We Had It So Good Read Online Free PDF

meadows, toward the industrial buildup of the city.
    He was also homesick for sunshine, blue skies, for everything he thought of as America, which included Coca-Cola machines andjelly doughnuts. Stupid things to miss, he thought. You could get them here, but they tasted nothing like the same.
    Men. Celibate, bored, stoned men. There were no women in his college or any of the men’s colleges. There were colleges for the chicks, but they were guarded by gate rules. In one of them, he was told, when a lady had a gentleman visitor, she had to move the bed out into the hall.
    He spent all day in Dyson Perrins, which women seldom entered, and when they did, they were ferocious brain-boxes in staid tweed skirts and lace-up leather shoes. He had a few moves, you could not get out of high school in Los Angeles without them, but there was nothing here that resembled dating. You asked the English if they wanted something and they said no. You couldn’t take this refusal at face value because it was merely the appetizer, you asked again, maybe two more times, before the answer came, “Are you sure?” or, if food were offered, “If you think there’s enough.” This tedious game had to be played out in every social situation, including, he assumed, sex. If it took three tries to get a girl to share a package of potato chips with you, what would you need to do to get her into bed?
    At the end of his first year, the summer of 1969, Stephen moved out of college with John Baines, another Rhodes Scholar, to Jericho, a neighborhood of small Victorian houses, built for dolls, they both thought, but at least they had finally left the Middle Ages behind and accelerated into the architectural future by several centuries to the nineteenth.
    They were cottages for artisans, and were coming to be admired as charming, but theirs was a slum, with mattresses on the floor and an ashtray full of roaches. The deck, amp and speakers of the stereo were the only items that resembled furniture. The squalor depressed him. The cabin of the ship where he could not even sit upright toread was more romantic than this Lilliputian dwelling, and at least above it life was in ceaseless motion, people coming and going. His idea of a class system was defined by dollars, the rich and the not rich, that was clearly observable on a ship and in Los Angeles, but in Oxford, class was something that could be understood only in the long centuries it took to roll the lawns perfectly flat.
    It was difficult to keep the house clean, and the kitchen’s antique fittings were grimed with dirt going back to the Roman Conquest. The gas stove was filthy and unhygienic, damp seeped in from the river. Stephen developed colds and was prey to viruses. It was at Oxford that he first developed a condition called bronchitis, when a cold went to your chest and you wheezed and coughed up green phlegm. He would have bronchitis with every cold until he finally gave up smoking in his thirties. In the meantime he dosed himself with a pharmacopoeia of drugs. He was sick and miserable.
    And then two girls moved in next door. What a stroke of luck, what a lifesaver. They had taken the house for their third year and were not returning to their parents’ homes for the summer, waiting it out, like him, in quiet, deserted Oxford, a city now without thronging bicycles, replaced by American and French tourists with cameras that swung from their chests like bulky breastplates.
    He had seen these girls before, even if you hung out all day in Dyson Perrins they were still one of the sights of the city, drifting arm in arm along the High, trailing behind them the smoke from their roll-up cigarettes and the pungent scent of heavily perfumed Oriental oils dabbed on their arms and throats. Their eyes were rimmed with black, like film stars’ of the silent era, and their lips stained purple with paint applied from a matte black tube. Each wore matching green stockings, but the