Читать книгу Mr Nice - Говард Маркс - Страница 13

Looking back, it seems ironical that I should have gone temporarily straight just when the rest of the country realised that England was some kind of headquarters of Sixties culture and creativity. The death penalty had been abolished; incitement to racial hatred had been outlawed; mini-skirts had become fashionable; sex had become okay; poets smoked dope, and Dylan had played electric at the Royal Albert Hall. Carnaby Street and the King’s Road had become world fashion centres with Twiggy as supermodel. Mick Jagger, with support from The Times, had beaten a drugs charge. Students, particularly those from the London School of Economics, wielded power. Thousands of people demonstrated against war and for the legalisation of marijuana. The Duke of Bedford had hosted a Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey. British music dominated the world. Many prominent members of whatever was happening had passed through my Oxford rooms. Some had smoked their first joints there. Instead of trying to get up there with them, I decided to become a physics teacher.

Ilze, equally strangely, decided to become an English teacher. We had both been enrolled by London University to do the Postgraduate Certificate in Education and expected to gain teaching positions in London during the subsequent years. We took up residence in a spacious third-floor flat in Notting Hill. The first term of the teaching course was anything but demanding, and in my spare time I read the books that all my contemporaries had talked about during my undergraduate years. One of the first was Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. It was the most interesting book that I had ever read, and it led to my reading a variety of works by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza. This reading provoked my sincere and lasting interest in the history and philosophy of science. It dawned on me that I’d wasted all the facilities available to me at Oxford, and I longed to return there to make use of them. I wrote to those who administered the postgraduate History and Philosophy of Science courses at Oxford, expressing my interest in the subject, and they suggested I came to Oxford to be interviewed. I was accepted to study for the Diploma in History and Philosophy of Science (a year’s course).

During late December of 1967, Ilze and I became married at my parents’ local Welsh Congregational chapel. Although we revelled in each other’s company, I still have no idea why we took such an extraordinarily impractical step. We had no intention of having children. We had no money. Ilze was destined to become a poorly paid primary school teacher. I was destined for goodness knew what. We took a one-night honeymoon at a bed-and-breakfast establishment in a place called Ogmore-by-Sea.

One of our wedding presents was a Go set. Go has been Japan’s most popular board game for about 1500 years. Playing it well demands great skill, strategy, and patience. It is capable of infinite variety. Yet the rules and pieces are so simple that children can play. Easy handicap rules allow players of unequal skill to play together. Japanese war leaders throughout history have studied Go. Originally, it was a Chinese game dating back at least four thousand years, when the rectangular board on which it was played was marked out on sandy beaches. Ilze and I had both played chess at an elementary level but no longer enjoyed doing so. Go was different. It was aesthetically so much more pleasing, as if one was dealing with the basic structures of life and thought.

I became very bored with the teaching course. Although I was leading a straight life, I still liked to wear my hair long and dress like a hippie, and the staff were constantly berating me for doing so. I withdrew from the course and, naturally, lost my grant. To make ends meet, I took a five-hour-a-day teaching job at a London crammer college and did some private tuition in the evenings. I befriended one of my young fellow teachers, a Welshman named Dai. We would drink at the Princess Royal in Hereford Road, a favourite haunt of some Black South African musicians and entertainers, whom I also befriended.

A few of my Oxford undergraduate friends had also moved to London. One who had done so was Graham Plinston, a PPE student, one year my junior, who, well equipped with kif and hashish, had often frequented my Balliol rooms in 1966 before he set up his own communal dope-smoking rooms in a small village between Oxford and Woodstock. The police raided them and found some LSD. Graham was fined £50 by the police and rusticated for a year by the University.

‘Howard! Hello. What are you doing in London?’

‘I’m living here now, just round the corner in Westbourne Grove.’

‘Really! I thought you had stayed in Oxford or gone back to Wales.’

‘I guess I should have, Graham. But I’m going back to Oxford next year to do some postgraduate work.’

‘That’s a coincidence. I’m going back there myself next year to finish my degree. This rustication has been a bit of a pain. What are you doing with yourself these days?’

‘I’ve got a teaching job. The rest of the time, I usually play Go.’

‘What! These coincidences are getting ridiculous. I learned Go a few months ago, but now I have no one to play with. Shall we have a game?’

There were many hippie pads in London, but Graham’s Lansdowne Crescent flat was an expensive hippie pad. There were not only the usual kilims on the floor and kaftans hanging off pegs, but also priceless porcelain on shelves, stacks of perfume and after-shave in the bathroom, and up-to-date gadgetry squatting in corners. It was a flat one would expect to find belonging to a successful rock singer.

Graham laid out the Go board, put on the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and handed me a sticky lump of aromatic Afghani hashish. I didn’t hesitate. I rolled a joint. I jumped right back into it. I smoked hashish every day for the next twenty-two years.

Back at the Westbourne Grove flat, another Oxford friend, Humphrey Weightman, showed up. He had just come into some money, bought a new expensive stereo, and wanted to leave it, along with his extensive record collection, with us for safe keeping. We set it up, rolled some joints, and played the latest albums. It was great. Tensions began unwinding.

Ilze and I were natural hosts, and with the help of Humphrey’s stereo and Graham’s Afghani, Westbourne Grove quickly became a natural successor to Balliol and Paradise Square. Most evenings and weekends, the flat was full of people, including some newly-met Black South African musicians and minor celebrities of the time. Graham and I usually huddled in the corner playing Go, while everyone else either danced or lay down on mattresses or cushions. There was an endless supply of marijuana and hashish.

I was comforted to discover that although I found reading mathematical physics more difficult when stoned, I found reading philosophy easier. It is not that philosophy is any easier than mathematical physics. It’s just that reading philosophy was actually what I wanted to do. When one is stoned, it is very hard to do what one really doesn’t want to do.

My freelance tuition work required me to visit students at various times of day and night at their homes and teach on an individual basis. Such irregular schedules, combined with my increased marijuana use, inevitably led to occasions when I would be required to teach when very stoned. The first time this happened, I was asked by a nineteen-year-old Arabian student to explain to him the theory of permutations and combinations, a part of school mathematics at which I was never very proficient. Until this point my teaching abilities had not been particularly remarkable. I was far too impatient with my pupils when dealing with subjects I knew well, and I deviously avoided other subjects. Under marijuana’s influence, however, I now found I was extremely painstaking with my explanations and extraordinarily patient with my pupils’ progress. I ceased to feign knowledge when I had none and would honestly admit that I had forgotten everything and would have to work things out from scratch. I found it easy to put myself in the students’ positions and appreciate and solve their difficulties. From then on, I made a point of smoking marijuana before teaching, and my students made excellent progress.

London was definitely an interesting place to be in 1967/1968: the Beatles provided singalong psychedelia with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and established their Apple boutique, while their manager, Brian Epstein, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The Rolling Stones took a shot of rhythm and blues out of their music and produced love and peace singles like We Love You and Dandelion‚ while their leader and founder, Brian Jones, struggled to get released on bail for a drug charge. Procul Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale made an appropriate anthem for the junkies and housebound. Eighty thousand people (including me) marched on the American Embassy to protest against the war in Vietnam. But the dreaming spires of Oxford were too much to resist. A delightfully stoned academic career was at hand.

There was a problem with respect to how my diploma course would be financed. In those days there were two main grant-giving bodies funding postgraduate study: the Department of Education and the Science Research Council. The former limited its grants to graduates in non-scientific subjects while the latter would only fund students undertaking research degrees in the pure sciences. These regulations precluded my Philosophy of Science studies being funded by either body. A thick publication gave a complete listing of organisations that funded postgraduate study and the conditions under which they did so. I scoured through this book and discovered the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship, which was restricted to applicants who lived in a small area of Wales which included the village in which my family lived. My mother’s brother, Uncle Mostyn, was then Chairman of Glamorgan County Council. I approached him about the possibility of being awarded the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship, and he arranged for me to be interviewed by the trustees. They agreed to pay all course fees and awarded me a maintenance grant.

Ilze and I decided that while I resumed my studies at Balliol, we should live in a romantic country cottage outside Oxford. A third-year English undergraduate, Bill Jefferson, whom I liked very much, and his girlfriend, Caroline Lee (daughter of Anthony Lee, our man in Anguilla), had similar intentions. Bill Jefferson and I combined forces to scour the countryside for suitable cottages. We became well known at an enormous number of country pubs but were making little progress at finding a place to live. Eventually, while getting drunk at a pub called The Plough in Garsington, we discovered a cottage for rent not one hundred yards from where we were drinking. The landlords were egg producers called Jennings of Garsington, and we rented the cottage for a twelve-month period. Ilze found a teaching job at a primary school in Didcot. My father had given me a beaten-up Hillman, and I would get up extremely early to drive Ilze to Oxford railway station in time for the Didcot train. The drive took place in total darkness, I would then breakfast at either Balliol, if my stomach felt strong, or at George’s workers’ café in the market, if feeling queasy or hungover. I usually ate at George’s.

Just after my postgraduate term started, the Dean spotted me hanging around the Porter’s Lodge and invited me to come and see him for a chat. He said he needed my help in sorting out what was, in his eyes, becoming a very serious problem at Balliol and, indeed, at most of the University’s colleges. I fearfully assumed the problem being referred to was drug use and that the help the Dean was seeking was my becoming some sort of grass, keeping the college authorities apprised of the identities and habits of drug users. I could not have been further from the truth. The problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution. My assistance was not to become a mole but merely to refrain from participation in protests etc. and persuade the cronies that I would inevitably attract to do likewise.

Balliol had certainly become quite revolutionary by October 1968. Although the attire and appearance of student revolutionaries were almost identical to those of 1966 hippies, the attitudes were poles apart. Smoking marijuana was now regarded as some sort of stupefaction imposed on the working classes by the bourgeoisie. There didn’t seem to be any revolutionary music as such, and Top Ten hits had deteriorated from 2,000 Light Years from Home to Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.

During the 1960s, Balliol College life was essentially determined by the whims, preferences, and behaviour of the second-year undergraduates. First-year students were too meek to set the trends, and third-year students were apt to become distracted by Finals. During 1968, the trend was definitely one of revolutionary activity. One topic on which I agreed completely with the revolutionary students was that of racial equality. The Right Honourable Enoch Powell, MP, was giving an anti-immigration speech at Oxford Town Hall, and I participated in what turned out to be quite a violent demonstration. A few fellow participants had been brutally assaulted by police and, to add insult to injury, been charged with assault themselves. The next morning, I missed my tutorial with Michael Dummett, a chain-smoking, Go-playing, devout Christian, who later became Oxford University’s Wykeham Professor of Logic but was then a Fellow of All Souls and taught me in mathematical logic. I missed the tutorial in order to make myself available at court to speak on my injured and arrested friends’ behalf. I hadn’t let Mr Dummett know and was feeling a little guilty. Also feeling a little guilty for missing our appointment was Mr Dummett, who had presented himself at the same court to speak up for someone else who had also been arrested during the previous night’s demonstration. We burst out laughing at the sight of each other. The same day, he invited me for lunch at All Souls, where I had the privilege of sitting next to the Warden, John Sparrow. After lunch, Mr Dummett had to hurry off somewhere, and I was taken for a walk around the grounds of All Souls College by John Sparrow. Like the Dean of Balliol, he was concerned about revolutionaries and unconcerned about marijuana smoking.

One evening, Ilze and I went to a dinner hosted by one of her colleagues who taught at the school in Didcot. There were two or three other couples present, including John and Fanny Stein. John at that time was a general medical practitioner about to become a Fellow of Magdalen, while Fanny was a housewife. About halfway through the dinner, I discovered that Fanny’s maiden name was Hill and that she was the daughter of Christopher Hill, David Lindsay Keir’s successor as Master of Balliol. Fanny and I struck up a strong friendship. We fancied each other like mad, but newly-entered marital obligations prevailed, and we didn’t have an affair with each other until long after.

Shortly after my first meeting with Fanny, I ran into Christopher Hill at a function held in the Balliol students’ bar. We hardly knew each other but quickly became engaged in earnest conversation, which we both wished to continue when the function drew to a close. The Master asked if I would be prepared to buy a bottle of whisky on my account at the students’ bar and bring it up to his lodgings, where he would immediately reimburse me and continue our discussions. I was delighted to do this. We got on remarkably well, and by the end of the evening Christopher had accepted my invitation to have dinner in Garsington.

Ilze was very nervous at the prospect of entertaining such distinguished guests and had no idea what kind of meal to prepare. During the previous year in London, I had befriended the chef of the local Indian restaurant and had become reasonably proficient at cooking curries. Christopher had mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed Indian cuisine while he was in India. I agreed to cook the food, which Christopher and his wife, Bridget, gratefully devoured.

Christopher had tremendous sympathy both with revolutionaries and with those who wished to smoke marijuana. He was also a source of an immense amount of information about Garsington. He mentioned that Russell Meiggs (my long-haired hero) lived only a hundred yards away from us (I had never seen him in the village) and that across an adjacent field, tucked in a hollow, was Garsington Manor, the one-time residence of the Morrell brewery heiress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom Christopher referred to as Lady Utterly Immoral. Apparently, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, etc. had all been frequent guests at the manor. Weeks afterwards, after a night tripping out on the first LSD I had taken for years, I embarrassed myself by knocking on the door of Garsington Manor and asking the occupants if Aldous Huxley could come out to play.

There were isolated pockets of marijuana smokers, mainly postgraduates. One of these was at our cottage in Garsington. One regular visitor was Graham Plinston, now completing his final undergraduate year. He was always keen to play a game of Go and always brought with him a few ounces of excellent hashish. I would sometimes buy more than I needed and sell off the surplus at enough profit to pay for my own absurdly heavy consumption, which was about twenty joints a day. Bill Jefferson was close behind.

I got down to my philosophy reading. A common difficulty encountered by those beginning to study philosophy is that whatever is read appears totally convincing at the time of reading. Smoking marijuana forced me to stop, examine, scrutinise, and criticise each step before proceeding. It assisted me not only in pinpointing the weaknesses of certain philosophical theories, but also in articulating alternative philosophical viewpoints.

As part of the course, I was asked to deliver a paper to learned men assembled in an ancient seminar room at All Souls College. My assigned topic was the difference in views of space and time held by Isaac Newton and Leibniz. Newton seemed to hold that solid things existed through absolute time in absolute space, which could be considered as God’s sensorium, sniffing out trouble everywhere. Leibniz, in many ways a precursor of Einstein, was a lot more hip and a lot more baffling. He seemed to maintain that space and time were shifting around out of control and that each bit of stuff had everything else in the universe as part of it. Writing about it was difficult, but I muddled through.

I became interested in confirmation theory: what evidence do scientists need to end up believing the things they do? A paradox arises when considering hypotheses of the general form ‘All X are Y’, for example, ‘All ravens are black’, together with what sort of evidence would tend to make them believable. One could begin by looking at a raven to see if it is black. If it is black, then this observation confirms the hypothesis to a limited extent. If one looked at thousands of ravens, and they were all black, then these observations would further confirm the hypothesis. ‘All X are Y’ is logically equivalent to ‘All non-Y are non-X.’ The two propositions ‘All ravens are black’ and ‘All non-black things are non-ravens’ state the same fact. Therefore, observations of non-black non-ravens would confirm the hypothesis ‘All ravens are black’ just as much as they would ‘All non-black things are non-ravens.’ This leads to the counter-intuitive conclusion that observations of such things as red noses, white swans, etc. confirm the statement ‘All ravens are black.’ Everyone knows, of course, that they do not.

Bill Jefferson was an English literature student from Yorkshire, and he would sometimes organise poetry readings. He organised one at some college in Oxford, and brought two of the poets, Christopher Logue and Brian Patten, together with some of their entourages, back to the cottage in Garsington. A second, more informal, poetry reading took place, followed by a mammoth drinking and smoking session lasting at least a day. This, however, was quite a rare occurrence, and the cottage in Garsington never achieved the status of my previous accommodations in terms of hosting debauchery and culture.

The preponderance of student revolutionaries dominating the quadrangles and bars, the lack of both fellow marijuana smokers and fellow philosophers of science, and the paucity of books on History and Philosophy of Science in the Balliol library led to my spending less and less time in College and becoming rather disaffected with it. I was visiting Balliol no more than once a week. Ilze was most unhappy with her teaching job in Didcot, and we both thought seriously of leaving Oxford once I’d completed my diploma course. The expectation was for me to continue at Balliol with a B.Phil, or D.Phil, course, but this could easily be done at another university. I decided on the University of Sussex, which in those days was referred to as Balliol by the sea. Brighton looked like fun. Ilze obtained the promise of employment at a convent school in Worthing. My diploma was acquired without too much difficulty, and I was beginning to feel reasonably secure about my ability to pursue an academic career. At the end of the diploma course, Christopher Hill asked if I would be interested in participating in a summer school that Balliol was organising for the benefit of teenage boys who came from deprived backgrounds. I was glad to help, and I really enjoyed my every involvement with the venture. Part of my task was straightforward teaching. Part of it was socialising with the young men with the intention of convincing them that university men were not all stuffed shirts. This was easily achieved by a pub crawl followed by the viewing of a pornographic film at the Scala cinema in Walton Street.

Ilze and I moved to Brighton and found a cheap sea-front flat. Through Christopher Logue, who rented a room in their house, we met Johnny Martin, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Sussex, and his wife Gina. We all had similar interests: marijuana, LSD, rock music, and after-eight philosophy, and we spent much time together.

I hated Sussex University. By this time, I had a firm idea of what a university should be like, and Sussex didn’t come up to it. Every room had a number rather than a name. There was no romance about studying in an office-block library. One couldn’t lie back and think that this was where, in the past, great minds produced great ideas. My supervisor was a Polish logician named Jerzy Giedymin. He was reckoned to be brilliant, but only in areas that no one else could test. I found him very difficult to understand, whatever he was talking about. He made it plain he had no interest in irrelevancies such as confirmation paradoxes. I made it plain I had no interest in studying his irrelevant obsessions. He said I should never have left Oxford. I said he was right.

I was still getting the Thomas and Elizabeth Williams Scholarship and spent the first term’s instalment on a new stereo system. The next few months were devoted to listening to Led Zeppelin, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, and Black Sabbath. I decided to give up academic life and withdrew from the University of Sussex. Ilze’s schoolteacher’s salary was barely enough to live on, but I managed to make up the shortcomings to almost survival level by getting more hashish from Graham Plinston, who often came down to Brighton for a weekend by the sea and a game of Go, at which we were both now becoming proficient.

Graham had visited Morocco, where he met Lebanese Joe. Joe’s mother was an entertainer in Beirut. Joe knew Sam Hiraoui, who worked for the Lebanese airline, Middle East Airlines. Sam also had a textile business in Dubai, the great Middle East gold-and silver-smuggling port on the Persian Gulf. Sam’s partner in Dubai was an Afghani named Mohammed Durrani. Graham explained that through these people he was being delivered fifty pounds of black Pakistani hashish every month or so. For the first time, I imagined what an interesting and rewarding life a smuggler’s must be. But Graham was merely treating me as a confidant. He was not making me any propositions. I was just another provincial dealer selling a couple of pounds a year to survive and not wanting to do too much other then survive.

There were one or two ex-Oxford students attached to the University of Sussex. One was a brilliant mathematics lecturer, Richard Lewis, who would often visit Ilze and me along with Johnny and Gina Martin. Richard came from a relatively wealthy family, owned property in Brighton and London, drank like a fish, smoked everything at hand, thought mathematical profundities, and was a keen and talented chess player. He had heard of Go, was interested in the game, but had never played. I taught him. After a dozen games, he beat me. He still beats me.

Richard had a beautiful wife, Rosie. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. At the same time, Ilze couldn’t take her eyes off Johnny Martin. In no time, all six of us had grounds for suing for divorce, all three marriages were breaking up, and Richard and Rosie’s daughter, Emily, was calling me Uncle Howie.

Graham Plinston’s wife, Mandy, telephoned. She asked if I could come up to London to see her as soon as possible. When I got there, Mandy was distraught and crying.

‘Howard, Graham has disappeared. There’s something wrong. I think he’s been busted. Can you go and find out? You can have all the expenses you need.’

‘Where is he, Mandy?’

‘He’s got to be somewhere in Germany.’

‘Why do you want me to go?’

‘You’re the straightest of Graham’s friends. You don’t have a record or a file on you. Can you imagine what our other friends are like? Graham was meant to meet this German guy Klaus Becker in Frankfurt. He’ll probably be able to help you find Graham.’

‘All right, I’ll go.’

I had never flown before, and I was excited throughout the flight. At his house, Klaus told me that there’d been a bust in Lorrach, a Swiss–German border town near Basle. He suspected the person busted was Graham. I flew from Frankfurt to Basle on a scary propeller plane. Not speaking a word of German hindered progress somewhat, but I was eventually able to get newspaper back-issues from the Basle public library and found a report of the bust. Graham had been driving a Mercedes from Geneva to Frankfurt. A hundred pounds of hashish had been stuffed under the back seat and in the door panels. At the Swiss–German border, the car had been searched and the hashish found. Graham was in Lorrach prison.

I took a cab to Lorrach and walked around the streets until I found a lawyer. He went to see Graham in prison and agreed to defend him. Graham had no messages.

When I arrived back at London airport, I telephoned Mandy and gave her the Lorrach lawyer’s particulars.

‘Is he all right, Howard?’ Mandy asked.

‘The lawyer said he looked fine.’

‘Did he have any messages for me? Anything he wants me to do?’

‘He didn’t have any messages for anyone, Mandy.’

‘Howard, would you mind going over to see a friend of Graham’s and telling him what happened on your trip? He’s a good guy, but he’s a bit concerned about what’s happened and wants to hear everything from the horse’s mouth.’

‘I don’t mind, Mandy. Where do I go?’

‘Mayfair, 17, Curzon Street. His name’s Durrani.’

Mohammed Durrani was the grandson of the brother of the former King of Afghanistan. Educated in Delhi, he served eleven years on the Hong Kong Police Force and had several shady businesses throughout the East. One of them was supplying Pakistani hashish to Europe. Durrani let me in to his Mayfair flat. He had a hawk-like face, Savile Row suit, beautifully manicured fingernails, and wore strong after-shave. He poured me a Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky and offered me a Benson & Hedges from his gold, monogrammed cigarette case. He lit my cigarette with a Dupont lighter, introduced me to Sam Hiraoui, his Lebanese partner, and said, ‘Thank you, Howard, for agreeing to come. We have simple question. Has Graham talked?’

‘He said he didn’t have any messages for anyone,’ I answered.

‘We mean to the German police.’

‘I don’t know’

‘The reason we ask, Howard, is that we have merchandise in pipeline which might be compromised by our friend’s arrest. You are best friend, Mandy says. Do you think he would let police know anything about our operations?’

‘Not deliberately, obviously, if that’s what you mean.’

‘That is what we mean.’

‘In that case, no. He hasn’t talked. But here’s all the newspaper reports, lawyers’ papers, etc. Maybe these will help you.’

‘You have been very efficient, Howard, very efficient,’ said Durrani. ‘We are much in debt to you. It is possible, inshallah‚ that we may have merchandise to sell in England when Graham is in German prison. Are you interested?’

‘I don’t have any money, but I am honoured you ask me.’

‘We would give you 100% credit,’ said Lebanese Sam. ‘Simply sell it, keep your commission, and give us the agreed amount of money.’

‘I’m not really that kind of dealer, Sam. Graham would give me a pound or two to sell every couple of weeks. That’s it. I’ve never done any real business of any kind.’

‘Surely you must be knowing people who are buying merchandise?’ Durrani asked.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But you were at the Oxford University with Graham, no?’

‘Yes, we were at Oxford together, but it’s not much of a business school.’

‘It is world’s best, Howard. Graham sells his merchandise to people from the Oxford University.’

‘That’s very probable. Can’t you get hold of any of them to sell your stuff?’

‘We know only David Pollard, and he is now crazy man.’

I knew David Pollard. He was an exact contemporary of mine at some Oxford college other than Balliol. He too read Physics and was by no means crazy, though he was a little eccentric and had recently suffered tragic circumstances. In fact he was brilliant and invented all sorts of things from kidney dialysis machines to LSD manufacturing accessories, as well as pioneering the first British joint-sized rolling papers, Esmeralda. His girlfriend, Barbara Mayo, had gone hitch-hiking on the M6 motorway, and had been raped and murdered. The police never found the killer, but David was routinely grilled and treated as the prime suspect. The police finally let him go, and he threw his LSD manufacturing plant into the Thames. I had no idea he was Graham’s main wholesaler.

‘Jarvis once came out to Beirut to see me,’ said Sam, ‘but I have no idea where to get hold of him. Neither does Mandy. I don’t think he was at Oxford University, but Graham sells to him.’

I had met Jarvis a few times with Graham. He was a state-of-the-art London Sixties dealer: shaded glasses, pop-singer clothes, model girlfriends, and lots of new vocabulary. He hailed from Birmingham but spoke Chelsea.

‘No, he wasn’t at Oxford, but I could probably track him down.’

‘Good,’ said Durrani. ‘We look forward to good business. I will ask Mandy to call you when we are ready.’

The German and Mayfair experiences filled me with a new kind of energy and excitement. So much of me longed for more of this adventure. I thought of things I could buy with a lot of money.

Back in Brighton, I saw lots more of Rosie and little of anyone else. I told her about my recent adventures and the proposition I’d been made.

‘That’s wonderful, Howard,’ said Rosie. ‘That’s obviously what you should do. Get out there and be somebody in your one and only life. I think selling Durrani’s hashish in London is a brilliant idea. It’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t have any money to set myself up. I’d need a flat in London, a car other than my beaten-up Hillman, operating expenses, all kinds of things, let alone money to live on.’

‘Howard, I don’t know about you and Ilze. But Richard and I are not going to carry on pretending to be living with and loving each other. We’re separating. My family has money. His family has a lot more, and they will certainly make sure that Emily, their granddaughter, will be properly provided for. I’m going to move to London. My parents will rent me a flat and buy me a car. You can stay there anytime you want, use the car, and if you need to borrow a couple of hundred pounds to set up a business, I couldn’t think of a better investment for me to make.’

In a whirlwind of love, romance, and unlimited possibility, Rosie, her baby daughter Emily and I moved to a maisonette in Hillsleigh Road in the expensive part of Notting Hill. Richard would visit and play Go. We have remained very good friends. Ilze would also visit, and although we both felt somewhat betrayed by each other’s infidelity, we remained on the very best terms.

During my postgraduate year at Oxford, I had met and liked a friend of Graham’s called Charlie Radcliffe. He was from an aristocratic background, had an enormous collection of blues records, chain-smoked marijuana, belonged to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and had been busted for forging a staggering quantity of first-class counterfeit United States $100 bills with the words ‘In God We Trust’ replaced by an anti-Vietnam war slogan. He worked then for Robert Maxwell’s publishing company, Pergamon Press, in Headington, just outside Oxford. Now Charlie, too, was living in London, and when he heard of Graham’s bust, he tracked me down to get what news he could. I told him what I knew and mentioned the possibility of my being asked to sell Graham’s hashish in his absence. I asked if he could help me out by either selling some or getting hold of Jarvis, whom Charlie knew quite well. Charlie was eager to make some money but explained that he had a partner, Charlie Weatherley, who would have to be involved. I had met Charlie Weatherley a few times when he was an undergraduate at Christ Church. He was now a heavy hashish-consuming biker and, when not pushing his Norton Commando to the limit, listened continually with amusement to the Grateful Dead. He was a joy to be around. Charlie Radcliffe and I decided that the simplest and fairest arrangement for all concerned was that Jarvis, the two Charlies, and I form a syndicate to market Durrani’s hashish. My initial responsibility would be to receive the hashish from Durrani and store it at Hillsleigh Road. Jarvis and the two Charlies would sell the hashish to their various dealer connections. I would then be expected to take the money to Durrani after splitting the profit four ways. We were ready. All we needed was the hashish.

No hashish materialised. Durrani never got in touch, and Graham was released after serving a six-month sentence. Throughout that six-month period, however, partly because of the conveniences provided by the Hillsleigh Road maisonette and partly, I’m sure, by the continual hope of Durrani coming through with large amounts, our newly formed syndicate operated as arranged with hashish from other sources. Through these dealings, I became acquainted with Duncan Laurie, a major hashish importer who had set up the Forbidden Fruit chain of Sixties boutiques in the King’s Road and Portobello Road, Lebanese Joe, the person responsible for Graham’s knowing Durrani, and James Goldsack, David Pollard’s dealing partner. Essentially, I was making money and connections by sticking Rosie’s neck on the line and mercilessly using her accommodation, car, and telephone. But I was also able to buy a few pounds of hashish at the best prices, and these I would sell in quarter-pounds and ounces to university dealers and friends in Oxford, Brighton, London, and Bristol, where my sister was doing a French degree. My new career had begun. Trading in cannabis would remain my active profession for the next eighteen years.

My views on cannabis differed in some ways from those of Jarvis and the two Charlies. They were far more radical than I and tended to see hashish as a new meaningful currency capable of overthrowing the fascist overlords. They wished hashish to remain illegal. It gave us a means of living and salved our rebellious consciences by fucking up the establishment. We were true outlaws: we didn’t really break laws, not real ones; we just lived outside them. We didn’t pay tax because we didn’t want our money being used by the armed forces to kill innocent foreigners and by the police to bust us. We just wanted a good time, and we worked hard and took risks to get it by supplying a badly needed service. I went along with most of this but couldn’t begin to condone the punishing of those who wished to smoke marijuana and, therefore, could not logically condone the illegality of the hashish trade.

Graham had hatched up several plans while incarcerated. Some were hindered by his inability to enter Germany without first paying his rather hefty fine. I agreed to take £5,000 of Graham’s money to Frankfurt to give to Lebanese Sam. He would then take care of the fine. Currency restrictions made it illegal to take more than £25 out of the country, so I stuck the money down the back of my trousers and checked in at Heathrow. A couple of policemen did an unexpected anti-terrorist passenger search. Before I had time to realise the danger I was in, I had been incredibly inefficiently searched and motioned through the boarding gate. I didn’t feel relief. I just felt a bit dazed and confused.

On the way back the next morning, I hid the receipt for the fine payment and £300 generously given me by Sam in my sock. I bought some duty-free perfumes for Rosie. Customs stopped me at Heathrow.

‘Where have you come from, sir?’

‘Frankfurt.’

‘Is this all your luggage?’ he asked, pointing to my small briefcase and plastic bag of perfume bottles.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you buy these perfumes duty-free?’

‘Yes, at Frankfurt airport.’

‘Do you realise, sir, that it is illegal to buy duty-free items if out of the country for less than twenty-four hours?’

‘Yes‚’ I lied.

‘How long have you been abroad?’

‘Two days,’ I lied again.

‘Would you mind opening your briefcase, sir? I would just like to have a quick look.’

The briefcase contained only my used airline ticket, a toothbrush, and a book appropriately entitled The Philosophy of Time.

‘Travelling light, sir?’

‘I stayed at a friend’s house. I didn’t need to bring anything.’

The Customs Officer picked up my used airline ticket and looked at the dates.

‘I thought you said you had been gone for two days. This ticket shows you left London last night.’

‘Yes, two days: yesterday and today.’

‘Would you come this way, sir?’

The Customs Officer led me to a cold, breeze-blocked room.

‘Let me see your passport. Thank you. Would you mind taking off your clothes?’

‘Of course I mind.’

‘Mr Marks, if you have no contraband, you have nothing to fear.’

‘I have no contraband, and I have nothing to fear. But I’m not taking my clothes off.’

I was beginning to worry about the £300 in my sock. If it was illegal to take £25 cash out, then it surely must be illegal to bring in twelve times that amount, or was it?

‘Then you leave me no choice. I will hold you both for attempting to smuggle perfume into the United Kingdom and on suspicion of carrying other contraband. You either let me strip-search you now or the police will do so when I put you in their cells.’

‘I’ll take the second option.’

‘That’s up to you. There is another alternative. You declare what contraband you have to me and hand it over. If I accept your declaration as true, we’ll deal with the matter without strip-searching.’

‘I’ve got £300 in my sock,’ I stupidly confessed.

‘Show me.’

I took off my shoe and sock and gave him the bundle of fifteen £20 notes and the fine-payment receipt.

‘Did you take this money out of the country, sir?’

There didn’t seem much point admitting that fact.

‘No. A friend gave it to me in Frankfurt. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Is it illegal to bring back money, too, if I’ve been away for just a short time?’

‘No, Mr Marks, bringing sterling into the country is not illegal, but taking more than a certain amount out of the country is. Why did you put it in your sock? So we wouldn’t see it?’

‘Just for safe-keeping, I suppose.’

‘Is this receipt also in your sock for safe keeping? What is your occupation?’

‘Well, I’m sort of unemployed at the moment, but usually I’m a teacher.’

‘Who is Kenneth Graham Plinston?’ he asked, looking at the name on the receipt.

‘Just a friend, really. He owed some money in Germany and asked me to sort it out.’

‘You always pay off his debts? Are you that well paid a teacher?’

‘No, I used his money. It was his friend who gave me the money in Frankfurt.’

‘What was this friend’s name?’

‘Sal.’ I knew I had to lie on that one.

‘Italian, is he?’

‘I think so.’

‘Just one moment, Mr Marks.’

The Customs Officer left with the receipt. After several minutes, he returned with a senior official-looking man in plain clothes.

‘Good morning, Mr Marks. I’m with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise Special Investigative Branch. We are going to charge you the duty on the perfume you bought. In the matter of the £300, we can’t touch you. Here it is. We know your friend Mr Plinston. We know how he makes his money. We trust you aren’t going the same way. Stick to teaching.’

Graham seemed totally unperturbed when I got to his house and gave him the receipt and report of my brush with the law.

‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about there, Howard. We’re friends, and that’s that.’

‘I’m not worried about it‚’ I said. ‘I’m just telling you what happened. I really couldn’t care less.’

‘That’s good. Howard, something’s just come up. Would you like to make quite a decent sum of money by doing a couple of days’ work in Germany driving some hash around to various friends of mine?’

‘Graham, I’ve never driven abroad. I can’t imagine driving on the wrong side of the road.’

‘There’s always a first time.’

‘Maybe, but it shouldn’t be when I’ve got dope in the car.’

‘Couldn’t you hire someone, Howard, to be your driver? I’ll be paying you plenty.’

‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could do that.’

‘Okay, Howard, I’ll call you from Frankfurt in a few days when I’m ready.’

Neither Jarvis nor the two Charlies were interested in venturing from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It was too much of a disruption. However, Charlie Radcliffe’s attractive lady, Tina, had a New Zealand friend called Lang. He had years of all kinds of smuggling experience and was in London looking for work. He was more than happy with the German proposition. We agreed to split profits.

Lang and I met Graham in Frankfurt airport. Graham explained that a ton of Pakistani hashish was in a lock-up garage. The assignment was to rent an appropriate vehicle, go to the garage, load up the hashish, deliver some to a group of Californians in a predetermined lay-by, some to a couple of Germans in Frankfurt, and the rest to a group of Dutchmen at a pre-arranged location in the middle of the Black Forest. Lang and I would be paid £5,000 between us.

We rented an Opel estate car with massive space for baggage. The lock-up garage was in an expensive suburb of Wiesbaden. Inside the garage were twenty 50-kilo wooden boxes with ‘Streptomycin, Karachi’ stencilled on each. The smell of hashish was overpowering. We loaded up the Opel, covered the boxes with a rug, and drove to the lay-by. A couple of Cheech and Chong look-alikes were waiting in a large saloon car. We pulled up alongside. One of the Californians jumped out and opened the boot. Lang and I opened the back of the Opel, and the three of us transferred five of the twenty boxes to the saloon. We shook hands. The saloon car drove off.

The Dutch and Germans were not ready to receive their hashish. Lang and I had to kill a few days. We drove the Opel from Wiesbaden, along the banks of the Rhine, to a village called Osterich. There we checked into a hotel, curiously named, in English, The White Swan. We wined and dined and broke into one of the boxes. We got stoned.

The day before the rendezvous with the Dutch, we took a boat down the Rhine to Wiesbaden. Lang wanted to get some English newspapers. While we were crossing one of the city’s main streets, a car came quickly round the corner, shot the red pedestrian light, and almost knocked Lang over. In a moment of understandable anger, Lang hit the back of the car with a rolled-up newspaper. The car screamed to a halt. A huge red-faced German jumped out of the car, ran over to Lang, gave him a tremendous thump across the head sending his glasses splintering on the road, ran back into the car, and drove off. It was all over in seconds. Lang was barely conscious and was blind without his glasses.

‘You’ll have to drive tomorrow, mate,’ was all he said.

The rendezvous with the Dutch was at a remote but accessible clearing in the Black Forest. With fear and apprehension, I drove the hashish-filled Opel into the country’s wooded depths. It took no time to adjust to driving on the other side. We got to the clearing. There was no one there. After twenty minutes, two Volvos arrived. Inside one was Dutch Nik, whom I’d once met at Graham’s. Inside the other was a man who introduced himself as Dutch Peter. We gave them thirteen boxes.

At an efficient German chemist’s, Lang soon fixed himself up with a pair of new prescription glasses and was able to drive the Opel into Frankfurt for the final drop-off to an unnamed German in the car park of the Intercontinental Hotel. It passed without incident.

Graham had been supervising matters from his room in the Frankfurter Hof. He had bought a new BMW. He asked if we wanted to keep him company for a few days, after which he would pay us off. Lang wanted to get back to London and was happy to be paid there. I stayed with Graham, who was collecting bags of money. After a couple of days, we hid the money, a mixture of United States dollars and German marks, in the BMW, and drove to Geneva. Graham banked large quantities of German and American cash in his Swiss bank account after first giving me our payment. I asked what happened to the hashish we had distributed and was told that the German would be selling his hashish in Frankfurt, the Californians would buy brand-new European cars and ship them stuffed with hashish to Los Angeles, while Dutch Nik and Dutch Pete would be driving the 650 kilos of hashish they received to England. I asked who would be selling the hashish once it got to England. I presumed Graham would now revert to using David Pollard and James Goldsack. Graham smiled.

‘You will be, Howard.’

‘But I know that in the past you’ve used Dave Pollard and James. I don’t want to cause problems.’

‘Howard, I also used to use Jarvis and the two Charlies. London dealing is musical chairs. Anyway, Dave Pollard is out of business. You can keep James happy by letting him have some hash to sell at a good price.’

Jarvis, the two Charlies, and I sold the 650 kilos of hashish and made about £20,000 profit between us. I had made £7,500 in just one week. For the first time ever, I felt rich and gradually began to get used to a lifestyle of fast cars, expensive restaurants, and gadgetry. I bought a brand-new BMW, record and cassette-playing equipment of all descriptions, and a water bed. Rosie suggested we rent a flat in Brighton to use at weekends and other periods when I wasn’t tied up moving hash around London. She still had friends in Brighton and missed the proximity of the sea. We rented a ground-floor flat at 14, Lewes Crescent. One of Rosie’s friends was Patrick Lane, ex-Sussex University English Literature graduate working as an accountant for Price Waterhouse Ltd. Patrick and I got on well with each other. He introduced me to his seventeen-year-old sister Judy. Her smile, her waist-length hair, and her long legs tantalisingly stayed in my mind. It wasn’t long before I invited Patrick to participate with me in Graham’s next proposal.

Mohammed Durrani had a variety of ways of getting hashish into Europe. The most common was in the personal effects of Pakistani diplomats taking up positions in Pakistani embassies and consular offices throughout Europe. Durrani would arrange with the diplomat to put about a ton of hashish into the diplomat’s personal furniture and belongings before they left Pakistan. A diplomat’s personal effects would be unlikely to be searched on arrival, and he could always claim diplomatic immunity or blame it on the Pakistani shippers if the dope was accidentally discovered. On this occasion, the personal effects had been delivered to the diplomat’s residence in Bonn. Patrick and I had to rifle through the cabin trunks, remove the hashish, and drive it to a disused gravel pit near Cologne, where Dutch Nik, Dutch Pete, and other Dutch would pick it up and smuggle it to England. Everything went without a hitch, and after taking care of sales in London, I’d made another £7,500.

Graham had made a great deal more and was intent on legitimising his hard-earned money in the form of respectable London businesses. He had met Patrick and liked him, He needed a bent accountant and felt Patrick would be ideal. I could see no disadvantage. Soon Graham and Patrick had established a carpet shop, Hamdullah, and a property company, Zeitgeist, at 3, Warwick Place, Little Venice. They carried appropriate business cards which they flashed at every opportunity.

My lifestyle went from expensive to outrageously flamboyant. In London, Brighton, Oxford, and Bristol, I would pick up the tab at every bar and restaurant I visited. Any of my friends who wished to merely smoke hashish rather than sell it would be given as much as they wanted free of charge. There are few things that give me more pleasure in life than getting people very stoned and giving them good food and wine, but meanwhile I could see very well the sense of using some of my money to set myself up in the way Graham was doing. It would have to be on a smaller scale, but in principle it could be done.

Redmond and Belinda O’Hanlon were undergraduate friends of mine at Oxford. Redmond was now at St Anthony’s doing a D.Phil, on Darwin’s effect on nineteenth-century English literature while Belinda was running a small dressmaking business with Anna Woodhead, the Spanish wife of Anthony Woodhead, another Oxford undergraduate friend. Their clientele were largely Oxford University ladies looking for suitable ball dresses. Anna and Belinda were badly under-capitalised. I gave them the impression that I had recently inherited some money. We agreed to go into business together from small, tucked-away premises near Oxford railway station. Using cash, I bought a bunch of sewing-machines and formed a company, AnnaBelinda Ltd. It immediately did well, and we looked for suitable street-front rental premises to open up a boutique. We found them at 6, Gloucester Street, where AnnaBelinda still stands.

A few more Durrani scams occurred, but they involved significantly smaller amounts. Occasionally I would drive a stashed car across a European border. I’d get a religious flash and an asexual orgasm every time I did. Marty Langford and a couple of other Kenfig Hill school friends, Mike Bell and David Thomas, were also living in London doing boring and menial jobs. I gave each the opportunity of working for me moving and stashing hashish, taking telephone calls, and counting money. Each took it, and I was no longer exposing the London flat to the dangers inherent in street dealing: they were exposing theirs. The four of us were probably London’s only Welsh criminal gang, and were jokingly referred to by our fellow dealers as the Tafia. It was dangerous fun. But I was spending almost as much as I was earning. Thousands of pounds a month were not enough.