Duncan

I don’t know if it still happens, but in the seventies and eighties, there were many council owned flats and houses that were categorised as unfit for habitation. Some were to be demolished, some refurbished, but in the meantime, they were offered to students for short-term rentals.

I moved into one of these when I started living with Sam, after I went back to North London Polytechnic in 1981. It was a huge detached house in Leyton. I think it had been an approved school for boys before. It was certainly run-down. Inside was a maze of little rooms and corridors. We had the big front room with a tiny kitchen at one end of it.

Sam was a bit of a Euro-hippy and so he’d draped scarves here and there and apart from a large mattress on the floor hadn’t bothered with much furniture. I can’t even remember a desk. There were guitars of course, and amps, and a big stereo system.

Looking back, I think the reason I stayed there the whole year wasn’t so much to do with Sam, although he was a nice person. It was more to do with the house itself, the other people in it, and the fact that I was still quite numb after Joel’s death. I didn’t really want to be alone.

It was a nice area of London. Most of the people had been there all their lives. Even though they didn’t quite know what to make of us, I think we were at least a change from the juvenile delinquents who’d lived in the house before. There was a cheerful little pub across the road, and on Sundays they would put bowls of free seafood on the bar counter. We never had enough money for food, and I think we overstepped the mark, because after a while they would put the bowls under the counter when they saw us coming.

In the front room opposite us was a girl we hardly ever saw. I think she was in the middle of a sad love affair perhaps. She was perfectly friendly, but always looked distracted and vague when you spoke to her and generally kept herself to herself. She was trying to finish an MA at Cambridge. I have no idea why she was doing it in London. We shared a bathroom with her and above the loo she had stuck a little note. It said, “We aim to please. You aim too please Sam”.

In another part of the ground floor was a further set of rooms where a more sociable couple lived. I think he was a geologist. I can’t remember what his girlfriend did. They were much better cooks than Sam. I still hadn’t got the hang of cooking so I never bothered much myself, but Sam did and sometimes it was literally inedible. He would make big stews – throwing whatever he could find into the pot, and they all tasted uniformly disgusting.

Once he gave me the worst food poisoning I’d ever had. I couldn’t move so the doctor had to visit, and after he’d given me an injection to stop me throwing up, he took Sam a little further away from where I was lying and pointed at the kitchen end. “You really need to do something about hygiene,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

At the top of the house there was one room that was completely empty except for a huge drum kit. It belonged to everyone and I guess it was used a little like a punchbag. Whenever anyone was frustrated about something, you’d hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs and then shortly afterwards the incessant thump thump crash crash, until they had got it out of their system, whatever it was.

I didn’t mind the drum noise. It was a welcome change from the constant Jimi Hendrix. Sam played more Jimi Hendrix than anyone ever ought to. It was the main reason I spent most of my time on the first floor.

There were two rooms there. They were both incredibly clean and organised. Duncan lived in one, and Alistair in the other. They’d both recently graduated from Cambridge with firsts in maths and they were recovering from the pressure.

Al was on the dole. He wore thick black-rimmed spectacles and I don’t think he washed his hair very often. He was very tall and very thin and he wore two or three charity shop jumpers one on top of the other to keep warm. He was very, very shy. I don’t think he did much at all. He just sat in his clean room quietly, occasionally cooking complicated vegetarian things with Duncan. They’d go to the markets at the end of the day to get cheap vegetables.

The place I headed for – where you could almost always find me, was Duncan’s room. He was lovely. I wasn’t attracted to him – he wasn’t exactly ugly, but his mouth was too big for his face – like he hadn’t grown into his features yet. Once I introduced him to Zachy and afterwards Zach gave me a blank look and said “he’s ok I suppose, but how can you possibly talk to someone as hideous as that?” With Zach everything was black and white. He’s still the same now.

Duncan’s room was spotless, like Al’s, but he’d lined the walls with books, floor to ceiling. He’d made the shelves from bits of wood he’d found. He was doing some computing research at my Polytechnic. I visited him there once – it was in another building from where I studied. There was a huge room filled with massive, humming machines. Duncan gave me a sideways look and said, “even if you think it might be fun, just please, please don’t press any buttons. I know you want to, but just don’t”

He was only at college part-time. We would spend hours and hours talking and reading together. It was like a breath of fresh air being with Duncan. He didn’t ever just like things – he fizzed over with enthusiasm for them, and being up there was so relaxing – you just sat on the mattress and let yourself get carried along in the slipstream of his excitement.

He said he was making up for lost time – his whole life up until now had been maths. His parents had hot housed him – he was naturally brilliant, but you still had to work to get a scholarship to Cambridge and then once he was in, he’d had to keep up the pressure to get the first that he was expected to achieve. He hated his parents.

There must have been thousands of books in that room – it was like a treasure trove. Not one of them was about maths. They were mainly history, and politics and philosophy and geography. He was passionate about the Spanish civil war and he was my personal tutor for all things anarchist. He was also catching up on music and had the best punk collection of anyone I knew.

I am guessing he liked me because I was never too serious about anything – I don’t think there had been very many people like me at Cambridge. Also he admired the fact that my hair was three different colours at once that year – pink, orange, and peroxide blonde. It took a long time but it was worth it.

The other interest we shared, which was helpful when we stayed up all night talking, was opium. I have no idea why it was so easy to get in Leyton that year, but it was our main financial outlay. Sometimes we’d smoke it, but mainly I think we ate it – little brown sticky lumps that didn’t taste very nice. It was wonderful stuff.

I think it was the following Easter that the Falklands war started. I was on my way home from Nice – I’d been visiting friends there, and I remember being startled at the headlines in the newspapers once we arrived in Dover. When I was back in Leyton it was astonishing. I was studying history – I knew all about jingoism – but I honestly thought we’d gone past all that.

The people I mixed with, my family, my college friends – hardly anyone was British and I’d certainly never heard someone say they were proud to be British. I loved London – it was my home, but it would never have occurred to me to say I was patriotic.

Suddenly, you’d get on buses and they’d be full of old men with medals pinned to their jackets. Margaret Thatcher would be on the radio and in that awful, patronising, “I am going to talk very slowly because you are not very bright” way of speaking, she’d castigate the BBC for saying “British troops” instead of “our troops”.

I remember those bizarre TV reports where they could only hint at what was happening, and those weird news conferences given by the government spokesperson who looked and sounded exactly like a robot.

When I saw the television pictures of the troops going off in ships with great crowds cheering, I felt immensely sad for them. It seemed so obviously engineered – two leaders in trouble seizing on a small problem as a way of boosting their popularity. I couldn’t understand how other people didn’t see that.

There were all those awful Sun headlines that covered the whole front page and, worse still, the articles inside where they would list “ten reasons why we should hate the Argies” – one of them was that Argentinian men only liked anal sex because they felt inadequate or something. It would have been funny except people were actually being killed – people my age and younger. We got badges, which said, “I love Argies” and wore them proudly.

When it got warmer Duncan and I took a trip together. We hitched to Cambridge first and he took me punting down the Cam, all the way to Grantchester I think, smoking joints and drinking wine the whole way. I was rubbish at punting – I couldn’t stop laughing and I dropped the oar thing and we collided with another punt. We stayed a few nights with his friends there – I could see they were a little bit defensive towards Duncan, as if he’d sold out somehow by not staying within academia. I don’t think they approved of me at all.

Then we continued on to the town in the North where his dad was professor of physics at a university. It was the first time I’d been past Cambridge. I had only seen pictures of coal mines and factories before. I could see why he didn’t like his parents. The walls of the house were plastered with his older brother’s achievements – the blues, the certificates; Duncan changed the minute we walked in the door. I’d never heard him be rude to anyone before.

His mother was really overbearing and bossy. She completely got the wrong end of the stick. I don’t think Duncan had ever brought a girl home, and you could see the grandchildren light go “ching” in her eyes. She must have been very desperate for them, to ignore the pink hair and the leather jacket.

As soon as we left for London, Duncan became his breezy, funny self again. I saw a lot of him that summer. Sam went home to Switzerland, and I got ready to go to Nice for the year.