14. university of life
While the big gig was drawing near, life outside it was stable and alright.
After the brief interlude with the quiet nurse, I was visiting my girlfriend in London again. Usually by bus, which took a while but gave you the best seat in London.
The old Routemaster buses were really old by then. Rivets everywhere, and the conductress used a string to ding the bell. They were mainly conductresses, but conductors too. The drivers were almost all male. I can't remember any driveresses.
The best place to sit was on the top deck, right at the back. The seat for two was in a kind of alcove, with no aisle to your right: you were in the left-hand corner at the back, slightly behind the top of the stairs, if you can picture that.
Because those buses were built when people were shorter, six footers like me had to bow their heads upstairs and the seats didn't have enough leg room. But that made the rear alcove cosier. Everyone else liked it too, so it was usually taken, but when it was free I'd travel with the girlfriend, or Robin, or by myself, and feel like I owned the town. You don't have that on a London bus today.
Routemasters were more stable, too. They didn't have the hydraulic suspension that came with buses which followed. I don't know if 'hydraulic suspension' is a thing, but it sounds right to me: those old vehicles were big lumps of metal; probably harder to drive, but they were solid underfoot, whereas on today's buses you feel like you're on a bed of air, less steady on your pins, so you have to hold on tight or get thrown about. Getting out of your seat was something you didn't have to think about on a Routemaster.
I took the tube sometimes, but the bus saved me a few pence. Literally pence and literally a few.
The bus was the Number 36, all the way from Paddington Station to southeast London. It went through the city centre and took a long time, so fare dodging was trickier.
Anywhere else, it was easier then than now. Clippies on buses couldn't keep track of every single passenger, and there were no automatic barriers at tube stations, or oyster cards - so ticket collectors had to deal with a hundred passengers every few minutes. Wave an out-of-date ticket at them and they never looked hard enough.
But the 36 took so long your only chance was pretending to nod off. Easier if they changed crew en route, because the second ticket collector wouldn't know you hadn't paid. But one day an inspector got on at Trafalgar Square, and I had to 'wake up' and fork out. The conductor wasn't impressed. Look at that, he said. Pretending he's asleep - to save 14 p! Well, as I say, two pizzas in a proper restaurant were only a pound, so it all counted.
*
Have a look through the chapter on the 1970s to see how so much has changed. But here's a quick look at buses.
They were frequent enough, but that changed in the 80s, when you could wait half an hour at a bus stop. Why? So the tories could say London Transport wasn't working and buses needed to be privatised, which happened in the next decade.
Waiting times stayed long, a situation that didn't change till Red Ken got back into power. Now our buses are regular and frequent, and tube trains are almost unnecessarily good! One every two or three minutes in Central London.
I admit we're privileged here. In the rest of the country, especially the North, public transport reads like a train wreck.
London went through a similar phase. I don't know if it was due to the failure that was PPP (initiated by Labour), but in the early 2000s you got your money back if a tube train was more than fifteen minutes late. So a wait of just under that was common. I was the only person I knew who filled in the forms. Well it happened quite a lot, and by then I was saving a lot more than 14 p.
Never mind a few pennies. For a while, somewhere else, I used to travel for free all the time.
In the mid-Seventies, I didn't just work at my dad's mental hospital. There was another one, Fair Mile, an equally big hospital, this one psychiatric, at Cholsey in Oxfordshire. To save on travel expenses and having to get up early, I rented a room in the main building for two quid a week. Yes, really that little.
To get to the hospital, I took a stopping train from Reading. But Reading's a major station, not so easy for getting away without paying. So I'd walk to the next one down the line, Tilehurst. We used to live quite near it until I was seven, but now it was three miles from my dad's house. Fine by me if it saved a few bob. There was never anyone at Tilehurst in the evenings, or at Cholsey, so I got on and off without ever paying.
Then, one cataclysmic day, I got off at Tilehurst coming back - and there was a ticket collector at the gate. What a fucking liberty. A tall asian, I remember. He was there from then on, so there was no point walking to and from Tilehurst any more. I got on and off at Reading, and had to pay. Bollocks. Until the asian guy turned up, I was saving 34 p per trip!
Same reason you forged rail tickets occasionally, if they hadn't been collected from you at the station. The tickets were small and cardboard and the print was purple, so you had to be intricate with black and red biros. I got caught just once, in Oxford, and then only because the ticket collector got the date wrong! But you gave a false name and address and they never bothered to check.
Saving money on travel like that didn't compensate for the amounts I lost by being an idiosyncratic prat.
When I went by train and tube, I always paid full whack. I didn't have to, but I'd got it into my head that I wasn't a student like everyone else, so I refused to get an NUS card, which would've saved me a third on fares. Duh. I didn't take that attitude with the Freedom Pass!
*
I've always been eccentric, not always in a good way. Clothes, for instance.
At the dreaded boarding school, you had to wear their uniform even though the place was out in the countryside, with no-one else to see you. By the weekend, you were chafing to put on greatcoats and ankle boots with elastic sides and cuban heels and fray the bottom of your flared jeans.
Me, I went one further with a frilly shirt. I don't think it had ruffle cuffs, but definitely a big frill down the front. I wanted to go really OTT with a red or gold number, but they were only available in white.
I've always believed Western men dress in drab colours. Two hundred years of drab. Wish we'd go back to those green georgian tailcoats or burgundy regency jackets, footwear with buckles (there's one on the green suede shoes I got married in), big wraparound cravates - though the tight breeches only work if you've got the legs and no waistline. Beau Brummell was cool in turning the world black and white. but I blame the victorians for not going back to colour.
I did my bit for flamboyance with that shirt, but it wasn't really a going concern. It's one thing wearing that kind of gear if you're Jimi Hendrix, but not a sixteen-year-old kid shivering in a queue for lunch. And I stayed in flares even when I moved to London, despite Robin's gentle promptings.
Meanwhile the student grant left you with ten pounds a week to spare, which wasn't bad in those days but not enough to become a clothes horse unless your parents were well off (no shortage of rich kids at Oxford). But I was quite happy to wear the same clobber for two years at a stretch. Maybe it went with listening to the same songs over and over.
In my second autumn at college, I bought a sweatshirt for the first time. I got it so my top would go down beyond my waist. I used to think my legs were too long. I even measured myself, how about that. I calculated that if you divided me into seven parts from the neck down, five of them were below the waist! Too much, almost Joey Ramone territory. I still wear everything outside my trousers, but for fashion reasons now, since someone introduced shirts reaching below jackets in the mid-Eighties. It's more comfortable too, something less to ruck up inside your waistband. I can sense your level of interest from here.
That sweatshirt was navy blue when I bought it, grey by the fourth year. It was seen on stage more than once.
Most men in Oxford were still in flares (punk took an age to get that far northwest). Mine were usually greying cords that used to be black, Bernie had trousers from Austin Reed. I wore a thin leather thong round my neck (cheaper than a chain, and a relic of the hippy years).
I never had a student scarf (I thought of myself as something else, remember). You'd see guys walking round Worcester College with Worcester College scarves and Worcester College on their sweatshirts. Me, I bought a knitted girl's scarf from Miss Selfridge in Oxford. Blue and something. It reached beyond my knees on both sides. I wrapped it round my neck a couple of times, let it hang long, and thought it looked good. Regency, even. So did the girlfriend. Sometimes eccentric in not a bad way.
*
After two years in each other's pockets, I was seeing less of Blond Steve even though we were sharing the same house now. When I wasn't rehearsing, I was in London, while he devoted more time than me to studies. We both played football as always, and I was having an infinitely happier time with that than before.
I was never what you'd call a real footballer, but I wasn't useless. College second XI level, while Steve was in and out of the first. When I got to Oxford, I started at right-back then moved up front, where I scored a few goals and generally did OK. But in the second year, the team was taken over by a cabal of hockey players, and that was the end of my time in it.
But this last year was a return to the good days and more. My fairhaired housemate put in a word with the second eleven captain, and the season ended gloriously. I owed Steve for that.
*
Meanwhile he wasn't all work and no play. He had a girlfriend too, another reason we didn't hang around together so much. He'd met her in the year abroad, and one night he went to pick her up from Oxford Station.
It was late by then, and I'm in bed with my own girl, about to doze off.
When you came in through the front door, my bedroom was the converted front room immediately on the right, with the toilet across the hall. Steve and his Freundin tiptoe in and talk quietly in german. They go upstairs and there's nothing for a little while. Then they make it clear they're pleased to be back together.
His bedroom was directly above mine. The bed had springs, but what you heard most was her high-pitched calls. We suppressed our mirth below.
We met her the day after, and she stayed for a while. Cooked a meal for the four of us who lived in the house. She started with a spicy soup, then brought out a huge apple strudel. We'd never had a dessert as a main course before, and you can imagine four english lads enjoying the novelty. Years later, a birding mate of mine used to order a main course and two puddings instead of a starter. Every kid's dream.
*
So our social lives were in full swing. But rehearsals still took up a lot of my time. Except now there weren't many more of them. The gig was upon us. For me, no escape from an audience. For them, no reprieve from my dulcet tones.