Going Up (11 page)

I tried sporting a pipe, as Sullivan did, but it was difficult to keep alight and scorched my throat. Out on pub crawls, I was impressed by Tony Becher’s and Sullivan’s capacity for drinking pint after pint and by their ability to get up the next morning in time for a nine o’clock lecture. Living at the top of E staircase made me wary of overfilling my bladder. To get to
the lavatories, we had to go down six flights of stairs, cross the courtyard and go into the clammy canyon of the communal facilities. The Rabelaisian solution was to do as David Gore-Lloyd did during our poker games (in which one could lose as much as three shillings on a catastrophic evening): he opened my mansard window and pissed directly into the Cam.

David’s family manufactured Wills Gold Flake cigarettes. Before the war, they owned a steam yacht with a crew of eight. No sort of a scholar, he was a Roman Catholic from, he indicated, an old recusant family. Until publication of the Kinsey Report, he went regularly to the Catholic church; its large, ornate black and white clock jutted over the Regent Street pavement. The discovery that almost all priests were statistically determined to have sexual outlets (Kinsey’s ‘scientific’ term) did not torpedo David’s faith, but it did precipitate a slide from ancestral credulity. No critic of the time doubted that Kinsey’s ‘research’ had been scientific. It was unthinkable that his whole statistical apparatus could have been, as it proved, wilfully warped. Who could have guessed, in those days, that the whole exercise might have had the unacknowledged motive of seeking to normalise Kinsey’s own bisexual proclivities? His allegedly scrupulous method had no place for qualitative distinctions: in Kinsey’s book, when quantifiable man went into the bedroom, love was never made; quotas were filled. Robert Graves’s ‘meum-tuum sense’ had no place in them. Thanks to Kinsey, seconded by a sprinkle of sophistry from me, David Gore-Lloyd’s antique Christianity fell away. The Church lost the antique lustre, advertised with euphuistic elaboration, in
Brideshead Revisited
, which had been recently Penguinised in a tributary ten-pack of Evelyn Waugh’s works.

To supplement college food, Tony Becher and I frequented the Taj Mahal, in the paved enclave, opposite St John’s main gate. For two and sixpence, we ate heaped brown plates of food while looking out at the entrance to Whewell’s Court, Trinity, where Wittgenstein (of whom I heard my first whisper from a young don called Renford Bambrough) had had his austere
rooms before he left them to go and die, of prostate cancer, in Dr Bevan’s house. As for William Whewell, the quondam Master of Trinity and an important philosopher in his day, who was he compared to his late tenant? Yet Sidney Smith had said of him, ‘Science is his forte and omniscience is his foible.’

Sullivan and Becher had learned the vocabulary of the barrack room. They spoke of ‘bints’ and the need for a shag with a squaddy’s unashamed and unselective appetite. When frustrated, Tony threatened to have ‘the screaming ab-dabs’; masturbation was ‘bashing your bishop’, perhaps because the erect penis, plus foreskin, looks like a mitred bishop on a chessboard. Fingers were known, at vexed moments, as ‘cunt-hooks’. According to Tony, ‘Up your gonger!’ was an Other Ranks commonplace. The recommended destination was, in the context, unmistakable but I have never seen the phrase reproduced in reminiscent print. If a woman had the curse, she was said to have ‘the jam rags up’. National Service was a march on the wild side. I knew only one man, in my fourth year, who had actually done any fighting. He had been a tank commander in Korea. Quick thinking under Chinese fire enabled him to get his tank literally back on track and saved his crew. He received the MC but I cannot remember his name. He sang nicely in the Footlights.

Whatever Philip Larkin may have said about the cultural divide between repressed pre-1963 England and Swinging London, the 1940s and 1950s were enriched by a sexual vocabulary, and a certain common experience, that derived from National Service. Ex-sergeant Sullivan recounted how he had first got his end away, under some Liverpool pier, as the result of a ‘knee-trembler’ with an older girl. In the Education Corps, he widened his carnal knowledge by tumbling his sergeant-major’s wife while on the move in the back of a three-hundredweight lorry. He had been sweetly surprised by the dexterity with which another older woman had climaxed their sexual bout by reaching beneath and between her legs to caress his balls. Being an
officer and a gentleman may have postponed Tony Becher’s
dépucelage
, but his language had lost its virginity during his thirteen weeks of ‘basic training’. Tony did not do so in person until the Christmas vac of 1950, while on a holiday in South Africa. He returned to tell us about it and also about avocado pears, which none of us had ever tasted. He had picked up the habit of calling black children ‘piccanins’.

Sex was neither a priority nor an obsession with Sullivan, nor did it leave a sentimental afterglow.
Mutatis mutandis
, he aped Macbeth: if ’twere done, ’twere best it be done quickly. I listened and smiled and said little. Love for, and pride in, Beetle kept me reticent. When she first came up for the weekend, we spent an anxious night in my narrow bed, with my oak sported. Had we been discovered, or betrayed, I should certainly have been sent down. I introduced her to my friends only when we happened to bump into them. She was a happy secret I was not keen to share. In her absence, I wrote her long letters and she wrote back as promptly and as unguardedly. I was smiling as soon as I saw her envelope in my pigeon-hole.

Why then did I ask Hilary Phillips to visit me in Cambridge? I went to meet her on the long platform when she arrived one Saturday morning in the spring term. She wore a garden-party hat and carried a candy-striped umbrella. I greeted her as if I were again an awkward adolescent. I doubt if I kissed her hullo; pretty as ever, those heels, that skirt, and especially the hat did not belong in Cambridge. I conducted her with more embarrassment than ostentation through the courts of St John’s and up the wooden stairs to my proud garret. I fear that I invited her to come up at least partly so that I could make it clear how wide the gap now was between us.

I was eager to establish my well-read emancipation from religious belief and from what D. H. Lawrence called ‘the beastly bourgeoisie’. Having recently been swept away by A. J. Ayer’s
Language, Truth and Logic
, I enlightened her on the literal nonsensicality of metaphysics, which included the existence of God and the apparatus of transcendental morality. As
I offered Fitzbillies cakes and pressed her to a glistening Chelsea bun, I paraded all the jejune sophistication of a smiling intellectual bully. If my one-time darling had been more calculating, she might have smiled and sighed and offered me her lips, to start with; but she did not. My well-sourced repudiation of suburban morality made her sigh and look at her little watch.

I lacked the ruthlessness, if not quite the desire, to make a more virile assault on her than I had ever attempted in Portman Mansions. Certain that she would never do it, and not at all certain that I wanted her to, I asked her to have another Chelsea bun and stay with me that night. She declined to do either. The not wholly unwelcome effect of my rhetoric was to hasten her return to the station. Not long afterwards, I heard of her engagement to someone called Gerald.

My thespian reputation was not enhanced when I was cast in the salty part of Poseidon in a clumsy Mummers production of Jean Giraudoux’s
The Trojan War Will Not Take Place
. I had no idea that the play, written in 1935, was designed as propaganda for Franco-German
rapprochement
or that Giraudoux had been an enthusiastic member of the Vichy government. Throughout that first year I was too content with Beetle to venture any bold step on the ladder to Cambridge advancement, intellectual or social. I never went to meetings of the Classical Society. No one reproached me for my sporadic attendance at lectures. Ovid wrote my report:
Video meliora
proboque, deteriora sequor
.

Nevertheless, I was shocked when, during a discussion of Book Lambda of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
, Howland advised us not to bother with several chunks of text on which,
experto credite
, we should never get a question, because no one had any clear idea what they meant, perhaps not even Aristotle. Glad to be spared having to construe the inexplicable paragraphs, I was enough of a humbug to think that scholars should have been required to puzzle over them. ‘Bede’ did me too much honour: assuming that I was enough of a scholar, it did not occur to him, who had found things so
easy, to play more literally the role of ‘director of studies’ and oblige me to ordered diligence.

So far as the Classical Tripos went, the Golden and Silver Ages of Greece and Rome furnished texts and cruxes enough to abbreviate any curiosity about, for instance, the Hellenistic world. After the ignominious death of the city’s greatest orator, Athens was said to have had no stylist worth emulating. The rhetoric of the great Demosthenes had been directed against Alexander the Great’s father, King Philip II of Macedon. He dwelt, with conspicuous disdain, on the alien provenance of the pretender who affected to be the ruler of all the Greeks. In fact, Demosthenes’s style was more admirable than his character: he was a self-glorifying, sometimes corrupt, politician. In 1950, he was still depicted as a prototypical Winston Churchill, fulminating against tyranny and denouncing appeasers and collaborators, such as Aeschines and Isocrates. With the loss of its independence and its empire, Pericles’s exemplary
polis
dwindled into a provincial university city under foreign patronage, first Macedonian then Roman. In the 1960s, Harold Macmillan would propose that Britain stand to Jack Kennedy’s USA in the wise role that the Greeks, supposedly, had with the Romans who supplanted their place in the sun. In the early 1950s, however, Britannia appeared to retain a ruling role in the world’s order. If one wanted time to stand still, Cambridge was the place to be.

P
LAYING BRIDGE WAS my regular drug. Among those often available to make up a four was Ivan Idelson, a chess Blue, who was doing a PhD in some abstruse department of mathematics. Brown-eyed and black-haired and, I assumed, of Russian origin (he called himself Ivahn, although later in life he anglicised the pronunciation as Eye-v’n), he rented a room at 5 Jordan’s Yard, a mews of decrepit terraced houses across from the side gate of St John’s. I would find him wearing a claret-coloured smoking jacket and, quite often, playing Chopin on the black overstrung piano in the front room. He lived with a buxom, horsey, boss-eyed girl called Sonya. I accompanied her, because she asked me, to a point-to-point at Cottenham, a village near enough to Cambridge to be reached by bicycle. We watched the races and were spattered with mud from the loud hoofs and then we pedalled home. I went up the sagging stairs with her to the room she shared with Ivan and she told me, hugging her knees as she rocked on the bed where I was sitting, that she had taught him everything he knew about sex. I was not tempted to take the course.

One day, looking for a Saturday afternoon game of bridge, I was walking across King’s Bridge and met a Leavisite research student against whom
I had played a few times. He was unavailable, he said, because his ‘woman’ was coming up from London. As he talked, he removed the little plastic lid from his pipe and, while it dangled on a short lace, applied a Swan Vesta match to the tamped tobacco. His frown was deepened by wanting to know something that he hoped I might be able help him with: not to put too fine a point on it, female anatomy. His woman seemed willing to go to bed with him but he was unsure how he could know exactly when, that is where, it would be right to, well, I knew what he meant. I was a little pleased to be able to tell him that, provided the female disposed herself amiably, the way in would be available to firm pressure. If he had time to consult it, I told him, there was a book called
Perfect Marriage
that carried clarifying diagrams. He sighed, put a new match to his pipe, and – between puffs – said that he would go back and read
Women in Love
again. The followers of Dr Frank Leavis, like those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, were a clan of believers whose fidelity to their leader allowed no deviant reading. D. H. Lawrence was Leavis’s guide to ‘mature’ sexual practice. My bridge-playing friend’s name was Hitchcock.

The lease of 5 Jordan’s Yard was held by a shiny-headed ballistics boffin with white eyelashes over blue, unblinking eyes. John Brickell did secret government work in a laboratory on the outskirts of the city. We knew no more than that it was well paid. His tenants could do as they pleased as long as they pleased him. With no woman of his own, he relished the sight of comely Scandinavian females. Ilse (whom Brickell called ‘Nutty slack’), Monika (‘Monik / She’s a tonic / She’s Supersonic / Our Monika’, according to Tony Becher) and Anna (the actor Tony White’s pneumatic mistress) had only to sanction his seigneurial presence while they dressed and, preferably, undressed. Tony White was Peter Hall’s regular, very handsome, leading man at the ADC. He would disappoint his director by declining to become a professional actor. In the mid-1970s, he got wind of the fact that I had portrayed him, as Dan Bradley, in
The Glittering Prizes
, but died of
septicaemia, after breaking his leg in a casual football game, before he could see what I made of him. When John Sullivan was dying, in 1993, he asked me to send him the tapes of the same TV series, in which he was lightly disguised as Bill Bourne.

Swollen with bohemian tenants, 5 Jordan’s Yard seemed to be held together only by its thin, papered walls. The pretty Danish Brigitte shared one of the upstairs bedrooms with Rijn Van Dyck, a Dutch research student with a charming smile and a pale, rumpled, no longer young face. A Yugoslav émigré, Poznan Mirosevic-Sorgo, lodged in another upstairs corner. Michael Jurgens, the son of a Netherlands margarine magnate, was a frequent caller. He told us that margarine was colourless until jaundiced by chemical means. He was so pale that he might have been made of it. He admired Beetle.

The narrow staircase sagged as you climbed the two steep flights to where Gordon Pask had filled the wide attic rafters with rows of batteries and valves linked by a nexus of wires to the panel from which he controlled their interplay. Gordon was small, wore a selection of old clothes, and had curly metallic hair. Of no manifest age, he had large, pale grey, unblinking eyes and unhappy teeth. It was painful to see him smile. An early pioneer in computer technology, he was said to have begun his PhD thesis with the words ‘As I have said before’. His current project was the construction of a musical typewriter. Gnome and gnomic, he was at once a parody of an eccentric genius and, as his electronic innovations were to prove, the genuine article.

Gordon lived with a large, plain Communist called Elizabeth. When, after a number of years, they had a child, he referred to it as ‘the gadget’. With his dwarfish other-worldliness, he seemed to have more things on his mind than he was ever going to have time to unpack. While taking breaks from assembling machinery of unfathomable complexity, featuring something called ‘negative feedback’, he composed elongated, dark-figured
murals on the walls of the downstairs room where Ivan Idelson mooned over his piano.

John Brickell found me amusing enough to be given a seat at the Sunday lunches that he cooked and loaded onto a wide, black centrally pedestalled round table in the ground-floor room. He expressed ‘be gone’ to unwanted postulants merely by looking at them. His stare could have a forbidding steadiness; those on whom it was fastened rarely came back. When I told him that Beetle and I were nervous of spending another night in my rooms, he offered his kitchen floor. There was a camping mattress we could borrow. Who would ever know or care that I had not been in my Third Court garret all night?

5 Jordan’s Yard became our weekend home from home. Our nights were interrupted only by Gordon Pask. He would crepitate down the yielding stairs and then appear, fuzzy-haired, in the doorway. ‘Don’t disturb yourselves, my dears…’ Since the natural span of the day was too short for his complicated work, Gordon had a chronometry of his own: each of the days of his ten-day week lasted thirty-six hours. As a result, he sometimes needed sustenance in the early hours. He would step over us in order to take a pot of Oxford marmalade from the cupboard. He consumed several spoonsful, wincing, and then filled a glass of water with which he washed down a number of aspirin tablets shaken from a bottle in his pocket. He winced because the marmalade had found the cavities in his teeth. Aspirin was more readily accessible than dentists. When someone warned him that it was addictive, he said that, since he took fifty a day, he could confirm that they were not. Gordon was the living refutation of the notion, common in our philosophy, that one cannot feel the pain of another. You had only to look at those stumpy brown teeth to see and feel its refutation.

I neared the end of my first year at Cambridge without having made the brilliant friends whose company I might hope to enjoy for the rest of my life. I avoided loneliness with Tony Becher and John Sullivan, who entertained us with his terse Liverpudlian adventures (when his mother asked
him where he was going, he would reply ‘Out’) and with his repertoire of bawdy lyrics. Working with a parody of scholiastic solemnity, he produced a manuscript edition of ‘Eskimo Nell’, complete with variant readings and pseudo-pedantic footnotes. He also knew the full text of ‘The Good Ship Venus’, on which the cabin boy ‘stuffed his arse / with broken glass / and circumcised the skipper’.

His resourcefulness
in malis partibus
was crowned, later in a distinguished academic career, by Professor J. P. Sullivan’s upward reappraisal of the work of Martial,
The Unexpected Classic
. John was an expert on sexual perversities of a rare order. His bedside reading was a fat volume of Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexual aberrations. John devised an Aristophanic Greek term,
homartallelophagia
, for the pleasure, detailed in Joyce’s
Ulysses
, to be derived from a man and a woman masticating the same piece of cake and passing it, in their kisses, from one mouth to the other. In trimmer style, Tony Becher devised the acronym ‘Snip’, to stand for ‘smart new perversion’.

Tony seemed not to need to be as diligent as John. First-year mathematics required accurate concentration, not sustained library work. I do not remember seeing him reading a novel or any kind of history. He was not curious about the sexual habits of the Trobriand Islanders and took no interest in Christopher Caudwell’s
Studies in a Dying Culture
, which, Sullivan advised me, tolled the end of bourgeois art. Tony expressed no political views and had no obvious devil to drive him. Had we not been billeted as neighbours, would we ever have spoken to each other? It was, however, thanks to him and Sullivan that I met Renford Bambrough who, like my friends, had rowed for LMBC. As an undergraduate, he had bumped so successfully that a Second Eight oar was hanging in his rooms.

We first encountered Renford during a pub crawl, at The Baron of Beef. In his late twenties, he was both a supervisor in Classics and an evangelical philosophical disciple of the late, but recent, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As teasing as he was earnest, he initiated us, softly, almost playfully, in the
esoteric vocabulary that lifted Moral Sciences into a higher form of freemasonry. Commonplace phrases (such as ‘We can never know the mind of another’) acquired an arcane sense. Stiff hand gestures, derived from the Master, distinguished philosophical sheep from homespun goats. Raised eyebrows incited a man to think again, possibly, or at least to rephrase some callow truism. Renford’s delivery made what he said, or did not, seem to sit in inverted commas; he rode an intellectual tandem, on which he was at once himself and a parody of what he wished to be.

Renford set an example of academic advancement that John Sullivan was determined to follow, although – unlike Tony Becher and me – John was not to be diverted from the subject that had secured his exeat from the working class. Renford was keen to make a junction between analytic philosophy and the second part of the Classical Tripos. He advocated a light-blue form of Greats, in which ancient history and philosophy, both ancient and modern, had always played a solemn part. This modest proposal ran up against entrenched positions, and vanities, in both faculties. Its promoter’s insistent diffidence prevailed in time for me to be among the first to embark on the new course.

After a few glasses, Renford would giggle at good jokes, but he did not relish bawdy. At once young and elderly, as the precocious often are, he was already married and had two small children. His first name was John, but to be called by his middle name graced him with distinction. I never heard him answer to any other. He gave us the impression that philosophy was the kind of game that any bright person might learn to play. The first pupil from Sunderland Grammar School to win a Cambridge scholarship, Renford had, like Baron Moss, been a Bevin boy during his National Service.

Working in the mines was far more dangerous than occupying Germany, but it lacked the hairy khaki glamour enjoyed by both John Sullivan and John Erickson, a small, dark historian, with a strong Hibernian accent, who told tall stories with the promise of their accuracy. Erickson had been a sergeant
in whatever branch of the army was delegated to supervise transport. In the course of routine duties, he had signed a page that he hardly scanned, which was needed, along with other bumph, to authorise the departure of a train to Berlin. A few days later, he was summoned to his CO’s office and told that the train he had signed for had been sold, presumably by its driver, to the East Germans and had disappeared behind the iron curtain. How did he propose to compensate the loss? Erickson blanched calmly and asked to see the copy of what bore his signature. When it was swivelled to him, scholarly attention led him to point out that he had signed only for the maintenance of ‘discipline’ on the train. Had there been any complaint in that regard? There had not. He saluted, turned and walked away without a dent in his wages or a bad mark on his record. Erickson promised that rolling stock often rolled, downhill as it were, into the German Democratic Republic. Post-war National Service seemed to be a matter more of keeping one’s wits than of patriotic gallantry. The Korean War was too far away, and too American, to carry any practical threat.

Like Sullivan, Erickson was bent on academic escape from his native haunts. He had learned Russian while doing National Service and appeared already to be the ponderous authority who would write thorough volumes on Soviet military history. His researches led him, on one occasion, to a symposium in a camp, somewhere near Cambridge, full of Ukrainians whose nationalism he was unguarded enough to call ‘Russian’. He was abruptly aware of the rage that then united his audience. He made a scampering exit, but was pursued, so he said, all the way to the gate by an angry mob, not a few of whom were likely to have been recycled SS men. John’s amorous adventures were less sophisticated than his studies. His hearth-rug attempt to seduce a girl seemed to be ‘almost there’ when he felt a ‘searing pain’ in his left thigh. Convinced that his target female had stabbed him to the bone, he looked down and saw that the coffee-pot on the gas-ring was boiling over into his left-hand trouser pocket.

St John’s was a large, rich college without snobbish or intellectual élites. King’s and Trinity remained bastions of antique privilege, with places traditionally reserved for those with elegant connections or attractive qualities. Johnians had few common characteristics. Even the Fellows came from all over the social map and gave themselves no cabalistic airs. The astrophysicist Fred Hoyle was the only one of whom anyone in the wider world might have heard. ‘Imagine the world as a cricket ball’, uttered in an uncompromised Yorkshire accent, was his signature phrase. I should not have recognised him if I passed him. Professor Jopson, a ranking etymologist, was more noticeable: he always wore a beret, wheeled a bicycle and was never seen in public not wearing bicycle clips.