When my student grant ran out, I started looking round for some way of financing my research. I applied for (and obtained) a research fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge, with the support of my erstwhile French Literature tutor Prof. Ralph Leigh (who was working on a 36-volume edition of the correspondence of Rousseau): he magnanimously forgave me for hating the whole of 17th century French literature. The fellowship enabled me to carry on working on Italian (which eventually led to the publication of my Italian Syntax book) and to extend my sphere of interests to Romance Syntax. It also brought me a beautiful suite of rooms overlooking Great Court in Trinity. And, more importantly, the cherished right to walk on the grass in the College. Of course, when I got married, I had to move out of my suite of rooms in College: Trinity was, in those days, an exclusively male preserve. But I was still allowed to walk on the grass (though not my wife).
Eventually, the time came to find a 'real' job. I managed to obtain a lectureship in Linguistics at the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (where my main claim to fame was having an office opposite Malcolm Bradbury). But after two years, UEA had one of those periodic financial crises induced by government cost-cutting exercises, and the Dean's advice to bright young scholars in East Anglia was: 'Go west, young man'. I'd given a talk on the syntax of French structures like J'ai vu Marie qui pleurait at a Romance Linguistics Seminar where I was spotted by Stephen Ullmann, who asked me whether I'd be interested in a job in Modern Languages at Oxford (a post which had formerly been held by Pieter Seuren). So, off I went to Oxford, in the expectation that I'd (sp)end my days there teaching French, Italian and Romanian Syntax.
But Oxford was a strange place. It turned out that the Modern Languages Faculty had absolutely no interest whatever in my teaching courses on Romance Syntax -- on the contrary, most of my students came from English or Psychology. So, I ended up lecturing on English syntax to a hundred or so students. I soon discovered how merciless undergraduate audiences can be when ten students walked out in the middle of my fourth lecture because I had ventured to talk about word-order in Japanese (Apparently, they'd got the idea that if English was a universal language, a course on Universal Grammar must be about English). Four lectures later when I showed them their first tree diagram, another ten students walked out (muttering under their breath that they'd come to Oxford to do English not Algebra).
Then one of those surreal things happened that can only happen in Oxford. While looking through the newspaper, I saw an advertisement for a Chair in Linguistics at Oxford -- a Chair that nobody had told me about (even though I was the only University lecturer in Linguistics at the time). The appointments process dragged on and on (as only Oxford appointments can), but eventually Roy Harris was appointed. Roy was as witty, entertaining and sociable a companion as anyone could wish for -- but was overtly anti-generative in orientation, and I saw his appointment as a clear message that the University had a very different Linguistics agenda from mine. So, I started looking for another job.
I was lucky enough to be offered a Readership at Essex. A great place, with lots of committed and lively staff and an invigorating atmosphere -- a real breath of fresh air after Oxford. Essex also had a deserved reputation for encouraging innovation and championing academic freedom -- especially the freedom to teach what you want in the way you want. But my abiding memory of my first period at Essex is the endless round of parties -- especially when Yorick Wilks took over as Head of Department: his parties started at 12 noon on Saturday and finished at 12 noon on Sunday. Yorick took particular care to entertain the children at his parties: one year, he hired an ice-cream machine, and I remember one five-year-old clutching an ice-cream cornet tightly in his hand and proclaiming triumphantly 'That's number 36'.
Next, my academic career at Bangor.