It turned out that the college nurse was watching out for my arrival, perched in the Porter’s Lodge. She was a part of the welcoming committee. Not a welcome part, as far as I was concerned, but Mum greeted her warmly, as if a weight had been lifted off her heart.
I sulked, though the passive emotional states aren’t particularly effective coming from those who are assumed to be passive by decree of fate anyway. My sulk became intense without becoming any more noticeable. Was I not a standard member of the student body? And was this standard treatment? Would she be watching over us all in the same attentive manner, tucking us in and giving us our doses of cod liver oil?
It was obvious that I didn’t need nursing. After all, if I had needed nursing then Downing College would have chosen someone else — someone who didn’t — to have the honour of being their first disabled undergraduate. They didn’t want to make work for themselves, after all.
I can’t help feeling that there’s something only semi-respectable about nurses who don’t work in actual hospitals or surgeries. A college nurse is like a ship’s surgeon or a vet attached to a circus — the position simply reeks of dark history, of secret drinking or worse. I don’t know what medical arrangements exist in a flea circus, but perhaps the same type of character is drawn to that environment too, entomologist down on his luck, whiff of formaldehyde on the clothes if not the breath.
Assuming I didn’t have such a prejudice already, then this must have been the moment I acquired it. This particular college nurse wouldn’t have lasted a minute under the command of Sister Heel or any other of the dragons whose nostrils I had seen shoot out jets of disciplinary flame. Not only did this person wear a cardigan, she had dropped cigarette ash on it while she waited, puffing away in the Lodge with the porters. The starch had gone out of her, or never been properly absorbed, as it must be, from the fibres of the uniform right down into the nervous system.
Once she had officially greeted me, she had two questions to put: was I on any medication? No, as she must already have known. Did I know the name and address of the GP assigned to me by the University? I did, it had been in the paperwork — Dr Buchanan at the Trinity Street practice. Then she went about her business, having accomplished precisely nothing. I thought that if she was going to be there at all, she should have the good manners to take my temperature and blood pressure, to pester me about my last bowel movement. Either do the job or don’t — but don’t just hover!
The porters were expecting not only me but the Mini. If there was an undertone of suspicion in their welcome, it attached to the car not the disabled student. If there’s one thing that college functionaries know in their bones, it’s that undergraduates don’t have cars — or those who do keep very quiet about it. If I was going to have a car, then I was almost being a spoilsport by owning up to it. Much more fun for the authorities to catch me red-handed at the wheel and drag me before a disciplinary board. Still, any hard feelings didn’t last. The Mini was expected just as much as I was. There was a parking space designated for it, inside a back entrance of the college, accessed by Tennis Court Road. From there it was only a few yards to my room.
The room was Kenny A6 — 6 being the room, A the staircase, Kenny the Court. If you’re looking at the doorway of A staircase from Kenny Court, then my room was the one with the first window on the right. Porters and others keen on brevity could just scribble ‘KA6’.
The very edge of Johnability
It was almost a suitable place for me to live. Almost. So take your pick of proverbs — beggars can’t be choosers, or a miss is as good as a mile. There were a couple of steps at both the front and rear entrances, so access wasn’t easy in either direction, and impossible in the wheelchair.
The back door at least had a handle I could operate, and although there was no handrail I could lean against the wall to assist my transfer between levels. The front door of A staircase was impossible for me to manage unaided. It had one of those hydraulic piston arrangements at the top, a door-closer of savage power. I think I’ve heard that device referred to as a ‘muscle’, though that may not be its technical name. In any case, it outclassed anything my muscles could accomplish.
I would have to get into the habit of going in the back way, after parking the car. The proximity of the car park made it simpler to come and go by the back door and the back entrance than to pass through the heart of the college.
I might have developed more esprit de corps if my day-to-day dealings with Downing had amounted to more than refuelling trips to the Hall. Esprit de corps! That’s one of the bits of French I do like. The spirit of the body — it’s irresistible. Can it also mean the wit of the body?
The room was marginally Johnable. It was on the very edge of Johnability. I dare say it was the pick of the bunch in terms of Downing’s available stock, and there was no legal obligation for the college to take me at all — it was either a social experiment or an act of academic charity — so I could hardly complain. At least it was on the ground floor. It would do. It would have to.
On that day there were hundreds of fresh undergraduates installing themselves in their rooms, and most of them had the help of their parents to settle in, whether they wanted it or not. In the weeks before term began I had been looking at the map of Cambridge that I had bought when I came for my interview, making myself familiar with the town’s geography, and I knew that in hundreds of rooms from Newnham to Girton, from Clare to Jesus, fathers were looking out of the window and preparing to separate a five-pound note from its fellows in their wallets, and mothers were feeling the thinness of the sheets and inspecting the stains round the plugholes in the washbasins.
I was twenty, which made me older than my academic contemporaries. Even so, here I would have a sensation I had been deprived of and had longed for. As a freshman I would be part of a generation. The closest I had come to a generation before this was a ward, then a dormitory, then a class. This was a society on a much larger scale.
In this new place, though, it would be up to me to make my own contacts. Cambridge University was an institution, but not like any I had known before. This would be a place of elective affinities. I wouldn’t have company and competition thrust on me without having to make the effort. Friends, lovers, enemies. They would be all my own work.
Mum and Dad were part of a generation, too, on this day, the generation of parents settling their children in at university. I suppose the occasion must have been clouded for Dad by the sense that I was receiving a privilege which he had been denied. I couldn’t do anything about the War and the forfeiture of his further education, but I could at least include him in my privilege by letting him settle me in. If I was impatient for my new life, I was well enough brought up to humour my parents on the last day of the old one. Mum laid my clothes out in the little chest of drawers, squeezing everything into the top drawer. The lower drawers being more or less out of reach.
The small room was dominated, if not actually usurped, by a large Parker-Knoll reclining chair. This wasn’t college issue (anything but!) nor a surprise, since it was another manifestation of Granny’s equivocal bounty. I had contributed £2 on the usual basis — this was not a present but an investment in my future.
Under normal circumstances the porters might have kicked up a fuss about the delivery of an item of furniture for a freshman’s room several weeks before the beginning of term (Granny liked to get things done in good time). The circumstances were not normal, but this was no sort of concession to the needs of the disabled. Granny was the abnormality, and this was a concession to her. She rarely used ‘My good man’ as a form of address, but she seemed permanently capable of it, and people would do almost anything to head her off before that point was reached.