The Ned Wood Archive

No One Idea can Solve every Problem on Earth

I’ve been down for two weeks and met quite a few new folks.  Jo and Helen lived above us in the hall, so we’d go up to see them at the weekend or meet them in the Dining Hall.  Helen had both Pavlov’s Dog albums, which fascinated me, because I’d never heard of them before.  I tried to get her to play them, but she’d always want to put on Blue Oyster Cult or something.  Jo had Tapestry and stuff.  I’d never heard Carole King either, but I didn’t think I wanted to.  Sonia was also at the Hall and we’d arrange to sit together for meals.  They’d got this strange arrangement were you’d eat a meal like Sunday lunch in the Dining Hall, then you cook the next one yourself.  But as we’d only got these pathetic little stoves, you couldn’t cook much.  At least I couldn’t cook a thing – I only knew how to boil spuds.  So we’d arrange to pool our resources and have Jo or Helen do the cooking.

There were a few guys I’d met too.  Only I didn’t get on with them so well.  Steve I guess was OK, a bit of a lad, but harmless.  I think he thought I should drink a bit more because if I didn’t, I was letting my sex down.  Mike was more serious.  He’d look you in the eye and express an opinion almost without emotion, save for the faintest trace of a smile when he’d finished as if he was happy at having done his duty, namely to put you right.  He was a Marxist, that much I knew, because somehow early on everyone was categorised politically and he wanted it made clear that he was a Marxist.  I didn’t know what that really meant.  Rod was in the SWP and I think that was similar, but I never found out.  Rod was a loud mouth and a bad tempered whinger who never had a good word for anyone, so I shouldn’t have felt picked on.  And then Bernie was a nutter – he had a great big curly beard and curly black hair and was a buffoon, always sprouting off in a loud voice.  Do you know David Bellamy? – just like him.

I’d also met another Forest supporter – a guy called Dennis Moore whose uncle or cousin or something had actually played for us.  Denny was a third year English student who wanted to go into journalism.  In fact, he wanted to be Des Lynam.  Remember this was in 1976, before Des Lynam was Des Lynam.  Lynam was just the guy who did the football on the radio on a Saturday afternoon, but Denny worshipped him.  “He never gets flustered.  He does those links so well.”  I didn’t get it. To me, he was just the muzak between the sport.

So, this being Saturday, we all decided to go to Glen bar.  Denny wanted us to drown our sorrows, so I said I’d go along.  I mean: another bloody season down the tube.  I couldn’t believe it.  One week we thrash Sheffield United 6-1, next we lose at Blackpool.  Won three, lost three, drawn four.  That’s wasn’t going to get us promotion.  I mean we hadn’t even scored.  We’d lost 1-0 to bloody Blackpool.  

We hadn’t been at Glen long when Mary turned up.  I noticed her as soon as she walked in.  This was the second time I’d seen her.  She was a bit more friendly this time.  She was wearing that same denim dress which I kind of liked.  And she had a couple of friends with her, one was a scruffy guy who I found out was called Neil.  The other was a quiet guy called Tim.  He was pretty scruffy too, although that isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.  Actually most people were scruffy in 1976.  It was the decade fashion forgot, at least the few years after two-tone Levi’s and Ben Sherman’s went out of fashion.   I’d tried to stay current with things like oxford bags and the massive great skirts for each leg that came afterwards – you know: 36 inch wide trousers you could hide a Hippo in with waist bands so wide you had to cut out arm holes.  What ridiculous gear they were.  I had a brown pair, an olive green pair, and a cream pair.  When I got down to Southampton I found that almost everybody else wanted to wear jeans.  Blue faded jeans.  Or blue faded cords.  And blue faded shirts and blue faded sweaters.  My wearing smart gear wasn’t rebellion as such, I just liked being different, so I went through a stage of refusing to wear jeans.  I remember we had this one lecturer who always wore the same corduroy trousers and a baggy sweater.  Even the other guys on the course thought he was too scruffy, so we turned up in suits to one of his Friday afternoon labs.  Of course it was easy for me cos I had a couple.  Some of the guys didn’t have suits, so they had to scrounge one of me jackets.  That was how I was then – I prided myself on having a different pair of trousers for each day of the week, even if they did look ridiculous.  Anyways, I liked the way this Mary looked – she obviously cared more than most people about her appearance.

As always happened in those days, you got invited back to someone’s room for coffee, although I insisted on tea which was usually a mistake because there was never any milk, only coffeemate.  But it was interesting to go back to some one’s room and check out the posters on the wall or leaf through their record collection and see what they’d got.  Although normally it was always soppy girl posters and Elton John records.  So I’d go along to satisfy my curiosity.  What I didn’t know till later was that in the three weeks since these guys had come down for freshers week, they had already formed their own little debating society and almost every night sat around in Mary’s room and argued politics.  So I went back with them and found myself just sat on the floor listening to the four of them: Mary, Neil, Tim, and some tall guy with long sidies called Gray. 

Neil would say something like, “What is the one thing that defines Socialism?”

(And I think, that’s easy: what is it that the Labour Party stand for? Trade Union Power)

“Nationalisation,” says Gray

(And I wonder why? what would that do?)

“ERRRRMMMM Give everyone equal opportunity,” says Tim

(don’t they have that?)

Neil: “No the first thing you have to do is pay the workers a decent wage.”

(Me thinking:  I knew it – strike for better pay.)   

Mary: “And what do you consider a decent wage?” 

Neil: “Everyone should get the same of course – no socialist can believe otherwise.”

(Me: Well, that won’t work, because you need incentives for people otherwise, they’ll just sit around scrounging.)

Mary: “No, you can’t do that, you fool.  The best you can hope for is a more equitable scale.”

(Me: Which is more like it, but we should be free to earn what we can get, otherwise we’ll end up like in 1984 or Brave New World or Russia.)

Neil: “You are selling out.”

Mary: “No I’m being realistic.”

Neil: “No, you’re selling out.  You can only have true equality with equality of income.  Or better, give to each according to their need.”

(Me: My history teacher at school, who was proud to tell us how he voted whenever he got the opportunity, used to say that equality was a myth and that if you gave everyone the same amount of money at the start of each day, you’d have rich people and poor people at the end of the day.)

Gray: “The thing is Neil; you can’t dictate how much each person will get until the government owns all of the factories.”

Tim: “You mean the state.  The State is different from the government.  The state has to own the means of production.”

Mary (ignoring Tim’s pedantry): “No, what you do is raise the minimum wage at the same time as changing the scales of Income Tax, so that the lower paid pay no tax and the bosses’ salaries are effectively cut at some ceiling. “

(Me: Don’t we have that at the moment.  Isn’t that why the Stones are tax exiles?)

Mary:  “Neil’s problem is that he thinks we can introduce Socialism by handing out guns to the working class.”

Neil: “It’s the only way – you fancy intellectuals will never get us anywhere.  The only way that we can enjoy the fruits of our labour is to take it and if that means through armed struggle then so be it.”

(Me: Jesus, does he really mean that?  [But Mary is smiling.  With hindsight, I know it’s at being called an intellectual.])

Tim:  “Neil, you don’t get anywhere with rockets and guns.”

Neil: “The end justifies the means”

Tim: “No Neil, err, the means determine the end.  If you use force, you’ll end up by creating a monster just like Russia.”

 (Me: Just a minute.  I thought that was what you guys wanted)

Mary: “Neil, that is why I won’t join the SWP.  You lot see things in black and white.”

Neil: “Fine.  Just come back in twenty years’ time and see what’s changed.”

And so, it carried on.  I can do nothing but sit there and wonder what I have got myself into.  I think this guy Neil is a Wally, but the others seem pretty intelligent.  In fact, I’m conscious that I am ignorant about most of what they are saying, even though I disagree with it.  I’d never met a Socialist before.  Unless you count one of the guys at school, but I never knew whether he said he was a Labour supporter as a tease – to wind everyone else up.  Anyway, all that happened was that we laughed at him. Of course, we never spoke about it seriously.  One day my dad had our Labour MP in his shop, but all I found out was that he didn’t end up buying anything.  Then there was the day this MP gave a talk at school.  I missed it, because I was the prefect on playground duty, but apparently everyone sat on the right of the hall.  Actually, I wasn’t into politics.  I could remember a couple of elections two years earlier, and I had secretly hoped for the Liberals to do well, but I think that was more because they were the underdogs than because I though Jeremy Thorpe was God’s gift to mankind.  Or it may have been some liberal streak in me that I hadn’t quite come to terms with.  It may also have been a little bit of rebellion against me old dears.  Voting Conservative was just what you did, like watching BBC instead of ITV.  Tories were smarter than the Labour party folk.  They wore better clothes and brushed their hair and didn’t smoke or have beards.  They probably lived in better houses.

I had quite a few questions I wanted to ask, but I felt shy asking anyone because they all knew so much more than I did.  I was embarrassed because I was a second year, and they were only freshers.  And I was in awe of them because they had it and I didn’t.  I was in awe of all of them.  Mostly, though, I was in awe of Mary.  So, I just left quietly when everyone else did, not really any the wiser.