I felt sadness at the defeat which was thrown into relief by this small triumph. The real discipleship was my relationship with my guru, and however exciting and revelatory I managed to make my reminiscences of India, I knew that some longed-for process of kindling, of catching fire at last, had not in fact taken place despite my conviction of flammability. The quest and its goal seemed further away than ever.
I almost longed to be proselytised by those of other religions, so that I could have my convictions honed by the abrasion of alien creeds. In fact I didn’t suffer unduly from the attentions of the God Squad — it was as if I had been inoculated by that clumsy first approach from the apostle Colin. Others weren’t so lucky. One lovely gentle student called Chris Charnock, reading English, who had religious feelings that weren’t fully formed, felt so persecuted by the evangelical wing of the university that he had a sort of nervous breakdown. I didn’t know him very well, but we had enjoyed some vague spiritual chats, and he had lent me his copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy. Now he couldn’t stop weeping and had to be sent home. He didn’t come back the next term. I felt sorry to lose an ally, someone with whom in time I might have shared my own feelings of falsity and strain, but I was glad for him that he was away from what had been for him a place of torment. Nothing could have been more damaging to this shy mystic, feeling his way towards his inklings, than to be lectured on hell and its fires.
Downing had a chaplain, but I had little contact with him. He was very tactile, and I don’t mean anything sinister by that. It’s just he was very keen on the hugs and pats, which I don’t find it easy to discourage (there’s never an electric fence around when you need one), and on one occasion he took a small liberty. He ran his hand over my starveling and lop-sided beard, saying with a twinkle, ‘John Cromer, you’re only half a man, aren’t you?’, which I found rather wounding. I should have stood up for my peculiarity and my faith both, by saying, ‘I take that as a compliment, chaplain. Ardhanishvara is Lord Shiva represented as half man and half woman. It’s your loss that callow Christianity has no time for such subtleties of incarnation. The interest is all in the half-tones.’
Nelson never ordered pizza
Sometimes I missed the evening meal in Hall and went out to eat with a group. The favoured destination was a cheap place called the Eros on Petty Cury. One reason for the low prices was that it occupied relatively undesirable premises on the first floor, which necessitated much human machinery to get me upstairs and downstairs again at the end of the meal. The descent was frightening since cheap wine was likely to have boosted the confidence of my porters at the expense of their coördination. The staple dish was moussaka (can it really have cost only six shillings, thirty new pee as we practised saying?), but the Eros also offered a ‘Florentine’ pizza, topped with spinach and a rather sinister, glistening fried egg.
That wasn’t the reason, though, for my never ordering it. I have nothing against pizza beyond the fact of its being unitary. Admiral Nelson never ordered pizza either, and the reason is obvious. Two good arms are required to dismantle the savoury disc. Of course Nelson had Emma Hamilton, but for once she was no substitute. There’s no getting around it — having your food cut up for you beyond the age of five is bearable only in surroundings of relaxed intimacy, and not always then. A plate of pasta, on the other hand, by the generosity of its composite nature, offers tendrils to the questing fork. Even to the fork that twirls ineptly in slow motion.
The restaurant was hardly one which Granny would have recognised as such, what with the chipped plates and the unmatched cutlery. But there was one little waiter, from the Philippines I think, who was vaguely reminiscent of the waiter at the Compleat Angler, so expert at buttering up a woman who prided herself on immunity to flattery.
This Filipino would sometimes ask an undergraduate for a phone number as well as his address on the back of a cheque. This was in the days before cheque guarantee cards, when no pledge more formal than an address was required. He certainly took the name of the establishment at face value. The god of boyish desire threw arrow after arrow into his heart, till it must have had the pitted texture of a pub dartboard.
I was the only one who seemed to notice the glaring inappropriateness of the extra request. This waiter only asked the pretty ones for this detail, and was perhaps shrewd enough to ask only parties whom wine had fuddled. Not shrewd enough, though, to realise that the numbers he was given were never more intimate than those of the public phones on some privileged staircases, which took incoming calls. The best he could hope for was pot luck. Perhaps the right person would pick up the phone and hear the plaintive murmur of ‘Here is Eros boy. You are nice James?’
Some of the letters which the porters kindly delivered to A6 were government circulars to do with decimal currency, which would be introduced in February of 1971. These circulars with their jaunty tone nevertheless managed to suggest that decimal currency was an impossibly difficult challenge for young, old and everyone in between. I determined to master it. Time is an illusion, absolutely right — but that’s no excuse for being stuck in the past.
By the time my Heffers bill for the term arrived I was well ahead of the game. Laboriously I converted all the sums from pounds shillings and pence into New Pennies, and wrote out a cheque accordingly. There’s a thin line between being cheeky-charming and getting people’s backs up, and I don’t always know which side I’m on. Heffers returned the cheque, with a wry covering letter saying they were impressed by my preparedness for change, not to mention my computational skills, but would I mind replacing the old cheque drawn on the new system with a new one drawn on the old?
The tides of history were rising over Britannia’s knees on the big old dirty copper penny, but she hadn’t been swept away just yet. I can’t help feeling it would have been more fun if Heffers had given me credit as a pioneer of the new world of sensibly divisible money, by holding on to the cheque for a couple of months, till it ripened into legal validity.
When I went home for the Christmas vacation I didn’t know what sort of welcome I would get from the family. By the family I mean Mum. The others were dependable in their ways. Peter would be quietly happy, Audrey would blow hot and cold, and Dad would greet me absently, as if he was pretty sure he knew me but couldn’t remember the context.
I even considered staying in Cambridge over the vacation, though Hall would close down and I would have to cater for myself. I would also need my Tutor’s permission, which pretty much ruled it out. Graëme Beamish had obviously made a resolution, well ahead of the New Year, to refuse any further requests from the occupant of A6 Kenny. I made a resolution not to put his resolution to the test.
In the event Mum was warm and gracious, very much on best behaviour. It seemed that at last she accepted me having a home elsewhere. I wouldn’t keep coming home if she made it an ordeal when I did. It made a difference that she was having great trouble with Audrey.
Audrey was hardly more than ten, but her wilfulness was phenomenal. She would never back down. Sometimes I think she was frightened by her own anger. She wasn’t alone in that.
The present I remember most fondly from my twenty-first birthday (it did for Christmas as well) was a purse containing twenty-one fifty-pence pieces. The coins were legal tender already, as ten shillingses, though I felt honour-bound to wait until decimalisation dawned to spend them. This was from my other grandmother, Dad’s mother. We hardly ever saw her. By this time she was retired, living in a part of Edinburgh called Hunters Tryst, which I loved even before I learned that it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Christ’. She was a rather childlike creature who had spent most of her life running her own little gift shop, specialising in glass animals. She was always feeling sorry for people and giving them ridiculous discounts. Not much of a businesswoman. Eventually the shop burned down, and we learned that it had never been insured. She seemed remarkably calm about it, saying that she had had fun out of it for years and years without doing anyone any harm, and that was the main thing, wasn’t it?