The Ned Wood Archive

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Ready and waiting to explode

Max Frost and the Troopers

I had a dream that night.  It started with me and Chris walking down to the common just like we had, but then, when I was alone, the clouds parted and this golden ambience filled the woods.  It sounds like some corny Monty Python sketch about King Arthur writing it down, but of course, being a dream, it was totally real at the time and totally serious.  And then what happened was Annie’s face appeared, glowing and lightening up the woods, smiling like the old Cheshire cat.  But in my dream, it just felt so good.  So peaceful.  Then I woke up and I couldn’t understand what it meant.

The exams were coming.  That’s what Bernie was telling Mike that lunchtime.  Bernie was worried.  I was pretty laid back about them cos I thought I was pretty good at geology.  But Bernie was worried, it being his first year.  At first Mike didn’t see what the fuss was about, but he was reading Politics and Sociology with Humbug which didn’t matter on about thirty three counts, of which the pertinent ones today were:

• It isn’t a real degree.  Geology is.
• Sociologists don’t have to learn anything for exams, just spout off on a couple of essays.  Geology involves acquiring a deep and lasting understanding of the earth and its history.
• His first and second year exams don’t count towards his final degree.  Ours do, about 20% each.
• His first exam wasn’t until the middle of June; our practicals would be starting in less than two weeks.

So Bernie tried to get Mike to understand the importance of being able to identify hundreds of different rocks.  Which prompted Mike to start quizzing us about “The Role of the Mob in Political History” which was an essay he had written for his course.  In fact he attempted to prove that Politics and Sociology with Humbug was superior to Geology on account of we didn’t have to write essays every week.  I wasn’t impressed because, as far as I could see, Mike’s essay was a diary of his life in the SWP.  

It started with some picketing in Birmingham from about five years ago, although he would only have been about 12 or 13 when it happened.  I knew a bit about what he was talking about because my gran told me about it.  Granny Dawson lived in a place called Duddeston which was near this coke depot which was surrounded by miners during the miners strike, the idea being to prevent the coke from being shipped out.  Mike said it was a Major Triumph for the Working Class, which is how he got the credit even though he wasn’t there.  I remember Granny Dawson didn’t like it at all because there was fighting between the pickets and the drivers.  But then she was always the biggest Tory in our family.

Then Mike told us about the Fight against Fascism as he called it.  (If you haven’t spotted, Mike loves to capitalise his phrases when he’s talking.) He’d been at a Demo in London to try and Stop the National Front from holding a meeting.  We never agreed about this stuff, any of us.  I expect you’re the same.  You have these ongoing discussions with your mates, or acquaintances, that never get resolved.  We’d always go backwards and forwards between freedom of speech as an absolute right on the one hand and the need to protect people, or whatever on the other.  And different folk have different ideas about what you should stop people from saying.  Like if I go up to a geezer and insult him, that’s stupid, rude, and could easily get me cut up, but I don’t think I should be locked up for it.  But you got to draw the line.  Like, I can call Viv Anderson a tosser when he cocks up (which isn’t that often), but I can’t call him – well, you know.  Chris would say that the law is irrelevant; the moral code which prevents you from insulting anyone in any way is so much higher than the law of the land.  And he’d back that up by saying that any form of violence, verbal or physical, against another person always came back to you sooner than you thought.  That was a theme of his – we called it 24-hour karma.  Anyway, it always seemed to me that Mike would let you say what you liked provided you didn’t disagree with him by too much.  And other folk would quote Voltaire or whoever said that thing about I don’t like what you say, but I’ll defend your right to say it, knowing full well that they wouldn’t defend Mike’s right to say anything if it cost them so much as the price of a cup of charlie.

This demo of Mike’s was some major event in his ‘People’s History’; however, I’d started to tune out around this point.  Sometimes Mike has a tendency to go on just a little too long.  This conversation was actually happening in the New Refectory which we’d gone to for a change, enjoying the fact that it was so quiet that afternoon.  And then Sonia turned up and so did Annie.  The New Ref was Sonia’s sort of place, so I wasn’t really surprised to see her, but I sat up when I noticed Annie, even though I didn’t really know whether it was her place or not.  That was how the class system worked at Southampton. You could tell people by where they drank. The new Ref is so much shinier than the Coffee Bar, all the squeaky clean folk go there, so I don’t know how Bernie and Mike got in.  Sometimes that’s one of its attractions – these squeaky clean folk don’t ever say anything, so you can sit and read a paper or do some thinking or even work while you are drinking your tea.  There were other places to hang out, like the Old Ref or the other Coffee Bar under the ballroom, or even the Union Bar itself, but they all had the wrong atmosphere, either too dark, or too boring, or too alcoholic.  The Union bar did develop into a good alternative to the Coffee Bar when the juke box got its act together.  Which was when X-Ray Spex “The Day the World Turned Dayglo” came out and it got onto the Union bar juke box before the Coffee bar juke box.  But that was about a year later.

Well, you could tell Sonia didn’t want to listen to Mike, back then she was far to gentille to agree with his premise that the only time the Working Class got anywhere was when the Socialist Workers got together in a display of People’s Power (and those are Mike’s capitals not mine).  Annie on the other hand started to rib him.

“Tense for you and those doses in the SWP, always faffing about on marches,” she said.  I was getting into her lingo a little, so I understood some of the words, and I knew she was taking the piss. 

And then she started to smoke.  That wasn’t a very New Ref thing to do either.  She could have got us arrested.  She was sat talking, then as if it was perfectly normal, she pulled a packet of fags out of her pocket and lit one.  Worse, she offered Son and me one.  Now back then I wasn’t as bigoted ‘bout such obnoxious behaviour as I am now, but I was still pretty righteous.  Me and our kid used to lift packets from our mates’ pockets down the pub and crush them in front of their eyes.  It’d take them a couple of minutes to catch on that it was their fags we were crushing.  They’d laugh at us and then nervously feel their pockets, their faces turning deathly pale as if we’d just murdered their only offspring. Which we had.  And then we’d go through telling them that it didn’t matter whether their ciggie was burnt or crushed, it had the same effect on the ciggie, but they should thank us for adding eight minutes to their life.  At least me and our kid did that until he started to smoke.

So I looked at Annie, the fag desecrating her beautiful lips like graffiti on a Rosetti and I called her stupid or some such casual insult.  And she got the message and walked off.  Sonia looked at me as if I’d just done something really soft like if I was given a ticket for the Cup Final and I just ripped it up.  She asked if I’d meant to be so rude and that made me feel guilty.  But Bernie got us back into the argument with Mike about politics, so I didn’t get a chance to apologise.

Oh, we had great times discussing politics, me and Bernie and Mike.  After carrying a torch for Mary for the best part of four months, I’d developed some fairly standard left wing ideals.  The sort of ideals which put me slap bang in the centre of student thought at Southampton, in terms of volume of argument, if not in terms of number of believers.  To my right was yer typical silent majority.  Quiet, consistent, and following their own unimaginative path to careers in accounting, engineering, and marketing.  On my left were a smaller noisier bunch like Mike and Rod and Neil and their gang.  The thing was that everyone on Mike’s side had to have a different label.  There were Socialist Workers and Trotskyites and Militants.  Then there were the Young Liberals who tried to outdo all of the above.  Maybe they argued amongst themselves, but they always ganged up on folk like me.  Whenever I got to talking with those guys they always made me feel a reactionary.  And they always told me I was an old Tory.  And then I’d get into bands like the Clash who were supposed to be left wing.  And then again, I could no more agree with White Riot than I could with Red Lion Square or any of Mike’s other battles between the SWP and the police.  Neil would say that the ends justify the means.  And we’d say, no, the ends are the product of the means and you can’t make a good vibe with bad karma.  The means determine the ends. It seemed like we were in the middle.  We weren’t your white rioters and we weren’t your Tory vermin.

Of course, everyone in the press, meaning everyone in the NME, was telling us that the new punk bands were a sign of hip radical politics and that anyone who listened to them was right on.  So I wore my musical taste as a badge of political correctness in front of guys like Mike and Neil and Rod, none of whom liked the Pistols or anyone.  And then Paul Weller said he was a Tory and I was completely bubble and squeaked.  

It was the next day, Thursday, and I was sat in the coffee bar reading the NME.  The Jam were on the cover.  And on the centre spread, dressed in suits, just as cool as you like.  Cos you know I like to dress up a bit meself.  And they had those shoes with the white bits.  Here were a band you could look up to……

And, guess what.  I looked up from the rag and there was Annie standing with a cup of tea and a bar of me favourite chocolate.  (Yes, it was even a Topic, so she must have seen me eating one.  Impressive Huh?).  She obviously wanted to apologise for giving me grief with her foul weed the previous day. 

She sat down and told me a bit more about herself, but as I’d got the NME with me, we ended up talking more about music.  I wanted to play her some great New Music on the Juke Box, but some fool had put all this Lynryd Skynryd on ahead of me.  The strange thing was, Annie liked it.  Freebird and Sweet Home Alabama and all that jazz.  She started telling me about the bands she’d seen: Genesis, with Gabriel obviously, but also old farts like the Stones and Zeppelin.  It was my brother’s record collection all over again.  I told Sniff about it when he rolled in after Annie had left.  I was looking for him to back me up and say “Does she know it’s 1977 already?” but he said “It’s all RocknRoll, mate.  It’s all Eddie Cochran.”

I dunno.

On the Friday I was playing Rods with the guys from the course just before going to a palaeontology lab when one of them, Mick Wright, started giving me some grief about hanging around with punky women.  He did it just to put me off my game, but, tell the truth, he didn’t need to that day because me and Olly were getting pasted by him and Harris.  You know how it is, sometimes you’re on a roll and everything goes like a dream, even your shots from full back.  Some days you can’t do anything except fire the ball against your midfielders and let it slip under your keeper.  It was one of those get the ball trapped under your keeper and end up putting it in your own goal sort of days.  But Wrighty kept on, always making sure to follow up when his opponent was on the retreat.  He’d seen me and Annie having a chat in the coffee bar, I guess, which I hadn’t expected.  I sort of assumed that when I was taking a break in the coffee bar between lectures or during a practical, then only the guys from my course were there.  Which was generally true, most of the other folk I knew were arts students and therefore had afternoons off.  And I also thought that as most of my geologist mates were Old Refectory and Union Bar sort of folk, that none of them came in to the coffee bar when I was having lunch with Bernie and the other guys from Chamberlain.

But Wrighty had seen me and so he suggested that I wouldn’t be doing my career any good if I spent my days talking to people with punky red hair.  So I knew he was talking about one of the days when Annie had been wearing red streaks in her hair.  Red streaks which were just food colouring applied with a toothbrush.  Effective, but very temporary.  It has to be said that Wright and Harris never really saw eye to eye with anyone I talked to who wasn’t a geologist.  Come to think of it, they didn’t get on with most of the geologists either.  But I’ll say this for Wrighty, he put a good word in for me with my tutor when I needed it, and I haven’t forgotten that.

But that Friday I gave up playing Rods a couple of games earlier than I usually would have done and loaded up the juke box with a few favourites to break me out of the depression I was feeling on account of my bad form at the rods table.  I span the Hot Rods’ I Might Be Lying and the Adverts’ One Chord Wonders and sat back against the wall and opened up my folder of fossil drawings to look as if I was working.  And, of course, Annie rolled in, high on the delight that you get on a Friday, knowing that the weekend is just a cup of Charlie away.  She shrieked when she noticed me, which can’t have been surprise, and which I didn’t really think was delight.  And when she shouted “Oh!  My hero” loud enough for all in that half of the bar to hear, I assumed she was referring to the fact that I was attempting to work.  I looked over at the Rods tables to make sure there weren’t any geologists left within earshot and relaxed, kicking my feet up onto the coffee table, as they’d all headed back to the Geology Building.  I smiled at her.  It’s nice to get attention.  She asked me what I was doing and I told her I was a geologist and that I was hiding from a palaeontology lab.  I’d got me folder on me lap and I’d been looking at some pictures I’d drawn.  I’m not very good at drawing, so when she’d come over and sat next to me I’d closed it up.  It was a pretty obvious move and had only served to draw attention to my folder, so she opened it up again, and without commenting on my scrawls as I had expected took one of the drawings which was a pretty unimpressive trilobite and turned it into a glorious emperor butterfly by giving it four magnificent wings.

“So what do you do? “  I asked, expecting the obvious answer about her course.

“I live.  I breathe.  I paint.  I draw.  I have fun,” she said.  Which I thought was neat.  So I gazed at the drawing.  I still have it.  I’d drawn the dull outline of a dull Silurian trilobite.  It had very little ornamentation, maybe just the hint of a spike at the end of the pygidium.  She extended the tail and added four vibrantly patterned wings with whorls and swirls that still, after all of these years, flow and shimmer on the page.  And when you allow your eyes to step back from the intricacies of the wings and look at the whole marvellous butterfly, you would swear that it is taking off and soaring skywards.  

Annie talked about how wonderful the week had been; remembering the sunny hours rather than the rains because we’d had both.  She had me close my eyes, sit back against the wall, and soak up the sun racing through the Coffee Bar windows.  She told me that she’d done the same thing the previous day on a seat by that brook that runs across the campus.  She reminded me of the joys of May that I remembered from being a kid, before my Os and As and coming to university, in the days before I had exams and I’d just hang out down the road from our house wandering across old Brown’s fields and catching sticklebacks in the stream the other side of the railway bridge.

So my mood changed completely after that.  It was so good that I went back to the department and did some reading.  So good that I gave a hand to a couple of swots who were wanting someone to test them in the palaeo lab.  So good, that I even helped an old dear across Bassett Road.  

And it paid off, because the next day I got my return, my 24-hour karma.  Forest played Millwall and won (OK so it was one nil and it was an own goal, but we won.)  And Bolton drew.  They were on Match of the Day.  Me and Sniff and Denny Moore all watched it.  And we all cheered so loud when Luton equalised.  I’d been to a party, but it hadn’t been any good, so I’d left.  I can’t remember much about the party – not even whose party it was (the invite says ‘Linda, Gillian, Louise’ but I’m still no wiser.)  After Match of the Day, me and Sniff invited Denny, a Forest supporting third year, up to my room to see our ritual of updating the league table.  He looks at it, then decides to leave to do some work.  Like I say, he’s a third year and thinks that finals mean something.  Me and Sniff stare at it for a little longer:

Wolves	55	(41)	[57]
Chelsea	53	(41)	[55]
Forest	52	(42)	[52]	GD 34
Bolton	48	(39)	[54]	GD 21
Notts	48	(41)	[50]

Sniff had added goal difference.  Look at it.  34.  Pretty impressive Huh!

Anyway, that’s it.  We’ve played all our games.  We’ve got to sit back and wait.  Only Bolton can catch us now.  They need five points from their last three games on account of we’ve got the best goal difference in the world.