Chapter Two
Teens to Early Twenties
1953 -- 1961
About travelling on the thumb:
On Christmas morning 1956 I woke to find a brand new beautiful electric blue full size Triumph Sports bicycle in the living room. I hope my parents (and my Gran, who had probably contributed several weeks worth of her pension towards the bike) enjoyed the giving as much as I enjoyed receiving, and I was out of the house and a mile along the Great North Road before I realised that it was raining.
Most weekends I would call on my friend Peter and we would head out, often at random, and ride until dark. A typical day would see us covering 60 to 80 miles. We did not ride at the speed of serious cycling clubs, who often passed us easily, but we would turn down any road which looked vaguely interesting. We would sometimes take a break at Lindholme RAF station, where if we were lucky we would see the Lancaster bombers take off or land; sometimes a Spitfire or Hurricane would arrive on a visit. At times when Peter had other plans I was happy to go off on my own, often coming home early in the morning with my leg muscles on fire and the last dregs of energy used up by pushing my bike up the path to our back door.
One Saturday morning Peter arrived shortly after breakfast, but as I went to get my bicycle he said “Leave the bikes. Something different today.” We walked up to the A1, the Great North Road which since Roman times had been the backbone of north-south English commerce. We walked along the shoulder for a few yards and Peter said “Watch this!” He turned to face oncoming traffic and raised his left arm with the thumb held up high. I had no idea what he was trying to do. Almost immediately a small car pulled onto the shoulder and Peter called me to follow him as he ran to the car. Two minutes later we were riding along with a complete stranger towards Wakefield, and I was sitting in the back, stunned. We walked around the town for a few hours and then thumbed a lift back to Doncaster. That day changed my life in ways I could not have imagined.
At the Army Surplus store in Doncaster I bought a steel-framed backpack, a cheap sleeping bag, a very small tent, an alcohol-burning stove and an all purpose frying/boiling/cooking pan. I now had the means of staying overnight, when necessary, with a warm, dry place to sleep, and the necessary gear to brew up a cup of tea anywhere at any time. The whole package cost me close to £1, which came from money I was saving to buy a small motor for a model plane I had built.
Hitch-hiking around England was far more for me than simply a lesson in Geography. Standing by the side of the road, any road, my backpack holding all I needed, gave me a feeling of freedom such as I’d never known. I was probably closer to contentment than I’d ever been. The shadows which I’d carried at the back of my mind since I was a small child began to recede. I would sometimes find myself walking along the side of the road oblivious to the fact that a car had stopped to pick me up until the driver sounded his horn to wake me from my reveries.
As I gained experience I became less fussy about where I slept. A haystack, a barn, a hollow in a hedgerow if the climate allowed; I once spent a rainy night in a recently vacated chicken coop in a deserted allotment garden. I especially enjoyed walking the back roads at night and rarely stuck up my thumb on such occasions. There was a strange sweet melancholy about these times that I’d never known before and would not find again. I found that I could manage very well on little or no sleep; sometimes as the sun touched the horizon and the dawn chorus began its serenade to morning, I would find a comfortable spot and doze for an hour or so. This was possibly the origin of my many years of insomnia and shallow sleep, but even if I had known that this would happen I would not have given up my midnight walks. It was rather ironic that when I finally found a way to step out from my shadows it would be in the middle of the night.
And then, after two or three all-night walks, one night became very special.
I don’t even remember where I was that night, nor where I had come from. I stopped my lorry-driving friend and climbed down from his cab at dusk, the red sky at the horizon promising a good day tomorrow. I sat on the ground at the side of the road, took the spirit stove from my backpack, poured in a couple of teaspoons of methyl alcohol, lit the tiny blue flame and made tea. I thought I should start searching for a place to sleep; since the night promised fair weather, any hollow place under a hedge would do. But that night, the weather was fair, I wasn’t tired and it seemed a perfect opportunity for a midnight walk. I knew that there was a much lower chance of a ride when thumbing at night, but I didn’t care. In fact I didn’t even want a ride. I wanted to walk through the night. I re-packed my backpack and set out by the side of the road. I didn’t know where I was, nor where the road led; I didn’t care about that, either.
I had a small flashlight with which to follow the kerb when the light failed completely, but the moon was bright, and almost full, so would probably provide enough light for my purposes; and then I looked at the sky, and what I saw there staggered me so much that I almost fell down. I saw the stars.
I’d never really looked at the stars. If I looked up at the sky at all it was in daylight, or in a light-polluted city, or under wall-to-wall cloud. I knew, if I stopped to think about it, that we were on a tiny ball of rock and water spinning around a no-account little sun situated way out on the arm of a spiral galaxy so far from the center of the universe that it could only be measured in light years.
I was miles away from any source of light pollution looking up at a cloudless sky in the middle of the night. There were millions of stars. This was no chart from the Physics lab showing the major constellations. This sky was full of stars. It was a field of stars, so close to one another that there seemed to be no space between them. And as I gazed at the heavens a feeling like nothing I’d ever experienced came over me, and I stood there in wonder for a long time.
Looking back on that magical night I think that for a small instant I was allowed to touch Nirvana, the state of mind sought by spiritual men of many faiths. For the first time in my life I felt an inner peace, a contentment, that drained all doubt out of me. I saw that my life was a spiritual journey on which I had barely started. I was truly a small child, innocent, curious, unafraid, for I knew that there was a power which would always be with me to see me onto the right path and guide me through my journey. I never realised just how sad was the life I had been living until I was given this brief moment of pure untainted joy.
I came to the top of a hill, and looking down along the road before me I saw a small town asleep. I had come some distance during my dream, and stood on the top of a nameless hill, looking down a nameless road to a nameless town, and I wept for the ecstasy that I’d briefly felt and which was now once more beyond my reach.
I took many midnight walks and even tried to find that same hill on that same road, but without success. On clear, cloudless nights I was always aware of the stars, and sometimes would lie on my back by the side of the road, lost in the starlight.
When I qualified for a place at Leeds University in 1959 I packed away my gear and stored my backpack in the attic. I didn’t expect to have much use for it any longer. I was wrong.
About Girls:
Unlike my previous schools Grammar School was co-ed. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by girls. I loved them; I hated them; I was terrified of them; I was fascinated by them; I was tremendously attracted to them; I was totally repulsed by them. But mostly I did not understand them. To be in close contact with a girl could cause me to break out in a sweat and have my tongue swell to a size which made speech impossible.
In my early teens I was unbelievably ignorant of the ‘facts of life’. I knew the very basic ‘facts’ of the biological process, but even for those my source of information was so suspect that it could not be trusted. I hesitated to ask for clarification and in retrospect I see how that would have been a complete waste of time since I’m sure my peers were at least as ignorant as I. I could not ask a teacher, or any relative, and the idea of asking my father for information or advice on anything was never a realistic possibility.
So I moved through my school years with powerful but ambivalent feelings towards the girls with whom I shared classes, and the few girls who expressed any interest in me found their advances ignored, mainly because I had no idea how to respond to them. In the end this was the best possible outcome for these girls, as I would have made a pathetic boyfriend.
About Grammar School:
At fifteen the main focus in my life was school. I remained true to my vow to spend as little of my life as possible in Doncaster, and still firmly believed that the way out was by means of education. I took my schooling for granted, and only realised later how much I owed to the Education Act of 1947, which had opened the door to Grammar School and University. So I paid close attention to my teachers even in subjects such as Latin, History, French and German classes which I felt would serve me poorly or not at all in finding and keeping a job. (I would later come to regret that I had not paid more attention to my French lessons).
I found schoolwork easy. My fellow students would arrive at school early to compare homework notes usually followed by complaints about how much time it had taken them to solve some maths problem or work on a translation from German. I would join in these sessions even if I’d finished the Maths homework in ten minutes and the German translation in fifteen. It was very important to me to ‘fit in’, to be ‘accepted’.
I considered most of my teachers to be world class losers (‘those who can, do; those who can’t, teach’?) but a major exception to my lack of respect for them was my Physics teacher, “Deadshot”, so called for his accuracy with the chalk eraser when aimed at a student who was giving less than total attention to the blackboard. I loved Physics, most of which was obvious to me. While Deadshot struggled to instill Newton’s Laws of Motion into resistant brains, I though I could have come up with these laws on my own as a rainy Sunday afternoon diversion.
A strange incident occurred one afternoon in Biology class. We were studying circulation of the blood in the human body, a subject which I found interesting, though I still spent more time doodling in my notebook than looking at the blackboard. The whole thing was, once again, absurdly simple to understand. The blood gets pumped by the heart which is, not surprisingly, a pump doing what pumps do, round the lungs, picks up oxygen. Tubes go here, tubes go there, red and blue tubes everywhere (I liked the sound of that and wrote it down). A bright six year old could understand it. Then without any warning my stomach heaved, and I tasted the school dinner I’d eaten an hour ago; it tasted no better the second time around; then again, and the half digested dinner was in my mouth. I just made it to the corridor and threw up the dinner then added my breakfast. I felt dizzy and nauseous and staggered out of the building to sit under a tree at the edge of the soccer field. A young girl from my class came looking for me as she had seen me leave class and thought I might need help – which I thought was one of the sweetest things that had ever happened to me and I fell in love with her on the spot. Fortunately for her all I said was “thank you, that was very kind,” and left it there.
I did not understand what had happened to me or why, and in the end put it down to a particularly nasty school dinner; but it could not be mere co-incidence that the episode marked the start of a squeamishness which would haunt me for the best part of the next forty years. I developed a terror of everything medical, causing me to faint at the mere thought of a hypodermic needle and turned me into a shivering wreck simply by having to step into a doctor’s surgery or a hospital lobby. When a later biology lesson involved the dissection of a mouse I hid. When the class cut open sheep’s eyeballs I simply left school for the day. Apparently nobody missed me.
About the Sixth Form:
I now studied Physics, Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, also known as Theoretical Mechanics. All were harder at this level; the days of simple schoolwork and easy homework were definitely over. My Pure Maths teacher, who we called Pansy, though I have no idea whether that was really her name, was another capable teacher. I was sometimes hard pressed to keep up with her tough schedule but when exams rolled around the hard work paid off. With her classes plus the extra tuition she had given my exam results earned me a County Exhibition Scholarship worth £250 a year. This would pay tuition plus board and lodging, leaving little for anything else, and I had already realised that holidays would be used for seasonal jobs to put a few pounds into my bank account so that I could afford to buy course books and, much more importantly, stand my rounds in the inevitable student drinking which I knew was in store. I had also started smoking the previous year, but cigarettes in 1959 were not a high budget item.
I applied for admission to Universities at Leeds, Sheffield, Leicester and Manchester and was offered places at the first three. I chose Leeds for its excellent reputation in Physics, even though it meant more time spent in the North of England. At Mum’s urging Dad borrowed a car from a friend and drove me to Leeds, dropping me at the student union building. Goodbye, Doncaster. I was gone.
About University:
Standing outside the student union building in September 1959 was a heady experience; I was excited to be at the start of what I knew would be a pivotal period in my life. I was one of the first sons of a coal miner to go to Leeds University, and I knew that my fellow students would be a different kind of animal from the crowd I was used to.
Inside the Student Union I signed up for membership, got my photo-ID card and wandered around the stalls which had been set up by various societies. I joined the Judo Club and the Debating Society, picked up literature from various others, and made my way out to find a bus which would take me to my first lodgings – or ‘digs’ as they were known to the students.
I knew that I would be sharing digs with another first year student who was studying bacteriology. I feared that we would have so little in common we could not get along, and I knocked at the door with more than a little trepidation. The landlady took my small suitcase and showed me to the bedroom which I would be sharing with the bacteriologist, who was waiting to meet me in the front parlour.
I opened the door and stepped into the parlour. The young man inside was leaning against the fireplace mantel, puffing on a pipe, which he took out of his mouth as I came in. “Oh God”, I thought, “He’s about to say something witty in Latin or Greek.” He said “How do, Barry. I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to find the local boozer (pub), have you?” I said “No, but it can’t be far. Let’s go look for it.” And so started a friendship which would span two continents and five decades.
The first weeks at Leeds were exciting and full. Things I’d worried about didn’t happen, while good things which I’d not expected happened almost daily. In particular I’d been worried that I would have a hard time making friends and end up a lonely student with nothing in his life but hard grind. I was prepared for this, but not a bit disappointed when it didn’t happen. I think that a good 90% of new students were so eagerly looking to make new friends that it was impossible not to find them.
At the Physics mixer we were seated according to no known pattern to be served rubber chicken and cheap wine. I found myself at a six-seat table with five other young men, four of whom would end up, along with my bacteriologist roomie, as the best friends I had ever known or would ever know. They were Bert, Henry, Nipper, or just Nip, and Sam, none of whom used their real names. I introduced myself as Barry, but when I confessed that Barry was my name the others refused to acknowledge it, so I went by the nickname I’d had all the way from primary school: I was Daz.
We were firm friends before the dinner was over. We left together and walked and talked our way over Woodhouse Moor until the early hours of the following morning, then arranged to meet in the Student Union the next day. I showed up with my roomie, the bacteriologist, who was allowed to remain Chris, since we didn’t already have one.
About Studying vs. Hitch-hiking:
From the start I was disappointed with the quality of instruction at Leeds; I’d expected to sit at the feet of great men of science and learn from minds at the cutting edge of Physics but the professors were an uninspiring collection, showing little energy or enthusiasm for their disciplines and I quickly became bored.
At an early morning maths lecture the professor was droning on, scratching numbers on the blackboard and had not once looked at the class. Bert suggested that we should all strip naked and shout ‘Hey, professor’ to see if he noticed anything when he turned around, but I had a better idea. I had a copy of the ‘Telegraph’ and I used the middle pages to make a huge paper airplane which I launched from the back row. The plane flew perfectly and circled round between the prof’s head and the blackboard. He jumped like a scalded kangaroo and turned on the class shouting “Who is responsible for this childish prank?” I stood up and told him “Sir, I cannot tell a lie. It was him,” pointing to Bert, who stood up and pointed at Sam, saying “No, he did it.” Sam jumped up and started crying. “I always get the blame! It wasn’t me!” he sobbed. The prof stamped his feet and stormed out. The other students were not too happy with us, but we all left together.
At the Union lounge my new friends and I sat around drinking coke and determined that none of us would be returning to that Maths class, as we could work much more effectively in private study with the appropriate books. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end of classroom study for me. I finished my coke and announced: “I’m off to London. Who’s coming with me?”
With no takers, I headed for the Doncaster road, and arrived home at one p.m. Dad was working the night shift so he was upstairs sleeping. Mum and I decided he would not enjoy being disturbed and left him to his slumbers. I picked up my backpack which still contained the gear from my last excursion, and Mum made me some jam sandwiches. My wonderful grandmother had been saving up my pocket money (she had always provided half my weekly stipend out of her pension) and gave me five half crowns. (A half-crown was worth two shillings and six pence, about fifty cents in 1959). This was more money than I’d ever had in my pocket, and ensured that I would not go hungry on this trip. A Transport Café, where the lorry drivers ate, would supply a full English breakfast of sausage, eggs, French fries and baked beans, a thick slice of toast and butter, with a mug of tea the size of a small bucket -- which they would often top up free – all for one shilling and sixpence, and a meal like that would usually see me through the day. I kissed and hugged my two earth angels and was on the A1 heading south by half past two.
At about six p.m. my ride dropped me south of Peterborough, about half way to London. Being late in October the daylight was already fading fast and a cold wind was coming in from the north-east. I had on a heavy wool sweater, knitted by my Mum, and a cotton jacket to keep out the wind, plus a long University scarf to wrap around my neck (and head if needed). The colourful scarf was also useful to help me persuade approaching drivers to give me a ride. Despite the threat of bad weather I’d already pretty much decided to walk through the night, and being on the A1 with twenty-four hour traffic, I could always change my mind and stick up a thumb.
I circled the roundabout (traffic circle) at which I’d been dropped, and took the sign reading ‘A1 London and the South’. As I put my feet on the southbound road a great flood of nervous tension which I had not even known I was carrying, began to ebb away from me. I took a deep breath of the cold night air, and wondered what on earth I had been so stressed about. The answer, when it came, stunned me.
I did not love Physics. I didn’t even like it much. The same for maths, which was no more than something I needed for my physics studies. I’d convinced myself that I had a deep affinity for these subjects but deep down inside I think I’d known for a long time that this was not so. This convenient fiction had eased my passage through grammar school and played a very important role in my Great Escape plan – I could not have studied so hard at subjects which I did not enjoy -- but it was based on a lie. What could I do with a Physics degree? Teach? I would sooner join my father, dig coal and breed grandchildren for my Mum to spoil.
I was facing a serious dilemma. What should I do next? With nine CGEs at O-level and three more at advanced level I was eminently employable, but how would I go about finding a job? I had no idea where to start. It would probably be best to quit university before I was in too deep. I’d have to give back my grant money, which meant finding a paying job a.s.a.p. But where could I live? Going back to Doncaster, living at my Dad’s house, was unthinkable. I could already hear him crowing ‘I told you so.’ I came to a roundabout and chose the London exit, noting that I had walked close to twelve miles. My watch said 2 a.m. I didn’t have an answer to my predicament, nor did I know how to go about solving it. Perhaps my new friends could help; they were an exceptionally bright bunch, and I could certainly give it a try. Maybe the best thing might be to continue as normal for the present, plodding on towards a degree until I could come to grips with the problem. I had no scruples about such a course of action and it could be a really good year: I would be footloose and fancy free, not caring whether I passed the end of year exams or not; indeed, it would be not, for I had no intention of continuing the charade for a second year.
I noticed that the wind was now blowing so hard that I had to lean into it to remain standing; I also noticed that it was raining heavily and I was soaked to the skin. I considered digging out my poncho, buried deep in my backpack but decided it was already too late; it was one thing to be an avid hitch hiker but to go on now would make me a complete idiot: my excursion had come to an abrupt end. I came to another roundabout, but ignored it. I crossed the road and stuck up my thumb to a heavy truck which was grinding up the gears as it left the roundabout. I stepped into his headlights to make sure that the driver got a good look at my University scarf. He pulled over as I’d hoped he would and I headed back to Leeds.
I jumped down from my ride in Headingly, a Leeds suburb, took a bus back to my digs to catch up on a little sleep and find some dry clothes and bumped into an angry landlady on the stairs. She was upset about cooking my evening meal when at least twice a week I would fail to show up to eat it. I asked why that was a problem since she still got paid for cooking the meal even if it went directly into the garbage or to the dog’s bowl, thereby demonstrating how ignorant, ill-mannered and just plain stupid a nineteen year old male can be when he tried really hard. She said that she was sick of not knowing where I was or when I might be back, and that her contract with the University implied an in loco parentis obligation to ‘keep an eye’ on me. Since I was determined to make that impossible she would be obliged if I would start looking for new accommodation. I asked if it was OK for me to get a couple of hours sleep first, and she stormed off. This was the second digs I’d been kicked out of, and I would shortly be called before the Lodgings Warden to explain what was going on.
After two hours sleep I headed for the Union Lounge, in which three tables were now in use for a never-ending bridge tournament. Bert and Nipper were involved in a game, Sam was reading the local paper and Henry entered when I did. They had thought I was joking about a trip to London, and when I explained about hitch hiking they were all anxious to come with me next time I got a yearning for the open road. I got a coffee and decided not to bring up my reservations regarding ongoing studies. Not there, and not then.
About Drinking:
I tasted my first pint of Tetley’s English Bitter Ale at seventeen. My friend Peter and I stood outside a Doncaster pub for ten minutes gathering our nerve for the incursion since the legal drinking age was 18 and we were both a year short. We needn’t have worried. The innkeeper welcomed us to the bar with a big smile and a cheerful “What’ll it be, lads?” We took our pints to a booth and raised our glasses to ‘the first, but not the last’. It was awful. It tasted so bad that I considered the possibility that the landlord was playing a joke on us, though I shuddered to think what he might have used to top up our tankards. Peter took a big drink, licked his lips and grinned. “Good stuff!” he said, and took another great gulp. “Damn right!” I replied and followed suit wondering whether Peter was also lying. We didn’t stay for a second pint. I did not acquire a taste for beer until the late sixties, ten years later, but that was after I had downed many more pints.
Drinking played a huge role in University life, and was only limited by our dismal financial status. All of us were children of the working class, and, knowing how tight were our parent’s budgets none of us were willing to ask them for money, so a night’s drinking was usually limited to three or four rounds, often less.
Some people become violent when drunk, others become friendly and soporific. I became moody and befuddled. A couple of pints of beer would usually help my insomnia, even though traditional wisdom suggested the opposite, but the sleep was never restful. My dreams were often frightening, and the feeling could sometimes follow me into my waking day. With or without alcohol sleep was seldom restful. Getting up in the morning was becoming increasingly difficult and I’d often stay in bed until eleven o’clock or even noon. My friends attended lectures and brought me notes. Sam did a good job of imitating my voice in those lectures which still held a roll call, believing as we all did that poor attendance could cause our grants to be cancelled.
With my friends I was taciturn and distant.
Bert was the first to confront me. After a night out – usually at a pub, but sometimes a movie or even a University Hop – we would wander across Woodhouse Moor to a coffee bar called The Piazza, where we would nurse a frothy coffee or two and solve all of the philosophical problems of 1959 Britain. Bert stopped me on the moor, and told the others we’d catch up later. He didn’t even need to ask the question. I blurted out the whole thing. He listened carefully, then said: “I think we’re all feeling a bit like that, Daz. We’re not ready to throw in the towel yet maybe, but we’re starting to think that three years is a lot to devote to a qualification that won’t make a smidgeon of difference to whatever we end up doing for a living. I doubt that any of us plan on teaching, and I don’t think we want to do research into a bigger and better bomb either. Truth is, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.
“But why sweat it, Daz? What you’ve decided to do is absolutely the best thing. Enjoy your year. Goof off. Hitch-hike to the Orkney Islands. Write shitty letters to the Editor of the London Times. Get thrown out of the Debating Society for obscene language. Do things that you’ll never have a chance to do if you don’t do them now. I have a sneaking feeling that when we all see what fun you’re having we’ll more often that not come with you.”
If we weren’t all terrified of being taken for homosexuals I would have hugged him.
Next day we met up as usual and I announced that we were going out for a Chinese meal and then for a drink or two at the Union Pub, and it was all on me. I’d been to the university library and sold back the books I’d recently bought there. The librarian agreed that they didn’t look any worse for wear than when I’d bought them and gave me back £10 of the ₤12 I’d paid.
At Christmas break Bert and I found work as Porters at Leeds Central Railway Station, helping with the mountains of mail which arrived each day. We worked the night shift, often with extra hours added to the normal eight. The work was not demanding, mostly consisting of off-loading sacks from an incoming train, sorting destinations and loading sacks onto the outgoing train. The full-time porters passed most of the hard physical work to the temps and showed up on the platforms only when the London express trains came in loaded with returning businessmen, many of whom had passed their time on the journey at the train’s bar. These men gave very generous tips for the simple act of carrying their small baggage to the taxi ranks; folding money was often involved, but the temps always found themselves diverted to ‘urgent’ work elsewhere in the station. We didn’t really mind; the work was easy and the pay was good.
One night a crate of single-malt whiskey arrived on a train from Scotland, and was accidentally dropped on the platform. The young porters were so clumsy that the crate was accidentally dropped four times at which point the sound of breaking glass was heard. Fortunately there were six porters close by who by a stroke of luck all happened to be carrying their coffee mugs, so by the time the