It worried me that my A-level results might not be good enough, but Eckstein reassured me in the only way he knew, by making me feel I knew nothing about it. ‘If Eckstein recommends you, that counts for something. I don’t say they will take you, but they will give you an interview.’ From what he was saying, a set of A-level papers barely scratched the surface of the applicant’s abilities. A Cambridge interview was a sort of academic X-ray, which would examine the very bones of my mind and pronounce them sturdy or unsound.
His recommended strategy was to apply early. It made sense to allow extra time for the university to prepare properly for my needs (preferably not by coaching undergraduates in the art of cushioning the wheelchair’s falls downstairs). I thought back on the time at Trees before Granny’s chequebook made the extension happen — if it had taken years for my own home to begin to be tailored to my measure, then it made sense to give a mere institution as much notice as possible. Eckstein also pointed out with his usual tact, which was none, that with my disordered educational history I had some catching up to do. I shouldn’t expect to go up until 1970, when I would be a little older than my university equals.
I still wasn’t entirely sold on the idea — the idea of Cambridge, that is. I liked the idea of university. Setting my sights on Cambridge was too much like living Dad’s life as he would have wanted it to be. Under the trivial difference of disability, wouldn’t the other students be rather like me? There would be a sprinkling of toffs and some working-class boys on best behaviour, but there would be an awful lot of the inhibited middle class, from whom little could be learned. There would also be women, but I can’t say I gave them much thought. I hadn’t yet had my fill of young male company.
Perhaps there were other places than Cambridge that would have me, even without Eckstein’s recommendation. There was a cabalistic instrument called an UCCA form to be filled in. The letters stood for Universities’ Combined Clearing Apparatus or something of the sort. I describe it as cabalistic because there were strict rules about how to list your choices, not all of them printed on the form. There were rules behind the rules, and perhaps you were supposed to know them from birth. I believe in previous lives, but I don’t think mine were lived at graduate level. When the system was explained to me, with all the things that couldn’t be said or could only be said in a particular way, I began to think of Great Britain as one big application form bristling with invisible rubrics, needing to be actually filled out only by those who had been refused in advance.
Got an Egyptian tram-driver instead
By then I had found my other place, the university I preferred in my mind to Cambridge. Keele. Keele was new, Keele was modern. It was ‘red brick’ (it was even in Staffordshire, where they actually made red bricks), and had only been given the status of university a few years before. Fine by me. It made sense that Keele would suit me better. The syllabus there was progressive, requiring students to study both arts and sciences instead of narrowing themselves in the traditional way. I could almost feel my brain expanding at the prospect. Keele was also likely to place fewer stumbling-blocks in the path of a wheelchair than a labyrinth of ancient learning like Cambridge. Admittedly Burnham had failed to provide anything in the way of lifts, despite being new and modern, but the principle wasn’t discredited by a single disappointment.
My motoring map told me that Keele was comfortably further away from Bourne End than Cambridge, and this intensified its advantage. Dad was always talking about the excellence of nature’s way of doing things, that birds pushed their chicks out of the nest at the earliest opportunity, but it was clear that in this case I would have to push myself out, against the furious resistance of the mother bird. I told myself that at red-brick Keele I would meet true companions, mates, working-class fellows with brick-dust on their brawny arms. This sort of dream seems stupid right up to the moment when it is fulfilled. Didn’t E. M. Forster himself crave union with an English policeman? Okay, he got an Egyptian tram-driver instead, but he seems to have made the best of it.
I also had the idea that Dad wouldn’t be jealous if I went to Keele, since it would hardly count as a university in his eyes. Perhaps jealousy wasn’t even a factor in the equation. It was never easy to predict what would catch Dad on the raw and what he wouldn’t even register.
I wanted to put Keele as my first choice, Cambridge as my second, but that was ruled out of court. Cambridge had to come first, or not at all, though in theory the admissions authorities of Cambridge were airy about the irrelevance of other examination boards’ assessments of students, saying more or less If we wanted A-grades, we could take our pick of the best — but really, it takes something more than the ability to pass exams to make the sort of student we’re interested in.
They could see right through the shallowness of status and ranking. You, on the other hand, were required to pay the proper homage. It was legitimate to put Cambridge second if you put Oxford first, and vice versa, as long as you didn’t mind the bureaucratic equivalent of a bloody nose. Nothing good would come of such an act of provocation. It was within the rules — even the rules behind the rules — but it was completely stupid. So the sentence ‘I want to go to Keele and find proletarian love, but failing that, I suppose I’ll risk complicating Dad’s emotional state by plumping for Cambridge’, when translated into the language of UCCA, became 1. Cambridge, 2. Keele. How much was lost in translation? Just about everything. It was as inadequate as my first stab at Lorca’s poem.
On top of which, you have to put your chosen college in the space on the form, not just ‘Cambridge’, so my first choice was Downing College, Cambridge. Downing being where Eckstein had studied, and where he had his contacts. 1. Downing College, Cambridge. 2. Keele.
Keele offered me an interview first, in May. I was surprised when Dad said he’d come with me. I’d be doing all the driving, though, I’d promised myself a real safari. I supposed he wanted to get away from Mum, who was being rather difficult, but I was pleased all the same. He was even taking two days’ leave from work. Dad and I only ever seemed to be on the same path for a little while and by accident. I felt that I was basically a nuisance as far as he was concerned. I didn’t look beneath the surface. I was content with self-pity and a limited view of a complex man. I didn’t try to understand more deeply, by making myself sensitive to undercurrents, or the lack of them. Dad thought I was a nuisance, yes, but he also thought Peter and Audrey were a nuisance. It wasn’t personal.
Of course it wasn’t flattering that one of Dad’s routine words for describing us and our behaviour was ‘nauseating’, and I had been quite shocked when I learned its exact meaning (when Flanny our GP gave me an injection to help me keep food down when I got the measles at last). So Dad was actually saying his children induced the desire to vomit! It served him right that I passed measles on to him so promptly. But after all, if I had wanted a different father, all I would have needed to do was choose another womb. He was only really part of the fittings and furnishings of the womb of my choice, one of the mod cons if you choose to think of it that way. Dad en-suite, liable to vomit on contact with his children.
Dad liked being a father, he just didn’t like having children. It’s not really a paradox. Family life didn’t bring out the best in him, but in whom does it bring out the best, exactly? Certainly not me. I could be a perfect beast on evenings when I had decided to bait him.