When I returned on the Sunday evening, as soon as I opened the front door, and before I could even take a step down the hallway, the landlord suddenly appeared from his room, which was the old living room, next to the front door, and greeted me in a rather overly effusively and friendly manner. He said: ‘Chris, my friend, I have just discovered that I have accidentally been charging you and the other tenants too much for your gas! I did not realise! I have therefore re-set all the gas meters in the house to where they should be, so from now on your gas will be cheaper! Not only that, but I am refunding you all £5 each to make up for any overpayment you may have already made. Good news, yes?’ I replied that it was indeed good news and collected my mail – the letter from the gas board - and went up to my room to read it.
As I suspected, when I opened the letter it explained that landlords were allowed to re-sell gas to their tenants at a slightly higher tariff than standard, but that there was a legal limit on how much more they could resell the gas for. I knew from my previous examination of the meter that he had been charging us way over the maximum limit allowed. The slimy get had clearly taken the letter from the gas board, addressed to me, steamed it open, read it, and then re-sealed it and put it back on the hall table! Not only that but when I re-checked my gas meter, he had indeed re-set the meters, but only adjusted them as little as possible, so he was still charging us the absolute maximum for gas that he could legally get away with. I also conservatively estimate that he owed us all at least £20 each for the excess money we’d all had to shove in our meters since we moved in, but he repaid us just £5 each. Cheeky blighter.
The lino house also gave me my first real taste of having to cook for myself - and I didn’t have the faintest idea! For a start this was very much in the days before any form of cookery/home economics/food and nutrition courses were on the radar in any boys’ school such as the one I attended and I was never even taught the rudiments of cookery, let alone anything else. Similarly, when I was brought up, ours was a very traditional home, and cooking was classed very much as woman’s work, and the kitchen was a woman’s space. Pete and I therefore almost never even entered the Kitchen, let alone did any cooking, and hence my knowledge of the culinary arts was virtually zero.
Culinary Chaos
Meals in my new lino house therefore consisted of such culinary delights as beans on toast, fish fingers, sausages, fried eggs, canned soup and a variety of packet and ready-to-cook meals (all of which were totally inedible). Note that the vast majority of my meals involved frying something, as frying was pretty simple (I don’t think I actually ever even opened the oven door; that was just a bridge too far), and whilst microwave ovens had just begun to appear in homes around the country by this point, they were still very much new technology that could only be found in some of the wealthier or more modern homes – and certainly not in my family home in Oxford or in any house I ever lived in as a student!
Because I was frying most things I bought some lard in a plastic tub, and used this for frying, as I’d seen my mum do. After the frying was finished, I would then pour the fat from the frying pan back into the tub of lard, again as I’d seen my mother do. I’ve no idea why mum ever did this, but in my case it was about the only thing I knew about cookery, and it saved me money. However, one day I realised that the boiling fat I was pouring back into the plastic tub, had actually melted and ruptured the walls of the tub, and horrible, hot, greasy lard was oozing everywhere! That put an end to my attempts at saving money by re-using lard, or using lard at all (thank heavens!)
I also bought a selection of ready meals in tins or packets or whatever, and I found them all to be absolutely disgusting and inedible, without exception. They seemed so convenient and easy, but the promise they offered of delicious meals that were easy to make, was illusory. One of the worst incidents I had as part of my great culinary exploration was with a Fray Bentos meat and potatoe pie. These came in saucer shaped tins (and still do I believe) and all you had to do was to pierce the lid in a few places and then put it on top of a saucepan full of water and steam it for about half-an-hour or so until cooked. Simple. However, one day I tried this on a seemingly delicious steak and kidney pie that I’d bought - but forgot to pierce the lid of the tin first! I left the pie steaming over a pan of boiling water and left it for a while. When I came back into the kitchen the once saucer shaped tin was by now almost completely round! Without any holes in the lid, there was nowhere for the heat and steam inside the tin to escape, and pressure had built up inside, forcing the tin into a spherical shape. Oh, dear, what to do about it?
The obvious course of action would have been to allow the tin to cool and then throw the whole thing away, but this was far too obvious and sensible an option. I decided to open the tin and see if the pie inside was still edible. I found the can opener and after quite a bit of a struggle, due to the deformity of the tin, I finally managed to get the can opener onto the rim. I squeezed the levers of the opener together and turned the key on the side and managed to puncture the tin and make a hole. I knew that I had managed to puncture the tin because a terrifying spray of steam mixed with gravy and generally liquefied beef and God knows what else came shooting out of the hole! I leapt away in surprise and shock, and this meant that the pie was no longer being held in place! Because the tin was now spherical, it could move easily, and being propelled by a jet of steam and liquefied pie, it span around wildly on the kitchen worktop, spraying the whole kitchen and myself in boiling liquefied pie. Eventually it literally ran out of steam and came to a rest next to the sink.
I paused for a moment and looked round at the complete devastation it had caused, with bits of pie dripping from everywhere and the room full of steam and condensation. At least I wasn’t burned. Having looked around the kitchen at what had come out of the tin I decided not to try and open the rest of the tin, but did what I should have done initially, and threw the whole thing away. I cleaned up the kitchen as best I could (thank heavens for that lino! Ha!), and then went and had a good wash and changed my clothes. No more pies for me.
There was also some culinary invention going on as you had to use whatever ingredients you happened to have in. This led to my amazing invention of the Banana Omelette! All I can say is that is that it was a culinary delicacy best consigned to the annals of History!
Then there was another time when some friends came round and we got the munchies. All I had to offer them was spaghetti - nothing else, just plain spaghetti with no sauce or anything. It was the only time I ever longed to eat Banana Omelette again!
Loneliness, Leeds and ….. Stalking!
I was struggling. I was now in my third set of digs in as many months, and I was basically very lonely. I now had a room on my own, which in some ways was great, but in other ways was bad as I felt isolated, with little contact with any other students, and I couldn’t really see a way of meeting people or making friends.
The other students on my course were very friendly, but we just had little chats at break times etc. - we hardly ever went out socially, and although I went to see bands and so forth at the Students’ Union, going on your own to such events was actually more lonely than staying at home, as everyone else was having a laugh and enjoying themselves, while I stood quietly somewhere and watched everyone else having fun.
I tried to join the Hockey club, which was a complete disaster, (I went once, but was never invited back), and similarly I tried to join the sailing club, with almost identical results (I went to beginners’ sailing club every Wednesday for 3 weeks in a row, and each week it was cancelled due to strong winds). I even tried to enlist in the Air Cadets, remembering my passion for the Air Training Corps I’d had in younger years, but at the signing-up meeting, the officers took one look at me in my trench coat with long hair, and suggested that perhaps this wasn’t the right group for me. (Oh, things could have turned out so differently!)
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