The Fry Chronicles (11 page)

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:

‘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 members 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.

I have no idea what kind of figure I cut. Well, no that’s not true. I am afraid I have all too clear an idea of what kind of a figure I cut. My typical mode of dress was a Harris tweed jacket with leather buttons, Viyella shirt and knitted tie, V-neck lambswool sweater, corduroy trousers of lovat green and brown half-brogue shoes polished to a high gloss. With my trademark flop of hair and a pipe clamped between my teeth I looked like what I of course had been all the previous year, an assistant master from a small rural prep school, perhaps with something of the air of a Second World War back-room boffin. Whatever impression I gave it certainly wasn’t that of a hip young rocker in the age of The Clash and The Damned.

It turned out that Queens’ did indeed have two deans, a Dean of Chapel, and a Dean in charge of discipline. At each of the first-week decanal sherry parties I found myself falling into conversation with a first-year called Kim Harris. He was handsome in a way that reminded me of a young Richard Burton and radiated a powerful mixture of
severity, secrecy, relish and surprise that I could not but find intriguing. Like me he was separated from other freshers by appearing on the one hand more mature and adult while on the other exhibiting an unembarrassedly high doctrine of what Cambridge ought to be. He was educated, I soon discovered, at Bolton School, an independent day school that a generation or two earlier had thrown Ian McKellen at Cambridge and a grateful world. Kim had come to Queens’ to read Classics. He dressed rather like me but in Church’s full brogues and V-necks of the purest and priciest cashmere. He was even capable of wearing a bowtie without looking absurd, which is a very great human skill indeed. We became instant friends in the way that only the young can. We did not consider going to any party or event except in each other’s company.

‘Are you gay?’ I asked him quite early on.

‘Let’s just say that I know what I like,’ was his prim and opaque reply.

Kim Harris. Not unlike a young blond Richard Burton.

Aside from his proficiency at Latin and Greek Kim had another skill and at a level of brilliance that seemed to me to be quite superhuman. He was a chess Master. At Bolton he had played with, and to some extent mentored, Nigel Short, who was already becoming well known as the greatest prodigy England had ever produced. At the age of ten Short had beaten the great Viktor Korchnoi and now at fourteen was on the verge of becoming the youngest International Master in history. Kim was ‘just’ a Master, but that meant he was skilful enough to play blindfold, a trick I never tired of urging him to perform. Without any sight of the board he would demolish all comers.