Mostly the gradient of university life was against me, but there were occasions when the playing field was level, or even had a tilt in my favour. It’s only fair that they should get a mention. Those were days like the ones I remembered (as a spectator, of course) from Vulcan, when an able-bodied local team was unnerved by the home side’s competitiveness or was undone by its own chivalry. Either way, it got thrashed.
Fascinating elastic bread
One triumph had its roots in a moment of outrage. As I was working my knife and fork down into my plateful of food one day in Hall, they came across something which felt like a special sort of bread, resistant but also squishy. I was intrigued. Evidently Chef had excelled himself, and all for the benefit of the little Modern Languages student in the wheelchair. I thought that before I took a bite I would just peek under the topping to see what this fascinating elastic bread was. It was a steak. It was an animal slab, and I went berserk. I’m sorry (very slightly sorry) to say that I howled for this heinous object to be taken out of my sight.
The massed carnivores of the college watched it go, incredulous with sorrow. They mourned its passing, except that mourners don’t usually lick their lips. Even I could see that this was a shining specimen of the flesh feast, succulent, cooked to perfection — I hadn’t eaten at the Compleat Angler all those times without knowing what steak should be like. Granny might make a little road across her plate, but Peter laid down a four-lane highway over as many plates as were put in front of him. I imagine this superb atrocity was destined for High Table and had been blown off course. No wonder my fellow students looked on in such anguish. They would never see such a meal in their academic lifetimes, and I was sending it back with shrill squeals of protest.
Next day the college Chef came to interview me about my preferences. ‘I’d like to make a special list of what you can and can’t eat, sir!’ This was a diplomatic breakthrough, this embassy to the untouchables. The outcastes were being wooed. Nato was reaching out a tentative hand to the Warsaw Pact.
The ‘special list’ was simple enough. Can eat: non-meat. Can’t eat: meat. That was it, essentially, but it seemed best to go into detail and make positive suggestions. Just to be on the safe side I mentioned that vegetarians couldn’t eat anything which had been in contact with aluminium, and he gravely wrote down this also.
From then on Chef paid special attention to the herbivores. The other two got the benefit without the shock of being ambushed by that steak, buried like a landmine of animal tissue beneath the innocent tomato topping. In a college of notoriously awful food, the three of us — the one per cent — dined in something like luxury. The minority is always right, of course, but rightness doesn’t usually tingle in the tastebuds as it did in ours then.
It wasn’t long before the carnivores noticed the general superiority of our rations. A deputation approached the Bursary to request vegetarian food. Request refused — if they had wanted to register as vegetarians they needed to do so before arriving in college. This was entirely unfair and very pleasing. On the one hand, every new vegetarian is a gift to the world. If there’s one religion that should be allowed to proselytise, it’s vegetarianism. On the other hand, the deputation didn’t represent a change of heart but a sly bid for better grub.
We lonely three were conscientious objectors who had faced down the stigma of refusal, while they were like volunteers who wanted to desert now that they had seen what life was like in the trenches of institutional catering. They were sent smartly back to the front, and we conchies held steady at one per cent.
Mum wasn’t much of a letter writer by this stage of our lives, but she did send on to me a note from Mrs Osborne. Apparently Kuppu had wished me to be informed that if I ever returned to Tamil Nadu she would look after me for the rest of her life.
This was a sweetly shocking thing to hear. The contrast with Cambridge life was very great. A gardener’s wife in India could pledge herself, after a few short weeks of acquaintance, to serving me as long as she had breath. In the West my value to anyone else was not high, and my needs were strictly my own.
Dad was never much of a correspondent either. A letter from him was always something of an event, and his first letter to me at Cambridge was by his standards a hysterical document. A bit of a facer, frankly … timing could be better … not as if they’re short of a bob or two. He had received a bill from Downing. He sent it along for me to look at. Should he pay it? Why should he? But how could he not? Little ripples of alarm churned up the preferred flatness of his letter-writing manner.
The bill was for the expense of fitting a rail over the bath on my staircase. It was accompanied by a compliments slip from the Bursar, but no refinement of stationery could soften the blow. The bill was for ninety-two pounds. Dad didn’t know whether to pay it, to refuse point-blank or to challenge the amount. And neither did I. None of the alternatives had the slightest appeal for Dad: being taken for a fool, defying authority and waiting for the bailiffs, or haggling like a carpet-seller in the souk.
Even so, this was a thunderbolt which was in some ways almost refreshing — an antidote to brooding, something out there in the world that damanded immediate attention.
Ninety-two pounds! It was an outrageous sum of money, as Dad knew very well since he had paid for the very similar (if not identical) over-bath rail at Trees. It was clear that Downing had given the work to some top-drawer contractor, then passed the mark-up on to us. It wasn’t even as though the college had been required to provide a hoist. I had brought my own. Technically I suppose it was Dad who had brought it along, loading it in the back of the car that had escorted me to Cambridge. It was made by the same Everest and Jennings who had made my first electric wheelchair, inferior predecessor of the Wrigley, and it wasn’t anything fancy. It was really only the motor from one of their chairs, lightly modified. Instead of the relays required to power a chair, there were two strings, a green and a red. Green for Go and red for Stop. Heaven help you if you’re colour-blind — but not in itself an elaborate piece of equipment.
The Cromer family rail
I didn’t even understand the principle behind sending Dad a bill. Was the idea that we would sell the rail back to the college when I left, minus depreciation calculated on some standard basis, or were we entitled (perhaps required by law) to rip it out and take it with us out into the wider world? Would we be sued for negligence at a later date if we left the Cromer family rail — a horizontal funicular only suited to the most unadventurous sightseer — disfiguring Downing’s handsome bathroom ceiling?
Dad had no one to ask, but I did. Every Cambridge college assigns to its students an official whose job is to defend their interests, against the college itself if need be. This is their tutor. I was up against exactly the sort of situation for which the tutor system was designed, so I went and complained to mine.
When I say ‘I went and complained’, of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Nothing is ever that simple. To get help from my tutor I needed an appointment with him, and to get an appointment I needed help from someone else, someone to carry notes back and forth on my behalf. The system was essentially the same as what Mrs Osborne used to send messages in Tiruvannamalai, except that she had the benefit of a large stock of boys clamouring to be chosen. Perhaps the simplest method in Cambridge would have been to send someone with a message to my tutor’s pigeon-hole in the Porter’s Lodge, but there was no guarantee of a swift response and I felt that this was an emergency of some diffuse sort.