When Ronnie Rogers enrolled for a course at the local Mechanics Institute in 1963 he was stunned to see that the chap standing ahead of him in the queue (the son of a naval officer who would make his mark as a Professor of Dilettante Studies at the University of the North Circular) was wearing a pair of jeans. In those days there was much uncertainty about whether turning up at a public institution in jeans was a way of 'taking the piss' or constituted the quintessence of cool. Ronnie was even more taken aback when the cool dude jeans wearer
introduced himself and shook hands. (Even today suit-wearing academics continue to be taken aback when the aristocrat they have invited to give a lecture turns up wearing jeans.)
The zeitgeist of the Mechanics Institute at this time - a heady brew of conservative traditionalism, anarcho-Marxism and self-seeking individualism - helped change Ronnie's life for good. He drifted further away from his prefab estate roots and came close to gravitating towards one of those de-centred and deracinated identities which was the cause of much existential anguish and political floundering during the next decades.
Ronnie signed up for the famous 'Bath PPE' course in politics, economics, and philosophy.
(While the 'Oxbridge PPE' opens doors to The Establishment, the 'Bath PPE' opens doors to Drinking Establishments.) Ronnie then went off to the Arty Little Cinema with the naval officer's son to watch Citizen Kane (1941).
Charles Foster Kane was a power-hungry newspaper tycoon with an American passport and a half-concealed Australian identity. In the film's deathbed scene Kane whispers the word 'Rosebud'. 'Rosebud' was the name of the sled he had been playing with as a young child a few moments before his mother called him into the house. He was then sent away from his home, with the beloved sled being left abandoned in the garden.
When the Arty Little Cinema's screening of Citizen Kane ended Ronnie Rogers wondered whether the bearings that had been bestowed on him by a benevolent slice of history might soon be lost. Perhaps his own prefab had been his 'Rosebud'. This feeling of the dye having been cast was to stay with him for years to come.