The Ned Wood Archive

I’ll Never Forget the First Day I Met Her

The best thing about Southampton is the Coffee Bar.  For three years it was my home.  Longer in fact because when I’ve been to other places, I’ve tried to find or make places like the Coffee Bar, but never succeeded.

The Coffee bar was a long thin room with glass down one side that let you look out at the brick walls of the gym and the rest of the Union building.  But the view outside wasn’t important, it was what was inside.  

Of course, the most important aspect was the Bar and the tea it sold.  At one end of the room, the bar itself sold the three staples of university life.  Tea, Chocolate, and Cheese&Browns.  The tea was made properly.  I don’t know why that should be so unusual, but so many places just don’t care what they slop in your cup.  At the Coffee Bar they knew that they had a steady flow of customers throughout the day, so they’d make a big fresh pot every five or ten minutes and they had these enormous metal pots.  Metal mind, which of course is what you need to make tea, not china, and, of course, a steady supply of boiling water, so when you wanted tea, there it was, hot and properly brewed.  And you needed to have chocolate with it. So, they had the sense to order about thirty bars of Topic a week which was about what I needed.  Sorry, me maths is up the spout.  Four a day is only twenty a week.  And then at lunchtime they’d have Cheese rolls with pickle.  And not just any pickle, but the rich brown pickle made by the good people of Branston on which generations of Woods and other East Staffordshire folk have been raised.

At the other end of the room were the Rods tables.  The Coffee Bar had a couple of Brighouse tables and that is where you would find me and three other Geologists when we could get a break from classes.  Strange, but I’d sometimes be in the Coffee Bar with the guys from the course and sometimes be there with the folk I knew from the hall, but never at the same time.  Well, they didn’t like each other for a start.  The lads on the course I guess thought that my mates were a bunch of lefties – which they were – while the guys from the hall thought that all geologists were a bunch of reactionaries – which they were.  So, they wouldn’t mix.  And if they ever saw me with the other group, they’d try to prise me away as if it represented some sort of political victory.  Who cares.

On Mondays some poor idiot had decided we should have four lectures in a row from nine till one.  The fourth was good fun because it was Trotter talking about plate tectonics which was cool, so we had to see that.  The first two were OK because if you made the first, the second was in the same place, so you had no excuse.  The problem was the third.  Nobody can sit through three consecutive lectures, so we’d always leg it over to the Coffee Bar come eleven and stay there playing Rods until twelve.  Rods.  Table Football.  Why, what do you call it?  Of course the department wondered why no-one ever turned up at the Environmental Geology lectures and now I guess I wish I’d been to a few more.  But at the time a game of Rods was more important than saving the world, know what I mean?

So, on Mondays at eleven we’d play Rods, the four of us: me; Sid Harris – this tall guy who ended up looking at fossils; Mick Wright, who did a PhD studying sand; and Ollie Veane – he was a mineralogist but was probably not much different from me and just went with the flow.  Usually, it would be me and Ollie against Sid & Mick.  We’d swap round, sometimes I’d take the front, sometimes the back – between the two of us, you couldn’t really tell who was better in which position.  But the others had their act together.  Mick was best at the back – he’d get the ball trapped by his back two, then flick his wrist and the next thing you knew is he’d score – unless of course Sid had left one of his forwards down and had blocked the ball.  So, they went through this pantomime.  Mick would trap the ball, then elbow Sid out of the way, checking that his men were turned to the horizontal, then do his dummying routine as if we were fooled.  Actually, when I was playing at the back, Ollie had this knack of leaving his men down and deflecting the ball in.  Probably because my back shots weren’t always on target.  The games ended up pretty level anyway unless one of us hit a streak.

So we’d be there most afternoons as well, between maybe three and three thirty, taking a break during one of our practicals.  On the other hand, at lunchtimes, it was the turn of the hall crowd.  And I’d be in my other usual spot which was sat next to the third important feature of the Coffee Bar, viz. the Juke Box.  This was right in the middle of the long wall and as all the seats were sort of benches about one foot from the ground, you could settle yourself into the nook between wall and one side of the juke box and watch the world go by.  Now this was just before the glorious heyday of the Juke Box when all the World turned DayGlo, but still they had some pretty fab tunes on that thing.  A lot of old Stones like Honky Tonk Women and Brown Sugar, of course, and some student classics like Layla and Tull and In A Broken Dream, but they also had some more old stuff like the Yardbirds and obscure stuff like Buffalo Springfield For What it’s Worth.  And they’d have Sweet Home Alabama as well but from where I was sat next to the Juke Box you could just reach round the back and hit the eject button.  Thursday was the best day because that was when the NME came out, so I’d sit there for most of the morning reading it.  Or, on the other days, Sonia would come by, and we’d try to do the Telegraph crossword.

One of the other guys who was always there was Nick.  He was a friend of Sonia’s.  I knew Sonia, or Son as we sometimes called her, from the hall.  And I met Nick through her.  I found out that he also knew Mary.  In fact, I first met Mary in the Coffee Bar.  She was on the same course as Son.   If I thought about all of this, it might turn out to be that I was destined to meet her one way or another.  If you believe in fate.  Any road up, a crowd of them off Sonia’s course came in one lunchtime including Mary and I can remember being struck by how different she looked then.  Somehow taller than everyone else, and much more elegant, even though what she was wearing wasn’t that much different from everyone else.  In those days everyone wore jeans, or if you were female, you were allowed to wear a denim skirt one day a week.  Now Mary obviously had a touch of individualism about her, because she had a denim dress. At the time she was wearing a bluish purplish sweater designed to complement her hair which was black and blue sometimes and black and purple at other times, depending on how the light caught it.  Sweater or no sweater, you could tell that the cut of her dress was different.  She had that cheeky smile, and I caught her eyes which were dark and yet playful.  Her dimples rolled around her cheeks as she checked out the new surroundings before condemning it.  “What a hovel” she cried “How can you bear to eat here Son?  It’s full of pretentious boys”.  Trying to break the ice I invited her to join in with the crossword, not knowing that she regarded Telegraph readers as a species somewhere beneath Australopithecus.  She looked at me and cut me down saying “You know they shouldn’t really let people like you out on your own until you’ve been taught not to believe what you read in that.”  And yet she said it with such a mischievous smile that I couldn’t help but think that she was going to like me.  Or did she act like that with everyone?

And then she’d gone.  I think I was in shock.  I’m not used to folk talking to me like that.  The others had gone too, but I didn’t miss them.  I sat down in my corner next to the Juke Box and picked up the paper.  But I couldn’t do much more of the crossword, so I just sat and stared.