Chapter 71

Our last few days at work in the frozen vegetable factory were fairly quiet, workwise, although the rain and the equinoctial gales were back with a vengeance, so the caravan now seemed pretty damp and dismal. Despite the bright electric light in the living room, the convector heater and Fred's guitar, the evenings dragged a little, and most of us chose to go to bed early with the hot water bottles and a warm companion to help us ignore the wind whistling around the walls. By now, we'd almost had enough of living in the cramped caravan, and the end of the week was awaited with anticipation. We'd given up on the trestle table and chairs outside a few weeks earlier because of the poor weather; they were now back in the canteen and we were back to crowding around the caravans small table for our breakfast and supper – not a convenient arrangement at all for ten fully-grown people!

On the Wednesday, Mr Johnston stopped at our table at lunchtime and asked if we would kindly stay behind for a few minutes so he could talk to us. Once we had all finished eating and dumped our empty plates on the trolley, the four Loughborough students also came over, and we nattered about our plans for the next term until he returned. Working together for three months had made us all quite good friends with Pam, John, Peter and Hilary, although their daily commute meant that we hadn't gone out for a drink together; they were too keen to get home in the evenings.

"I know that I'm probably being a wee bit premature, but as it's all gone so well this year, I'm going to ask you all now if you'll come and work here again next year?"

We looked at each other. There was silence for a few seconds until Fred cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry, Mr Johnston, but I graduate next June and I've been offered a job to start immediately, so unless that suddenly falls through, I won't be available."

Malcolm agreed.

"I don't know where I'll be working, but if they want me to go straight there, I won't have a lot of choice. If Sian and I are taking some time off, we'd quite like to take four weeks off walking in the Dolomites, as we may not get the chance again for a few years."

"Okay, that's fair enough. I just thought I'd let you all know that I'd be delighted to see you back here; you've been very good workers and got me through the season without too many new grey hairs."

John and Pam also said that they would like to have a month's Inter-rail travel around Europe, but that otherwise they would love to get some work. Peter and Hilary explained that they hadn't made their minds up what to do for their second long vacation, but that a few weeks work would be much appreciated.

It was clear that the twins and Jen and Hamish would also welcome plenty of paid work; I looked at Julie before explaining that we too would probably be available for a few weeks, but couldn't yet promise.

"Great! Thank you; you've all been a great help this year, and I'd be delighted to see any of you back next summer. Frankly I'd be grateful for any time you can give me, especially in early July and this last month when the youngsters are back at school. I can cover you in August, and I'd hate to lose you totally just because you wanted some time to yourselves."

We parted on good terms – even though he preferred to achieve as much certainty and continuity as possible in his casual workforce, Mr Johnston clearly accepted that we had lives of our own, and that he'd been lucky this summer that we were all content to devote the whole of our holiday to earning money.

Our last day at work was Friday 27^th September. We didn't go on the line at all; we spent the day cleaning up the caravan, saying goodbye and thank-you to everyone – especially Mavis who had spoiled us rotten with extras for our breakfasts and suppers – and sorting out our pay. We all got our P45's – the form you get in the UK when you finish a period of work with an employer, that also goes to the taxman – and the bottom figure was even better than we had expected. Okay, the deductions for Income Tax and National Insurance were more than we liked, but weren't a surprise.

After lunch, Mr Johnston drove us all into town himself using the Luton van; we'd already said our own farewells, and the other eight were dropped at the station to head home for the weekend to collect anything they needed to start back at Uni. Jen and I were delivered home to discover that Dad had taken the afternoon off to help get us sorted out. The first job was to lay out our clothes and load up the washing machine!

The second task was to get to the bank with our final pay cheques before they closed for the afternoon; that was done by the skin of our teeth and with Dad driving, the two of us having forgotten that it closed at 3.30 on a Friday afternoon rather than the usual 4.00. In the rush, there was no time to talk to the bank manager – but then, now we were comfortably in credit, there was no particular need to keep him sweet in case we needed an overdraft.

The third job was much more to our taste – to accompany our parents to try out the new Indian Restaurant in town. Dad's favourite shopkeeper, Mr Patel, had done so well with his newsagents that he'd persuaded a cousin to set up an eating place round the corner. The Chinese restaurant had broken the ice for foreign food locally, and people were now willing to try another new cuisine – let's face it, with packets of Batchelor's Savoury Rice (just add to boiling water, ready in 20 minutes) being so popular, the real stuff was bound to be a hit. (With the benefit of hindsight, though, it may well have been the Batchelor's that had the least monosodium glutamate content... )

Over our meal, which was actually not at all bad despite the appalling choice of tinned beers, Mum and Dad told us about the new comedy on BBC 1 television on Thursday nights, 'Porridge'. It was about life in prison – apparently 'doing porridge' is slang for doing time. Ronnie Barker was Norman Stanley Fletcher, a career criminal, with Richard Beckinsale playing Godber, his novice prisoner cellmate. There had been four programmes of the series broadcast so far, and it had been an instant hit. Dad laughed again as he recalled the plot of the previous evening's episode, when one of the other prisoners had been stung by a bee while they were outside the prison on a work party, and Fletch had volunteered to go and summon first aid – but had of course gone straight into the pub for a pint of beer, pleading injured innocence when found.

"They've got them all dressed in blue battledress as the prison uniform, the really itchy woollen ones the RAF wore. Brought back a few memories, that did!"

Mum laughed.

"Yes, and your Dad doesn't stop telling me that it looks really cushy compared to what he had to endure during National Service."

Dad pretended to look hurt.

"But it is! They get three meals a day, a roof over their head, warm dry cells, nobody really shouting at them – the life of Riley I call it! Anyway, you watch out for "Porridge" – I think you'll enjoy it."

"Jon, did you ever decide whether to get a TV in the flat?"

"Not sure, Sis. We finally agreed that Vee was going to see if Radio Rentals have reduced their rates, but it's not as if there's a lot on that we want to watch. We also don't know what the workload will be this year; we may not have a lot of time to spare."

I didn't mention the other practical problem – as Julie and I had taken over the flat's official 'living room' as our bedroom, there wasn't a common place where we could all sit and watch the gogglebox, and as much as we liked our flatmates, we weren't overly keen on opening our room up to be shared. Sian and Malcolm had suffered quite a lot of intrusion when they had the living room of the caravan over the holidays, and we didn't fancy that happening to us for the next year.

"So how do you survive without your fix of "Doctor Who?""

I laughed. There was no doubt that I'd been a serious fan since the start, and Saturday just wasn't Saturday without the Doctor. Dad was teasing me; he was as keen as I was!

"I admit that it's difficult, but I have discovered beer instead! Is Tom Baker going to be a good Doctor?"

"Not sure, I think I'll miss Jon Pertwee. "Planet of the Spiders" was a pretty good place to finish his stint, although that last episode was a bit rushed."

"Anything else I'm missing out on by not having a telly?"

"Not really – ITV have just started a sitcom called "Rising Damp" with Leonard Rossiter, but we're not sure about it yet. It's only been on a couple of times, and they're still trying to establish the characters. "Are You Being Served"? was good this spring, but it's off until after Christmas, I think. Oh, and they're doing a final series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" this autumn, as well. Otherwise, it's just the usual."

I got away with paying the bill – as we had told our parents just how much money we had earned, they made no protest this time. We were home in time for Mum and Dad to watch the Nine O'Clock News on the BBC with Kenneth Kendal – this was still a couple of years before 'Auntie' finally took the revolutionary step of employing Angela Rippon as the first regular female newsreader. Jen and I made them a cup of tea, and then she headed off for a good long soak in a hot bath, while I sat and chatted with them before bed.

We helped around the house on Saturday; doing some tidying up in the garden before lunch. There wasn't a great deal to do as we hadn't yet had the first frost of the winter, although there were a lot of windfall apples to be picked up and sleepy wasps to be avoided.

Our grandparents came over for lunch; it was good to see them, although we didn't have a lot of real news for them. One day washing carrots is pretty similar to the next one! They stayed until tea, and then Dad took them home.

One great relief for me that evening was that the current series of "That's Life" had finished six weeks earlier – Dad quite enjoyed it and often repeated the funny stories told by Cyril Fletcher, but I never did like the sound of Esther Rantzen's voice – it was too contrived and grating for my tender ears – so I normally found something else to do, somewhere where I couldn't hear the television. Things haven't really changed over the years in British Saturday evening television (apart from 'Strictly' which Julie never misses – and forty years later, Bruce Forsyth is still there with the same old jokes!); there's a basic assumption that anyone with any gumption is out of the house, so the cheapest and most moronic programmes are scheduled for then.

That evening, I did have to endure Bruce Forsyth and the Generation Game, with the conveyor belt of prizes including the television, the fondue set, and of course the cuddly toy. If memory serves, I was spared the sight of Anthea Bedfun; she'd quickly got herself up the duff after marrying Bruce as soon as their divorces were through, and was on maternity leave. About nine o'clock, I took myself off for a long soak in the bath with an Isaac Asimov paperback. Jen popped her head round the door with a cup of tea and made some suggestive comments; fairly soon after that I got chucked out of the bathroom so everyone else could get ready for bed. I sat up in bed until just after midnight finishing the book; one thing I did miss about being away from home was access to my paperback collection.

On Sunday, Mum and Dad took Jen and all her stuff back down to Reading by car; I spent most of the day with my grandparents helping out with the chores and the preparations for winter, like chopping sticks for kindling wood so that they could more easily light their fires. Their generation prided themselves on being able to get their coal fires burning on one match, a twist of newspaper, a piece of egg box and a couple of sticks. I could do it that way when I had the patience to build a little pyramid under a few small pieces of coal, but I have to admit that I greatly preferred to use a piece of firelighter and take any doubt out of the process!

Grandma Shaw was doing pretty well, considering that Grandad had died in the Spring, but then I suppose she'd looked after him for a few years as the effects of the gassing in the Great War had affected his health, so she did now have more time to herself. She busied herself baking while I used her little billhook to chop up some wooden fruit boxes into small splintery kindling sticks that would easily catch light. I stayed for lunch with her; I think she was glad of the company even though Mum and Dad were very good about seeing her most days.

"Are you going to be home for Christmas, Jon?"

"I'm not sure yet, Grandma – Julie has been talking about us going to see her parents for a few days, so we might be there for either Christmas or New Year, and I don't know whether Jen will be here or not. But we'll make sure we see you!"

She sighed. Now that Jen and I had a serious boyfriend and girlfriend, she realised that we wouldn't be around as much as she would like. I promised again to keep in touch before walking round to Dad's parents to give them a hand. I suppose it brought home to me how different things were from my parents' generation; it was most unlikely that Jen or I would find jobs locally and live close to Mum and Dad for the rest of their lives.

Mum and Dad were safely home when I got back; they'd had a reasonable if slow journey, and had helped Jen get all her stuff safely piled up on her desk. They were on their second pot of tea.

"Has she got a nice room this year?"

"Yes, I think so, not much of a view but she says that's a good thing so she doesn't get distracted looking out of the window when she should be writing an essay!"

I made sure that I took a note of Jen's new contact details – I didn't tell Mum that Julie and I were hoping to pop up for a weekend shortly; it was better that she didn't realise quite how close we had all become.

The local chip shop being closed on a Sunday, we had sausages and scrambled eggs on toast as a quick and easy supper. Mum didn't feel up to cooking after six hours in the car, and I didn't blame her.

Monday was taken up with a (much needed) haircut and a trip to the cash and carry for the like of teabags, soap and shampoo which were half the normal price when bought in bulk, and were worth transporting all the way back to Cardiff. Julie phoned and confirmed that we were back in the flat; she ran out of 2p coins so it was only a quick conversation. After tea, the three of us sat in front of the TV and watched the first programme of the new series of "Call My Bluff" with Robert Robinson, Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell. As usual, I'd never even heard of one of the words presented for definition, and Mum was by far the winner among us, with much better guesswork than Dad or I managed!

On Tuesday morning, Mum dropped me off at the station for my train, and, laden as I was with rucksack, sleeping bag and a bulging suitcase, the two changes of train had me a little bit worried. I had thought about overnighting in Bristol with the twins, but as we had possession of the flat from the first of the month, it seemed silly not to get back to Julie's bed as soon as I could. British Railways, to their credit, got me back to Cardiff as timetabled and not too ruffled.

And, god, was it good to be back in Julie's bed! I dropped my bags on the floor of our bedroom, and she gave me an extremely warm and enthusiastic welcome! You wouldn't have thought that we'd only been apart for four days!

That over, we reluctantly got dressed again, and I unpacked my luggage, taking the bulk items into the kitchen to join our stores.

Over a cup of tea, Vee told me how the encounter with our landlady had gone.

"I had thought that Mrs Hughes would refuse point-blank to have any men living here, so we wouldn't have a deal, and we'd be all heading over to live with Fred until some places in Senghenydd House became available, but she jumped at our first offer! I think the girl in the bottom flat took her to the Rent Tribunal when she received the notice of the rent increase, and it sounds like they capped the increase at less than 5%, so she was trying to avoid us doing the same."

"Was she upset that you hadn't signed the contract when you posted it back?"

Vee smiled.

"She hadn't actually noticed! I told her that we couldn't afford her 30% increase, but that if we could have our boyfriends living here, we could just about go to 20%, and she was so delighted to get more than the Rent Tribunal would have given her, that she held out her hand straight away. And it's no skin off our noses; we're actually paying much less per head with six of us contributing. Moving flat now would have been a real nuisance, and we love it here."

That was a huge relief. A tricky landlady and a forced move would have really mucked up the start to our final year, but a happy landlady and the legalisation of my occupancy was the outcome we wanted, even if the rent had gone up. We had seen a few of our fellow-students digs, and we knew that we were actually very lucky. Fred had a friend who shared a two-up two-down terraced house on Ninian Park Road, backing on to the railway line with the privy out the back, and he told horror stories of screaming neighbours, rats in the back yard, drunken football fans pissing on the front of the house, and having to run the coal fire because it was the only way of getting hot water other than boiling kettles. Richmond Road, despite the two-and-a-half flights of stairs, was an utter paradise in comparison.

"What about the first floor?"

"I saw Monica and Sarah yesterday morning before Mrs Hughes arrived and told them what we were planning to do; they hadn't thought of moving their boyfriends in, and they were going to think about it. From what Sarah said, they were thinking of moving out as soon as some other self-catering accommodation came up, but will probably stay if the boys do contribute."

"So we'll still be kept awake by the sounds of passion from downstairs?"

She giggled.

"You're lucky they were out shopping half an hour ago, or they'd have grounds for complaint themselves. I could tell you were back almost as soon as I got through the front door – I could hear Julie quite clearly."

My girlfriend and I both blushed. Vee had turned the tables on me very well. She giggled again.

"Yeah, I know. It was hard work keeping the the noise down in the caravan all summer, and I have to admit that it was much better when you found that field and told us about it, so I could let myself go occasionally. You two know better than most that I can be quite loud!"

We certainly did! My intimacy with Julie had only begun because she had run upstairs thinking that someone was being murdered, having heard the sounds that Vee was making as she encouraged me to drive Gustav into her during our first Sunday morning fuck – and repeated experience didn't make Vee any less reticent in telling us how good it felt. Mind you, if you'd had a fiancee who didn't care whether you got any pleasure or not, perhaps communicating with your new lover was a very good way of training them to do what you liked. Not that Julie and I minded one jot; most of our sexual skills had been learned with the help of Vee.

Julie grinned at me.

"Vee's just winding you up! Fred stayed over last night, and I had to put my pillow over my ears to get to sleep. I don't know what he was doing, but Vee seemed to like it a lot!"

Our petite red-headed Welsh flatmate smirked. She was clearly a great deal happier with life than she had been a year earlier, when her soon-to-be-ex-fiancee had ruined her first summer package holiday by getting pissed the first night and then giving himself a tummy bug by drinking Spanish tap water.

Fortunately, before the conversation got too detailed about exactly what Vee and Fred had been doing, we heard the front door close and Sian's voice coming up the stairs, calling for the kettle to be put on. Life was back to normal.

We basically ignored most of the events of Freshers Week; other than getting our new NUS cards, we took the opportunity to get our grant cheques collected before the rush of returning students, and paid them in to the bank. We also went into the University to go through our pigeon holes and sort out things for the first proper week of term, and to get ourselves back into study mode.

Oh, and we took advantage of being in the big city to buy some winter clothes – we'd all changed shape a little bit over the last year with plenty of food and exercise, and there was a lot more choice at much cheaper prices than there ever had been in the gentlemans outfitters back home. I even let Julie take me to Marks and Sparks to buy a new woolen pullover. There were still a lot of posters up around Queen Street and Cathays Terrace for the two 'Roxy Music' concerts at the Capitol Theatre on the 21^st and 22^nd September – which of course we'd missed!

The girls went to the clinic to check that they were still on the books and to collect their next prescriptions for The Pill, while Malcolm and Fred wrote out adverts for people to take their places in their old house, and took them across to the Students' Union to pin up on the Accommodation notice board.

I had received seven of the bi-weekly editions of the Chemical Society Review via my pigeon hole in the Chemistry building, so spent some time going through them to see if there was anything of great interest. I marked up a paper on the formation of hydro-carbons by micro-organisms which I thought Malcolm would find interesting, and then tried to get my head round the paper written by Dr H J Twitchett from ICI's Research Division summarising recent developments in the "Chemistry of the Production of Organic Iso-Cyanates". I was considering applying to ICI for a job, and I thought it wouldn't hurt my interview chances to mug up a bit on what they were working on at the moment, so at least I could demonstrate that I had undertaken some research into the Company I hoped to work for. After three months with scarcely a thought of Chemistry, it took a few minutes to get back into the language! In fact, I was so out of practice, I had to get a piece of paper to write down the atomic structure of 3-isocyanatomethyl-3,5,5-trimethylcyclohexylisocyanate before my brain could take in the words!

Fred and Vee went along to the Freshers Fair and signed up to the Folk Music society; Vee admitting later that she had wanted to do it the previous year but hadn't dared ask any of us to go along with her. We promised to attend some of their concerts and provide an audience if they wanted to try out new songs; with Vee's wonderful singing voice and Fred's playing, they'd already given us a lot of listening pleasure.

I heard Vee's voice that bedtime – Sian was in our bathroom, so I nipped down to the half-landing bathroom to brush my teeth, only to find the door shut. I put my ear to the door, and immediately worked out that Vee was in there – and from the sounds I heard, Fred was in her! I quietly took myself back up the stairs and waited for Sian to finish. I suggested to Julie that we could go down to the half-landing once Vee had finished her 'ablutions', but, sadly, she declined. Part of me wondered if Vee was again wearing the baby-doll nightie that she had first showed me the night fifteen months earlier when Jen had been sleeping in Julie's bedroom, and which had led to an immediate trip down to the half-landing bathroom radiator to release our mutual passion without alerting my virgin kid sister to what was going on.

We had only just got back into the swing of things for our final year in the Richmond Road flat when, on Saturday 5^th October 1974, the IRA killed five people with a bomb in one pub in Guildford, and blew up another that had fortunately been evacuated as soon as word spread of the first blast. Guildford was fairly close to Reading, and Mum got really worried about Jen, who had to promise her that they would not to go out to pubs.

I talked to both of them on the phone that week; Mum was probably being a little bit too over-protective but was genuinely frightened that her daughter might get caught up in a new bombing campaign. As Jen and Hamish very rarely went out drinking in pubs anyway, she was more than happy to reassure Mum that she'd be extremely careful.

Things were a bit more tense everywhere – litter bins were removed so that bombs couldn't be left in them, people were on the look-out for unattended luggage, and there were frequent false alarms. Vee reported being evacuated from the library because of a suspicious package, and the commissionaire from the front desk in the Chemistry building spent a lot more time patrolling the corridors and checking the provenance of deliveries and workmen, and a lot less time turning the pages of The Sun or The Racing Post.

Mrs Hughes, our landlady, popped in by appointment on the Sunday morning to meet us three lads; we had made sure that the flat was especially tidy, and that went off without a hitch. It turned out that she'd had a horrendous time a few years earlier when she let a place to four boys, who had left it in a dreadful state when they vacated it at the end of the year, and she had been forced to replace virtually every item of furniture. However, she seemed to take to us, and she already knew that the three girls were trustworthy, so if she didn't exactly go on her way rejoicing, she seemed happy enough.

We had just endured the second General Election campaign that year, and although we didn't pay much attention to politics, we were quickly fed up with all the fuss. Luckily, it was all over on the 10^th. James Callaghan was our Labour M.P. in Cardiff; he had represented the constituency since 1950, and with his majority and a split opposition, there was no risk of him ever losing the seat. He had previously been both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary; Harold Wilson had made him Foreign Secretary in March, and his opponents in Cardiff South East knew that they didn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of being elected against such a local heavyweight, who had already held three of the four major offices of State.

The Marxist-Leninist candidate had been a real pain for more than a week, with his megaphone and his billboards cluttering up our route just inside the Union doors, and we were delighted to see him lose his deposit, with only 75 votes.

Harold Wilson and the Labour Party managed to achieve a majority in the House of Commons this time around – albeit a tiny one of three seats, so there was no change of government, it was just majority rather than minority, but still shackled by its lack of authority. Given the reported double-digit annual rate of inflation and the Trades Union unrest, I was never convinced that it was to their advantage to continue in power.

(That was Harold Wilson's fourth General Election victory, but was also his last. In March 1976 he resigned quite suddenly, tired and weakened by the struggle against economic crisis. Jim Callaghan became Prime Minister, and of course was roundly thrashed by Margaret Thatcher and the resurgent Conservatives in 1979.)

The third weekend of October was the one that Julie and Jen had agreed we would go up and stay in Reading. Because of the recent IRA bombs nearby, Jen did offer to come down to Cardiff or meet us in Bristol, but we decided that we'd rather have the privacy of their rooms at Reading.

Julie wasn't at all averse to playing her 'honorary brother' game with Hamish again, and Jen and I were really looking forward to a couple of full nights together, so that we could try to repeat the pinnacle of sexual ecstacy we had achieved on that moonlit July night by the stream in the hayfield - and of course have some of the 'wild wild sex' that I had promised her.

We went up by train on the Friday night; we expected a much easier and more comfortable journey than Jen and Hamish normally endured when they came to Bristol, as we were going against the flow out of London for the weekend. Sian and Malcolm came with us as far as Parkway; the twins' parents were staying with them, and Sheila had decided that it would be good if they got a decent chance to meet their niece's boyfriend. Malcolm had followed my example and had a haircut; I'd told him that Mr & Mrs Carter were actually okay under the bluster – all bark and no bite.

There was quite a visible security and police presence on the station at Cardiff, with frequent loudspeaker warnings about not leaving luggage unattended. One of our fellow passengers said that there had been a false alarm at Swansea, when someone had left their suitcase unattended, and had it blown up by the Bomb Squad. He also mentioned that the culprits found no sympathy from anyone when they complained about the loss of their belongings.

We easily found seats on the train; Jen had told us that most of the time they had to stand in the corridors all the way from Reading, as every seat was taken at Paddington, even the reserved ones! Hamish reckoned that if they were silly enough to leave for the station after four p.m., it was almost quicker to go back to their room for the night and try again in the morning, than queue to get onto an already packed train full of city escapees!