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.
