Monday 15 April

A little later in the morning I returned to find that Bob had not been to bed, that Ella was up early drinking tea, and that Bill Pettit, Steve Stiles, Ted Tubb, Don Wellheim and, come to mention it, everyone else, were wandering the corridors in a powered down condition looking for hairs of dogs. There was also a crowd outside the entrance to the bar, still and silent except when they stared red-eyed at the quivering wrists holding their watches.

PETER WESTON:

Fellow novice Bob Rickard ran round furiously with the new fans and we hardly saw him all weekend until we finally had to drag him out of the hotel, late on Monday morning. He'd had a wonderful time, met all sorts of interesting people, he assured us, as we drove back in the worn-out company Cortina I had borrowed for the occasion, my MG sports car being in dock for emergency repairs. One of them was Greg Pickersgill attending his first convention. We met briefly at Buxton, but neither of us took much notice of the other. Greg said,

"I distinctly remember talking to you for a while in a corridor. I also remember being passed on the stairs by Harry Bell. It was that kind of first-con experience. All I can think of is how much OLDER everyone seemed than me, and how essentially unapproachable they were, even the people whose names I knew from fanzines. (We're talking about people maybe five years older than me, but that's a long time when you're sixteen, and a particularly naive, socially, sixteen as I was.) I was genuinely in awe of people like, for God's sake, Chas Legg, because he was a STUDENT - we're at the time of the student uprisings and high politicisation here, remember, when people like me looked on students as some sort of advance elite front-fighters for the new age. Remember what I said earlier about 'naive'?"

Dave Griffiths, Moira Read, Barbara Mace, Harry Bell (jpkr)

JAMES WHITE:

Peter Day and Eric Bentcliffe had both kindly offered to drive Bob and me to the airport, thus allowing us a few extra hours at the convention. We had the choice of making Peter's family uncomfortable or squeezing Eric's s-f collection, so we decided to go with Eric, figuring that his magazines were not likely to squeeze back.

It was a very pleasant run to the airport with the sun shining brightly and the Peak district looking beautiful despite the bare trees. At one stage Eric got very worried because he thought he was running a big end, but it turned out to be Bob snoring in the back seat. At Ringway he could not find a parking spot so we unfortunately had to say good-bye and thank you to him and check in. We kept expecting to see fans in the departure lounge or in the coffee bar, and had to keep reminding ourselves that we were back in the real world. As we moved to board our aircraft we looked at the signs welcoming us to Manchester, a city whose pavements our down-at-heel soles had never even touched, and told each other that this had been one of the best cons ever and that it would take several days before our feet really touched the ground.

Anne Keylock, Gerry Webb (ns)