Halfway through my first term a notice appeared in the Porter’s Lodge at Balliol College announcing: ‘The following gentlemen will read essays to the Master on … The subject will be “The Population Problem”.’ My name then followed along with six others whose surnames also began with L, M, or N. I was not aware there was a population problem. About a week’s notice was given, and I was very nervous. I hurriedly withdrew some books from the college library, and shamelessly copied huge chunks. Someone informed me that Sir David Lindsay Keir, Master of Balliol, used these essay readings to determine how well freshmen could hold their sherry. This gave me some comfort.
Fortunately, I was not one of the three gentlemen chosen to read an essay. I drank an enormous amount of sherry and had a long conversation with Sir David about the origins of the Welsh language and its grammatical peculiarities. He was of the belief that Welsh was a purely Celtic language with grammatical features akin to those of Gaelic and Breton. I, on the other hand, steadfastly maintained that the aboriginal Welsh was pre-Celtic with unique grammatical oddities such as the regulated mutations of the beginnings of nouns. A few weeks later, he told me that I might have been right. Sir David had not, up to the time of our conversation, been aware of the admittedly disputed fact that America had been discovered in AD 1170 by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynnedd, whose followers bequeathed elements of the Welsh language to the Padoucas Indians. Keeping my sherry glass full, Sir David listened with polite interest to my detailed account of this esoteric history.
Also present at this essay reading (or, in my case, non-essay reading) were freshmen John Minford and Hamilton McMillan, each of whom had a very significant effect on my life. John Minford was immediately convinced that I was a talented actor and persuaded me to join the Balliol Dramatic Society. Hamilton McMillan, years later, was convinced that I would make a talented espionage agent and persuaded me to work for MI6. It is strange to think that had my surname not begun with M, I would have suffered neither the glare of stage lights nor the attention of the world’s media.
To entice me into participating in Balliol Dramatic Society activities, John Minford asked if I would be prepared to play the part of First Yob in the Balliol College/Lady Margaret Hall Christmas pantomime, The Sleeping Beauty. It was a small part, which consisted of uttering a few appropriate, timely obscenities and lying around looking either vaguely menacing or perversely seductive. I agreed on condition that Julian Peto be persuaded to play the part of Second Yob.
My membership of the Balliol Dramatic Society led to my befriending other members, and I soon became adopted into a group of largely second-year Balliol undergraduates, often referred to as ‘The Establishment’. These included Rick Lambert, the current editor of the Financial Times, and Chris Patten, currently Governor of Hong Kong. They were all heavy drinkers and very entertaining. ‘The Establishment’ also formed the core of the Victorian Society, and I was invited to become a member. It was a strange society, to say the least, but again the main requirement was to down large amounts of drink, this time port, which I had never tried. Each member was obliged to sing a Victorian song to the audience of other members, and further obliged to sing different Victorian songs at subsequent meetings. The officers of the society permitted me to sing the same song on each occasion. The song was a Welsh hymn, Wele Cawsom Y Mesiah, sung to the tune of Bread of Heaven.
The pantomime went well, and a cast party was held. I made a disgusting exhibition of myself by attempting to imitate Elvis Presley while the main vocalist of Oxford University’s most illustrious rock group, The Blue Monk and His Dirty Habits, was taking a break. As a consequence of this, I began my first affair with a university undergraduate, the rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber of St Anne’s College. No more Woolworth’s girls for a while.
The room next door to me was far more spacious and attractive than mine. I would sometimes spend time there, often accompanied by Harold Macmillan’s grandson, Joshua Macmillan, who was a very close friend of the occupant. For some reason, the room became vacant, and I took it over.
My new quarters considerably enhanced my potential for entertaining guests. A few days after I moved in, Joshua visited and warned me that I would be likely to get lots of visitors in the middle of the night, particularly at weekends. The reason for this was that the bars of the window were removable, thereby giving an extraordinarily easy access to the street. The secret was known by a dozen or so friends of Joshua, and they would like to continue to make use of the facility. The removable bars also dramatically facilitated my nocturnal entries and exits as well as those of my friends, all of whom soon shared the secret. My room became a popular late-night venue. Interruptions at 4 a.m. by others seeking access were occasionally inconvenient, but they gave rise to the broadening of my circle of adventurous Balliol students and loose women.
At the beginning of each term, returning students would have to sit ‘collections’, examinations designed to test the previous term’s progress. The examination papers were very likely to be lying around one of the physics tutors’ college rooms. A preview of the papers would solve the problem of how to make a satisfactory showing at the examination. This, of course, would require clandestinely entering the tutors’ rooms and searching through their desks. A couple of days before the beginning of my second term, I made a tour of inspection of the exterior of the rooms of Dr P. G. H. Sandars and Dr D. M. Brink. They were locked, but Dr Sandars’s room was on the ground floor. The following night, at about 3 a.m., I crept across the deserted college grounds, opened the window, and, armed with a torch purchased that afternoon, proceeded to search Dr Sandars’s desk. After about half an hour, I gave up. There were no collection papers to be seen. Prowling around was relatively safe, so I had a look at Dr Brink’s room. This, too, was on the ground floor, but the window was inaccessible and tightly shut. I wandered around trying to figure out a way of getting into Dr Brink’s room, in which I was convinced the elusive collection papers would be found. It then came to mind that Wally, the venal night porter, kept in the Porter’s Lodge what appeared to be a full set of duplicate keys. I strolled across the quad to my room, got out of my window into St Giles’, walked to the Porter’s Lodge, and asked Wally to let me in. Once inside I told him that I had locked myself out of my room with the key still inside. He asked for my room number, and I gave him Dr Brink’s. He handed me the key to Dr Brink’s room and asked me to return it to him when I had retrieved my original. I proceeded to Dr Brink’s room, opened the door, immediately found a stack of collection papers, took one, and returned the key, together with another half-crown tip, to a very grateful Wally. I passed the collection examination with flying colours.
Balliol undergraduates often spoke of a character named Denys Irving, who had been rusticated from Oxford and had sensibly spent his period of banishment from the city walls visiting exotic parts of the world. He had recently returned from his voyages of discovery and was about to visit, presumably illegally, his friends at Oxford. I was invited to meet him. Denys had brought with him some marijuana in the form of kif from Morocco. Up to that point I had heard the odd whisper of drugs being taken at the university and was aware that marijuana was popular with British West Indian communities, jazz enthusiasts, American beatniks, and the modern intellectual wave of Angry Young Men. I had no idea of marijuana’s effects, however, and, with a great deal of enthusiastic interest, I accepted the joint that Denys offered and took my first few puffs. The effects were surprisingly mild but quite long-lasting. After just a couple of minutes, I started having a sensation akin to butterflies in the stomach but without the customary feelings of trepidation. This led to a desire to laugh followed by my interpreting most of the conversation as amusing enough for me to do so. I then became acutely aware of the music that was being played, James Brown’s Please Please Please,