Class of '79. Chris Rooke
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I WAS A STUDENT IN THE SEVENTIES!
Introduction
The 1970s was a decade of major upheaval. We had hippies, and progressive rock, and big music festivals, and drugs and peace and love, which slowly gave way to, and clashed with, social and industrial unrest, Punk rock, different drugs, and pop culture. In personal terms, my own life was about to be turned upside down as I moved from living in the middle class comfort and relative luxury of home in Oxford, to living on my own in a strange working class city, with poor accommodation, bad landlords, left wing radicals, no money, no drugs/too many drugs, run-ins with the police, falling in and out of love, having no money, trying to follow a challenging course of study, and generally trying to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as a student. Being a student at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the 1970s was a massive roller coaster ride of highs and lows, laughter and sorrow, utter stupidity and a fight for mere survival. What follows is a recount of life as an undergraduate in the ‘70s. You might not believe some of it, as it's so incredible, but it’s all true and it’s just how it was, back then, back in the day!
CHAPTER 1: HOW I GOT TO UNIVERSITY – OR NOT!
How I failed my A levels
I took my ‘A’ levels in 1976, when I was 17 years old. By this time my family had become completely dysfunctional, with my parents living separate lives, and neither of them took responsibility for their offspring. My father, once a pillar of Oxford City council, but by now a disillusioned retiree, had just lost his job, at the age of 64. One day at work he had a big argument with some civic dignitary or other and, being highly principled, he walked out, just like that, and never went back. It was half way through his final year at work and he lost half his pension. Only later did we realise that dad was actually suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease and his mental faculties were already failing.
My mother remained as she always had been – slightly out of touch with this world and living in some ‘happy world’ that only she was in touch with. I’m guessing she was on some kind of medication as she once went absolutely ballistic at my elder brother when he played Mother’s little helper by the Stones on the record player in his bedroom. But her mantra was always ‘Boys will be boys’ and she generally left me and my elder brother Peter to our own devices – and we took full advantage. Peter even went as far as fitting a Yale lock to his bedroom door.
I guess that’s all you need to know about my family – my brother fitted a Yale lock to his bedroom door. From that you can probably kind of guess the rest. Why would a child want to hide things from their parents so much that they wanted to fit a Yale lock to their bedroom door, and what parents in their right minds would ever let him do so!?
Mopeds and motorcycles
In the lead up to my exams I was left pretty much to my own devices, as had been the case for the preceding few years. I had little restraint or authority at home, and so things began to go slightly awry. Weekends and evenings were spent in the various student bars and pubs around town (which, being the major student hub that was Oxford, there were many to choose from) and my days, supposedly filled with revision whilst on study leave were spent mending an old Mini I had bought. I always loved driving and riding motorcycles and I had taken my moped test at the start of my A levels, as soon as I turned 16, so I could take my girlfriend on the back (the fact that I didn’t actually have a girlfriend at the time was irrelevant! - I lived in hope.) It was the mid-seventies when I turned 16 and the sports moped craze was at its height (before the law changed a few years later to stop 16 year olds going way too fast on ever more powerful machines). The king of the sports moped was unquestionably the Yamaha FS1E, but there was no way I could afford one, so I bought a second-hand Casal moped, a bike that had originally been designed by Zundapp in Germany, but were actually made by a company in Portugal. It was an absolute dog of a bike, with a false neutral between every gear, and an exhaust pipe that fell off every time you hit a bump, but it was fast!
When I finally turned 17 (it seemed like an eternity!) I was old enough to ride a proper motorcycle, up to 250cc (once again, the law on this changed soon after) and I sold the Casal and bought an old BSA Starfire 250 that I paid just £60 for as it ran so badly. Luckily, the one talent that I inherited from my father was an ability to work on anything mechanical, and I was able to mend the Starfire without too much fuss (a bent needle in the carburettor was the problem), and I took my motorcycle test as soon as I could. Taking my test meant that I could ride more powerful bikes and also, again, I could take my girlfriend on the back, as by then I did actually have one: the beautiful Diane. Having passed my motorbike test, I sold the BSA and bought a Suzuki 350 Rebel, which was a revelation when compared with old Starfire in that it was fast, light, ran like clockwork and didn’t leak oil.
Teenager on stationary motorcycle
A short while later I sold the Suzuki, and, together with some cash I’d saved up from my part-time job, I bought a Mini – my very own car!
The part-time job I had was as a cleaner at Debenhams in town, and cleaners began work at 6.00am and finished at 8.00am, six days a week. This meant that I had to get up at 5.30 every morning before heading to work on my moped/motorcycle, doing my cleaning job, and then heading straight off to school. As a result of such early starts I was continually in a state of tiredness and fatigue and I fell asleep at school quite regularly, and it most certainly didn’t help with homework in the evenings. My dad had a favourite expression: ‘Hard work never hurt anybody,’ but a few years later I came to realise that this glib statement just simply isn’t true – how many people have died in the mines and factories of this world by being overworked, ill-treated and exposed to noxious chemicals? Hard work has definitely hurt a lot of people.
Quite apart from having to get up at a ridiculous hour of the morning, the job itself was horrendous, and we (myself and my great friend Gazza) were given areas to clean that should really have been covered by at least two people. My job was to hoover and mop the entire second floor of the department store. This meant that to begin with I had to hoover the sports department, followed by the the main admin offices situated behind it.
The offices were a nightmare to clean as they used copious amounts of rubber bands for some task or other, and they littered the floor every day, and these would regularly jam the roller on the ancient hoover I had been provided with, which then had to be dismantled and unblocked before I could continue. I then had to mop the floor of the kitchens that serviced the café/restaurant, before then hoovering the whole restaurant itself. It was a bugger of a job, and I had to work really hard every day just to try and finish all the work in the allotted time, which made me even more tired. But I made good money: £6 a week! Wow!
Mini Madness!
And so it was that I bought my first car, still only aged 17, a British Racing Green 850 Mini, reg no. BUD 929B, with an original long gear change lever that went straight into the gearbox, and a button on the floor to start it. I paid £120 for it and I loved that car to bits, but almost needless to say, it was an absolute old banger, being already 12 years old and having had a hard life. The seller had seen me coming; a callow youth, and he ripped me off completely. It transpired that the sills of the car, which were structural, were completely rusted through and the car required major surgery to put right.
Just after I bought it, I remember once attempting to jack the car up to adjust the brakes, but instead of the car lifting off the ground, the jack just went straight through the sill! The MOT was due 2 weeks after I bought it, and of course it failed miserably, requiring two new sills and these would cost around £140 to fit, which was £20 more than I’d paid for the car! I had no hope of ever paying that amount and so instead I spent my revision days applying plastic padding to the bottom of the sills, sanding it down and then painting over it, in the hope that the tester would be fooled into thinking it was