‘Little man’ isn’t a phrase I’m any too fond of, but they seemed nice, and if it wasn’t for rough diamonds I wouldn’t have any diamonds at all. Sometimes the wheelchair acts as a lie-detector, and I certainly didn’t think they were messing me about. ‘Nothing much,’ I said, not thinking anything of it. ‘Come to ours, then,’ he said. ‘I’m Frank and this is Shirley. It’ll be a laugh.’ As I say, I didn’t take it seriously in the slightest bit, but Frank was very insistent, asking for my phone number (and getting Shirley to write it down on her hand). He said, ‘I know I’ve had a drink, mate, but I mean it. Come to ours for Christmas. That’s twice I’ve asked you drunk, and I’ll phone tomorrow to ask you sober. That’ll make it official.’ Just then a groan went up, not from me but from the whole packed room. The disc-jockey had followed ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ with Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’. Frank didn’t seem surprised, saying, ‘Bill said he’d do that, but I didn’t think he’d see it through.’
It was a minor outrage in relative terms. One legendary night ‘Bill’, assuming it was the same character, played Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’ (an evocation of a bad trip generally agreed to be more damaging than the real thing) four times in a row, then followed it with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, which by all accounts began to sound equally sinister.
People groaned at the Osmond song partly because they knew there was a fair chance they would wake up the next morning with that tune in their heads, and would have to be vigilant and avoid humming for the rest of the day.
Blow me down if Frank didn’t phone the next day and repeat the invitation, and by this time I was beginning to take him seriously. He said he and Shirley lived in a basement flat on Victoria Avenue, but we’d all manage somehow.
And in fact my first experience of a family festival without a family was a fair success, though once was probably enough for all parties.
Frank and Shirley’s basement was below a barber’s (Alley Barber’s, if you must know). I was expecting it to be dark, but hadn’t entirely reckoned on the cold and the damp. There was only an outside lavatory, across a little yard, which was a bit of a shock to the system. There had been indoor plumbing on Coronation Street for years. Frank’s record collection was enormous, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see moss growing on the vinyl of records he hadn’t played for a while.
He worked in the record department of Miller’s music shop on King Street, an old-fashioned sort of business which sold instruments and hired pianos to students. He was in charge of the pop record section, which was smaller than the classical one, and his real interest was the even smaller section labelled New Wave & Progressive. There were only two racks, New Wave & Progressive A–L and New Wave & Progressive M–Z, though he was hoping they would expand to three.
The discount he got as a Miller’s employee explained the size of his collection. ‘I like a good beat,’ he told me, ‘but why settle for one when you can have two or three, all going on at the same time?’ We listened to Gentle Giant, to Caravan, to Gong, and of course to Frank Zappa, not only my host’s namesake but the uncrowned king of New Wave & Progressive M–Z.
The only sentimental moment of my stay came on Christmas Eve, when Frank played ‘Lucky Man’, a track from Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first LP. It was a sort of soulful folk song, with an anti-war message, and it acted on him like a thousand Christmas carols rendered down. He had been rolling a joint when the song started and he froze, though he must have known what was coming since he had just put it on. He wept openly all the way through and then sat still, wiped clean of emotion. If he had wanted to give that joint a festive touch he could have moistened the edge of the rolling paper with tears rather than the traditional saliva.
Shirley worked as a secretary at a firm of solicitors. I told her she should become a lawyer herself, but she just laughed. It seemed to me that once you got a foothold in the world of work there was nothing to stop you, but that wasn’t how Shirley saw it. She was very sure she wasn’t clever. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘Frank bought me The Naked Eunuch for my birthday in June, and I still haven’t got past Chapter One.’ It was tantalising not knowing which of two famous books of the period she actually meant.
Shibboleth nut roast
Frank did most of the cooking, and came up with plenty of vegetarian basics. I had told him in advance that he should stick to his normal style of eating, and for form’s sake he had decided to roast a bird on the day. I was really agitating against that strange shibboleth nut roast, something that nobody much likes, a misunderstanding that has turned into an iron-clad ritual, with each party convinced of making a concession to the other.
And what could possibly be wrong with a plate of sprouts, carrots and bread sauce?
Everything went swimmingly until Shirley asked me, while Frank was making our omelettes, if I wanted to come with her to Midnight Mass. She said she was as lapsed a Catholic as it was possible to be, but she didn’t feel right not going on Christmas Eve, and I agreed. She warned me that Frank wouldn’t come.
I don’t think she’d realised that there was a difference between her going to Midnight Mass on her own and her saying that ‘we’ were going to Midnight Mass. He was obviously put out about it, though he wouldn’t own up. We begged him to come along, but of course that wasn’t the point. He should have been asked first. Finally he said he was going for a training run. Never mind that he’d been half asleep over his beer half an hour earlier.
It turned out that Frank was an exercise nut in between attempts to drink and smoke his way to oblivion. Now he pulled on his Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes, which everyone understood in those days were the mark of the committed athlete, did a couple of stretches and toe-touches, and went out into the night. This was apparently his favourite way of working off a hangover, just as a joint was part of his winding-down routine. Smoking and drinking were known to be unhealthy, but the experiments that young people conduct on themselves are invariably designed to prove the immortality they assumed as first premise. What’s a flawed methodology between friends?
It was strange to be joining a congregation at the very Catholic Church whose off-kilter bells had haunted my insomnia from the first week of my first term. I might have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been worrying about the domestic tensions of the household I was installed in.
I had Frank and Shirley’s bed, while they slept on a pile of cushions. For extra warmth they zipped me up in a sleeping bag. Just as I was slipping off to sleep I thought there was a moment when the silence between them lost its sharp edges and became tender, but I didn’t have a lot to go on.
Shirley brought me breakfast in bed on Christmas morning. Hot chocolate followed by tomato soup – a rather harrowing transition for the taste buds, but effective in boosting body heat. I particularly remember from that morning a gesture Shirley made with her hand, like the one furtive smokers use to hide their cigarettes, except that (unflappable hostess) she was unobtrusively plucking from my sleeping bag a wandering slug, cupping it out of sight in her palm. I realised that this gastropod was a bit of a rarity, since the ones that don’t die in the autumn usually hibernate, but even so it didn’t rank highly as a Christmas present, despite the trail of mucous tinsel it left behind on the nylon facing of the sleeping-bag. Oh Maya, you shouldn’t have!
We had a no-presents pact, though in the manner of such things it involved a certain element of suspense. Only at the last moment of the day would it become clear if we had held our nerve. I had some globes of bath oil in reserve, in case she reneged, just as Shirley kept a box of Maltesers handy. In the end we were doomed, for all our good intentions, to exchange small spheres.
Frank seemed depressed, not by the mild upsets of the night before but by something that had been announced on the radio. Clumsily I tried to cheer him up, and Shirley didn’t make a much better job of it. It doesn’t mean anything, we tried to tell him. It’s of no consequence. He thou
ght the world was being overwhelmed by commercialism and bubble-gum. What chance was there for a third rack of New Wave & Progressive at Miller’s?
What caused all this soul-searching was the announcement on the radio that ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’ was Britain’s Christmas Number One. I thought it was par for the course, the world being what it is, Christmas being what it is, Little Jimmy Osmond being what he was. But Frank took it hard.
After lunch I proposed a visit to the Bot, knowing full well that it would be closed on Christmas Day, but needing to mount some sort of expedition. Frank came along, as I had guessed he would (unless perhaps I asked him to). He was fascinated by the orange cardboard indicator which went with my parking privileges. ‘That’s dead handy, that is,’ he said. ‘Everyone should have one of those.’ Rather missing the point, I felt, of the civic concession. ‘What do you call that? Your cripple clock?’ Well, no, I called it my orange thingy. I flinched at his phrase, though I don’t think it was meant aggressively. It was just the least attractive facet of a rough diamond catching the dim light of a winter’s day. I said those words to myself a few times, trying to neutralise them, cripple clock, cripple clock, but they were like a mantra in reverse, they refused to shed their meaning. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I call it the time machine.’ Hoping to override the appalling catchiness of his formula.
While Shirley and I went on our walk, Frank stayed in the car to have a smoke. It wasn’t immediately obvious why he couldn’t have done that while he walked with us, but it’s no news that men (in particular), though they hate to be excluded, prefer not to participate fully in other people’s lives.
For all the vividness of what I could show Shirley of the splendours of the Bot at that distance and in that season it would have been simpler to stay at home, ask her to close her eyes, and fearlessly describe. I was reduced to pointing vaguely with the stick, indicating the place where the Bot grew cannabis as an attractive herbaceous annual, with no sense of playing with fire.
When we came back there seemed to be a grin on Frank’s face, or somewhere near it. There was a preening twinkle that couldn’t be pinned to any individual feature but belonged only to the collective. He seemed to have cheered up in some way.
It was days before I noticed that he had embellished the orange thingy, the time machine, using a ball-point pen to change the units of measurement from hours to thousands of years. In all innocence he had recalibrated the instrument to help me navigate in the depths of the Dark Ages. Without in the least knowing what he was doing, he was reminding me that I was in it for the long haul. I was no time lord, but serving my time like everyone else in the Kali Yuga, unless my guru laid on a Tardis for my benefit, with modified controls.
Apricocks out of season
New Year was actually more traumatic than Christmas, not as an event but as a symbol. 1973 was the year in which my undergraduate exemption from life’s real demands lapsed and all bills fell due. I felt like Faustus towards the end of Marlowe’s play, when the soul on which he has borrowed so heavily must be repossessed. The bailiffs are on their way. O lente, lente currite noctis equi. In preparation for the Tragedy paper I had learned to admire the metrical skill of that interpolated Latin line, the dragging hooves of the first half while the reins are pulled back, the helter-skelter careering of the second. It wasn’t so enjoyable to be caught up in the same terrible rhythm, without having had any of Faustus’s fun. I hadn’t enjoyed legendary beauties or apricocks out of season, just a few fumbles. Nobody had even wanted me to sign on the dotted line in the first place. Slow down, my nightmares, galloping, galloping on.
Everyone else seemed remarkably calm about the end of their student lives, the deepening shadows in the academic grove. In my third undergraduate year I still took what everyone said at face value. It’s a good job I wasn’t reading philosophy, or this would have counted as an academic failing as well as a personal one.
An odd masquerade was going on as my contemporaries faced up to the end of their student lives. Academic work itself had been out of fashion for some time, thanks to the lingering effects of the ’60s. Application to books on any more than a casual basis went by the unsavoury name of ‘gnoming’. Everyone claimed to be aiming for a Third Class degree, though it was understood as a matter of brute mathematics that there weren’t enough of them to go around. Some unlucky folk would end up with Firsts. Life could be very unfair.
The incorrigibly interested or slyly ambitious would study in secret, working their way through books that they would defensively insist they had shoplifted. Everyone spoke the language of anarchistic disaffection in a cryptic counter-cultural Esperanto. Fashion demanded that those who had splashed out on tickets for a May Ball should claim to have gatecrashed the event by some providential set of circumstances, such as a stacked pile of chairs found by the river, handy stepping stones into the college grounds, while heavily armed porters patrolled elsewhere.
Any talk of jobs was disparaged, even by those who had quietly been making plans. At that period of all but full employment, when a Cambridge degree gave potential employers a throb of desire, any actual plan to enter the world of work was seen as a great betrayal. It meant selling out your dreams, giving in to what was variously called the System, the Machine, the Man, even (by those who imported their radical reading matter, buying it from an eccentric bookshop in town calling itself Cockaygne) Straightsville or Amerika.
As far as the rival party lines went, I was necessarily a dissident. I didn’t think that it would be a betrayal of counter-cultural values if I got a job. Nor did I think that it was my duty to make a contribution to the economic functioning of the country. I just thought it would be a bloody miracle.
My tutor, though returned from sabbatical, was aggressively neutral where my welfare was concerned, but I don’t mean to suggest that there was nobody paying me any mind. There was a definite sense of rallying round. Some of my supervisors started coming to A6 Kenny, rather than expecting me to toil over to their rooms. Not only that, a handful of fellow-students had mercy on me and started to take notes on my behalf (for the Tragedy paper, for instance) so that I was spared the ordeal of hitch-lifting to lectures. The only trouble was that there seemed to be an inverse relation between people’s helpfulness and the legibility of their handwriting. Often the simplest solution was to ask my helpers to read out their notes, and to make my own record of the re-enactment.
At the library I had those take-away privileges, while everyone else had to eat on the premises. Now I was benefiting from the academic equivalent of room service. It might seem that after three years the world had finally showed up in my room as promised, helpless to resist me, wanting its belly tickled. In fact these were emergency measures undertaken by kind people who rightly suspected I was close to throwing in the towel.
My levels of disposable energy had greatly diminished, though there was nothing obscure about how this had come about. For reasons of economy I had dropped first breakfast and then dinner from my schedule. Lunch became my only real meal, and that is not a regime on which the body thrives. I lost weight, and gained a certain perverse satisfaction from being in full charge of my appetite, if of nothing else.
To fill the metabolic crannies
Wealth is relative, wealth is subjective, and I felt poor. In strict monetary terms I was better off than I had been at the start of my university life, but my predicament was much more intractable. My only guarantor was Granny, and she wasn’t reliable in that rôle. She enjoyed having beneficiaries but soon got bored of dependents and was likely to punish them.
There was a recession going on, even if it was only in my head. I was no longer pushing the boat out. I was pulling the boat in. No more fancy cigarettes from Bacon’s to beguile my guests, and no more snacks to fill the metabolic crannies left empty by the catering in Hall.
In better times I had provided a finger buffet – slivers of Ry-King crispbread spread with cashew-nut butter from the Health Food Shop in Rose Cres
cent. This was hugely popular. I got through so much Ry-King that I could send off the required number of coupons for the clear-top plastic holder for their product which the manufacturers dangled as a temptation in front of eager consumers. It gave me pleasure to arrange the crisp rectangles in their tailor-made vivarium, and even got me thinking that I should collect the coupons for another and relaunch my menagerie with a new millipede to revolt Jean Beddoes – Son of Nasty Thing. Son and daughter in one.
A sizeable whack of my income in this period went on cashew-nut butter, which has never been cheap, but I considered it an expense well justified. I imagined that every savoury nutritious bite I provided was making converts to vegetarianism, lessening the demand for animal slaughter, when I was only pandering to the outrageous calorific demands of active healthy bodies.
I clung to the totem of ‘proper coffee’, despite the expense, preferring to limit my intake than permit a return to granule or powder. Real coffee was a currency I could use to repay those who came to share their lecture notes.
One of my helpers had hair of a strange dark blond and lips so absurdly full even an angel would want to bite them. He turned out to be half-Spanish, and so I ventured into his mother’s tongue if only to brush up my accent. That sort of brushing-up always feels rather fierce, less like grooming of any sort than scrubbing rust off metal using bristles of wire.
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