Part 2 in process - Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

sense of it all. It would have been much easier if we had just been given books from which to
compile sets of notes. Having written that though even the poorest of lecturers injects some
element of understanding in a mysterious way. The entire scene was always under the threat of
the guillotine - of examinations. In that second year it was not even clear if and when
examinations were to be upon us. I could only suspect that I had to excel all the time, and that
became my everyday existence. There was no element of intense competition with other
students, I hardly knew any of them towards the end of that second year. I wished to do well
for myself alone. By that time my friend of many years, the black and white sheepdog, had
been “destroyed” as they say. I was told this suddenly when I returned from the Spring term.
He had been dead for a long time before I was told. So I was truly alone as the third year of
the undergraduate degree approached.
The second year ended as had the first, with a sudden evaporation and a fault in
time. The students at 8 Powell Street went their own way and I never saw any of them again.
Many years later I corresponded with Roger Goodger for a while but the others disappeared as
suddenly as they had arrived. I do not recall clearly whether or not I worked at B. P. Baglan
Bay during that summer of 1970 as well as the summer of 1969. At the time it was a giant
petrochemical refinery adjacent to the vast steel works at Margam. I have some vague
recollections of using a lecture bottle to collect ethyl chloride from a pipeline. My father was
working there as a labourer at the time, having left the coal mine at Bryn Lliw with the rank of
overman, or underground manager. I saw him in the distance pulling a trolley one day and he
looked profoundly unhappy. The coal miner was the aristocrat of the working world in South
Wales. I was never told much, and I still do not know why he was not given a job as an above
ground manager. My mother told me just before she died that he had been diagnosed with 30%
dust in the lungs. I remember that the chlorine plant was next to the laboratory at Baglan Bay,
chlorine was made by electrolysis of sea water. One day there was an accident in the chlorine
plant, and an evacuation of the laboratory. Another day there was a fire in a tower, maybe
making propylene before being converted into polypropylene. The petrochemical plant always
smelled very badly, and on a rainy day the distant mountains looked very bleak. The B. P. Plant
was stuck out on a flat plain near the sea, alongside the dreary Sandfields estate and the angular
shadows of awkward giants in the distance, the steel making towers. The hillside behind the
steel works had been blasted into a primitive ochre colour by the sickly fumes, the rotten eggs
of carbon disulphide and the acidic sulphur dioxide. Fumes poured out of the steelworks and
out of the cooling towers at Baglan Bay. I can see no sign of these towers now, they must ave
been levelled and destroyed.
It was beginning to get very uncomfortable at Pant y Bedw, but I still had very
little desire to return to Aberystwyth at the end of that summer of 1970. Eventually I made my
way back to the new digs at Alexandra Road. Mrs Gill was a small lady married to Mr Gill,
who worked in the Post Office building opposite the EDCL. He had captured a Japanese sword
which was placed in the corner of the student room. There were about four other students but I
cannot remember their names, and we had the great luxury of a T. V. Fortunately the students
were good natured and stable and the food was good, the usual bed and breakfast and full board
on Sunday. My parents came up with me in September 1970 and seemed to get along well
enough with Mrs. Gill. This was the most intense year of my time at Aberystwyth as