Mr Nice Read online

  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 passed.

  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 God, 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 nobly.

  The degree results were displayed in the Examination Schools in The High and indicated that I had obtained a second-class 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-class 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; sex 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, 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 passed 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 spacious 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. 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 Japan’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. Japanese 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! Hello. 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, 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 albums. 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 qui
ckly 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 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 and 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 made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Embassy 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’ café 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 assumed the problem being referred to was drug use and that the help the Dean was seeking was my becoming some sort of grass, keeping the college authorities apprised of the identities and habits of drug users. I could not have been further from the truth. The problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution. My assistance was not to become a mole but merely to refrain from participation 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 attitudes were poles apart. Smoking marijuana was now regarded as some sort of stupefaction imposed on the working classes 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 to 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 participated in what turned out to be quite a violent demonstration. A few fellow participants had been brutally assaulted by police and, to add insult to injury, been charged with assault 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 Fanny Stein. John at that time was a general medical practitioner about to become a Fellow of Magdalen, while Fanny was a housewife. About halfway through the dinner, I discovered that Fanny’s maiden name was Hill and that she was the daughter of Christopher Hill, David Lindsay Keir’s successor as Master of Balliol. Fanny and I struck up a strong friendship. We fancied each other like mad, but newly-entered marital obligations prevaile
d, and we didn’t have an affair with each other until long after.

  Shortly after my first meeting with Fanny, 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 embarrassed myself by knocking on the door of Garsington Manor and asking the occupants if Aldous Huxley could come out to play.