Now once again a day boy at Sevenoaks, I set about getting into my father’s university college, Christ’s College, Cambridge and I took a scholarship exam to study Natural Sciences there, i.e. Physics and Chemistry. I did not do well enough to get a scholarship or an exhibition, but I was offered a place and naturally I accepted. There was now little point in staying on at Sevenoaks School, so I called it a day there at the end of the autumn term in December 1965 and made enquiries with one of the teachers there, as to whether there might be any coaching I could do of other students at Sevenoaks. Besides coaching one student there, this also led to me being offered work part time teaching at two other schools in the town, St. Thomas’s, a Catholic school for boys, a mile or so from my home and Sevenoaks Preparatory School, a school, located only a short walk from where I lived.

 

Somehow I combined all of these three part-time jobs and this kept me pretty busy for the next two terms. Coaching at my old school, led me to me being able to use the teacher’s common room at my old school, where I was ignored by practically all the teachers, except bizarrely Mr. Gilbert, the man who taught woodwork and mechanical drawing, who alone amongst the teachers, was very amiable, which I would hardly have expected, since I had been pretty hopeless at woodwork, though that had been over five years earlier.

 

In September it was up to Cambridge, where I was due to start studying Natural Sciences. However while I enjoyed the theory of Chemistry, I had little interest in practical science and Physics, so considering the alternatives, I applied to switch to studying Mathematics. It was agreed that I could do this, but if I did not do well enough, I would have to accept the consequences. And thus began one of the most enjoyable years of my life, during which apart from the odd epileptic fit, I spent my time playing a lot of bridge, attending lectures and being coached by two graduate students, neither of whom really made much impact on me. I also made a few friends, notably Philip Wilson, whose brother was a graduate also at Christ’s, and who went on to a career as a professor of Maths at Birmingham, while Philip was forever falling in love with one young lady after another. In particular one lady he was enamoured of, was studying to become a teacher at a teacher training college in Bishop’s Stortford some twenty miles or so south of Cambridge. And he and I hitchhiked down there and attended dances there. I met one lady there, I was rather taken by and she later that year accompanied me to the Summer Ball at Christ’s College, where we were entertained by the Who! Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones appeared at the Summer Ball at King’s College! Those were the days!

 

However, my chickens came home to roost when my first year’s examination results came through. I had done disastrously. Sitting in the examination room, I had not really known where to start on any of the questions and I had looked around at my fellow students busy writing and so was not surprised, but I felt a complete failure, when I compared myself with my parents’ success at University.

 

I was summoned up to Christ’s and I took the train to London and then after getting from Charing Cross to Liverpool Street, I found I had missed my connection, because of a delay on the first journey, so I was late for the interview, which did not help and unsurprisingly I did not succeed in getting a second chance there and was duly sent down. My parents, in particular my mother, was distraught, because they were obsessed with the idea that I had to get a degree to get a good job, so I now applied to my mother’s college, which had recently gone co-educational. Royal Holloway College occupied an enormous Victorian building on the A30 near Egham in the north west corner of Surrey. I played it safe for this interview, I hitchhiked and got there with plenty of time to spare and was accepted to once again study Mathematics.

 

During my first year, I found the work, which consisted of approximately half the work I should have done at Cambridge, relatively undemanding and I got through the first year’s exams without too much trouble. In the summer holidays I worked at a record shop in Sevenoaks for a short period and having joined the Youth Hostel Association, I set off to see a bit of the country and in particular I was intrigued by a record shop that regularly advertised in the small ads in the back of the New Musical Express as selling a lot of old records which was located in Argyle Street in Glasgow. I set off and eventually got there the following day and I spent an hour or so looking through boxes of old mainly second-hand records, finding just one that I wanted. It was a long way to go for little reward, but the shop was very busy, which did give me pause for thought.

 

Meanwhile I had also started going off for the day on circular hitchhiking journeys around Kent, Surrey, South Essex and South and East London simply looking for record shops which had overstocks they were selling off cheap and thereby augmenting my collection at a lower price than I would have paid had I bought them when they came out. Occasionally I would come across a shop that had vastly overstocked and I found some gems through this bizarre activity. And while hitchhiking, I would also occasionally meet the odd interesting person. Probably the most interesting was a gentleman called Michael Ingrams, who had hosted a popular current affairs series on ITV, called “This Week”, which had for some reason stopped abruptly, who gave me a lift almost to the door of my house and with whom I had a fascinating conversation.

 

On another occasion I was hitchhiking into London from Royal Holloway College and found myself being given a lift by an Irish actor called Dermot Kelly, who had been the sidekick of Arthur Haynes, a very popular comedian who had a series on ITV, until he suddenly died of a heart attack, which was a great loss to the world of comedy. Another time I was given a lift by the chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc, which I had not even heard of then, but which I later learnt was a massive mining conglomerate. He took me in his Rolls Royce, from Kennington Oval to the A25 near Oxted.

 

Occasionally the same person would give me a lift twice. I will always remember one chap who gave me a lift on the day that both his father had died and his wife had given birth to his first son, and then he gave me another lift a year or so later. When I pointed this out to him, he remembered me.

 

However while I pursued these interests, I became more and more depressed. I was beginning to think what, was the point of my existence. I was taking phenobarbital now to control my epilepsy and one day in late 1968, in my college room, I swallowed a whole bottle of the stuff. However immediately after I did so, I changed my mind. I knew I did not really want to die and so I knocked on the door of a postgraduate student who occupied a room near me and he rang 999 and I was whisked off to Ashford hospital in an ambulance. They pumped the drugs out of me and I survived. My mother hurried over to see me and stayed by my side for some time, until it was clear I was going to recover.

 

Meanwhile somebody or a group of people had damaged the Kennedy memorial located at nearby Runnymede by a bomb. This was at the time of the Anti-Vietnam war protests and was thought to have been committed by some such protestors. Nevertheless the police had little to go on and indeed they never found out who did it. However, my suicide attempt had attracted their attention and I was visited in the hospital by a detective investigating the incident. My mother was there at the time and I told the detective that “No I had had nothing to do with bombing, but if I had had anything to do with it, I would not have bombed it, I would got a crane and lifted it up and dropped it into the nearby River Thames. Then no-one would have known what happened to it.” The detective must have realised I had had nothing to do with it, since I was never bothered about it again. My mother was however left feeling somewhat embarrassed.

 

Meanwhile I continued to hitchhike around Surrey and I even went right down to the South Coast look for records and visited Littlehampton, where I came across a record shop selling off a fair variety of overstock records, amongst which was a copy of an E.P., an extended play record, the same size as a normal 7” single, comprising the four most notable tracks by Arthur Alexander. I noticed it because I already had a copy of that same E.P. and it was one of my favourites.

 

Arthur Alexander was a soul singer, and one of the first to record at the famous Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama and is unique in so far as of two of his biggest hits, one, Anna, was recorded by the Beatles on their debut album and another, You better move on, was recorded by the Rolling Stones on their debut album. And no other artist has such a unique position in the history of popular music. In the spring of my second year at Royal Holloway, I was talking to a fellow student about popular music and we found ourselves discussing collectable records. The conversation turned to this soul star and he told me he would love to get a copy of that E.P. I told him I thought I knew where I could find a copy and when he told me how much he would like a copy, the next day I had a free afternoon, I hitchhiked down to Littlehampton, where it had not been sold and I bought it, took it back to the college and sold it to the student, making a small profit.

 

Meanwhile for lack of any other useful way of passing my time there, I discovered a way I could make a bit more money on the side. Tony Boog was the gentleman who ran the catering at Royal Holloway College for many years and while I was there at the start of each term the undergraduates were issued with a book of meal tickets, which could be used to purchase lunches or dinners from the college canteen. The tickets, colloquially referred to as Boog tickets, were dated, seven available for each week and the majority of students would use them for seven of the fourteen lunches or dinners on offer each week, the week starting as the term had on a Wednesday. Many students would just use the seven tickets allocated to them, but many did not and either had tickets left over as each Wednesday approached, or were in the market for the tickets that students would have left over. And this is where I stepped in and bought and sold overstock tickets, which kept me usefully busy, particularly on Mondays and Tuesdays, each week for the tickets’ purposes starting on a Wednesday.

 

I continued to suffer from epileptic fits off and on throughout that academic year and eventually was put back on the drug that I had started taking to control them after my first fit in 1964. However, during the last one I had, I perforated my left eardrum, probably on the corner of a modern wooden armchair I had in my room and I was taken to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, where it was patched up, though my hearing in that ear has never been the same since then. Some weeks after that I had what turned out to be my last epileptic fit, when I went back to the hospital to get the stitches removed from my eardrum.

 

Dosed up with drugs, I fell asleep during one of my exams, but somehow I scraped through my second year exams and did enough to be able to come back for my last year. Little did I realise how much my life would change during the coming holiday.

 

I had worked in a couple of record shops, one in Sevenoaks and another in Tonbridge in the holidays between my years at university, but after my latest epileptic fits, I did not feel up to working in a shop any more and decided to take life a little easier and went out on the road, hitchhiking around Kent looking for those elusive records that would fill the gaps in my collection. In late July I ventured down to the Kent Coast and discovered a shop with a vast surplus of overstock 7 inch singles in the small town of Hythe. I picked up quite a few records for myself and headed back home, but a few days later, my parents decided it might be an idea for the whole family to go down to check on Jane, my father’s mother at her home in St. Leonards-on-Sea. We did not stay there too long and then mainly because I had had second thoughts about buying another record from the shop in Hythe, I suggested we go for a drive along the coast to Hythe.

 

When we got to Hythe, I made an excuse to go and get the record and looking at what was left, I realised the shop could probably be persuaded to sell a lot of the remaining records at a very low price. I was aware of small adverts in the back of the New Musical Express, and felt there was quite probably demand for a lot of these records, which I could probably pick up for a song. Back in the car I put the idea to my father, whose reply was simply that it was stupid idea, there was no money in old records. My mother calmed the atmosphere, pointing out it probably would not cost much to try my idea and then I would give up on such ideas, if they were indeed ridiculous. 

 

By now we were driving back to Sevenoaks, but the following day I set off to Hythe by thumb once again and sorted through their overstocks, picking up a hundred or so records, mainly back-catalogue Tamla Motown records, which I thought had potential for a ludicrously low price. Back home with them, another idea occurred to me. A chap I knew well by the name of Len Saturley, had just opened a record shop in Sevenoaks and consequently had a pretty large 5% quota of overstocks which he could return to the manufacturers for a full price credit. So I went around to his shop and put the idea to him that I had come across a source of overstock records in good condition, that I could sell him at a very reasonable price if he were so interested. He indicated he could cheerfully take up to a thousand if I could come up with such and so the following day I headed back to Hythe and the chap running the shop there sold me the rest of what he wanted get rid of for a very reasonable price and then I lugged them to the outskirts of the town, where fate smiled on me when I got a lift from foreign gentleman in a plush car who identified himself as the son of the Philippine ambassador. He took me all the way home, dropping me at my house in Sevenoaks and I counted how many I had and proceeded the following morning to take them around to Len’s shop, where he cheerfully gave me the agreed price. I was £23 better off than I was a few days before and I still had what I thought were the better records, mainly if not all on Tamla-Motown, which were left for me to sell by mail order. £23 might not seem like much now, but this was 1969 and there has been a lot of inflation since then, and for the first time in my life, I could look my father in the eye and point out that my idea had already made a fine profit, my next thought was how to create the lists of what I had left to sell.

 

The husband of my keen friend of my mother was a keen amateur astronomer, a gentleman who was even acquainted with Sir Patrick Moore, by the name of John Smith and for use in his astronomy, he had a primitive duplicating system, which he was happy to lend to us. One typed out what one wanted to duplicate on a stencil and then this was attached to a frame and then one could then roll a roller over the stencil and produce copies of the original. Having placed an advert in the New Musical Express, I got a fair number of people keen to look at what I had to offer and a remarkably high proportion of them wanted the records I had kept back to sell this way. In fact one was even looking for one of the few Tamla Motown records, I had dismissed as being of little interest and which I had included in the junk lot I had sold to Len. Luckily he had not sold it and was happy to let me have it back at cost. It was clear to my father that there was indeed money to be made from old overstock records and I was making even more money now and my main problem was now where I could find such records.

 

During my last year at Royal Holloway, I kept buying and selling the meal tickets to pass the time and did just enough work to scrape through with a third class honours degree. I was so happy I had got the damned thing, that I remember sweeping up a very small lady Maths professor in my arms. Fortunately she took no offense. Also during the year I did a lot of hitchhiking around simply looking for record shops with overstocks they wanted to get rid of, some were happy for me to pick out the ones I particularly wanted, which enabled me to avoid buying too much junk and I soon had plenty to keep me occupied, particularly after we bought a duplicating machine which enabled me to churn out pages listing them for sale and which I could then put together and send off to potential mail order clients. Meanwhile my father found himself visiting America and would look out for overstock records there, some of which he bought and brought back to England, so we could sell them. This would lead to minor problems later, since he was not declaring them for customs purposes.

 

My parent accepted that buying and selling records could be a lucrative sideline, but they were still sure I needed to progress to a stable career and so I accepted my parents proposal that I attend a teacher training college in Worcester, so I could prepare for a life as a teacher. So in September 1970, I headed up to Worcester and after staying with my godfather and his family in Malvern for a few nights, I found a house I could board at not far from the university. Most of the term, my fellow graduates spent their time playing board games or football, which I joined in with to some extent, but I also did a bit of selling Charity Xmas cards to some of my fellow aspiring teachers and I hitch-hiked around the area and found a couple of shops with overstocks to sell in the Worcester area and somehow I lugged the records back to Sevenoaks by hitchhiking at the weekends. In fact I even found another shop I could buy from en route to Sevenoaks, at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.

 

My fellow students, were a mixture of roughly half men and half women, and while some of the women were clearly keen to go on to a career in teaching, the majority of the men were there because they had no clear view of what they wanted to do with the rest of their life. I will always remember one chap there who told me he thought I was like that Private Walker in Dad’s Army. I had found a few more things to buy and sell, mainly charity Christmas Cards and I do not think he meant that as a compliment, but I took it as such. However as the term neared its end, I decided I did not want to teach, not now any way, I wanted to try selling records by mail-order full time, however impractical that idea might seem. So I told the people running the course at the college, I did not intend to return the following term and they accepted my decision with good grace, though they told me they thought I would make a fine teacher, which with the shortage of maths teachers, we had then and still do, I feel they would have said to any man quitting such a course at such a time. I also remember one fellow student, a lady talking to me and saying she looked forward to seeing me the next term, to which I replied, “Maybe I won’t be here next term.” She scoffed at my suggestion, but I did tell one fellow student, who had fallen ill and was in the college’s sick bay, that I would not be back, so he could tell the others in due course and I bade farewell to Worcester.

 

My parents were not happy, but they accepted what I had done and now fate took a very fortunate turn. My father was longing to get back to working in Washington and applied for another posting to the British embassy there and got it. He went off to America a few weeks into 1971 and I got back on with hitchhiking around the South East looking for shops with overstocks. I also did a bit more coaching Mathematics to young ladies from Walthamstow Hall and then along came the biggest postal strike in British history. And during that strike, I had the most profound experience of my life. I fell in love.

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Chapter Three – University and finding my destiny

06/04/2019