The Fry Chronicles (10 page)

It is true that I was a scholar. It is true that I was older than my first-year contemporaries. True also that I had more experience of the ‘real world’ (whatever that might be supposed to be) than most. True as well that, unlike a surprising number of those arriving at university, I was very used to being away from home, having been sent to my first boarding school at the age of seven. True too that I had an apparently assured manner and a deep, resonant voice that made me sound as if I belonged to the place quite as much as the wooden panels, shaved lawns and bowler-hatted porters. I concede all that, but it is very important that you understand nonetheless how very scared I was inside. I lived, you see, in quivering dread of being at any moment
found out
. No, it wasn’t my status as a convicted criminal on probation that I wanted kept secret, nor my past history as thief, liar, forger and gaolbird. As far as I was concerned those home truths were perfectly fit for broadcast, as was my sexuality, my ethnicity or any other thing of that nature. No, the terror that gripped me during those first few weeks at Cambridge was all about my intellectual right to be there. My dread was that someone would approach and ask me, in front of a crowd of sneering onlookers, my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would prevaricate and palter in my usual plausible way, but, this being Cambridge, such stratagems would cut no ice with my remorseless and (in my imagination) gleefully malicious interrogator, who would stare at me with gimlet eyes and say in a harsh voice that crackled with mocking laughter: ‘Excuse me, but do you even know who Lermontov
is
?’ Or Rilke or Hayek or Saussure or some other name my ignorance of which would reveal the awful shallowness of my so-called education.

At any moment it would come to light that my scholarship had been wrongly awarded, that there had been a muddle with examination papers and some poor genius called Simon Frey or Steven Pry had been cheated of their proper place. A relentless public inquisition would follow in which I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake who had no business at a serious university. I could even picture the ceremony in which I was formally ejected from the college gates, slinking away to the sound of jeers and whistles. An institution like Cambridge was for other people, insiders, club members, the chosen – for
them
.

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:

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.

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.