VT Coughtrey - Headrow Clothes (7)

NOTES	In the Autumn of 1966, following the unexpected meeting with Walter and consequent exchange of letters with my mother, things began to change for the worse. My landlady suddenly decided to sell the house in Avenue Hill and I couldn't spare valuable drinking time looking for another decent place, so I took the first thing I saw advertised. This was a bedsit in the Hyde Park area. I didn't bother to hire anyone to move my possessions. I left everything behind, except for a few items of clothing and a bag of political pamphlets.
	The house was owned by an Indian and occupied by himself and his large family. They were very recent immigrants and besides charging a higher rent for this one room than I had been paying for the self-contained flat, had a very un-English view of the tenant-landlord relationship. For example, if he noticed that your light was on later at night than he thought proper, the master of the house would let himself into your room to see what was going on. One night I was lying drunk on the floor when this happened. Upon entering the room he fired a barrage of angry questions. "Why is this light still on? What is the meaning of lying on the floor? Why are you still dressed?"
	Worse even than this, the only other tenant was a young female student who was determined to prove her liberal credentials by being as sympathetic and friendly as possible to these poor downtrodden immigrants, getting involved in their plans to bring relatives and friends into the country and inciting them to claim racial discrimination on various counts. This really annoyed me and when alone with her on one occasion, I'm afraid I made racial remarks designed to be as offensive as possible. Whereas she had merely been haughtily stand-offish towards me before this outburst, she now refused to speak to me at all, so sharing the tenants' kitchen with her was a tense experience.
	I don't think I lasted for more than about six weeks at that place, before moving to another bedsit in the same area, my fourth address in Leeds. This one was a tiny room in a gloomy, cavernous house largely unaltered since Victorian times, but the rent was only 30 bob (£1.50) a week. The landlady was a severe Irish woman who complained about anything she could think of, such as the condensation I caused by having a bath in the freezing bathroom, or the noise I made by inserting pennies too energetically into the gas meter (for the ancient gas fire). One one occasion, after subjecting me to a long moral harangue, she tried to evict me. This was for having a woman in my room. There had, of course, been no woman. What she had heard was the small radio I had bought to replace the television set left behind at Avenue Hill. When I eventually persuaded her of this, she relented concerning the eviction, contenting herself with a good telling-off for not asking permission to have a radio in the room.
	The miserable nature of my accommodation (which I somehow lacked the will to do anything about) was one of a number of factors that combined to produce an explosive situation. I was beginning to be dissatisfied with my job as it gradually dawned on me that the expansion of power and responsibility had now gone as far as it was going to. The collection, bagging, baling and selling of clips and waste paper, cleaning lavatories, filling fire buckets and being the boss of two cleaners were set to remain the sum of my jurisdiction. The rats, alive and dead, were beginning to get on my nerves and the worsening fumes from the boiler in the unventilated cellar were now causing me to doze at my desk, so I was falling behind with all my duties and losing my erstwhile excellent reputation. Furthermore, I had at last accepted that the girls were only teasing - there was no chance in hell of ever interesting any of them in anything more than footsie under the table (and even that was becoming a rare event). As described in Chapter 39 I had tasted a little involvement, however pathetic, in direct political action and it whetted my appetite, but the scope for this in Leeds was very limited, to say the least. The frustrating feeling grew that there were barricades to be manned, but not here.
	In view of all this it was unfortunate that it was now past the season for day trips at weekends, because that meant a return to spending most of my time, when not at work, in the pubs. Tetley's mild, in ever increasing quantities, became an indispensable solace. Of course, I always tried to capture the interest of any unattached women I came across in pubs. I succeeded on only two occasions, when a drunken woman of about 60 offered a quick fling in an alleyway for ten bob (50 pence), and a young alcoholic propositioned me while extraordinary skeins of snot poured from her nose into her beer. I rejected both of them.
I hesitated over whether to include this disgraceful chapter, especially as I've detested yobs and antisocial behviour with a passion for the past 40 years or more, but it seemed dishonest to leave it out.	I probably resumed the habit of going for a vindaloo (or two) when the pubs had shut, but I tended not go home straight away afterwards. Instead, I took to roaming the streets shouting raucously and occasionally smashing windows or public telephones. In other words, I was the first yob. And being the first, I roamed alone, unlike those who took up the profession later. (For the record, I have long since found all such behaviour utterly appalling and detest all yobs with a passion). After enough alcohol, I became immensely strong, in view of my slight build. On one occasion, in the city centre, I picked up a metal dustbin full of rubbish with one hand, swung it round my head a few times and flung it into the middle of a main road. By sheer luck, it failed to hit any vehicle. Sometimes I went on the rampage all night, as on the occasion when I staggered from the city centre all the way to Leeds-Bradford airport, leaving an 8-mile trail of destruction behind me.
	The extraordinary thing is that, although this went on intermitently for about six months, the police only appeared twice. The first occasion was on Christmas Eve 1966, when they interrupted my efforts to destroy the Christmas tree in City Square. They threw me into a police van and were about to give me some rough treatment when I stopped them in their tracks by some quick thinking, despite being very drunk. You may remember that over a year earlier I had had been given a lift by a magistrate's daughter to my new bedsit. I now claimed to be her boyfriend, naming her and even throwing in a description to back up this preposterous lie. Ridiculous though it may seem, this had a big impact on these simple Mr Plods, and they immediately changed their behaviour towards me. Nevertheless, they put me in a police cell over Christmas. I was relieved to find that the magistrate of my acquaintance was not on the bench when I appeared in court. I was fined £5.
	In the new year, I carried on much as before, until the second intervention by the police. It was Easter 1967 and I had (unaccountably, in view of my unsatisfactory encounter with them - see Chapter 39) arranged to go to a Peace Pledge Union conference in Sheffield. I couldn't find the venue, so went on a pub crawl instead. It ended with my kicking in the plate glass window of a shop, knowing a policeman was watching me, but confident of being able to outrun any wheezy copper. I was an awesomely fast sprinter, especially when drunk. What I had not bargained for was the rather bad cuts I had sustained on my ankle, which slowed me down enough for the rozzer to collar me. At the police station I launched into an anarchist diatribe that was only halted by the action of the duty sergeant, who all but lifted me off my feet by the lapels and offered to alter my face. I demanded treatment for my foot, which was leaving a trail of blood, but they only laughed and flung me in a cell. In court the next day, the policeman giving evidence said that I had resolutely refused medical treatment for my foot. But his most dramatic evidence was that pacifist literature had been found on my person. Despite this shocking revelation, and notwithstanding my previous conviction, I again got off with a £5 fine.
	I reported all this to the girls at the factory, expecting that they would be duly impressed. Well, they were, and expressed contempt of the police. Even so, their sexual desire for me remained curiously at an under-the-table, foot-fun level, strictly lunch times only.
	Suddenly, I made a momentous plan for the approaching long weekend of the Whitsun Bank Holiday, at the end of May. I decided to write again to my mother, this time inviting myself to Barnet to stay with her and my grandmother for a couple of days. At the same time, I wrote to Walter, inviting him to come up to Leeds for the Church Fenton air show on the Saturday, with the idea of returning with him to Barnet the following day. My mother wrote back, seemingly quite enthusiastic about the prospect of my visit, and Walter readily agreed to come up for the air show.
	But no sooner had this all been arranged, than my landlady again called me into her room. "The police have been here, asking for you. You can pack your bags and get out of here within the week." I had no idea why they should be after me, as I'd actually done nothing wrong since the court appearance back at Easter, but in my typically submissive way (when sober) I agreed to leave without a word of protest. I suppose the police were simply wanting to interview me as a suspect in relation to some incident of criminal damage, on the grounds that that I was already known to them in that connection. Anyway, they didn't return during the subsequent few days before I left the address.
	Instead of quickly writing to Walter and my mother (none of us had a phone) to cancel the plans, I allowed things to go ahead and said nothing. When Walter arrived at Leeds City station I sprang it on him that I was going to have to vacate the bedsit at the same time as leaving with him for Barnet and, furthermore, had nowhere to return to. We went to the air show and very much enjoyed it, then Walter came back with me to the room and must have stayed overnight. I don't know how we got away with that. The next morning - Sunday - he helped me pack as much as I could cram into the available bags (he had some spare ones with him, as usual).
	Once again leaving behind any possessions that couldn't be carried, I made my way with Walter to the station. As the London-bound train pulled out, I suspected I wouldn't be seeing Leeds again for a while, if ever.