A welcome in the hillside

It was raining as I arrived in Cardiff

Three months later the only change was that it had turned to snow.

I had booked into the halls of residence for the first year so that I would get fed and they gave me a ground floor room. In a quiet corner, or so I thought. The first night I discovered that it was the room that everyone used to get in through the window after hours to avoid the hall porter.

In those days they were strict on security which meant that your every move was watched and visitors had to be signed in and out and only allowed to stay for a short time. It all changed over the years I was there and a year after I left I could go back and sleep on a friend’s floor without anyone noticing.

Needless to say the hall was for men only. The women’s hostels were either in the centre of town or out at Penarth – a half hour bus ride away from the centre. For them visiting was restricted to an hour in the afternoon and an hour in the evening until the principal decided to abandon attempts at propriety on the basis that “they can do what they like in the hour so we are not stopping anything”. But that was all too late for me.

University Hall is out at Penylan which is a couple of miles from the uni so we had to use the trolley buses which were still running then. It was a stop-start journey as the cantilever came off the wires or got tangled with them at corners and had to be reset. They phased them out over the next year or so by which time I had decided to walk and save the fare.

The first week as ever was a mad round of signing up for everything in sight. I joined the film club to watch dubious “art” films; the student paper, although I never did get around to writing anything; BUNAC, who organise working holidays in the States, although I never went; the drama group, Cardiff University Players, where I spent much of the next three years; and the Anglican Chaplaincy because they had a coffee bar for lunch.

I was also down to study law and accountancy for an economics degree so I joined the accountancy society since they did field trips. With them I got to see Concorde being made and several trips round the local Brains brewery.

And there were dances. Still to live music in those days. Local band Love Sculpture seemed to play at everything. 

I managed to turn up to most of the lectures and found the library, though I only used it in the run up to exams. I was still working on the principle that I could pass exams on a month or so of cramming provided I had the notes and a few years past papers. I don’t think I ever imagined that I would get a first and so was always aiming for a 2 something. In the end my predictions of the questions went wrong on the company law exam and I settled for a 2.2.

I was fairly quickly involved in drama productions. I went to the first audition and gave them my best Henry V before Agincourt after which they asked me to do the lighting. Which was fine by me as that meant there were no lines to learn.

So I learnt stage lighting from Russ Hunt who dropped out a year later to do lighting for stadium tours by rock bands. The lighting workshop, where we made up leads and tested and repaired the lights and stored spare equipment, was in the basement of the computer centre. Computers in 1967 were the size of a small semi-detached and required large rooms with sprung floors and air conditioning. What they never seemed to notice was that the cellar was running with water from a burst pipe. It came down the wall next to the mains cable for the computer. We did tell them, but they took no notice. Meanwhile we were standing in water checking our lighting equipment. Perhaps not a good idea, though we all survived.

The first play I was involved in was the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. An Elizabethan comedy which involved a head speaking and various apparitions. We also decided to blind the audience at one point by pointing several floodlights on them and switching everything on at once. That took more power than we were meant to use so we had to replace all the fuses with metal bars and hope the mains supply would cope for a few seconds. It did and it was a couple of years later that the college electrician blew the main fuse trying to unjamb our dimmer board by sticking a screwdriver in it. The screwdriver melted through and somewhere in left the arts block without power for most of the day until we could find the main fuse which was anonymously in a box that had been painted over many times.

There was a play every term as well as touring productions that came in. And for three years I helped to light them all. The old slide dimmers in those days were constantly overheating and we had to take the covers off to try to keep them cool. But it was useful for keeping the chips warm. Together with the sound guys we took it in turns to go to the Woodville for beer or the chippy in quiet moments of the shows and so I got to know a bit about sound as well, which came in useful later.

Some of the shows were truly weird. A group called the People Show came in for the Cardiff Arts Festival. They were largely improvised and so the show had no real beginning and no end. When they ran out of ideas they simply didn’t come back on stage. As I was responsible for putting the house lights back on it would have been nice to know the cue. But there wasn’t one. So each night I had to guess.

By my second year I had got to know some of the music department and became involved in the 20^th Century Music Festival which happens every year. That involved working in other venues around Cardiff. The Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre was the venue for the London Percussion Ensemble who were performing, amongst other things, the world premier of Howard Rees’s “Cat’s paw in the silence of the midnight goldfish”. This was a fairly anarchic piece written by a former Cardiff student and involved the performers walking around the stage hitting whatever they passed. Trouble was there was also a film being projected on the backdrop and a trumpeter up in the gods. So I had to give enough light for the performers to find their way around but not too much to overpower the film. With only limited equipment that wasn’t easy. But returning to his home turf to present his work seemed to be enough for Howard and he didn’t make too many rude comments about my lighting.

I was also part of the stage crew for the London Symphony Orchestra at the New Theatre when Tamas Vasary performed Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto. Our job was to move the piano after the concerto to the back of the stage where it was need as percussion for the second half. Trouble was Andre Previn, conducting, decided it was going out of tune as we moved it, so it had to stay centre stage throughout the concert.

There were also variety shows to light. Each year the rag week culminated in an extravaganza with the usual student sketches and then a band or two. One year they had booked a new band, billed as waiting for a record contract. Unfortunately the contract came before the show and they cancelled at the last minute. So I never got to light the first performance by the Electric Light Orchestra.

We certainly did the first and last performances of “The Long Lonely Voyage of Chester Winchester”. Written by one of the students it was entered for the National Student Drama Festival but Francis Chichester’s widow threatened to sue if we performed it again. On another occasion I was lighting a play for another Cardiff college and the director would never get back to me on what lighting was needed, so I went away for the week before the play and only turned up half an hour before the curtain went up with the key to the lighting desk in my pocket.

In my final year there was talk of a new theatre being built and Liz Weston, our director, was asked to be part of the planning group. So we all dreamed of what we would really like in terms of space and sound and lighting. Some of which became a part of the Sherman Theatre.

There were of course other shows to go to. My experience of music broadened to include Stravinsky, Lutoslavski and the operas that Welsh National Opera put on each year. Then there was the Glenn Miller orchestra, Jazz at the Half Moon club, and poetry from the Barrow Poets and the Liverpool Scene.

After a year I left the halls of residence and moved into a flat in Tydraw Road in Roath with three other students. Allen Powell was from the valleys, I had met him at the Chaplaincy although he was Presbyterian. He invited me to share the flat and I moved in with two others. It was just up the road from the lake and I spent many hours along the lake taking photographs and watching the ducks. It was a bit like my Saturday afternoons in St Albans.

My mother loaded me down with Vesta curries – just add hot water and it tastes like wet cardboard. So after a week I decided to learn to cook. Allen was a reasonable cook as well and we soon were eating very well and very cheaply too.

With another four students upstairs we had a wide variety of musical tastes. There was always music on. From the Beatles, the Stones and Cream; Leonard Cohen or David Akles; to Blossom Dearie and Paul Simon withy occasional bursts of Dvorak and Stravinsky. Or if Allan was left in charge Josef Locke and Richard Tauber (useful for getting rid of those who always hang around at the end of parties). Allan also introduced me to the Presbyterian Church in Windsor Place and I started going there most Sunday evenings. After church we would go back to the manse ostensibly to discuss the sermon but more often to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In – the cult comedy of the time. Allan’s religion was eclectic, he was as often to be found in Anglo Catholic churches as Presbyterian ones. And he was an expert on the finer points of liturgical practice. I began to gather my own experiences too – studying the mystics with the Roman Catholic chaplain; attending Ash Wednesday ashing services at the Anglo Catholics and going to silent retreats at St Teilo’s Priory.

The chaplaincy had various days out – to the monks on Caldy Island; to St David’s; and to Exeter to the Cathedral. In Exeter I spent the whole day in a pub near Exeter City’s ground with Kay’s boyfriend, Dave (?), while the rest of the trip went round Britain’s least interesting cathedral. I had been to the Incredible String Band at the Festival Hall with Dave and Kay and her sister Mary. Mary and I had then had a passionate correspondence over a few weeks and I had gone over the summer to see them in Romford. Kay and Mary’s dad was the crossword compiler for the Daily Express. Which seemed a reasonably exotic job to me. But his conversations were equally cryptic. In the end Romford and Cardiff were too far apart and I found friends closer to home.

One was my second great love. Judy was a radiologist at the Cardiff Hospital but had a lot of friends at the university. We went out for much of my second year.  Even now if I hear Hey Jude my heart skips a beat. Also through the Chaplaincy I met Pat. She was from Bristol and gave me my first contact with that city. We also walked down on the beach on the Severn Estuary and saw the new bridge being built.

Cardiff was the main time I felt one of a crowd. There were always a lot of people doing things together. Glyn and Trish, Gill and Car, Gilly, Helen, Bob, Dave and Jill, Steve, Chris, Margaret and Linda Mary. All on a variety of courses and spread over different years, so we would never meet up on a conventional reunion.

In my second year a group of us decided to go off to Ireland. We went on the boat from Swansea to Cork and then got the bus down to Glengarrif on Bantry Bay. There we rented a cottage for a week. One night in the pub we were challenged to a darts match by the locals. As we had a darts board in the flat in Cardiff we were pretty proficient except that one of the locals could get triple twenty every time. Even so the resulting conversation led to an invite to go out on the bay the following day shrimping. The shrimps went straight from the sea into boiling water on the deck and were eaten within minutes of being caught. At the end of the first week we went up to the Shannon and hired a boat for a week. Sailing the Shannon we called at Clonmacnoise to look at the Celtic remains and then onto Lough Ree where we managed to run the boat aground in the middle of the Lough. For some reason it seemed to be my job to go ashore and call the owners to come and tow us off.

We also had a day out at Weston. Taking the ferry from Barry we went to the old pier at Weston (now derelict). Some went off to the Tropicana (now derelict) to swim while I stayed on the beach and watched the sea which seemed to be a good half mile away. There were also days out to Porthcawl to watch the sea crashing over the promenade and Llantwit Major. Little did I realise then that I would end up retired and living in Clevedon, watching the lights of Cardiff across the Bristol Channel.

Allen graduated at the end of my second year and I advertised for new flatmates and Eric Dobbin arrived. He rode a motorbike and spent most of the next year with the bike in bits in the sink as he tried to keep it going. It did mean that I could get a lift into college most days and sometimes a lift back. Saturday nights became cinema night. There was a fleapit cinema, The Globe, down the road, which went from a continental film season to an international film season and then back again. Either soft-core porn or deep meaningful Ingmar Bergman and Bunuel. The woman who took the tickets at the door came round at half time with ice cream while her husband projected the films. Occasionally rats ran along the front of the balcony. But they did show the spaghetti westerns, and Easy Rider, which Eric went to see every night for a week. After the film it was down the pub and then chips on the way home. As a result Sundays were a lazy day with enormous breakfasts at lunchtime – sausages, bacon, beans, eggs, black pudding and fried bread. Very healthy. The guys upstairs managed to leave their chip pan on and burnt the kitchen out so they too shared our kitchen for a time.

Every year there was a rag week to raise money for charity and part of that was a sponsored walk from Cardiff to Barry and back. Some of the runners could do the 26 miles in three and a half hours. I used to take about six. One year at the end and facing a two mile walk back to Roath I decided to kip down on Glyn’s sofa. As we were nodding off to sleep I suddenly realised that the gas fire was still on. So in my half awake state I said to Glyn, You’d better turn the gas off, if the shilling runs out when we are asleep we will be gassed. Well it made sense at the time. And he did turn the gas off.

The last of the trips for me was with the Windsor Place Presbyterians to Oberammergau. I had already graduated by the time we went in the summer of 1970. We started with a week at Lido di Jessolo on the Venice Lagoon. I did my usual thing of going off by myself and spent some of the evenings with the Swedish courier who took me to the places the couriers go after work.

By the time we got to Seefeld I had attached myself to one of the group who had a boyfriend back at Cardiff and we had a good time in the mountains. The passion play was a great disappointment to me. Everyone else thought it was wonderful. But it was overblown, too staged and unreal. I had just spent three years in student drama, small scale, intimate and largely improvised. And to see the whole village on stage for seven and a half hours speaking archaic German was too much. Also the group were getting on my nerves. Some of the British had taken primus stoves with them to brew tea in their rooms in medieval alpine thatched chalets. Didn’t seem a good idea to me. On the last night I went off with the courier again and got very drunk. The flight home was through turbulence and with the hungover feeling from the night before I never did get to say goodbye to the people I had just spent three years of my life with and would possibly never see again.

Luton airport seemed a very lonely place.

In my last year I had stirred up the chaplaincy by bringing in friends of all denominations and none and there were endless debates about whether the chaplaincy had to be just for Anglicans – which would have kept out people like Allen; or whether it was open to anyone. I even tried to get elected president to change things but received only one vote (I never voted for myself). At that point I left, which was a good idea anyway as it was my final year and I needed to spend time in the library. I am not sure if anyone noticed that I no longer turned up at lunchtimes. But the chaplain, Anglo Catholic to the core, was certainly surprised when I said I was going to be ordained.

As I was trying to work out what to do with my life I went to the milk round interviews with prospective employers. I really didn’t want to spend the rest of my life behind a desk. I had something of a reputation as someone that people could talk to and my interest in spirituality had grown over the years. People often ask when I decided to become a priest and the answer is I don’t know. It was a path I seemed to be guided down without any one specific moment of enlightenment. Almost everyone was surprised not least my parish priest in St Albans where I had not so much as read a lesson and the Cardiff chaplain who thought I was a troublemaker.

But at some point I turned up on the doorstep of the Director of Ordinands at Little Gaddesdon and without too much questioning he set the ball rolling for me to go to a selection conference at Almondsbury retreat house and begin the process of applying to colleges.

My family were against it. My father wanted me to go into the city to follow in his footsteps and even got a friend of his to write a dubious reference that later came back to haunt me; and my brother, born again and a true believer simply didn’t think I was “A Christian”.

But somehow I got through the hurdles and arrived in August 1970 at Lincoln Theological College.