by Stephen Fry
You may think I am exaggerating, and perhaps I am. But by no more than 5 per cent. All those thoughts truly did spin around in my head, and I really did fear that I had no right to be a Cambridge undergraduate, and that this truth would soon become obvious, along with academic and intellectual deficiencies that would reveal me to be entirely unworthy of matriculation.
Part of the reason I felt all this is because I think I had a much higher doctrine of Cambridge than most undergraduates. I believed in it completely. I worshipped it. I had chosen it above Oxford or any other university because ... because of ... oh dear, there is no way of explaining this without sounding appallingly precious.
My favourite twentieth-century author in those days was E. M. Forster. I hero-worshipped him and G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles and their associated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Lytton Strachey as well as the more illustrious planets in that system, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I admired especially the cult of personal relations that Forster espoused. His view that friendship, warmth and honesty between people mattered more than any cause or any system of belief was for me a practical as well as a romantic ideal.
'I hate the idea of causes,' he wrote, 'and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' That claim, from an essay called 'What I Believe' and published in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy, was taken by some to be all but treasonable. Given his connections to the group later known as the Cambridge Spies, it may be easy to see why such a credo still causes unease. He knew that, of course, for he went on to write:
Such a choice may scandalise the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.
I know how insufferably awful I must appear when I tell you that I wanted to go to Cambridge because of the Bloomsbury Group and a parcel of poofy old bien-pensant writers and traitors, but there we are. It wasn't because of Peter Cook and John Cleese and the tradition of comedy, much as I admired that, nor was it because of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and the tradition of science, much as I admired that too. Cambridge's beauty as a university town had some influence, I suppose. I saw it before I ever saw Oxford, and it pierced my heart in a way that first love always does. But it really was, pretentious as it may sound, the intellectual and the ethical tradition that appealed to my puritanical and self-righteous soul. I had emerged from a monstrous youth, you must remember, and I suppose I felt I needed the holy fires of Cambridge to cleanse me.
'Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them.' I honestly cannot remember if that phrase is my own or whether I borrowed it from somebody else: I seem to be credited with it on the web, which proves nothing, of course. Anyway, it is true that Martyrs' Memorial in Oxford commemorates the burning of the three Cambridge divines Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer in the city of Oxford. There has always been a sense that Oxford is a worldly, political and establishment institution, strong in humanities and history, and that Cambridge is more idealistic, iconoclastic and dissident, strong in mathematics and science. Certainly Oxford has provided Britain with twenty-six prime ministers where Cambridge has managed only fifteen. It is indicative too that Oxford was the Royalist headquarters during the English Civil War while Cambridge was a Parliamentarian stronghold; indeed Oliver Cromwell was a Cambridge alumnus and local to the area. Roundhead Cambridge, Cavalier Oxford. This pattern is repeated in theology - the tractarian Oxford movement is high church to the point of being Romish, whereas Wescott House and Ridley Hall in Cambridge are low to the point of being evangelical.
This same doctrinal distinction is even to be seen in comedy, mad as that may sound. Robert Hewison (an Oxonian) in his excellent book Monty Python: The Case Against shows how the great Pythons were divided along Oxford and Cambridge lines. Those long lean Cantabrigians (Virginia Woolf had noted fifty years earlier how Cambridge breeds them taller than Oxford) Cleese, Chapman and Idle were all icy logic, sarcasm, cruelty and verbal play while the Oxonians Jones and Palin were warmer, sillier and more surreal. 'Let's have a dozen Pantomime Princess Margarets running over a hill!' Jones might suggest, to which Cleese would coldly riposte, 'Why?'
The creative tension between those two in particular, according to Hewison, formed the heart and soul of what Python was. You might see the same thing in the differences between Cambridge's Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller and Oxford's Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. It is more than possible that you find the cuddly Dudley and the even cuddlier Alan Bennett and Michael Palin much more likeable than their tall, aloof and rather forbidding Cambridge counterparts. And perhaps this extends down to the later incarnations - Oxford's Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis are shorter and surely sweeter than the lofty and fractious Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
Cableknit Pullover, Part 1.
The backlit ears of Hugh Laurie, gentleman.
Cableknit Pullover, Part 2.
There is tremendous romance in the cavalier tradition and absolutely none in the puritan. Oscar Wilde was an Oxford man, and a great part of me is deeply drawn to the Oxford of the aesthetic movement, Arnold's 'Scholar-Gipsy' and the Dreaming Spires. But the pull of Cambridge was always stronger; Forster's world marked me for her own at some point in my teenage years and thenceforward it was Cambridge or nowhere.
All of which goes some way towards explaining, perhaps, why I was so nervous about being found out. It was obvious to me that Cambridge, the Mecca of the Mind, would be filled with the most intellectually accomplished people in the world. Students of organic chemistry would be familiar with Horace and Heidegger, and classicists would know the laws of thermodynamics and the poetry of Empson. I was unworthy.
I would have had to be epically delusional or truly, medically paranoiac not to recognize such insecurities for what they were: a mixture of too idealistic a sense of what Cambridge was, allied to lashings of the worst kind of late adolescent solipsistic angst. I had never fitted in at school and, now that I was come to a place almost expressly designed to suit me, suppose I turned out to be unable to fit in there too? What did that say about me? It was too frightening to contemplate.
But the first two weeks at a university are designed, which is to say they have evolved, to enforce the realization amongst freshers that everybody is in the same punt and that everything will be fine. Besides which, after a few days I had met enough people and overheard enough conversations to realize that Cambridge was far from fifth-century Athens or fifteenth-century Florence.
University life begins with the Freshers' Fair and all kinds of 'squashes' - recruitment parties thrown by student clubs and societies. What with the comparatively healthy bank balance of a student in the first week of their academic year on the one hand and that keen desire to be accepted and loved that flows from all the insecurities I have described on the other, it is likely that a fresher will join any number of extracurricular groups in their first week, from the established - the Footlights Club, Varsity magazine and the Cambridge Union, to the weird - the Friends of the Illuminati, the Society of Tobacco Worshippers and the Beaglers Against Racism. All very silly and studenty and adorable.
College and Class
I suppose I am going to have to stop off here and explain in the briefest and simplest of terms, if I can, the nature of collegiate life at Cambridge. Only Oxford has a comparable system, and there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works without having lived inside it. And, of course, no reason why anyone should care. Unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing, even if those corners are as uncool as the cloisters of Oxbridge.
There are twenty-five Cambridge colleges (well thirty-one in all, but
two of those are for postgraduates and the other four only accept mature students), each of which is a self-governing institution with its own history, income, property and statutes. Trinity College is the largest, with 700 undergraduate students. It is also the wealthiest of all Oxbridge colleges, worth hundreds of millions and owning land everywhere. Others are poorer: in the fifteenth century Queens' was a big supporter of King Richard III, whose boar's head device still flies from college banners, and it consequently suffered from confiscations and other financial penalties following that unfortunate monarch's defeat on Bosworth Field.
Each college has a hall for dining, a chapel, a library, senior and junior combination rooms (common rooms at Oxford) and a porter's lodge. They are mostly medieval in fabric and they are all medieval in structure and governance. They are entered by towered gateways and laid out in lawned and cobbled courts (at Oxford these are called quads). You would not design an educational establishment from scratch along these peculiar lines, and indeed no one ever has. Yet for over 800 years the two collegiate universities have run continuously without a break and there has been no cause to change the fundamental principles that organize them, except through the slowest and most immeasurably gradual evolution. Whether Oxford and Cambridge can survive the envy, resentment, dislike and distrust of future generations we can only guess. It is perfectly possible that someone will attach to them the hideous word 'inappropriate' or the hideous phrase 'not fit for purpose' and they will be turned into museums, heritage centres or hotels. No one can stop them from being historic, however, and without vandalism they cannot prevent them from being physically beautiful either. Those two qualities alone will ensure that, come what may, young people will want to go to them in sufficient numbers to risk their being considered elitist.
An Oxbridge student is given a place, not by the university, but by his or her college and it is there that they will live and take their instruction in the form of tutorials - which at Cambridge are called supervisions. The average number of undergraduate students at a college is about 300. When I arrived at Queens' in October 1978, there were five others reading English in my intake. Or was it six? I know one changed to theology, and two others dropped out altogether. No matter. The university, as distinct from the colleges, runs the faculties (History, Philosophy, Law, Classics, Medicine and so on) with their tenured readers, lecturers and professors. In my time Queens' had three English Literature Fellows (or 'dons') who were also attached to the university's English faculty, although it is perfectly possible to be a Fellow within a college, taking supervisions and teaching undergraduates and yet be without a faculty post. Oh lord, this is so complicated and dull ... I can almost hear your eyes glazing over.
Look at it this way. You live and eat in your college and attend supervisions arranged by the dons in your college for which your write essays, but you go to lectures and are ultimately examined by the university faculties which are outside the college. There is no campus, but there are faculty buildings, lecture theatres, exams schools and so on. Would it help if I said colleges are like Hogwarts houses, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw and so on? I have a horrible feeling it might ...
The Queens' College of St Margaret and St Bernard is one of the oldest in the university. It is also one of the prettiest, with a divine half-timbered cloister court, a charming medieval Hall, all done over by Thomas Bodley and Burne-Jones at the height of the late pre-Raphaelite period, and a famous wooden structure known as the Mathematical Bridge that spans the River Cam and connects the old part of the college with the new. When I arrived in 1978 Queens' was still an all-male institution. Girton, the first women's college, started taking men the following year, while the more advanced King's and Clare had been mixed for six years, but Queens' was carrying on in much the way it had for more than half a millennium. Incidentally, the apostrophe after the 's' is there on account of it being founded by two queens, Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. In Le Keux's Memorials of Cambridge, which I am sure you have read, but I will remind you anyway, the author, writing in about 1840, spells the name of the college as Queen's College, and appends a footnote:
A custom has arisen latterly of writing the name Queens' College, as being the foundation of two queens. This appears to us an unnecessary refinement. We have the authority of Erasmus against it, who always calls his college 'Collegium Reginae'.
'Reginae' is of course Latin for 'of the Queen', in the singular. God, I sound like a guide book. Not surprising, as I'm quoting from the college website. Anyway, there you are.
As the only English scholar in my year I had been allocated a rather fabulous set of rooms overlooking the President's Gardens. That's another idiosyncratic Oxbridge nonsense - the titles given to heads of houses. Some are Masters or Mistresses, others are Wardens, Provosts, Principals or Rectors and a few, as is the case with Queens', are styled President.
On the day I arrived I stood at the bottom of my staircase and for ten minutes I played with the exquisitely exciting proof that, for the time being at least, I truly was a Cambridge undergraduate. You see, each staircase has at its entrance a wooden board on which are hand-painted the names of the occupants residing within. Next to each name is a sliding block of wood that obscures or reveals the words IN and OUT, so that when a student (or Fellow, for the dons have rooms in college too) passes the board on their way to or from their rooms they can signal their presence or absence to an anxious and expectant world. I was happily flicking my block of wood back and forth and would still have been doing so to this very day if the sound of approaching footsteps hadn't sent me scuttling up to my rooms.
I had arrived that afternoon with a collection of carefully chosen books, a typewriter, a gramophone, a pile of records, some posters and a bust of Shakespeare, all of which were soon disposed about the rooms in as pleasing and artfully artless an arrangement as I could contrive. Undergraduate sets are composed of a bedroom, a main room and a gyp-room, or kitchen. Gyp was the unfortunate nickname for a college servant: the more appealing Oxonian appellation is 'scout', but I'm not going to get side-tracked with Oxbridge minutiae again, I promise. I know how much it upsets you.
I had determined that I would go out later for coffee, milk and other staples. For the moment I was content to sit alone but for two dozen or so invitations carefully laid out on my desk. In the days before email and mobile phones, communication was managed by notes left in a student's pigeonhole in the porter's lodge. If someone wanted to contact you it was much easier for them to leave a message there than to have the fag of climbing all the way to your rooms and slipping it under your door. I had already gone down to the porter's lodge three times in the last hour to see if any more invitations had come in. The pigeonholes were arranged and colour-coded according to undergraduate year. Thus a club or society could undertake a mass leafleting of first-years, a kind of targeted spamming. Hence the quantity of paper spread out on my desk. The invitations to squashes being held by sporting, political or religious societies I had instantly thrown away, but I had grouped together invitations from dramatic and literary clubs, magazines and journals. What about the Cambridge University Gay Society? I was undecided about this. I liked the idea of pinning my pink colours to the mincey mast but was wary of being involved in anything campaigning or strident. In those days I was a most conservative or at least actively inactive sort of figure politically. In the jargon of the day, my consciousness was unawakened.
Invitations to sherry parties held by the college's Senior Tutor, by the Dean of Chapel and by an entirely different person also claiming the title of Dean were not to be refused, I was told. Also essential was a gathering in the rooms of A. C. Spearing, the college's senior English Fellow, who was to be, it seemed, my Director of Studies. The most impressive and formal invitation, all pasteboard, gold embossing and armorial bearings, was the one summoning me to the Queens' College Matriculation Dinner, a formal event in which the entire intake of first-years would be officially received and enrolled as member
s of the college.
And so I embarked on this round of parties and introductory gatherings. In A. C. Spearing's rooms I met my fellow English Literature freshers. We stuck together in the first week, accompanied each other to assorted squashes and introductory lectures, swapped second-hand gossip and sized each other up academically, intellectually, socially and in one or two cases I suppose, sexually. We were very typical of our generation. We knew T. S. Eliot backwards but could barely quote a line of Spenser or Dryden between us. With the exception of one of our number we would have looked like, to an outside observer, as prize a parcel of punchably pompous and buttoned-up arseholes as ever was assembled in one place. The exception was a bondage-trousered, leather-jacketed, henna-haired youth called Dave Huggins. He looked like the kind of punk rocker you would cross the King's Road in Chelsea to avoid. Despite being far and away the friendliest and most approachable of our group he scared the hell out of me and I think out of everybody else too. Something in my booming voice and apparently confident manner seemed to appeal to him, however, or amuse him at least, and he dubbed me the King.
For all his forbidding street aspect, Dave had been to school at Radley, one of the smarter public schools: in fact almost all of us in the English Literature intake had been privately educated. Unsure of ourselves and nervous of being found academically wanting as we may have been, I cannot imagine how alarmingly and alienatingly at home we must have seemed to those arriving from state schools, to that cadre of young men and women who had never before stayed away from home and never before met public-school product en masse. Some months later a student who had been educated at a comprehensive in south-east London told me that for weeks he had been unable to understand what 'say gid' meant. He kept hearing it everywhere: 'Say gid! That's jarst say gid!' Eventually he realized that it was how the upper middle-class pronounce 'So good, that's just so good.' He observed how strange it was for him to be in the minority. Some 3 per cent of the population received private education in those days and here he was - one of the great 97 per cent, but somehow feeling like a chimney sweep who has gatecrashed a Hunt Ball. No matter how much Cambridge might have presented itself as a purely academic institution whose only criterion for entry was academic, the dominant accent to be heard was public school. It took a very special kind of self-belief and strength of character not to feel angry or out of place in such an environment.