The exams for Part I, when they came, felt anything but momentous. I sat the papers in a sort of academic quarantine (the same drill as for my A-levels) with an invigilator for my own exclusive use. I was segregated from my fellow examinees because of the clacking disturbance of the typewriter and also because of my privilege of extra time – bags of it. I was allowed 50 per cent more time than my fellows because of the physical inconvenience of the process, though I never used anything like that much. I’d call out ‘I’ve finished’ as soon as I properly could.
It seemed only fair that I should have a bit more time, but all the same I chafed against the extravagant allowance. It seemed so imprecisely worked out, as if the authorities were really saying, ‘Give the little chap an easy ride – he doesn’t get many of those.’ I would have preferred a more precise system, with observers making the calculations on a case-by-case basis, so that I would be allowed, say, 3 hours and 13 minutes, and not a second more. I didn’t want favours – I wanted a time-and-motion-study man to follow me around for a week, and then to stand sternly over me during the exam with a stopwatch. I mean, are we taking this seriously, or are we just amusing ourselves?
I imagine that standard invigilators survey the room with an impartial sternness. My personal invigilator would tend to give me encouraging smiles, which I didn’t enjoy. I was afraid that this goodwill might escalate into actual patronage, that he might fetch me a cup of coffee and a sticky bun to keep me going, and then slide across specimen answers to the questions or correct my grammar.
Towards the end of that summer term Alan Linton brought me a present. He kept telling me that discovering homœopathy had changed his life and given him a direction. He was in my debt. I was rather prickly about friendship at that period, not wanting people to get too close in case I ended up relying on them, and if Alan hadn’t been safely leaving Cambridge I dare say I would have bristled.
He delivered his present to A6 after Hall one evening. It was a piece of cake. ‘It’s a funny cake,’ he said, making his eyebrows shoot up and down à la Groucho Marx, twitching, ‘if you get my drift. Very funny indeed.’ Meaning that it was made with marijuana. I felt very alienated by the general drug culture of the time, but this was an irresistible offer. I turned down joints with the excuse that I only smoked Spanish cigarettes (and not just any Spanish cigarette either), feeling that Cannabis sativa was rather dragged down by its association with Nicotiana tabacum. Now I could have a transgressive nibble on the sly, and no one would be any the wiser.
‘And this is to go with it,’ Alan said, reverently producing a record from a plastic bag. It was his treasured copy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. If albums were as good as their titles, it was already my favourite record. He made clear that the dope cake was a gift, but the record was only a loan. He must have realised that an album was a difficult object for me to manage – tape cassettes, reliable and easy to handle, would soon replace them, and I for one couldn’t wait – so he put it on my stereo, perched on top of the spindle, ready to go.
He also left me something called a Dust Bug, a perspex lath with a sort of toothbrush and a miniature plush roller mounted on it, which was supposed to sit on a little rod, held in place on the surround of my turntable with a little rubber sucker, but I decided not to bother with that.
I set up the turntable with the arm that steadies records on the spindle over to the right, so that when the side had been played the needle would return to the beginning. I knew that marijuana distorted the sense of time, and I wanted to make sure that the music would last for the whole of the experience.
It made sense to eat the cake before I sat down. I was pleased to see that it was moist. I broke it into pieces which would sit snugly on the fork. I closed my eyes while I chewed the cake, savouring the slightly dusty flavour, trying to decide where spice ended and cannabis began. I got the stereo under way and was settled in the Parker-Knoll by the time the second track started. The album was famously profound and poetic. Now I would make up my own mind.
It blue my mind
By the time the needle reached the end of the side I had remembered that I was likely, in the course of the coming intoxication, to become atrociously hungry. That much I had learned about the effects of the drug. It would make me into a monster of appetite, and all I had to appease the monster was a Mars bar tucked away in a desk drawer. I should really have been keeping it in a fridge anyway, as a homage to the Mars bars of my childhood, but there were no fridges for students then. I decided not to wait until the eating mania struck before I fetched it. I should make the trip while I was still Mr Jekyll, more or less in charge of my faculties, before Mr Hyde took over and started bellowing for ratatouille.
Even as Mr Jekyll I had trouble foraging for the hidden snack. The Mars bar felt oddly springy in my hand, like something made of an elastic syrup, or as if there were a thousand Mars bars in a loose association, so that I picked up just the first one, and there was an appreciable delay before the others caught up with it – and then of course there’s always a straggler.
Finally I was back in the Parker-Knoll in the relaxed position. I had pulled up my drawbridge and was alone on the ramparts with the phenomenon of tender howling (against jazzy strings) that was Astral Weeks. I already knew this was the record I had been waiting for all my life. It blue my mind. It blew through my mind. It blew my mind.
I didn’t know how many times the needle had traversed this amazing music. I had no idea what time it was anywhere on earth. I only knew it was time to eat the Mars bar.
If I’d given it more thought, I would have cut the bar into chunks or slices and used a fork. As things stood, with my arm extended to its maximum and my teeth angled forward (it certainly felt as if my teeth were angled forward) I could just about nibble the front quarter-inch of the Mars bar. I got the giggles, remembering something that I’d heard a girl asking rather coquettishly in the Whim on Trinity Street – ‘Why do Mars bars have veins?’ I suddenly saw that this was a question that needed to be asked.
A Mars bar does indeed have veins, chocolate tubes breaking the surface of the bar, as if caramel was circulating through them, supplying the nougat core with vital nutrients and access to unthinkable sensations. The whole ridiculously penile confection was alive. It was a soft hard-on. It was Cadbury’s Flake that had the fast reputation, and its adverts always portrayed Flake-eaters as oral nymphomaniacs, but the Mars bar was every bit as concupiscent. It was shameless, and it knew what it wanted.
What a tease it was! But two could play at that game. By now I’d eaten as much as I could reach of the bar. It would have to wait for its consummation. I decided to put the rest of it down while I worked out how to convey it to my mouth. My coördination must have been affected by the action of the drug, because I immediately managed to nudge it off the arm of the Parker-Knoll and onto the floor. It annoyed me that I had been so clumsy, but there seemed no point in mounting a rescue expedition just then. The Mars bar wasn’t going anywhere.
Now my thoughts were tending in a different direction. It was time to masturbate. It wasn’t really my idea, and it certainly wasn’t Van Morrison’s. I felt it was the Mars bar’s idea. Those five inches of chewy sweetness had put ideas in my head.
With a little effort I retrieved my own organ from my flies. In the position I was in I could just about flick my fingers against the glans. My mind wandered, though, and I kept losing the thread of arousal. Then suddenly I was ejaculating, without the usual run-up, and with the pleasure oddly scattered and silvery. It was the anagram of an orgasm. A morgaso, perhaps, or (stroke of genius, this, I thought) Om ragas! I suddenly wished I had one of Dad’s crossword puzzles within reach. In this state, surely, I would be unstoppable – though of course, since I’d added extra letters in my anagrams, I was only on my normal dismal form.
I sat there for a few seconds, then decided that I shouldn’t put off the cleaning-up operation any longer. I wriggled to make contact with the lever of the Parker
-Knoll. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t budge. That’s when I realised that the drawbridge had malfunctioned and I was trapped in my plushly upholstered castle. The Mars bar on the floor wasn’t going anywhere, and nor was I.
I began to get cold, particularly in the groin area, where I was slick with genetic information, the signed confession of my self-abuse. I tried to doze. It was hopeless. The Dream-Cloud was out of reach. Van Morrison burbled lyrically on, unperturbed by my desperate situation. He kept on singing at me that he was beside me (‘and I’m – beside – you –’) with the most extraordinary intensity, but that was no real consolation. I was beside myself. My fear, of course, was that I’d still be marooned in the Parker-Knoll, pubes crackling with my own dried seed, Mars bar skulking on the carpet like a bowel movement, when Mrs Beddoes arrived to do her morning rounds.
I must have slept. I woke up in the early morning chilled to the bone. I gave the lever of the chair one last try and it yielded. The drawbridge swung smoothly down and I was free. It was as if I had been applying pressure in the wrong direction. I suppose that’s possible.
The first thing I did was to turn the stereo off. Then I had hell’s own job cleaning myself up. Finally I wriggled under the Dream-Cloud to get warm.
And that was pretty much the beginning and end of my student experience of C. sativa. It was also the beginning and the end of my Van Morrison phase. I had listened to Side One of Astral Weeks (‘In The Beginning’) non-stop between about 8.30 and 5.15 the next morning. I never got as far as Side Two (‘Afterwards’). ‘In the beginning’ was more than enough. In the beginning just about finished me.
When Mrs Beddoes came I groaned, and she cleaned round me with theatrical tact. She asked if I needed the doctor and I made stoical noises. When I woke up again it was after eleven.
Like every other undergraduate I had formally been assigned a doctor, in my case one at a medical practice in Trinity Street. I can’t say I was impressed. He didn’t know anything about Still’s Disease, and by now I suppose I was used to doctors who had the good manners to pretend they knew more than me.
Slowly rolling goosebumps
I was used to Flanny’s little ways by now, and whatever her other shortcomings she was a good sport when it came to prescribing drugs. So I let her do the donkey-work of writing my scripts. There was no point spending the time it would take me to break in a new medical professional just for term-times, when I had Flanny so well trained.
During the summer holidays of 1971, though, Flanny took a holiday of her own, so I saw another doctor in the same practice, Dr Bailey. The summer break was the ‘long vac’ in Cambridge parlance, and certainly I anticipated a long vacuum which medication might help to fill. I thought this new chap might not be so biddable, so I decided to play safe.
What I wanted was a prescription for Mandrax, a widely prescribed drug of the period, much maligned since then. I still give it high marks. To me it’s pretty much the Jesus Christ of prescription drugs (meaning no offence, or not much). Mild and loving, but reviled and rejected, and all for trying to help.
The name, granted, isn’t well chosen. Whoever came up with it must have had mandrake in mind, which isn’t reassuring, and then finished off with a Bond-villain flourish (isn’t Drax the baddie in Moonraker?). Give a drug a bad name.
It’s not actually one of the barbiturates, though it shares some of their properties. The great thing about Mandrax is that you can take an awful lot of it with very little in the way of side-effects. Naturally the question of ‘side’ effects is wholly subjective. What’s at the side depends on your angle of vision. Some people lead decidely off-centre lives, and a side-effect can be right up their alley.
Above a certain dosage I might get a sort of nomadic paræsthesia, with tingles and patches of numbness lazily playing over my body. To tell the truth I rather enjoyed that. It was like having slowly rolling goosebumps, and goosebumps are only a mild case of horripilation, which is one of the signs testifying to the presence of God. Mandrax offered no more than a simulation, but I enjoyed the experience anyway, this synthetic merry-go-round of skin sensation, a slow swirling where my body met the world. Emotionally it detached me from a world that was only posing as real. Since the body is no more than a screen, it makes sense to project onto it something you enjoy.
But don’t just shuffle down to the local fleapit without checking what’s on! It shocked me that young people would smoke, sniff or inject anything they could get their hands on, taking untested substances into their bodies with total abandon. I found the general drug culture of the time very alienating because it was so different from my own. Didn’t they have any standards, any finesse? Even in terms of transgression I preferred the drama of the subverted prescription to the flat illegality of hashish. And I always liked the reliability of standard strengths and dosages. None of the uncertainty you get with your street muck.
When I was preparing for my appointment with Dr Bailey I decided I would take no chances. I didn’t write down Mandrax as such on my list of requirements. I didn’t even use its generic name of Methaqualone. This was a time for heavier disguise. By now I knew my way around the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, the MIMS, pretty well. It’s pretty much a GP’s Bible. I’d seen it on Flanny’s shelves, and noticed how well-thumbed it always was, though of course it’s not for sale to the general public. Gamekeepers do like to keep ahead of poachers, don’t they? But it’s better sport if both groups are well-informed.
A nurse at Addenbrookes had given me an old copy, and sometimes I’d scrounge one from my GP when I needed to check dosages. There could be no better way of keeping tabs on the profession with which this body has linked my destiny, and I didn’t need to be madly up to date. The rate of change wasn’t so very frantic then, and I could keep pace with the professionals without too much trouble.
Ever since CRX, where Ansell had laid aside her tenderness to reel off technical terms to her colleagues, I had coveted the medical manner. Knowledge isn’t power, whatever people say. Knowledge is power’s poor relation, at best. It’s the consolation, if not the booby prize. Still, it was all I could aim at. I might never become a doctor, but I could reasonably hope to sound like one. I could mimic the preoccupied expression, the technical drone.
I knew from my studies of MIMS that Boots the Chemist had its own private version of the drug, in two fractionally different formulations called Melsedin and Melsed, so I plumped for one of those instead.
Melsedin and Melsed. They haunted me, that pair of near-identicals. I knew from experience that it was perfectly possible to be in love with just one of a pair of twins, feeling no more than warm indifference to the other – and people seemed to have strong preferences as between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, though to the outsider’s eye and palate it’s all just treacly carbonated water. Melsed or Melsedin? I tossed a coin.
It seemed to me, as I looked at my little slip of paper, that the Mandrax, even wearing its carnival mask as Melsedin, looked a little suspect, so I added Dexedrine in first place on the list. Dexedrine I cared less about but still enjoyed. I had moved on since the days of involuntary binges on amphetamine-tinged hundreds and thousands. I could say no, and I could do without perfectly easily. I was confident in my willpower. I was struggling to do without sugar at the time, no easy thing for vegetarians, who tend to have a weakness for sweet things.
Torpid heat-bumps
Dr Bailey might baulk at either the Dexedrine or the disguised Mandrax, but he was unlikely to withhold them both. Finally, as a gesture towards clean living, I put down ‘Redoxon 1000 mg’ – a gram of effervescent Vitamin C, a good all-round tonic for the system. Now there were two guilty faces in the line-up of medication, one undisguised and the other masquerading, along with a radiant innocent included to raise the general tone of the group.
In person Dr Bailey seemed more like a handler of animals than a human doctor. He was very burly, ripe for the wrestling of steers. He can’t literally have worn a butcher’s
apron, though that’s how I picture him. There was an oar hung up on the wall in his surgery, trophy of a university past. When he learned I was at Cambridge he asked which college, and then ‘How’s their rowing?’ He seemed shocked that I had no idea. As far as he was concerned, there was no excuse for not knowing about torpid heat-bumps, times and regattas. All that nonsense – he did go on.
Then Dr Bailey saw my little manifest of pharmaceuticals and his face went long. He was troubled by what he saw. Finally he laid his pencil against one of the items on my list and said, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Someone with your low body weight needs to be extra-careful about dosages.’
The 1970s was the golden age of prescribing, as far as I’m concerned. It was all downhill after that. Dr Bailey was like the man in the Australian beer advert, who blames the bottle of sweet sherry (the ladies’ choice) for the collapse of his truck’s axles, after he has loaded it to the gunwales with crates of lager. Dr Bailey was an Australian at heart. The toy truck of this body was due to be fully loaded with Mandrax, but that didn’t worry him. It was going to be supercharged with Dexedrine, which would set the engine pounding, but that too was fine. He worried that I might be overdoing it with the Vitamin C. It turned out that it was the only innocent in the line-up who had no alibi. A whole gram of Redoxon? Was that wise?
I promised I would be careful. Scout’s honour.
The summer passed in tingling and numbness. The summer passed. Peter was off on his travels, and the Washbournes were on a Greek island. I imagined them in adjacent deck-chairs, him reading about Buddhism, her engrossed in a Regency romance, highly compatible in their own syncopated way. On my own I felt shadowy and fraudulent. I seemed only to be able to meditate with an audience.
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