I told him that I had, but expressed my concern that they were likely to punish me for my silence. The Dean rea.s.sured me by saying that if that should happen, they would have to cope with his resignation. I believed him, and, from that day on, we had an unbreakable bond of friendship.
I determined to become a dedicated beatnik (the word "hippie" had not yet been invented). Brylcreem was abandoned, and my hair just flopped onto my shoulders. Drainpipe trousers were exchanged for frayed jeans, winkle-pickers for Spanish leather boots, long velvet-collared jacket for a short denim one, and a white mackintosh for a sheepskin coat. I smoked as much marijuana as I could get my hands on, read Kerouac, listened to Bob Dylan and Roland Kirk, and attended French movies I didn"t understand. My whole life seemed to have changed dramatically except for my promiscuity and avoidance of academic work.
On June 11th, 1965, a bunch of us went up to London to attend Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall. This was a modern poetry conference featuring Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Esam, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, and other notables. It turned out to be the largest audience ever a.s.sembled to hear poetry in this country and the first genuine large-scale "happening". Peace and love, getting stoned and making love. A new generation was taking over. I wanted to be part of it.
I spent Oxford"s very long vacations in filthy clothes. .h.i.tchhiking fairly randomly around Great Britain and Europe in the belief that I was somehow "On the Road". My European travels included a visit to Copenhagen, where I ran out of money. Luckily, I had made friends with members of a Danish rock-and-roll group, who very kindly allowed me to sing with them on a few occasions, thereby earning enough to leave the country. The route back to the United Kingdom took me through Hamburg, where my friend Hamilton McMillan lived. Mac had given me his address, and I telephoned him from a sordid bar in the Reeperbahn. I was looking for the Star Club, where the Beatles had been discovered. Mac was delighted to hear from me, insisted I stay a few nights at his home, and came to pick me up.
Mac a.s.sumed that I would be unlikely to be mistaken for a city gent, but even he was noticeably shocked at my outrageous, dishevelled, unkempt, long-haired, dirty appearance. He was also slightly disconcerted by the ever-increasing crowds of curious and intrigued Hamburgers who were staring fixedly at the degenerate specimen of humanity I presented. The possible reception that we both might encounter at his parents" home was filling Mac with understandable apprehension. We sat down for a few beers and his fears gradually lifted. He felt confident that after seeing me, his parents would, at least, refrain from nagging him about his lamb-chop sideburns. In fact, his parents turned out to be the most accommodating and generous hosts, although a long hot bath and a quick laundering of the dirtiest of my clothes had no doubt helped. Mac and I had a great time. He loved to display my shoulder-length hair to his friends, and I loved to be so displayed. We cemented our friendship and remained very good friends until British Intelligence and Her Majesty"s Customs and Excise terminated our relationship.
For a period of about two weeks I slept rough outside the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. This meant that I was invariably first in the queue when the box office opened to sell the forty tickets it withheld until the day of performance. I would buy four tickets, the maximum that could be sold to any one person. One ticket was kept for my own use, as I had become quite a genuine Shakespeare fan by then, two would be sold at vastly inflated prices to American tourists, while one would be given, or sold at a very cheap price, to an attractive single female. She would, of course, be obliged by her ticket to sit next to me during the performance, and conversation was easy to start up. I wondered if other people played these kind of games.
During my hitch-hiking escapades, I picked up a varied a.s.sortment of ethnic rubbish, pretentious objets d"art objets d"art, gimmicky knick-knacks, and other hippie trinkets with the intention of using them to decorate my college room. They included a 400-square-foot net used to protect fruit trees from birds, a road sign stating "Mind the Hose", a very large Cezanne poster, and rolls of aluminium foil. I suspended the net from the room"s ceiling, papered the walls with aluminium foil, and nailed the Cezanne poster to the floor. Lamps made of orange-boxes containing low-wattage coloured bulbs were carefully placed in corners, and my newly acquired record player was set up with extension speakers dotted around the walls. All and sundry were welcome to visit my quarters and bring their friends, records, alcohol, and supplies of marijuana and hashish. The rooms rapidly became the location of a non-stop party, with music continually blaring and dense clouds of marijuana smoke clouding out of the door and windows. I dropped out completely from all college activities and would rarely venture out of my room other than to eat lunch at George"s workers" cafe in the market or dinner at the Moti Mahal in The High.
The fame of this dope-smoking haven, enshrined and protected by College and University, had spread far and wide. The occasional student visitor from the Sorbonne or Heidelberg would show up, as would the odd member of the embryonic London underground. Marty Langford, who was studying art, and a few other Kenfig Hill friends dropped in. Even John Esam, one of the beat poets who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall"s Wholly Communion, graced the premises with his presence. He turned up unannounced in my room and offered to sell me some LSD, which I had never heard of. Each dose was in the form of a drop absorbed by a sugar cube. The cost of each treated sugar cube was 3. John Esam told me that it was like hashish, but infinitely more powerful and not the least bit illegal. He was telling the truth on both counts. I purchased a few cubes and stored them away for use on another day. I made enquiries among my friends. A few had heard of LSD, but none had taken it nor knew anyone who had. It was all very mysterious. Someone said that LSD was like mescaline, which Aldous Huxley had written about. Someone else said that a Harvard scientist, Timothy Leary, had experimented with LSD and written about it.
About a week or so later, I was invited by Frances Lincoln, a vivacious Somerville student, to come to her rooms for tea. On the strangest of impulses, I decided that this would be an opportune moment to take one of the sugar cubes, and I ate one about an hour or so before my appointment. No discernible effect had occurred by the time I left Balliol, and when I reached Somerville I concluded that I must have been well and truly conned into the purchase of this so-called wonder drug. Halfway through eating my teacake, the effects suddenly hit me. The pictures on the wall came to life, the flowers in the vases breathed heavily and rhythmically, and the Rolling Stones record that was being played sounded like a Handelian heavenly choir singing to the accompaniment of African tribal drumming. It was impossible to explain to Frances what was happening inside my head, but she was politely intrigued by my descriptions. When the four Beatles on the front of the alb.u.m cover of Please Please Me Please Please Me jumped up and played, I said I ought to leave. Frances escorted me back to Balliol and left me at the front gate. I wandered around the quads and the Junior Common Room in a giggling stupor. Fellow students were used to seeing me in various states of intoxication, and I doubt if my condition occasioned any alarm. At about midnight, a full eight hours after ingesting the sugar cube, the effects wore off, and I went to bed. jumped up and played, I said I ought to leave. Frances escorted me back to Balliol and left me at the front gate. I wandered around the quads and the Junior Common Room in a giggling stupor. Fellow students were used to seeing me in various states of intoxication, and I doubt if my condition occasioned any alarm. At about midnight, a full eight hours after ingesting the sugar cube, the effects wore off, and I went to bed.
The next few weeks, spent partly in Oxford and partly in Wales, were devoted to finishing off the sugar cubes. Several friends joined me in this experimentation. John Esam came again, and I purchased more sugar cubes. I took one which resulted in what came to be generally known as the "horrors". These are extremely difficult to describe. Instead of finding the LSD experience an amusing, interesting, thought-provoking state of instant Zen, replete with benign and wondrous hallucinations, one finds it frightening and grave, and one experiences instant psychosis. Flowers no longer gently breathe. They turn into werewolves and bats. The hallucinations turn into menacing demons. It"s not funny, and I became uncharacteristically depressed and perturbed about the meaning of life, its futility, and my ident.i.ty. Although the severe effects wore off after the usual time period, the problems they caused remained. I was convinced that the only way to resolve these problems was to take more LSD and try to come to grips with whatever was disturbing me. This didn"t work. The "horrors" continued to manifest themselves in diverse forms. Between acid trips I read anything I thought remotely relevant to the LSD experience: Aldous Huxley"s Heaven and h.e.l.l Heaven and h.e.l.l, Doors of Perception Doors of Perception, and Island Island; Evan Wentz"s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead The Tibetan Book of the Dead; Sydney Cohen"s Drugs of Hallucination Drugs of Hallucination; and Timothy Leary"s The Psychedelic Experience The Psychedelic Experience. None of these did anything to dispel the intense depression I was suffering. I became unusually introverted, morose, suicidal, and probably crazy. My miserable demeanour did nothing to deter people from maintaining the almost non-stop "happening" at my college rooms, but it seemed to have less and less to do with me. I just sat discontentedly in the corner, occasionally smiling weakly at whoever came in.
In those days it was not, for some extraordinary reason, against college rules to possess an air-rifle. I did not have one myself, but there was one lying around in my room. One evening, alone in my room, I was leaning out of the window, pointing the air-rifle at pa.s.sers-by in St Giles" and yelling mindless plat.i.tudes at them. Most of those who noticed me simply ignored this puerile behaviour, but one man took particular exception. He too started yelling, saying that I had no idea what real war was like and that if I did find myself face to face with an enemy, I would be too scared to pull the trigger. I pulled the trigger. The rifle was not loaded, but the noise startled the man at whom it was carefully aimed. He set off in the direction of the Porter"s Lodge with the obvious intention of gra.s.sing me. I still possessed enough good sense to dash down to the cellars, run through them, and emerge into a remote area of the College grounds. The Dean was striding purposefully from the Porter"s Lodge. He saw me, and asked me to accompany him as there seemed to be some problem in the vicinity of my room. We both entered and beheld the air-rifle lying conspicuously on the floor. The Dean said that someone in the street had been shot at with this same air-rifle, and although I was clearly elsewhere and not responsible for this particular outrage, this was just one of a number of worrying instances concerning my room. He asked me to report to him in one hour.
After listening to a quick reprimand about the company I was keeping, I explained my feelings of futility and depression and their likely cause, the still not illegal use of LSD. I brought up my total neglect of studies, but the Dean seemed completely unworried by my lack of academic progress and felt it important that I should not worry about this either. He insisted that I took off the last six weeks of that particular term, concentrate on some meaningful extracurricular work, and seriously consider a change of subject in which to take finals. He would sort things out with my tutors. The Dean had always been a keen supporter of the Dramatic Society and suggested that I re-involve myself with their activities.
I went to see John Minford to see if he knew of any openings in forthcoming drama productions. At the same time he was working on a treatment of Peter Weiss"s Marat/Sade Marat/Sade. There weren"t any obvious parts for mind-blown Welsh hippies, but as virtually all the characters were lunatics, he was confident he could accommodate me. He gave me the part of The Singer, which entailed my looking stoned, unkempt, and menacing, and behaving like a s.e.x maniac. I was required to sing four songs. Minford composed the music. Two were in the style of Elvis Presley and two in the style of the Rolling Stones. The part was tailor-made.
The final rehearsals and public performances took place at the Great t.i.the Barn just outside Faringdon. Learning my lines, perfecting my performance, and travelling daily from Oxford to Faringdon took up many hours of each day. There was little time left for sitting around moping. Although a few of the cast cracked up under the strain of continually acting as if completely mad, I found that pretending to be crazy for much of the time prevented me from going insane the rest of the time. I ceased being morose, reverted to my previous heavy indulgences in s.e.x, alcohol, and marijuana, and did not take LSD again for a number of years.
In the light of the Dean"s advice to me, a number of my friends had suggested that I consider switching from Physics to either Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) or Philosophy, Physiology, and Psychology (PPP), paying particular attention to philosophy. I talked to the Dean about it and he arranged for me to speak with Alan Montefiore, a PPE tutor, who gave me a short reading list and asked me to write, before the end of term, an essay on the definition of "good". Approximately eighteen hours of each of seven days were spent struggling through a series of texts in moral philosophy before I realised that I would neither be able to fully understand the subject nor be capable of contributing to it. Years later I found out that no one completely understood moral philosophy and that non-comprehension was by no means a bar to contribution. Sheepishly I attempted to explain this seemingly serious inability to Montefiore, who seemed confused by my problem but was also extremely kind and considerate. He offered to give his advice and a.s.sistance to me any time I thought I might need them. I didn"t change courses. I stuck with Physics.
I was elected to organise the entertainments for the forthcoming 700th anniversary Commemorative Ball. My primary duty was to engage groups to supply the musical entertainment. I had a budget of 1,000. The entertainment manager"s main goal was to try to spot talent likely to become famous within a short period of time and book them while they were still at a relatively low price. A daunting precedent had been set by Magdalen College a couple of years earlier. They had booked the Rolling Stones for a mere 100 just before they became superstars. My knowledge of pop music was then as good as anyone"s, and I booked the relatively unknown Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces for a mere pittance. Within weeks of being booked, they both had Number One hits. Their respective managers wanted to withdraw from the Balliol booking as this would clash with recently offered lucrative tours. Contractually they were obliged to appear and could be heavily sued for not doing so. The agent suggested a solution: if I let the Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces off the hook, I could choose artists normally costing up to about 2,500 but would only have to pay the cheap prices agreed for the original two groups. I agreed. As a result we engaged the Kinks, the Fortunes, Them, and Alan Price, all of whom were already top names. There was still money left over from the original 1,000, so I engaged an Irish s...o...b..nd, a string quartet, and a professional all-in wrestling bout. On the night of the ball, I smoked marijuana with Them and Alan Price and drank whisky with Ray Davies.
Final-year undergraduate students were required to live out of College in lodgings. Julian Peto, Steve Balogh, and I tried to find some. During our searches we encountered a Canadian postgraduate named Gilbert Frieson. He was living in one room of an otherwise empty house, 46, Paradise Square. He was a heroin addict with strong suicidal tendencies. He made countless suicide attempts and actually succeeded sometime during 1968 or 1969. Gilbert had absolutely no money and was about to be evicted unless he could find tenants who were prepared to rent the whole house and allow him to continue living rent-free in his room.
The house was in an atrociously bad state of repair, had once been rented by William Burroughs, and stood in the shadow of Oxford prison, a much more externally attractive penal inst.i.tution than any I"ve since encountered. A few yards away from the house was a wonderful pub called The Jolly Farmers, which was more than prepared to serve regular drinks after time.
One morning my late lie-in was rudely disturbed by dense clouds of smoke pouring through the floorboards. Within minutes, visibility was reduced to zero. Dashing out of my room, I discovered that Gilbert"s room on the first floor was on fire, with flames licking through various holes in the walls. Julian and Steve were still asleep. I kicked down Gilbert"s door and became engulfed in smoke. I was unable to see Gilbert. I was unable to see anything. After some kamikaze forays into the room, I a.s.sured myself that Gilbert wasn"t there. The telephone was situated downstairs and for the first and only time in my life, I dialled 999. A number of fire engines rolled up in Paradise Square, and a large squad of firemen charged into the little terraced house, extinguished the fire, and flooded the premises. It took about two weeks to get the house back into anything vaguely resembling the appalling state it was in when we first rented it.
The news of the fire spread far faster through the University than did the fire itself through the house. The matter came to the attention of the Proctors. We were informed that our house was not a registered lodging, and unless it somehow became one we would have to seek alternative accommodation. An official deputation from those responsible for determining which lodgings could be deemed registered would be visiting within a few days. Registered lodgings required a landlord or landlady to be living on the premises, whom the deputation would have to be able to meet. For a great mult.i.tude of reasons Gilbert was not thought by us to be a suitable candidate for presentation. To solve the problem we asked the friend of a friend to pretend to be the landlady for the day that we were expecting to be visited. She was a single parent with a baby daughter, and we made up the spare room to look like the home of such a mother and child. To our great surprise, the officials were quite satisfied with what they found and accepted our premises as registered lodgings.
People were always on the look-out for cheap rooms to rent in Paradise Square, and shortly after we became registered, a couple of pleasant long-haired hippies knocked on our door and asked if we had any s.p.a.ce to let. We rented them the "landlady"s room". They had a great many town friends, who gradually took over the house, filling it with delightful marijuana smoke and music from Joe c.o.c.ker and Cream. Julian, Steve, and I had no objection to this development, and once again my home turned into a place where people from far and wide came to smoke marijuana and generally hang out.
The best girl I knew was a St Anne"s English student, Ilze Kadegis. She was a beautiful, fiercely witty, golden-haired Latvian. She had an exotic past, present, and presence. We had dated each other off and on for about a year and spent about half our time at her lodgings, which were very close to St Anne"s, and half the time at Paradise Square.
In Paradise Square Julian and I kept noticing strange people sitting in cars for long periods of time outside our house reading newspapers. One day, while I was eating lunch at Ilze"s lodgings, a plain-clothes policeman came round and informed me that Oxford drug squad officers were searching my home and my presence was required. I was driven to Paradise Square, where about a dozen or so of Oxford"s finest were tearing the place to bits. Steve Balogh had already been taken to the police station in St Aldate"s for having a sugar cube in his jacket pocket. The police presumably thought it was LSD (now illegal). In fact it was a lump of Tate & Lyle that Balogh had appropriated from Balliol Junior Common Room. In my room the ceiling, which had been in an extremely fragile state since the fire, had collapsed, and all fittings had been wrenched from the wall. One of the policemen was proudly displaying a marijuana roach, which he claimed he found lying in the ashtray. I feigned an expression of complete surprise. The policeman told me that he was taking the roach for forensic a.n.a.lysis. Both my and Julian"s particulars were laboriously recorded, and we were told that the police would be in touch after conducting laboratory tests on the roach and various culinary items that they had wrapped up in plastic bags.
The Dean managed to get Balogh out of custody and demanded to see the three of us. We trooped sheepishly into the Dean"s room and were told that as nothing incriminating had been found on the premises, other than the roach, the drug squad would not press charges provided we were prepared to be questioned by the police in the presence of a chosen representative. The Dean strongly advised that he should be our chosen representative. We agreed and marched off to the investigation rooms in St Aldate"s Police Station. We denied all knowledge of everything, including the roach. The police seemed disappointed but let us go. The Dean told us that we"d all had a very narrow escape and, given that we were taking our Finals within six months, we should knuckle down, study, and refrain from smoking marijuana with town hippies.
The Dean"s counsel was sound and his words of advice were sincerely taken. We resolved to study. This resolution was facilitated by the sudden departure from Paradise Square of the hippie tenants. They were lucky enough not to have been present when the police carried out their raid and were not keen on pushing their luck any further. Julian and I began studying in earnest. I can"t remember what Balogh did. Ilze joined our intensive studying programme. We were so committed that we spent the entire Easter vacation in Oxford revising, or more accurately, learning for the first time, our degree courses. We even gave up smoking marijuana on weekdays.
The work for tutorials I was now coping with easily, but somehow or other, I had to complete many months of practical physics experiments in the eight weeks that were left for me to use the Clarendon Laboratories. Not completing them severely limited the chances of getting a worth-while degree. With the a.s.sistance of the loan of practical physics workbooks completed by other students and a friendly Clarendon Laboratory Demonstrator/Examiner who looked the other way while I stole my record card and filled in the blanks, the work was successfully completed within two weeks.
This period of study continued until Finals. Julian and I would occasionally take breaks to play table football or get drunk in The Jolly Farmers. On one occasion, about three days before Finals, our break took the form of a water-pistol fight. New machine-gun water-pistols had just come on to the market, and we had each purchased one. While tearing barefooted around the house, brandishing one of these new models, I stepped on a rusty nail protruding from a plank of wood. The pain was excruciating, and within an hour or so my leg turned purple. Julian and Ilze took me to the Radcliffe Infirmary, where I was given a series of penicillin overdoses, painkillers, and a pair of crutches. I left there unable to either think or walk, and could not study to save my life.
On the first day of Finals I was carried to the Examination Schools and given a specially located desk and chair which enabled me to maintain my leg in a horizontal position. I struggled through the first three papers but felt fairly certain I"d made a mess of them. The pain suddenly eased, and I found the next three papers much easier. I felt I"d at least pa.s.sed.
Soon afterwards, we all drifted back to our various parents" homes, taking our possessions with us. After a few weeks I was summoned for a viva, an oral examination, normally used to decide borderline cases. I was not told which borderline I was straddling.
At the same time, my sixteen-year-old sister was run over by a car while on holiday with my parents in Stratford-on-Avon. My father saw her lying on the street with blood oozing from her. Whatever faith he"d had in G.o.d, it left right at that moment. Linda had survived but was critically ill with multiple injuries. She"d be lucky to make it. A miracle would be required for her ever to walk again. I rushed from Wales to her bedside at Warwick Hospital and wept bitterly at the sight of her fragile and crippled ghostliness. My parents and I have never recovered from the despair and sadness that tortured us during that summer of 1967. Nothing hurts like the pain of someone you love. With superhuman resilience and determination, my sister pulled through. After months on crutches, Linda defied predictions and walked. She bore her burden so n.o.bly.
The degree results were displayed in the Examination Schools in The High and indicated that I had obtained a second-cla.s.s honours degree. I was delighted. Ilze and Julian were also given Seconds. Strangely enough, no Balliol Physics student of that year obtained other than a second-cla.s.s honours degree. This made my rather mediocre achievement seem more impressive than it was. I was probably the only Balliol physicist who was delighted with having a Second. I was pleased I had straightened out in time. Maybe I should stay straight.
Three.
MR MARKS.
Looking back, it seems ironical that I should have gone temporarily straight just when the rest of the country realised that England was some kind of headquarters of Sixties culture and creativity. The death penalty had been abolished; incitement to racial hatred had been outlawed; mini-skirts had become fashionable; s.e.x had become okay; poets smoked dope, and Dylan had played electric at the Royal Albert Hall. Carnaby Street and the King"s Road had become world fashion centres with Twiggy as supermodel. Mick Jagger, with support from The Times The Times, had beaten a drugs charge. Students, particularly those from the London School of Economics, wielded power. Thousands of people demonstrated against war and for the legalisation of marijuana. The Duke of Bedford had hosted a Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey. British music dominated the world. Many prominent members of whatever was happening had pa.s.sed through my Oxford rooms. Some had smoke their first joints there. Instead of trying to get up there with them, I decided to become a physics teacher.
Ilze, equally strangely, decided to become an English teacher. We had both been enrolled by London University to do the Postgraduate Certificate in Education and expected to gain teaching positions in London during the subsequent years. We took up residence in a s.p.a.cious third-floor flat in Notting Hill. The first term of the teaching course was anything but demanding, and in my spare time I read the books that all my contemporaries had talked about during my undergraduate years. One of the first was Bertrand Russell"s History of Western Philosophy History of Western Philosophy. It was the most interesting book that I had ever read, and it led to my reading a variety of works by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza. This reading provoked my sincere and lasting interest in the history and philosophy of science. It dawned on me that I"d wasted all the facilities available to me at Oxford, and I longed to return there to make use of them. I wrote to those who administered the postgraduate History and Philosophy of Science courses at Oxford, expressing my interest in the subject, and they suggested I came to Oxford to be interviewed. I was accepted to study for the Diploma in History and Philosophy of Science (a year"s course).
During late December of 1967, Ilze and I became married at my parents" local Welsh Congregational chapel. Although we revelled in each other"s company, I still have no idea why we took such an extraordinarily impractical step. We had no intention of having children. We had no money. Ilze was destined to become a poorly paid primary school teacher. I was destined for goodness knew what. We took a one-night honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast establishment in a place called Ogmore-by-Sea.
One of our wedding presents was a Go set. Go has been j.a.pan"s most popular board game for about 1500 years. Playing it well demands great skill, strategy, and patience. It is capable of infinite variety. Yet the rules and pieces are so simple that children can play. Easy handicap rules allow players of unequal skill to play together. j.a.panese war leaders throughout history have studied Go. Originally, it was a Chinese game dating back at least four thousand years, when the rectangular board on which it was played was marked out on sandy beaches. Ilze and I had both played chess at an elementary level but no longer enjoyed doing so. Go was different. It was aesthetically so much more pleasing, as if one was dealing with the basic structures of life and thought.
I became very bored with the teaching course. Although I was leading a straight life, I still liked to wear my hair long and dress like a hippie, and the staff were constantly berating me for doing so. I withdrew from the course and, naturally, lost my grant. To make ends meet, I took a five-hour-a-day teaching job at a London crammer college and did some private tuition in the evenings. I befriended one of my young fellow teachers, a Welshman named Dai. We would drink at the Princess Royal in the Hereford Road, a favourite haunt of some Black South African musicians and entertainers, whom I also befriended.
A few of my Oxford undergraduate friends had also moved to London. One who had done so was Graham Plinston, a PPE student, one year my junior, who, well equipped with kif and hashish, had often frequented my Balliol rooms in 1966 before he set up his own communal dope-smoking rooms in a small village between Oxford and Woodstock. The police raided them and found some LSD. Graham was fined 50 by the police and rusticated for a year by the University.
"Howard! h.e.l.lo. What are you doing in London?"
"I"m living here now, just round the corner in Westbourne Grove."
"Really! I thought you had stayed in Oxford or gone back to Wales."
"I guess I should have, Graham. But I"m going back to Oxford next year to do some postgraduate work."
"That"s a coincidence. I"m going back there myself next year to finish my degree. This rustication has been a bit of a pain. What are you doing with yourself these days?"
"I"ve got a teaching job. The rest of the time, I usually play Go."
"What! These coincidences are getting ridiculous. I learned Go a few months ago, but now I have no one to play with. Shall we have a game?"
There were many hippie pads in London, but Graham"s Lansdowne Crescent flat was an expensive hippie pad. There were not only the usual kilims on the floor and kaftans hanging off pegs, but also priceless porcelain on shelves, stacks of perfume and after-shave in the bathroom, and up-to-date gadgetry squatting in corners. It was a flat one would expect to find belonging to a successful rock singer.
Graham laid out the Go board, put on the Rolling Stones" Their Satanic Majesties Request Their Satanic Majesties Request, and handed me a sticky lump of aromatic Afghani hashish. I didn"t hesitate. I rolled a joint. I jumped right back into it. I smoked hashish every day for the next twenty-two years.
Back at the Westbourne Grove flat, another Oxford friend, Humphrey Weightman, showed up. He had just come into some money, bought a new expensive stereo, and wanted to leave it, along with his extensive record collection, with us for safe keeping. We set it up, rolled some joints, and played the latest alb.u.ms. It was great. Tensions began unwinding.
Ilze and I were natural hosts, and with the help of Humphrey"s stereo and Graham"s Afghani, Westbourne Grove quickly became a natural successor to Balliol and Paradise Square. Most evenings and weekends, the flat was full of people, including some newly-met Black South African musicians and minor celebrities of the time. Graham and I usually huddled in the corner playing Go, while everyone else either danced or lay down on mattresses or cushions. There was an endless supply of marijuana and hashish.
I was comforted to discover that although I found reading mathematical physics more difficult when stoned, I found reading philosophy easier. It is not that philosophy is any easier than mathematical physics. It"s just that reading philosophy was actually what I wanted to do. When one is stoned, it is very hard to do what one really doesn"t want to do.
My freelance tuition work required me to visit students at various times of day and night at their homes and teach on an individual basis. Such irregular schedules, combined with my increased marijuana use, inevitably led to occasions when I would be required to teach when very stoned. The first time this happened, I was asked by a nineteen-year-old Arabian student to explain to him the theory of permutations and combinations, a part of school mathematics at which I was never very proficient. Until this point my teaching abilities had not been particularly remarkable. I was far too impatient with my pupils when dealing with subjects I knew well, and I deviously avoided other subjects. Under marijuana"s influence, however, I now found I was extremely painstaking with my explanations and extraordinarily patient with my pupils" progress. I ceased to feign knowledge when I had none and would honestly admit that I had forgotten everything and would have to work things out from scratch. I found it easy to put myself in the students" positions and appreciate and solve their difficulties. From then on, I made a point of smoking marijuana before teaching, and my students made excellent progress.
London was definitely an interesting place to be in 1967/1968: the Beatles provided singalong psychedelia with Sergeant Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band Sergeant Pepper"s Lonely Hearts Club Band and established their Apple boutique, while their manager, Brian Epstein, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The Rolling Stones took a shot of rhythm and blues out of their music and produced love and peace singles like and established their Apple boutique, while their manager, Brian Epstein, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The Rolling Stones took a shot of rhythm and blues out of their music and produced love and peace singles like We Love You We Love You and and Dandelion Dandelion, while their leader and founder, Brian Jones, struggled to get released on bail for a drug charge. Procul Harum"s A Whiter Shade of Pale A Whiter Shade of Pale made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Emba.s.sy to protest against the war in Vietnam. But the dreaming spires of Oxford were too much to resist. A delightfully stoned academic career was at hand. made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Emba.s.sy to protest against the war in Vietnam. But the dreaming spires of Oxford were too much to resist. A delightfully stoned academic career was at hand.
There was a problem with respect to how my diploma course would be financed. In those days there were two main grant-giving bodies funding postgraduate study: the Department of Education and the Science Research Council. The former limited its grants to graduates in non-scientific subjects while the latter would only fund students undertaking research degrees in the pure sciences. These regulations precluded my Philosophy of Science studies being funded by either body. A thick publication gave a complete listing of organisations that funded postgraduate study and the conditions under which they did so. I scoured through this book and discovered the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship, which was restricted to applicants who lived in a small area of Wales which included the village in which my family lived. My mother"s brother, Uncle Mostyn, was then Chairman of Glamorgan County Council. I approached him about the possibility of being awarded the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship, and he arranged for me to be interviewed by the trustees. They agreed to pay all course fees and awarded me a maintenance grant.
Ilze and I decided that while I resumed my studies at Balliol, we should live in a romantic country cottage outside Oxford. A third-year English undergraduate, Bill Jefferson, whom I liked very much, and his girlfriend, Caroline Lee (daughter of Anthony Lee, our man in Anguilla), had similar intentions. Bill Jefferson and I combined forces to scour the countryside for suitable cottages. We became well known at an enormous number of country pubs but were making little progress at finding a place to live. Eventually, while getting drunk at a pub called The Plough in Garsington, we discovered a cottage for rent not one hundred yards from where we were drinking. The landlords were egg producers called Jennings of Garsington, and we rented the cottage for a twelve-month period. Ilze found a teaching job at a primary school in Didcot. My father had given me a beaten-up Hillman, and I would get up extremely early to drive Ilze to Oxford railway station in time for the Didcot train. The drive took place in total darkness. I would then breakfast at either Balliol, if my stomach felt strong, or at George"s workers" cafe in the market, if feeling queasy or hungover. I usually ate at George"s.
Just after my postgraduate term started, the Dean spotted me hanging around the Porter"s Lodge and invited me to come and see him for a chat. He said he needed my help in sorting out what was, in his eyes, becoming a very serious problem at Balliol and, indeed, at most of the University"s colleges. I fearfully a.s.sumed the problem being referred to was drug use and that the help the Dean was seeking was my becoming some sort of gra.s.s, keeping the college authorities apprised of the ident.i.ties and habits of drug users. I could not have been further from the truth. The problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution. My a.s.sistance was not to become a mole but merely to refrain from partic.i.p.ation in protests etc. and persuade the cronies that I would inevitably attract to do likewise.
Balliol had certainly become quite revolutionary by October 1968. Although the attire and appearance of student revolutionaries were almost identical to those of 1966 hippies, the att.i.tudes were poles apart. Smoking marijuana was now regarded as some sort of stupefaction imposed on the working cla.s.ses by the bourgeoisie. There didn"t seem to be any revolutionary music as such, and Top Ten hits had deteriorated from 2,000 Light Years from Home 2,000 Light Years from Home to to Me and You and a Dog Named Boo Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.
During the 1960s, Balliol College life was essentially determined by the whims, preferences, and behaviour of the second-year undergraduates. First-year students were too meek to set the trends, and third-year students were apt to become distracted by Finals. During 1968, the trend was definitely one of revolutionary activity. One topic on which I agreed completely with the revolutionary students was that of racial equality. The Right Honourable Enoch Powell, MP, was giving an anti-immigration speech at Oxford Town Hall, and I partic.i.p.ated in what turned out to be quite a violent demonstration. A few fellow partic.i.p.ants had been brutally a.s.saulted by police and, to add insult to injury, been charged with a.s.sault themselves. The next morning, I missed my tutorial with Michael Dummett, a chain-smoking, Go-playing, devout Christian, who later became Oxford University"s Wykeham Professor of Logic but was then a Fellow of All Souls and taught me in mathematical logic. I missed the tutorial in order to make myself available at court to speak on my injured and arrested friends" behalf. I hadn"t let Mr Dummett know and was feeling a little guilty. Also feeling a little guilty for missing our appointment was Mr Dummett, who had presented himself at the same court to speak up for someone else who had also been arrested during the previous night"s demonstration. We burst out laughing at the sight of each other. The same day, he invited me for lunch at All Souls, where I had the privilege of sitting next to the Warden, John Sparrow. After lunch, Mr Dummett had to hurry off somewhere, and I was taken for a walk around the grounds of All Souls College by John Sparrow. Like the Dean of Balliol, he was concerned about revolutionaries and unconcerned about marijuana smoking.
One evening, Ilze and I went to a dinner hosted by one of her colleagues who taught at the school in Didcot. There were two or three other couples present, including John and f.a.n.n.y Stein. John at that time was a general medical pract.i.tioner about to become a Fellow of Magdalen, while f.a.n.n.y was a housewife. About halfway through the dinner, I discovered that f.a.n.n.y"s maiden name was Hill and that she was the daughter of Christopher Hill, David Lindsay Keir"s successor as Master of Balliol. f.a.n.n.y and I struck up a strong friendship. We fancied each other like mad, but newly-entered marital obligations prevailed, and we didn"t have an affair with each other until long after.
Shortly after my first meeting with f.a.n.n.y, I ran into Christopher Hill at a function held in the Balliol students" bar. We hardly knew each other but quickly became engaged in earnest conversation, which we both wished to continue when the function drew to a close. The Master asked if I would be prepared to buy a bottle of whisky on my account at the students" bar and bring it up to his lodgings, where he would immediately reimburse me and continue our discussions. I was delighted to do this. We got on remarkably well, and by the end of the evening Christopher had accepted my invitation to have dinner in Garsington.
Ilze was very nervous at the prospect of entertaining such distinguished guests and had no idea what kind of meal to prepare. During the previous year in London, I had befriended the chef of the local Indian restaurant and had become reasonably proficient at cooking curries. Christopher had mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed Indian cuisine while he was in India. I agreed to cook the food, which Christopher and his wife, Bridget, gratefully devoured.
Christopher had tremendous sympathy both with revolutionaries and with those who wished to smoke marijuana. He was also a source of an immense amount of information about Garsington. He mentioned that Russell Meiggs (my long-haired hero) lived only a hundred yards away from us (I had never seen him in the village) and that across an adjacent field, tucked in a hollow, was Garsington Manor, the one-time residence of the Morrell brewery heiress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Christopher referred to as Lady Utterly Immoral. Apparently, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, etc. had all been frequent guests at the manor. Weeks afterwards, after a night tripping out on the first LSD I had taken for years, I embarra.s.sed myself by knocking on the door of Garsington Manor and asking the occupants if Aldous Huxley could come out to play.
There were isolated pockets of marijuana smokers, mainly postgraduates. One of these was at our cottage in Garsington. One regular visitor was Graham Plinston, now completing his final undergraduate year. He was always keen to play a game of Go and always brought with him a few ounces of excellent hashish. I would sometimes buy more than I needed and sell off the surplus at enough profit to pay for my own absurdly heavy consumption, which was about twenty joints a day. Bill Jefferson was close behind.
I got down to my philosophy reading. A common difficulty encountered by those beginning to study philosophy is that whatever is read appears totally convincing at the time of reading. Smoking marijuana forced me to stop, examine, scrutinise, and criticise each step before proceeding. It a.s.sisted me not only in pinpointing the weaknesses of certain philosophical theories, but also in articulating alternative philosophical viewpoints.
As part of the course, I was asked to deliver a paper to learned men a.s.sembled in an ancient seminar room at All Souls College. My a.s.signed topic was the difference in views of s.p.a.ce and time held by Isaac Newton and Leibniz. Newton seemed to hold that solid things existed through absolute time in absolute s.p.a.ce, which could be considered as G.o.d"s sensorium, sniffing out trouble everywhere. Leibniz, in many ways a precursor of Einstein, was a lot more hip and a lot more baffling. He seemed to maintain that s.p.a.ce and time were shifting around out of control and that each bit of stuff had everything else in the universe as part of it. Writing about it was difficult, but I muddled through.
I became interested in confirmation theory: what evidence do scientists need to end up believing the things they do? A paradox arises when considering hypotheses of the general form "All X are Y", for example, "All ravens are black", together with what sort of evidence would tend to make them believable. One could begin by looking at a raven to see if it is black. If it is black, then this observation confirms the hypothesis to a limited extent. If one looked at thousands of ravens, and they were all black, then these observations would further confirm the hypothesis. "All X are Y" is logically equivalent to "All non-Y are non-X." The two propositions "All ravens are black" and "All non-black things are non-ravens" state the same fact. Therefore, observations of non-black non-ravens would confirm the hypothesis "All ravens are black" just as much as they would "All non-black things are non-ravens." This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that observations of such things as red noses, white swans, etc. confirm the statement "All ravens are black." Everyone knows, of course, that they do not.
Bill Jefferson was an English literature student from Yorkshire, and he would sometimes organise poetry readings. He organised one at some college in Oxford, and brought two of the poets, Christopher Logue and Brian Patten, together with some of their entourages, back to the cottage in Garsington. A second, more informal, poetry reading took place, followed by a mammoth drinking and smoking session lasting at least a day. This, however, was quite a rare occurrence, and the cottage in Garsington never achieved the status of my previous accommodations in terms of hosting debauchery and culture.
The preponderance of student revolutionaries dominating the quadrangles and bars, the lack of both fellow marijuana smokers and fellow philosophers of science, and the paucity of books on History and Philosophy of Science in the Balliol library led to my spending less and less time in College and becoming rather disaffected with it. I was visiting Balliol no more than once a week. Ilze was most unhappy with her teaching job in Didcot, and we both thought seriously of leaving Oxford once I"d completed my diploma course. The expectation was for me to continue at Balliol with a B.Phil. or D.Phil. course, but this could easily be done at another university. I decided on the University of Suss.e.x, which in those days was referred to as Balliol by the sea. Brighton looked like fun. Ilze obtained the promise of employment at a convent school in Worthing. My diploma was acquired without too much difficulty, and I was beginning to feel reasonably secure about my ability to pursue an academic career. At the end of the diploma course, Christopher Hill asked if I would be interested in partic.i.p.ating in a summer school that Balliol was organising for the benefit of teenage boys who came from deprived backgrounds. I was glad to help, and I really enjoyed my every involvement with the venture. Part of my task was straightforward teaching. Part of it was socialising with the young men with the intention of convincing them that university men were not all stuffed shirts. This was easily achieved by a pub crawl followed by the viewing of a p.o.r.nographic film at the Scala cinema in Walton Street.
Ilze and I moved to Brighton and found a cheap sea-front flat. Through Christopher Logue, who rented a room in their house, we met Johnny Martin, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Suss.e.x, and his wife Gina. We all had similar interests: marijuana, LSD, rock music, and after-eight philosophy, and we spent much time together.
I hated Suss.e.x University. By this time, I had a firm idea of what a university should be like, and Suss.e.x didn"t come up to it. Every room had a number rather than a name. There was no romance about studying in an office-block library. One couldn"t lie back and think that this was where, in the past, great minds produced great ideas. My supervisor was a Polish logician named Jerzy Giedymin. He was reckoned to be brilliant, but only in areas that no one else could test. I found him very difficult to understand, whatever he was talking about. He made it plain he had no interest in irrelevancies such as confirmation paradoxes. I made it plain I had no interest in studying his irrelevant obsessions. He said I should never have left Oxford. I said he was right.
I was still getting the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship and spent the first term"s instalment on a new stereo system. The next few months were devoted to listening to Led Zeppelin, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, and Black Sabbath. I decided to give up academic life and withdrew from the University of Suss.e.x. Ilze"s school-teacher"s salary was barely enough to live on, but I managed to make up the shortcomings to almost survival level by getting more hashish from Graham Plinston, who often came down to Brighton for a weekend by the sea and a game of Go, at which we were both now becoming proficient.
Graham had visited Morocco, where he met Lebanese Joe. Joe"s mother was an entertainer in Beirut. Joe knew Sam Hiraoui, who worked for the Lebanese airline, Middle East Airlines. Sam also had a textile business in Dubai, the great Middle East gold- and silver-smuggling port on the Persian Gulf. Sam"s partner in Dubai was an Afghani named Mohammed Durrani. Graham explained that through these people he was being delivered fifty pounds of black Pakistani hashish every month or so. For the first time, I imagined what an interesting and rewarding life a smuggler"s must be. But Graham was merely treating me as a confidant. He was not making me any propositions. I was just another provincial dealer selling a couple of pounds a year to survive and not wanting to do too much other than survive.
There were one or two ex-Oxford students attached to the University of Suss.e.x. One was a brilliant mathematics lecturer, Richard Lewis, who would often visit Ilze and me along with Johnny and Gina Martin. Richard came from a relatively wealthy family, owned property in Brighton and London, drank like a fish, smoked everything at hand, thought mathematical profundities, and was a keen and talented chess player. He had heard of Go, was interested in the game, but had never played. I taught him. After a dozen games, he beat me. He still beats me.
Richard had a beautiful wife, Rosie. I couldn"t take my eyes off her. At the same time, Ilze couldn"t take her eyes off Johnny Martin. In no time, all six of us had grounds for suing for divorce, all three marriages were breaking up, and Richard and Rosie"s daughter, Emily, was calling me Uncle Howie.
Graham Plinston"s wife, Mandy, telephoned. She asked if I could come up to London to see her as soon as possible. When I got there, Mandy was distraught and crying.
"Howard, Graham has disappeared. There"s something wrong. I think he"s been busted. Can you go and find out? You can have all the expenses you need."
"Where is he, Mandy?"
"He"s got to be somewhere in Germany."
"Why do you want me to go?"
"You"re the straightest of Graham"s friends. You don"t have a record or a file on you. Can you imagine what our other friends are like? Graham was meant to meet this German guy Klaus Becker in Frankfurt. He"ll probably be able to help you find Graham."
"All right, I"ll go."
I had never flown before, and I was excited throughout the flight. At his house, Klaus told me that there"d been a bust in Lorrach, a SwissGerman border town near Basle. He suspected the person busted was Graham. I flew from Frankfurt to Basle on a scary propeller plane. Not speaking a word of German hindered progress somewhat, but I was eventually able to get newspaper back-issues from the Basle public library and found a report of the bust. Graham had been driving a Mercedes from Geneva to Frankfurt. A hundred pounds of hashish had been stuffed under the back seat and in the door panels. At the SwissGerman border, the car had been searched and the hashish found. Graham was in Lorrach prison.
I took a cab to Lorrach and walked around the streets until I found a lawyer. He went to see Graham in prison and agreed to defend him. Graham had no messages.
When I arrived back at London airport, I telephoned Mandy and gave her the Lorrach lawyer"s particulars.
"Is he all right, Howard?" Mandy asked.
"The lawyer said he looked fine."
"Did he have any messages for me? Anything he wants me to do?"
"He didn"t have any messages for anyone, Mandy."
"Howard, would you mind going over to see a friend of Graham"s and telling him what happened on your trip? He"s a good guy, but he"s a bit concerned about what"s happened and wants to hear everything from the horse"s mouth."
"I don"t mind, Mandy. Where do I go?"
"Mayfair, 17, Curzon Street. His name"s Durrani."
Mohammed Durrani was the grandson of the brother of the former King of Afghanistan. Educated in Delhi, he served eleven years on the Hong Kong Police Force and had several shady businesses throughout the East. One of them was supplying Pakistani hashish to Europe. Durrani let me in to his Mayfair flat. He had a hawk-like face, Savile Row suit, beautifully manicured fingernails, and wore strong after-shave. He poured me a Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky and offered me a Benson & Hedges from his gold, monogrammed cigarette case. He lit my cigarette with a Dupont lighter, introduced me to Sam Hiraoui, his Lebanese partner, and said, "Thank you, Howard, for agreeing to come. We have simple question. Has Graham talked?"
"He said he didn"t have any messages for anyone," I answered.
"We mean to the German police."
"I don"t know."
"The reason we ask, Howard, is that we have merchandise in pipeline which might be compromised by our friend"s arrest. You are best friend, Mandy says. Do you think he would let police know anything about our operations?"
"Not deliberately, obviously, if that"s what you mean."