I dare say there were a few women who called the shots, but it was more of a female fate in those days to start May Week as the cornerstone of your boyfriend’s existence, and to end it more in the rôle of a stepping-stone, one on which he had wiped his shoes in passing.
Tickets for May Balls were very expensive, since they included food, drink and entertainment from mid-evening till dawn. Many couples had bought tickets well in advance, deposits had been paid for the hire of evening dress, so they went through the festivities despite the fact of rupture. Champagne, Pimm’s No.1 cup, whole roast boar, smoked salmon, all to be endured rather than enjoyed, at a sombre carnival that was like a wake without a body (unless you count the boar). I heard enough accounts of these events to be able to build up a composite picture. Couples would hang on grimly till dawn, dancing with eyes averted, then trudge away from the pleasure-grounds through a tide of plastic glasses and discarded kebabs. Really it was a relief not to be going. I counted my blessings. I don’t like tears and don’t like silences that seethe with reproach.
Not that there was much silence on the night. If the Nasty Thing had survived so long, the ambient vibrations would surely have done it in. I remember a slow blues that seemed to have twelve hundred bars rather than the specified twelve. Sometimes between numbers I could hear a more distant uproar, presumably Pembroke’s Ball or perhaps even Emmanuel’s, according to the dictates of the breeze. Homerton was also a possibility, I suppose, though the Balls at women’s colleges had the reputation of being a little more restrained, even staid. They were rumoured to serve vegetarian food and hire trad jazz bands. These were highly effective passion-killing measures even when imposed separately. In combination they made the successful production and maintenance of an erection, its shepherding to a climax, a practical impossibility.
Finally the echoes of sobbing died away from the courtyards of the golden colleges. Spilt emotion evaporated relatively quickly from ancient flagstones, but for quite a while many undergraduate hearts would feel an affinity with the lawns where marquees had stood, drained to yellowness and marked by the sharp heels of hollow revelry.
I stayed in A6 just as long as I could. I would have loved to convalesce at Mr Johnson’s Home in Bognor, but from health there can be no convalescence. Any other sort of institution might take me in but wasn’t guaranteed to let me out. Finally there was nothing for it but to face the family, with nothing to shield me but a thick sheaf of the strongest prescriptions I could think of, endorsed with the autographs which Flanny distributed so freely.
Peter was away on holiday. He took a train to Inverness and spent the summer hitch-hiking round the Highlands. Audrey was in residence, but we had never really been friends. She was in a state of wildly excited transition, spending most of the time with her best friend Lorraine Leeming. They would walk around with rolled-up tights stuffed into their tops, modelling the soft shapeliness to come. They would shout, ‘What God has forgotten we stuff with cotton!’ then roll on the floor shrieking with laughter, till their makeshift busts were squashed flat.
Looked good in a kaftan
The rest of the time they would write cheques in each other’s favour. Pay Audrey Cromer Two Million Pounds. Pay Lorraine Leeming Two Million Pounds. It was always two. A single million wasn’t enough for these plutocrats in the making. They were too young to have chequebooks so they drew their own from scratch. Freed from the constraints of plausibly representing legal instruments of exchange their cheques grew physically large, sometimes made up of several pieces of cardboard taped together.
The closest thing I had to allies in Bourne End were the Washbournes, Malcolm who shared my spiritual interests and his wife Priscilla who warmly mocked them. ‘Call me Prissie,’ Priscilla said from the first, meaning I suppose that she wasn’t. Wasn’t prissy, that is.
Mum seemed to think that the Washbournes were only trying to be youthful and trendy by being friendly to me, sucking up to the young, as if I was obviously a waste of an older person’s time. I said to Dad once, I don’t think Mum is very keen on the Washbournes, and Dad said, ‘Let’s face it, John, your mother isn’t very keen on anybody.’ Which was true enough but didn’t help in the short term.
The women were different types, and had no use for each other. Everyone always complimented Mum on how thin she was — how did she manage it? What was her secret?
Her secret was not eating. No great mystery. And to Prissie’s eyes Mum was actually too thin, a monument to appetite repressed. ‘You need some meat on your bones, Laura dear,’ she said once, which I think Mum never forgave. In her own eyes, if she wasn’t thin, she wasn’t anything.
Prissie for her part made her mark in the short period, a half-decade perhaps of heyday, when undernourishment was not quite compulsory and the phrase earth mother had an edge of awe rather than disdain. She looked good in a kaftan, the only one I ever saw (in that age of kaftans) who did. She could carry herself.
Prissie lived in bare feet — I don’t know why that way of putting it sounds so strange — though she would reluctantly put on shoes to go to the pub, slipping them off the moment she was ensconced with a drink.
From Mum’s point of view, of course, she was simply obese. I heard her mutter once, ‘That woman! Even her earrings are fat.’ She particularly disapproved of Prissie’s love of going barefoot. Mum seemed to think that shoes were necessary, like moulds for jelly, to stop the feet from spreading. Prissie would find, when she finally acknowledged the need for shoes, that she couldn’t force her feet back inside them.
I would often go out to the pub with the Washbournes. In fact I’d give them a lift. Prissie would be terribly appreciative, saying what a relief it was to be able to drink and not worry, since I was so responsible. She would keep up a running commentary in the car, saying, ‘John, you are miraculous. You must be the best driver in the world, that’s all I can say. I mean, there hasn’t been a peep out of Malcolm all this time’ — perhaps two minutes — ‘but when I’m driving he winces and groans the whole time. And now look at him — he’s blushing. Rather sweet. That must be your doing. I haven’t been able to get a blush out of him for years.’
‘How marvellous,’ she went on, ‘that you can park anywhere you like!’ — since I had the benefit of my parking permit from the council, an orange card with a revolving indicator inside, on which I could show how long I expected to be away from the car.
‘How long do you think we’ll be?’ I asked. ‘Not long,’ said Prissie, ‘we’re just having a drink or two,’ and I told her to set the clock for four hours, just to be on the safe side. The joke of the whole rigmarole being that the Black Lion was only walking distance from home, for them anyway, and there were no restrictions on parking in any case.
The comedy continued inside the pub. Malcolm would install me on one of the high bar stools. I was conserving my funds, which meant I would order water with a dash of lime cordial, costing all of 4p, and nurse it all evening if need be. I’d buy a packet of peanuts for entertainment value. At one time peanuts had been provided free in a dish (a powerful dehydrating agent, and so hardly an unselfish gesture from the management), but people had been seen wrapping some up in a napkin for later, and that was that.