The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  I don’t remember filling in application forms for any university, but I must have done. I did once have to go into my dad’s room and ask him what I should put down as his occupation, which troubled him greatly, causing a lot of damning and blasting.

  ‘You can see my occupation, God damn it. When I get out of this bed, I will show you what an occupation is. Hand me that stick. Marion! Marion! I’m getting up, where is my bloomin’ stick, damn and blast, after all the money I have brought into this damn house . . .’

  In the end, in the column for father’s occupation, I put down ‘Civil Servant (Retired)’.

  Applying to Durham had been totally decided and organised by the school. None of our parents had been to university, not even the apparently posh ones living at Stanwix, though presumably Mike’s dad, being a dentist, must have attended some sort of college. But the fathers of all my other friends, as far as I knew, were more or less white-collar workers. Ian Johnstone’s dad worked in a bank. Dicky Wilson’s dad worked at 14 MU, as did Reg’s, as had mine. I assume all of them had left school at fifteen or sixteen.

  Dicky had already got into Oxford, while Reg and Mike were going to stay on for a third year in the sixth, whatever happened in their A-levels, in order to try the Oxbridge entrance exams. But for most of the rest of us in the upper sixth, the school had guided us to places where they thought we might get in and where they had contacts, having sent pupils in the past. They knew how universities worked. Our parents didn’t.

  They had apparently been sending a lot recently to Durham, which was about our nearest university, geographically, though it was right across the country, over in the Northeast. It was a small northern city with a cathedral, so it didn’t seem as if it would be a massive cultural upheaval, compared with trying for some Big City University, like Birmingham, or even scarier London.

  My interview was with a Dr Thomson in his overcrowded suite of rooms in Durham Castle, the home of University College. When I entered, there was opera music blaring out loudly and he asked me if I liked opera. I stupidly said, ‘Oh yes, I am very fond of Rigoletto.’ I had recently been taken to a performance in Glasgow, while visiting my Uncle Jim and Aunt Linda. I found it totally boring, stiff and false. We then spent most of the interview talking about opera. I thought that is it. I will never get in.

  Some weeks later, when the A-level results came out, I went down to school to pick them up. I found I had passed all three, with a B in each of them. Then I received a letter saying I was being accepted to read for an honours degree at Durham, followed by a letter from the City of Carlisle Education Office, signed L. Charnley, Director of Education, informing me was I was being given a ‘Major Award’, which would be F + £210. I have it in front of me, and I still don’t know what the ‘F’ stood for, but it meant that all my tuition fees would be paid direct by them. I would get an annual maintenance grant in three equal portions, plus travelling expenses back and forward to university if they exceeded £7 per annum. I would also get a vacation allowance.

  I was in the money! I could not take it all in. All I knew was that everything, whatever everything might turn out to consist of, was going to be paid for. Despite having an invalid father, and no income coming into the house, I was going to go to university.

  We all went from school and waited for the pubs to open. I had half a shandy and compared notes with everyone else about how they had done and where we would all be going next year. To everyone’s amazement, Reg had failed one of his A-levels, German. It was a stupid one to have taken and he had always moaned about it. He didn’t know what to do now. Sitting for Oxford seemed pointless, as they would not be impressed by his A-level results. He didn’t know whether to resit his German at Christmas, then do his national service, get it over with, or try Oxbridge all the same. Mike had got his A-levels and was still going to stay on to try for Oxbridge entrance.

  Ian Johnstone, another of my Stanwix friends, had also passed and was coming to Durham, but to a different college. Brian Cooke, one of the two others who had come from the Creighton with me, was going to the same college at Durham. Alistair McFadden, had also passed and was going, I think, to Sheffield or Birmingham.

  So, all three of us from the Creighton had got into university in two years, at the first attempt. In fact, the other two went on to get PhDs. Brian even became a professor. So much for a second-class school for eleven-plus failures. I will always feel grateful to the Creighton, taking me in when we arrived from Scotland, and preparing me for O-levels. Then, of course, to the grammar school, especially for teaching me Latin in such a short time.

  During the long school holidays of 1954 – or should I say vacation, as I was about to go up to university (not ‘uni’, for no one used that annoying abbreviation in the fifties) – I got a summons to go and visit the minister of Warwick Road Presbyterian Church. Oh no, I groaned, not him, that boring bloke.

  He was the dour Scotsman I thought was a total pain, just like his church, where I had been dragged along for years by my mother. I was to call at his manse one evening and was given the address.

  I expected an old Victorian detached residence, but it was a dull semi in Stanwix. He chuntered on about how well I had done, getting into Durham, a credit to his congregation, blah blah. Then he handed me an envelope – in which there was £10. I was overwhelmed. I immediately took back all the awful things I had said and thought about him. Apparently, some member of the congregation had left money to give to people like me, a young member of the church, who had got into university. He hadn’t given it out for some time – because, of course, so few went to university.

  Ten pounds in 1954 is around £200 today, so it was a great present, enabling me in theory, when I got to Durham, to buy loads of books. Or, more likely, countless shandies and entrances to student hops.

  I went past that church just a few months ago. It is at the top of Warwick Road, a prime location in the middle of the city. It closed as a church a few years back. Opposite it, the Lonsdale cinema has also gone, Carlisle’s major cinema, where I attended the ABC Minors and the Beatles once played. The church is now an antiques emporium. Where I used to listen to the dreary sermons you can now buy vintage clothes, postcards, books, toys. Downstairs, where I went to Sunday school, there is now a very pleasant coffee bar. Much more useful.

  I also recently went back to my old schools. The two secondary schools I attended, the Creighton and the grammar school, had amalgamated, along with the girls’ school, the Margaret Sewell, and become a comprehensive in 1968. They still use the same buildings. The main part of the old grammar school, which I was so thrilled to enter in 1952, is now the school’s sixth form and has 350 pupils. We had about sixty.

  There were black leather armchairs in the corridors, with pupils lolling around in them. Mr Banks would have brought out his whacking strap for that.

  It’s sad in a way that the old grammar school is no more, the name wiped out after all these centuries, but, on the other hand, I am all for the comprehensive system. Too many lives were stunted by that awful, divisive eleven-plus exam.

  15

  UP AT DURHAM

  With some of the money from the church I bought a trunk, in which I packed all my stuff for the term ahead. It felt like Tom Brown’s School Days, having one’s own trunk, on which I pasted a huge label saying E.H. Davies, University College, The Castle, Durham. No postcodes in those days. I thought I should put my official name, as that was the one on my grant letter from Carlisle education department.

  I then went down to the railway station, paid some money, and a British Railways truck came to our front door and took the trunk away. It then got transported to Durham where it was dumped on the ground floor of the Castle Keep. It was a good system, and not too expensive. Presumably the middle classes, who had their own car, took trunks and their loved ones all the way to university.

  I did not have many clothes and only a couple of pairs of underpants, rather tatty. For many years I never wore any
, not knowing they existed, or my mother had never been told about them. Have I made that up? Vests, I had loads of vests, as grandmothers and aunts sent them for Christmas. I also took my father’s overcoat and his shirts and collars, the ones you put on with a stud at the front and back and were hell to wear as they stuck into your Adam’s apple. He was clearly never going to need his clothes again. The ambitions of male teenagers in the early fifties was to be old enough, i.e. eighteen, and to look and dress like your dad, proving you were now grown-up.

  I went on the train with several others from school, three of them going to the same college as me, while one of them, Ian, my friend from Stanwix, was going to St Chad’s and another to St Cuthbert’s.

  My trunk was there when I arrived, among dozens of other trunks which had landed from all parts of the country. I found my room number on a list and got someone to help me up to the room I was allocated. Then I helped him with his trunk. My room was miles up, on the top floor of the Keep, along endless stone corridors, all cold, and then up cold stone staircases. You entered through double doors, made of ancient oak, an outer and inner door. I learned later that if you closed the outer door, it meant your ‘oak was up’ and you did not want to be disturbed because you were studying hard. Or similarly busy.

  It turned out to contain two rooms, a large sitting room, plus a separate bedroom. Lucky me, I thought, having all this, after all my life sharing a room with my brother. I went in and found a figure in spectacles sitting at the window looking out across Durham towards the railway station, from whence I had just come. He had a notebook and a stopwatch and was busy writing down train times and details. Oh my God, I had not realised I had a roommate, Hugh from Peterborough. I had been stuck with a trainspotter with whom I would have to share a study and a bedroom for the next year. Bringing girls back, if I ever struck lucky, was going to be awkward, not to say embarrassing. Would he keep notes, write down the times?

  University College, Durham was situated in Durham Castle, although it also had other buildings around Palace Green. It was the first of the Durham colleges, founded in 1832, which made Durham the third oldest university in the whole of England, after Oxford and Cambridge. A long time after. All the same, it felt suitably ancient and traditional, located in a building dating back to Norman times. It had courtyards and a grand hall, towers and galleries, with college servants and a High Table butler, and was totally residential, aping the Oxbridge pattern, not that I had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. We had a bedder to make our beds and clean our room, a motherly local woman with a very strong Geordie accent which I could not understand.

  You had a subject tutor you saw each week for whom you wrote essays, and also a moral tutor you saw once a term when he invited you to his rooms for a sherry party. I had never had sherry before, except the horrible sweet British stuff that my mother sometimes bought at Christmas and kept in our cocktail cabinet till it turned to sugar.

  There was a college buttery, beside the Great Hall, where you could buy bread and milk and eggs and basic essentials as well as college sherry – bottles bearing the college’s coat of arms, awfully smart. Best of all, you did not have to pay cash. You could put it on your battels, sign for it and settle up at the end of term.

  The servants addressed us as ‘mister’ and the tutors referred to us as gentlemen. So unlike our dear life back on the council estate.

  We were all members of the JCR – the junior common room – which meant the undergraduate body of the college. The common room itself was a rather nice large sitting room with sofas and chairs, the morning newspapers, a record player and suggestions book, where clever clogs would write long if rather silly things.

  Having unpacked my trunk on that first day, said a few words to Hugh, in between trains, I came down to look for the common room. I went in slowly, looking around, not sure if I had the right place. As a newcomer, you kept quiet, let the second and third years make all the jokes, read the papers first, decide what music would be played. If you fell foul of some rule or tradition, you’d be penalised for your transgression and have to pay a sconce, which often meant drinking a bottle of wine while upside down or some such juvenile jape.

  There were regular JCR meetings, run totally by the undergraduate body, with the Senior Man in charge and the JCR secretary making notes. It seemed so formal, with gentlemen begging to differ, making points of order, moving on to item number three on the agenda. I had never come across this sort of committee-like organisation before, yet it was all being run by students like me, lads only a year or so older, as opposed to dons or proper grown-ups. Several of the students did seem incredibly grown-up to me. And of course many were, having done their national service first, seen the world. There was also a handful of public school boys who were so fluent, so well spoken, so clever. They just seemed to stand up and out it all came. Was it a trick – how had they learned it?

  I thought it was rather wonderful and quaint, if rather elitist and pretentious. I didn’t know at the time, having no experience of Oxford or Cambridge, that this sort of residential collegiate life was a straight pinch from Oxbridge.

  I discovered many years later that one of the best-known, most amusing, most successful nineteenth-century books about Oxford undergraduate life, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green by Cuthbert Bede, was in fact written by a Durham student, not an Oxford student. His real name was Edward Bradley (1827–1889), a clergyman and novelist who had been at Castle in the 1840s. The clue was in his pseudonym – Cuthbert after St Cuthbert and Bede after the Venerable Bede, two of Durham’s best-known icons. (Cuthbert’s shrine is still in the cathedral, as are the bones of Bede.)

  In 1954 when I arrived at Durham, there were nine colleges in all: University College (known as Castle), Hatfield, St Cuthbert’s, St John’s, St Chad’s and Bede – all for men – then there were three for women, St Mary’s, St Hild’s and St Aidan’s. The total student population of the Durham colleges was 1,500 – all of them residential. We were officially Durham Colleges in the University of Durham, because the university also contained King’s College, Newcastle. (A few years later, Newcastle became an independent university in its own right.) We had nothing to do with Newcastle. That was a much larger urban, redbrick, modern, city centre college, somewhere miles to the north. We considered ourselves a cut above them, classier all round.

  We were told, and believed, that our perfect situation and residential system was the ideal, how a varsity should look and feel. We were on a peninsula in the middle of an ancient city, with the River Wear making a loop all the way round, cutting us off inside it. The cathedral and castle, most of the colleges and ancient university buildings, were clustered in the centre of the peninsula, around Palace Green, a large open, grass space in the middle on which you were not supposed to walk. University policemen, known as bulldogs, could fine you for walking on it.

  Those who felt intimidated by it all, or reacted against it, considering it unreal and phoney, went around saying that Durham was an ivory tower, cut off from the real world. I felt proud and privileged and fortunate to be there, but rather overwhelmed. Despite having friends with me from Carlisle, and the fact that there were two or three Old Carliols in the years above, I seemed to be on my own most of the time and a bit lost. Everyone seemed cleverer and more confident. I wondered how long it would take to understand how it all worked . . .

  You had to wear gowns for all lectures, when seeing your tutor and for formal dinner in the Great Hall in the evening. All meals were in the same hall, and the first years all sat together. The High Table was at the top of the room, where the dons sat together and were served by their own uniformed butler called Eddie, who tended to mince about, make catty remarks, was very funny and camp. He was the first homosexual I’d ever become aware of.

  My main feeling in those early weeks was one of elation, anticipation and hope. I felt for the first time in my life that I was starting something new – at the same time as everyone else was starting something n
ew. In Dumfries, I had seemed out of it, arriving from England. At the Creighton, I had just arrived from Scotland. At the grammar school, I had always felt an outsider. Now I felt on equal terms with all the others, beginning a new life, all together.

  When eventually I got to know the people in my year, most were very much like me – from northern grammar schools, in Tyneside, Yorkshire and Lancashire, most of them with regional accents. As I had. There were some from the Midlands and London, but mostly they seemed to be northerners.

  Unlike mine, their family backgrounds were mainly lower middle class; their parents owned their own houses. But everyone I knew was first generation university. The public school boys had stood at the JCR meeting, but there were very few of them. One had been at Winchester and one at Fettes in Scotland. Today, around half are privately educated, or the sons and daughters of professional parents, all of them graduates themselves. I wonder if the council house comprehensive kids feel out of it. In 1954 I was never really aware of any class divisions. The differences between us were mainly regional.

  There was, however, one significant group of people with chips on their shoulders. These were the people who had failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge. At their schools they had been academic high-flyers, tipped to sail through A-levels and get an Oxbridge scholarship, but, at the final hurdle, they had not made it. For whatever reason. Possibly some lacked the supposed or perceived spark needed to stand out in an Oxbridge interview, or the confidence and fluency that a better public school would have given them. One or two maintained they had got into Oxbridge, but had opted for Durham instead because they’d been offered a scholarship. I never knew there was such a thing, but the college did turn out to have organ scholars and classics scholars who seemed to have higher status.

  For the first few weeks, some of the Oxbridge rejects did mope around with a slightly disgruntled yet superior air, as if they were too good for this place. I couldn’t understand it. Having not tried Oxbridge, or applied to anywhere else, I felt Durham was totally wonderful and marvellous. Whether Durham would feel that about me remained to be discovered.