The ‘student revolution’ of ’68 seemed to have passed UEA by, almost entirely. Perhaps its geographical location in a remote part of East Anglia; and the predominantly middle-class student ‘body’ dulled any notions of dissent.

There was a plethora of sports cars ( MGBs mainly) owned by students in the university car park.

UEA  was an incongruous place : set in the heart of the glorious Norfolk countryside and housed in Denys Lasdun’s bleak New Brutalist architecture.  From the air, the campus resembled’ a maximum security asylum for the criminally insane’, as a good friend of mine once described it..

By July 1969, however, Jonathan had become restive, and had decided to leave university teaching and   to pursue his fledgling writing career in London.

He and I were still ‘together’, and I visited him a few times in London, where he had moved and was renting a room in the home of the journalist, Angela Lambert.

Angela was the most lively and entertaining of landladies. A very pretty woman, with dazzling green eyes, she was living with the Hungarian writer, Stephen Vizinczey, whose seminal book  In Praise of Older Women’, had been published in 1965, to great acclaim.

I only met Stephen once , as we both arrived at Angela’s doorstep at the same time, but I was impressed  even  then by his courtly, sensual  mitteleuropaische  charm.

Astonishingly, Raban, according to a girlfriend of his, had spent the summer vacation  pacing the floor of his attic  flat at  33 Unthank Road, in an agitated state, willing my marriage to Andy to fall through, which it had done – spectacularly. When I returned to my own small   flat, I found a pile of  notes on the floor,  entreating me to contact him. I still have them. Their tone was urgent and  a little desperate. I still have these billets-doux, and have kept them for our  son, Alexander, to read. Even though  I was in no state to cope with a relationship with Jonathan in my rather  shell-shocked, on-the-rebound mood, I was a little flattered by his  attentions, so I rather passively went along with them.

He was an attractive man. An alpha male. I’d seen him around campus with an array of the  prettiest, most stunning students. In these pre-politically correct days, liaisons between students and lecturers were tolerated.  I went along ( with Jonathan) to soirees at the home of Malcolm and Elizabeth Bradbury, where  Malcolm fussed over me somewhat nervously.

Over the years, Malcolm was always very  kind to me. Solicitous, and concerned, perhaps he could see that I was a little ‘out of my depth’. The febrile atmosphere of the Department of English and American Studies, at this time, was later to be brilliantly fictionalised  and satirised by Malcolm in his prescient novel The History Man.  I have always thought that I  recognised parts of myself in the character of the hapless girl student in the book : Felicity McFee.

Years later, when Alexander, the son of Jonathan and myself, became an undergraduate at UEA – in the Department of American and English Studies –  Malcolm kept a watchful and encouraging eye on him.

Snoo Wilson, the playwright, who  was a student during these times, and  close to Lorna and Vic Sage, later   described my relationship with JR as ‘a rabbit (me) caught in the headlights’.

However, in many ways, Jonathan and I made an attractive couple. We shared a love of poetry – the work of Wallace Stevens, Ed Dorn, William Carlos Williams. We contracted a kind of ‘unofficial engagement’; and it  was at this time, that Jonathan moved in to my tiny flat ( unasked) with a large, brown leather suitcase ( which remained on the floor for the duration of his stay), and on which he wrote non-stop; his lengthy frame sprawled out across the carpet. I would hand him meals on plates and he would continue writing.  His first piece of fiction – a short story-  entitled ‘A Senior Lectureship’  was written here, and accepted by London Magazine.  Two of the characters in the story were based loosely on the academic, Howard Temperley, and his wife, Rachel.

UEA had opened my eyes to a rigorously intellectual and bookish world. I spent time in book-lined rooms, in elegant, country houses. There was a lot of intelligent debate, and casual sexual dalliance conducted in smoky pubs and bars, such as ‘Backs’, where Peter Mercer, Roger Fowler and the Sages were habituees. I hardly went in to the Department of Fine Arts and Music.

Jonathan dug out a bundle of my poems from under my bed, read them, made some excellent critical judgments and adjustments; pronounced them good, and suggested I try and get them published.

I took his advice and sent a handful to the Listener magazine.. I was aiming high, but to my astonishment, the charming Derwent May, Literary Editor at that time, accepted one of them : Concerning the Spiritual in Motherhood, and it was published on 3rd July, 1969.  I was paid ten guineas, and still have the letter of acceptance.

Jonathan and I celebrated with a bottle of wine and a good meal.

The talks given  by Mack and George both seemed to have gone   well; and members of the academic staff,  including Professor  Malcolm Bradbury and Roger Fowler, senior lecturer in Linguistics, both attended and joined us for drinks afterwards. I think both evening events had been successful; and  Jonathan and I  had been  briefly drawn together more closely in organising them.

Happily, it was nearly the end of term and  I’d had an interview with the Paul Mellon Foundation on June 18th,(  to help to  do research on their dictionary of British painters) had been accepted, and was due to start work on Monday. July 1st.

I left Norwich for London, and totally forgot about JR.

While I was in London, I was unfortunate enough to get drawn in to a completely surreal whirlwind engagement to an old friend, Andy Allan, a researcher  on the Eamonn Andrews show for Thames Television.

Andy was later to become an executive for three major  ITV companies; and is destined to be remembered for axing  a show called ‘Crossroads’, and bringing the ‘ Inspector Morse’ series to the nation. On a more personal level, he was destined to jilt me on August 31st 1969,  a week before our country church wedding , leaving me with a bespoke wedding dress from Liberty’s, a marquee in a friend’s garden, crates of champagne, a broken heart, and the urgent need to cancel 250 invitations and the photographers from ‘Time and Tide’ magazine. Eamonn Andrews had been scheduled, too. to make an appearance.

It seems that this was ‘not to be my life’, so I hurried back to UEA to begin my second year there on Monday. 7th October, chastened and doped up on Librium. I was anxious to hide away for a while, but my concerned friends decided to drag  me in to the students’ bar on Tuesday, 8th October, where a very charming and rather predatory  JR approached me with the following line:

‘So glad you didn’t get married. Now you can go out with me’.

‘And marry me’, he added.

I had just turned twenty-three.

I wrote this piece in 2000, and I am publishing it now.

‘The Society of Jonathan’.

I was 22 when I first met the writer and academic, Jonathan Raban, at UEA. He was 25 – good-looking, ambitious and charismatic.

In the summer of ’68 ( that revolutionary time, which barely registered at all  in the tranquil environs of East Anglia), and  in my third term of my first year at UEA, I enrolled  in one of his courses – on ‘American Poetry’. Raban was a star turn, a young Turk, and often didn’t disappoint; although I had  started to become bored in his seminars, as he used to direct his attention, almost exclusively, to a worthy, but dull student named  Alan Tuckett.

Tuckett was to marry a fellow student – Penny Allen, who was later to become the first wife of the writer, Ian McEwan. Years later, I came across Alan in Brighton, where he was running the Friends’ Centre at the Quaker Meeting House. I wonder if he ever remembered the ‘exchanges’ that  he had had  with Raban.

Jonathan and I became closer when he learned that I was friendly with George MacBeth and Professor M.L. ‘Mack’ Rosenthal – both living in London. Jonathan then suggested that we invite them both up to UEA to speak to the students. So, on  June 11th, 1968, and Wednesday, 26th June, respectively, ‘Mack’ Rosenthal and George came up to UEA to speak about their work.

In the summer of ’67, shortly after the excitement of Poetry International, I was given a place at the University of East Anglia in the Fine Arts and Music Department, to read for a B.A. (Hons) degree.  I had worked for two years now in London, and was longing to escape to the wildness and  fresh air of Norfolk. I was tired of my Saturdays  spent in Biba ( finding a new outfit for work).  Once I met Jane Asher, as we both had the arm of a dress each, and she generously let me take it ( it’s now in the costume department of Brighton Museum and Art Gallery).

I had exhausted myself trailing round art galleries; studying at the Courtauld, and so on. But I knew  that I’d ‘put in the hours’, and was ready to work hard and appreciate this precious second chance to read for a degree.

I still went to poetry readings. George Macbeth became a friend and mentor; I also met M.L. Rosenthal  a professor of English at  New York University. I even read a few poems out at poetry gatherings, and once in a church ( organised by George), who ferried me around in his Scimitar car to many venues, including the  ICA ,  where I met Alan Brownjohn, John Stallworthy, and heard Stephen Spender speak. He also introduced me to the poetess, Stevie Smith.

The winter of ’67 was arctic. Snow and winds seem to blow straight at us from Siberia.The glass inside the windows of my ‘digs’ froze up. I moved out to student accommodation on campus. The New Brutalist architecture of Denys Lasdun was bleak and unforgiving. I often took shelter in the lovely Georgian tea rooms in Norwich. Work was enthralling – we students were a small group, and became close friends with our tutors: John Gage, Alistair Grieve and Stefan Muthesius. One of the students in my group even  went on to marry Stefan. These were very different times from today. Students and lecturers mingled, drank, socialised and had relationships with each other. This would be a scandal nowadays.  The concept of ‘gross moral turpitude’ didn’t really exist then.

And it was in this easy-going environment that I met a young junior lecturer called Jonathan Raban.

We were expected to take a ‘subsidiary’ course along with our main subjects, and I signed up for ‘Modern American Poetry’. It was a subject and a field that I loved and knew quite a lot about – and the youthful and sparkling  Jonathan was much-admired . Born in 1942, he was only three years older than I was then. Almost one of my peers. Aged 22, I, too, had work experience and more maturity than the average undergraduate. There was an attraction – more on his side – between us. But , more importantly, for me,  I loved the course that he was teaching, and the louche gang of English Department lecturers that he worked along side. I was spending more and more  time with him, although I still managed to hang our with my FAM friends and attend lectures, seminars,and so on. I was on dangerous ground – among sophisticated people in a different league from my own.

Every evening at Poetry International was an’embarrass des richesses’ of poetic talent. Unlike today, no ‘cult of celebrity’ existed, and performers and audience alike all mixed together in the bar and talked to each other.  These were the egalitarian Sixties.

I recall the young,handsome Czech poet, Miroslav Holub, reading. His country was, politically, on the verge of Russian occupation. ( This was just before the Prague Spring of ’68) when the Czech people were brutally invaded by Russia).

Thirty years  later, in 1998, I  heard him read again at the 1998 Brighton Festival, and his work was still as fresh and vigorous. This time he read alongside Carol Ann Duffy, Sophie Hannah, Hugo Williams and others. A few weeks later, he was dead.

But the most thrilling writer to walk onto that stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was,  undoubtedly, W.H. Auden. Wearing a worn,crumpled brown suit, a waistcoat and carpet slippers, he looked haggard and grey, his remarkable face lined by years of taking gin, vodka and benzedrine. However, when he read in his soft, transatlantic voice, his manner was masterful and assured. The entire  hall  was still.

When he finished his reading, there was thunderous applause, and some of us dared to jump on  to the stage next to our revered idol. I gingerly asked for his autograph, and he then wrote it neatly and precisely on my programme.

I treasure it to this day.

When the Festival was over, the poet and critic, John Stallworthy wrote:

‘Come again, every good poet who has been lured to London this week for Poetry International  ’67’..

It’s interesting to speculate that these ‘Beautiful People’ were likely to be  the parents of kids who, in the future, would queue all night to see an Oasis, Bowie or Blur concert – to name just a few bands.

Poetry in the late 60’s was a kind of ‘off-shoot’ of rock n’ roll.  It was uber cool. The American poets – Ginsberg and Robert Creeley –  gave spine-tingling readings that sounded like jazz- inspired riffs. They were to influence the innovative group of ‘Liverpool Poets’ : Roger  McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri, who were  also linked with the whole Beatles musical phenomenon.

I was lucky. On the nights I attended  Poetry International, I managed, with my friends ,to get front row seats. Every reading was excitingly ad hoc.  One night, unexpectedly, Tennessee Williams strode onto the stage: beaming, handsome, his green eyes shining with fun and laughter – and amused us all with readings of his poems.

We also heard the great Russian poetess, Bella Akmadulina , read. And, gloriously, the great Italian poet, Ungaretti.

Guiseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was already a very frail ,old man.. Famous for his translations into Italian of William Blake’s visionary poems (Visioni di William Blake), published comparatively recently in 1965, he, too, in spite of his age, appealled massively to a young ‘hip’ audience, who were all just rediscovering Blake’s work.

On the first night, Ungaretti read from  Sentitmenti del Tempo – ‘The Feeling of Time’ (1950), where he raged like Dylan Thomas, to this predominately young audience, against the end of life,and the  ‘dying of the light’.  It was a magisterial performance. As the critic, Julian Jebb, later wrote:

‘Ungaretti raged like Yeats against old age in a voice which made one think Henry Irving was still alive and had been born an Italian’.

Working as a Museum Assistant in the National Art Library at the V&A was a joyous experience. John Harthan , who ran the Department, was a decent, kind, scholarly man, and  was well-liked and admired by us all. The ‘paperkeepers’ and we assistants felt a  real attachment to the precious books, leaflets and catalogues that we handled every day.

Professor Peter Lasko,who had just set up the new Fine Art Department at the University of East Anglia in 1965, was a regular visitor to the Library.  He had moved – with some of his colleagues –  from the Courtauld Institute  to this new experimental ‘off-shoot’ in Norwich.

He was canvassing for potential students when he suggested that I leave the V&A, take a degree at UEA, and then return to my current job after graduating.

It was a beguiling offer, and I was soon fascinated by the prospect of leaving London for some welcome, much-needed Norfolk country air. The prospect of returning to academic work also began to appeal. I needed to stretch my mind more.

Within weeks, I had been accepted on the FAM course, and was ready to leave London and begin in the autumn term of 1967.

But, before that, I was  to attend the first Poetry International literaryfest at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank, which was organised by Ted Hughes and  Patrick Garland.  They were both keen to keep it as a ‘non-English’ event, but were later persuaded to include several ‘British’ writers, so Graves Spender, Auden and Empson  were to read their work – live!

As the poet and critic, A. Alvarez was to write:

‘If a bomb landed on the South Bank on the first week of July, 1967, it would wipe out world poetry’.

Over four nights – the 10th, 11th, 12th, and the 13th, the line-up of ‘foreign’ poets included: Octavio Paz, Neruda, Yves Bonnefoy, Pasolini, Bopa, Robert Bly and Anthony Hecht and Tennessee Williams ( among others).

The hall was jam-packed every night for four nights; and, as Julian Jebb of the Financial Times  was to write:

‘The queue of Beautiful People – many with their bells and flowers, who half-surrounded the QEH last night in the hope of return tickets was proof enough that the first of four evening recitals of Poetry International was an occasion’.

Time  magazine created the term ‘Swinging London’, in April 1966, but I was unaware that I was  living in such exciting times.

For me, it was  ‘metro, boulot, dodo’, and my life centred around the museum, and the little mews flat. There, I taught myself to cook from Elizabeth David’s  French Provincial Cooking, which I read cover to cover,as one would read a novel.  It was part recipe book, part travelogue, sprinkled with neat drawings and French phrases. I was utterly gripped. It was an entree  into another completely different way of life.

I had already ‘au paired’ in Brittany – for six weeks – with a delightful family during the vacation at Birmingham.  Dr G – a wealthy Parisian gynaecologist/ abortionist  –  was on his second marriage with his Bardot-look-a- like young wife, with whom he had two children: Eric (6) and Natalie (5).

My job was essentially to keep  the children  from killing themselves (  jumping out of windows and such like) bathe, breakfast and amuse them until ‘Madame’ rose at 12 noon.

I was then free to do as I please.

A cook would arrive from the village  to prepare our lavish midday lunch, at which I was always served first, as an honoured guest.

Monsieur and Madame’s hobby was their little private aeroplane, and they would fly off at the weekends leaving me solely in charge of the kids.

As I had absolutely no experience of caring for children apart from a little adolescent baby-sitting, this was challenging in the extreme. But we survived, even when I had to call the local vet when Eric’s temperature rose sky high.

They rewarded me with great kindness, a good salary,gifts of jewellery, and many years of friendship and correspondence, even when Monsieur landed up in jail for a while.

It was a marvellous introduction to the country and its people.

While the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam were raging in the back of our lives, the UK was having a ‘Labour moment’ with the election of Harold Wilson in March 1966 ( the year in which David Cameron was born); and we were weathering our own home-grown dramas: the Aberfan disaster; the imprisonment of the notorious ‘Moors Murderers’ ( Ian Brady and Myra Hindley); and the spy, George Blake’s flight to Moscow.

Many of my generation were concerned  with human rights. I’d heard Malcolm X speak at Birmingham University – to a packed audience – days before he was assassinated in February 1965; and went on to read  The Fire Next Time  by James Baldwin, and later Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver published in 1968, which I still have on my book shelves.

My university ‘adventure’ had  ended; and now I had to find a job.

I had acquired a shelf of books, but had no shelf to put them on. I was homeless.

I’d   read as much philosophy as I could. Extracts from the great philosophers, and all about Kant, Wittgenstein and Heidegger from Bertrand Russell’s  The History of Western Philosophy.

A friend, who worked at the Natural History Museum in Kensington, put me up in his home in Putney. He suggested that I walk over to the V&A and ask if they had any job vacancies.

There was a menial Civil Service job available  in the basement office. I was accepted. In  a year’s time I was promoted to Museum Assistant in the National Art Library.  I had taken the first steps on a career ladder.

A colleague offered me accommodation in his poky ,flat in Harley Street Mews.  The BBC ‘head honcho’, Lord Grade, parked his chauffeur- driven car beneath us.

I had time to read and write a little. I went to poetry readings and met George MacBeth, (‘Mr Poetry’ at  the BBC), and Mike and Frances Horowitz.

I had a risque  poem called ‘Consummation’published in a magazine called  Poetmeat.  It published other young ‘new’ poets: Penelope Shuttle, Lee Harwood and Dave Cunliffe. I also had poems  accepted by Scrip, Breakthru, and Preface.

Like Birmingham University, the V&A had been partly designed by Aston and Webb in 1909. The two buildings were so similar.

London was ‘swinging’; and I was at the heart of it, buying my clothes at Biba every week and wearing the shortest skirts possible.

And I bought a book of poems, which I really loved:  North from Sicily. Poems in Italy  1961-64  by Alan Ross Published by Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965.

I really loved these fresh, direct, very modern poems. And had no idea then that in 2001, Alan would publish some poems of mine in the last two editions of  London Magazine  shortly before his death; and that all those years in to the future, I would attend his memorial service on Tuesday, 30th October 2001 at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.