0150 Picalgar Squircas
When I eventually went up to university, to Imperial College in London, I found myself in digs; in Fulham, by the Bishops Park on the river. In the digs, run by a spinster of a certain age, there were four of us; myself and John Power, in the room downstairs, and Harvey and Martin upstairs.
Our room was quite large, on the ground floor with a nice bay window onto a quiet suburban street. We had twin beds and a table, on which to write, together with a wardrobe. It was fairly spartan but comfortable. We had our breakfast and evening meals provided for us.
Thus started one of the most intense friendships I ever had. But first of all was the excitement when we arrived, with a few days to go before we actually started our courses. We had the run of London for the first time in our lives. We immediately dashed up to the West End and in particular to the area around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square where the nightlife was -- hence the title of this chapter. Picalgar Squircas was the name we gave to the epicentre of our adventures. In fact we did little more than wander around the shops at night, marvelling at all bright lights and the human activity. I remember we were once looking in the HMV store on Oxford Street when a professional photographer took our photographs -- ostensibly for a record cover, though I never saw this!
When we did get to Imperial College, it was - first of all - to go to the union for ‘freshers day’, when we were supposed to sign up to all the spare-time activities. In fact we got involved in the inter-college rivalry. Imperial College was made up of the Royal College of Science (RCS) -- the scientific disciplines to which I, John and Harvey belonged -- City & Guilds (C&G) -- the engineering part to which Martin belonged -- and the Royal School of Mines (RSM) to which none of us belonged. There was intense rivalry between these colleges. At the beginning of term it took the form of traditional battles to capture each other's trophies. Ours was a thermometer fashioned out of a broomstick and a ball-cock! This soon disappeared and later had to be retrieved from the top of the Empire State Building in New York -- these pranks were done as a very sophisticated level. I, and the others, got involved at a very early stage when the City & Guilds freshers were having their welcome dinner. We barricaded them in, so they couldn't get out. I well remember rushing out in a state of excitement, and fear at what might happen, and jumping on the back of a waiting motorcycle which then roared off. My driver was less than impressed when it turned that I hadn't got their spanner, which was their trophy, but had just run away!
Much of our first term, was therefore taken up with such nonsense. This came to a head with the traditional Morphy Day battle between the two sides (RCS and C&G, though RSM were as far as I can remember not represented) along the towpath by Putney Bridge. It was a boisterous affair, with many of us - including myself - ending up in the river. This ruined my clothes, fortunately very old ones, but had I swallowed any water in the process the requirement then was to have your stomach pumped out; so polluted was the river!
I slowly started to move into more serious things, having been persuaded to propose the first coloured person, Samuel Akintola Apeji (the son of a Nigerian chief), for union president. I plastered the whole union with posters for his candidacy. He didn't get the job, but it was good experience for what was to come later.
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