to Dave’s home in London to borrow money from his parents for the train back to Wokingham.
In the holidays I would visit Gill and Bill in Wokingham, always good for a laugh, and in the summer of 1967, ‘You MUST hear this!’ It was the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP.
Brum was known for its Indian restaurants, something uncommon elsewhere in those days. I’d walked passed the famous Veeraswamy’s in London’s Regent Street and wondered what the food would be like. Mother often made a tasty curry with curry powder, out of left-over roast pork with apple and sultanas, but that was very different from what was on offer in the restaurants near the uni in Selly Oak. Of course it was de rigeur to attempt a vindaloo, but after it blew your head off you’d be happier with Madras in future. In those days chicken in a curry would by default be on the bone and you’d have to ask for it off the bone if you preferred.
There were several bars in the student union, which on certain Saturday nights were so chaotic that they’d be closed one after another and then we’d run down to the Cross Guns pub nearby and that would be closed in turn, not before the floors were covered in beer. In my first term, my so-called friends would tell the bar staff not to serve me as I wasn’t yet 18, but I don’t think they ever took any notice. Getting a drink at the union when there was a band on was terrible – there could be five solid lines of blokes between you and the bar, so slow progress. I remember The Who, Tyrannosaurus Rex introduced by John Peel, and the fantastic local Spencer Davis Group. The chem eng society promoted some gigs, for which the hall was decorated to some theme – once, the notorious ‘Public Hanging’. We did the poster and a badge for Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band.
Next to the uni was the King Edward Grammar School in big grounds, and somehow we found that there was an open-air swimming pool in a central quad. One summer we took to climbing over the railings and having a late-night swim. One night there was quite a large group there when some official arrived, and we grabbed our clothes and ran across the playing fields to escape. We didn’t risk it again.
Another adventure was going underground in the uni. Someone showed us an unlocked hatch that led down into a network of tunnels underneath the campus, and we went down several times to explore these. You could come up in different buildings. There wasn’t any point, but it was exciting.
Pete was fanatically keen on jazz and old dance bands, and a bit later on early (medieval and renaisssance) music. We listened to many jazz albums in booths in the uni library and to 78s which we (mainly Pete) had bought from junk shops, of which there were many then. Some of these were pretty rubbish but every so often there was a brilliant one. I learnt some fine songs from these – My song (Rudy Vallee, not Elton John, though I did like that in its day), Stardust, If I had a girl like you, I can’t get started (Bunny Berigan)– which I still remember. We used to go to the various districts of Brum to find and explore junk shops. I bought a solar topi on one occasion and the harmonium or strictly, American organ, which we still have, on another. At the end of uni I arranged to transport the organ to Wokingham by the only option then, British Road Services. I was back home when it arrived; they brought it out of the van in broken pieces.
On Sundays in summer we would take special excursion buses from the centre to places on the periphery of Birmingham, such as the Lickey Hills. We would also be sent to far-flung parts of Brum to try to sell copies of the rag mag. We took a kitten we’d adopted on an excursion to Kenilworth Castle, where we let it run around the grounds. It made a nasty mess in Pete’s car on the way home.
Dave Ruddlesden and I were elected to the Guild Council in our second year. Dave had interested me in Labour policies; his father had been a Labour councillor in Luton. The meetings of Guild Council, which made decisions about the running of the student union, were often dramatic, and those of the Debating Society were entertaining.
In that year Dave Hurd, Pete and I lived in digs in Northfield, with a sweet landlady Mrs Squires who looked after us well despite our occasional bad or at any rate drunken behaviour.
In the summer of 1967 were were required to spend 6 weeks on an industrial placement. Ellesmere Port being a big chemical production area at that time, a number of us were working at sites there and were allocated accommodation in Chester. I was lucky enough to be put up, not in digs as for most of us, but at a comfy hotel where I worked my way round the dinner menu several times. They had a cellar bar where we used to congregate after dinner until the small hours. I worked at Cabot Carbon, where they made carbon black, a soot-like powder that was used in making car tyres. They hadn’t given much thought to what their couple of students would do so a lot of the time I used to climb high up to sit and enjoy the view over the Dee estuary. It was only towards the end of our placement that they at last came up with the portable pitot meter that we needed to study the airflow in various pipes, enabling us to write up a decent report.
In our final year of chem eng we had to do the design project, a terrifying big piece of work involving much searching for data in the chem eng library. I got hold of a thick mail-order catalogue, stuck plain paper on its spine, wrote something like ‘Vital chemical engineering data handbook’ on it and put it on the shelves. We then enjoyed pointing it out to other students who would rush off to consult it for the info they needed.
You can see in the annual photos of the Chemical Engineering Society that Dave Ruddlesden, Dave Hurd, Peter Spencer and I liked to mess about posing with hand on hip, cork moustache and sitting on one leg. We also dressed up to go to see the film Bonnie and Clyde at the cinema. We went in Pete’s car, which looked very suitable for 1930s gangsters on the run. I wore my dad’s old three-piece suit and carried a machine-gun which I’d made out of bits of scrap – and of course a felt hat – we all had felt trilby hats.
At that time, in our final year, the four of us were living in a big shared house opposite Edgbaston Cricket ground and Cannon Hill Park. Dave R and I shared a room and Dave Hurd and Pete another.
There was another chap living there who annoyed us for some reason and we ‘machine-gunned’ him from the stairs as he came in the front door, which he didn’t find at all funny.
When the weather suited we would read the Sunday papers in Cannon Hill Park, and if it was cold we could go in the hot-house there. They had big fairs there and I once tried jellied eels from a stall – never again. We were interested to read about a ‘Be-in’ at the arts centre in the park in October 1967 led by a little-known artist called Yoko Ono – but we didn’t go to it. Another event I wish I hadn’t missed was a Handel opera at the Barber Institute at the uni with Janet Baker. I’d invited a girl and she’d declined, so I didn’t go. Janet Baker was in her prime then. I did hear her later in La Calisto at the Proms – but I didn’t really see her, as I was promenading up in the gallery, with no view.
Our bedroom at Edgbaston Park Road was at the front of the house with a table in the big bay window, where we collaborated on the book Robin Soak. It was so cold in there in the winter even with the gas fire on, you could only get your front a bit warm while the back of your legs were still freezing. First thing in the morning, a hand would come out from under Dave’s eiderdown and get a cig. I’d have put my bowl of cereal ready on a chair beside my bed the night before so I could eat it under the covers. Surely sometimes the milk must have been a frozen slush?
With GTG I went on a coach trip to see a celebrated Polish mime troupe at a drama festival at Bingley, my first time in Yorkshire. I was excited when we went past Pudsey which I knew was associated with Len Hutton, a cricketing legend. Afterwards for some strange reason I could always picture that bit of road, which I now know as the Pudsey bypass. On the coach I managed to sit next to (probably only on the way there!) a girl I was keen on, Maggie. I learned that she came from Stone in Staffordshire and when a few months later I found myself travelling past Stone going back and forth to a job at the Fylde Water Board, I wrote her a letter addressed to her at ‘somewhere in Stone’ and threw it out of the car window. It did get to her, and I had a reply, but things did not develop.
My final year at Brum was 1968, a year when student protests were erupting, in protest at the Vietnam war and US imperialism generally. France was brought to a standstill by strikes. I was fashionably disenchanted with the idea of going into the oil or heavy chemical industry and when we had to choose a project to study I said I wanted to do something on sewage – which I knew very little about, except for playing in the Wokingham sewage works when I was young. It was just a little idea of rebellion. Anyhow, my tutor sent me to see the professor of biochemical engineering who set me a project on aeration in the activated sludge process. I was rather surprised to find this fascinating! The journals I consulted in the library had some great adverts in which I copied – ‘Alfa Laval’ is on my office wall as I write this. Looking in a directory of research establishments, I came across the Water Research Association, at Medmenham near Henley, only 15 miles from Wokingham. I’d never heard of it but it sounded interesting. I wrote them a letter asking them to let me know if any jobs came up. A few days later there was a telegram in my union pigeon-hole – could I come for an interview? I got the job, and so was smugly settled at a time when the others were tramping around open days and recruitment fairs.
The job was to design, procure and then install and run a pilot plant on the River Trent at Nottingham. I would be at Henley for 18 months until the equipment was delivered to Nottingham. During that time I shared a house in Henley with Ross, already working at WRA; a modern house that he was buying. It was in an odd development of townhouses more or less in a circle facing out, with little gardens at the back and parking in the centre. I was sent to work all over the place and was told to get a driving licence as soon as possible so I could drive cars from the pool. My dad gave me his old Morris Minor and as a learner I drove it to and from work every day with Ross supervising. I had six official lessons and passed the test. The following day I drove a group of us up to Olympia in London, where WRA had a stand at some exhibition. Not long after, I had to drive a van up to Shrewsbury to set up an exhibition about water supply at the county show or something, complete with ‘magic tap’. I well remember coming to some road junction at a bit of an angle so that I couldn’t see what was coming from one direction. I had to get out to check the road, jump back in when the road was clear and drive off as quick as poss.
During this time I joined Singers Anonymous and first met Kathy at one of Gill and Bill’s parties – a Shakespearean one I think, where I was supposed to be Hamlet. I was certainly attracted, but she was spoken for.
After uni Dave Ruddlesden and I had various holidays together. We toured pub B&Bs in the Yorkshire Dales; we toured Cornwall, and found ourselves near where my parents’ friends George and Molly had retired to, so called on them. It was uncomfortable as they were suspicious of these two young men and didn’t seem to remember me at all. We went to Dublin for a few days, my abiding memory of which is the surprise of having fish and chips with smoked fish. We camped at Wasdale Head in the Lake District. And we went on a package holiday – two weeks in Majorca, which I booked at the Coop travel agents in Nottingham. My recollection has always been that it cost us £43 each for the package including full board at the hotel. It seems ridiculous but I have found online a reference to prices not far off that! We would start drinking aperitifs mid-morning and be waiting outside the huge dining room of the hotel, ravenous, by lunchtime. It didn’t occur to me until years afterwards that the dictator Franco was still running Spain, and I can’t think how Dave would have agreed to going there.
Jim had graduated a year before me and at first was working in rep at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester where I and Dave Ruddlesden visited on various occasions to see the play and have a lot to drink with Jim. On one occasion we got through 7 bottles of a Greek white wine Kolossi in a Greek restaurant in London Road, where we entertained the poor diners with some musical numbers. I only drank half a bottle so Dave and Jim were well away. That night Jim was sick over his treasured suede coat and ruined it. He never really got over that. Later he moved to Inter-action in London where Geoff Hoyle and Patrick Barlow also worked, and I used to go often to stay in their commune where everyone bedded down on chairs and the floor around a big hall. During the day they’d put on street theatre and such. One I remember clearly involved Patrick Barlow as a schoolmaster demanding to know what a boy’s name was. “Silence, sir.” “How dare you tell me to be silent! What is your name?” “Silence, sir.” – and so on and on. Once I was sent all round London in taxis delivering leaflets to various small theatres, and to the artist Felix Topolski at his home which was some enormous house on a road inside Regent’s Park. I went to some lunchtime theatre production where the two actors stripped completely naked in front of an audience of about 20, shockingly intimate! I was also given tickets to various shows which Jim was supposed to review. I didn’t like Nicol Williamson as Hamlet at the Roundhouse, despite Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia, and left at the interval.
When I was about to move to Nottingham to install the pilot plant, I went to the loo at WRA and there was the rather remote Director next to me. He told me that he would put me in touch with a friend of his in Nottingham. This turned out to be a quite elderly chap, a small man who wore a pinstripe suit and homburg hat, while he went around selling and maintaining a certain brand of industrial pumps. He had one arm and one leg, on opposite sides, and it was amazing to see him taking apart and re-assembling a pump. He took me to Trent Bridge cricket ground where he was a member, and out into some woods to shoot rooks. I had one go and was glad that I missed. He bagged several, and then drove us into the centre of the city to a butchers that bought the birds off him! He was a great character, but as soon as I’d made some younger acquaintance, I didn’t look him up any more. Through another single chap living in the same house where I had a downstairs flat, I went on some weekend walks with the Coffee Pot Club – where single ‘professionals’ could meet. This was the only time that I lived alone. I bought a stereo system and some LPs, and joined the Radio 3 listeners’ panel which involved sending in detailed critical reports on programmes I’d listened to. As time went by I found time to listen to fewer and fewer so gave it up. My flat in Premier Road was only a minute’s walk from the Forest, an open space where the huge annual Goose Fair was held. On the other side of the Forest was the Arboretum, then the cemetery and the beautiful residential area The Park, an attractive route into the city centre. In the centre was the amazing Trip to Jerusalem pub built into caves in a sandstone cliff.
My pilot plant was built in a big barn beside the Trent at Colwick sluice downstream of Nottingham. I was assigned a local man to assist. This was Bob Coxon, a wiry local with teddy boy’s black slicked hair and plenty of dubious connections. He’d pull up his jacket sleeve to show – and try to sell – you several watches up his arm. He’d bring the Daily Mirror which I enjoyed reading when hed finished with it, particularly the Old Codgers. He’d go out mid-morning and come back with loads of meat in a wrap of paper, and fry us up a big mixed grill for lunch. If I happened to be at a meeting at the Trent River Board’s offices at Trent Bridge, I’d go for lunch to a big cafe with a huge menu offering every possible combination of the components of fried breakfasts, pies and veg, or one of the many Indian and Chinese restaurants along Meadow Lane offering set lunches. My regular evening meal for one was a Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie with tinned potatos and tinned carrots.
The main parts of the Colwick pilot plant were 4m tall steel tanks, in pairs – two streams in parallel, mirror images of each other. When they had been put in place by a mobile crane, I looked at them and declared that two of them were the wrong way round. Really? Was I sure? Yes. The fitters duly brought the crane back in and swapped them over. When they had gone, and I tried to fit the connecting pipes, I realised they’d been right first time. Somehow I rocked and ‘walked’ them very slowly and with great difficulty, into the correct positions.
One morning when I arrived there was a policeman standing by the entrance. ‘Can I help you?’ ‘Well, can you help him?’ said the officer, pointing toward the floating jetty where we pumped water out of the river. There was a body caught up alongside it. Turned out to be a youngish man who had disappeared when he’d gone out to the shop one foggy night and must have walked into the river. I was shocked to see the metal coffin that the undertakers put him in before driving it away in a plain van.
When I’d finished in Nottingham I moved back to Henley and shared a house, the Odd Cottage, with two other single chaps from WRA. I rejoined Singers Anonymous, my fellow tenor in which bought a tent and sang its praises. I liked the sound of it so much I bought one the same – a 2 person bell end ridge tent with windows and plenty of storage pockets. I remember a wet weekend camping at Lechlade, with a tremendous thunderstorm lighting up the tent and night. It may have been the maiden outing of the camping equipment. On another occasion the two matching tents were pitched side by side in the Brecon Beacons, the tenor and Kathy in one, I on my own in mine due to a last-minute change of mind by my intended partner. Kathy and I got on fine and when a bit later I heard that her circumstances had changed, I solicited her telephone number and succeeded in inviting her to a party at the Odd Cottage. There was potentially a bit of a problem as two other girls I’d invited decided they’d come. I was able to put one off, and the other came but happily took an interest in someone else. I should clarify that such a situation wasn’t at all typical of my romantic success up to that point.