Elves with hairdryers
Being back in the warm was a great luxury. It was tropical! It wasn’t long before I was almost dry. Of course my shoulders lost heat more quickly than my bottom, and my bottom was still damp when the rest of me was dry. Ideally, if my body had allowed the position, I would have lain face down on the bed while National Health elves with hairdryers played warm currents of air across my backside. As it was, I would ease myself up onto the carpet, whose traction enabled me to raise my bum from the seat of the chair, and then retrieve the still-damp straps from underneath me. Sometimes I would have to take them back into the bathroom personally, but usually I could ‘volunteer’ a student to take them back to the bathroom and hang them up for me ready for next time.
That sort of ‘volunteering’ can only be an emergency measure — language itself rebels against intransitive verbs being turned inside out like that, like umbrellas in a hurricane, and the social fabric is damaged by people’s helpfulness being forced instead of being allowed to open out like a blossom in its own sweet time. But as far as I was concerned, in my Cambridge period, that was just too bad. Jump to it! I haven’t got all year.
I didn’t do much home-making in my new premises, but I did pamper myself with a couple of indulgences that had been forbidden at home. First I bought joss-sticks and lit them, an act banned at home. Dad explained, ‘The thing about joss-sticks, incense, all that sort of stuff, is … you see, they can disguise all sorts of other smells …’ And I had said, ‘I know. Isn’t it marvellous?’ I missed the point, I failed to twig. Dad wasn’t referring to the standard male fug of a shared bedroom but to the smell of cannabis. Mary Jane, goblin weed, eater of souls. No doubt cannabis made people do many strange things in those years, but one of the strangest was to make parents sniff around their children like police dogs at airports.
At Trees I had wanted a red lightbulb in my room, to make it more like a shrine, but this suggestion also created alarm. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to be attuned to the effect I wanted to create, that receptive spiritual aura. The disapproving term Mum used was ‘boudoir’, while Dad’s phrase was ‘knocking-shop’. So I simply draped a piece of red cloth over an existing bulb, and gave their opposition a united front. Fire risk. Concern for safety masked something more mysterious, a moral disapproval of coloured light. In my best surly-hippy manner I muttered, ‘You’d tax the ruddy rainbow if you could find its home address. You’re a disgrace to the Age of Aquarius.’ Not that I believed any of that guff.
Now I was free to install that questionable glow, to let my moral fibre loosen softly under its influence. Mrs Beddoes rather hesitantly installed a red bulb at my command, and soon I was happily basking in its rosy aura — the colour of life in the womb, on those sunny prenatal days — in my boudoir in Kenny Court, my yet-to-be knocking-shop.
There were ways for undergraduates to fill their calendars, short cuts to a social life — clubs and societies. These were on display at the Freshers’ Fair, to be held in the Corn Exchange. My tall staircase neighbour P. D. Hughes — Pete — said he was going, and didn’t mind giving me a push. I know I say ‘tall’ the way some people say ‘nice’, but Pete really was. He was nice and tall. He sometimes had to duck while going through a doorway designed for smaller folk. He and I lived in a constant state of amazement at the size of each other’s shoes.
The din at the Freshers’ Fair was astounding, a physical reminder that I was part of a massive intake of student flesh, perhaps the loudest noise I’d heard since The Who took the stage at Slough. I felt correspondingly oppressed and insignificant. I was hoping there would be a Ramana Maharshi Society, since Cambridge University was alleged to be a progressive environment, but I was out of luck. The closest thing to it alphabetically was Mah-Jongg Club — not close. The closest to it in content, at least as other people were concerned, was the Transcendental Meditation Society, of which I had a holy horror. How dare this sub-guru Mahesh appropriate (and garble) the name of Maharshi?
Pete seemed not to have interests or hobbies as such. He was drawn to stalls manned by women, no matter what organisation they represented, chess club or choral society. Men outnumbered women by a factor of ten at the university, something which neither gender ever forgot. Pete, though tall and nice-looking, was awkward, conscious of the odds against his being a winner in the sweepstakes for companionship. If there was a pretty face at a stall, he asked for details of the organisation concerned. With a little encouragement he might have signed up for anything. A smile could easily have drawn him in to satanism or even stamp-collecting.
He would park me at an angle while he made a play for a young woman whose looks he liked. I wouldn’t be able to see his target from my position, but I could follow the progress of the little flirtation from the behaviour of Pete’s hands on the handles of the wheelchair. Unconsciously he would rock me back and forth, like a mother pacifying the baby while chatting to a neighbour, but since his physique was large and strong — not to mention gripped by sexual tension — his movements weren’t as smooth as he must have imagined. They weren’t at all soothing. No baby could have been lulled by such agitated pushing and pulling. It would have woken and howled. I had to bite my lip myself.
Pete accumulated a lot of leaflets and fliers, smudgily printed on rough brightly coloured paper, which he dumped in my lap while he pushed the chair. After we had left the Fair, he gathered them up and thrust them into a rubbish bin. We had been warned against the temptation, common for freshmen, of signing up for every sort of society and voluntary organisation, rather than find our own way in a relatively denuded social landscape, but we seemed in our different ways to be immune.
After a few days at Cambridge, all the same, I began to have the nagging feeling that I had missed something. When the feeling clarified itself, it turned out to be a throwback to my first reactions at CRX. Then the question had been: I can see the hospital, but where’s the school? Now it was more complicated: I can see Downing College, the Senate House, King’s Chapel, Heffers, Lion Yard, the Corn Exchange, the Modern Languages Department, the Blue Boar and the Round Church, even the University Library (most of them, admittedly, only on the map, or while arriving in the Mini), but where’s the university? If the whole august institution had devoted itself to the vichara, to Self-Enquiry, asking constantly with full attention the arch-and only question Who Am I?, what would be its answer?
Holy tipples
The University had a motto, of course, but it was a bit on the cryptic side: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra. Roughly, ‘This is where we receive enlightenment and imbibe holiness.’ But the Latin doesn’t make a complete sentence and you have to supply the missing grammar. Hinc means ‘from here’. Good — I’m in the right place. And the next bit is about light and holy tipples (poculum being a diminutive meaning a goblet or the liquid it contains, so ‘little drinks’) and it’s in the accusative, so someone is doing something to the light and holy tipples — or will do something or has done something. ‘Getting them’ is as good a guess as any, and I suppose it may as well be ‘us’ that does it. It’s all rather frustrating — or to put it another way, good practice for construing Sanskrit scriptures.
Oxford has a motto, too — Dominus Illuminatio Mea — also with the verb missing, but this is a pretty elementary conundrum since there aren’t hundreds of verbs which are followed by a noun in the nominative. Technically it’s called ‘taking the complement’. Verbs are shy beasts. Only a few can take a complement.