‘To man-oover,’ I suggested, ‘your lovely hoover.’ Her face went blank. It was a mistake to start out on a playful note, as I should certainly have known. I’ve learned that beginnings must be neutral. My little sally hadn’t broken the ice but plunged her into terror and dismay. After that, the vacuum cleaner was a mad dodgem car of suction bumping back and forth in that confined space, her duster was a blur. I let her get on with it.
Can I really have wanted to impress her with my cleverness? If so then I was demonstrating the opposite. She didn’t need to be shown I was clever — why else would I be here, unless I could manage a certain something in that line? — but human and unfrightening.
I was familiar with the spectacle taking place in front of me, of tension being discharged through the medium of housework. I was installed in the Parker-Knoll, so I just pulled the joystick to lift my legs out of her way. Her gaze kept skittering to the corners of the room as if she had spotted a spider there. After a time I realised that I had the situation reversed. If there was a spider in the room, it was me, and she was doing all she could not to stare into its arachnid eyes.
I considered the cup of tea she had brought me. Was this part of a bedder’s duties, to slake the morning thirst of students? It seemed unlikely. I imagined the bedder way of life as something handed down over the years, a samurai code. So these must be c tea-bag of charity. I would spurn them. Special treatment was exactly what I didn’t want, not noticing that it can sometimes be the product of ordinary kindness.
The patience of water
I refused to be a charity case, and so I made it my mission to turn my bedder into a sort of friend. I would have to win her over very delicately. Patience was the key. Sooner or later this woman who had been assigned to me would look me in the eye, and at that point the charm offensive proper could begin. I was used to people who stared at me, or kept their distance, but her job required her to come close. She couldn’t clean the room from outside the premises, and I didn’t really see why I should struggle to vacate my room for her benefit.
In the meantime I needed a neutral question. I asked her about the clock I had heard in the night. She put her head on one side and gave it some thought. When she said she thought it must be the Catholic Clock — I suppose she meant the clock from the Catholic Church — her eyes just barely grazed my face. Progress enough for one day. I didn’t even know her name yet. She would tell me in her own good time. I told myself with feeble bravado that I wasn’t in a hurry. Time was on my side, and I would wait it out. Her name wouldn’t change between now and the time she told me what it was. I’d be seeing her often enough. I had the patience of water, and would wear her petrified face down into a smile.
The bedmaker makes the bed. That’s all there is to it. She does some low-level tidying-up and some low-level snooping. She’s supposed to report you if you haven’t slept in the bed allotted you by the college, or if you’ve infringed regulations in some other way. Perhaps you have been cooking gourmet meals on your gas-ring. Traces of feathers and scales on the Formica reveal that you have been stuffing swans with sturgeons — two slaps in the face for the Queen if you’ve only been poaching them, a third for the college if you’ve gone mad with the frying pan. Your bedmaker will prepare a dossier.
The gas-ring is intended for the boiling of water — milk at a pinch. Any dish more complex or whiffy than a boiled egg amounts to infraction. Frying is a mortal sin, as I had been warned well ahead of time. Time would tell if I was capable of staying on the right side of such pettifogging regulations. Meanwhile I would try my luck in the dining hall.
Of course it wasn’t easy to get into Hall, physically — there were the usual couple of massive Downing steps. It was as if the architect had wanted to set up regular barriers against me personally, ritual road-blocks in my path, to remind me I was only there on sufferance and must constantly apologise for my presence by asking for help.
There was a ticket system for Hall, with everyone being issued a little book of vouchers. Eating in Hall wasn’t compulsory, but undergraduates were charged for one book of tickets a term, whether they used them or not.
The vouchers were collected when you queued for your meal, and that was where I had the advantage. I wasn’t expected to queue, and the staff rarely bothered to collect my tickets. Perhaps once a week a waiter would murmur, ‘Better take a ticket from you today, sir, eh?’ and give me a nice wink. Outrageous, really. Quite unfair on the other students, the wheelchair-deprived.
Three of us were vegetarians, out of a student body of three hundred. Three! It’s an astonishingly low figure, with all the cultural upheavals of the 1960s still echoing, but there it is. Perhaps engineering and medicine, the traditional Downing subjects, attract the deep-dyed carnivore. Any reference in conversation to Gandhi’s vegetarianism would be countered by a reference to Hitler’s. One-all. Student culture, wavering between ideologies of diet, was waiting for the decider.
I soon made friends with one of the other dissidents, a third-year medical student called Alan Linton, and after that he sometimes helped me up the steps to the Hall with a mighty hoick. As an able-bodied third-year he didn’t live in college, or else I’m sure he would have been my mainstay in terms of getting around the college at mealtimes.
I was a rather hard-line vegetarian in those days. I would call carnivores (since flesh is flesh) cannibals by proxy. I called fish ‘sea flesh’ or ‘meat-that-swims’. Of course as a child I myself had been fond of (whisper it) cold tongue, which I had chosen to think of as a close-textured vegetable bearing no resemblance to the talking muscle installed in my own head. Perhaps I was atoning for that now, in some contorted fashion, by being so doctrinaire. I was so much at sea in my new surroundings that I made rather a meal of the few certainties I thought I had.
The standard vegetarian meal was a cheesy ratatouille-y concoction, usually served on toast. It was tasty enough, certainly not bad. Monotonous — but I was used to monotony, having grown up in its bosom. Relentless variety would have been a more searching test of character. The college meat-eaters seemed to think that what they were served was actively inedible, so we in the grazing minority weren’t badly off in relative terms.
The choice of Downing hadn’t been initiated by me but by Klaus Eckstein, but I’m happy to detect a deep logic to it. Downing wasn’t a glamorous college, not a Cambridge icon — not famous for age or beauty, for façade or choir, student princes or Nobel laureates. It was central but tucked away, since a hedge of shops had grown up around it. It had roughly the status of a prominent recluse. The only well-known scandal in its history was of a bursar who had run off with vast sums, requiring the college to sell off a substantial tract of its holdings to the university. Hence the Downing Site of faculty buildings just next door.
Downing was mainly a slow-working factory for turning out engineers and medics. Unforeseen side-effects of the manufacturing process seemed to be drunken shouting late at night, wild laughter and a certain amount of scuffling.
Some mornings I would see half-skeletons left out in the courtyard, suggestively posed. A little later their owners, red-eyed and stumbling — the present owners, rather than the original inhabitants — would retrieve the bones from these tableaux of post-mortem dissipation.