The Ned Wood Archive

Active with the Activists

Things were changing.  Punk was coming.  I was growing up.  Mary was changing too.  She was not so angry, not so headstrong, not so hectoring.  That last time when she threw me out, maybe she threw all of her hang-ups out too.  After that she stopped putting me down.  She still gave me the benefit of her wisdom, but I guess I was more receptive to it.  Her vision was growing clearer and I was hearing it more clearly.

She’d also stopped hanging around with those guys like Neil and Tim that she’d been arguing with or with Mike and Rod.  No – I don’t think she ever hung around with them.  She knew them, that was all.  That was one of my little victories.  They never got invited round for spag bol.  They didn’t change.  They still wear their revolutionary Marxism or whatever they called it on their sleeves.

I never really got on with them either.  I don’t think they trusted me.  I was too much of a Tory to ever have my heart in the right place, which was important for folk like Mike or Rod.  Mike’d always suspect my motives.  When he saw me at the debating chamber (and it was always from across the seats -he’d sit right on the left and I’d sit at the back near the exit) – he’d look down his nose as if to say “You don’t deserve a vote – you’re not one of us”.  When we had the Sit In, he thought I was only coming along for the ride.

The Sit In was a protest against grant cuts, which was the big issue of that term.   Now my Dad paid for me to get my degree, cos he had the money.  But a lot of other folk down there, like Mary for instance, had to get a full grant to get by.  And the grants were getting cut back, while tuition fees and the like were going up.  Not everybody needs to go to university – there was a guy who’d been at hall for two weeks and hated it and had only been there cos his Mam had forced him to go – he shouldn’t have gone.  But loads of folk benefit from it, so they should all get a chance to go.  Meaning that nothing as banal as cash should get in their way.  So we occupied the admin building for two nights.  Passive resistance just like Gandhi.  Except the novelty wore off after the first night, so we left the next morning.  Mike as well.

There was only one time we ever got close.

I can’t remember how it started, but every so often, maybe once or twice times a term, they’d get up early – about 8 or 8:30 and go over to the Avenue.  If you know Southampton, you’ll know that the Avenue, even though it is only one lane in each direction, is one of the main arteries into town.  In fact, it is the main road that brings traffic in from the north of the A33.  And like most busy roads in Rush Hour, it was full of traffic at this time of day, even back in the Seventies.  Now part way along the Avenue were pairs of turnings, one to the East and one to the West.  If someone wanted to turn right into these side roads, they’d have to cross the oncoming traffic.  And if you’ve ever tried to cross oncoming traffic in rush hour you will have discovered that a good 95% of all drivers, probably closer to 99%, are brain dead morons incapable of seeing past their own noses, all hell bent on not losing the eight or ten yards between them and the car in front, and all adamant that they will no way let the driver trying to turn right turn in front of them.  So you see these poor sods trying to turn right and having to wait while five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty cars edge forward in the opposite direction.  It’s the same at the top of the Avenue where there is a roundabout.  Most of the traffic goes north-south, but any poor sod trying to cross from east to west has to wait because, even though the stream into town is going nowhere, none of the drivers are going to give up their precious ten yards of tarmac.

Of course it always happens that the southbound traffic will be held up while some poor geezer waits to turn right at the same time as the northbound traffic is also held up.  And because of the layout of the side roads, before they notice what is going on, these braindead drivers have deadlocked the road.  These two mighty convoys, one in each direction carrying the best brains in Hampshire, are each simultaneously 

• stuck behind a guy turning and 
• stopping someone on the other side of the road turning.  

Stalemate.  And also, great entertainment.  Because Mike and Rod and a couple of mates would turn up, about four or five of them, and they’d spot the driver who was blocking the right turn, the driver who was so busy keeping up the arse of the driver in front that he didn’t notice that he was delaying himself and all the other drivers in the road.  And they’d line up next to him and start applauding.  No catcalls or jeers, just a steady sarcastically appreciative handclap.

Usually the fun would be ruined by one of the chaps making the right hander, who would give up and drive straight on instead.  But some times they’d just be so stubborn that they would stay there waiting for the poor sod blocking them to find a way out.  Of course, Mike and Rod and anyone else watching wouldn’t help, just make them feel more and more guilty and embarrassed.  I guess they felt that maybe they would cotton on to their own selfishness.  Anyways it sounded like a great laugh, so I joined them.  I think Bernie did too.  He was a nutter, bit like me, thought everything was one hilarious pisstake.  Mike and the others were more serious. It wasn’t environmentalism back in those days.  In the seventies, that just meant saving the whales.  This was their way of damning the capitalist bourgeoisie – meaning the folk who actually worked. Of course it was better if they could pick on a flash car like a Jag or a Merc, but they figured everyone was fair game.  I think the only thing that stopped them taking it further was the fact that Rod had been done for scratching a Roller with a screwdriver, so they made sure that they didn’t do anything they could be collared for.

So one day we were giving this sad guy in a Merc some grief and he was obviously in a hurry because he was blasting on his horn for the traffic in front of him to move.  I could see he was getting more and more wound up.  And judging by the number of horns crying out, so were other folk.  Rod, Bernie, and Steve went over to make sure the guy doing the blocking on the other side got his fair share of flack. And then I noticed that the Merc was getting out of his car.  So was the Allegro driver who was trying to turn. Now this Allegro chappie can’t really decide what he wants, so he timidly starts to suggest to the Merc guy that he should move.  The Merc guys snaps and lunges towards the Allegro to try and grab him, but manages to catch and rip his own suit on something like a wing mirror or something.  Now I’m thinking about slinking away and, in typical English fashion, avoiding witnessing a scene.  Mike on the other hand thinks this proves once and for all time the inborn inferiority of the middle class (and therefore the superiority of the working class) and seeing his chance to start the revolution there and then puts on his best Upper Class twit voice and says

“I say you chaps, would you mind moving along, my fellow students and I would like to continue our Sit In here”.

Needless to say old Merc legs it after Mike, and I have to leg it pretty damn quick too on account of he knows I’m with the Commie.  Heading north up the avenue we notice that more than a few drivers are out of their cars trying to figure out how to shift the traffic.  We can see that the roundabout is completely blocked in all four directions before we duck away into the posh streets off to the side, and, because we know this area so well, we have soon cut across the golf course and doubled back on ourselves, coming out by a small alley next to this little park so we can see the Avenue about 20 or 25 yards away through the trees.  We can see the traffic, which still hasn’t moved, we can see various drivers looking around, probably not so much looking for us as looking for the idiots who chased after us and left their cars completely blocking the road.  And we can hear them shouting and swearing at each other, and we can hear the horns chorusing like birds at dawn, and all of us are bent double, our eyes streaming with laughter.