Peter was awarded an upper second. He had enough grade 1 papers to earn a first class honours degree, but his absolute fail in his Middle English paper cancelled out one of the grade ones, so dropped him a class. He had a session with his tutor, Blunden, and decided to stay up in Oxford to read for a B.Lit on The Uneducated poets of the Eighteenth Century and managed to arrange for a grant to last two years. Then we cycled to Pangbourne by the Thames to help with a Camp for Unemployed – half of them Welsh miners, the rest unemployed East of London clothing workers. We students were expected to sleep eight to a bell tent and of course strictly sex-segregated – so Peter and I huddled together in the enormous marquee which, having no ground-sheet, forced us to sleep under our sleeping bag on the cold, cold grass after the nightly camp fire.

In those days, before the war, the English were entirely unmusical, so while the Welsh sang nightly round the fire, the East Enders could only recite Christmas Day in the Work-house and similar pieces. One of them went mad suddenly, I presume he was manic depressive, and six of the students including Peter had to sit on him all night to prevent his running amok, until they could get a couple of doctors in to certify him. Peter said that he raved in half a dozen languages brilliantly, reminding him of James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere. We had an interesting visitor, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, incognito – a composer friend of Brecht. Peter managed to write down the words and music of two of his compositions – The Comintern and The Miner’s Song. Much later we discovered that his real name was Hans Eisler.

I don’t remember at what stage of that holiday we found ourselves camping in a small tent at Pangbourne again, having run out of money. We had company. A tent full of young men invited us to share food and drink with them and we finally got to sleep very late on that moonlit night. As a result, we slept until lunchtime and by the time we got ourselves dressed and packed our rucksacks the banks were all shut. We had sixpence, were out of fags and very hungry.

Hopefully, we went to the police station in the vain hope that they would cash a small cheque for us – which of course they couldn’t. There was no such thing as cheque cards in those days. However, they did offer us inumerable slices of bread/butter and blackcurrent jam – nice doorsteps of slices – and several large mugs of very sweet strong tea.

We hadn’t mentioned our sixpence, so were able to feed it into a cigarette machine for ten Players.