Freshly minted heptagons
Perhaps no one can watch everything they care about going up in flames without feeling a certain lifting of the spirits. Few of us get the chance to find out, and so we pay lip-service to the notion of catastrophe.
She said she would have liked to send me the full twenty-one pounds, but her funds wouldn’t stretch so far. I was very pleased with my stack of coins. Peter too was impressed by my new purse bursting with freshly minted heptagons, and asked who had given it to me. ‘Granny,’ I said, and then, seeing his incredulous expression, ‘The other one. Nice Granny.’ There was no implied criticism of the one who came first in our minds, the ur-Granny, who wouldn’t have thought much of an unconditional gift. For her, presents came into the same category as kites, balloons and aprons, having strings attached by definition.
Dad’s mum loved animals even when they weren’t made of glass. As a child I asked her, where do the animals go? Go after death. And she said, ‘I’m sure there’s a little corner of heaven God keeps for animals.’ A paddock in paradise — why not? It’s what Nice Granny would have provided herself.
The only limit on her niceness was that she didn’t love her children. Nature and strangers but not her own children. A worm in a jar was ‘a perfect lamb’ (as she had said once), but her own children were perfect nuisances. When children got to be about eight years old they began to be bearable to her — they were allowed to say goodbye to her then, gently clasping the tip of her outstretched finger.
Luckily there was Midge to bring them up, a local girl who had joined Nice Granny’s household when she was twelve and never left. When Nice Granny was getting old Midge said she wanted the house, and Nice Granny said, Then you’d better have it.
Understandably Dad had no more than a pained fondness for his mother, and a deep though resentful bond with Midge. If it turned out that his mother hadn’t put anything in the will about Midge getting the house, he would certainly have seen her right.
I spent a lot of time getting my thanks about my birthday down on paper, which was probably wasted effort. There’s nothing that introduces a false note into a thank-you letter more reliably than actual gratitude. It’s a container that can accommodate almost anything more easily than what it was specifically designed to hold. A sincere thank-you letter is a live chick pecking its way out of a dyed egg on an Easter table-decoration, and giving everyone a turn.
Returning to Cambridge after Christmas didn’t exactly feel like a home-coming, but there were fewer possibilities for explosion and upset on Kenny A staircase than in Bourne End. It was too peaceful to feel like home. I almost felt I was getting to know the ropes.
Jean Beddoes had started to confide in me — not about private matters, though I could have compiled a fair-sized dossier on her husband’s health from what she let slip on the subject, and I picked up a certain amount of information about her money worries. It was more when she felt out of her depth as a bedmaker that she would come to me for advice. One day, for instance, she told me that she didn’t know what to do about a student on my staircase. Should she report him to the college authorities, or was it none of her business? She couldn’t make up her mind.
The student in question, Dexter Hoffman, was known to me, since he would stay talking over coffee and cigarettes when everyone else had gone. At last I would simply tell him to go. He was impervious to hints, but oddly docile when given a clear directive.
Hoff was reading philosophy, though our discussions were not philosophical in any obvious sense. Dexter (always known as ‘Hoff’) was known as a conversationalist, meaning that he paid only the slightest attention to what anyone else said, just enough to turn the talk back to the rut of his preference when it deviated.
Hoff was a college character whose foibles were much discussed. He filed his collection of albums by an esoteric system which remained mysterious in its details even when the general principle became known. The record at the extreme left was Love’s Forever Changes, while the one at the other extreme was An Electric Storm by White Noise, a group known only to Hoff, or so it seemed.
Privileged guests would be challenged to put the record on Hoff’s turntable back where it belonged in the ranking. It was considered a triumph to be only ten places off. The criterion was ‘heaviness’, a quality which obsessed the student population but had never before been systematically considered. The Vietnam War was heavy, Blind Faith were heavy, the prospect of getting a job and joining an oppressive Establishment was undeniably heavy, but no one before Hoff had even attempted to rank them comparatively.
It wasn’t clear if he was serious about this, or making one of his jokes. Since he rarely laughed at other people’s jokes, and never at his own, it was hard to tell. About his albums he seemed to be serious. Forever Changes earned its place by being ‘deep’ but not heavy. An Electric Storm, on the other hand, was absolute heaviness, a sort of Kelvin zero. As he put it, ‘If you listen to the last track late at night and you’ve smoked some shit, you can think that it’s you that’s dying.’ And this was not a dreadful warning but a recommendation.
Our conversations, though, were about sex. He was a ladies’ man of some obsessiveness, though his preferred term was ‘girls’. He was always smuggling girls into his room at night and sneaking them out again in the morning. He strongly opposed co-education (technically, co-residence), and thought it would never come to pass in Downing.
From his philandererer’s perspective, co-residence would take all the excitement out of his conquests. As he explained it to me, ‘If you can just click with the girl in the next room, well — where’s the challenge in that?’ It was a question of sportsmanship. When the grouse moor is right next to the gun room then there’s nothing to brag about in bagging a huge tally.
If there had been women on the premises, he would still insist on hunting abroad, on principle. Well, partly on principle — it was also a lot easier to stop girls hanging around after he lost interest if they didn’t live there in the first place.
I did wonder whether Hoff was really the womanising sensation he claimed, but his word was broadly accepted on the matter. Some dissidents suggested that girls took their clothes off just to get him to stop talking, though others questioned whether even such a drastic measure would necessarily shut him up. ‘They expect me to try it on,’ he would say. ‘They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. They’d take it personally.’ He took his rôle very seriously, though I didn’t think it was strictly necessary for the smooth running of the town, or even the nurses’ hostel.
He had a strange hairstyle, though it was probably more of a refusal to have a hairstyle. His hair was naturally frizzy, and he both let it grow and tamed it with a savage parting, so that the ensemble looked like a cottage loaf which has risen unevenly. Of course women often like an element of helplessness in men, but I doubt if that was part of the plan.