I had only the dimmest idea about what matriculation actually was, but that was clearly not the point. The Bursar was nodding gravely, so I went on: ‘But you see, I have only the one pair of shoes, which are brown. There they are, see?’ His eyes slid past my feet as I wiggled them faintly. ‘And I can’t just pop into a shoe shop and pick up another pair. They take months to make.’ I didn’t give him all the details, the numbered lasts, the annual entitlement. ‘It seems simpler not to go.’
‘Oh, don’t give up hope,’ said Mr Gates. ‘Do please attend. I can’t say matriculation, though an ancient ceremony, is a very thrilling event in the life of an undergraduate — certainly it pales beside a “demo” or a “sit-in”. But it is an academic milestone you have earned, so please attend. It doesn’t exactly mark your birth as a student member of the university. Your academic christening, perhaps. We shall wet a great many babies’ heads! But even so, yours would be sadly missed. So please attend. Pay no attention to trivial regulations. These rules were made to be broken.’
Which was a lovely thing to hear. It would be even lovelier if there was a list of the rules that were like that — which ones you could blow away with a single puff of breath, which ones would turn and sink their teeth into you.
I know we’re all supposed to adore the big-hearted small-mindedness of British life — the professor’s forbidden dog in his college rooms, for instance, classified by indulgent authority as ‘cat’. I suppose it’s easier to enjoy such things if you can be confident they will work in your favour.
It did seem strange that the phrase ‘no exceptions’ didn’t offer any sort of guide to the breakability of the rule to which it was attached. It was like hearing that Fragile labels are attached promiscuously to packages of every type, rubber balls as well as crystal. Fascinating but unhelpful, particularly if you were a fragile package yourself.
Of course, it’s possible to be too pedantic, though I can hardly believe I’m saying so. A number of times I’ve heard myself referred to as having brittle bone disease — I’ve even been told so to my face — and I’ve managed to stifle the urge to correct the mistake. This isn’t University Challenge, this is daily life in the Kali Yuga, and they’ve grasped the essential point. Don’t drop him.
While I was lucky enough to be holding a bursar captive in my room, carpeted between the Parker-Knoll and the wheelchair, I pressed my advantage and asked for exemption from another rule. I wanted a phone in my room. It was against regulations, of course, but so was having a car and wearing brown shoes to matriculate (or be matriculated?), and I had cleared those hurdles in my own athletic fashion.
It turned out that Mr Gates could stone-wall as well as coax. ‘That’s something you’ll have to take up with your tutor,’ he said, ‘and I’m afraid university people get very worked up about possible precedents.’ University people — as if he was some other order of creature.
Pretty flink myself
He seemed remarkably calm himself about the prospect that the next generation of freshmen, having learned of the trail I had blazed, would turn matriculation into an orgy of non-conformist footwear. Desert boots, flip-flops and Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes would be flaunted without shame.
On the telephone question I felt confident about approaching Graëme Beamish for help. It seemed obvious that he would sympathise with the bind I was in. It leapt to the eyes. Consider: to request a telephone I needed an appointment with him, but without a telephone it wasn’t easy to arrange one. That was just the sort of thing we could avoid in future, with a little flexibility and some installed apparatus.
I already had the support of my director of studies and German supervisor, Roy Wisbey, a good teacher and a terrific chap. He would carry me up to his rooms without any fuss and then sit next to me on a sofa while he looked over what I had done. I remember him praising me for the phrase ein flinkes Eichhörnchen, saying there was no better match in the world of adjective and noun — ein Einhörnchen being a squirrel and flinkes meaning ‘frisky’, though (his words not mine) frisky didn’t capture the full sense of the German, that pert alertness, bristling junior vitality. That kind comment made me feel pretty flink myself.
Didn’t Roy Wisbey keep urging me to phone him if I had a question of any sort? And every time I explained that this wasn’t possible he asked almost testily: ‘Why on earth haven’t you got a phone in your room?’, as if I might have thrown it out of the window in a fit of temper. ‘How are you supposed to manage?’ A very good question. He suffered from tunnel vision as it strikes academics, mild mental glaucoma, so that although he didn’t miss a thing in his subject area, he could be very vague about other parts of life. I kept telling him I wasn’t on the phone, and he kept asking me for my extension number, undeterred.
Graëme (the academic who did academic impersonations) greeted me with great satisfaction. ‘It is as I promised you, John,’ he said. ‘The bill that has lost you so much sleep has been magicked away. It has been legitimately settled without requiring the draining of your father’s funds, which I’m sure are tied up as is proper in high-yielding bonds.’ Perhaps he was misled by our address on the Abbotsbrook Estate, realm of stockbrokers and advertising executives, suggestive of top-people status. We had a home there, but nothing so secure as a niche. Mum would have liked a niche, nothing better. About Dad I’m not so sure.
I was curious about how the trick was managed.
‘Ah, John, those who ask to have magic explained only guarantee themselves disappointment. The fact is, there exists a splendid organisation called the Bell, Abbott & Barnes Fund, whose help is available to undergraduates in hardship. I think there is a connection with the British Legion — at all events, when I learned of your father’s history in the armed services I decided they should be our first port of call. We needed no other. They were happy to oblige.’
This was not at all what I had expected. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Don’t thank me, John,’ said Graëme with what seemed to be withering irony. ‘I do these things for fun. It is my whim, my caprice, my joy, and no acknowledgement is expected.’ In academic fact Graëme, as I had found out by this time, was a physicist whose work on ‘lattice transformations in niobium disulphide’ had important implications for electronics or (for all I know) cookery. He specialised in compounds of niobium, named after a bereaved mother who never stops crying. He knew the secret sorrows of the periodic table. Why should he want to put on such a show of stuffiness in his rôle as a tutor?
Actually it made perfect sense. In the lab he wore a white coat and possibly goggles. Meeting his tutees he wore a different metaphysical uniform — university fustian from head to foot, with implied spats sticking out below the hem of his gown. His rooms, of course, corresponded to his ‘real’ academic life rather than his persona, so there were no dusty books, wall hangings or tuns of madeira. The only thing that could be described as an ornament (though it would have drawn my eyes anyway) was an array of half-a-dozen polished globes, the size of steel marbles, suspended bilaterally from strings in a wooden framework, an executive toy designed to illustrate a physical law — to wit, the conservation of momentum. Newton’s Balls, they were called. I longed to set them going, but didn’t dare to ask. Silly, really. If it wasn’t childish for him to have them there then it was hardly childish for me to want to play with them.