Look Back in Hunger Read online

  Finally, we mounted the steps of the plane and that’s when the shenanigans started. Several people started to cry and wail and had to be physically pushed into the plane and once we sat down some people had enormous panic attacks and tried to get off. One poor woman literally tore her hair out, so terrified was she. This had rather a positive effect on me because I realised that on the scale of fear-of-flying candidates, I was a relatively mild case. Another guy gripped the arms of his seat so forcefully that his hands could not be removed from them. At one point there was a completely farcical scene reminiscent of the comedy film Airplane, when members of staff lined up to try to get his fists open and his hands off the seat.

  Eventually the plane took off, accompanied by a serious running commentary by the pilot, during which he described every single nuance of what was happening—noises, bumps, shakes, the lot. Jeff contributed a comedy commentary and pretended he was driving a car, so as we took off he was changing gear up from first to fifth in true comedy-mime fashion. We flew down to Southampton and back and the palpable sense of relief and the enormous cheer that went up when we landed was something to behold. Some people had never even been on a plane before and there was lots of hugging and crying and other very un-British behaviour.

  I would say, on the whole, it was a big help. I flew to Australia some years later and rather enjoyed it.

  Brunel University itself was a very modern, higgledy-piggledy set of buildings. Rumour had it that the architect’s plans for the library were misread by the builders and the library was built the wrong way round. I really hope that is true.

  Also, Brunel was used as a location in the iconic film A Clockwork Orange, in the very first scene, when some young men kick a tramp to death. Oh, how proud we were to know that the soulless concrete buildings in which we moved and studied were used to portray the literal and moral wasteland conjured up by Stanley Kubrick.

  Having no knowledge of the local area and not knowing anyone, I initially moved into halls of residence, which were full of new, scared students, most of them away from mum for the first time. Each of us was allotted a little box of a room with the absolute minimum of furniture and character. For all we knew, we could have been in a detention centre at one of the Channel ports, so sparse were our surroundings.

  One story that was told time and time again was the tale of a poor unfortunate first year who went home for the weekend and returned on a Sunday night to find nothing in his room except a turfed floor and a sheep.

  After a month or so in my little private hell, I decided to move out, as I could not stand the yoghurt pots with name labels on in the fridge, the queue to whip up baked beans on toast and the lack of a communal area to meet and get to know other students. Serendipitously, a fellow student a year ahead on my course wanted to move nearer the place and so we did a straightforward swap and I moved into a house-share in Ruislip and found myself sharing with three men and another woman, all on the same course as me. I loved it—the sense of separation from college, the opportunity to talk to people in the evening rather than sitting in a room staring at a minuscule black and white telly and many nights with a cheap bottle of wine, laughing our heads off.

  Being mobile at university changed my life. I could drive into college, pile many pissed students into the car for nights out in London and make myself scarce when the occasion demanded it.

  One of my great regrets about Brunel was the fact that The Sex Pistols played their last England gig there roughly eight weeks before I arrived. The Sex Pistols really signified something major for me and although I and most of the women I knew did a version of punk-lite, the air of rebellion and revolution that they engendered in us created an atmosphere of real anticipation that change was afoot.

  Two Tone had also attracted me—bands like The Specials and Madness—and while I was at Brunel, The Specials arrived there to play. Unfortunately, a welcoming committee of skinheads, well aware of their anti-racist stance, had turned up too and before long set up a chant of ‘Sieg heil’ during their first song. This was too much for Jerry Dammers, the keyboard player, who vaulted over his keyboard, grabbed a guitar and jumped off the stage, swinging it at someone’s head as he did. Of course, this immediately started a massive ruck—fists and boots flew indiscriminately, security swarmed in and the gig was stopped after one song. What a pain.

  We had more luck with The Damned, who were due to play a gig at the Clarendon on Hammersmith Broadway, a well-known, manky punk venue. Several of us turned up to find that the show had sold out and headed disconsolately into the downstairs bar. Spotting a door in the corner which we worked out must lead somewhere near the stage, we came up some stairs and arrived in the area where The Damned were doing a sound check. Being a punk band, they didn’t give a shit that we didn’t have tickets, so we watched the sound check and then got stuck in with the rest of the audience when they arrived.

  I think probably the best gig that I ever went to was The Beat and The Pogues at the Hammersmith Palais. The mad, scrabbling, joyful, pissed audience bouncing up and down in a frenzied fashion, set against the loudest, most brilliant, inspiring music contributed to an evening full of huge excitement that I could not get out of my head.

  My commitment to seeing bands was curtailed by lack of money and an unwillingness to leave campus. As a student in Uxbridge, travelling to the centre of London involved a long journey on the underground (we were at the end of the line) and my experience of the tube had not been pleasant, so I stopped going on it.

  What put me off was an incident which occurred early one evening, when I found myself travelling into central London to meet a friend. I was in a carriage, pretty much on my own, apart from a young couple right down the other end. A guy got on and sat opposite me. I was reading a book and didn’t take much notice of him. He seemed a bit fidgety but I didn’t want to look at him because I had quickly learned the London tube-travel rules, which are that you don’t strike up a conversation, meet anyone’s eyes or get involved in any trouble. So I continued to try to read, even though it was hard to concentrate. I raised the book up a bit higher to cover my face and tried to take in the words which were swimming in front of my eyes. Then I heard the sound of a trouser zip being undone and thought to myself, ‘Oh Christ, he’s going to have a wank.’

  The problem in these situations is that lots of us women are unsure what to do. Most of us have a vision of ourselves rising to our feet and declaiming in a loud voice, ‘Stop that immediately or I will call an officer of the law!’ If only. For some reason, any sort of sexually deviant behaviour disarms most women, makes them feel paralysed, frightened and ashamed, and that is what men like that rely on—that you will be too embarrassed to do anything.

  I knew there was a couple down the end of the carriage, so rather than hang around for the floor show, I decided to go and seek some support. I walked up the carriage as quickly as I could and sat opposite them. They looked a bit pissed off that I had chosen to sit right by them when the carriage was empty. So, as I felt scared, embarrassed and socially awkward all at the same time, I thought I’d better explain myself. I said, ‘I’m really sorry that I’ve had to sit here, but there’s a bloke up there masturbating.’ They looked at me as if I was mad and got up and walked away to the next carriage.

  Cheers, guys, thanks for your help. I suppose this is the concern of a lot of people in London: that the have-a-go hero will always get it in the neck and therefore you must at all costs keep out of trouble. But this incident made me angry and I resolved to try in future to be a good citizen who got stuck in, whatever the risk.

  I got the opportunity a year or so later, when I was in Camden Market, a bustling student paradise with everything the aspiring fashionista could want to buy reasonably cheaply. I had decided to have a mooch around on my own and meet a friend later. It was raining and the streets were very crowded. As I walked along I became aware of a couple in their thirties arguing. The man was about six foot and very well built, whereas the wom
an was much smaller and thinner, and he towered over her. Initially, he had just been shouting at her, but then he started to get more threatening and push her around a bit. This all happened in seconds and, as I passed, he began to raise his fist. Many other people had noticed it going on and were studiously avoiding looking at it. It started to rain more heavily. I just could not ignore it, so I walked up to them and shouted at the bloke, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  He was obviously totally shocked that I had intervened and turned to look at me with an expression that said, ‘And who the fuck are you?’

  The woman seized her chance. She had been holding a rolled-up umbrella and she raised it as high as she could and brought it down on his head with a huge thwack. Neither she nor I stayed around to face the consequences. We both legged it in opposite directions and disappeared into the crowd.

  So, the upshot of those kinds of incidents was that I generally stayed on campus to watch what the entertainments manager had cobbled together as some sort of varied music programme.

  I saw Hazel O’Connor, a punk-ish singer with a shock of bright-blond hair, who was quite famous at the time with two singles in the charts, ‘Will You’ and ‘Eighth Day’. She also had a hit film out, Breaking Glass, which I went to see. There was a splendid old-fashioned commissionaire outside— uniform, braided cap and all—shouting very entertainingly, ‘This way for Broken Glass!’ During the film, Hazel O’Connor‘s character takes an overdose and there is a scene in which she very dozily tries to come round. Some wag in the cinema shouted, ‘Wake up, love, for fuck’s sake, we’re bored shitless.’ It got the biggest reaction of the night.

  On our occasional ventures to the cinema in Uxbridge, it was slightly frightening, because the place tended to be patrolled by packs of young lads at night. One time we went to see Straw Dogs, a very violent film set in the West Country and directed by Sam Peckinpah. There is a legendary rape scene in which the female star, Susan George, is attacked by some local Neanderthals and begins to enjoy it halfway through. Loads of women, including us, got up and walked out during this scene. I was very impressed by this protest. I think you’ll find women enjoying rape is a purely male fantasy.

  I also saw The Vapors while at Brunel. They were one-hit wonders with their single ‘Turning Japanese’, which is apparently about masturbation. Yes, work it out. Then there was Paul Young and a hideous Radio One roadshow with Dave Lee Travis, who rose up on to the stage dressed in a silver robot costume. Unintentionally very funny.

  This was as close as I got to DLT sadly, but I did have a couple of exciting celeb encounters in the early eighties. My friend Betty and I knew some cool people who organised parties in central London and one night we were invited to a warehouse party to launch Debbie Harry’s new film, Videodrome. We had a whale of a time, got very pissed and stood next to Debbie Harry for a while. She was rather overweight at the time, having been ill I think, and we could not believe our thighs were smaller than hers. We fell asleep on the night bus and ended up somewhere like Harlesden and had to walk home in the freezing cold, stopping to examine a cat on the pavement which seemed to have frozen solid, a rictus grin on its face.

  One day we overstretched ourselves in terms of a cultural expedition. We decided to drive down to Exeter to see the first night of Anthony Minghella’s play, Two Planks and a Passion. One of my three best friends, Edana, is Anthony’s sister and we were all very excited that we knew someone who was becoming famous.

  We drove down in Edana’s tired old yellow Renault. Exeter is a bloody long way from Uxbridge. The play was magnificent, like a medieval mummers’ play. After the performance, we went for dinner and met Anthony, a charming, impressive man, very gracious and fiercely intelligent. The enormous tragedy of his early death dealt a very powerful blow to his absolutely delightful family, and many others.

  After seeing the play, we had to drive home and it was absolutely pissing with rain. I’d agreed to drive back and everyone else in the car dropped off to sleep. At the time, the M4 was blessed with a number of deep grooves which, in the wet weather, used to fill with water and become small ponds. I hit one of these at about seventy miles an hour, and the car aquaplaned across the road towards the central reservation. I remember thinking, ‘Christ, I’m going to kill them all and they won’t even know about it.’ Thank God, the car came out of the skid just as we were about to hit the central barrier and I managed to straighten it up. Everyone else snoozed on and I cried with relief, feeling very alone in the pouring rain somewhere near Swindon.

  Anyway, back to Brunel. While at university, I had some cracking holidays on a shoestring, because as students that was all we could run to. I went to Greece a few times with various combinations of friends. We went to Skopelos, Skiathos, Crete and Ios.

  In Ios I met a very nice soldier who was a conscript and didn’t want to be a soldier at all. We spent a lovely night on the beach together, talking bollocks, snogging and trying to communicate in his very bad English and my even worse Greek. As the sun began to rise, he realised that he was late getting back to the barracks and ran off up the beach, shouting that he would meet me the following night at the same place. He never turned up and I was mighty miffed. After a few days, I received a message that because he had been late back to barracks, he had been confined there for a fortnight as a punishment. And that worked out at two days after the day I left. The course of true love, blah, blah.

  I went to Crete with Lizzie, who was a true free spirit, and within a day she had met a toothless hippie, formed a huge attachment to him and gone to live on the beach with him, leaving me to my own devices in our little rented cottage. I got to know a few people and spent my days on the beach, but the nights were hell. This was because the middle-aged Greek man who owned the row of cottages had taken a fancy to me and each night he would come round at midnight and try to talk his way in for a bit of copulation. Most evenings he was quite easily persuaded to go away, but one night he came round really drunk, accompanied by a huge Alsatian, and started banging on the door and kicking it to try to break it down. It was terrifying. I pushed all the furniture up against the door and sat on my bed. He gave up after about half an hour and I sat there until the morning. I packed all our stuff, hauled it down to the beach to find Lizzie and told her we had to get out of town.

  She grudgingly bade goodbye to Mr Toothless Hippie and, as we had no money, we went down to the local bank. But someone had been there first. The bank manager was none other than the brother of the amorous psycho who had tried to batter my door down. He refused to give us any money, so we were forced to start walking until a kind old farmer agreed to give us a lift and dropped us off in the next town.

  Of course, along with all the social happiness that university offered, there was the small matter of getting a degree. My attitude to studying, I’m afraid, has always had an element of the ‘fuck it, that’ll do’ to it. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because a lot of it was fascinating. Each year we took three subjects, which we could choose from a list of about nine.

  One could never tell how interesting the course was going to be, or how good the lecturer was. You just had to hope. We also had to do a statistics course and take an exam at the end of it. This was an open exam that you were allowed to take books and old exam papers into. I got hold of some old papers from a friend, and when I went into the exam I discovered about seventy per cent of the questions were exactly the same and she’d got them all right, so I just copied them. I prefer to think of that as resourceful rather than cheating.

  Let’s say, I got by. Party or work? I knew which one I would always go for. I chose courses on the basis of whether they sounded a laugh or not and therefore ended up doing an odd mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. I chose evolutionary psychology and ethnomethodology one year. Evolutionary psychology was fascinating and taught me a lot about the way gene pools behave, ‘a mixture of radical change and pragmatic conservatism’, a phrase that has stuck in my
head for years. I remember once saying to our professor, ‘Do you think there could ever be a sexually transmitted disease that actually kills people?’ He seemed dubious, but about a year later HIV and AIDS seared themselves into our consciousness. It was perhaps the only intelligent observation I ever made at university. I asked this question because at the time we were covering disease transmission and it just occurred to me that no sexually transmitted diseases were fatal. At the time.

  Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, was bonkers, a branch of sociology that examined the minutiae of everyday social encounters by reducing them to the tiniest slivers of interaction by turning them on their head to reveal the paradoxes at the heart of the way we relate to each other. It meant that we indulged in a number of surreal social experiments around the streets of Uxbridge, whose residents didn’t seem ready for us at all.

  For example, we had to go out on the streets and ask random individuals the way somewhere, but pretend each time they refined their explanation that we simply didn’t understand their directions. The poor bloke I asked ended up saying, ‘For fuck’s sake, are you foreign or something?’ and walked off, while another woman’s direction-giver got so frustrated that he actually put her in his car and drove her to where she wanted to go.

  One experiment which revealed so much about the way we interpret things was carried out with a group of students who were invited to ask questions about any aspect of their lives. Some were given random answers generated by a computer and others were advised by a professional counsellor. Of course, both groups confessed themselves completely satisfied with the answers they were given, which just goes to show that we are all completely suggestible.