This was the real reason they discourage nepotism. The experience is too traumatic for the older relative. George’s room had the same bed, pushed back under a sloping double cupboard, with the same adjustable shelving above. There was the same desk with the same wide, shaded anglepoise light. The same plate-glass window ran along the width of the north side looking out on to the same roof garden, where the same shrubs now seemed surreally overgrown, reinforcing the impression that it was a looking-glass dream, because when I say ‘the same’ I don’t mean it in a comparative sense, I mean it in its absolute sense. Why hadn’t they, at the least, changed the colour scheme or replaced the lino?
When I was at Emmanuel, according to ‘the alternative guide’ for college undergraduates, I flooded the North Court passages after an accident with a washing machine. (Heh, heh.) But this was completely untrue. Surely I had felt nothing for my college? Emmanuel had merely become ‘a place to sleep, hadn’t it? I sneeringly rejected the beery Junior Common Room and its habitués, dressed like a Marks and Spencer knitwear catalogue. I pompously spurned everything that reminded me of school (the sports teams, the head of the river, the rowing bumpery-frumpery, the college societies, and the Master’s wife, with her well-thumbed copy of Who’s Who resting on her nest of tables). My college scarf had lain for years at the bottom of the architect-designed chest of drawers, wrapping up some china. So why was it affecting me so oddly now?
‘We should go.’ My wife was standing by the door, having said her goodbye to George.
‘Yes. Do you want to meet later? Anything you need? Hadn’t we better get you a kettle?’ I was grasping at utensils. ‘Shall we meet you for tea?’
‘Perhaps.’
We went out via Front Court and I started to slow my steps. There were the same posters for what looked like the same productions of The Bald Prima Donna. I furtively glanced at the stairs up to the pigeon-holes. I had to fight a residual urge to go up and look — as if there might still be something in mine. No, no. This was ridiculous, but what my wife could not understand, and what I could not admit, was that I had never finished whatever it was that had started here. I was standing in the cloisters looking across the square of grass at the yellow stone hall and trying to leap across thirty years, but the leap that I was trying to make was forward, to accept the present. Thirty years? My father once told me that he had never felt a day older since he had been at university.
‘What on earth is the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’ My son had usurped my life. He had thirty years on me, stretching ahead of him. This was where my own life had suddenly become what it had never been before: exciting. It had remained exciting, but never as much fun. I was fiendishly envious of my own flesh and blood. ‘We can get a kettle in Robert Sayle, if it’s still there,’ I said.
In 1972, my mother was impressed by my place at Cambridge. My father, apparently, had been bright enough and qualified for Oxford, but the War intervened, or his father died (the exact circumstances varied), and he had had to stay at home and become a doctor in Cardiff. Mummy had to admit that she wasn’t quite sure what it was all ultimately ‘for’. She hoped, I think, that I would eventually become as successful as David Frost, the Cambridge graduate who most seemed to epitomize varsity success amongst the middle classes in the late sixties.
At school, only the senior chaplain, ‘Sexy’ Gardiner, ever stopped the roar of the qualification machinery for long enough to allow the Oxbridge factory to examine itself. ‘Why are you all going to university?’ he asked, in the middle of a general studies lesson. We stared sullenly back at him. Eventually Horth stuck up a hand. ‘Because you told us to,’ he said.
There was no ‘beyond’ Oxbridge. It was the edge of the flat world. This was the era of The Graduate, with that party scene when the man comes up to Dustin Hoffman and says, ‘I have one word to say to you — “plastics”.
Nobody even said ‘plastics’ to us. Nobody said ‘law’, or ‘civil service’ or ‘City of London’ either. Nobody said anything beyond ‘get a degree.’
At Cambridge I was to bump into a few seemingly deluded would-be rulers of the country wearing waistcoats who liked to bray loudly and publicly at either basset hounds or rowers or the Union. (They ended up editing major newspapers and running political parties and were not deluded at all.) But they were not us. We had no sense of destiny, only mild shame. How could we do anything other than blush and groan slightly when our mothers introduced us to some pompous friend with the dreadful words ‘He’s going up to Cambridge next year’? We learned to mutter to our contemporaries, ‘I’m at college.’
We were, after all, products of the Melody Maker and NME, of earnest endeavours to persuade teachers that the lyrics of Procul Harem were the equal of Shelley, that the bass rhythms of Deep Purple were as musically complex as Scarlatti, and that Bob Dylan was as clever as Auden (and decidedly more important because he was populist, egalitarian and youthful). A whole generation had been corralled and seduced by the marketing ambitions of a self-important youth culture. Nick Hornby was somewhere over the park in Jesus, preparing for an early career writing for music magazines.
‘My father tells me you were at Emmanuel,’ a different famous novelist I interviewed for Bookworm once said.
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Seventy—two.’
‘Oh.’ He looked bemused. ‘Same year as me. What did you read?’
‘English.’
‘Gosh, same subject.’
I was in a different set. ‘Funny we never met.’
‘Yes, well, I spent most of my time at Cambridge lying in my room smoking dope,’ he said.
In Brideshead, they drink themselves insensible in panelled halls. In The Adventures of Verdant Greene, Verdant spends most of his waking hours chatting up shop girls. Betjeman never did any work. Byron ran up debts furnishing his rooms. Peter Cook spent most of his time in London, writing revues for Kenneth Williams. But they were all self-consciously, unashamedly, at Cambridge or Oxford. Not us. We were the egalitarian generation. The ‘Oxbridge seventies lot’ rather scrupulously avoided any national presence until Stephen, Emma and Hugh came along and were clever in public again. For years, the most outwardly famous product of Cambridge of my era was ‘the Cambridge Rapist’.
There is an undistinguished triangle of open space, just off the river, at the corner of Grantchester Road. In 1972, my mother drove me off the main A11 and through the suburbs to start my own first term and it was this bit, ringed with low Victorian villas, rows of almshouses and the tall trees of the meadows by the river (not collegiate Cambridge at all) that spuriously hit me with the promise of cloistered academia.
There were enough bicyclists wrapped in scarves, purposefully crossing the green on old-fashioned machines, enough breezes picking up the first autumn leaves, enough rays of sun, weak in that high east-of-England white sky (shining on distant cupolas and spires) to fool me into believing that I had immediately captured the essence of the university. I would become a tweed-clad, mole-like scholar myself, studying in my private world of difficult books, hurrying like all these others to lectures, supping the odd half pint of beer but otherwise burying myself in the routine contentment of serious study.
Over the next five years I spent in Cambridge I was intermittently seduced by this fleeting madness again. The town encourages it. The Victorian leafy, bricky fustian could sometimes wrap me up like an old don’s cardigan, for, oh, at least a minute at a time.
I got a gown. I had a bicycle. I was shown my room in South Court. Then I went up those stairs for the first time and visited my pigeon-hole. It was already stuffed with instructions on supervisions and lectures, which all seemed to start in a week, but it was also crammed with dozens of advertisements for extra—curricular activity of a vaguely Christian nature, and one hand-written note.
‘Need someone to play a part in the Rivals. Interested? Get in touch, Douglas Adams.’
Douglas had been
in the year above me in school. Like me, an enthusiastic schoolboy actor, he had, like me, never been given much to do. But I had got to know Douglas sitting in the changing rooms waiting to go on as the Bloody Captain or Julius Caesar. In the sixth form, along with a bloke called Paul Johnstone, who subsequently threatened to sue Douglas for calling him the worst poet in the world, he had started a thing called ‘Artsphere’ (‘Fartsphere’ Mr Baron winningly called it). It put on concerts. My last school memory of Douglas had been of him plucking at a Donovan song on a shadily lit platform in the Memorial Hall. He had so many self-conscious twiddles in his guitar finger-picking technique that it went on for about twenty minutes and the lighting crew ran out of colourful gobos to match his invention.
I went straight to Heffers and bought a copy of The Rivals. Douglas was playing Sir Lucius O’Trigger. It was a character and what’s more it had more than six or seven lines. Fag, the servant, had more lines than I was accustomed to as well, but they were, thankfully, in separate gobbets. Perhaps I could learn them without getting them wrong. I hurried off to a rehearsal room in St Catherine’s College and read some of these lines to a marvellously clever, older woman director called Sue Limb. (She was probably twenty-one.) She and her partner, Roy Porter, appeared to be fully grown adults and yet somehow they were my equals — a novel concept to me then. Roy, who was reassuringly scruffy, had such pertinent ideas that the process of getting them out made him twitch spasmodically.
Whoever had been playing my part had run into a little spot of bother with his tutors, but they skated over that, and seemed perfectly willing to pp tolerate me as a baby. Everybody in the production looked as sophisticated as shit. Some were even postgraduates. Some were third-year students with important-sounding titles in university theatrical bodies I had not yet heard of. This was more entertaining than sitting in the bar with the new fresher intake watching a geek demonstrate how he could write his signature backwards.
Towards the end of the week, I managed to fit in a preliminary meeting with my tutor, Gerard Evans. After some chat about settling in, he asked me if I had any extra-curricular ambitions.
‘Well, I’m interested in the theatre side,’ I said.
He flinched. ‘Yes. My best advice would be to possibly get involved in a little college production and then next year, or perhaps in the summer term, you might audition for something at the ADC.’
‘Oh, I’m already in something that’s on at the ADC,’ I chirruped blithely.
He didn’t groan. He was too dignified to make noises. But if the eyebrow he raised had been capable of a sound, it would have come out as a sort of extended, low creak. He looked into the middle distance.
‘Well … In my experience the amateur theatre can become rather demanding on an undergraduate’s time,’ he said. ‘Some people do rather overdo things. I would caution against letting it rule your life.’
Yes, but what did he know?
Eventually, towards the end of my first week, in between feverishly rehearsing The Rivals, I was able to squeeze in a meeting with my teachers — though we quickly learned to differentiate between teaching as we had understood it at school and teaching as it was practised at Cambridge. Our first supervision was a meeting with two crazed enthusiasts for the historical process. They seemed to have descended from some heady and complicated research undertaking to spend an hour trying to focus on the requirements of a group of defective novitiates.
Both of them were relatively new to the process of taking supervisions. This accounted for their enthusiasm. (The rather more usual distracted weariness was left to others later.) They divided us into two sets, alighted seemingly at random on a topic for our first essay and then vied with each other to suggest reading lists. A spew of titles and articles gushed forth, running to thousands of pages. It was followed by a colossal fountain of supplementary reading. ‘Oh, while you’re there, have a look at …’, ‘Actually I suppose you ought to read …’, ‘Don’t bother with the opening three chapters, but do look at his other book … If you can manage the original French …’, ‘I tell you what is rather fun …’Transported by the possibilities, they threw in dozens of works and, eventually, entire oeuvres. (‘You should try to get up on Althusser generally over the next few weeks. Walter Benjamin is essential. I suppose you’ve all read Das Kapital. Engels is good on revolution in general. Read him tonight.’)
Lectures? Lectures were more knotty. ‘The obvious ones, of course,’ though we were cautioned against paying serious attention to some of the leading academics of the university. On the other hand, it was thought a good idea to attend lectures quite unrelated to our subject, in disciplines far removed from our papers, just as part of our general education.
I reeled into South Court feeling slightly queasy. I was tasked to read three library shelves more than I had ever read before, over the next five days. History had become rather more than a dilettante exercise in hypothetical surmise. History was a science. It was an adjunct of dialectic. I had better try and find out what the hell that meant.
But other differences between school and university quickly became apparent. Having been hosed down by a water-cannon of sources, we were then left entirely to our own devices. We had no obligation to re-encounter these terrifying founts of bibliography for another whole week. Nonetheless, I bicycled straight to the James Stirling faculty library and I arrived for my evening rehearsal carrying a sack of books. This, in itself, raised a few eyebrows.
By the end of my first term, I had realized that morning lectures could be skipped and nobody was going to find out. (Or, at least not until I showed my miserable ignorance in an examination paper.) I diligently applied myself to the reading-lists until I was expert at filleting them, skilled at avoiding the longer paragraphs and hugely practised at skipping any detailed bilge presented as research. This released time not merely for rehearsals but for other important undergraduate skills: lying in bed until lunchtime and habitually staying up all night, which was when essays finally came to be written with the aid of Pro-Plus, the caffeine tablet.
But what the hell! The exams were a gratifying two years away. My college was staffed by revolutionary historians under the tutelage of Roderick Floud. They decided that examinations were retrogressive. We were not expected to take prelims at the end of the first year, like everybody else. They were a distraction from ‘the real work’. This was accurate as far as I was concerned. My ‘real work’ was already in Cambridge amateur theatre.
15. In the Sweet Shop
By November 2004 I was back in Cambridge again and in another febrile state. In the spring, my former director of studies, John Harvey, the man who had engineered my jump from History to English at the end of my second year, had telephoned my house. Would I come and open the ‘new English building’? How could I not? My son had now been at the college for a year.
‘Tell me …’ I asked, trying to remember to which of the pamphlets from Emmanuel this could possibly relate, ‘I don’t think that I have actually made, er … a contribution, financially, as it were, as yet. Is it finished and everything?’ Well, obviously it was finished, since they were opening it. ‘Sorry, that was a foolish question.’
After thirty years I was still anxious to try not to sound foolish to my director of studies. I had to find out later from my son that the building wasn’t a college building as I had imagined, but the faculty building. I had already made a contribution to that. Perhaps that was why they were asking me to open it. But what had originally seemed to me a casual trip to my old college began to get laden with baggage. Three months later, at a party somewhere in the Cotswolds, standing by a bar made out of ice blocks, wondering whether it was time to join the other seven hundred guests for a tented sit-down dinner and a free funfair, I was joined by a noted QC and defender of radical causes.
‘I’ve just been reading about you in the paper,’ he said. I prepared for a chat about old buildings.
‘You’re going to Cambridge or something.’
‘Cambridge? Am I? Oh yes. In the autumn, I think.’
‘Well, you seem to have caused a bit of a scandal.’ He chuckled with the conspiratorial warmth that lawyers reserve for the discomfort of others.
‘A scandal?’
‘Some dons have complained about you being chosen to open their building. You know what they’re like. Something about low comedians blah, blah … when they have so many distinguished graduates and so forth.’
This was the moment the Tatler chose to take a candid snap of the two of us, ‘enjoying the party of the Cotswold season.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he continued after studying my expression. ‘The paper seems to think the dons are being rather snooty.’
I didn’t care about the newspaper. I was thinking about my speech. I had assumed that I could get away with a couple of blandishments and a platitude. It was all very well for him. He was used to facing a hostile crowd and cowing it with rhetoric. I advertised cars for a living.
They wouldn’t let me out of it.
‘No, no. Pay no attention to gossip. It is you we want, ‘the faculty secretary told me firmly.
Three months later I arrived early They usually want you to get there early and then they don’t know what to do with you. So they opened up a room and stuck me in it. Then they found a professor and stuck him in it too to make small talk with me, except that the professor was, as professors are, self-conscious about small talk and felt obliged to put up a running critical commentary on our conversation. (‘I see there are two punchlines to that story …’ though he laughed at neither.)
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