Читать книгу Class of '79 - Chris Rooke - Страница 29

I stayed overnight at Gazza’s, sleeping on the floor of his small bedroom and showering (at last!) in a little ‘Jack and Jill’ shower cubicle that he shared with the room next door. This meant that I was missing my lectures in Portsmouth, and so accompanied Gazza to one of his English lectures instead. I had envisaged a large lecture theatre, but when we finally arrived, through a maze of corridors in a grand building, it was actually quite an intimate space, with about 15 other students sitting at modern desks. During the course of the lecture, the lecturer herself kept looking at me with a slightly quizzical expression, as she clearly couldn’t quite place me. Luckily, however, she apparently thought I was a new member of her group that she hadn’t noticed yet.

Gazza himself had applied to Leeds to read Theology, although he had no intention of actually reading Theology, and he only did it to get himself a place at Leeds, and as soon as he arrived he applied to change courses to English Lit, which is what he’d wanted to do all along.

In those days, applying for a less popular course with lower entrance requirements, and then switching courses was a relatively common ploy. After a bit of argy-bargy the university had granted his request, so he was himself a relatively new member of the English Lit group.

The lecture itself was on ballads, which was interesting, but I spent most of the lecture passing infantile notes to Gazza, trying to make him laugh. I eventually succeeded by passing him a note that read: Hey, baby, get your gums round my plums! Now, when you think of undergraduates, studying hard for their degree and with a thirst for knowledge and enlightenment, you may forget that sometimes they actually have the mental age of a 13 year old and that they sometimes sneak into someone else’s lectures and pass childish notes to each other, giggling secretively. Anyway, I was happy as the lecturer stared hard at Gazza for laughing at a very inappropriate moment.

At the end of the lecture the lecturer asked myself and another student to come and say ‘Hello’, explaining that she still didn’t know everyone in the group. Luckily for me the other student went up to see her straight away, and under the cover of that meeting, Gazza and I made a swift exit before she realised we’d gone.

Later on that day it was time for me to go and head back to Pompey, and having said my farewells I returned to my car, only to find a parking ticket stuck to the front windscreen! I was shocked, as even in the hazy stupor I'd been in when I’d arrived a day or so before, I’d checked that I was OK to park there. When I looked at it, the ticket was for parking facing the wrong way round at night, with the front of my car facing the oncoming traffic! I am the only person I have ever known to have been done for such a heinous offence, and I wasn’t happy, not happy at all - but there you go. In those days we even had police on the streets!