Mr Nice: an autobiography (8 page)

On June 11th, 1965, a bunch of us went up to London to attend Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall. This was a modern poetry conference featuring Allen Ginsberg,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Esam, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, and other notables. It turned out to be the largest audience ever assembled to hear poetry in this country and the first genuine large-scale ‘happening’. Peace and love, getting stoned and making love. A new generation was taking over. I wanted to be part of it.

I spent Oxford’s very long vacations in filthy clothes hitchhiking fairly randomly around Great Britain and Europe in the belief that I was somehow ‘On the Road’. My European travels included a visit to Copenhagen, where I ran out of money. Luckily, I had made friends with members of a Danish rock-and-roll group, who very kindly allowed me to sing with them on a few occasions, thereby earning enough to leave the country. The route back to the United Kingdom took me through Hamburg, where my friend Hamilton McMillan lived. Mac had given me his address, and I telephoned him from a sordid bar in the Reeperbahn. I was looking for the Star Club, where the Beatles had been discovered. Mac was delighted to hear from me, insisted I stay a few nights at his home, and came to pick me up.

Mac assumed that I would be unlikely to be mistaken for a city gent, but even he was noticeably shocked at my outrageous, dishevelled, unkempt, long-haired, dirty appearance. He was also slightly disconcerted by the ever-increasing crowds of curious and intrigued Hamburgers who were staring fixedly at the degenerate specimen of humanity I presented. The possible reception that we both might encounter at his parents’ home was filling Mac with understandable apprehension. We sat down for a few beers and his fears gradually lifted. He felt confident that after seeing me, his parents would, at least, refrain from nagging him about his lamb-chop sideburns. In fact, his parents turned out to be the most accommodating and generous hosts, although a long hot bath and a quick laundering of the dirtiest of my clothes had no doubt helped. Mac and I had a great time. He loved to display my shoulder-length hair to
his friends, and I loved to be so displayed. We cemented our friendship and remained very good friends until British Intelligence and Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise terminated our relationship.

For a period of about two weeks I slept rough outside the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. This meant that I was invariably first in the queue when the box office opened to sell the forty tickets it withheld until the day of performance. I would buy four tickets, the maximum that could be sold to any one person. One ticket was kept for my own use, as I had become quite a genuine Shakespeare fan by then, two would be sold at vastly inflated prices to American tourists, while one would be given, or sold at a very cheap price, to an attractive single female. She would, of course, be obliged by her ticket to sit next to me during the performance, and conversation was easy to start up. I wondered if other people played these kind of games.

During my hitch-hiking escapades, I picked up a varied assortment of ethnic rubbish, pretentious
objets d’art
, gimmicky knick-knacks, and other hippie trinkets with the intention of using them to decorate my college room. They included a 400-square-foot net used to protect fruit trees from birds, a road sign stating ‘Mind the Hose’, a very large Cézanne poster, and rolls of aluminium foil. I suspended the net from the room’s ceiling, papered the walls with aluminium foil, and nailed the Cézanne poster to the floor. Lamps made of orange-boxes containing low-wattage coloured bulbs were carefully placed in corners, and my newly acquired record player was set up with extension speakers dotted around the walls. All and sundry were welcome to visit my quarters and bring their friends, records, alcohol, and supplies of marijuana and hashish. The rooms rapidly became the location of a non-stop party, with music continually blaring and dense clouds of marijuana smoke clouding out of the door and windows. I dropped out completely from all college activities and would rarely
venture out of my room other than to eat lunch at George’s workers’ café in the market or dinner at the Moti Mahal in The High.

The fame of this dope-smoking haven, enshrined and protected by College and University, had spread far and wide. The occasional student visitor from the Sorbonne or Heidelberg would show up, as would the odd member of the embryonic London underground. Marty Langford, who was studying art, and a few other Kenfig Hill friends dropped in. Even John Esam, one of the beat poets who had performed at the Royal Albert Hall’s Wholly Communion, graced the premises with his presence. He turned up unannounced in my room and offered to sell me some LSD, which I had never heard of. Each dose was in the form of a drop absorbed by a sugar cube. The cost of each treated sugar cube was £3. John Esam told me that it was like hashish, but infinitely more powerful and not the least bit illegal. He was telling the truth on both counts. I purchased a few cubes and stored them away for use on another day. I made enquiries among my friends. A few had heard of LSD, but none had taken it nor knew anyone who had. It was all very mysterious. Someone said that LSD was like mescaline, which Aldous Huxley had written about. Someone else said that a Harvard scientist, Timothy Leary, had experimented with LSD and written about it.

About a week or so later, I was invited by Frances Lincoln, a vivacious Somerville student, to come to her rooms for tea. On the strangest of impulses, I decided that this would be an opportune moment to take one of the sugar cubes, and I ate one about an hour or so before my appointment. No discernible effect had occurred by the time I left Balliol, and when I reached Somerville I concluded that I must have been well and truly conned into the purchase of this so-called wonder drug. Halfway through eating my teacake, the effects suddenly hit me. The pictures on the wall came to life, the flowers in the vases breathed heavily and rhythmically, and
the Rolling Stones record that was being played sounded like a Handelian heavenly choir singing to the accompaniment of African tribal drumming. It was impossible to explain to Frances what was happening inside my head, but she was politely intrigued by my descriptions. When the four Beatles on the front of the album cover of
Please Please Me
jumped up and played, I said I ought to leave. Frances escorted me back to Balliol and left me at the front gate. I wandered around the quads and the Junior Common Room in a giggling stupor. Fellow students were used to seeing me in various states of intoxication, and I doubt if my condition occasioned any alarm. At about midnight, a full eight hours after ingesting the sugar cube, the effects wore off, and I went to bed.

The next few weeks, spent partly in Oxford and partly in Wales, were devoted to finishing off the sugar cubes. Several friends joined me in this experimentation. John Esam came again, and I purchased more sugar cubes. I took one which resulted in what came to be generally known as the ‘horrors’. These are extremely difficult to describe. Instead of finding the LSD experience an amusing, interesting, thought-provoking state of instant Zen, replete with benign and wondrous hallucinations, one finds it frightening and grave, and one experiences instant psychosis. Flowers no longer gently breathe. They turn into werewolves and bats. The hallucinations turn into menacing demons. It’s not funny, and I became uncharacteristically depressed and perturbed about the meaning of life, its futility, and my identity. Although the severe effects wore off after the usual time period, the problems they caused remained. I was convinced that the only way to resolve these problems was to take more LSD and try to come to grips with whatever was disturbing me. This didn’t work. The ‘horrors’ continued to manifest themselves in diverse forms. Between acid trips I read anything I thought remotely relevant to the LSD experience: Aldous Huxley’s
Heaven and Hell
,
Doors of Perception
, and
Island
; Evan Wentz’s translation of
The Tibetan Book of the
Dead
; Sydney Cohen’s
Drugs of Hallucination
; and Timothy Leary’s
The Psychedelic Experience
. None of these did anything to dispel the intense depression I was suffering. I became unusually introverted, morose, suicidal, and probably crazy. My miserable demeanour did nothing to deter people from maintaining the almost non-stop ‘happening’ at my college rooms, but it seemed to have less and less to do with me. I just sat discontentedly in the corner, occasionally smiling weakly at whoever came in.

In those days it was not, for some extraordinary reason, against college rules to possess an air-rifle. I did not have one myself, but there was one lying around in my room. One evening, alone in my room, I was leaning out of the window, pointing the air-rifle at passers-by in St Giles’ and yelling mindless platitudes at them. Most of those who noticed me simply ignored this puerile behaviour, but one man took particular exception. He too started yelling, saying that I had no idea what real war was like and that if I did find myself face to face with an enemy, I would be too scared to pull the trigger. I pulled the trigger. The rifle was not loaded, but the noise startled the man at whom it was carefully aimed. He set off in the direction of the Porter’s Lodge with the obvious intention of grassing me. I still possessed enough good sense to dash down to the cellars, run through them, and emerge into a remote area of the College grounds. The Dean was striding purposefully from the Porter’s Lodge. He saw me, and asked me to accompany him as there seemed to be some problem in the vicinity of my room. We both entered and beheld the air-rifle lying conspicuously on the floor. The Dean said that someone in the street had been shot at with this same air-rifle, and although I was clearly elsewhere and not responsible for this particular outrage, this was just one of a number of worrying instances concerning my room. He asked me to report to him in one hour.

After listening to a quick reprimand about the company I was keeping, I explained my feelings of futility and
depression and their likely cause, the still not illegal use of LSD. I brought up my total neglect of studies, but the Dean seemed completely unworried by my lack of academic progress and felt it important that I should not worry about this either. He insisted that I took off the last six weeks of that particular term, concentrate on some meaningful extracurricular work, and seriously consider a change of subject in which to take finals. He would sort things out with my tutors. The Dean had always been a keen supporter of the Dramatic Society and suggested that I re-involve myself with their activities.

I went to see John Minford to see if he knew of any openings in forthcoming drama productions. At the same time he was working on a treatment of Peter Weiss’s
Marat/Sade
. There weren’t any obvious parts for mind-blown Welsh hippies, but as virtually all the characters were lunatics, he was confident he could accommodate me. He gave me the part of The Singer, which entailed my looking stoned, unkempt, and menacing, and behaving like a sex maniac. I was required to sing four songs. Minford composed the music. Two were in the style of Elvis Presley and two in the style of the Rolling Stones. The part was tailor-made.

The final rehearsals and public performances took place at the Great Tithe Barn just outside Faringdon. Learning my lines, perfecting my performance, and travelling daily from Oxford to Faringdon took up many hours of each day. There was little time left for sitting around moping. Although a few of the cast cracked up under the strain of continually acting as if completely mad, I found that pretending to be crazy for much of the time prevented me from going insane the rest of the time. I ceased being morose, reverted to my previous heavy indulgences in sex, alcohol, and marijuana, and did not take LSD again for a number of years.

In the light of the Dean’s advice to me, a number of my friends had suggested that I consider switching from Physics
to either Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) or Philosophy, Physiology, and Psychology (PPP), paying particular attention to philosophy. I talked to the Dean about it and he arranged for me to speak with Alan Montefiore, a PPE tutor, who gave me a short reading list and asked me to write, before the end of term, an essay on the definition of ‘good’. Approximately eighteen hours of each of seven days were spent struggling through a series of texts in moral philosophy before I realised that I would neither be able to fully understand the subject nor be capable of contributing to it. Years later I found out that no one completely understood moral philosophy and that non-comprehension was by no means a bar to contribution. Sheepishly I attempted to explain this seemingly serious inability to Montefiore, who seemed confused by my problem but was also extremely kind and considerate. He offered to give his advice and assistance to me any time I thought I might need them. I didn’t change courses. I stuck with Physics.

I was elected to organise the entertainments for the forthcoming 700th anniversary Commemorative Ball. My primary duty was to engage groups to supply the musical entertainment. I had a budget of £1,000. The entertainment manager’s main goal was to try to spot talent likely to become famous within a short period of time and book them while they were still at a relatively low price. A daunting precedent had been set by Magdalen College a couple of years earlier. They had booked the Rolling Stones for a mere £100 just before they became superstars. My knowledge of pop music was then as good as anyone’s, and I booked the relatively unknown Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces for a mere pittance. Within weeks of being booked, they both had Number One hits. Their respective managers wanted to withdraw from the Balliol booking as this would clash with recently offered lucrative tours. Contractually they were obliged to appear and could be heavily sued for
not doing so. The agent suggested a solution: if I let the Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces off the hook, I could choose artists normally costing up to about £2,500 but would only have to pay the cheap prices agreed for the original two groups. I agreed. As a result we engaged the Kinks, the Fortunes, Them, and Alan Price, all of whom were already top names. There was still money left over from the original £1,000, so I engaged an Irish showband, a string quartet, and a professional all-in wrestling bout. On the night of the ball, I smoked marijuana with Them and Alan Price and drank whisky with Ray Davies.