42. girl power
The song contest didn't take up all my time in that final term.
I revised for exams a bit. And I hadn't lost interest in women.
After the break-up, I was footloose again, and I wasn't going to turn down new opportunities. Starting with an old flame.
*
Back in 1973, I hadn't been out with anyone at all, even though I was eighteen (boarding school can do that to you).
I was working at my dad's mental hospital, and there was a nurse there. Short and trim, with jet black hair and a sweet voice, a little jewish girl called Miriam. She was like a ripe blackberry and I was smitten.
But I was new to this, and it didn't work out. Started well with a picnic and the film If... - then I suggested a night on a beach and she was up for it. She was always a bit of a hippy, and a night like that sounded quite rock festival (she did Glastonbury with Matthew, who hired us for Borocourt).
We went to Hayling Island, where I'd spent holidays with the hospital staff and patients. Thought it would be a romantic place to start. But we didn't take a tent! We just shivered on cold sand and came home early and she wouldn't see me after that, which I thought was a bit harsh.
For the next nine months or so, I went out with other women, including my first real girlfriend. But I spent a night with one of them in the same house as Miriam and her man, and that stung.
Eventually, we got together again, and she was keen. But I wasn't so much. For some reason (more experience?), the spell had broken. The day of my mum's funeral, I went to see her afterwards, in her room at the nurses' home - but instead of talking, we went to bed, which was sad and grey. We met up again in my second year at college, but that was good only up to a point.
Even so, I thought I'd try again, because there'd been something there once. Invited her up to the house in Headington.
Before she set off, she told me she'd had a kid. Something like eighteen months earlier. That's when I remembered we'd never taken precautions! I made some calculations - but she showed me a photo of a mixed-race boy. Apart from me, she'd only ever gone out with black guys.
This time round was the worst of the lot. No-one's fault, but we didn't click and never saw each other again, though she invited me to a party in London a few years later and I remember her very fondly.
In fact, somewhere in the back of my mind, part of me feels if we'd made it at the beginning, we might still be together now. So Miriam Rovnick would've been the only girlfriend I ever had, and I quite like the thought. Even though I don't believe that at all!
*
My oldest mate Robin, from the shit boarding school. His mum Claire, who hired our band for the ICA. She had a fling with someone who was married to a descendant of the Duke of Wellington.
Robin took me to a party at their house, a massive pile on top of a grassy hill in Sussex. Antique furniture with oil paintings to match.
Everyone dressed up - except me. Rob lent me a white sweatshirt with a Moscow University logo across the front. It was a joke (the motto was Passis or Elsis!), but some of those posh girls took it at face value. Are you russian?
So I pretended to be. Bad accent but everyone had a drink so they believed me. Believed Robin too, because someone decided we were brothers, so he was russian for the night too. Harmless fun.
How can I be sure they swallowed our accents and weren't just enjoying us making fools of ourselves? You had to be there.
By then, Claire had stopped seeing her bit on the side, but Robin was friends with his three daughters. They had names you might expect from that kind of ancestry: Charlotte, Emma, Henrietta, attractive girls in very different ways. I remember dancing to Burlesque with one of them, a Family song and another of those you can't really move to. But it was one of her sisters I went out with.
Again we spent time in Headington, again it didn't go any further, though we stayed pals in London for a bit (dancing in the Café des Artistes when it was still free to get in) - and she introduced me to a girl I spent two years with.
*
Thinking back, the 1970s don't look an easy decade for women. You might ask how many have been.
The pill had been in circulation for years, and I think a lot of girls felt they had to go to bed with men just because they could now. You're not going to get pregnant, so why not? Have to say it happened with me sometimes.
There again, it may have been an age thing. Young girls unsure of themselves. As they got older, they knew what they wanted and just went for it - or not at all. I was very aware of the change.
Seems to have been going the other way in recent years. From 2009 to 2018, the number of adolescents saying they had no sex at all rose from 28.8% to 44.2% among young men and 49.5% to a whopping 74% of young women.
Meanwhile the Seventies were still run by men for men. And things like the sexism in TV comedy series gave you a clue about male attitudes.
If a girl said no and the man didn't listen, she wasn't going to get much help from people who were supposed to provide it - because most of them weren't women. The police probably didn't believe rape existed. If you went home with a man, you were asking for it. The silence surrounding Jimmy Savile gives you some idea: it was everywhere.
Not just sex. Some cafés wouldn't serve single women after midnight (on the assumption they were prostitutes). And until 1982 it was illegal to serve a woman in a pub on her own. She had to sit at a table and wait for a man to bring her a drink from the bar. Imagine that crap. In 1969 and 1972, when I was 14 and 17, my British Visitor's Passport had a picture of me next to a box for 'Photograph of wife', with a space for her signature below.
The right-wing press invented bogus stats about the harm done to kids if mums didn't stay home - so in 1975 only 57% of women had jobs (see the bit on Watts the corner shop).
In sport, there was no football or rugby World Cup for women till 1991. In athletics, at the Olympic Games, no running events beyond 1500 metres; no walking races; no triple jump, pole vault, or hammer. They had a pentathlon, with only five disciplines, not a decathlon (they're still three short now - and still play best of three sets at Wimbledon).
In 1970, if a woman bought something like a washing machine, she needed her husband's signature on the hire-purchase form. When a married couple wanted to buy a house, the mortgage lender factored in only a proportion of the wife's income, because she was bound to stop working when she started a family.
Some women believed this was fair. At my dad's mental hospital, one of the nursing assistants was a middle-aged woman called Mrs Properjohn. She told a group of us it was only right for women to be paid less, because they stopped work to have kids. I'm still proud of myself for saying it was men who made them pregnant. It left her speechless for once. I was fifteen at the time.
Meanwhile female patients had to put up with male doctors. If you had 'women's troubles', you'd be described as unstable (a word they used about my own mum) or neurotic. Male GPs hadn't a clue how to treat PID - even in the early 90s, my fiancée was advised to go home and 'try to lead a normal life' - and their attitudes to battered wives was a national disgrace: 'One asked me what I had done to provoke my husband'. You have to hope things improved when female medical students began to outnumber the men.
But in the 1970s, in some areas, some things did begin to change.
Right at the start of the decade, the Labour government brought in the Equal Pay Act, then the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, which led to the Equal Opportunities Commission. The first women's refuge was set up in 1971. The following year, the Old Bailey had its first female judge.
Even so, women still had to have their pubic hair shaved before giving birth, which they did with their ankles up in stirrups whether they wanted it or not. On the other hand, they stayed in hospital for a week as a precaution, which was a blessed relief for a lot of them. Nowadays you're out in a matter of hours - and there's a lot fewer health visitors.
A complicated decade, then.
In bed, too. Some girls slept with you when they didn't really want to - or didn't, though they fancied you - a few thought nothing of having immediate sex with a guitarist or drummer. If he'd worked in their office, they wouldn't have looked at him twice. But see him in a rock band...
Once in a while, I knew what that was like. At the third time of asking, I didn't say no.
*
It's early afternoon and I've just turned left onto the High Street from Cornmarket. I've got a shoulder bag because I've been shopping, something I didn't do very much at college.
I've already mentioned the limits of a student grant, though by then my dad was earning enough to have to contribute a bit. Apart from food, I can't remember buying many items at all.
For a start, not many clothes. I lived in the same sweatshirt for years, and stage gear for the final term. In the house up the hill, a small wardrobe was all I needed, plus a fold-down desk I used as a sock drawer.
I bought a lot of cassettes, and a few things in my first year. Spent six quid (a lot in those days) on a chequered wooden chessboard, a classy piece of work which I've still got even though I don't play chess! A ring made out of half a crown, which I'm still annoyed I lost on Manly beach in Sydney. And those indispensable student accessories: candles.
This is what Oxford was like at the time. Near the corner of Broad Street and Holywell, there used to be a shop that sold nothing but candles. Their window had a giant castle made of wax, the size of a big doll's house, in different colours, with witches leering out through windows, a really impressive piece of work.
I bought a couple of things there. A small yellow toadstool with red spots for my sister and a sand candle for my room in first year. I hung it from the ceiling to provide a romantic glow for lady visitors, but you tended to head it on the way past and I've never paid for a candle since. Someone invented electric light.
Unlike a lot of students, I didn't put up posters by Mucha or Rackham. One wall had a big caricature of Laurel and Hardy, which creeped me out so I binned it, the other side of the room a snow scene with black trees which I painted myself. The sky's the same colours as the land. I produced a number of similar works between school and college, but I was no better at painting than singing, so I packed it in (when I found a girlfriend!) - though my aunt kept that snowscape on her wall for the last thirty years of her life.
*
Here in 1977, I haven't gone far down the High Street when someone comes up behind me quite quickly and says hi. A bit breathless and touching my right arm. I turn round and it's a girl, and I recognise her. She asks if I'm going anywhere special.
Just back to the house. It's a long walk but I left the bike behind because I couldn't be arsed to park it in different places, and I never spent money on bus fares in Oxford.
She asks if she can come too.
Uh, sure. OK...
I'm completely taken aback - especially when she says we'll need a taxi (there's a rank further down the High). Students didn't take cabs much, but she didn't want to be seen with me!
*
This was the only groupie I went to bed with at Oxford. I call her that because it's the word she used herself. She rather liked the idea. She'd seen me at the Song Contest but also around college. I'd seen her too.
I didn't mention her to anyone till now, all these years later. She had a boyfriend at Worcester and we didn't want to risk causing him any grief.
He was prominent in college life, so she was something of a First Lady. Bit of an aristocratic bearing (sure enough, her dad owned land in Dorset), though it probably came from knowing she looked the part.
That afternoon, I thought I couldn't be this lucky. Someone was going to be home for a change, and she'd back out because the guys I lived with were all at Worcester too. The house was usually empty during working hours, we studied down in town. But today of all days...
No, it was alright. Only the two of us, and she left before dark.
I thought that would be it, just the once. A bit of danger with a grungy singer, no commitments. Fine by me: I was flattered as hell, felt like a real rock star for a day. Nothing like this had ever happened to me.
But it went very well, so she made a second visit. My room was at the front of the house, and I remember waiting for the sound of her cab beyond the overgrown hedge. This time I'd asked the others how long they'd be out, then I bought some drink and she stayed almost the entire day. All heaven broke loose.
You don't come back for more if things are absolutely fine with your boyfriend. She told me she was going to leave him, but not before finals. I liked her for that.
That didn't mean she'd be trading him in for me. I didn't want that either, so we saw each other a third time then stopped. Met up with her in London two years later, and it was good again - cafe lunches and a walk in Regent's Park, nice to be out in public with her - though never going to last long.
But she made the end of that summer term, in a way coloured my whole time at Oxford - and said I did the same for her. We added some excitement and romance to each other's lives, and college can be short of that.
Life's made up of close things. We might not have got together if I hadn't made a sartorial decision. She noticed me in the street because I'd started wearing my faux-punk threads offstage. Tutorials, pubs, dinner in college -
- and Oxford High Street in bright sunshine when a First Lady with a blue beret and hair down her back couldn't resist tugging at a sleeve she recognised.