The Ned Wood Archive

The Chase is so much better than the Kill

It’s Tuesday afternoon and I’ve decided to give petrology a miss.  It can be fun sometimes, but not today.  I should be feeling guilty on account of missing most of Monday coming back from London.  I’m sat in the Coffee Bar listening to the Righteous Brothers and Otis Redding.  You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling and My Girl on the Juke Box in the sort of heavy rotation they would be proud of on MTV or Radio Luxembourg (pick your era).  But this time it’s my money.  I put Can’t Explain on to try and snap out of it, but I’m stuck.

In London I could think about football and the Stones.  On the train back I realised how much I cared for Mary and now I can’t think about anything else.  This is how it works.  You see someone who is attractive and you like being near them.  Then you realise that it’s stronger than attraction and you panic.  You know what you feel about them, but you still waste too much time trying to work out whether you really like them or not.  Then you have to work out whether they like you.  If you’ve got this far, you have to figure out a way to ask them out.

Already that day I’d hung around the New Ref and the Old Ref and some stupid place I’d never been to before that was pretending to serve tea and coffee but no-one used.  I’d walked round the concourse for half an hour and around all the corridors, all of it just in case Mary would come waltzing through.  But she never did.  I just wanted to see her face just to make sure it was how I remembered it.

And now, I’m sat in the Coffee Bar trying to work out what I really think of Mary.  And every time I try to think things through logically, my concentration slips and I end up just thinking about the four precious times I’d seen her.  Four times in what, six weeks.  How fate had starved me.  The first time was here in this very room, she was just six feet in front of where I am now.  Chaffing, joshing, teasing, and ribbing.  Then, in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed in anticipation, discussing, debating, arguing, wrangling.  Then, upstairs in the New Ref, Mary, me, and Sonia mixing Pop and Politics and asking what the use is.  And then, back at Glen, preaching, haranguing, crusading.  That face, that noble beauty, that spark, that fire, that warmth.  And you know I’m not sure I trust my memory.  I mean is her hair really that black and that bright?  Does time really stop when she starts to talk?  Is her smile really quite that devastating?  And if all this is true, am I the only one that knows?

Then Nick turns up and I realise it’s getting late.  I should go and find out what everyone else did in the lab today and copy out someone’s notes.  I don’t want to get into some conversation about whatever it is that’s eating Nick today, so I make my excuses and beetle off.  Anyway I’m still having this conversation in  my mind about Mary and what I think of her.  I couldn’t share that with Nick.  I couldn’t let him know the struggle I was having.  You don’t do that sort of thing if you’re a bloke.

Wednesday I have to go to lectures and stuff, but I end up meeting Nick in the Coffee Bar.  He chides me for running away the previous day.  I don’t tell him why, even though it’s what I’m thinking about.  I’m wondering whether I should change my life style so I see Mary more often, but at the same time I remember when I was at school and I used to have these crushes on the fourth years, the more I tried to arrange my routine to bump into them, the less I’d actually manage.  There was this girl called Lesley Ryan who had a small pointed nose, long blonde hair, and always wore knee length pleated skirts.  She was probably a second year or a third year, I never found out.  I’d see her through the window during German on a Wednesday.  It took me weeks to find out her name.  I’d try and find out which class she was in and then track down which rooms they’d be in at what times, but I never could.  And then one Tuesday, she started walking down the corridor while we were waiting outside the chemistry lab.  The corridor was about fifty yards, and I could pick my spot so as to see her as soon as she turned the corner.  I’d pretend to read my text book, but manage to sneak a glance every now and then.  And I could time it right, so I’d innocently look up, or walk across to talk to someone, just as she was passing.  I learned her habits, the way she tossed her long hair, the way she nervously brushed her skirt.  Week after week I’d look forward to my two glimpses.  And that was all I ever got.  I didn’t know how to go about talking to her.  I wouldn’t have known what to say.  Anyway, she was going out with Mulder.  But the moral is, if you want to bump into someone, let them come to you.  So I waited in the Coffee Bar.  And bumped into Nick.

“Do you like buses?”  he asked.

“Actually, I’m kinda neutral,” I said.  Buses are buses.  They exist.  I’d ride them down to town.  I used to have me bike here last year, when I was in Millbrook and I’d only take the bus if I had to.  Same as when I was at school.

“Buses are wonderful things, ” Nick Said. “So are trains.  I was having a discussion with this guy who said he hated public transport.”  Nick always had discussions, never arguments.  “He said taxis, cars, and planes were all that mattered, everything else was bad.  Of course with an attitude like that he was obviously not thinking straight, but if you got beyond his black and white outlook, it was an interesting point.”

“Nick”, I said “do we know anyone who takes a plane anywhere?  Planes are for your holiday once a year, if you’re lucky.  I don’t think you can really talk about planes as transport.  I mean not to go up to Birmingham or anywhere.  And anyway why aren’t they public transport.  What did your mate mean by public transport?”

“He meant anything that plebs use.  Only losers take the bus or the train.  Successful people use the car.”

“Rubbish.  I use the train.”

“Not always, I bet.  How did you get your stuff down here?  Same way I did wasn’t it?  In your old man’s car.  What’s he drive?  Mine’s got a Granada.”

I didn’t want to answer that one, so I asked him where he stood on public transport.

“You know, we take British Rail for granted.  But we shouldn’t forget that nationalisation of the railways was one of the most important things this country ever did.”

He was right: I’d never thought about it.  I had a train set at home that was done up in the LMS livery.  And me great granddad and his dad before him had worked on the LNWR.  But I put the differences down to the fact that modern life was rubbish.  The colour had gone from this really neat maroon to boring blue and the cute little locos I had in my train set were more elegant than the obnoxious intercity engines you saw these days.  But I didn’t know the philosophical difference.

“The importance of nationalising the railways,” he continued, “is that the state is responsible for providing the means of transportation for the people rather than a few self interested rich kids.  You see nationalisation was introduced to control the means of production and thereby control the means of distribution of wealth.  But there’s more to it than that.  The state in a western democracy means the people.  We mustn’t confuse ourselves with the Warsaw pact.  Nationalisation means that the people control the industry.  With trains it means the people can determine when and where the trains run.  And if we did it properly, we could have a train or a bus lined up for every journey anyone wanted to take.  Or at least make a giant step towards it.  If the railways hadn’t been nationalised, you’d find the profit motive meant that only the most lucrative journeys would be available.  Services would be cut and people would be forced into cars or whatever.  You haven’t got a car have you.  So you could maybe go up to London by train, but I bet if you wanted to go home to Nottingham or wherever it is without nationalisation you’d have to go via London, because there wouldn’t be any other trains.  And you couldn’t put your bike on the train or buy tickets at Swaythling because it wouldn’t be economical.  But folk that have got cars’ll just use them more often.  Have you seen the Avenue in the morning or tried to drive round the North Circ in London.  No, you’ve never driven in London, have you.  Well, you don’t move, you’re stuck there, it’s quicker walking.  It’d be like that all over the place if the railways didn’t exist.”

I’d heard about the North Circ.  A guy at the hall was from London and he used to say it was quicker to drive through the centre than to use the North Circ, but he had a bike so maybe that didn’t count.  I don’t know if I’d been in a traffic jam in those days.  Certainly the drive from home to Southampton was pretty easy, there weren’t too many cars on the road.  Maybe driving into Birmingham when I used to go to Virgin Records, or out of it along the Tyburn road, sometimes got a bit crowded.  It’s strange to think back at how open the roads, even the M1, were in those days.  I don’t know if I was convinced though, but I was beginning to see his point.

Now if he’d have said folk would be thrown off trains because they’d bought their ticket from the wrong place; or that trains would decide half way through the journey not to stop at certain stations, so as to get back on their schedule and avoid paying compensation; or that they’d abandon stopping at some stations altogether because they’d get charged for doing so; or that railworkers couldn’t use fire extinguishers to put out fires because they belonged to a different company; we’d have accused him of being Neil in disguise.  But not even Nick was that perceptive.

He carried on: “See, if you let folk run companies for profit, that is exactly what they’ll do – consume, wreck, exploit the earth, its resources, its people, do anything in fact for profit.  Not necessarily for the common good.  Certainly not for the common good unless it pays more.”

“You know, Nick”, I said. ”We’re doing Environmental Science as part of the course.  And one of the things they were saying is that there’s only so much coal and oil in the world.   I don’t see any proof, but let’s assume it’s true.  Now, if I had an oil well and I knew that oil was running out, I’d save my oil and put the price up.  But if I knew that it wouldn’t run out for twenty or so years, I’d pump it out as quickly as I could and try and get as much money out of it.”

“Yeah, and if you had a power station, you’d make as much electricity as you could and try to convince everyone to use as much as possible”

“Yeah – you’d invent new lights and electric tools like toothbrushes and tin openers”

“Not that toothbrushes and tin openers are going to use up much electricity,” he pointed out.

“No, OK, you’d have loads of electrical stuff and lights blazing everywhere.  But the point is that instead of trying to save and rationalise the oil or whatever, we’d be trying to use it up.”

“Well you’re OK on the Coal and the Electricity, because they’re nationalised.  Now we have to do the Oil Companies”.

I thought of an objection.  “Nick.  Don’t you think that if you were an oil company boss  and oil was running out, you’d invest in trying to find another line of business like new sources of energy.  Like tidal power or solar power, or even nuclear power.”  The first two were trendy.  Nuclear power, though was bad news, even in 76.

“If you’re saying that only capitalists can research and develop, then your logic has gone out of the window.  There is nothing that capitalists have got that the people as a whole don’t.  That’s because the people includes everyone, so they’ve got the brains, the power, and the cash.  Don’t tell me that they haven’t got the incentive, because not everyone is that mercenary.  Don’t give me that ‘only privatised industries give people incentive crap’.”  

But I wasn’t aware that I had.  So he went on some more.

“Look at us.  We’re not here because it pays better.  We’re here because we want to be.  What we need to do is to make these nationalised industries serve us.  All of us.  Surely if we put our brains to it, we could really do something worthwhile instead of spending our time greedily running around chasing up every last ounce of profit.”

After that, we both sat back, as if to admire our work.  Well, he admired his work and I splashed around in the deep end of the debate.  I wondered whether they’d nationalised the trains in Chile.  I was going to ask him if he knew, but he was making to leave, so I let him go and allowed my thoughts to turn from Chile to Mary.  I put my feet up on another seat and prayed in vain that she’d walk in.

On Thursday it happens.  I see Mary from the Old Ref where I’m eating some lunch.  She’s walking outside past the window into one of the Arts buildings.  Just that sight of her confirms what I’d really known all that week.  My life was suddenly incomplete and Mary was the only way it could be whole again.

Trouble was, could I really start dating someone who disagreed with everything I did?  Was that how she thought about it and would she get hung up about my Dad’s income compared to hers?  Back at home I had a crush on a girl called Nina.  After school we went round to her place, just the two of us.  She lived in this really small house near the railway.  Just a kitchen and a living room.  We sat in the living room which was so quiet and empty.  Obviously Nina thought she was treating me special putting me in her Mam’s best room, but I hated it.  It had the old damp smell of rooms that aren’t used.  My old Grandma had rooms that were the same, but we didn’t have to use them.  This was uncomfortable.  I didn’t belong there.  I felt as if I had nothing in common with Nina and any feelings I had for her disappeared at the thought of her living in this sad cramped house.  I never spoke to her again after that, even when we saw each other at school.

So why am I letting class get in the way?  Surely I can rise above that?  But I start to imagine Mary in a cold damp two roomed house with her Mam and Dad and I feel a shudder down me spine.  No it wouldn’t be like that, Mary’s too bright to live in a dreary house.  As for all that stuff she spouts, well life wouldn’t be as much fun if we all agreed would it?

So what does she think about me?  Actually I probably thought that was a lot less important.  In the end my charm would win through.  It’s only a front that she puts up.  Surely…

On Friday, I do some work.  Stratigraphy is just drawing maps and colouring them in, but it’s one of my favourites.  Fortunately, I seem to be good at it, so I get lots of questions from the other guys on the course as well as lots of teasing about where had I been.  Friday night, I stay in and listen to some nice romantic stuff.  Elton John (no, really), Bryan Ferry, the Supremes “You Can’t Hurry Love”.  And that allows me to think that I’ll sit and wait and Mary will walk into my arms and everything’ll be OK.

Saturday is a windy November day.  If you are interested, it’s Chelsea at home, which is one all.  I spend the morning at the library trying to read some references.  Trotter had given us a sheet of them and when I found out that most of the guys had read some, and Bryn Lewis who was the class creep had read them all, I decided I had better start.  They were about plate tectonics, so they were actually pretty interesting, but by lunchtime I’d had enough, so I headed of to meet everyone at the Contraceptive for lunch.  In those days the family planning clinic was just round the corner from the Crown and Sceptre which is why we called it the Contraceptive.  They did sausage and chips for lunch.  I found out that they’d just started doing pizza, so in honour of Billy (and by association, Mary) I had pizza. And chips.

On Sunday I went to see Sonia.  I wanted to talk to her about Mary, but I couldn’t find a way.  I wasn’t going to bring it up, I just hoped there’d be some way to steer the conversation.  It didn’t really matter.  I’d been thinking about Mary all week.  I had to do something.

All right then.  What next?  How do I ask her.  After wasting Monday and Tuesday trying to come up with some special form of words, I decide just to go for it.  After all, I’m never going to just bump into her.  Except then I did, outside the pigeon holes in the union concourse, and I’m stuck, flustered, and lost for words.  That was the first time I’d seen her in ages, but when I did see her, even though I couldn’t say two words straight, at least I knew I was trying to do the right thing.

So, that evening I go round to her room and I pray to whatever God I believed in in those days, Bryan Ferry or Brian Clough, or maybe even Brian Eno, that she was alone. 

And she was.

And she said No. 

Actually, it was more like “Thanks for asking, no you shouldn’t have, I couldn’t possibly, but you shouldn’t have really.”  Which means what?

Wipeout!