Part 3 (2/2)

Ilze and I were natural hosts, and with the help of Humphrey's stereo and Graham's Afghani, Westbourne Grove quickly became a natural successor to Balliol and Paradise Square. Most evenings and weekends, the flat was full of people, including some newly-met Black South African musicians and minor celebrities of the time. Graham and I usually huddled in the corner playing Go, while everyone else either danced or lay down on mattresses or cus.h.i.+ons. There was an endless supply of marijuana and has.h.i.+sh.

I was comforted to discover that although I found reading mathematical physics more difficult when stoned, I found reading philosophy easier. It is not that philosophy is any easier than mathematical physics. It's just that reading philosophy was actually what I wanted to do. When one is stoned, it is very hard to do what one really doesn't want to do.

My freelance tuition work required me to visit students at various times of day and night at their homes and teach on an individual basis. Such irregular schedules, combined with my increased marijuana use, inevitably led to occasions when I would be required to teach when very stoned. The first time this happened, I was asked by a nineteen-year-old Arabian student to explain to him the theory of permutations and combinations, a part of school mathematics at which I was never very proficient. Until this point my teaching abilities had not been particularly remarkable. I was far too impatient with my pupils when dealing with subjects I knew well, and I deviously avoided other subjects. Under marijuana's influence, however, I now found I was extremely painstaking with my explanations and extraordinarily patient with my pupils' progress. I ceased to feign knowledge when I had none and would honestly admit that I had forgotten everything and would have to work things out from scratch. I found it easy to put myself in the students' positions and appreciate and solve their difficulties. From then on, I made a point of smoking marijuana before teaching, and my students made excellent progress.

London was definitely an interesting place to be in 1967/1968: the Beatles provided singalong psychedelia with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and established their Apple boutique, while their manager, Brian Epstein, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The Rolling Stones took a shot of rhythm and blues out of their music and produced love and peace singles like and established their Apple boutique, while their manager, Brian Epstein, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The Rolling Stones took a shot of rhythm and blues out of their music and produced love and peace singles like We Love You We Love You and and Dandelion Dandelion, while their leader and founder, Brian Jones, struggled to get released on bail for a drug charge. Procul Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale A Whiter Shade of Pale made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Emba.s.sy to protest against the war in Vietnam. But the dreaming spires of Oxford were too much to resist. A delightfully stoned academic career was at hand. made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Emba.s.sy to protest against the war in Vietnam. But the dreaming spires of Oxford were too much to resist. A delightfully stoned academic career was at hand.

There was a problem with respect to how my diploma course would be financed. In those days there were two main grant-giving bodies funding postgraduate study: the Department of Education and the Science Research Council. The former limited its grants to graduates in non-scientific subjects while the latter would only fund students undertaking research degrees in the pure sciences. These regulations precluded my Philosophy of Science studies being funded by either body. A thick publication gave a complete listing of organisations that funded postgraduate study and the conditions under which they did so. I scoured through this book and discovered the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholars.h.i.+p, which was restricted to applicants who lived in a small area of Wales which included the village in which my family lived. My mother's brother, Uncle Mostyn, was then Chairman of Glamorgan County Council. I approached him about the possibility of being awarded the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholars.h.i.+p, and he arranged for me to be interviewed by the trustees. They agreed to pay all course fees and awarded me a maintenance grant.

Ilze and I decided that while I resumed my studies at Balliol, we should live in a romantic country cottage outside Oxford. A third-year English undergraduate, Bill Jefferson, whom I liked very much, and his girlfriend, Caroline Lee (daughter of Anthony Lee, our man in Anguilla), had similar intentions. Bill Jefferson and I combined forces to scour the countryside for suitable cottages. We became well known at an enormous number of country pubs but were making little progress at finding a place to live. Eventually, while getting drunk at a pub called The Plough in Garsington, we discovered a cottage for rent not one hundred yards from where we were drinking. The landlords were egg producers called Jennings of Garsington, and we rented the cottage for a twelve-month period. Ilze found a teaching job at a primary school in Didcot. My father had given me a beaten-up Hillman, and I would get up extremely early to drive Ilze to Oxford railway station in time for the Didcot train. The drive took place in total darkness. I would then breakfast at either Balliol, if my stomach felt strong, or at George's workers' cafe in the market, if feeling queasy or hungover. I usually ate at George's.

Just after my postgraduate term started, the Dean spotted me hanging around the Porter's Lodge and invited me to come and see him for a chat. He said he needed my help in sorting out what was, in his eyes, becoming a very serious problem at Balliol and, indeed, at most of the University's colleges. I fearfully a.s.sumed the problem being referred to was drug use and that the help the Dean was seeking was my becoming some sort of gra.s.s, keeping the college authorities apprised of the ident.i.ties and habits of drug users. I could not have been further from the truth. The problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution. My a.s.sistance was not to become a mole but merely to refrain from partic.i.p.ation in protests etc. and persuade the cronies that I would inevitably attract to do likewise.

Balliol had certainly become quite revolutionary by October 1968. Although the attire and appearance of student revolutionaries were almost identical to those of 1966 hippies, the att.i.tudes were poles apart. Smoking marijuana was now regarded as some sort of stupefaction imposed on the working cla.s.ses by the bourgeoisie. There didn't seem to be any revolutionary music as such, and Top Ten hits had deteriorated from 2,000 Light Years from Home 2,000 Light Years from Home to to Me and You and a Dog Named Boo Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.

During the 1960s, Balliol College life was essentially determined by the whims, preferences, and behaviour of the second-year undergraduates. First-year students were too meek to set the trends, and third-year students were apt to become distracted by Finals. During 1968, the trend was definitely one of revolutionary activity. One topic on which I agreed completely with the revolutionary students was that of racial equality. The Right Honourable Enoch Powell, MP, was giving an anti-immigration speech at Oxford Town Hall, and I partic.i.p.ated in what turned out to be quite a violent demonstration. A few fellow partic.i.p.ants had been brutally a.s.saulted by police and, to add insult to injury, been charged with a.s.sault themselves. The next morning, I missed my tutorial with Michael Dummett, a chain-smoking, Go-playing, devout Christian, who later became Oxford University's Wykeham Professor of Logic but was then a Fellow of All Souls and taught me in mathematical logic. I missed the tutorial in order to make myself available at court to speak on my injured and arrested friends' behalf. I hadn't let Mr Dummett know and was feeling a little guilty. Also feeling a little guilty for missing our appointment was Mr Dummett, who had presented himself at the same court to speak up for someone else who had also been arrested during the previous night's demonstration. We burst out laughing at the sight of each other. The same day, he invited me for lunch at All Souls, where I had the privilege of sitting next to the Warden, John Sparrow. After lunch, Mr Dummett had to hurry off somewhere, and I was taken for a walk around the grounds of All Souls College by John Sparrow. Like the Dean of Balliol, he was concerned about revolutionaries and unconcerned about marijuana smoking.

One evening, Ilze and I went to a dinner hosted by one of her colleagues who taught at the school in Didcot. There were two or three other couples present, including John and f.a.n.n.y Stein. John at that time was a general medical pract.i.tioner about to become a Fellow of Magdalen, while f.a.n.n.y was a housewife. About halfway through the dinner, I discovered that f.a.n.n.y's maiden name was Hill and that she was the daughter of Christopher Hill, David Lindsay Keir's successor as Master of Balliol. f.a.n.n.y and I struck up a strong friends.h.i.+p. We fancied each other like mad, but newly-entered marital obligations prevailed, and we didn't have an affair with each other until long after.

Shortly after my first meeting with f.a.n.n.y, I ran into Christopher Hill at a function held in the Balliol students' bar. We hardly knew each other but quickly became engaged in earnest conversation, which we both wished to continue when the function drew to a close. The Master asked if I would be prepared to buy a bottle of whisky on my account at the students' bar and bring it up to his lodgings, where he would immediately reimburse me and continue our discussions. I was delighted to do this. We got on remarkably well, and by the end of the evening Christopher had accepted my invitation to have dinner in Garsington.

Ilze was very nervous at the prospect of entertaining such distinguished guests and had no idea what kind of meal to prepare. During the previous year in London, I had befriended the chef of the local Indian restaurant and had become reasonably proficient at cooking curries. Christopher had mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed Indian cuisine while he was in India. I agreed to cook the food, which Christopher and his wife, Bridget, gratefully devoured.

Christopher had tremendous sympathy both with revolutionaries and with those who wished to smoke marijuana. He was also a source of an immense amount of information about Garsington. He mentioned that Russell Meiggs (my long-haired hero) lived only a hundred yards away from us (I had never seen him in the village) and that across an adjacent field, tucked in a hollow, was Garsington Manor, the one-time residence of the Morrell brewery heiress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Christopher referred to as Lady Utterly Immoral. Apparently, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, etc. had all been frequent guests at the manor. Weeks afterwards, after a night tripping out on the first LSD I had taken for years, I embarra.s.sed myself by knocking on the door of Garsington Manor and asking the occupants if Aldous Huxley could come out to play.

There were isolated pockets of marijuana smokers, mainly postgraduates. One of these was at our cottage in Garsington. One regular visitor was Graham Plinston, now completing his final undergraduate year. He was always keen to play a game of Go and always brought with him a few ounces of excellent has.h.i.+sh. I would sometimes buy more than I needed and sell off the surplus at enough profit to pay for my own absurdly heavy consumption, which was about twenty joints a day. Bill Jefferson was close behind.

I got down to my philosophy reading. A common difficulty encountered by those beginning to study philosophy is that whatever is read appears totally convincing at the time of reading. Smoking marijuana forced me to stop, examine, scrutinise, and criticise each step before proceeding. It a.s.sisted me not only in pinpointing the weaknesses of certain philosophical theories, but also in articulating alternative philosophical viewpoints.

As part of the course, I was asked to deliver a paper to learned men a.s.sembled in an ancient seminar room at All Souls College. My a.s.signed topic was the difference in views of s.p.a.ce and time held by Isaac Newton and Leibniz. Newton seemed to hold that solid things existed through absolute time in absolute s.p.a.ce, which could be considered as G.o.d's sensorium, sniffing out trouble everywhere. Leibniz, in many ways a precursor of Einstein, was a lot more hip and a lot more baffling. He seemed to maintain that s.p.a.ce and time were s.h.i.+fting around out of control and that each bit of stuff had everything else in the universe as part of it. Writing about it was difficult, but I muddled through.

I became interested in confirmation theory: what evidence do scientists need to end up believing the things they do? A paradox arises when considering hypotheses of the general form 'All X are Y', for example, 'All ravens are black', together with what sort of evidence would tend to make them believable. One could begin by looking at a raven to see if it is black. If it is black, then this observation confirms the hypothesis to a limited extent. If one looked at thousands of ravens, and they were all black, then these observations would further confirm the hypothesis. 'All X are Y' is logically equivalent to 'All non-Y are non-X.' The two propositions 'All ravens are black' and 'All non-black things are non-ravens' state the same fact. Therefore, observations of non-black non-ravens would confirm the hypothesis 'All ravens are black' just as much as they would 'All non-black things are non-ravens.' This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that observations of such things as red noses, white swans, etc. confirm the statement 'All ravens are black.' Everyone knows, of course, that they do not.

Bill Jefferson was an English literature student from Yorks.h.i.+re, and he would sometimes organise poetry readings. He organised one at some college in Oxford, and brought two of the poets, Christopher Logue and Brian Patten, together with some of their entourages, back to the cottage in Garsington. A second, more informal, poetry reading took place, followed by a mammoth drinking and smoking session lasting at least a day. This, however, was quite a rare occurrence, and the cottage in Garsington never achieved the status of my previous accommodations in terms of hosting debauchery and culture.

The preponderance of student revolutionaries dominating the quadrangles and bars, the lack of both fellow marijuana smokers and fellow philosophers of science, and the paucity of books on History and Philosophy of Science in the Balliol library led to my spending less and less time in College and becoming rather disaffected with it. I was visiting Balliol no more than once a week. Ilze was most unhappy with her teaching job in Didcot, and we both thought seriously of leaving Oxford once I'd completed my diploma course. The expectation was for me to continue at Balliol with a B.Phil. or D.Phil. course, but this could easily be done at another university. I decided on the University of Suss.e.x, which in those days was referred to as Balliol by the sea. Brighton looked like fun. Ilze obtained the promise of employment at a convent school in Worthing. My diploma was acquired without too much difficulty, and I was beginning to feel reasonably secure about my ability to pursue an academic career. At the end of the diploma course, Christopher Hill asked if I would be interested in partic.i.p.ating in a summer school that Balliol was organising for the benefit of teenage boys who came from deprived backgrounds. I was glad to help, and I really enjoyed my every involvement with the venture. Part of my task was straightforward teaching. Part of it was socialising with the young men with the intention of convincing them that university men were not all stuffed s.h.i.+rts. This was easily achieved by a pub crawl followed by the viewing of a p.o.r.nographic film at the Scala cinema in Walton Street.

Ilze and I moved to Brighton and found a cheap sea-front flat. Through Christopher Logue, who rented a room in their house, we met Johnny Martin, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Suss.e.x, and his wife Gina. We all had similar interests: marijuana, LSD, rock music, and after-eight philosophy, and we spent much time together.

I hated Suss.e.x University. By this time, I had a firm idea of what a university should be like, and Suss.e.x didn't come up to it. Every room had a number rather than a name. There was no romance about studying in an office-block library. One couldn't lie back and think that this was where, in the past, great minds produced great ideas. My supervisor was a Polish logician named Jerzy Giedymin. He was reckoned to be brilliant, but only in areas that no one else could test. I found him very difficult to understand, whatever he was talking about. He made it plain he had no interest in irrelevancies such as confirmation paradoxes. I made it plain I had no interest in studying his irrelevant obsessions. He said I should never have left Oxford. I said he was right.

I was still getting the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholars.h.i.+p and spent the first term's instalment on a new stereo system. The next few months were devoted to listening to Led Zeppelin, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, and Black Sabbath. I decided to give up academic life and withdrew from the University of Suss.e.x. Ilze's school-teacher's salary was barely enough to live on, but I managed to make up the shortcomings to almost survival level by getting more has.h.i.+sh from Graham Plinston, who often came down to Brighton for a weekend by the sea and a game of Go, at which we were both now becoming proficient.

Graham had visited Morocco, where he met Lebanese Joe. Joe's mother was an entertainer in Beirut. Joe knew Sam Hiraoui, who worked for the Lebanese airline, Middle East Airlines. Sam also had a textile business in Dubai, the great Middle East gold- and silver-smuggling port on the Persian Gulf. Sam's partner in Dubai was an Afghani named Mohammed Durrani. Graham explained that through these people he was being delivered fifty pounds of black Pakistani has.h.i.+sh every month or so. For the first time, I imagined what an interesting and rewarding life a smuggler's must be. But Graham was merely treating me as a confidant. He was not making me any propositions. I was just another provincial dealer selling a couple of pounds a year to survive and not wanting to do too much other than survive.

There were one or two ex-Oxford students attached to the University of Suss.e.x. One was a brilliant mathematics lecturer, Richard Lewis, who would often visit Ilze and me along with Johnny and Gina Martin. Richard came from a relatively wealthy family, owned property in Brighton and London, drank like a fish, smoked everything at hand, thought mathematical profundities, and was a keen and talented chess player. He had heard of Go, was interested in the game, but had never played. I taught him. After a dozen games, he beat me. He still beats me.

Richard had a beautiful wife, Rosie. I couldn't take my eyes off her. At the same time, Ilze couldn't take her eyes off Johnny Martin. In no time, all six of us had grounds for suing for divorce, all three marriages were breaking up, and Richard and Rosie's daughter, Emily, was calling me Uncle Howie.

Graham Plinston's wife, Mandy, telephoned. She asked if I could come up to London to see her as soon as possible. When I got there, Mandy was distraught and crying.

'Howard, Graham has disappeared. There's something wrong. I think he's been busted. Can you go and find out? You can have all the expenses you need.'

'Where is he, Mandy?'

'He's got to be somewhere in Germany.'

'Why do you want me to go?'

'You're the straightest of Graham's friends. You don't have a record or a file on you. Can you imagine what our other friends are like? Graham was meant to meet this German guy Klaus Becker in Frankfurt. He'll probably be able to help you find Graham.'

'All right, I'll go.'

I had never flown before, and I was excited throughout the flight. At his house, Klaus told me that there'd been a bust in Lorrach, a SwissGerman border town near Basle. He suspected the person busted was Graham. I flew from Frankfurt to Basle on a scary propeller plane. Not speaking a word of German hindered progress somewhat, but I was eventually able to get newspaper back-issues from the Basle public library and found a report of the bust. Graham had been driving a Mercedes from Geneva to Frankfurt. A hundred pounds of has.h.i.+sh had been stuffed under the back seat and in the door panels. At the SwissGerman border, the car had been searched and the has.h.i.+sh found. Graham was in Lorrach prison.

I took a cab to Lorrach and walked around the streets until I found a lawyer. He went to see Graham in prison and agreed to defend him. Graham had no messages.

When I arrived back at London airport, I telephoned Mandy and gave her the Lorrach lawyer's particulars.

'Is he all right, Howard?' Mandy asked.

'The lawyer said he looked fine.'

'Did he have any messages for me? Anything he wants me to do?'

'He didn't have any messages for anyone, Mandy.'

'Howard, would you mind going over to see a friend of Graham's and telling him what happened on your trip? He's a good guy, but he's a bit concerned about what's happened and wants to hear everything from the horse's mouth.'

'I don't mind, Mandy. Where do I go?'

'Mayfair, 17, Curzon Street. His name's Durrani.'

Mohammed Durrani was the grandson of the brother of the former King of Afghanistan. Educated in Delhi, he served eleven years on the Hong Kong Police Force and had several shady businesses throughout the East. One of them was supplying Pakistani has.h.i.+sh to Europe. Durrani let me in to his Mayfair flat. He had a hawk-like face, Savile Row suit, beautifully manicured fingernails, and wore strong after-shave. He poured me a Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky and offered me a Benson & Hedges from his gold, monogrammed cigarette case. He lit my cigarette with a Dupont lighter, introduced me to Sam Hiraoui, his Lebanese partner, and said, 'Thank you, Howard, for agreeing to come. We have simple question. Has Graham talked?'

'He said he didn't have any messages for anyone,' I answered.

'We mean to the German police.'

'I don't know.'

'The reason we ask, Howard, is that we have merchandise in pipeline which might be compromised by our friend's arrest. You are best friend, Mandy says. Do you think he would let police know anything about our operations?'

'Not deliberately, obviously, if that's what you mean.'

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