Semi-Detached (31 page)

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.)

In
return, I started talking nonsensical persiflage about architectural language.
We warily circled each other on the new roof terrace.

The
rest of the faculty itself at last arrived and stood by, clutching glasses of
warm wine and gawping at their new apricot terracotta building. A jazz band
played in an improvised tent. These were ordinary men and women, who had other
jobs to do, who undoubtedly felt obliged to turn up, just like me. They were
curious, not judgemental; indifferent, not pompous; a little distracted, but a
forgiving audience. One after another, we speakers stood on a coffee table and
talked across a waste of beards and pale suits.

‘I
suppose you fell on your bottom as a baby and have been making jokes ever
since, said the professor wryly, as we went out for photographs.

As soon
as I decently could, I trotted away from the new faculty building, past the
Sidgwick site and across a de Chirico dreamscape. The building block lumpiness
of Stirling’s library, where I had fumbled after history journals, still looked
like an unused plastics factory. There were no Japanese students standing
outside the famous sun trap waiting for bits to fall off it today, but I could
see exactly the same rows of bent-wood blond armchairs, facing out now on to a
new Law faculty, designed by Norman Foster. On the other side was a recent,
round, multi-coloured blob, the faculty of Divinity and beyond them, the old
Brutalist blocks, where a big sign baldly announced ‘Criminology’ like an
unusually literate advertising hoarding. Despite these new additions, little
monuments to architectural caprice, plonked-down pavilions of some forgotten
twentieth-century international exhibition, it all felt far more familiar than
I expected. I had clearly been here enough times to get by..