The Ned Wood Archive

Saying everything is groovy

When your tyres are flat

Jeff Beck

I was so full of Stonehenge after going down that I listened to Mike Oldfield and Steve Hillage for three days solid.  

And then it was Monday.  And just to do something different, Bernie and I went down to the Union.  We didn’t have lectures and that jazz any more, with the written exams starting that Wednesday, but sitting around Chamberlain revising was getting pretty boring.  Sure I’d got Annie to help out.  I learned my lesson after going to Stonehenge and finding out that she knew more than I did about it.  When I mentioned it to her, she told me that after I’d banished her, she’d gone over to see Viv and had helped her revise.  I’d also realised that I’d be sitting an archaeology exam with those mad first year archaeologists.  And I wondered what I’d let myself in for.

So, I’d had Annie round to help me revise that weekend.  Mostly we talked about what a buzz going to Stonehenge was, but some of the time she read my notes, asked me questions, and drew wings on my trilobites.

I’d already decided what I was wearing for the first exam.  I’d got Dusty’s majestic Haywain jacket hanging in my wardrobe.  It would look exceedingly excellent with my drainpipe jeans and white baseball boots.  I’d got about seven or eight ribbon ties by then.  I’d been collecting them from the haberdasher’s in Portswood: a couple of different blues, a black, a red, a white, an orange.  I could almost wear a different one to each exam.  The first exam was over in the chemistry department.  I don’t know what it is with exams, it was the same at school.  I guess they’re a bit like Cup Semi-Finals.  They have to be on a neutral ground.  So we’d do our Palaeo over in chemistry, our archaeology in the Nuffield, and so on.  I got to collecting rooms, like collecting grounds.  If you only go somewhere for an exam, it puts a completely different slant on the whole area, like going to a part of the country that you’ve never been to before.  My memories of Fulham are always of walking down through that park by the side of the river to get to the ground.  My memories of the chemistry department are always of that old room, with big bulbous radiators along the wall, and me waiting in Dusty’s red jacket, while every one else sort of skirted round me as if I was radioactive.  Oh and such a bad exam.  Ostracods, conodonts, and foraminifera.  Nothing interesting like a crinoid or a graptolite.  And certainly no trilobite, winged or otherwise.  At least in the archaeology exam I could write about something.

They were all bad exams.  It was a conspiracy you know.  Ever since I’d organised that time when we’d turned up to that lecture wearing suits.  The lecturer taking it was such a scruff, we all thought we could have a laugh.  Trouble was, since then they’d had it in for me.  Of course, I played right into their hands.  I always like to dress up for exams, it makes you feel good, makes you feel important.  For the last one, the geophysics paper which I could do in my sleep, I’d turned up in my blue suit with a white shirt, thin blue tie, and blue hair.  Before we went in everyone had autographed my shirt, which I thought was neat, but caused a five-minute delay because the two grey old duffers monitoring the exam had to check every word to see I wasn’t cheating by bringing in my notes written on my sleeve.  They read all of the comments, but I’m sure they didn’t understand much.  And it being the last exam, there is a tradition that you play up as much as possible and I had been chosen to lead the traditional rush for the toilets after eighty minutes.  Do you do it?  It means that you’re all supposed to ask to go to the bogs and this causes a procession because only one of you is allowed to go at a time, and you have to have one of these old duffers come with you.  Well, we were in the Physics lecture theatre, which may be the largest lecture theatre on campus, doing this exam with hundreds of other students doing other exams in the same room, and right on cue at ten to four, I put my hand up and ask to go out.  No big deal, I walk out across the front, blue suit, blue tie, blue hair, and all.  But I get a standing ovation, which I‘m sure was started as a prank by Harris and Wright, but which spread rapidly across the whole theatre.  So I was famous for fifteen seconds, but that’s no excuse to deliberately set bad questions.

On the Friday at the end of the first exam week, Bernie and me were sat in the coffee bar.  We sat and listened to stuff I didn’t have yet like One Chord Wonders and New Rose.  And then Bill the philosopher appears.

Bill is like a comet on a different astral plane.  His orbit crosses our reality only rarely.  When it does, he stays with us for a few minutes or hours and then floats off into his own world again.  That’s why we call him Bill – after Bill Haley.  Yeah, I know, we should have called him after Edmund Halley, but don’t split hairs on me, we were only young.  I hear his voice before I look up.

“These things, what do you call them?  Exams isn’t it?  Yeah, well do we have to take them or what?”

“I’m sorry?”  My reaction is the same as Bernie’s.  Did we hear what he said?  We look at each other, then back at him, quizzically, so he’ll attempt to rephrase his question.

“You got exams this week haven’t you?” he asks.  “No,” we both answer.  “Not any more… We’ve finished for the week…  The last one was this morning… Got some next week, though.”

“Well, are they compulsory?  Can you just, like, turn up or not, depending on how you feel?”

“Well,” says Bernie, “I guess you can choose whether you turn up or not.  It does depend on how you feel.  But I guess if you don’t turn up, your degree doesn’t turn up when you show up to collect it in a couple of years.”

“Oh yeah, right,” says Bill.  He walks off.  Me and Bernie are wondering just how many exams he’s missed already.  You think you get used to him, but you never do.  We both think about saying something, but don’t, just stare ahead in stunned silence.  And then he called from the door.

“Bernie, Riff.  One more thing.  What day is it?  Is it Monday or Tuesday or what?”

We both shrugged as if we didn’t know either.  And then we lost the signal again.