6. uncertain terms
Away from the high-octane world of rock 'n roll, social life and degree course were the usual mixed bag.
I've already referred to university studies as schoolwork - and I'd had a lifetime of that.
For most students, certainly in the 1970s, college life was an improvement on school. You had a room of your own, away from your parents, and there was less work to do, more time for leisure, under less pressure than they have now.
Oxford didn't use modules. You had an exam after two terms, in case they'd let you in by mistake (I nearly failed it) - then nothing till finals at the end of your third year. The work-play balance was your responsibility. You could study hard or prat about for two years if you could get away with it, which is largely what I did. Truth is: I didn't want to be there.
Most students went to university straight from school, so they felt they had a lot more freedom. But I'd taken my A Levels a year early, then spent a term back at the shit boarding school preparing for the Oxford Entrance exam. After that, two terms, with holidays in between, studying nothing at all. Time enough to realise I didn't want to do it any more.
I spent those months working at the mental hospital as usual, like I did the same when I came from Rome early. And I had a regular girlfriend. But by the start of year three, I wasn't especially content. Not looking forward to another year writing about books I didn't rate. The modern languages course was mostly ancient literature, and a lot of it was un fucking readable, though I didn't mind some of the plays, maybe because I'd done some acting at school.
A lot of students didn't think that way. They actively liked the courses they were doing. Good for them. Life would've been less boring if I'd felt the same. The Oxford colleges weren't short of a few quid, and Worcester had a plush library, above the main entrance. Tall bookcases full of old tomes, warm red lamps on individual desks, a view over the grass quad at night, with old buildings on the sides. I'd go up there to finish an essay I didn't want to do, and wish I could get into it, because this was a great place if you liked that sort of thing. Instead I never used the Bodleian Library.
Before I even went to college, I thought of making a break for it. Forfeit my university place and go back to Rome instead, make it work this time. I imagined finding Cinecittà and asking for work on a film set, maybe a bit of acting or writing. I specifically thought of Pasolini, hence the irony of him being murdered while I was there in '75. I thought he might be impressed by my zeal, giving up a place at Oxford to check the gate on a film camera.
Didn't happen, of course. I've never had that kind of bravery. Most people don't.
Maybe I could've found a job in London instead (I was never going to stay in Reading), but I had no idea what I wanted to do. A writer one day maybe, but it was only a vague notion and I in all the time I was at college all I wrote was a few duff poems. In those four years, I never grew up enough to have any adult ideas for a novel. I did start a play about a chess player, even asked for funds to put it on. Got turned down because it was crap.
College is where I went after all. Well, it beats working for a living.
Sounds a selfish attitude at this range. Since getting to Oxford was the thing, and being there wasn't what I wanted, why didn't I leave so someone else could have my place? A lot of kids would've killed to study hard there.
But most students don't just pore over books for three years (even Martin Neubert did a lot of other things!). Anyway I'd worked long hours at A level (not much else to do in a boarding school), so maybe I deserved it. Besides, it's asking a lot of an 18-year-old to feel guilty about staying on.
As it turned out, the first year was borderline glorious. I say that even though my mum died in the first couple of months. She was only 40 but they couldn't stop the cancer spreading. My brother and sister were younger than me, and her death messed up their lives, whereas I was older and hadn't lived with her for six years.
When I got the news, from the phone in college, Steve S was with me. I came out of the cabin and said 'one-all', the football score. Steve's dad had died before he left school, so now we had one parent each. Gallows humour matters.
After her funeral, I called my oldest friend Robin. I stood in a phonebox for an hour in the dark, and didn't cry once. Never have, though I still grieve for her, dying so young when she was full of life.
You have to get on with things, and they were generally good. I met Bernie and the Steves, played some college football, went to pubs and curry houses, maintained the longest hair in town. I went out with three girls I sort of aspired to, one for each term or thereabouts, including the prettiest student in Oxford, and generally enjoyed things.
Then everything went horribly pear-shaped in the summer. I lost the star girlfriend, in circumstances you couldn't invent. When I got back to college, one of the french class thought this was a real hoot, jumping around in front of the others (he actually jumped). 'She dumped him, she dumped him!' What a fucking hero.
The following year, he became that rare thing at the time: a married student. My first girlfriend had been good looking like the last one. Maybe he was just jealous.
Get this guy on his own and he was politeness itself. Put him in a group and he'd emerge from himself and take the piss (out of my italian christian names, for instance). It's a form of cowardice. When he tried something similar in a football knockabout, Blond Steve kicked him in the head. Twice! Once for me, I like to think.
Compare and contrast the reaction of my tutor in italian, David Robey at Magdalen:
Sorry to hear it. I thought you made a nice couple.
Me, ruefully: So did I.
*
So the next year at college became a difficult second album.
I'd had a girlfriend I really liked, who'd liked me, and I wanted that again. Fair enough - except I wanted it immediately. Any girl I dated, I hoped for bed first night, not for the sex so much, just so we'd be together from the very start.
That wasn't like me. I'd always been happy with courtships, their romantic and exciting build-ups. But now I needed an immediate plaster over the wound (remember I was only nineteen). Girls weren't up for that. My unfashionably long hair and dodgy clothes sense didn't deter them - but they shrank from the vibes I was giving off.
I went out with quite a number of women, which wasn't easy at Oxford, with its segregated colleges. But I didn't sleep with them all, and none of them lasted long. The first term alone, there were three really lovely girls with long dark hair. One was a gorgeous little scot called Suzy Watson, but I couldn't cope with her inexperience.
Another one had the name Briony. I'd never heard of it before, or the plant, and I thought it might be the female version of Brian, though I didn't tell her that. We lasted one evening. She took me to a folk club, where I nearly dozed off, I took her to my room, where she didn't want to stay. I spent a night with the best-looking girl in town, but it wasn't a success and she soon met someone else.
In my first year, I'd dated a friend of Kitty's, my first girlfriend. She spent time as a day patient at the Warneford. It was a mental hospital, but put your eyebrows down. She was fine, and we had a great evening at a party there, her and Bernie and one of the Steves. Girls in Laura Ashley dresses dancing to Maggie May, a magic memory. But we never made it as a couple.
I did get together with a girl from a language class I should never have asked out (though we were friendly after college), and a pretty blonde with long curly hair: Laina Gray, half american. I attracted her by looking through her handbag while she danced with someone she clearly didn't fancy! We had some good moments, but I let her go for no proper reason. So it went on.
It wasn't just me. Other Steve had girl trouble the previous year. So did the blond one this time round, good looking though he was. Most male students did. Because most of them didn't have girls at all.
Stands to reason. Simple arithmetic. Men outnumbered women by more than six to one. And meeting someone outside the university wasn't easy. So you had to trawl the college discos, especially St Catherine's, St Catz, and most teenage boys weren't suited to that. I guarantee a lot of them were virgins when they left Oxford.
You didn't just meet students at these discos. I went out with a couple who had careers. I didn't go out with someone who was sixteen.
She worked at the Oxford & County secretarial college, the Ox and Cow. The girls there turned up at discos and parties. She had a woolly hat, a weird thing to wear at a college dance, her name was Carol, and she came from Lancashire. When I asked her surname, she wouldn't tell me, even though I'd told her mine, which took some explaining.
I presumed her name was one of those that raise a smile down south, so I had a guess.
Eccles.
Don't be daft -
Higginbottom.
How did you know?!
We had a slow dance to Angie, by the Stones. I met two girls called that, so the name followed me around in year two. But with Carol I didn't take it any further (though I sang a song by that name). Sixteen, for christsake. Those college dances were a grim grind.
If you didn't do discos, you had to have a plan of campaign. When I re-formed the Worcester table-tennis team, our first match was at Exeter College. I went with a guy I'd seen around, distinctive with his yellow hair and muttonchop sideburns, like something out of Dickens. He told me the first thing he did when he came to Oxford was find himself a woman!
He joined the Worcester-Somerville music society, met someone, and set himself up for the next three years. She looked like Queen Victoria (to match his dickensian look), but mission accomplished.
The collegiate system meant Oxford didn't have a CSU, a central students' union. This made it harder to co-ordinate political action apparently. So undergraduates went on marches, Blond Steve among them. He's been left wing all his life, and I eventually went that way too.
But we all knew the real reason for wanting a CSU. Without one, there was no central student bar, which is where men in other universities met girls (Other Steve enjoyed himself at Leeds). I used to tell my blond sidekick those demos wouldn't do the trick quickly enough. It must take months to set up a central union. You still had to hit the discos. I went to lectures only in the first week of every year, to see if any attractive new girls had turned up. Never anything to report.
It didn't help that you couldn't bump into them organically, as part of daily life. Very few male colleges had started admitting women. At the time, I didn't know any had. That changed after I left. I remember going back to Worcester after a couple of years and thinking hmm these can't all be girlfriends walking through here...Within a decade, Oxford had no more all-male colleges. By 2018, female students outnumbered the men. If we'd had the same ratio in my time, I would've washed more!
*
I missed Bernie that second year, which he spent in hospital. But Steve and I got on as usual, though we had the odd flare-up over topics like George Best, as you do. Steve's always had a temper, and I can exasperate anybody!
We spent time in the local pubs (scotch eggs and jukeboxes more than drinking) and local tandooris, and had long chats in his room. Always his, not mine. I must've been the only student at Oxford without a kettle. So I could never offer anyone coffee. I didn't mean to be an unwelcoming git; it just didn't occur to me.
For a start, I didn't like coffee much. I've always had a kid's taste buds, a sweet tooth. I didn't like cheddar for years and coffee was too bitter. So I took three sugars. This came to a head when there was a shortage in 1974 (a reduction in imports from the Caribbean). I go round to Steve's one day, he makes the coffees, and I ask where the sugar is. Er, none left, he says. He's run out.
I didn't believe that. He didn't drink coffee without sugar either. So I opened the door to his books cabinet - and uncovered a two-pound bag he'd hidden behind the dictionaries!
Aha, I cried in triumph. I knew it!
That's because of you, you tosser.
This was a word I'd never heard before he came along, but I soon picked up what it meant. I studied languages at college.
You and your three effing spoonfuls.
I had to reduce the intake after that. His mum had sent him the bag of sugar through the post! It was that precious.
Looking back, I should've bought him a bag, or a jar of coffee. Fuck knows I consumed enough of his. But I didn't think outside myself then. They say you don't finish growing up till you're twenty-five. Call me evidence for that.
Years later, I tried coffee without any sugar at all. Took me three weeks to stop hating it, but I've had it without ever since. Even though Steve can afford it now.
Like everyone in the band, he was a Rolling Stones fan - though he pretended not to be in front of me! All because I hated the Beatles, his favourites.
I am the walrus
I am the egg man
You are the twat.
Sergeant Pepper's is the ultimate emperor's new clothes. Who the fuck would coo over Mr Kite today? Fixing a Hole or When I'm 64? It came out the same year as Between the Buttons and the Velvet Underground's album with Nico, and yet it tops the all-time lists. Listen to it, people.
Then try this exercise. Name an exciting Beatles song. Just one. I asked a scouser I knew, a big fan of theirs, and he had to stop and think. Came up with something I'd never heard of - and I've heard a lot of Beatles songs.
The only good thing any of them ever did was put up the money for Life of Brian.
So the band I cobbled together wouldn't be playing anything by McCartney. Jagger and Richards never wrote Maxwell's Silver Hammer or Ob-La-Di, let alone Mull of fucking Kintyre.
*
Meanwhile I carried on doing as little schoolwork as possible. I remember one evening with an old don, an expert on Corneille. Three of us had to write a piece on some poem or other, then read it out in front of him. One guy wrote four pages, the other one twelve (twelve!). I managed two. We got about the same grade.
Another time I wrote something for Keith Gore to look over. After a page and a half, I honestly didn't think there was anything more to add, so I left it at that. He gave me the highest mark I ever had. Maybe anything lower wouldn't have looked cool.
*
I was such a Rolling Stones fan I even smuggled them into class.
An assistant came over from Paris to help with our spoken french. For one of his assignments, we had to pick a poem, read it out in front of everyone, then discuss it between us. Most of them went for Verlaine or Rimbaud or whatever. I made them listen to Dandelion.
Musically it's interesting, with harpsichord, some camp singing, and Brian Jones on the mellotron, which not many other people could get right. But we were there to look at the lyrics - and though they fit the sound, they're trippy bollocks.
One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock five
Dandelions don't care about the time
Dandelion don't tell no lies
Dandelion will make you wise
Tell me if she laughs or cries
Blow away dandelion
Wot?
No wonder the assistant was sniffy about it. If I'd picked something by Baudelaire, I might've done better in finals.
Dandelion in french is pissenlit, because it makes you wet the bed. A song title for the Pistols, not MP Jagger in 1967.
*
What with work and the girl situations, that second year was a drag. For Steve too.
Now, university life is what you make it. So you can throw yourself into debating societies or the college camera club. But the pair of us couldn't be doing with all that. I think we wandered through the first-year stalls, but we didn't join anything. I never have.
We played some football and I hit a tennis ball in the summer, and we went to the cinema more than I ever did afterwards. Couple of Mel Brooks films: Young Frankenstein, which is well shot and quite funny but not a patch on Blazing Saddles. Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones misreading the situation at Altamont.
The Exorcist, which was scary as shit. Went with both Steves, and we were grateful that two girls in front of us were really terrified, so you could smile at them and pretend you weren't all that bothered. Crazy that it lost the Oscar to The Sting, though we enjoyed that too.
The Last Picture Show gets a mention in Virginia Plain, but I seem to be the only person in the world who found it dull as a fridge. I knew Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be good when I read the scene about the knight whose arms get cut off. Laughed out loud at the DPS in NME in the JCR, the first time I understood that everything starts with the script. The ending's a cop-out, though - even when Spike started that kind of thing.
But we didn't see a film every week, and I didn't even go punting till ten years later - in Cambridge! So me and Blond Steve were reduced to thinking up a practical joke involving the entire modern languages department.
All we wanted was a girlfriend, a ball to play with, and the occasional biriyani. In Oxford at the time, it was a lot to ask.
Is that why I stuck with the same girl for eighteen months? After the string of flings in Year Two, maybe I felt I needed something long-term. The flings weren't great, but they were better than this.
At the start of the final year, we broke up (again). There was a party at our new house in Oxford, and Bernie and I went to meet her at the station. She'd missed her train, and I hoped she wouldn't turn up at all (no mobile phones, of course). When she did, I cold-shouldered her, which Bernie was right to tell me off about. That's not your style, man. She spent the night on his sofa while I walked another girl home.
I'd have liked that one to work out, but I never met anyone so shy. She literally didn't say a word at times. Shame, because she was nice looking, with long dark curly hair and a good figure. You'd suggest going somewhere and she'd always agree. I called her the malleable nurse, which was unfair, but she was too reserved to say what she wanted to do. A few years later, I'd have handled it differently, but I was used to a girl who talked a lot, so I went back to her. I'd dated two good-looking nurses in a row but not for long. More fool me.
*
So I carried on with the girlfriend (again). And it wasn't all bad. We had various weekends in London, where she went to university.
Unlike Oxford, her college had a central bar and hall. Robin came over from the other side of town for a party, and I saw the Fabulous Poodles there.
This was the ultimate band for a student bash. Like ours, their name said they didn't take themselves too seriously. Their frontman did the usual naff thing of taking the piss out of punk rock, wearing a huge fake razorblade as if it had sliced through the top of his head. But he was the only guy I ever saw live who played the theme to the Old Grey Whistle Test. As a harmonica player of some renown myself, I was up for that. I still whistle it to myself, a kind of hoot through cupped hands, and it sounds like you might expect.
At Camden Lock, I found Rolling Stones bootlegs on a stall outside Dingwalls (cassettes, of course - that's how long ago this was). Rummaging through record stalls and record shops isn't something kids miss nowadays (I don't), so they don't know they're losing out. When you can order any music online and have it delivered, why would you want to look through rack after rack of vinyl or cassettes or even CDs, hoping for rare albums or singles you never expected to find? Trust me, you would. Treasure hunting, with other treasure hunters around and the treasure played loud through speakers.
I spent years not finding two tracks by a short-lived pair called the Marbles, then nicked them off Youtube. Played them to death for a while (singing along with Graham Bonnet was a right mismatch). But I saw a copy of the Stones' Cocksucker Blues by accident, and that was a much bigger thrill. Jagger sings really well on it.
I collect stamps, but I've never bought any on the internet - because nothing beats going to Stampex with my mates - or Lawford's in Reading or FILNUM in Parma - and hoping. The stamp shop in Oxford closed down decades ago, but I've still got the album I bought there, and it's a treasured possession. Padded front and black pages: sumptuous and safer. They really don't make 'em like that that any more.
Stamp shops for me and record shops for everyone: these were often the most exciting places in town.
In Deptford Market, I bought the girlfriend a secondhand mink coat. Rabbit actually, hence the price tag of a fiver - but she looked a million dollars, like a gangster's moll. She didn't wear it much and I wouldn't buy it now.
But we had these good moments mainly because we saw each other only every two or three weeks. And there were too many stupid quarrels. I remember a vegetarian restaurant on Edgware Road where she spent the whole dinner mimicking the shy nurse and ended up with the beads of her necklace across the floor. An accident, but waiting to happen. I should've tried harder with Little Miss Quiet, let alone Melissa.
At least the party in Oxford, where we broke up temporarily, was a good one. It was our housewarming bash, and the place was always good to come back to. At another party there, the music was so loud a police car turned up as I was leaving with the nurse.
On a different subject, I remember watching a World Cup match in the communal room. England were playing in Rome, and in those days I supported them ahead of Italy. At the time, there was very little live football on the box, so you spent your life trying to avoid the result before watching the highlights (check out a famous Likely Lads episode).
One of the guys we shared the house with, Pete Whiteside, he knew the result of this England-Italy game, and I told him not to utter a word about it, on pain of death. It's alright, he said, I've only seen the goals.
Typical. People can't resist saying something. Goals. In the plural. When one side take the lead, you know it's not going to end 1-0. Any information is too much.
In this case, at least we could hope for an equaliser when England went behind. But then Bettega heads his wonder goal and England miss out on the finals. I stopped supporting them after Euro 96 (thirty years was plenty). Switched completely to Italy, so the Final of Euro 2021 had a perfect ending. But the stress, porca putana.
Pete Whiteside wanted a communal way of living. Sunday lunches together and so on. Me and Steve were too old and curmudgeonly for that (all of 21), so we weren't keen on Pete's kitty for mutual expenses. He couldn't believe we wouldn't pay for a strip of insulation round the main door. Thirty-five p to keep warm, he pleaded. Nah, too unrock 'n roll for us. He did well to tolerate us.
But I tell myself he quite liked our style. We liked his. The two pairs didn't socialise together, but we were fine in the house. No arguments of any kind, and our share of laughs. Pete would've been happy to meet up in Australia if he hadn't lost my piece of paper!
*
By now I was spending less time with Steve. Even in the second year, he'd been into the schoolwork much more than me, and more so now with finals coming up next summer. His german girlfriend came over and he played a lot of football. All in all, it was clear he wouldn't be joining the daft rock band I'd mooted.
That was taking up a lot of me. Hanging around with Bernie, or the four of us at rehearsals, or going through lines in my head on the bike into town. I'd never heard the words to Johnny B Goode before, so I was way behind Patrick and his intro.
Used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
Go sit beneath the trees by the railway track
Engineer would see him sitting in the shade
Strumming to the rhythm that the drivers made
When they sent records into space in 1977, this was the rock song they enclosed, not something by Elvis - because Chuck wrote it himself. To get it played on white radio stations, he had to change the words from 'little coloured boy' to 'little country boy'. Either way, I found it a right bastard. Took me weeks to learn the wretched thing. Not just the words but when to start saying them. I probably heard it in my sleep.
I was trying to sing rock songs with no previous experience and no voice. If you're musical, you can't imagine that. If you're not, you know what I mean. It's a fucker.
Especially when you can see the rest of the band's faces.