Class of '79. Chris Rooke

give me entrance to the building and direct me to his flat.

      The blocks were all sub-divided into small flats, housing about 6 or 8 students, each with its own kitchen/dining area, and Gazza’s was up on the third floor. Luckily someone in the flat was up and I was able to gain access and find Gazza’s room. After knocking for a while, I was greeted at the door by a very sleepy friend who did a double take when they found it was me at the door, before giving me a great and excited welcome and bidding me enter.

      Although I was obviously a bit burned out (to say the least) he then took me for breakfast in a café and then proudly showed me round the Leeds Uni. campus. I have to say that this didn’t really serve to lift my general mood, as it was so vastly superior to what we had down in Portsmouth - a proper university! In some ways seeing Gazza was making me feel worse, not better.

      After that, we went back to his flat, and were sitting in the kitchen/dining area, when the cleaners entered. They were welcomed as part of the family and were obviously well known to all the students, including Gazza, and were very chatty, and they were eager to give us all the latest gossip. The really big news of the day was that a potential rapist had recently been apprehended trying to break into one of the girls’ flats next door! He was apparently some kind of low-life, who looked dirty and desperate and had tried to trick his way in. Luckily, however, he had been scared off by the courageous cleaning staff, despite being aggressive and possibly carrying a knife! Security had been called, but the suspect had vanished before they arrived. A general alarm had been sounded in the block and there was apparently great consternation amongst the girls who lived there

      Now, I know that I was a bit naïve and innocent, but it was only towards the end of this story that the awful truth dawned on me – I was of course the person they were talking about! By the time the cleaners told it, it had been embellished about 100 times and bits added on etc. and that’s why it had taken so long for me to cotton on. I was stunned: I was the person that they were now talking about? - an evil looking knife-carrying intruder and possible rapist, with lank hair and incoherent speech, who was almost certainly also a serial killer!?

      I blurted out that it was possibly me that they were talking about, and that my actions and intentions had been completely innocent. At first they refused to believe it, such was the description they had been given of the perpetrator, but I went on to explain what had really happened, and that it was all just a genuine mistake. The two cleaners were a bit deflated as this had been the hottest story to gossip about in months, and they had clearly been looking forward to telling it to all the various students in the flats they cleaned, probably adding a little more relish each time it was told. However, after a while they perked up a bit as I think that they realised that would now be able to go round to all their fellow cleaners and tell them the truth of what had actually happened – a truth that they had been able to glean as a result of meeting the dangerous stalker himself, face-to-face! Theirs would be the definitive story and that would give them some Kudos.

      A load of Ballads!

      I stayed overnight at Gazza’s, sleeping on the floor of his small bedroom and showering (at last!) in a little ‘Jack and Jill’ shower cubicle that he shared with the room next door. This meant that I was missing my lectures in Portsmouth, and so accompanied Gazza to one of his English lectures instead. I had envisaged a large lecture theatre, but when we finally arrived, through a maze of corridors in a grand building, it was actually quite an intimate space, with about 15 other students sitting at modern desks. During the course of the lecture, the lecturer herself kept looking at me with a slightly quizzical expression, as she clearly couldn’t quite place me. Luckily, however, she apparently thought I was a new member of her group that she hadn’t noticed yet.

      Gazza himself had applied to Leeds to read Theology, although he had no intention of actually reading Theology, and he only did it to get himself a place at Leeds, and as soon as he arrived he applied to change courses to English Lit, which is what he’d wanted to do all along.

      In those days, applying for a less popular course with lower entrance requirements, and then switching courses was a relatively common ploy. After a bit of argy-bargy the university had granted his request, so he was himself a relatively new member of the English Lit group.

      The lecture itself was on ballads, which was interesting, but I spent most of the lecture passing infantile notes to Gazza, trying to make him laugh. I eventually succeeded by passing him a note that read: Hey, baby, get your gums round my plums! Now, when you think of undergraduates, studying hard for their degree and with a thirst for knowledge and enlightenment, you may forget that sometimes they actually have the mental age of a 13 year old and that they sometimes sneak into someone else’s lectures and pass childish notes to each other, giggling secretively. Anyway, I was happy as the lecturer stared hard at Gazza for laughing at a very inappropriate moment.

      At the end of the lecture the lecturer asked myself and another student to come and say ‘Hello’, explaining that she still didn’t know everyone in the group. Luckily for me the other student went up to see her straight away, and under the cover of that meeting, Gazza and I made a swift exit before she realised we’d gone.

      Later on that day it was time for me to go and head back to Pompey, and having said my farewells I returned to my car, only to find a parking ticket stuck to the front windscreen! I was shocked, as even in the hazy stupor I'd been in when I’d arrived a day or so before, I’d checked that I was OK to park there. When I looked at it, the ticket was for parking facing the wrong way round at night, with the front of my car facing the oncoming traffic! I am the only person I have ever known to have been done for such a heinous offence, and I wasn’t happy, not happy at all - but there you go. In those days we even had police on the streets!

      The darkest hour ...

      I returned to Portsmouth, even more depressed than when I left, having seen the accommodation, friends and facilities enjoyed by Gazza in Leeds, compared to my miserable existence in Portsmouth, and for the first time ever, I was prepared to admit defeat, quit the course and return home to Oxford.

      But then, just when I was at rock bottom, I bumped into someone I knew from school in Oxford, who was also studying at Portsmouth. Alan (AKA Womble - a nickname he gained after wearing a bobble hat that made him look a bit like a Womble!) was in the year above me and was studying Accountancy. Although he was a year older than me, I knew him from school mainly through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme that we’d both joined, and I knew that he also shared my passion for motorcycles.

      Neither of us knew the other had come to Portsmouth Poly and we were both very happy to discover each-other’s existence, and immediately went for a few drinks together. By chance, it turned out that he was being forced to leave his digs at Christmas (in Southsea it was common for students to be turfed out of their accommodation, usually at Easter, as landlords could charge much higher prices to tourists in the Summer months) and he was also looking for somewhere to live! Not only that but he had already found a large room in an old Victorian house – and just needed a roommate! Perfect! We would move in together after the Christmas hols. A friend! Suddenly things were looking up. Remember the old adage: the darkest hour is right before the dawn!