and as there was no central campus, we would all troop to the café next door when given a break between double lectures.
Apart from this there were a collection of old Victorian houses that formed the administrative blocks, and various other buildings (old schools and the suchlike) that were used by various departments throughout the college, with the Students’ Union being in an old warehouse. The old library (that was finally replaced in my third year with a wonderful new building) was housed in a very unsuitable building, with cramped rooms and poor lighting, which wasn’t great, but even worse was the lack of resources. There were some books that were so in demand, yet of which they had so few copies, that the library operated a short term loan system. Nothing unusual about that you might think, but in our library if a book was marked as being on short term loan it meant that you could only take it out for 4 hours! If you didn’t get your reservation to borrow the book into the library in time, you were stuffed (and sometimes you were anyway as previous borrowers sometimes simply failed to return the book on time).
Fellow students - from later in the course
My Accommodation Part 1: Pepe’s
When I arrived, the good news was that they had just finished building a brand new hall of residence; the bad news was that although it was brand new, it was the only one they had. Fear not, however, as first year students were given top priority to live there, and that included me. But of course I had only accepted a place at Pompey late in the day, and that meant that the hall of residence was already full, and so there wasn’t a place for me.
This was a major blow, as being in a hall of residence in your first year had many benefits, foremost among these being that you were living amidst a large group of fellow students, from many different courses, and you therefore had a ready source of friends and you weren’t alone. As I was to discover later, living away from home for the first time without friends, can be a very lonely experience, and living amidst other students who are mainly also first years, can be a big help.
Secondly, a hall of residence can be a bit of a half-way-house between living at home and living entirely on your own. It can be a good way of easing oneself into independent living, without going straight in at the deep end, which can be quite a shock: for a start, it’s warm! That may sound facetious, but when you’ve lived in a student house without heating, you realise that the warmth you once took for granted, is actually a very expensive luxury. Halls are also relatively safe, comfortable, have all mod-cons and facilities on tap, are often near to the college itself, and sometimes provide food as well as accommodation. The downside is that they are of course relatively expensive
Anyway, I couldn’t get a place in the one and only hall of residence at Pompey, and so I had to make the best of it, and instead took a room in a house owned and lived in by one of the Art lecturers at the Poly: Pepe. It was a typical Art lecturer’s house: a small Victorian terrace, sparsely but nicely furnished in a slightly alternative way (alternative to the dated 1950’s soft furnishings and ridiculous retro-fitted PVC double glazing of my family home), with plastic sheeting acting as makeshift double glazing in the dining room. It was a very cool place to live, and I was very pleased to be there. It was also full board, so I ate breakfast and dinner with Pepe and his lovely wife.
He worked as a clown (seriously!) in his spare time, and once took me with him on a wonderful weekend to Action Space, an Arts’ centre in London where he was doing a couple of children’s shows, and I went along as backstage crew and drummer. I played during the magic tricks to further enhance them, and I also got very good at doing the percussion when he pretended to hit his colleague, another clown he knew from London. I sometimes had to stop doing this though, as it made some of the very young children cry!
On a tangential note, I had to make my own pot of tea for the first time ever whilst in London as I slept on a sofa in one of Action Space’s offices, and I didn’t know quite how to do it. I ended up putting 8 tea bags in the pot and then left it to brew (stew) for several minutes before pouring it out. The resulting concoction was so strong I physically wretched when I tried to drink it, and I’ve never been able to drink a cup of tea ever since! Despite that little interlude, the whole weekend was wonderful, if slightly bizarre (I was still rather shy and withdrawn and it was all a bit much for me at the time), and to begin with everything seemed great.
However, whilst living at Pepe’s was great on paper, but there was a catch, a big catch. There were actually two of us lodging in the house – in a shared bedroom. So, I had almost no privacy, and sharing a bedroom with a complete stranger was a potential recipe for disaster, and so it turned out to be.
The problem was that Dave, who I shared with, turned out to be a rather strange chap, and he kind of latched onto me, with his demand for company increasing as time went on. It was a very difficult and awkward situation. I was only 18 and away from home for the first time, and I was struggling to find my own feet, never mind having to look after and support someone else at the same time.
Of course, Dave really needed help. He needed counselling and looking after and a friend and someone to care for him, but I’m ashamed to say that in my case I did exactly the opposite. I quickly came to resent his constant demand for attention, his need to go everywhere I went and always be with me, and my attitude towards him began to harden and become one not of caring, but of annoyance and frustration. I wanted to have a good time, and go to wild parties and generally enjoy myself, and Dave’s presence was suffocating me.
After a month or so of this, I knew that I had no option but to move out, and get my own place. It was the only way I could see to escape the claustrophobic clutches of Dave. I was sad to leave Pepe’s house, as in many ways it was a wonderful place to live, but I just had to get away. However, by this time in the academic year there was little accommodation available, and in my desperation I agreed to move into a house run by someone I came to know as Mr Man, his wife and young daughter, which I instinctively knew was a mistake, but by that time I was desperate to move and I gave Pepe my required two weeks’ notice.
When the time came for me to move out, I said my slightly emotional goodbyes to Pepe and his wife, but David ruined the occasion by suddenly reminding me, at the most inappropriate moment, that I owed him £5. In all honesty I had forgotten about it, but luckily I had a fiver in my wallet (all the money I had) and was able to reimburse him there and then. I knew that he was actually punishing me for abandoning him, but that was to be expected. (In those days, £5 was a fair amount of money)
The Cashless Society – where cash is essential!
You need to be aware that in those dark days, cash was an essential means of paying for goods and services, but that actually getting cash out of the bank was very difficult. For starters, there was no such thing as a debit card; you paid cash, or cheque, or nothing. The only type of cards that were available were credit cards, and these were very new, and only those with limitless reserves of dosh were allowed to have them, and even then many places weren’t geared up to accept them.
Those establishments that did accept credit cards didn’t have electronic consoles, but instead rudimentary carbon paper copying machines that physically printed your card details onto paper, by sliding a printing block over it, with carbon paper creating a customer receipt. Debit cards were yet to be invented, and contactless was literally something from Science Fiction (I remember reading about it around that time, in a Philip K. Dick novel, and wondered if such an amazing idea would ever become reality).
People did have a bank card, but it was just a ‘cheque guarantee card’, that you had to present when you wrote a cheque, and
