Taking a short cut back from the University to our house in Brynmill Swansea at night meant climbing over a wall. Emma was not a fan of climbing walls but she did like stripey tights!
Emma and Dan in our local phone box, remember those?
Here is Huw's story which features the very phone box seen above!
Emma Cray
Ok, so it’s my final year at University and unlike pretty much all the people I knew who had secured rented houses with friends in and around town I was stuck on my own up in the euphemistically called “student village”. It’s not that there was anything particularly bad about it...it was just that it was pretty soulless and the people I found myself sharing a house with and I had very little in common.
Fortunately the “student village” did contain a pub and fortunately I did meet a bloke by the name of Dan there. Even more fortunately he wanted to move out and live a bit closer to town and live in a real house.
He said he knew someone else who was interested in sharing a house....another first year student called Jon. Finally there was a woman who was mad enough to share with us…….. her name was Emma.
The first time I met Emma was at a party in the Brynmill area of Swansea. It was in a very large old Victorian terraced house, lots of rooms and lots of students sharing it.
Dan was bored at this party.....so was I. Dan, had told me, at a previous party at the student village that by putting a coin inside a light bulb socket then switching it on you could “knock out” all the electrics in a house....it worked. It seemed like the thing to do to try this out again just to prove that it was not a fluke......it wasn’t....and it did work again.
Dan and I were sat in a room talking to Emma.....to be honest she looked amazing. She had beautiful blond spiky hair, was wearing a leather biker jacket Doc Martins - pretty much the standard uniform of the anarcho punks circa 1985. The thing is that most women at that time were either “straights” dressing like a secretary or hippies with colourful jumpers and sensible sandals.
Whilst Emma`s style of dress is quite common now and really says little about a person’s politics....back then it really was quite rare.
Anyway so Dan and I were talking to this amazing looking woman.....in candlelight as for some reason all the lights had gone off. Fortunately for some strange reason I did not make a complete idiot of myself during this now drunken encounter.
We actually had quite a sensible conversation we agreed that whoever had vandalised the lights was completely idiotic. Dan added that he would like to get his hands on whoever had done it.....given that it was him who had in fact done it....that would not have been too difficult.
Anyway that part ended without further incident.....and pretty soon after that our time of living together at 73 Rhyddings Park Road, Swansea, began.
Dan and Jon had the posh expensive £25 a week bedrooms.... I opted for the economy room which went for a mere £12 a week. The one drawback to this economy room was that it was in fact a converted kitchen larder barely fitting a single bed in it.
When Emma joined us she had the big room down stairs. It became the communal room of the house. The notable exception to this was the two other residents in the house - Assad and Sian. The politest way to describe them was that they kept themselves rather noisily to themselves.
As was true of most student houses at the time we lacked a TV. So the entertainment was typically spent listening to music and talking. No mobile phones internet or social media... any contact with ‘the outside world’ was made from traipsing to a public phone and invariably having to queue for ages to call someone....who invariably wasn’t in. There was letters I suppose but these typically took days to write, days to get round to posting and even longer to getting ... if you were lucky… a reply.
Emma had the big front room with bay windows....it was the unofficial communal room of the house. She introduced me to some amazing music..... one of the tracks that stands out in my mind was from a psychedelic 60s band called USA the track is ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. She had this on a compilation tape her friend had sent her. For ages we searched to find this track but to no avail..... it was only about 5 years later I heard it being played in a record shop in Chester and I was able to buy it.
Somehow whatever hassles I had during the day all seemed to evaporate in the evenings with Emma listening to the likes of ‘Intellstella Overdrive’ by Pink Floyd. Having the ‘munchies’ then raiding Jon or Dan’s cupboard and eating tins of rice pudding.
On the wall was the one particular poster that used to fascinate me. It was from a book by Bob Black called ‘The Abolition of Work’. It had a young woman lying in bed with the quote; ‘I didn’t work to work today....I don’t think I will go tomorrow. Lets take control of our lives and live for pleasure not pain’.
This was a time when the traditional left were demanding jobs....the right to work!. It was just after the Miners had fought bravely to defend their jobs but eventually with the whole apparatus of the state against them had been defeated.
This was demanding the right not to work.....was it just an excuse to be lazy or was this really important? The conventional wisdom is that these ideas are for the youth and growing up means growing out of them and voting for a twat like Boris Johnston.
Funnily though the older I have got and the more I have seen people working in alienating jobs for years in the hope that one day they will be free of it and be able to retire. (Now that retirement age has been risen to just about 70...it is certainly true that the best years of your life will be well behind you before you are free from work.) The more I see in life the more the truth and the possibility of liberation and fulfilment from that poster speaks to me.
So that was the thing with Emma she always got me to think differently about things. Through the years after college I always looked forward to the letters and sometimes compilation tapes she would send now and again opening my eyes to new ideas and sounds.
Thanx Emma,
love Huw
And here's a couple more photos of Emma and Dan in my room
in our second year in Swansea (I believe).
and this one could be anywhere but I know I was falling in to those eyes at the time!
