So when I was a student I lived in this tower, in what was at first known as Fallowfield Village, and then became Owens Park. This is the view from the back. At the time (1964) this was an all male building, the block just visible to the left - Green Court - was a women's block, and there was another to the front, the name of which I can not now recall.
There were various eccentrics and ne'er-do-wells living in the place, as well as a fair selection of normal human beings, and we all got along pretty well. I was there the year it opened, and the place was let to students of all different years, from freshers like me, to post grads of all sorts.
As I say, we all got along pretty well, but there were one or two cliques whose behaviour could annoy, on occasion, and the occasional person whom you you might do better not to cross. One such group included a tall rangey bloke called Mike, who had a Citroen Light 15, and a girl friend who lived in his room, against all the rules and regs. Nelly our Irish cleaner once said to me "Liz is the only girl that lives on this floor isn't she Jim?", so I suppose that helped. Mike had two friends, one who looked like and lived under the name of "Ringo" and Pete Norton, who although he looked entirely bland was pathologically strong. He seemed to be able to conjure up reserves of strength the way madmen are supposed to, and he had absolutely no regard for his own or anyone else's safety. He once arrived back drunk after a night out and having gone to sleep, someone decided it would be funny to sneak an ice cream advertising sign with its weighted concrete base into the room. Next day the sign was found embedded in the path six floors below. He'd woken in the night and thrown it out of the window. On one occasion while attempting to buy a Chinese meal from a takeaway in Moss Side (and this was a time when Moss Side was massively territorial and not at all enamoured of students) he accidentally knocked a bystander's meal from their hands. Not unreasonably the chap suggested Pete might like to buy him another. Entirely unreasonably Pete told him to fuck off and buy his own, without calculating the odds, which were so far not in his favour that he spent the ensuing five days in hospital.
Ringo in his turn was unstable though less dangerous. He was prone to indulge in practical jokes which were usually less rather than more amusing. The principle difficulty with him was that if he took against something you did, he would employ his mate Pete to enforce whatever retribution he invented, and since Pete was like a force of nature this was best avoided.
Anyway enough preamble. All of this meant that this little troika thought it was a law unto itself, and as is the way of things, Mike and Pete who had little doubt of their own superiority weren't a daily problem, but Ringo who was more insecure could be. Each floor of the tower had a pair of kitchens and each kitchen had in it a baby belling cooker. Sometimes when he found himself challenged in the laundry department, he would rinse through a pair of socks and put them in one of the cookers to dry on "low". This took quite some time, and meant that no one could use the cooker for up to an hour. No amount of remonstration had any effect on Ringo who just thought that complaints were amusing. This was doubly frustrating in that the time when Ringo most often wanted to dry his socks was before a Saturday night, just at the time when the rest of us wanted to use the cooker.
I was never one to resist a challenge but I was also not one who wanted to put his frail flesh or belongings on the line. There are two characteristics I have which have stood me in good stead throughout my life, one is the capacity to act alone, the second is to keep my mouth zipped afterwards, forever if necessary.
There were various eccentrics and ne'er-do-wells living in the place, as well as a fair selection of normal human beings, and we all got along pretty well. I was there the year it opened, and the place was let to students of all different years, from freshers like me, to post grads of all sorts.
As I say, we all got along pretty well, but there were one or two cliques whose behaviour could annoy, on occasion, and the occasional person whom you you might do better not to cross. One such group included a tall rangey bloke called Mike, who had a Citroen Light 15, and a girl friend who lived in his room, against all the rules and regs. Nelly our Irish cleaner once said to me "Liz is the only girl that lives on this floor isn't she Jim?", so I suppose that helped. Mike had two friends, one who looked like and lived under the name of "Ringo" and Pete Norton, who although he looked entirely bland was pathologically strong. He seemed to be able to conjure up reserves of strength the way madmen are supposed to, and he had absolutely no regard for his own or anyone else's safety. He once arrived back drunk after a night out and having gone to sleep, someone decided it would be funny to sneak an ice cream advertising sign with its weighted concrete base into the room. Next day the sign was found embedded in the path six floors below. He'd woken in the night and thrown it out of the window. On one occasion while attempting to buy a Chinese meal from a takeaway in Moss Side (and this was a time when Moss Side was massively territorial and not at all enamoured of students) he accidentally knocked a bystander's meal from their hands. Not unreasonably the chap suggested Pete might like to buy him another. Entirely unreasonably Pete told him to fuck off and buy his own, without calculating the odds, which were so far not in his favour that he spent the ensuing five days in hospital.
Ringo in his turn was unstable though less dangerous. He was prone to indulge in practical jokes which were usually less rather than more amusing. The principle difficulty with him was that if he took against something you did, he would employ his mate Pete to enforce whatever retribution he invented, and since Pete was like a force of nature this was best avoided.
Anyway enough preamble. All of this meant that this little troika thought it was a law unto itself, and as is the way of things, Mike and Pete who had little doubt of their own superiority weren't a daily problem, but Ringo who was more insecure could be. Each floor of the tower had a pair of kitchens and each kitchen had in it a baby belling cooker. Sometimes when he found himself challenged in the laundry department, he would rinse through a pair of socks and put them in one of the cookers to dry on "low". This took quite some time, and meant that no one could use the cooker for up to an hour. No amount of remonstration had any effect on Ringo who just thought that complaints were amusing. This was doubly frustrating in that the time when Ringo most often wanted to dry his socks was before a Saturday night, just at the time when the rest of us wanted to use the cooker.
I was never one to resist a challenge but I was also not one who wanted to put his frail flesh or belongings on the line. There are two characteristics I have which have stood me in good stead throughout my life, one is the capacity to act alone, the second is to keep my mouth zipped afterwards, forever if necessary.
Now it just so happened that the two kitchens on a floor were linked by a very narrow access passage, so it was possible to go into one kitchen (A above), and appear and disappear briefly in the other (B). What I did, I did entirely unplanned. Going into kitchen A I found that the oven was in use, though there was no one about. I then went through the corridor to kitchen B where I found the kitchen empty but the cooker occupied by Ringo's socks. Without a moment's hesitation I turned the cooker up to max, and made my escape unobserved to my room. Ten minutes later all hell broke out. Oh the cursings! Oh the stompings! Oh the fuming of both socks and rage! Everyone came out of their rooms, everyone fell about laughing, and who could tell which of those creased with laughter was the incendiarist? Only me, and I never did.
Just for verisimilitude, here is a picture of my then girlfriend Gem cooking on that very Baby Belling, and to her left in the background the door to the access corridor. Which is good, because I'd forgotten there were doors.
