by Tom Sharpe
‘He won’t drink anything,’ he whispered. ‘He won’t say anything. He just sits there smoking that filthy pipe.’ Carrington looked at Skullion with some alarm. Visions of Skullion drying up in the middle of the interview began to seem a distinct possibility.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Skullion looked at him sourly. ‘Never felt better,’ he said. ‘But I can’t say I like the company.’ He glowered at the young man.
Carrington escorted him out into the corridor. ‘Poofter,’ said Skullion as they went up in the lift. Carrington shuddered. There was something disturbing about the Head Porter’s new attitude. He lacked the eagerness to please that seemed to affect most people who came to be interviewed, a nervous geniality that made them pliable and stimulated in Carrington a dominance he was unable to satisfy outside the artificial environs of the studio. If anyone was likely to dry up, he admitted to himself, it seemed more likely to be Cornelius Carrington than Skullion. He ushered the Porter into the brilliantly lit studio and sat him in the chair before hurrying out and having two quick slugs of whisky. By the time he had returned Skullion was telling a young make-up woman to keep her paws to herself.
Carrington took his seat and smiled at Skullion. ‘One thing you must try to avoid is kicking the mike,’ he said. Skullion said he’d try not to. The cameras moved round him. Young men came and went. In the next room behind a large darkened window the producer and the technicians arranged themselves at the console. Carrington on Cambridge was on the air. 9.25. Peak-hour viewing.
*
In Porterhouse dinner was over. It had, for a change, been an equable affair without any of the verbal infighting that usually occurred whenever the Fellows were gathered together. Instead a strange goodwill prevailed. Even the Master dined in Hall and the Dean sitting on his right managed to refrain from being offensive. It was as though a truce had been declared.
‘I’ve done my best to see that more influential members of the Porterhouse Society have been informed about the programme,’ he told the Master.
‘Excellent,’ said Sir Godber. ‘I’m sure we all owe you a debt of gratitude, Dean.’ The Dean forbore from sniggering. ‘One does one’s best,’ he said. ‘After all it’s for the good of the College. We should get one or two fairly healthy subscriptions for the restoration fund as a result of young Carrington’s efforts.’
‘I found him a most sympathetic man,’ said Sir Godber. ‘Unusually perceptive, I thought, for …’ He was about to say an old Porterhouse man but thought better of it.
‘Flirty Bertie, they used to call him, when he was an undergraduate,’ shouted the Chaplain.
‘Ah well, he seems to have changed a good deal since those days,’ said Sir Godber.
‘They ducked him in the fountain,’ the Chaplain continued. It was the only ominous remark of the whole meal.
Afterwards they sat in the Combination Room over coffee and cigars, glancing occasionally at the large colour television set that had been installed for the occasion. At nine they switched it on and watched the news, while Arthur, the waiter, was told to bring some more brandy. Sir Cathcart arrived at the invitation of the Dean and when The Carrington Programme began all those who had some part in it were present in the Combination Room. All except Skullion, who sat in the studio with the suggestion of a smile softening imperceptibly the harsh lines of his face.
In the Combination Room Cornelius Carrington’s voice broke through the last bars of the Eton Boating Song which had accompanied the opening shots of the Backs and King’s College Chapel. ‘To many people Cambridge is one of the great centres of learning, the birthplace of science and of culture. Here the great English poets had their education. Milton was a scholar of Christ’s College.’ The interior of Milton’s room appeared upon the screen. ‘Wordsworth and Tennyson, Byron and Coleridge were all Cambridge men.’ The camera skipped briefly from an upper window in St John’s to Trinity and Jesus, before settling on the seated figure of Tennyson in Trinity Chapel. ‘Here, Newton,’ Newton’s statue glowed on the screen, ‘first discovered the laws of gravity, and Rutherford, the father of the atom bomb, first split the atom.’ A corner of the Cavendish Laboratory, discreetly photographed to avoid any sign of modernity, appeared.
‘I must say friend Carrington has a way of leaping the centuries fairly rapidly,’ said the Dean.
‘What’s the Eton Boating Song got to do with King’s?’ asked Sir Cathcart.
Carrington continued. Cambridge was the Venice of the Fens. Shots of the Bridge of Sighs. Punts. Grantchester. Undergraduates pouring out of the lecture rooms in Mill Lane. Carrington’s emollient voice proclaimed the glory that was Cambridge.
‘But tonight we are going to look at a college that is unique even in the unchanging world of Cambridge.’
The Master sat forward and stared at the College crest on the tower above the main gate. Around him the Fellows stirred uneasily in their chairs. The invasion of their privacy had begun. And it continued. Carrington asked his audience to consider the anachronism that was his old college. The balm had left his voice. A new strident note of alarm had crept in suggesting to his audience that what they were about to see might well shock and surprise them. There was an implication that Porterhouse was something more than a mere college and that the crisis which had developed there was somehow symbolic of the choice that confronted the country. In the Combination Room the Fellows gaped at the screen in amazement. Even Sir Godber shivered at the new emphasis. Malaise was hardly a word he’d expected to hear applied to the condition of the College and when, after floating through Old Court and the Screens, the camera zoomed in on the plastic sheeting of the Tower there was a unanimous gasp in the Combination Room.
‘What drove a brilliant young scholar to take his life and that of an elderly woman in this strange fashion?’ Carrington asked, and proceeded to describe the circumstances of Zipser’s death in a manner which fully justified his earlier warning that viewers must expect to be shocked and surprised.
‘Good God,’ shouted Sir Cathcart, ‘what’s the bastard trying to do?’ The Dean closed his eyes and Sir Godber took a gulp of brandy.
‘I asked the Dean his opinion,’ Carrington continued and the Dean opened his eyes to peer at his own face as it appeared on the screen.
‘It’s my opinion that young men come up today with their heads filled with anarchist nonsense. They seem to think they can change the world by violent means,’ the Dean heard himself telling the world.
‘He did nothing of the sort,’ shouted the Dean. ‘He never mentioned Zipser!’
Carrington issued his denial. ‘So you see this as an act of self-destructive nihilism on the part of a young man who had been working too hard?’ he asked.
‘Porterhouse has always been a sporting college. In the past we have tried to achieve a balance between scholarship and sport,’ the Dean replied.
‘He never put that question to me,’ yelled the real Dean. ‘He’s taking my words out of context.’
‘You don’t see this as an act of sexual aberration?’ Carrington interrupted.
‘Sexual promiscuity plays no part in college life,’ the Dean asserted.
‘You’ve certainly changed your tune, Dean,’ shouted the Chaplain. ‘The first time I’ve heard you say that.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ screamed the Dean. ‘I said …’
‘Hush,’ said Sir Godber, ‘I’m trying to hear what you did say.’
The Dean turned purple in the darkness as Carrington continued.
‘I interviewed the Chaplain of Porterhouse in the Fellows’ Garden,’ he told the world. The Dean and Bishop Firebrace had disappeared to be replaced by the rockeries and elms and two tiny figures walking on the lawn.
‘I never realized the Fellows’ Garden was so large,’ said the Chaplain, peering at his remote figure.
‘It’s distorted by the wide-angle lens …’ Sir Cathcart began to explain.
‘Distorted?’ snarled the Dean. �
��Of course it’s distorted, the whole bloody programme’s a distortion.’
The camera zoomed in on the Chaplain.
‘The College used to have a brothel, you know. People like to pretend it was a nunnery but it was actually a whorehouse. In the fifteenth century it was quite the normal thing,’ the Chaplain’s voice echoed across the lawn. ‘Burnt down in 1541. A great pity really. Mind you I’m not saying there weren’t nuns. The Catholics have always been broadminded about such things.’
‘So much for the ecumenical movement,’ muttered the Senior Tutor.
‘So you don’t agree with the Dean that …’ Carrington began.
‘Agree with the Dean, dear me no,’ the Chaplain shouted. ‘Never did. Peculiar fellow, the Dean. All those photographs of young men in his room. And he’s getting on in years now. We all are. We all are.’ The camera moved away slowly, leaving the Chaplain a distant figure in a landscape with his voice growing fainter like the distant cawing of rooks.
The Chaplain turned to the Senior Tutor. ‘That was rather nice. Seeing oneself on the screen like that. Most enlightening.’ In the corner a strangled sound issued from the Dean. The Senior Tutor was breathing hard too, and staring at the river at Fen Ditton. An eight was swinging round Grassy Corner and an aged youth in a blazer and cap cycled busily after them. As the eight approached and disappeared the screen filled with the perspiring face of the Senior Tutor. He stopped and dismounted his bicycle. Carrington’s voice interrupted his panting.
‘You’ve been coach now for twenty years and in that time you must have seen some extraordinary changes in Porterhouse. What do you think of the type of young man coming up to Cambridge today?’
‘I’ve seen some lily-livered swine in my time,’ the Senior Tutor bawled, ‘but nothing to equal this. A more disgraceful exhibition of gutlessness I’ve never seen.’
‘Would you put this down to pot-smoking?’ Carrington enquired.
‘Of course,’ said the Senior Tutor, and promptly disappeared from the screen.
In the Combination Room the Senior Tutor was speechless with rage. ‘He didn’t ask me any questions like that. He wasn’t even there,’ he managed to gasp. ‘He told me they were simply going to film me on the river.’
‘It’s poetic licence,’ said the Chaplain, and relapsed into silence as Carrington and the Senior Tutor reappeared in Hall and strolled between the tables. The camera focused on the several portraits of obese Masters before returning to the Senior Tutor.
‘Porterhouse has enjoyed a long reputation for good living,’ Carrington said. ‘Would you say that the sort of expense involved in providing caviar and truffled duck pâté was really necessary for scholastic achievement?’
‘I think much of our success has been due to the balanced diet we provide in Porterhouse,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘You can’t expect people to do well unless they are adequately fed.’
‘But I understand that you spend fairly large sums on the annual Feast. Would you say that £2,000 on a single meal was a fair estimate?’ Carrington enquired.
‘We do have an endowed kitchen,’ the Senior Tutor admitted.
‘And I suppose the College makes a large contribution to Oxfam,’ said Carrington.
‘That’s none of your damned business,’ shouted the Senior Tutor. The camera followed his figure out of Hall.
As the devastating disclosures continued the Fellows sat dumbfounded in the Combination Room. Carrington waxed eloquent on Porterhouse’s academic shortcomings, interviewed several undergraduates who sat with their backs to the camera to preserve their anonymity and claimed that they were afraid they would be sent down if their identities were known to the Senior Members of the College. They accused the College authorities of being hidebound and violently reactionary in their politics, and … On and on it went. Sir Godber put his case for social compassion as the hallmark of the educated mind and suddenly the scene changed. The images of Cambridge disappeared and the Fellows found themselves staring lividly at Skullion who sat firmly in his seat in the studio. The camera switched to Carrington. ‘In the interviews we have already shown tonight we have heard a good deal to justify, and some would say to condemn, the role of institutions such as Porterhouse. We have heard the old traditions defended. We have heard privilege attacked by the progressive young and we have heard a great deal about social compassion, but now we have in the studio a man who more than any other has an intimate knowledge of Porterhouse and whose knowledge extends over four decades. Now you, Mr Skullion, have been for some forty years the Porter of Porterhouse.’
Skullion nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You first became a porter in 1928?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in 1945 you were made Head Porter?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So really you’ve been in the College long enough to have seen some quite remarkable changes?’ Skullion nodded obediently.
‘And now I understand you’ve been sacked?’ said Carrington. ‘Have you any idea why this has happened?’
Skullion paused while the camera moved in for a close-up.
‘I have been dismissed because I objected to the installation of a contraceptive dispenser in the College for the use of the young gentlemen,’ Skullion told three million viewers. There was a pause while the camera swung back to Carrington, who was looking suitably shocked and surprised.
‘A contraceptive dispenser?’ he asked. Skullion nodded. ‘A contraceptive dispenser. I don’t think it’s right and proper for Senior Members of a college like Porterhouse to encourage young men to behave like that.’
‘Oh my God,’ said the Master. Beside him the Senior Tutor was staring at the screen with bulging eyes while the Dean appeared to be in the throes of some appalling paroxysm. Throughout the Combination Room the Fellows gazed at Skullion as if they were seeing him for the first time, as if the caricature that they had known had suddenly come alive by virtue of the very apparatus which separated him from them. Skullion’s presence filled the room. Even Sir Cathcart took note of the change and sat rigidly to attention. Beside him the Bursar whimpered. Only the Chaplain remained unmoved. ‘Skullion’s remarkably fluent,’ he said, ‘and making some interesting points too.’
Carrington too seemed to have shrunk to a less substantial role. ‘You think the attitude of the authorities is wrong?’ he asked lamely.
‘Of course it’s wrong,’ said Skullion. ‘Young people shouldn’t be taught to think that they’ve a right to do what they want. Life isn’t like that. I didn’t want to be a porter. I had to be one to earn my living. Just because a man’s been to Cambridge and got a degree doesn’t mean life’s going to treat him any different. He’s still got to earn a living, hasn’t he?’
‘Quite,’ said Carrington, desperately trying to think of some way of getting the discussion back to the original topic. ‘And you think—’
‘I think they’ve lost their nerve,’ said Skullion. ‘They’re frightened. They call it permissiveness. It isn’t that. It’s cowardice.’
‘Cowardice?’ Carrington had begun to dither.
‘It’s the same all over. Give them degrees when they haven’t done any work. Let them walk about looking like unwashed scarecrows. Don’t send them down when they take drugs. Let them come in at all hours of the night and have women in their rooms. When I first started as a porter they’d send an undergrad down as soon as look at him and quite right too, but now, now they want them to have an FL machine in the gents to keep them happy. And what about queers?’ Carrington blanched.
‘You ought to know about that,’ said Skullion. ‘Used to duck them in the fountain, didn’t they? Yes, I remember the night they ducked you. And quite right too. It’s all cowardice. Don’t talk to me about permissiveness.’ Carrington gazed frantically at the programme controller behind the dark glass but the programme remained on the air.
‘And what about me?’ Skullion asked the camera in front of him. ‘Worked for a pittance for forty year
s and they sack me for nothing. Is that fair? You want permissiveness? Well, why can’t I be permitted to work? A man’s got a right to work, hasn’t he? I offered them money to keep me on. You ask the Bursar if I didn’t offer him my savings to help the College out.’
Carrington grasped at the straw. ‘You offered the Bursar your life savings to help the College out?’ he asked with as much enthusiasm as the recent revelations about his sex life had left him.
‘He said they couldn’t afford to keep me on as Porter,’ Skullion explained. ‘He said they were having to sell Rhyder Street to pay for the repairs to the Tower.’
‘And Rhyder Street is where you live?’
‘It’s where all the College servants live. They’ve got no right to turn us out of our own homes.’
In the Combination Room the Master and Fellows of Porterhouse watched the reputation of the College disintegrate as Skullion pressed on with his charges. This was no longer Carrington on Cambridge. Skullion had taken over with a truer and more forceful nostalgia. While Carrington sat pale and haggard beside him, Skullion ranged far and wide. He spoke of the old virtues, of courage and loyalty, with an inarticulate eloquence that was authentically English. He praised gentlemen long dead and castigated men still alive. He asserted the value of tradition in college life against the shoddy innovations of the present. He expressed his admiration for scholarship and deplored research. He extolled wisdom and refused to confuse it with knowledge. Above all he claimed the right to serve and with it the right to be treated fairly. There was no petulant whine about Skullion’s appeal. He held a mirror up to a mythical past and in a million homes men and women responded to the appeal.
By the time the programme ended, the switchboard at the BBC was jammed with calls from people all over the country supporting Skullion in his crusade against the present.
18