The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  People in the fifties did bother to write fairly decent letters, letting you down gently, even if you were a young nobody at some provincial university. Today, the normal reply is silence.

  I did get my first payment from a national publication for actually writing something, as opposed to the two guineas from the Daily Express for a tip-off. I had been contacted by someone called Peter Dickinson on Punch, who was writing to a selection of student editors – possibly those on the NUS shortlists – explaining that they were doing a student edition and would like any humorous offerings. I sent something off, which was accepted – but, bugger it, the issue never came out.

  I did receive a cheque for six guineas, which I immediately cashed, and pinned the covering letter on my wall in my rooms on the Norman Gallery. That was a bit of name-dropping. The reference to the Norman Gallery will be totally meaningless to any but a handful of Old Castlemen.

  When I got back to Castle in the autumn of 1957, I was elected Senior Man – i.e. president of the JCR. It meant that when I started my DipEd year, 1957–58, I had two jobs – editing Palatinate and Senior Man.

  When I wrote and told Margaret, she was totally derisive, pouring scorn on the silly title. It is true that whenever I have mentioned being Senior Man, anywhere outside that tiny, isolated peninsula in Durham, people just laugh. (The title lives on: even though University College, Durham became co-ed in 1987, the Senior Man of the JCR is still called Senior Man, even if she is a woman.)

  There were three big attractions of being Senior Man. One, you got the best rooms in the house – in this case a suite of rooms on the Norman Gallery, which were stunningly situated, on a wide, handsome corridor filled with statues and pillars. At the end of my previous year, I had found a room to rent on South Street, outside the peninsula but overlooking the river, probably the nicest street in Durham City. I had been so thrilled to acquire it for my DipEd year, thanks to a friend from St Cuthbert’s, Peter Gilbourne-Stenson, who’d lived there the previous year and put in a good word for me. But when I was elected Senior Man, right at the beginning of term, I gave it up, so I never actually lived there.

  Secondly, as Senior Man I got a sherry allowance. I couldn’t believe it, and of course kept it quiet. The theory was that the SM would be having meetings in his rooms, inviting officers of the JCR, entertaining Senior Men from the other colleges, so naturally he had to offer them a quiet sherry, keep up the status and standards of Castle.

  Thirdly, and perhaps best of all, I got access to a typewriter, the JCR’s very own machine, a sit-up-and-beg Remington. Technically, it was for the use of the JCR secretary, Alan Flint, who lived in the rooms on the Norman Gallery next to me. His job was to make notes during JCR meetings, then type them up afterwards. I said he could still have the honour of keeping the minutes of the meetings, but the typewriter would reside in my room from now on.

  In my first year, I had considered the Senior Man as almost a demigod, so mature and impressive and organised. By the third year I realised it was an act, playing a part, looking as if you know what you are doing. All I mainly had to do was walk into JCR meetings, followed by the secretary. They would all stand up and I would announce solemnly, ‘This is a meeting of University College, junior common room. Gentlemen may smoke.’ I would sit down. Everyone else would sit down. Then I would take the meeting through the agenda, copying the system and phrases I had heard the Senior Men trot out in my previous three years, asking gentlemen to vote ‘aye’ or ‘nay’, but doing it all as quickly as possible.

  There were no rows or dramas during my year in office, but an awful lot of time was spent on boring problems to do with the college bar, buttery and the Undercroft, and then finally Castle Day and the June Ball, the two big events at the end of the academic year. It was hard keeping a straight face all the time, as if I cared about some of the more piddling stuff, and not appearing a total fraud, but now, aged twenty-one, I was at least a graduate. That meant I wore a BA gown to prove it.

  I went down to visit Margaret at Oxford a few times, as soon as she appeared to have settled in and I could get away. I hitchhiked, which took forever, as I did not want to spend money on trains. Everyone hitchhiked in those days. It was what you did. I suppose the war had helped to make it acceptable and commonplace, as there were few cars and vehicles, petrol was rationed, so you helped each other.

  Margaret and I did a lot of hitchhiking together, to the southern Lakes, Yorkshire and Scotland. I used to say I had a lucky thumb, which I would only put up in the air if we were desperate. You hid your luggage, if you had a lot, pulling it out of the dyke when the car has stopped. It was usually much easier with a girl than another boy, so you made sure she was most visible. I went off once to have a pee in a barn, leaving Margaret by the roadside. Into the barn stormed an angry farmer yelling, ‘You hard-faced bugger!’ I ran like hell, the farmer still shouting after me, just in time to jump into the car which Margaret had stopped. ‘You hard-faced bugger’ went into our repertoire of phrases whenever I did something vaguely unlawful.

  I liked to think I gave good chat, helped the driver of the car or the lorry to pass the time by being amusing, interesting or, most of all, interested in him and his life. I can’t remember a woman giving me a lift. It was always male drivers. Sometimes the rides were posh Jaguars or Daimlers. Mostly, though, they were scary bashed-up, rattling lorries and you were glad to get off. Sometimes they said they were just going to the next town. If you suspected that was a fib, you tried doubly hard to be interesting, hoping they would say, ‘Actually, I am going all the way to London.’ So you felt doubly grateful to humanity and the world and of course yourself, for having sold yourself.

  I still think that hitchhiking is the most adventurous form of travelling. You don’t know where you are going, how you will get there, with whom, or when, if ever. You are at the hands of traffic, fate, the whims and decisions of others. It can be frightening, worrying, freezing, sweltering. The conversation can be fascinating, annoying, non-existent. The thing to keep telling yourself, when no one has stopped for hours and you are totally losing heart, is that bastards never stop.

  Hitchhiking was huge in the UK and USA in the post-war years, right up to the 1970s, part of most people’s young lives. Now ordinary people, ordinary students, don’t seem to do it, only dossers or vehicle delivery drivers carrying their plates. Once cars became more common it was less necessary. The arrival of motorways made it harder, as you were not allowed to hitchhike on them. But I suppose social attitudes have discouraged it – and horror films. Risk-averse parents do not let their little treasures climb into a strange vehicle with a strange man.

  When I visited Margaret, I would aim to do it in a day, though it was an awkward cross-country route, Durham to Oxford, so I would often arrive in the dark. To begin with I slept on Mike Thornhill’s floor in Balliol, but eventually I was able to stay with the parents of Margaret’s new best friend, Theodora Parfitt. Her home happened to be in Oxford, in Northmoor Road. Both her parents were doctors. Theo and her sister had gone to boarding school while her younger brother Derek was at Eton. On the surface, they appeared to be terribly posh and well off and upper class, yet some of the carpets were threadbare and they seemed to eat a lot out of tins or packets. One room was filled with old newspapers, which the father was saving up to sell for salvage.

  Margaret, being a scholar, had a very good room in Somerville and seemed to me to be the centre of quite an admiring group. They were from the best public schools and were charmed by this forthright northerner who knew her mind and had an opinion on everything.

  When I went to various Oxford gatherings with her and her friends I fell silent, feeling provincial and lumpen and tongue-tied, awfully inferior, convinced they were all looking down on me for being a northern grammar school boy at a provincial university. None of them, of course, looked down on Margaret because of her background, for she could easily match them in conversational cut and thrust. But her girlfriends were all
very friendly and interested in me. It was the men, they just ignored me, as if I wasn’t there. So I would go all sullen and resentful.

  We were not sleeping together, certainly not. It’s 1957–58 – sex, as we know, did not arrive till 1963. I would go all that way to see her just to hold hands. But there was a bit of what was called heavy petting – as illustrated on swimming-pool notices of the time, warning patrons against it. There was sometimes the occasional anguished tussle, but none of that appalling, shocking physical intercourse nonsense, which we had only ever read about, half-believing it was not true. When we went hostelling for the weekend in the Lake District, we made it clear to Margaret’s parents that youth hostels were segregated, which they were, male and female dormitories, so all above board, but during the day, on our long walks, we tried to find somewhere dry and preferably with a roof on in which to crouch.

  Getting anywhere indoors and alone was such a struggle in the fifties and sixties. Even if you had a regular girlfriend or boyfriend, no parents would let you sleep together, or even stay the night. So in the early days of our courtship, going youth hostelling, spending all day and most of the evening together, was exciting.

  I was never as good a walker as Margaret. She walked straight and upright while I slouched the way Baden-Powell said every Boy Scout should never do, for it clearly smacked of slackness and abuses. I got her to carry our rucksack, except when we passed through villages or met anyone. So I didn’t appear a total seven-stone weakling. I did, when I was younger, before I had girlfriends, look at those adverts in The Hotspur and Wizard and wonder if I should send off for a muscle-building course, but I couldn’t afford them. By the time I did have the money, I seemed to have girlfriends anyway.

  We had stayed one night at the youth hostel in Penrith, after a day walking round Ullswater. In the morning, she counted up the pennies of our joint money and worked out we had enough for one more night in the hostel, for the two of us, or we could walk all day, have a good meal in the evening, and then go home. Which would I prefer? I paused, for probably ten seconds, and opted for the good meal and going home. I was never forgiven.

  Another time, sitting in romantic contemplation on the top of Place Fell after a lovely day, she asked what I was thinking. Which is what couples do, when young and courting. I foolishly told the truth. ‘I was just thinking I could really do with a pint and pie.’

  We spent a good holiday youth hostelling in Scotland. First of all, we went to Cambuslang to stay with my Uncle Jim and Aunt Linda. I wanted to show off Margaret, the Oxford scholar, and also show them off to Margaret, that I did have half-decent, artistic relations with their own house. In my mind, they were very bohemian and ever so liberal, so I had assumed and expected that we would be allowed to sleep together, in an actual bed. The moment I even hinted at this, we were not even allowed in the same house, never mind the same bed. They suddenly announced that Margaret was being accommodated up the road, in the house of my other aunt, Aunt Jean. They said they didn’t really have room for the two of us, but Aunt Jean would be delighted to give Margaret a bed.

  And she was. She brought Margaret breakfast in bed each morning, on a lovely tray, with flowers and fresh fruit. Margaret was charmed. Down at Aunt Linda’s, I had cold porridge, left behind when they went off to work.

  Then we headed off to Skye, over on the ferry, and walked and hitched to the very top at Uig, where we booked into the youth hostel. We took a stroll in the evening and sat in the heather on some little hill, from where, in the distance, we could hear a bagpiper practising. Very moody, very romantic, for us Scottish-born folk.

  Also staying in the hostel was a woman in her forties with a gawky, overweight son of about ten, over whom she constantly fussed. On the hour, she would say to him, ‘Here’s your ten o’clocks, Michael’, and shove some awful pie down his throat. ‘Here’s your eleven o’clocks, Michael.’ And he would be given a packet of biscuits. It went on all day long. The phrase entered our lexicon, another meaningless banality, said to each other satirically when being given something.

  Next morning in the hostel, we had words. Can’t remember now what it was about, but the upshot was that Margaret poured a bowl of cornflakes over my head. The hostel dining room was quite full, with half a dozen other couples who pretended not to notice what Margaret had done. For the next few days, arriving at other hostels, working our way up the west coast to Ullapool, we kept on meeting couples from the Skye hostel who would point at us, then whisper and start giggling. Not that Margaret cared, but I was black affronted, as my mother used to say, or ‘shanned to deeth’, as we said in Carlisle.

  On one of my visits to Oxford, I overstayed my time in her room in Somerville. Chucking-out time for all male visitors was six o’clock, just as it was for female visitors at Durham. I don’t know how we made a mistake, as nothing all that exciting was happening, just talking probably, but we suddenly realised it was eight o’clock. How was I going to get out?

  I didn’t know my way round the college, how to find a back door, and didn’t want to do myself damage by climbing any walls. We decided the best way was the most direct and brazen way – to go out the front gate, through the porter’s lodge. But disguised as a woman. Somervillians could go in and out till ten o’clock, so there were always women leaving or coming back.

  I rolled up my trousers, put on Margaret’s blue raincoat and wrapped her college scarf round my head, partly obscuring my face. Like me, she had bought a college scarf in her first year, before she decided it was naff. I got through the college gates okay, striding out boldly, then walked up Woodstock Road till I came to an alleyway. I went into it, looked around, took Margaret’s scarf and coat off and rolled down my trousers. It was then I noticed that a couple were standing in the alleyway, kissing against a wall. I was aware that the man had seen me, and noticed his look of surprise at my hairy legs.

  I got back to Balliol and spent the night on Mike’s floor. Next morning I hitchhiked back to Durham. It was a few days later that I discovered that the person in the alleyway who had spotted me was the editor of Cherwell. He did a front-page story about a man escaping from Somerville disguised as a woman. Some helpful person at Somerville then told him Margaret’s name, and he flogged the story to the Daily Sketch, a popular tabloid of the time, later taken over by the Daily Mail.

  Margaret was summoned before the principal of Somerville, Dame Janet Vaughan, who reprimanded her for bringing the good name of the college into disrepute, especially being a scholar. Her punishment was being gated for the rest of that term. Which wasn’t too severe. It was already quite near the end.

  In the second term, I had to start my teaching practice, which meant that, in December 1957, at the end of the autumn term, I resigned as editor of Palatinate. I managed a bumper edition to celebrate, and we sold 1,500 copies – which was saturation point, as the number of students in Durham was still only around that mark. It was by then about to start expanding, with new colleges being planned, such as Grey College, which opened in 1959.

  Jill Burtt did a profile of me in my last Palatinate, in which she described me as ‘a laughing mischievous devil with a rapid way of speaking so that it seems impossible he could ever be in repose’. I got some stick for that from my Oxford scholar friend.

  21

  READY FOR ACTION

  My teaching practice was at a secondary modern school in West Hartlepool, reputed to have about the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the country at the time. It wasn’t all that hard. It was just that I was useless.

  The teacher looking after me was very pleasant and helpful and I did admire him, for his wisdom and maturity, still trying his best, but well aware he wasn’t doing much to improve the lives of his pupils. He sat at the back during most of my lessons marking exercise books, as if unaware of what I was doing, but it was comforting to know he was there, in case world war three broke out. I was teaching history, not a full load, just a couple of periods a day to so-called easy classes.
I would prepare each lesson, as we had been taught, spending ages following the format we had been given about the aims of each lesson, then the achievements, but they never seemed to go to plan. I could never decide whether to be friends with them, talk about pop music and football, or be a right bastard and somehow get their respect.

  I once had to meet a parent who had come in to talk to someone about her son Nottingham. Naturally, I eventually asked how he came to have that name. ‘That’s where I had him,’ she replied with a smile. She also had a girl called Scarborough and another called Sheffield. I never found out if she was on the game or a long-distance lorry driver.

  In the staffroom you soon discover all the petty squabbles and personality clashes you are never aware of as a pupil, which in my case had been only four years earlier. There were chairs you could not sit in, mugs you should never use, whose turn for biscuits, who hated whom, which topics never to discuss. It was interesting, but not much use, as I couldn’t really write about it in Palatinate. I did describe the teachers at length in letters to Margaret, just as she had described the complicated family she had lived with as an au pair in Bordeaux, none of whom I had met.

  I still went down to Oxford at regular intervals to see Margaret. She was still not in love with Oxford, deciding she hated living in college, with girls all the same age and roughly the same type, all their voices, all the noise and the jolly JCR camaraderie. Like many girls, she had loved boarding-school stories when young, read all of Angela Brazil, and fantasised that she was not Arthur’s daughter living in a council house but an orphan who gets sent by a rich distant relative to spend her whole school life in a wonderful boarding school. But she found she much preferred to be on her own, away from groups and gangs and regimentation. So she started making plans to go into a flat in her second year, along with her friend Theo.