‘The breakfast tray, however, holds far more than merely coffee and rolls. It is as if his landlady is trying to save him the expense of eating for the rest of the day. There are hard-boiled eggs. There are slabs of pale cheese the size of small books, if the books were pale and sweaty. There are churned and rendered meats — swollen sausages and motley slices. There is a higher presence of offal in these productions than he would welcome even without the hammers in his head. The purity laws in Germany seem to stop with the irreproachable beer. In the butcher’s shop anything goes.
‘He can face none of it, not even the second half of his roll. But it’s out of the question, the height of rudeness, to reject so lavish and considerate a morning offering (the rates of the Gasthaus are extremely reasonable). So he stows the food away in his suitcase, planning to dispose of it in some better place at a more convenient time.
‘The next morning the hammers in his head are if anything heavier and more efficient at blotting out thought with their crashing. The breakfast tray presented to him with a flourish is even more disheartening, because he is feeling yet worse than he did the day before — and because there is even more food this time. The landlady has taken his tray-clearing performance of the day before as a challenge. In retrospect he has miscalculated by not leaving at least some of the eggs on the tray, the cheese perhaps, certainly the meats of ill omen. Too late now, though. He has no alternative but to repeat his breakfast-hiding trick. Day after day the problem recurs, but the time when he might empty his suitcase never presents itself.
‘In the common spaces of the Gasthaus, as the week goes on, the landlady becomes both glowing and skittish, a preening hausfrau, making admiring comments about the healthy appetites of the English, comments which his better-than-average conversational skills enable him to acknowledge gracefully, and to deflect.
‘It is at the beginning of the second week that a reek from the cupboard draws the landlady, while cleaning her charming young guest’s room, to the cupboard and the suitcase it contains. Opening the case, she is confronted with a black museum of the previous week’s breakfasts. All her thoughtful kitchen gestures are mashed together in various states of decomposition. The delicacies she had prepared to sustain this cherished guest on his explorations of her beloved locality have been dumped into the vastly inferior digestion, assisted only by flies, of his luggage.
‘The student is out all day, which leaves the landlady many hours to perfect the outburst of grievance with which she will greet the guest who has insulted her hospitality. When he returns, dog-tired after a day of hiking, he will be faced with a problem for which no primer nor phrase book could prepare him. The words pour out of her like the waters of the Rhine in spate.
‘It is now his task to find the words to explain to his landlady why he has disposed of her breakfasts as if they were sordid secrets. Only the right words will stop this solid lady, steaming with rage, from knocking him down her front steps. A large vocabulary and a secure grasp of tone will be required. A good accent will help, to be sure, but only if every other element is in place.
‘We are worlds away here from such rudiments as “Can you tell me please the way to the station?” or indeed “‘Brecht’s genius is to make an élite feel like the rabble, and a rabble like the élite.’ Discuss.”
‘That, my dear John, is why we send students abroad to perfect their language skills. They must learn to manage with no protective barrier between them and the local inhabitants. You can never be in that situation. You must take that protective barrier wherever you go. You cannot expect to plumb the depths of another culture when you need a rubber ring to keep afloat in your own.
‘My advice is that you should consider applying to the college and the university, but with the intention of reading English. Then there need be no delay in admitting you, since a year at High Wycombe Technical College slaving over Spanish will not be required of you.’
And while he was at it, the A. T. Grove in my fantasy might have saved me from another poor decision. He might have added, so softly that I wouldn’t quite be sure he had really said it, ‘Please don’t have a bone cut as a way of pleasing others. Your knee already does the job adequately — the job is only part-time — and your friend either loves you or does not. Love is not fussy about knees. That is the truth of it.’ Fatherly.
When I realised that it was pointless to pursue my course to the bitter end of a degree, I felt let down to a certain extent. False hopes had been encouraged. I would have to finish Part One just the same, and satisfy the examiners at the end of the year. It was hard to see this as a purposeful endeavour, or a meaningful use of my time.
The analogy is pure swank
But at least (I thought) I would be able to conclude my undergraduate career in record time. Modern and Mediaeval Languages was a one-year Part I, English a one-year Part II — so I would get my degree in two years flat.
I had mixed feelings about this truncated course. I wasn’t happy enough at Cambridge to want to stay any longer, but what came after Cambridge? In any case I had paid too little attention to etymology for once. The course for a Cambridge degree is called the Tripos, which derives from the Greek word meaning three-legged. A two-year degree, apparently, would be an absurdity exactly equivalent to a two-legged stool. So I would have to spend two years on Part II of the English course.
I could see that it would have to be English. I had grown to love both Spanish and German. They were strong flavours, Rioja and Riesling exploding on the palate, though the analogy is pure swank since I had tasted neither, and my inability to drop into a bodega or Weinlokal to remedy my ignorance was very much to the point.
Now I would have to wean myself back onto the small beer of my native tongue. The mild and bitter.
I had always been a literary reader. My mind was retentive, particularly of poetry, though I can’t really take the credit for that. My childhood tutor Miss Collins gave me a real incentive, when she restricted my reading time and took the books away. After that, my memory worked overtime, in case it happened again. I could recite reams by heart.
I didn’t anticipate much of an academic challenge. English was widely regarded as a soft option. My broader European perspective would give me a significant advantage. In the Tragedy paper, for instance, which was compulsory, I would ramble on about Büchner. I’d always had a soft spot for Büchner.
I had made a head start by having a poem published in an undergraduate literary magazine. It was called ‘Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Wheelchair’. The title went Wallace Stevens one better. I had loved his poetry since Klaus Eckstein had thrillingly recited, ‘Let be be finale of seem / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’ I probably make too much of the parallels to Hindu thought in Stevens’s metaphysics, but they exist. They’re real. Or at least ‘real’, which is as much as any of us can hope for.
There may never have been a time when it was possible for a poem, legibly written or competently typed, to be rejected by an undergraduate magazine — with or without modernist flourishes and a disability-pathos undertone. If there was such a time it certainly wasn’t the early 1970s. Standards were much lower than those on Woman’s Own. I make no claims for the quality of my poem. I hope no one is ever mischievous enough to disinter it.