NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
By the time the great sponsored walk of thousands was supposed to be
taking place, I had become so demoralized by my unexpected descent into
Norfolk Terrace, that I stopped going to the Duke Street office
altogether. Indeed, I had already allowed the whole National
Hostel Fund dream to die out of my mind. I never returned to 19
Duke Street, not even to pick up what few possessions I had accumulated
there. I certainly didn't pay any outstanding bills, such as the
telephone bill, or have any further contact with Barry Biven. In
short, I had done the old disappearing trick, yet again. As to
the great sponsored walk, who knows what happened about that? Did
thousands turn up in Hyde Park? Did anyone
turn up? If so, there must have been chaos, confusion and
bewilderment when the Great Leader failed to materialize. Was any
money raised? If so, where did it go? Curiously, I believe
this may be the first time I've ever wondered! |
| Although neither Barry
Biven nor any of my creditors tracked me down to Norfolk Terrace, a few
of my young female followers certainly did. During the few weeks
I was there, three or four of them turned up with various reasons as to
why they were desperate for somewhere to kip for the night, but it was
obvious in every case that what they were really desperate for were the
usual all-night discussions about the meaning of life - their lives, that is. I was
by now in no mood for this sort of thing and went to town on their
heads with knives of negativity rather than bandages of reassurance.
I conducted this spiteful surgery while lying in bed.
Eventually, the victims would fall asleep on the floor. I
seem to remember that the next morning, they left in a worse state of
mind than than when they had arrived, but the monkey-business on the
fire escape (see previous chapter) was probably a contributory factor.
"Let me out of this God-forsaken hole!" one of them yelled when
the door jammed. A couple of people who reckon to know the young
female mind have stated categorically that these girls must have gone
there looking for something other than psychotherapy. However,
the startling results of earlier exploratory triflings with that very
same hope had taught me to suppress, with some difficulty, all thoughts
of acting upon it. In any case, I'm not sure that the female
university student of that particular type in those years
has any particularly close relative today (correct me if I'm wrong), so you shouldn't claim to understand their motives unless you are well over 60 ! |
| Anyway, these unhappy anti-therapy sessions of the small
hours only added to my desire to escape Norfolk Terrace. That
anguished cry of "God-forsaken hole" was the last straw, and I decided
to forsake it too. I dossed around on people's floors, including
Angela's, until Christmas, then decided that the Brighton era was over,
as far as I was concerned. This feeling was exacerbated by the
fact that more and more of the people I had been accustomed to dropping
in on during my endless rounds of Brighton and Hove were themselves
disappearing. For example, many of the students had by now
graduated and returned home or gone on to other universities to do
higher degrees. |
| Those three extraordinary years in Brighton had
represented a kind of settling-down, albeit a crazy kind, and I was
brought to a very low ebb by the compulsion I now felt to move on.
I suppose I couldn't bear the thought of staying in the town
where I had rocketed to an insane height of delusional self-confidence
only to plummet back to earth for no very clear reason. But where
to go and what to do? Ann Hawkins, one of the Regency Square
girls with whom I had gone on that trip to Switzerland the previous
year (Chapter 65),
had moved to Leicester to do a post-graduate course, and had invited me
to stay with her and her parents over Christmas. So, thinking I
was saying goodbye to Brighton for good, I set out just before
Christmas to hitch to Leicester. I had nothing to take with me,
save for the ancient jumble tatters I was wearing and a wallet
presented to me by Angela on her return from Morocco several months
earlier. Whether or not I filled the wallet first by draining off
anything that may have been left in the National Hostel Fund bank
account, I can't remember. Nor can I remember if I went straight
to Leicester or stopped off for a few days in London. Anyway, I
turned up at Ann's flat just in time for the Christmas festivities,
laid on largely by Ann's parents. |
| On New year's Eve, though,
things started to go badly wrong. I was invited to the party at
Ann's college. It was pretty much like dozens of student parties
I had been to in Brighton, and I got just as drunk at this one as at
any of the others. The big difference was that I now felt a
complete nobody after the collapse of my largely imaginary empire in
Brighton, and I was very keen indeed to assert myself. This need
brought about a drunken resurgence of the brief extreme right-wing
sentiments of the Summer, but only because I thought that this was what
would cause most offence in this company. I remember that at one
stage I stood on a table and made a speech, Hitler-style, setting out
my plans for dealing with all 'chickenshit liberals'. This was
certainly not a new trick, but when I had occasionally done it at
Brighton parties it was done in the spirit of self-parody, to raise a
laugh and help the revels along, and it was taken in that spirit (it
was probably quite witty - I was capable of a species of wit when drunk).
On this occasion, however, the initial reaction of amusement on
the part of my audience infuriated me and I acted the part in earnest.
This caused some alarm and and I was coaxed off the table, only
to continue lurching around the place accusing everyone in my path of
the most unpardonable chickenshit liberalism, deserving the worst
imaginable retribution. Eventually I found myself gliding
smoothly across the room, feet well above the floor, towards the exit.
I had ignored or forgotten earlier information that some of those
at the party would be members of the rugby team. It was one such
who was now giving me a lift to the fresh air. My expulsion was
probably not as violent as it ought to have been, but it caused a lot
of merriment and cheering, which was worse. |
| When I got back to
Ann's flat, she was still at the party. I'm ashamed to say that I went
into her bedroom with a full pot of paint, which I threw over just
about everything, causing enormous damage. I then went to my room
and collapsed on the bed. When I'd recovered enough to get up the
following afternoon, I went to Ann feeling very remorseful and
even more fearful. "Oh, it was just one of those nights," she said
sweetly. "We all got up to some pretty appalling things last
night!" I spent a couple of days trying to clean her room up, but
a lot of things had been ruined. |
| This episode put me in an even
worse state of mind, and although I had not been invited to stay beyond
Christmas, I spent the first week of 1971 in bed doing absolutely
nothing, except to consume food, presumably provided by Anne. She
showed no sign whatsoever of being alarmed or irritated by this
behaviour. Perhaps because of that, rather than despite it, I
eventually felt obliged to go out and look for a job. The
employment boom was still not over, and it was as easy as ever to get a
job. I took the first one I saw advertised. It was in a
small factory that made parts for heavy machinery. That's to say,
they may have made some of the parts but claimed to have made all
of them. My job was to scrape the rust off parts - mostly huge
flywheels, as I remember - that had been salvaged from God-knows-where,
then make the pitted surfaces smooth again with metal-filler. I
then handed them over to the paint shop for re-spraying. It was
hard, dirty and choking work, but had the advantage of being one of
those jobs where you were the only one in the whole factory doing it,
and therefore king of your own little domain. |
| Pakistanis were
only just beginning to move into Leicester in significant numbers, and
were still a novelty in the factories, so they came in for quite a lot
of racial banter. They didn't like it, and I remember that there
was quite serious racial tension in that particular factory. I
was assigned a Pakistani assistant, but he seemed to have no English at
all, so it was easier to let him skive off nearly all the time, while I
did most of the work. The general opinion among the machine
operators was that I was letting the side down by accepting work like
that at all. The dirtiest and least skilled jobs ought to have
been the sole province of the 'Pakis' in their opinion. As they
were obviously not going to let this drop, I became less and less keen
on going to work in the mornings, and eventually stopped bothering.
I don't think the job could have lasted for more than about six
weeks, as I was aimlessly wandering the streets on the day that decimal
currency was introduced, sometime in February. I also associate
that event with slush on the pavements and power cuts caused by the
beginnings of the great industrial unrest that was to be a feature of
the whole of the 1970s. |
| I still hung on at Ann's, and although
she continued to make no comment on the situation, and remained
delightfully cheerful and friendly, I felt that I ought at least to try
to get Social Security. Of course, a great drawback with the
almost total absence of unemployment was that if you decided to avoid
work and live off the State for a while, as I now felt like doing, you
came up against the Green Card system, as described in various earlier
chapters. Before you could collect your money each week you had
to see if the Labour Exchange had a job for you. They always had.
You took the green introductory card to the prospective employer.
If you returned from the interview with your card marked
'unsuitable', you'd probably be sent away again with another card.
Only if rejected by two or three employers in a row could you
sign as unemployed for that week. The Labour Exchanges had boxes
and boxes of green cards, each representing a vacancy, and it was
extremely difficult to persuade employers that you were not suitable.
Many tried and failed. Of course, if you first got a job,
then applied for help until getting your first pay packet, the system
was very generous, as described in relation to the same city five years
earlier, in Chapter 25. |
| The
green card I was given when I tried to sign on this time round was for
a job in some vast plant outside the city. When I arrived I was
challenged by a security guard on the gate. I showed him the
green card but he reacted as though I was trying to be funny. He
insisted, in a very rude fashion, that no-one could go through his gate
without a pass. Having walked a few miles to this place, I
naturally lost my temper, whereupon the uniformed gorilla threatened me
with violence. I marched back to the Labour Exchange and related
the incident to the clerk who had given me the card. He leaped to
his feet, turned scarlet and shrieked "How dare you come in here
looking like a scarecrow, telling me cock-and-bull stories about
security guards and expecting money from the taxpayer? Mow your
hair, shave off that beard, put on some clean clothes and go back there
for that job tomorrow. Get it into your head that the Sixties
ended a year ago!" It was that last remark that hit me more than
anything else this despicable specimen of clerkdom had uttered.
The Sixties were over! |