‘I’ve got a teaching job. The rest of the time, I usually play Go.’
‘What! These coincidences are getting ridiculous. I learned Go a few months ago, but now I have no one to play with. Shall we have a game?’
There were many hippie pads in London, but Graham’s Lansdowne Crescent flat was an expensive hippie pad. There were not only the usual kilims on the floor and kaftans hanging off pegs, but also priceless porcelain on shelves, stacks of perfume and after-shave in the bathroom, and up-to-date gadgetry squatting in corners. It was a flat one would expect to find belonging to a successful rock singer.
Graham laid out the Go board, put on the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and handed me a sticky lump of aromatic Afghani hashish. I didn’t hesitate. I rolled a joint. I jumped right back into it. I smoked hashish every day for the next twenty-two years.
Back at the Westbourne Grove flat, another Oxford friend, Humphrey Weightman, showed up. He had just come into some money, bought a new expensive stereo, and wanted to leave it, along with his extensive record collection, with us for safe keeping. We set it up, rolled some joints, and played the latest albums. It was great. Tensions began unwinding.
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 cushions. There was an endless supply of marijuana and hashish.
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 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 and 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 made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Embassy 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 Scholarship, 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 Scholarship, 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’ café 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 assumed the problem being referred to was drug use and that the help the Dean was seeking was my becoming some sort of grass, keeping the college authorities apprised of the identities and habits of drug users. I could not have been further from the truth. The problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution. My assistance was not to become a mole but merely to refrain from participation 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 attitudes were poles apart. Smoking marijuana was now regarded as some sort of stupefaction imposed on the working classes 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 to 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 participated in what turned out to be quite a violent demonstration. A few fellow participants had been brutally assaulted by police and, to add insult to injury, been charged with assault 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.