Cedilla (82 page)

‘How will you be able to manage abroad, when that time comes? It is difficult enough for us to place students in suitable households without the additional burden of meeting your special needs. You are hardly in a position to risk immersion in a foreign culture, when you can hardly keep your head above water in your own.

‘If you do try to live abroad, you will be living in a bubble of artificial behaviour. Your exposure to a foreign culture will be for practical purposes nil. A genuine traveller can take a cable car to a beauty spot in the mountains without a second thought, while the only cable car with which you are likely to be familiar while you study for a degree will be the one, whirring and trundling, which conveys you from your wheelchair to the bath on A staircase, Kenny Court, Downing. I do not say this to be cruel but to save you time.

‘Klaus Eckstein has painted a vivid picture of the hazards of travel on Spanish trains, warning you that it is polite, just as it would be in Britain, to offer to share any food you produce – but that you must be prepared, as you need not be in Britain, for people to accept your offer with alacrity, producing forks and spoons from their pockets and having a good old tuck-in. But how will you be able to experience this for yourself?

‘Consider. A language student with what we consider satisfactory conversational skills in German goes to stay in a family-run Gasthaus in Thuringia. He explores his surroundings, which means in practice that he becomes familiar with the excellence of German beer, thanks to the
Reinheitsgebot
, the purity laws of 1516, which prohibit
adulteration of any kind. He has more than enough German to keep on ordering more beer.

‘In the mornings his head is full of hammers, and he can hardly dare to look at the lavish breakfast his solicitous landlady brings to his room. He drinks the coffee gingerly, and takes a few tentative nibbles at a sort of roll which crumbles to dryness in his mouth.

‘The breakfast tray, however, holds far more than merely coffee and rolls. It is as if his landlady is trying to save him the expense of eating for the rest of the day. There are hard-boiled eggs. There are slabs of pale cheese the size of small books, if the books were pale and sweaty. There are churned and rendered meats – swollen sausages and motley slices. There is a higher presence of offal in these productions than he would welcome even without the hammers in his head. The purity laws in Germany seem to stop with the irreproachable beer. In the butcher’s shop anything goes.

‘He can face none of it, not even the second half of his roll. But it’s out of the question, the height of rudeness, to reject so lavish and considerate a morning offering (the rates of the Gasthaus are extremely reasonable). So he stows the food away in his suitcase, planning to dispose of it in some better place at a more convenient time.

‘The next morning the hammers in his head are if anything heavier and more efficient at blotting out thought with their crashing. The breakfast tray presented to him with a flourish is even more disheartening, because he is feeling yet worse than he did the day before – and because there is even more food this time. The landlady has taken his tray-clearing performance of the day before as a challenge. In retrospect he has miscalculated by not leaving at least some of the eggs on the tray, the cheese perhaps, certainly the meats of ill omen. Too late now, though. He has no alternative but to repeat his breakfast-hiding trick. Day after day the problem recurs, but the time when he might empty his suitcase never presents itself.

‘In the common spaces of the Gasthaus, as the week goes on, the landlady becomes both glowing and skittish, a preening
hausfrau
, making admiring comments about the healthy appetites of the English,
comments which his better-than-average conversational skills enable him to acknowledge gracefully, and to deflect.

‘It is at the beginning of the second week that a reek from the cupboard draws the landlady, while cleaning her charming young guest’s room, to the cupboard and the suitcase it contains. Opening the case, she is confronted with a black museum of the previous week’s breakfasts. All her thoughtful kitchen gestures are mashed together in various states of decomposition. The delicacies she had prepared to sustain this cherished guest on his explorations of her beloved locality have been dumped into the vastly inferior digestion, assisted only by flies, of his
luggage
.

‘The student is out all day, which leaves the landlady many hours to perfect the outburst of grievance with which she will greet the guest who has insulted her hospitality. When he returns, dog-tired after a day of hiking, he will be faced with a problem for which no primer nor phrase book could prepare him. The words pour out of her like the waters of the Rhine in spate.

‘It is now his task to find the words to explain to his landlady why he has disposed of her breakfasts as if they were sordid secrets. Only the right words will stop this solid lady, steaming with rage, from knocking him down her front steps. A large vocabulary and a secure grasp of tone will be required. A good accent will help, to be sure, but only if every other element is in place.

‘We are worlds away here from such rudiments as “Can you tell me please the way to the station?” or indeed “‘
Brecht’s genius is to make an
élite feel like the rabble, and a rabble like the élite.
’
Discuss
.”

‘
That
, my dear John, is why we send students abroad to perfect their language skills. They must learn to manage with no protective barrier between them and the local inhabitants. You can never be in that situation. You must take that protective barrier wherever you go. You cannot expect to plumb the depths of another culture when you need a rubber ring to keep afloat in your own.

‘My advice is that you should consider applying to the college and the university, but with the intention of reading English. Then there need be no delay in admitting you, since a year at High Wycombe Technical College slaving over Spanish will not be required of you.’

And while he was at it, the A. T. Grove in my fantasy might have saved me from another poor decision. He might have added, so softly that I wouldn’t quite be sure he had really said it, ‘Please don’t have a bone cut as a way of pleasing others. Your knee already does the job adequately – the job is only part-time – and your friend either loves you or does not. Love is not fussy about knees. That is the truth of it.’ Fatherly.

When I realised that it was pointless to pursue my course to the bitter end of a degree, I felt let down to a certain extent. False hopes had been encouraged. I would have to finish Part One just the same, and satisfy the examiners at the end of the year. It was hard to see this as a purposeful endeavour, or a meaningful use of my time.

But at least (I thought) I would be able to conclude my undergraduate career in record time. Modern and Mediaeval Languages was a one-year Part I, English a one-year Part II – so I would get my degree in two years flat.

I had mixed feelings about this truncated course. I wasn’t happy enough at Cambridge to want to stay any longer, but what came after Cambridge? In any case I had paid too little attention to etymology for once. The course for a Cambridge degree is called the Tripos, which derives from the Greek word meaning
three-legged
. A two-year degree, apparently, would be an absurdity exactly equivalent to a two-legged stool. So I would have to spend two years on Part II of the English course.

I could see that it would have to be English. I had grown to love both Spanish and German. They were strong flavours, Rioja and Riesling exploding on the palate, though the analogy is pure swank since I had tasted neither, and my inability to drop into a
bodega
or
Weinlokal
to remedy my ignorance was very much to the point.

Now I would have to wean myself back onto the small beer of my native tongue. The mild and bitter.

I had always been a literary reader. My mind was retentive, particularly of poetry, though I can’t really take the credit for that. My childhood tutor Miss Collins gave me a real incentive, when she restricted
my reading time and took the books away. After that, my memory worked overtime, in case it happened again. I could recite reams by heart.

I didn’t anticipate much of an academic challenge. English was widely regarded as a soft option. My broader European perspective would give me a significant advantage. In the Tragedy paper, for instance, which was compulsory, I would ramble on about Büchner. I’d always had a soft spot for Büchner.

I had made a head start by having a poem published in an undergraduate literary magazine. It was called ‘Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Wheelchair’. The title went Wallace Stevens one better. I had loved his poetry since Klaus Eckstein had thrillingly recited, ‘Let be be finale of seem / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’ I probably make too much of the parallels to Hindu thought in Stevens’s metaphysics, but they exist. They’re real. Or at least ‘real’, which is as much as any of us can hope for.

There may never have been a time when it was possible for a poem, legibly written or competently typed, to be rejected by an undergraduate magazine – with or without modernist flourishes and a disability-pathos undertone. If there was such a time it certainly wasn’t the early 1970s. Standards were much lower than those on
Woman’s Own
. I make no claims for the quality of my poem. I hope no one is ever mischievous enough to disinter it.

The magazine was called
Freeze Peach
. I don’t think the editors wanted to produce a magazine and then devised a suitably clever name. More likely that they thought
Freeze Peach
too good a name not to have a magazine attached to it. The originators of
Woman’s Own
, their eyes less clouded by Maya, avoided this mistake.
Freeze Peach
stumbled on as far as a third issue, then died in a ditch. I take no responsibility for that, though my contribution probably didn’t help. If the magazine had kept going a little longer, I would have tried to lumber it with another opus (in the same vein of manipulative pluck) entitled ‘Not Waving but Downing’. One more case of the title coming first, the actual artefact being an optional afterthought. I was getting on the magazine’s wave-length, by writing a poem that was entirely parasitic on its title.

My taste was more adventurous in poetry than in prose. If I had
been asked then what was the most important book published in the twentieth century, I would have answered ‘
Ficcíones
’, in unison with every other self-respecting Cambridge undergraduate of the period – and Borges’s Spanish is indeed crisp and fine. But the books I read more than any others were Roald Dahl’s collections of admirably sick short stories. Books have always been awkward objects to me without exception, but I managed to tuck my copies of
Kiss Kiss
and
Someone
Like You
out of sight behind more impressive-looking volumes, just like everyone else.

Theoretically the person to consult in my perplexity was my tutor Graëme, but that was obviously not going to do any good with the way things stood between us, and I wasn’t going to grovel. Humble pie is no dish for vegetarians (historically,
numble pie
). The filling is deer guts, if you really want to know. I didn’t consult Graëme, just told him what I had decided. He gave a mannered little sigh and said that it was a matter of statistical fact that English students were more prone to nervous breakdowns than those who read Modern Languages. He hoped that my change of academic direction didn’t qualify as a cry for help in its own right.

I didn’t anticipate that the change of subjects would be too jarring. I was better integrated into the life of the college than I was with my department, though that wasn’t saying much. Still, the Mini had become almost the Downing taxi. I was often being asked to ferry people around, and I enjoyed doing it.

The risky parts of air travel are take-off and landing. The dangerous moments when conveying bone china by hot-air balloon are loading and unloading. Why should wheelchair-based car trips be any different? I was vulnerable while my helpers were conveying me from room to car, and much more so on the return journey, at the end of the day above all, when alcohol had a bit part in the drama, and sometimes the leading rôle.

It vexed me that Downing was a castle of learning strongly fortified against its own residents. Returning from an evening out, early enough for the back gate to be open, I was faced with a barrier, a vertical stanchion blocking access for cars. Dons with parking privileges were issued with keys which let them unlock it and hinge it down out of the way, this lone fat prison bar blocking the Mini’s liberty. I shared
their parking privileges but not their right to a key, without which parking privileges didn’t amount to much.

I asked for a key at the Porter’s Lodge and was told that I should apply through my tutor. Did I imagine the look of wry amusement which ricocheted around the room, bouncing off the notice boards and arrays of pigeonholes? They might have had the manners to wait until I had gone, my tail between my legs, and then they could have murmured quite audibly, ‘And a fat lot of good that will do you, as everyone knows!’ The nicest of the porters said that a key wouldn’t make all that much difference anyway, since I couldn’t manhandle the post myself – which made me wonder why I had ever thought him the nicest. If I had a key then my passengers would do the physical work for me, and the social bubble would be preserved that much longer. When I had to go by way of the Porter’s Lodge people tended to mooch off, and then I would have to recruit someone to return the key anyway.

One evening I came home late with a slightly rowdy party. We had made a ritual journey across the modest urban lawn of Parker’s Piece to pay our respects to Reality Checkpoint – no more than an elaborate Victorian lamp-post, really, ornamented with a motif of dolphins, but universally known by the phrase painted on its plinth. By common consent Reality Checkpoint offered reassurance to those who got lost while voyaging strange seas of thought alone and artificially bewildered by drugs. It was a pilot light to rekindle the snuffed spirits of those trapped between dimensions.