Prologue

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First a brief burst of contemporary name-dropping. Just before beginning to write this piece, I’d spent the weekend enjoying and helping to organise the Sixteenth King’s Lynn Fiction Festival of 2004. On the Sunday morning I introduced Alan Sillitoe, then in his late-seventies. I’d met him accidentally one evening in summer 2003, attending a reception where Dame Beryl Bainbridge was sharing with the poet Thom Gunn the David Cohen Award for a lifetime’s literary achievement. Its terms required the winner to donate part of the money to a deserving literary cause. Beryl chose our Festival as her beneficiary and I was there to meet her and collect the cheque.

 

Sillitoe and Gunn have both been significant names stored away throughout my adult life. Being with them, shaking hands and talking to them as though, perhaps, they were no one particularly special, or (much less likely) as though I was just as special as they were, was a surreally wonderful experience. I fell into conversation with Alan Sillitoe while drinking my British Council champagne from the tallest flute glass I’ve ever held. I was standing on the edge of the scrum of literati, their agents, publishers and hangers-on, trying to spot the faces I recognised and knew as well as those I recognised and didn’t know. Peter Porter, for one, spotted me and nodded in my direction, indicating ‘I’ll come over for a chat as soon as I’ve finished with this person’, the poet Michael Horovitz.

 

A small man detached himself from his group, came and stood beside me, and said ‘I think you’ve got the right idea. It’s not very comfortable in the middle of that crowd.’ ‘No’, I said, ‘I thought I’d just have a look round to see who’s here.’ He turned and looked up at me. ‘I suppose I ought to know who you are,’ he said. At that point, not knowing who he was, I felt rather famous for a couple of seconds. I also saw the possibility for some kind of outrageous practical joke. In fact, I said: ‘Actually, there’s no reason why you should know me. I’m just one of the people who organise the King’s Lynn literature festivals.’ ‘Oh, King’s Lynn,’ he said. ‘I came to one of their festivals years ago and had rather a lot of drinks.’

 

He’d obviously been to the much bigger annual summer festival, largely devoted to music, so I realised that, while he wasn’t standing next to anyone notable, I probably was. I said: ‘In that case, perhaps I ought to know who you are.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, with a quite overwhelming and disarming modesty, ‘my name’s Alan Sillitoe and I’ve written some novels.’ Having experienced the excitement of his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in 1958 and 1959, followed in 1960 by the films starring the two young actors Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, I thought his was the understatement of the century. Here was I, talking to one of the key figures in the magnificent and unparalleled seed sowing of the cultural phenomenon we’ve come to know as The Sixties.

 

Here was the contemporary of John Braine (Room at the Top, with Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret in the film), David Storey (This Sporting Life, filmed with Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts) and Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), whose books were all published within a couple of years of each other. Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, (with Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin in the film) had already come out in 1958, and Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Bill Naughton’s Alfie (with Michael Caine) were each making a similar impact by 1962. Whether they started off as novels or plays, they all became films in the British New Wave, negotiating the censorship obstacles of language, portrayal of sex, especially between young people before marriage, violence, and pregnancy issues, particularly abortion.

 

Many of these novels generated a new literary wave, the first look we’d had into modern gritty Northern realism in our time, the daily lives of working class blokes of our age or in their early twenties. They went to work in factories, chatted up girls on the bus or in the staff canteen, took them to the pictures or the pub, and eventually got them into bed, onto the sofa, up the narrow alley behind the boozer, on the back seat of the very second-hand car, or anywhere else the leg could be got over. It all hit me spectacularly at the time because I was more or less the same age as Sillitoe’s character Arthur Seaton. I was nineteen and was there at the start of my working life in London. He still lived at home with his mum and worked in a factory. I - and most of the people I met then - had left home to work in offices. So when Sillitoe’s first two novels came out, I was tasting the earliest moments of my own complete and unqualified independence. I was alone, entirely on my own in London for the first time. I had a job and a little money and no one to tell me or warn me or control me. Exciting, of course, and potentially hazardous, too.

 

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Holland Park / LETTER TO MYSELF, AGED 21

 

                                                                                                                      Shrewsbury,

                                                                                                                      February 2005

 

Dear younger Graham,

 

I’m writing this letter for two reasons. One, naturally, is to wish you all the best for your 21st birthday. For most of my lifetime, and long before, twenty-one has been the age for celebrating the arrival of adulthood. In recent years age eighteen seems to have become the more significant one. No matter, congratulations!

 

My other reason for this letter is to pin down, once and for all, the key details of my/your very earliest days in London. I’m dredging back towards my less distinct memories across nearly fifty years. In fact, they seem to be much clearer and fresher than you might imagine. I’ve probably played them over to myself a number of times and, in any case, the things happening to me then were all happening for the first time, and so making their very special marks on me and my memory.

 

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Digging in

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I’m starting at the very beginning, with your arrival at the Civil Service hostel in Holland Park, London, W11. You turned up there one afternoon in the first days of February 1958, carrying virtually all your worldly belongings, mostly clothes, in a single suitcase, thanks to a remarkable document, which I rather wish you’d kept because no one today would imagine such a thing being written. Appointed to the Paddington District Tax Office in North Audley Street, W2, just across Oxford Street from Selfridge’s, you’d received a letter from the appropriate department of the Civil Service Commission, telling you where and when to report for work but also where they’d arranged accommodation for you. Impeccably legible, clearly and helpfully expressed, this letter consisted of several pages of meticulously handwritten material. It explained the rules of the hostel, the rent you would have to pay (something less than £2 a week for full board), and detailed instructions for getting to it by public transport from St Pancras station. I can recall, more or less exactly, the final stage of those directions: ‘Arrive at Holland Park underground station, where take the lift to the surface. Leave the station, cross Holland Park Avenue immediately in front of you. Turn left up the slight hill, walk a few yards and then turn right down the road called Holland Park. Number 72 is on the right going down. The warden, Miss Green, will be expecting you.’

 

Hostels like this provided newly recruited civil servants from outside London with a place to live while they accustomed themselves to their unfamiliar surroundings. Further down on the left was the main hostel where the young female civil servants lived separately under the severe control of Miss Thornborough, watching every move from her office. Your building, officially referred to as ‘the annexe’, was full of young males, generally leading the none too bright Miss Green something of a dance. As you discovered, she was a plump Irish woman, very Irish in accent, of ageless appearance. She called you ‘Graham’ immediately, as though you were perhaps a younger brother or distant cousin. She may well have been hoping, as with all her new arrivals, that you wouldn’t be immediately led astray by your more seasoned room mates. If that was her hope, she got it wrong. Astray was exactly where you were all too willing to be led.

 

Miss Green takes you into the first room on the right, Room 1. It’s no more than a simple dormitory with six metal folding beds, very basic blankets, six small narrow wooden lockers, a gas fire with a large mirror above it and a wash basin. There are two more rooms of similar size on the ground floor. The rest of the multi-storeyed house has rooms for two or three people sharing, and one or two at the very top are singles. Each floor has a lavatory and bathroom. There is no catering at No 72 so, whatever the weather, you all have to walk to the other hostel building down the road for your breakfasts and evening meals.

 

In your room, you find one young bloke, hanging something up in his locker. Miss Green explains that he hasn’t been well enough recently to go to work, so was having a couple of days off sick. ‘Hello, Frank, this is Graham. Perhaps you’d show him around, help him to settle in and tell him how everything works. I’ll leave you with Frank, Graham, and I hope you’ll enjoy staying here.’ Frank Prosser’s accent is as Scottish as Miss Green’s is Irish. You’ll have found it hard to understand him at first but he’s very friendly and you get yourselves sorted out quite quickly. He’s about a year younger than you but doesn’t work for the Inland Revenue. You would only stay in the hostel for a few months, but you won’t recall Frank ever doing very much like going out for a drink or seeing films, or even talking about his job.  He’s very careful with his money, meticulous about his belongings and the neatness of his blankets but not without a good sense of humour. That was essential if you were to co-exist with these five other young blokes in close proximity every night – not very different from doing National Service.

 

You unpacked your stuff and, before long, the other occupants of Room 1 began coming back from work. First in was Trevor, a Cornish lad under eighteen, with a pronounced West Country accent, indistinct and fast talking, another one very hard to understand at first. Like Frank, he rather kept himself to himself and lay on his bed eating pieces of a saffron cake (he pronounced it ‘zavron’) which his mother sent him once a week. He gave you a piece of it once, just to try, but you didn’t really like it. He did, and his general rule was that it was all meant for him. John Gillard came in next, a very dark-haired bloke from Bristol with the appropriate accent, who also works for the Revenue. But this doesn’t draw you together – rather the opposite. He’s a year or so older than you and immediately and openly shows that he resents the fact that he’s on the Clerical grade while you are an Executive-in-training. Only three residents in the entire hostel are post-A level Executive Officers. Sometimes, as you walked through the general lounge (where the single TV set was) to the dining room down the road, you’d hear a little muttering: ‘There’s one of the EOs.’ ‘He’s not, is he?’ It was rumoured that being an EO was a sure thing for attracting women in the hostel. It probably didn’t take you long to discover that more qualities than simply your Civil Service rank are needed for that.

 

Beyond you and Frank, near the door, was Tim. He’s a big, tall, very gregarious bloke about your age from Folkestone with a very serious girlfriend there whom he goes off to visit rather urgently most weekends. A couple of weeks later, Tim takes you out to one or two pubs near Marble Arch to celebrate your birthday. Do you remember that evening? He introduced you to one of the first of many drinks you’d never heard of before, let alone tried: rum with peppermint cordial, known as rum ‘n’ pep. You persevered with it seriously that evening, but strongly disliked the smell of rum, and I can tell you now that you/I have probably never tried it again.

 

So there you are, in a dormitory that could also have been a hospital ward, apparently more or less accepted by a group of complete strangers wielding strong regional accents from all over the country. But the bed opposite yours, by the front bow-window, still has no one lying on it at half-past five, no one smoking a cigarette and reading the Evening Star, News or Standard, waiting for the moment to troop down the hill for dinner. Then he arrives. It‘s John Thompson, the canny counter staff from Wigmore Street Post Office, the hefty Geordie with yet another accent you’ve never encountered before. He is the man aged 27, years older than anyone else in the room, who’d done National Service in the RAF and, if everything he said was to be believed, had done most other things as well, or knew somebody who had. He’s the man everyone in the room and, probably, most of the blokes in the whole hostel, respect, esteem - and some possibly fear. Through the unfathomable chemistry of human relationships, he becomes your close friend from the very start and will remain so for years later. However, as you come to recognise, he’s a complete fantasist. Many of the things he tells people about what he’s done or claims to know about are simply not to be believed. Even so, like many such types, he has considerable charm and is a convincing raconteur.

 

After dinner on that first evening a disreputable figure in a creased greasy greenish suit comes into the room, a limp roll-up hanging from his reptilian lips. He addresses John Thompson in crudest Cockney. ‘Hallo, Fatso, where the bleedin’ ‘ell have you been, you fat cunt?’ John replies: ‘Oh, why don’t you just fuck off, you slimy creep?’ They then proceed, between guffaws, to slag each other off in every way they can think of, competing to see who can insult the other in the most repulsive terms without repeating themselves. John introduces him, saying that you’d ‘best keep out of this obnoxious little bastard’s way’. The other replies that he pities anyone having to occupy the same room as this ‘ugly, bloated twat’. This was mostly the way they interacted, knowingly entertaining everyone else who might be listening. It was a good double act. You’ve never met this style before, let alone most of the language, and, on this first experience of it, you may even innocently wonder whether some of it is genuinely meant.

 

This character was Ernie Laly. Apparently he had only half a stomach and a number of other internal bits missing too. He was far from well. He was possibly as old as thirty-five and was the only resident to my knowledge who wasn’t a civil servant. He worked in the packing department of Debenham and Freebody up Oxford Street and apparently they looked after him extremely generously in view of his general condition. He was probably very lucky to have a job and would be even luckier to reach pension age. His room, which you only visited once with John, was right up in the attic of the building. In this, as in many other respects, he was like one of those weird specimens in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, living alone up on the roof among the chimneys.

 

You knew nothing about this district when you arrived in it, but I’ve gathered a few points since then. The developers of these houses during the later nineteenth century would not have expected anyone like Ernie Laly to occupy them. Nor people like us. Despite the falling demand for west London houses for the rich by the mid-1860s, the Holland Park area became well established as a highly stylish place to live, assisted by the attractively rising ground of Campden Hill and by Holland House itself, venue for extremely classy Society junketings. The area attracted architects, sculptors and painters, and apparently Turner himself painted sunsets from Campden Hill Square. Much more recently, playwrights such as the late Harold Pinter and Simon Gray lived round here. Holland Park, the road, runs parallel to Holland Park Avenue, the Bayswater Road’s extension west from Notting Hill Gate to Shepherds Bush. The terraces here are all Nash-style, four storied with basements and attics, with white stucco fronts, steps and portico. In 1958, long before the later property booms had exploded, they looked a bit seedy, the stucco often wanting rather more attention than a simple coat of white paint – though if you were looking for really seedy in this area, you had only to walk up to some of the similar terraces immediately to the east of Queensway.

 

Holland Park, the area, was more or less rural until the house-builders came along, the only significant property being the grand and exotic Holland House, built originally in 1605 for Sir Walter Cope in a 600 acre estate stretching from today’s Holland Park Avenue to the present site of Earl’s Court tube station. Known first as Cope Castle, it became known as Holland House, following inheritance by Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland. The house remained in the hands of successive Barons Holland until the 1870s. Badly damaged in 1940 during a 10-hour bombing raid, and owned now by the local authority, its remains form the backdrop to the open air theatre and contain the Holland Park Youth Hostel. The parts of the park not sold off for late nineteenth century development were opened as a public space in 1952.

 

If it was a stylish and expensive place to live in the 1860s, it has become so again, only more so. Holland Park in the early 21st century is one of the most expensive parts of London to buy a house. A single leasehold flat in that building where you lived six to a room for those few months nearly fifty years ago was advertised for sale in 2004 at £1.5 million, and entire houses here can go for up to £10 million. No more doss-houses for fledgling civil servants here. Today the road contains the embassies of Greece, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Cameroon and Algeria - and who knows what else. The Windsor Castle pub (built 1826) in Campden Hill Road is a fine Grade II Listed building whose facilities I have tested again quite recently.

 

 

The first drinking lesson

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Your nearest pub was The Mitre, on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Holland Park Avenue, just a few yards up from the tube station. A big, four-square 1930s red brick building, one of Watney’s finest which, according to my recent research, is now called The Raj and described as a “Young persons’ pub with good music”. As you know, places described like that didn’t exist in 1958. It was simply a big, neighbourhood pub with several bars and an off licence round the corner. Hostel people generally used the large lounge bar at the back, where groups of customers sat round big circular tables in heavy, comfortable upholstered chairs with arms. Most didn’t have the spare cash for very frequent visits, so you were usually there on the Friday evening nearest to the monthly payday and probably during the following weekend. Apart from that, you might look in on a Friday evening when you thought you could afford it, which became less likely as the month wore on. Here John Thompson guided you enthusiastically and with constant support and encouragement through the practices and protocols of drinking substantial quantities of beer. His training schedule was powerful, persistent and punishing, but you emerged from it capable of standing up – and falling over – with the best of them. Indeed, those early days under John’s tutelage set you up with an abiding love of beer which has been a consistent feature of the past fifty years of your future life.

 

As your first ever payday approached, John had it all worked out. The key to successful beer-shifting was to have a good meal first. As he said: ‘Never drink on an empty stomach’. According to John, they did an enormous mixed grill at the Ritz Restaurant on Goldhawk Road down at Shepherd’s Bush. This would be a much better foundation for the evening’s drinking than the usual dinner at the hostel. You might even enjoy the food as well. In any case, you’d just been paid and could afford to splash out. The only Ritz you’d ever heard of was the other one, the rather grander place in Piccadilly and you may have wondered whether you were about to blow an entire month’s pay on a single meal. In fact, this Ritz, with its potted trees standing on the pavement either side of the door, was extremely reasonable, unpretentious to the point of being ordinary, but very popular and suiting your financial situation perfectly. For five shillings (5/-) you got a mixed grill like this: a small piece of steak, chop, sausage, liver, bacon, egg, chips, mushrooms, tomato, plus bread and butter and a cup of tea. This was one occasion when Frank came out, sometimes with one of the others from your room. If anyone couldn’t manage to finish it all, John Thompson could always complete the task for them: ‘Aren’t you going to eat the rest of those chips, then?’

 

After the meal, you all walked back up to The Mitre. John: ‘Give your food a chance to settle a bit before you start drinking’. As you reached the pub and went through to the lounge, you were both excited and a little apprehensive. How much were you going to have to drink to avoid appearing unqualified and wet behind the ears? In the company of the senior and much respected John Thompson, you would have to do the thing properly. What were you going to drink? How long would you be drinking? You’d made an early start at the Ritz and there were still hours ahead of you until closing time. Did you carry on until you were asked to leave, or did you get up and go when you thought you’d ‘had enough’? How would the rounds work? And how did you know when you’d had enough? This last question was to remain one of life’s great unfathomables for many years.

 

While somewhat unsure of the conventions, you quickly realised that you were in for a long haul. Declining a drink on your own round, or on somebody else’s, or getting up from the table at nine fifteen and saying ‘Well, I think I’ll be getting back now’ would have been a form of social suicide. Or, certainly, that’s what you thought. While the company wasn’t particularly macho or competitive, most slightly spotty nineteen year-old males are reluctant to lose face in front of their peers. You were no exception, particularly since you were anxious to make new friends. As the later part of the evening was to show, you were capable of losing rather more than just face.

 

So it began. Friday was the great traditional drinking night of the week, and as this was your first big Friday night out, John suggested magisterially that you should drink what he drank. He called it Black and Tan, a pint of Guinness plus Watney’s Best Bitter. Not only had you never had this drink before, you’d never drunk more than a pint or two of anything before, and then only in halves. You were about to experience strong beer in quantity. Many of the details of that evening evade me now, for the most obvious of reasons. You sat around the table, drinking your pints of this dark stuff, passing cigarettes around, chatting or listening to some of John’s taller, but always entertaining, tales. You learn that, when you spend a long period drinking sitting down, standing up only when you go to the bar or the Gents, you become less aware of the effect on your locomotion. When you all eventually get up to leave, an irregular, disorganised, weaving, staggering and lurching goes on as each person’s body tries to cope with the simple task of walking forwards. This disorienting effect seems to be enhanced the moment you hit the fresh air outside.

 

How many pints of that stuff did you have? Whatever it was, it was far, far more than you’d ever had in one go in your life and far more than was any good for you. Even your father, who greatly enjoyed his beer, might have been mildly horrified. You needed physical support as soon as you reached the pavement and John was the obvious one to supply it. John reckoned he still hadn’t had enough, so he led you all round to the off licence where, apparently, you contributed to a couple of flagons of Best Bitter and Guinness so that he could mix the Black and Tans back at the hostel for anyone still capable of drinking it. As I recall it, no one else wanted more, and I can see John now, sitting up on his bed, grinning broadly at the rest of us, knocking back still more Black and Tan while the rest of us clumsily prepared to go to bed.

 

Your father would have been even more dismayed by what came next. Even at this distance in time I’m slightly reluctant to recall it, let alone to remind you of something much fresher in your memory, which you may prefer to remain buried. But this is where things began to go wrong for you, fast. You may not remember telling John that you didn’t feel very well or him recommending the far from scientific expedient of taking an aspirin immediately to prevent a headache in the morning. As ever, he was ready with sound advice: ‘Have a good sleep and you’ll feel fine tomorrow.’ You did swallow the aspirin, got into bed and put your head on the pillow. At that moment, the room went into a wild and irregular rotation.

 

It’s one of the very least enjoyable sensations. You’re lying flat on your back. You don’t know whether to keep your eyes open or close them tight against this debilitating spiralling sensation. Your brain swirls, your stomach churns, your whole consciousness breaks away in a crazed, rocking, nauseating, anti-clockwise orbit around you. There is no fixed point. The whole room is in motion. You hold on to the sides of your bed as the room comes round again and again. Drinking too much makes people sick and you’re about to find this out by direct empirical means. Desperate for some relief from this anguish, you turn over on one side towards the window. Your stomach lurches, and on the carpet beside your bed you’ve parked the entire Ritz mixed grill, largely undigested. Atop this shameful pile sits the single aspirin, recently swallowed and not yet dissolved.

 

I know John Thompson dined out on the story for months: ‘ . . . and right on top of it all, the aspirin, just sitting there’ You sat there sweating, helpless on your bed while John and one of the others got busy with pieces of newspaper and cleaning materials. In due course, you quietly passed out for the night. In the light of your spectacular performance that night, John thought it best in future to lay the newspaper out beside your bed before you went out for the Friday evening bash - a wise precaution. Repeatedly failing to learn the simplest lessons about beer drinking, you continued with this wretched experience from time to time during the months and some of the years that followed.

 

The pounding, spirit-crushing headache you had the next morning may have become thoroughly familiar to you by now. On that day, it was yet another brand new experience. Alka Seltzer and one or two aspirins came into play but you couldn’t face either the walk to breakfast or the breakfast that would await you if you could have got there. While the others went down the road, you stayed in bed sustained by a single thought – in time, I can only feel better than this. When John came back, he encouraged you to get up and go round with him to ‘Greasy Joe’s’. ‘What you need is a strong cup of tea and something in your stomach’. He may well have been right though something in the stomach was actually the last thing you felt like.

 

Greasy Joe’s is the little café just along Lansdowne Road. It fitted perfectly the stereotype of the greasy spoon catering style, long before the annoying advent of food hygiene regulations. The place was nearly full at this time on a Saturday morning, local people and some blokes from the hostel, including Ernie Laly who often used it to supplement the unimaginative food and surroundings of the hostel. ‘Allo, Fats, ‘aven’t yer ‘ad enough to eat yet, yer fat git?’ ‘Get stuffed, Laly.’ Joe and his assistants worked behind the counter, dressed in long white coats that hadn’t been white for ages, dishing out mugs of tea and coffee and big rolls filled with sausages, bacon or fried egg, or plates of what we now call ‘Full English’. The windows were all steamed up and the atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke and cooking fumes. It was just the place for a young bloke whose head and stomach would rather be anywhere else. You toyed uncomfortably with a mug of instant coffee while John, having already despatched a hostel breakfast, got going on a fried egg and bacon roll. You spent the rest of the weekend in quiet reflection, possibly toying with the phrase ‘Never again’ from time to time. As you’ve discovered since, this was the first time but definitely not the last.

 

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Making a point

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As you know, regular patterns for living soon developed. Working all week, you generally spent fairly quiet evenings, preserving what spare money you had for the weekends. Someone in Room 2 was an authority on the flourishing Frank Sinatra. LPs like Songs for Swinging Lovers, Come Fly with Me and Only the Lonely were out that year and you were drawn in both by the unique voice and the seemingly perfect Nelson Riddle arrangements. You spent some time next door listening to Ole Blue Eyes, though staying in your own room you could hear it perfectly well through the plasterboard wall. On your first visit home, our parents now living in Bedford, you collected your portable Dansette player and brought it back to Holland Park, though only a couple of your few records were suitable listening for the room mates.

 

Many Friday evenings featured The Mitre, or occasionally a big Charrington pub on the left of Shepherds Bush Green, opposite the trolley bus terminus. The Ritz restaurant was usually included on payday. Saturday evenings took most of the room mates down to the hostel lounge to watch TV. John and you often went to see a film at Shepherds Bush, Notting Hill Gate or even up to the West End at the Odeon, Marble Arch or at one of the clutch of cinemas around Leicester Square. John had been living in London for some time and knew his way around on foot. With only your limited southeast suburban experience, you knew very little about central London or these western parts. So the two of you wandered across Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens and mooched around South Kensington and Ken High Street, often spending hours in the Science and Natural History Museums on quiet Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

 

This is how you began to get the feel of the streets and their directions, and to know which way you needed to go once you got on the Underground. John was weekly paid and one of his favourite projects on a Saturday morning was to ‘do a bit spending and buying’ in Marks and Spencer, Oxford Street. In good weather, you’d walk up to their great Marble Arch emporium, long before their main customer constituency had come to comprise very wealthy Arabs. You would stand at the counter and watch while he brought out pound notes and bought a new shirt, new socks or a new tie. Even something as relatively trivial as this was new for you, having had all that kind of thing done for you at home, and paid for by your/my parents. There was new excitement to be had in looking at clothes and deciding, for yourself, what kind of shirt or socks you wanted. Soon after came records and books from the Charing Cross Road. For the first time ever, you had your own money. It wasn’t very much but it was all yours – just over £20 a month net, but exclusively yours - and you alone could decide how to use what was left over after rent and repetitive daily expenses.

 

The least sociable of your room mates was John Gillard, the tax man from Bristol. If Frank was careful with his money, then Gillard was positively tight. On top of this, he didn’t seem to share the general sense of humour in the room. He might laugh quietly at something one of you had said, but he rarely, if ever, contributed to the banter. He was something of a loner and rarely allowed himself to relax or open up. When a few of you were sitting round a table in The Mitre, he stayed out of the rounds and bought his own beer, a bottle or two of Watney’s Brown Ale, never much more. While everyone in the group, whoever was there, passed their cigarettes round to everyone else (you all smoked), he got his packet out surreptitiously under the table, extracted a cigarette and returned the packet shiftily to his pocket. From time to time, possibly embarrassed by this awkward behaviour, he would nip out to the Gents and return with a lit cigarette in his hand.

 

Gillard bought the Daily Telegraph to read on the tube each morning and, returning in the evening, he would try and complete the crossword. But this task had to wait until he’d done his daily accounts. He sat on his bed and put down in a notebook everything he’d bought during the day and how much he’d spent on it. So his newspaper, tube fares, cigarettes, matches, lunch and coffee, for example, were all itemised, costed and totalled, every single day. As time went on, you realised that he’d constructed a kind of invisible cordon sanitaire around himself, a zone where he kept himself to himself. No one knew much about him and he wasn’t going to let you in. His bed was neater than anyone else’s, and somehow you felt it would be trespassing to approach it too closely. His belongings were more carefully arranged in his cupboard, and his shoes were shinier. He was fussy, and more vain about the details of his appearance than the rest of you, especially his dark, wavy hair. His face often wore a sulky expression of mild superiority, certainly of smugness at seeing himself as ever so slightly above the rest of you, seemingly considerably older than you, except for John Thompson, though probably only a couple of years older than the youngest in the room.

 

It was his self-satisfaction, almost haughtiness that eventually worked its way under your skin. You would talk among yourselves about him and his parsimonious little ways and, as often happens, he became the subject of subtly coded comments between you. You performed imitations of his more obvious mannerisms and, occasionally and very daringly, slightly repositioned a few of the possessions in his cupboard. He knew something was going on, but never said a word. This encouraged you to be more adventurous, more open and obvious in your attempts to pull him down to your level, to crack his carapace of unnecessary complacency and self-righteousness. You weren’t interested in continuous harassment: you just wanted some kind of response from him. In the end, one Friday evening, you decided to force the issue. When he came back from work, he found you lying, fully stretched, on his bed. You eyed one another, expressionless, saying nothing. He cracked. ‘Get off my bed.’ The others watched. You said nothing and he repeated it. ‘No’, you said. ‘I quite like it here, it makes a change.’ ‘Get off.’ ‘No, I’m OK here.’

 

Negotiation had failed. It was time to get physical. He tried to pull you off by one arm. You held onto the other side of the bed. This raised the risk of the whole bed becoming unmade and ending up on the floor. He stopped pulling, stood and looked at you for a while, working out his next move. Having committed himself publicly, he had to continue, though you were both quite sure that this situation wouldn’t lead to anything remotely like a fight. Gillard decided to put one foot on your chest, followed by the other one, so that he was actually standing on you. This made it impossible to get off the bed, even if you’d wanted to. He realised this and went back to pulling you off, this time by one leg. By this stage, you decided to surrender. You didn’t want it to get any rougher and thought the point had been made. He’d been forced to open up, to make some kind of public response, to show that he was as feebly human as the rest of you. You went quietly back to your end of the room. None of the observers was chuckling or gloating, and I can’t now recall that the incident was ever mentioned again. Had it been worth the effort? It didn’t really matter. Everyone understood the nature and point of what had taken place - except, possibly, for him.