AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME 2 (1968 - 1986) “HELL OR THE GARDEN OF EDEN” Myron Evans Published by New Generation Publishing in 2015 Copyright © Myron Evans 2015 First Edition The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.newgeneration-publishing.com CHAPTER ONE My decision to go to University College of Wales Aberystwyth was based on the fact that I had been there on holiday once in the fifties - to Sea View Place. I expected it to be the result of enlightenment and a pleasant college for dedicated scholars. I was fiercely determined to try to do well whatever it turned out to be. In the summer of 1968 I had worked in the machine shop of Aladdin factory deafened by noise and surrounded by machines to which human beings were bound like slaves, ashen faced and resigned. I had cycled there in the early morning, often from my grandmother’s house after listening to the BBC waking up with Handel’s music followed by the shipping forecast on a small transistor radio. One day when walking in to the machine shop I heard that Prague has been invaded by tanks. The machine shop was full of presses for parts of an Aladdin oil lamp. There was a quota for each part, a thousand an hour for the small parts, so the machine drove the human being mercilessly. The quota for bigger parts was less because the press ran slower. I remember an ill tempered aggressive outburst from some manager when the press became jammed. I worked so hard that the regulars were threatened and threatened me in turn - slow down or else. In one of the breaks from this machine enslavement I was told suddenly that Aberystwyth was very corrupt and not worth going to. My most lasting memory was working a double shift and arriving at my grandmother’s house very tired long after dark. She had less than a year left to live, and I dug up the whole garden here for potatoes to last her the winter. I was completely unwilling to leave this village of Craig Cefn Parc and sensed the trouble that Aberystwyth would cause me in the years ahead. It would not be a place of enlightenment, I had to learn that myself. The trouble started, as it often did at Aberystwyth, with 1 a letter. I was not going to be given a room of my own in a hall of residence. As with many things at Aberystwyth that seemed unfair and arbitrary. I remember thinking to myself: why couldn’t they build enough halls of residence? The answer unknown to me is that they had suddenly decided to expand under the Robbins reforms and had flooded the place with students. They had lost their Welsh identity before I even started, apart from a few Welsh medium departments and protesting heroes like Ffred Ffrancis. So my parents reluctantly drove up with me to find what was known as “digs”, a metaphor dangerously close to a hole in the ground. I think I drove up and back most of the way, having no idea where to go in Aberystwyth. So I turned off instinctively towards Sea View Place using a list which one way or another must have been sent me. The first place we called at was a grim black terraced house that looked out on a bog full of seagulls, the pungent and incredibly boring Aberystwyth harbour. My mother told the landlady that I had failed to get a place in a hall of residence and she shook her head, no vacancies. My father became suddenly enraged as he often did, I had not failed to get a place, the place had failed him entirely. He was an intelligent man, an overman at that time with lungs 30% filled with the killer dust. He had the coal miner’s hatred for middle class existence, which in turn regarded miners as being well below them in altitude. I was glad to get away and turned the corner into Sea View Place where my great uncle and aunt had hosted us in the fifties in a fascinating stay filled with bacon and gas, the bed and breakfast establishment. There were digs to be found in “Brig y Don”, and we were met by Mrs Hayes, a fluent Welsh speaker married to a sad and wholly defeated man called Mr Hayes who suffered some lung problem. She was at least a little like what was expected of Welsh speaking Wales. I was fixed up with half a room in an attic for about three pounds a week, bed and breakfast and full board on Sundays when we were stuffed like turkeys. I 2 saw it again recently, it had been boarded up and looked like a damp and decaying cardboard box. Into this digs would be crammed six or seven students, all living in one small room with no TV or radio. Was this what I had worked for at Grammar School? At the time I did not know that there would be six students, I expected one other student or two at most. I was filled with a sudden revulsion and was very glad to start the drive home to the farm at Pant y Bedw. It became all I could do to drag myself back to Aberystwyth and counted the days to the start of term, looking backwards not forwards. Why leave the peace and beauty of Craig Cefn Parc? The primary reason was the quarrelling between my father and sister and the always present pressures to do well - by then my own self imposed pressures. My mother did have some understanding of life outside and always tried to help, but the other two members of the family often reduced everything to ashes in front of her eyes. The day of departure finally arrived and very reluctantly, almost paralysed, I got into the car and slowly started to drive. The sheepdog was sitting on the dirt yard in a state of intense misery. As usual my sister had vanished somewhere and was not to be found. There was a large trunk with clothes and books that my mother had carefully packed for me, and I took my Yashica camera that I had bought in the Arcade in Swansea. I cannot remember much about that journey except for a sense of deep foreboding. Somehow the trunk must have been pulled up to the small attic room, which I had to share with a small, mature student with spectacles whose name I have forgotten entirely, doing teacher’s training. Slowly the place filled with students, none of whom could speak a word of Welsh. So what was I doing there I wondered. My parents left and were none too happy either. I remember only one name - a student called Tony Atkinson from Bolton. He had one older friend from Bolton. There was one from Cardiff, and one more from the South of England. It was a remote exile that I stepped in to. It was 3 not Athens of Pericles nor was it Florence of the Renaissance. There was no sign of Dafydd ap Gwilym. I had to get into a routine as quickly as possible so as not to be overcome with intellectual paralysis and the screech of seagulls, the monotonous crashing of very damp waves. There was a first week in which all kinds of weird things were happening, many weird hicks. I even forget what it was called, maybe rag week. There was a lecture with a professor who was bombarded with abuse in King’s Hall. This was supposed to be funny but I never saw the joke. Later I became slightly acquainted with him and he turned out to be a gold medallist in geography, a scholar of the age of British and Irish saints. In his old age his back was bent from years of study, his breath was short, and he was abandoned completely. He was looked after by an Indian colleague of mine from Calcutta, Deb Najumdar, who lived in a cell like room crammed with books and newspapers. My only real thought was collecting my cheque for the year, I think it was 282 pounds which had to be used for rent, food and books. It may have been divided into three terms, but I cannot quite recall. This had to be collected from the Old College, waiting in line with students from everywhere but Wales. Having collected that I knew that I could survive, if only in damp digs with one bar of electric fire, and to keep out of the bad smelling pubs. I do not recall really expecting anything at all, just a desire to do exactly as I was told. I knew that there were three subjects to take: chemistry, physics and mathematics. So after this first and pointless week was over there would be an opportunity to learn something. In that week the weird hicks were jumping off the bridge into the harbour, and at that point I decided to try to do something useful and look at the places where I was supposed to study.