by Mike Ripley
Campion stretched his long legs and made to take his leave.
‘Well, that all sounds rather jolly; I look forward to it. I always appreciate a young, fresh-faced audience, they are so innocent and often remarkably gullible, which is something I will have to rely on when it comes to my turn to spout. I don’t suppose you know what I’m expected to talk about, do you?’
‘I don’t know about the first-year intake,’ said Tinkler, his ridiculous eye-glasses aimed squarely at Campion’s face, ‘but the academic staff, all the staff in fact, will be dying to hear of your experiences at Black Dudley before the war. You are that Albert Campion, aren’t you?’
Nine Years Previously …
‘Do we have to use the word “radical” quite so much?’ asked the bishop.
It is difficult, nigh impossible, to stop an architect dead in his tracks when he is presenting his latest ‘vision’, but the bishop had come close. The rest of the enlarged steering committee no doubt felt the architect’s embarrassment, but none came to his aid.
‘But our mission is to lay down roots and to be radical is to grasp things by the root,’ said the architect nervously.
‘Are you quoting Karl Marx at me, sir?’
An unidentified voice down the table, from a bowed head with a hand across the mouth, quietly observed: ‘Should have gone with Groucho.’
The architect, as architects are wont to do when criticized (even by bishops), stuck to his guns.
‘But this new university is a radical experiment in higher education and it deserves a radical approach to its architecture. What is being created here is not an ersatz Oxbridge nor an upgraded redbrick university, but something new and exciting which is to be celebrated. I do not use the term “radical” pejoratively.’
‘I do,’ muttered the bishop under his breath.
The chairman of the county council, and pro tem chairman of the meeting, who had to work alongside the bishop more than most of those present, was seated at the far end of the long table on which was displayed a balsa-wood model of the architect’s vision of the University of Suffolk Coastal. It meant that the chairman was half-hidden by a series of khaki-coloured pointed structures.
‘I believe the building materials you propose are equally’ – he searched for a suitably conservative adjective – ‘innovative, are they not?’
The architect sensed an ally who might share his enthusiasms. ‘Concrete, Mr Chairman, will provide our building blocks; concrete poured and shaped as never before.’
‘Except by the Romans, who invented the stuff,’ growled the bishop, ‘and by the Nazis with their Atlantic Wall.’
Perhaps the architect needed more than one ally.
‘It is the fashionable means of construction,’ volunteered the chief planning officer, ‘and makes the statement that the university will be modern and forward thinking, representing all that is progressive about the decade.’
‘Exactly,’ the architect said gratefully.
‘And of course,’ said the planning officer, playing his trump card, ‘it provides a quick and cost-effective means of construction, well within the budget allocated by the government.’
From one side of the table, peering over the top of a balsa model resembling a large cylinder, came another supportive voice.
‘I estimate the basic university buildings could be open and functioning by late 1965, which would be an academic year earlier than those of the University of East Anglia.’
‘Really? That is interesting,’ said the bishop. ‘Who might you be?’
The chairman, thinking he was on safe ground, performed the introductions.
‘This, bishop, is Mr Gregor Marshall, who has recently been appointed estates officer for the campus.’
‘And what,’ asked the bishop, with an intonation worthy of Lady Bracknell, ‘is an estates officer?’
‘I am responsible for the safe and efficient running of the buildings and grounds of the new campus,’ said Mr Marshall from behind the cylindrical-shaped model, which reminded many at the meeting of the tube inside a toilet roll.
‘Are you saying you have power over this empire?’ The bishop waved a hand at the six-by-two-foot model laid out on the table before them like a bizarre ritual feast.
‘Responsibility perhaps, but hardly power,’ said Mr Marshall, glancing quickly at the architect. ‘I merely oversee the safe and efficient operation of the site once the plan is implemented and constructed.’
‘So we cannot call this a Marshall Plan?’
As the bishop was not known for making jokes, witticisms or pleasantries of any kind, not a single smile flickered across any of the faces around the table, although under the table feet shuffled and toes curled.
‘This is the architect’s plan, his vision,’ said Marshall. ‘It is my job to ensure that the lights stay on, the roofs don’t leak, the plumbing works, and the students have enough hot water for at least one bath a week once that vision becomes a solid reality.’
‘How interesting,’ said the bishop, ‘especially that latter point about bathing regularly. And you think this “vision” could be made flesh, or at least concrete, by 1965?’
‘Not all of it,’ said the architect, daring to stand and point to the model with what looked like a black fibreglass conductor’s baton, ‘but the main academic schools around the three piazzas and the Administration block should be ready and a good start made on the library and the lecture theatres.’
As he tapped a large hexagonal piece of balsa wood, the bishop leaned forward.
‘Is that the thing shaped like a threepenny bit?’
‘Yes, it is, and the students will probably nickname it so, which is no bad thing.’
‘And those pyramids? They look like a range of hills in the distance.’
‘Those will be the student residences and yes, they are pyramidal, with a flat for a member of staff or a trusted postgraduate at the peak and then each descending floor alternatively male and then female undergraduates, each floor complete with self-catering facilities. Naturally, they are of lower priority than the academic buildings, but should follow quickly as student numbers grow.’
The architect, who felt he was getting in to his stride, had a sudden crisis of confidence as the bishop got to his feet and bent forward until he loomed over the model, casting a good proportion of it into shadow. He silently reached out a hand and the architect, without question, handed over his pointing baton, which the bishop began to use like a rapier.
‘This is the library and that is the lecture-theatre complex?’
The architect murmured his agreement.
‘And these are the schools of study, based in these very Italianate piazza squares?’
‘Correct.’
‘And those pyramids in their own little Valley of the Kings towards the south of the site will be the halls of residence?’
‘In due course, yes.’
The bishop straightened up and weighed the baton in his hand before turning to face the architect.
‘So where, sir, is the chaplaincy?’
The silence round the table was deafening and it was the bishop himself who ended it.
‘Not only radical, but godless!’
TWO
The Visitor
It had been more than forty years, but Black Dudley was still as cold and unwelcoming as Mr Campion remembered it. It was, as it had always been, a great grey building, as ugly as a fortress without a twig of ivy or wisteria to soften its face. Several of the long, narrow windows and its guttering had been replaced but otherwise there were few signs of modernization, although the lower stonework showed the scars of modern life in a patina of chips and scrapes where, Campion suspected, bicycles and motorbikes had been propped up during its occupation by the military. It was one of the few signs that the site had experienced human habitation in a history which had included use as a monastery, a farmstead, a country house, the headquarters of a tank regiment during wartime and finally the nucleus
of a modern university. In essence, Black Dudley remained, as someone had famously described it: ‘a great tomb of a house’.
Mr Campion could put it off no longer. He had seen the west end of the house from the huge car park where he left his Jaguar earlier that morning, having arrived at the university ridiculously early for his lunchtime appointment with an unsettling sense of foreboding, but had chosen to stroll in entirely the opposite direction.
He could not explain his feelings of unease, though he did try to quantify them. They fell well short of the ‘someone’s just walked over my grave’ tremor, but were more concerning than the increasingly familiar ‘where did I leave my glasses?’ niggle.
Whatever the level of his discomfort, the source of it was, he was sure, Black Dudley itself, though he was not sure why. His previous visit – his first and only – had been a frantic mixture of danger and farcical drama involving ruthless gangsters intimidating an ill-matched gaggle of house-party guests, who survived the ordeal intact more by luck than judgement. Amidst the confusion there had been the bizarre ‘ritual of the dagger’, which had made Black Dudley famous in certain circles, and then a murder, which had made it infamous in much wider circles. Campion had played little part in the solution to the murder of the then-owner Colonel Gordon Coombe, and only through his private intelligence network had he learned that no one had hanged for it, though there had been several worthy candidates.
Perhaps it was the suspicion that he had not done as much as he could to see justice done which clawed at his memory, but it had been a long time ago in a society far, far away. Today was a different world and Black Dudley was no longer an isolated fortress guarding the rights and privacy of an elite few, but the nerve centre of opportunity for a new generation to enjoy a higher education that their parents had never even aspired to. On Campion’s pre-war visit to Black Dudley, it had been to a weekend house party – a fashionable and respectable pursuit for a certain stratum of society in the 1920s – but this one had always had the air of what he later termed ‘a Miss Havisham production’. Rather like Dickens’ gothic jilted bride who lured children to Satis House to play for her amusement, so the proprietor of Black Dudley, a wheelchair-bound invalid, had invited the gay young things of society down to darkest Suffolk to amuse themselves and, by extension, himself.
Still wary of approaching the house directly, Campion chose to wander once he had found a ground-floor exit from the Admin building. It was a way of finding his bearings, getting orientated; or so he told himself.
Emerging from the archway of the bridge-like building, the tubular library, raised on thick concrete pillars, was behind him. Before him was Piazza 3 which led into Piazzas 2 and 1, each of the latter built at a slight angle and a lower level to the other to disrupt a clear line of sight and introduce corners and steps to break up the blank slabs of concrete.
In Piazza 3 the university had gone to the extravagance of a central fountain, albeit of rectangular shape and concrete construction; or perhaps it was a goldfish pond, for there was no spurting jet of water and only on closer inspection did Campion discover that the reservoir of standing water in it was no more than four inches deep. As a conversation piece, it might have some point, but as a fountain it offered no competition to Rome’s Trevi and it was unlikely anyone would throw a single coin into it, let alone three.
The task of disrupting the stark outlines of the piazza and softening the bare concrete walls and plain uniform glass windows had clearly been left to the student body and Campion felt they had made a fair fist of it. Tables and chairs lined the four sides of the piazza, each draped with banners and posters announcing their provenance or intention, ranging from artisanal efforts advertising Pottery Club to suitably theatrical backdrops promoting the Drama Society. More strident, and mostly in red print, were the agitprop declarations of the Socialist Workers’ Society. Most stalls were manned by students with fashionably long hair and a kaleidoscope of sartorial designs: wide, bell-bottomed trousers for both males and females and colourful tie-dyed T-shirts being the nearest thing to a dress code. All the students looked slim and tall and Campion mused that his mother would have pronounced them ‘undernourished’ and their height as ‘unnatural’ because of the high platform heels which made their footwear somewhat precarious.
Although he had likened it to a North African street market, the Freshers’ Fair was an innocently uncommercial affair, though Campion’s nostrils did detect a peculiar scent of something botanical burning. It originated, he discovered, from the array of joss sticks and scented candles which adorned the table of something called the Transcendental Meditation Society, and Campion was so relieved he thought it churlish to question the spelling of the club’s recruiting banner.
Recruitment seemed to be the order of the day. Incredibly young, fresh-faced first-years, some wearing fragments of school uniform (but as casually as possible) and a few, even more embarrassingly, accompanied by a parent or two, shuffled from stall to stall to see if anything caught their interest and was worth signing away their social life for a term or two. Most of them, Campion felt, were actually looking for friends to share the experience of being away from home for the first time, so the actual activity on offer was probably immaterial. The Choral and Drama societies might well offer a group friendship; the sporty clubs – Rugby, Hockey and Football – would succour those of a competitive nature; the Chess and the Computing societies attracted the quieter, more cerebral among the new intake; and the Gliding Club, presumably utilizing one of the county’s many former airstrips, sought out the more adventurous. At least six political clubs and two student newspapers demanded the commitment of likely volunteers with the offer of physical exercise, friendships forged or even excitement.
Most baffling of all was the obvious, judging by the queue waiting to sign up, popularity of the Mountaineering Society, and Campion was duty-bound to ask one of the officials behind the stall, ‘Where are the mountains in Suffolk?’ only to receive the instant, non-ironic reply: ‘Scandinavia. We take the Students’ Union transit van on the ferry for a long weekend of climbing.’ When he said ‘climbing’, the official made the universal drinking sign by a tipping motion of his wrist near the mouth. Campion smiled at that, his faith in the ingenuity of young people confirmed.
The young were also, he was pleased to see, still capable of being embarrassed by their elders. At the Geology Society stand – a table covered in maps and rock samples – he spotted Beverley Gunn-Lewis deep in conversation with a short-haired young woman wearing a khaki military shirt, whom Campion presumed to be a member of staff rather than a student judging by the way ‘Bev’ was hanging on her every word. When she caught Campion’s eye, she automatically raised a hand in a childlike wave and, blushing, almost immediately dropped it back to her side. Campion raised his fedora with a flourish, nodded his head and moved on with a smile.
He was further amused while passing a table groaning under the weight of long-playing records disporting the musical stylings of virtually every American jazz legend and a smaller selection of British jazz royalty under a home-made banner stretched between two broom handles bearing the slightly redundant explanation: Jazz Club.
At first attracted by an LP featuring Fats Waller, recorded on a visit to Britain before the war, which had Scotsman George Chisholm, now better known as a television comedian, playing trombone, his eye had been caught by a small, crudely printed flyer showing a line drawing of a mountain peak from which issued a trill of musical notation. The message of the flyer was equally enigmatic: Every midnight – the Phantom Trumpeter. Was it an invitation or an advertisement? Campion could not decide, but both options appealed to his sense of fun, for surely there was mischief afoot here, and with sublime dexterity he palmed a flyer from the table and had it folded and tucked in a pocket before any of the students crowding around him realized that a thin, bespectacled old man, fifty years their senior, could move so smoothly and so quickly.
Before the steps leadi
ng down into Piazza 2 (and then the steps down to Piazza 1), Campion followed an opening in the solid wall of the classrooms and laboratories akin to a short tunnel leading out of the temporary marketplace and on to a vista of green grass rather than concrete.
Once out of the concrete rectangle of the piazza, Campion found himself on a curving shingle path. Behind him was modern concrete and glass, ahead of him a man-made lake bearded by tall reeds and grasses and clearly the home to a variety of waterfowl. Two-thirds of the way down the length of the kidney-shaped man-made lake, the path converged with two others and pointed the way to a wooden bridge which would not have looked out of place on a willow pattern plate.
It was from the middle of that arched bridge that Mr Campion got a full view of the front aspect of Black Dudley and the grey North Sea beyond. Each was as cold as the other.
In the distance, beyond the house and close to the shoreline was a small building which might have been the remains of a Roman watchtower or a World War II pillbox. Campion could not tell, and it niggled that he had no memory of seeing the structure before until he remembered that on his previous visit to Black Dudley there had been neither time nor opportunity to explore the land or the pebble beach which lay to the rear, seaward side of the house. The distant structure or building or whatever it was would also have been hidden by the trees lining the two-mile-long drive to the house from the main road. Those trees and indeed that impressive driveway were long gone either at the hand, or tank tracks, of the military, or as part of the transformation of the estate into a campus university.