Mr Nice. Говард Маркс
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the light of the Dean’s advice to me, a number of my friends had suggested that I consider switching from Physics to either Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) or Philosophy, Physiology, and Psychology (PPP), paying particular attention to philosophy. I talked to the Dean about it and he arranged for me to speak with Alan Montefiore, a PPE tutor, who gave me a short reading list and asked me to write, before the end of term, an essay on the definition of ‘good’. Approximately eighteen hours of each of seven days were spent struggling through a series of texts in moral philosophy before I realised that I would neither be able to fully understand the subject nor be capable of contributing to it. Years later I found out that no one completely understood moral philosophy and that non-comprehension was by no means a bar to contribution. Sheepishly I attempted to explain this seemingly serious inability to Montefiore, who seemed confused by my problem but was also extremely kind and considerate. He offered to give his advice and assistance to me any time I thought I might need them. I didn’t change courses. I stuck with Physics.
I was elected to organise the entertainments for the forthcoming 700th anniversary Commemorative Ball. My primary duty was to engage groups to supply the musical entertainment. I had a budget of £1,000. The entertainment manager’s main goal was to try to spot talent likely to become famous within a short period of time and book them while they were still at a relatively low price. A daunting precedent had been set by Magdalen College a couple of years earlier. They had booked the Rolling Stones for a mere £100 just before they became superstars. My knowledge of pop music was then as good as anyone’s, and I booked the relatively unknown Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces for a mere pittance. Within weeks of being booked, they both had Number One hits. Their respective managers wanted to withdraw from the Balliol booking as this would clash with recently offered lucrative tours. Contractually they were obliged to appear and could be heavily sued for not doing so. The agent suggested a solution: if I let the Spencer Davis Group and the Small Faces off the hook, I could chose artists normally costing up to about £2,500 but would only have to pay the cheap prices agreed for the original two groups. I agreed. As a result we engaged the Kinks, the Fortunes, Them, and Alan Price, all of whom were already top names. There was still money left over from the original £1,000, so I engaged an Irish showband, a string quartet, and a professional all-in wrestling bout. On the night of the ball, I smoked marijuana with Them and Alan Price and drank whisky with Ray Davies.
Final-year undergraduate students were required to live out of College in lodgings. Julian Peto, Steve Balogh, and I tried to find some. During our searches we encountered a Canadian postgraduate named Gilbert Frieson. He was living in one room of an otherwise empty house, 46, Paradise Square. He was a heroin addict with strong suicidal tendencies. He made countless suicide attempts and actually succeeded sometime during 1968 or 1969. Gilbert had absolutely no money and was about to be evicted unless he could find tenants who were prepared to rent the whole house and allow him to continue living rent-free in his room.
The house was in an atrociously bad state of repair, had once been rented by William Burroughs, and stood in the shadow of Oxford prison, a much more externally attractive penal institution than any I’ve since encountered. A few yards away from the house was a wonderful pub called The Jolly Farmers, which was more than prepared to serve regulars drinks after time.
One morning my late lie-in was rudely disturbed by dense clouds of smoke pouring through the floorboards. Within minutes, visibility was reduced to zero. Dashing out of my room, I discovered that Gilbert’s room on the first floor was on fire, with flames licking through various holes in the walls. Julian and Steve were still fast asleep. I kicked down Gilbert’s door and became engulfed in smoke. I was unable to see Gilbert. I was unable to see anything. After some kamikaze forays into the room, I assured myself that Gilbert wasn’t there. The telephone was situated downstairs and for the first and only time in my life, I dialled 999. A number of fire engines rolled up in Paradise Square, and a large squad of firemen charged into the little terraced house, extinguished the fire, and flooded the premises. It took about two weeks to get the house back into anything vaguely resembling the appalling state it was in when we first rented it.
The news of the fire spread far faster through the University than did the fire itself through the house. The matter came to the attention of the Proctors. We were informed that our house was not a registered lodging, and unless it somehow became one we would have to seek alternative accommodation. An official deputation from those responsible for determining which lodgings could be deemed registered would be visiting within a few days. Registered lodgings required a landlord or landlady to be living on the premises, whom the deputation would have to be able to meet. For a great multitude of reasons Gilbert was not thought by us to be a suitable candidate for presentation. To solve the problem we asked the friend of a friend to pretend to be the landlady for the day that we were expecting to be visited. She was a single parent with a baby daughter, and we made up the spare room to look like the home of such a mother and child. To our great surprise, the officials were quite satisfied with what they found and accepted our premises as registered lodgings.
People were always on the look-out for cheap rooms to rent in Paradise Square, and shortly after we became registered, a couple of pleasant long-haired hippies knocked on our door and asked if we had any space to let. We rented them the ‘landlady’s room’. They had a great many town friends, who gradually took over the house, filling it with delightful marijuana smoke and music from Joe Cocker and Cream. Julian, Steve, and I had no objection to this development, and once again my home turned into a place where people from far and wide came to smoke marijuana and generally hang out.
The best girl I knew was a St Anne’s English student, Ilze Kadegis. She was a beautiful, fiercely witty, golden-haired Latvian. She had an exotic past, present, and presence. We had dated each other off and on for about a year and spent about half our time at her lodgings, which were very close to St Anne’s, and half the time at Paradise Square,
In Paradise Square Julian and I kept noticing strange people sitting in cars for long periods of time outside our house reading newspapers. One day, while I was eating lunch at Ilze’s lodgings, a plain-clothes policeman came round and informed me that Oxford drug squad officers were searching my home and my presence was required. I was driven to Paradise Square, where about a dozen or so of Oxford’s finest were tearing the place to bits. Steve Balogh had already been taken to the police station in St Aldate’s for having a sugar cube in his jacket pocket. The police presumably thought it was LSD (now illegal). In fact it was a lump of Tate & Lyle that Balogh had appropriated from Balliol Junior Common Room. In my room the ceiling, which had been in an extremely fragile state since the fire, had collapsed, and all fittings had been wrenched from the wall. One of the policemen was proudly displaying a marijuana roach, which he claimed he found lying in the ashtray. I feigned an expression of complete surprise. The policeman told me that he was taking the roach for forensic analysis. Both my and Julian’s particulars were laboriously recorded, and we were told that the police would be in touch after conducting laboratory tests on the roach and various culinary items that they had wrapped up in plastic bags.
The Dean managed to get Balogh out of custody and demanded to see the three of us. We trooped sheepishly into the Dean’s room and were told that as nothing incriminating had been found on the premises, other than the roach, the drug squad would not press charges provided we were prepared to be questioned by the police in the presence of a chosen representative. The Dean strongly advised that he should be our chosen representative. We agreed and marched off to the investigation rooms in St Aldate’s Police Station. We denied all knowledge of everything, including the roach. The police seemed disappointed but let us go. The Dean told us that we’d all had a very narrow escape and, given that we were taking our Finals within six months, we should knuckle down, study, and refrain from smoking marijuana with town hippies.
The Dean’s counsel was sound and his words of advice were sincerely taken. We resolved to study. This resolution was facilitated by the sudden departure from Paradise Square of the hippie tenants. They were lucky enough not to have been present when the police carried out their raid and were not keen on pushing their luck any further. Julian and I began studying in earnest. I can’t remember what Balogh did. Ilze joined our intensive studying programme. We were so committed that we spent the entire