In an excerpt from his new memoir, the poet and literary scholar remembers losing his virginity, his first experience with LSD, and the 1970 Bath Festival.
The first person kind enough to go to bed with me was a student at Somerville. It was early on the morning of Friday 13 February 1970. (I already considered 13 a lucky number and lucky day of the month; it was on a Friday the 13th, for instance, that I heard I’d got an exhibition to read English at Trinity.) I was very anxious to lose my virginity and sensed that she, like Kay, would probably be willing. The fairly short-lived experience must have been far more satisfactory for me than for her.
There is of course a difference between a quick mutual schoolboy wank and quasi-adult sex. I was far too self-involved to appreciate this at the time. She, I’m fairly certain, saw sex as a possible route to a relationship; I saw it, with her at least, as simply a rite of passage I was relieved to have finally got through.
That evening, I went to Cambridge with friends. A Trinity fresher, Nick, owned a Daimler, so he drove us. The party included Clare and a friend of hers from Lady Margaret Hall, and my schoolfriend Charles Hingston, whom we were to pick up en route. The Daimler broke down on the A1, somewhere between London and Cambridge. The others walked to an all-night café, but Clare and I stayed in the car. Clare was a first-year theology student who had tutorials in Trinity with Leslie Houlden. She and I were on friendly terms and used to have lunch together after her tutorial. Now, alone in the back of the broken-down Daimler, things took a more physical turn, and by the time we returned from Cambridge we were “having a scene”. The lift in self-confidence from finally sleeping with someone was undoubtedly a crucial factor. Not that I could exactly say that to Clare, or to the other woman when I immediately broke up with her.
It was partly because of Clare, partly to get away from Luke, that soon afterwards I moved to a room in a different block. But before that I took the first of my three acid trips.
Hash mixed with tobacco was the main drug of choice during that first year, but – due to books like Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and songs such as ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘Purple Haze’, ‘White Rabbit’ and others – LSD and other hallucinogens had serious cachet, including claims to spiritual transcendence and revelation. Spotting drug-related puns in songs was a favourite pastime, especially when stoned. For instance, I enjoyed picking up on the reference to “tripping” in the Stones’ ’19th Nervous Breakdown’. Naturally, I had no idea what it might be like to have one breakdown, let alone 19.
I’m not sure my hopes before that first trip were that high-minded; “dropping acid”, like sex, was more something one should have done. I took the trip with two other Trinity freshers, both called Chris – one had long, blond hair, the other long, black hair.
“I hope you’re not worrying about anything,” said one of the Chrises a few minutes after we’d swallowed the tabs. Well, I was actually. I knew Clare wouldn’t approve; nor did she when she later found out.
A few images and impressions remain. At one point, blond Chris resembled an Anglo-Saxon chieftain laid out on his funeral pyre with thin red gashes across his face. At another, dark Chris grew horns and looked positively satanic. There was a period of frenetic drawing to illustrate a story we were going to write called The Wandering Gonad. At breakfast the next morning, the person sitting opposite me suddenly sprouted huge tusks which curved down over his cornflakes.
It wasn’t a bad experience, a “bummer”, but neither was it beautiful. The world, my world, was essentially unchanged.
Cricket continued to play a role in my life at Oxford – I turned out regularly for the Trinity College side and played once for the Oxford Authentics – but it is telling that when, in 1972, a Grateful Dead concert in London clashed with a college knock-out match, I went to the concert. Jerry Garcia played pedal steel guitar for the opening act, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and then lead guitar for the Dead – a marathon effort, amounting to well over five hours on stage.
It was, however, because of cricket that I heard of the Bath Festival in June 1970. I had been invited to play for the Old Wellingtonians against the current Wellington College XI during the annual Speech Day match – and I heard that Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention would be at the upcoming festival. Of course, I had to go.
As for the cricket match: two years earlier, I had taken five wickets in each innings. But now, unfit and out of practice, I was flattered to take one. As Mike Fox commented, I looked as though I was bowling from memory, which I probably was.
I remember the dawn coming up while Pink Floyd debuted Atom Heart Mother, then still known less evocatively as The Amazing Pudding. I remember hearing Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Canned Heat and Fairport Convention. But, showing how slippery memory can be, I thought I remembered Sandy Denny singing with Fairport, until being put right years later that she had left the band by then. What I don’t remember is probably just as significant: I don’t remember hearing (though I must have) all or some of Hot Tuna, Steppenwolf, Pentangle, The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane (their set was apparently cut short) and several others. I didn’t see Donovan’s legendary, impromptu, two-hour-plus performance. Among the soggy sleeping-bags I know I bumped into Nigel Richardson, who had been in the Hopetoun with me. I know I lost the cream-coloured, blue-edged pint-sized tin mug in which I had drunk my coffee all through Wellington. Sitting around in damp conditions listening to mostly half-familiar bands hadn’t really turned out to be my scene.
At some point, I bumped into David Kynaston, whom I had more known of than known at Wellington. He enthused about Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and the sequence promptly shot to the top of my must-read list. He and I hung out for the rest of the festival, agreed we didn’t need to stay for Led Zeppelin, took the train for London, and began the most important friendship of my life. It was David, who has a phenomenal memory, who put me right about Sandy Denny.
First Things by Harry Ricketts (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.