Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  Although I had little, possibly nothing, in common with my fellow Physics students (excepting, of course, Julian Peto), there was certainly no feeling of animosity towards me. Other Physics freshmen were courteous towards me and seemed now to be able to comprehend my heavy Welsh lilt. I gradually met Balliol students outside of the Natural Science faculty and formed the opinion that arts undergraduates, particularly historians and philosophers, were a far more interesting and non-conforming bunch than scientists. Some of them even had long hair and wore jeans. I developed a nodding acquaintance with them.

  My sexual adventures were confined to females not attached to the university. I assumed that university girls were not the type to go to bed with me or anyone else. This ridiculous assumption was the result of my Welsh coalfield upbringing, where there was no overlap whatsoever between girls who studied and girls who would ‘do it’. The ones that ‘did it’ would invariably be girls who had left school as soon as they could, and they would tend to work in Woolworth’s, betting shops, or factories. Consequently, my first sexual liaisons in Oxford were initiated in the Cornmarket Woolworth’s store and the odd street encounter. Most of the latter seemed to be with foreign students attending nursing and secretarial colleges. The illusion of British blue-stocking celibacy became further entrenched.

  Halfway through my first term a notice appeared in the Porter’s Lodge at Balliol College announcing: ‘The following gentlemen will read essays to the Master on … The subject will be “The Population Problem”.’ My name then followed along with six others whose surnames also began with L, M, or N. I was not aware there was a population problem. About a week’s notice was given, and I was very nervous. I hurriedly withdrew some books from the college library, and shamelessly copied huge chunks. Someone informed me that Sir David Lindsay Keir, Master of Balliol, used these essay readings to determine how well freshmen could hold their sherry. This gave me some comfort.

  Fortunately, I was not one of the three gentlemen chosen to read an essay. I drank an enormous amount of sherry and had a long conversation with Sir David about the origins of the Welsh language and its grammatical peculiarities. He was of the belief that Welsh was a purely Celtic language with grammatical features akin to those of Gaelic and Breton. I, on the other hand, steadfastly maintained that the aboriginal Welsh was pre-Celtic with unique grammatical oddities such as the regulated mutations of the beginnings of nouns. A few weeks later, he told me that I might have been right. Sir David had not, up to the time of our conversation, been aware of the admittedly disputed fact that America had been discovered in AD 1170 by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynnedd, whose followers bequeathed elements of the Welsh language to the Padoucas Indians. Keeping my sherry glass full, Sir David listened with polite interest to my detailed account of this esoteric history.

  Also present at this essay reading (or, in my case, non-essay reading) were freshmen John Minford and Hamilton McMillan, each of whom had a very significant effect on my life. John Minford was immediately convinced that I was a talented actor and persuaded me to join the Balliol Dramatic Society. Hamilton McMillan, years later, was convinced that I would make a talented espionage agent and persuaded me to work for MI6. It is strange to think that had my surname not begun with M, I would have suffered neither the glare of stage lights nor the attention of the world’s media.

  To entice me into participating in Balliol Dramatic Society activities, John Minford asked if I would be prepared to play the part of First Yob in the Balliol College/Lady Margaret Hall Christmas pantomime, The Sleeping Beauty. It was a small part, which consisted of uttering a few appropriate, timely obscenities and lying around looking either vaguely menacing or perversely seductive. I agreed on condition that Julian Peto be persuaded to play the part of Second Yob.

  My membership of the Balliol Dramatic Society led to my befriending other members, and I soon became adopted into a group of largely second-year Balliol undergraduates, often referred to as ‘The Establishment’. These included Rick Lambert, the current editor of the Financial Times, and Chris Patten, currently Governor of Hong Kong. They were all heavy drinkers and very entertaining. ‘The Establishment’ also formed the core of the Victorian Society, and I was invited to become a member. It was a strange society, to say the least, but again the main requirement was to down large amounts of drink, this time port, which I had never tried. Each member was obliged to sing a Victorian song to the audience of other members, and further obliged to sing different Victorian songs at subsequent meetings. The officers of the society permitted me to sing the same song on each occasion. The song was a Welsh hymn, Wele Cawsom Y Mesiah, sung to the tune of Bread of Heaven.

  The pantomime went well, and a cast party was held. I made a disgusting exhibition of myself by attempting to imitate Elvis Presley while the main vocalist of Oxford University’s most illustrious rock group, The Blue Monk and His Dirty Habits, was taking a break. As a consequence of this, I began my first affair with a university undergraduate, the rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber of St Anne’s College. No more Woolworth’s girls for a while.

  The room next door to me was far more spacious and attractive than mine. I would sometimes spend time there, often accompanied by Harold Macmillan’s grandson, Joshua Macmillan, who was a very close friend of the occupant. For some reason, the room became vacant, and I took it over.

  My new quarters considerably enhanced my potential for entertaining guests. A few days after I moved in, Joshua visited and warned me that I would be likely to get lots of visitors in the middle of the night, particularly at weekends. The reason for this was that the bars of the window were removable, thereby giving an extraordinarily easy access to the street. The secret was known by a dozen or so friends of Joshua, and they would like to continue to make use of the facility. The removable bars also dramatically facilitated my nocturnal entries and exits as well as those of my friends, all of whom soon shared the secret. My room became a popular late-night venue. Interruptions at 4 a.m. by others seeking access were occasionally inconvenient, but they gave rise to the broadening of my circle of adventurous Balliol students and loose women.

  At the beginning of each term, returning students would have to sit ‘collections’, examinations designed to test the previous term’s progress. The examination papers were very likely to be lying around one of the physics tutors’ college rooms. A preview of the papers would solve the problem of how to make a satisfactory showing at the examination. This, of course, would require clandestinely entering the tutors’ rooms and searching through their desks. A couple of days before the beginning of my second term, I made a tour of inspection of the exterior of the rooms of Dr P. G. H. Sandars and Dr D. M. Brink. They were locked, but Dr Sandars’ room was on the ground floor. The following night, at about 3 a.m., I crept across the deserted college grounds, opened the window, and, armed with a torch purchased that afternoon, proceeded to search Dr Sandars’ desk. After about half an hour, I gave up. There were no collection papers to be seen. Prowling around was relatively safe, so I had a look at Dr Brink’s room. This, too, was on the ground floor, but the window was inaccessible and tightly shut. I wandered around trying to figure out a way of getting into Dr Brink’s room, in which I was convinced the elusive collection papers would be found. It then came to mind that Wally, the venal night porter, kept in the Porter’s Lodge what appeared to be a full set of duplicate keys. I strolled across the quad to my room, got out of my window into St Giles’, walked to the Porter’s Lodge, and asked Wally to let me in. Once inside I told him that I had locked myself out of my room with the key still inside. He asked for my room number, and I gave him Dr Brink’s. He handed me the key to Dr Brink’s room and asked me to return it to him when I had retrieved my original. I proceeded to Dr Brink’s room, opened the door, immediately found a stack of collection papers, took one, and returned the key, together with another half-crown tip, to a very grateful Wally. I passed the collection examination with flying colours.

  Balli
ol undergraduates often spoke of a character named Denys Irving, who had been rusticated from Oxford and had sensibly spent his period of banishment from the city walls visiting exotic parts of the world. He had recently returned from his voyages of discovery and was about to visit, presumably illegally, his friends at Oxford. I was invited to meet him. Denys had brought with him some marijuana in the form of kif from Morocco. Up to that point I had heard the odd whisper of drugs being taken at the university and was aware that marijuana was popular with British West Indian communities, jazz enthusiasts, American beatniks, and the modern intellectual wave of Angry Young Men. I had no idea of marijuana’s effects, however, and, with a great deal of enthusiastic interest, I accepted the joint that Denys offered and took my first few puffs. The effects were surprisingly mild but quite long-lasting. After just a couple of minutes, I started having a sensation akin to butterflies in the stomach but without the customary feelings of trepidation. This led to a desire to laugh followed by my interpreting most of the conversation as amusing enough for me to do so. I then became acutely aware of the music that was being played, James Brown’s Please Please Please, and of the aesthetic qualities of my immediate environment. Each of these experiences was completely new to me and highly enjoyable. My next sensation was of the slowing-down of time. Finally I became hungry, as did everyone else, and invaded the premises of what later became the Sorbonne French restaurant, but was then the Moti Mahal, in a street appropriately named The High. This was my first experience of Indian food, and I became addicted to it for life.

  After endless bhajis, kurmas, pilaos, doopiazas, and other curries, the effects of the marijuana gradually wore off, and I invited the entire group to come back to my room, where we smoked numerous joints and listened to doo-wop music on my rather antiquated tape recorder. One by one, we passed out.

  The next morning was George’s day off. He was replaced by a scout who did not share his liberal attitude to carryings-on in college rooms and, on seeing the battlefield that was my room, promptly threatened to report it to the Dean. My newly found friends decided to headquarter themselves in my room for the day. Further friends of theirs from all over Oxford were invited to join the gathering. Someone turned up with a record player and a box of records. Others turned up with different types of marijuana and hashish. Loud Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan music blared, and cannabis smoke poured out into St Giles’ and into the Elizabethan section of Balliol’s back quad. During the early evening, Denys Irving returned to London, and the ‘happening’ slowly faded out.

  The next day, Joshua Macmillan died from respiratory obstruction, resulting from an overdose of Valium and alcohol. I saw his body being carried down the stairs. It was the first human corpse I had ever seen. Joshua’s death was tragic in every respect. Although people speculated that it might have been suicide, this was entirely inconsistent with his recent behaviour. He had taken a cure for heroin in Switzerland and claimed not to be using it any more. He also maintained that he only ever took barbiturates or alcohol when there was no marijuana to be found. Joshua and I were by no means close friends; we were simply acquaintances. His death, however, had a profound effect on me and forced me to carefully examine my attitudes to drug-taking.

  Shortly after Joshua’s death, my pigeon-hole contained a summons to see the Dean, Francis Leader McCarthy Willis Bund, as soon as possible. He came straight to the point. As a result of Joshua’s death, there would be inquiries by the police and Proctors (university police) regarding drug-taking in the University, with particular emphasis on Balliol. The Dean was making his own preliminary investigation and he had good reason (information from George’s stand-in) to start this investigation by asking me some questions. Did I take drugs? Who else did? Where were they taken? I explained that I had smoked marijuana a couple of times but that I was not prepared to give him names of others who might have also done so. The Dean seemed greatly relieved at my refusal to name others, and I’ve not forgotten the look on his face, which has since carried me through all sorts of unpleasant interrogations. He finished the meeting by asking me to have a quiet word with anyone I knew who did smoke marijuana, begging them not to do so on the college premises.

  The following weekend, the Sunday Times review section featured an article headlined ‘Confessions of an Oxford Drug Addict’, which was mainly an interview with a close friend of Joshua’s. A number of articles with similar themes appeared in other newspapers as a result of the University having been invaded by journalists wishing to write a story following up the death of Harold Macmillan’s grandson. The most unlikely students were bending over backwards to confess to some reporter their flirtation with Oxford’s drug culture. Marijuana smokers were popping up all over the place, and it was considered fairly unfashionable not to be one. Having fortuitously penetrated the drug culture a couple of days prior to the national exposé, I was accorded the status of one of its pioneers. I did absolutely nothing to dispel this misconception. It was, therefore, no surprise to anyone else, but slightly surprising to me, that I was issued with a summons to appear before the Proctors ‘in connection with a confidential matter’. I immediately sought the advice of the Dean, who was now getting very concerned at all the unwelcome attention Balliol was attracting. We spent quite a long time together in his room, and I must have given him my life story. During our conversation, I developed the beginnings of an enormous liking and respect for him, and it seemed that he had a fatherly type of affection for me. He spoke quite a lot about his life, taking care to mention his former position as Junior Proctor, and how Proctors generally were a bad lot. He advised me to behave with them in precisely the same way as I had done with him when first questioned.

  I turned up to see the Proctors. The Senior Proctor was David Yardley, a stern, police-interrogator type of individual. I refused to answer all questions on the grounds that it was against my ethical code to incriminate other people. I was dismissed with a ‘You’ll hear from us later.’

  I walked out of the building, and the Dean was waiting outside. He asked, ‘Did you stand up to that damnable pair?’

  I told him that I had, but expressed my concern that they were likely to punish me for my silence. The Dean reassured me by saying that if that should happen, they would have to cope with his resignation. I believed him, and, from that day on, we had an unbreakable bond of friendship.

  I determined to become a dedicated beatnik (the word ‘hippie’ had not yet been invented). Brylcreem was abandoned, and my hair just flopped onto my shoulders. Drainpipe trousers were exchanged for frayed jeans, winkle-pickers for Spanish leather boots, long velvet-collared jacket for a short denim one, and a white mackintosh for a sheepskin coat. I smoked as much marijuana as I could get my hands on, read Kerouac, listened to Bob Dylan and Roland Kirk, and attended French movies I didn’t understand. My whole life seemed to have changed dramatically except for my promiscuity and avoidance of academic work.

  On June 11th, 1965, a bunch of us went up to London to attend Wholly Communion at the Royal Albert Hall. This was a modern poetry conference featuring Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Esam, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, and other notables. It turned out to be the largest audience ever assembled to hear poetry in this country and the first genuine large-scale ‘happening’. Peace and love, getting stoned and making love. A new generation was taking over. I wanted to be part of it.

  I spent Oxford’s very long vacations in filthy clothes hitchhiking fairly randomly around Great Britain and Europe in the belief that I was somehow ‘On the Road’. My European travels included a visit to Copenhagen, where I ran out of money. Luckily, I had made friends with members of a Danish rock-and-roll group, who very kindly allowed me to sing with them on a few occasions, thereby earning enough to leave the country. The route back to the United Kingdom took me through Hamburg, where my friend Hamilton McMillan lived. Mac had given me his address, and I telephoned him from a sordid bar in the Reeperbahn. I was looking for the Star Club,
where the Beatles had been discovered. Mac was delighted to hear from me, insisted I stay a few nights at his home, and came to pick me up.

  Mac assumed that I would be unlikely to be mistaken for a city gent, but even he was noticeably shocked at my outrageous, dishevelled, unkempt, long-haired, dirty appearance. He was also slightly disconcerted by the ever-increasing crowds of curious and intrigued Hamburgers who were staring fixedly at the degenerate specimen of humanity I presented. The possible reception that we both might encounter at his parents’ home was filling Mac with understandable apprehension. We sat down for a few beers and his fears gradually lifted. He felt confident that after seeing me, his parents would, at least, refrain from nagging him about his lamb-chop sideburns. In fact, his parents turned out to be the most accommodating and generous hosts, although a long hot bath and a quick laundering of the dirtiest of my clothes had no doubt helped. Mac and I had a great time. He loved to display my shoulder-length hair to his friends, and I loved to be so displayed. We cemented our friendship and remained very good friends until British Intelligence and Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise terminated our relationship.

  For a period of about two weeks I slept rough outside the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon. This meant that I was invariably first in the queue when the box office opened to sell the forty tickets it withheld until the day of performance. I would buy four tickets, the maximum that could be sold to any one person. One ticket was kept for my own use, as I had become quite a genuine Shakespeare fan by then, two would be sold at vastly inflated prices to American tourists, while one would be given, or sold at a very cheap price, to an attractive single female. She would, of course, be obliged by her ticket to sit next to me during the performance, and conversation was easy to start up. I wondered if other people played these kind of games.

  During my hitch-hiking escapades, I picked up a varied assortment of ethnic rubbish, pretentious objets d’art, gimmicky knick-knacks, and other hippie trinkets with the intention of using them to decorate my college room. They included a 400-square-foot net used to protect fruit trees from birds, a road sign stating ‘Mind the Hose’, a very large Cézanne poster, and rolls of aluminium foil. I suspended the net from the room’s ceiling, papered the walls with aluminium foil, and nailed the Cézanne poster to the floor. Lamps made of orange-boxes containing low-wattage coloured bulbs were carefully placed in corners, and my newly acquired record player was set up with extension speakers dotted around the walls. All and sundry were welcome to visit my quarters and bring their friends, records, alcohol, and supplies of marijuana and hashish. The rooms rapidly became the location of a non-stop party, with music continually blaring and dense clouds of marijuana smoke clouding out of the door and windows. I dropped out completely from all college activities and would rarely venture out of my room other than to eat lunch at George’s workers’ café in the market or dinner at the Moti Mahal in The High.