Teenage Wildlife

How I learnt a lesson about violence

Popeye Punching by Roy Lichtenstein, 1961

The town I went to school in had a bad reputation for what was then called juvenile delinquency, as I mentioned in this earlier essay. But although I got into one or two minor fights, I didn’t go to any of the clubs or pubs in the evenings, when most of the fighting occurred. I was a pretty sheltered country boy, mostly unused to the ways of town life.

Street violence, though, was a topic we heard about in songs. David Bowie’s Teenage Wildlife, which wasn’t recorded until after I left school, was a song I would listen to on repeat when it came out in 1980. However, as a fan of the group The Jam, I was very familiar with their 1978 hit, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight:

I first felt a fist

And then a kick

I could now smell their breath

They smelt of pubs

And Wormwood Scrubs

And too many right wing meetings

Though the school I went to did what it could to push us in positive directions, this was not some hyper-pressured environment. There was just some modest prodding and support against a hinterland of near indifference. It might seem a cruel exaggeration to say the cows in our fields had as much interest in the value of academic education (“book learning”) as most of the parents in the town and its surrounding populations. However, it wouldn’t be too different from how it felt.

One of the bits of “prodding” the school did was take a group of students each year to the cities of Oxford and Cambridge. This gave the chance for those who were considered “Oxbridge material” to visit some of the colleges and form a picture of what it might be like to study there.

We were a naive bunch that headed off that early summer day in 1979 in the school minibus for the long drive (by English standards) from Devon to Cambridge, our first stop. Many of us, myself included, had travelled little and hardly knew anything of towns or cities outside Devon.

I can remember on this trip, for example, that I had my first taste of Chinese food – a cheap takeaway. There were Chinese takeaway restaurants in my town, of course, as there were in almost every town in the country, but it would never have occurred to my parents to order such food for us, much less eat it themselves. The sweet and sour pork, the prawn crackers and even the plain white rice (never eaten at home) were all part of the sense that I was entering a new and very different kind of world.

The trip to Cambridge went well. It’s a beautiful city, and we could hardly fail to be impressed by its charm, as well as the formal beauty of the colleges. It wasn’t the age that impressed – even our rough little town had a church that went back 900 years; it was the ambition, the confidence of their communities that the buildings represented.

Oxford, when we arrived, though bigger and more industrial in parts, was similarly impressive. We weren’t exactly walking around with our jaws wide open like country bumpkins, but we may have come over a little like that to the locals.

The first college visits in Oxford went well, including what was then one of its newest colleges, St Catherine’s. Here it was the modern architecture that struck me (our town might have an old church, but nothing remarkable had been built for over a hundred years). The main buildings of glass, brick, and concrete, Designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen and described by one expert as “a perfect piece of architecture”, were unlike anything I’d seen before.

The moat at St Catherine’s.

This beautiful setting, recreating the best of traditional Oxford colleges in a modern style, seemed idyllic. And that evening, after settling into our tiny but comfortable student rooms, we were allowed to venture out as a group, with a strict curfew.

Off we sauntered into the centre of the city in the evening sunshine. Drunken debauchery was far from our minds. The adventure of being in the city centre (which seemed big to us) was enough. We bought some baked potatoes with exotic sauces like “chilli con carne” (another novelty) from a van and wandered the streets like the wide-eyed visitors from the shires that we were.

As we passed along the wide High Street, we saw a bunch of punks ahead of us and coming our way. They were behaving boisterously (we could later smell they’d been drinking). Well, we thought—we’d seen punks before. We even had schoolmates who dressed in full punk regalia at weekends, including ripped t-shirts, leather jackets and safety pins.

The ones we knew were gentle people who liked the music and the borrowed sense of rebellion that went with it. So instead of doing the sensible thing, which would have been to quietly and unobtrusively cross the street in case of trouble, we carried on along the pavement. After all, what harm would it be to see some of the local punks on a night out?

They were a group of roughly ten, half of them girls and half boys (perhaps two or three years older than us), and as they neared us, one of them, presumably the leader, with purple spikes in his hair and a large ring through his nose, shouted, right, who’s first?’ A clear invitation for a fight, if seriously meant. We froze. What was this about? why the uninvited attention? What harm were we doing? What threat were we to them?

The leader looked at me and pushed me, not hard, and I tried to walk on. Others blocked my way. I began to get nervous. We were outnumbered and much less streetwise. We could hold our own on the rugby field and were toughened by farmwork, but we weren’t scrappers. And we weren’t intoxicated. They bunched more tightly around us. ‘Who’s first?’ the leader insisted, disappointed perhaps by our lack of reaction.

I was amazed that this could be happening with daylight only just fading on this summer’s evening in this famous university city. Were we about to be beaten up – or worse?

But just at that moment, one of the girls in their group said, perhaps out of pity, “come on, they’re not worth it to” the leader. It was a smart move, an appeal to the drunken vanity of the males along with a calculated insult to us. It worked. The leader turned away from us, and they proceeded to move on, shouting snatches of songs we didn’t know. Relieved, we headed off along the now clearing pavement.

The danger had passed. Almost.

But just behind the main group of punks was a straggler. Shorter in stature than the others and with shorter hair and a denim jacket, he may have been a newcomer to the group, yet to prove himself, or just a loner tagging along. Or simply drunker than the others. I don’t know. But as he passed us, he swung a drunken punch without pausing for a second. Within a few moments he was gone. But I was left clutching my jaw, where the punch had landed.

Although I’d taken a few blows on the rugby field, I was initially stunned by this. After the first impact, however, it didn’t hurt too much. When the others asked me if I was all right, I said yes. Confused by what had happened, we hurried back to the college.

That evening, my jaw began to ache quite badly. I managed to take a couple of aspirins and get to sleep, but by morning the pain was worse. I reported the night’s adventure to the teacher in charge of the group, who promptly took me down to the Radcliffe Infirmary, which was also the university’s teaching hospital.

The young doctor who attended me ordered some x-rays to be taken, and I waited in the hospital waiting room for him to reappear. It was my first time in an A&E department, though it hadn’t exactly been on the list of new things I was looking forward to on this trip. Half an hour or so later, the doctor jauntily ushered me into the tiny consulting room.

We’d given him the details of the incident, and I felt he adopted a light tone to cheer me up.

“I’m afraid the sod broke your jaw,” he said.

Broken jaw sounded pretty major to me. It was the kind of injuries boxers got or people involved in serious accidents. Did they have to wire me up? Make me eat and drink through a straw for weeks?

Fortunately, he said, it was just a small fracture, and that would not be necessary. I felt surprise but also relief, though I was still in pain.

It was a far from ideal end to an educational trip. I missed the final college tours. But the following day we were on our way home, and I was soon giving details to my parents, whose prejudices about what happened in “big cities” were confirmed and were to remain fixed thereafter.

A week later, referred by my GP to a specialist in the nearby city of Exeter, I waited again in a hospital waiting room. The consultant there was much older than his Oxford counterpart, and when he beckoned me into his consulting room, there was no jocularity, no attempt to put me at my ease.

Instead, the consultant fumed that I should never have been allowed to leave hospital without my jaw being wired up. The first doctor had taken a considerable risk. It was now, on balance, too late for this to happen (I sighed with relief inwardly as he said this). But I’d need to be really careful for some time with what I ate. And I’d have to come back in a couple of weeks.

Fortunately, the fracture seemed to heal ok, and that autumn I was able to play rugby again, which I think is what had worried me most. However, for many years afterwards (and even now very occasionally), opening my mouth too wide too suddenly could cause me to feel a twinge in a tendon in my jaw.

When I felt that twinge, it served as a reminder of that first eventful trip to Oxford. More importantly, it made me more conscious that I was living in a world where violence can happen without a reason. I’d never be quite so naive about the realities of city streets again.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but my first real lesson at Oxford took place in its streets years before I entered the university.