Liz, naturally, joined the Labour Club and CND. The shadow of a nuclear war weighed heavily on all our imaginations. I remember the Cuban crisis of April 1961 when the US invaded the Bay of Pigs. It was spring term in my first year away from home. We were all terrified, that weekend in particular, when the political commentators really thought that an atomic armageddon was about to be unleashed. Our considered reaction to the horror? We queued up for the Newnham phone box to call our parents. That was the measure of our political consciousness. Liz said of those days: ‘We were certain that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust. And when it didn’t, nothing has seemed quite so bad ever since.’
We undergraduates were not left to deal with our terrors alone, however, as each college had a moral tutor, in loco parentis, whose role was to support us. The aforementioned Lesley Cook was the moral tutor of Old Hall. She was a dashing woman with vibrant, strawberry-blonde hair, and was very tall and athletic: she sailed, she rode — her Dalmatian, Rubble, bounding along behind. I thought about her most of my time in Cambridge — I desired her fiercely. To this day I still do not know whether Lesley Cook was of my persuasion. I suspect that she probably was, and I did tell her repeatedly that I loved her. The avowal of my passion must have been awkward for her because she was a moral person; sleeping with a student would have been unthinkable. My way of reaching her was to bring her bags of fudge from the Copper Kettle, the much-loved tea shop on King’s Parade. At midnight, I would knock on her study door when I saw there was a light under it. She would let me in and I would give her the fudge, then I’d sit on the floor, and talk and listen. She dazzled me. She was an economist; her specialist subject was cement. Cement was not particularly dazzling to me, but we managed to range beyond it. We would talk about the world, politics, Cambridge, sailing, drama — everything. I was never happier than gazing up at her, trying to engage and amuse her. I think she liked me but, alas, never more than that.
Towards the end of that first year, one of the third years, Susan Earp, killed herself. Her friends had all been going to a party; she had told them that she didn’t want to go and stayed behind. When they went to fetch her for breakfast the next morning, her door was locked and they smelt gas. They broke the door down and found her lying there, dead. One of the girls gave a scream that resounded through the whole building: I’ve never forgotten that sound. I knew immediately that such a howl of despair and shock could only mean that somebody had died. That day, I remember standing at the bottom of the stairwell as the coffin was being carried down the winding Old Hall stairs. That is when it hit me that she was really dead, a few feet away from me in that coffin, and I felt guilty — because I had known she had been unhappy. We all knew: when she came down to breakfast, we could see from her expression that this was a soul in torment, but we wouldn’t have dreamt of speaking to her because she was third year and we were first year.
I decided that I must never let an unhappiness go unremarked or uncomforted again, and if I saw anybody unhappy, I would talk to them. From that time, I instituted coffee gatherings when people in the third year would talk to people in the first and second years. We deliberately cut across those barriers.
Lesley Cook felt responsible for Susan’s suicide. She told me: ‘I feel I have let her down, and let the university down and her parents and the college.’ She was not responsible, but she felt guilty because Old Hall was in her charge. Not long after, she left Cambridge to go to Sussex University and another tutor replaced her.
The last time I saw Lesley Cook was puzzling. It was years later when I came to Brighton Theatre Royal with The Killing of Sister George. To my delight she wrote, inviting me to stay with her on Saturday night. I accepted with alacrity and drove there after my two shows. She seemed extremely pleased to see me. We had a light supper and then she said, ‘I’m sure you’re very tired. I want you to have my room, I’ll sleep in my spare room.’ Of course, I tried to argue, but she insisted.
As I was getting undressed, she came into the bedroom in her underwear and said, ‘Sorry to barge in. I’ve left my nightie in here.’ She looked gorgeous, still a woman in her prime. I gawped at her, stammered, ‘Oh, of course.’ There was the slightest of pauses — and she left. Should I have launched myself at her? I wanted to but I didn’t. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. Breakfast was very agreeable and I left. It’s one of the might-have-been moments in my life. We stayed in touch; she died some years ago. She was very dear to me.
I never felt alone or lonely at Cambridge. While I was surrounded by my friends, Mummy and Daddy also loved coming to see me there. So much so, that Ruth Cohen, my principal at Newnham, remarked: ‘Your parents are here so often, Miriam, I could swear they’re keeping terms.’
As you see, quite clearly, I have not separated myself from my parents, and I probably never will, but I must admit that I was a little bit embarrassed by their frequent presence. Daddy got quite friendly with Ruth Cohen; I think he once asked her something incredibly personal about her knickers. I’ve tried to forget what it was.
In my second year at Newnham, my close friend and supervision partner Sophy Gairdner and I had a joint twenty-first birthday party on the banks of the Grantchester River. Nearly two hundred people came and it was a roaring success. It went on from lunch to late. All the food had to be carried across the meadows from the car to the riverbank. People arrived by car, on foot and in boats. The Gairdners brought masses of drink; Mummy had done the catering, but in the haste to get to Cambridge early, she left 600 meatballs behind in Oxford by mistake. Daddy drove all the way back to Oxford to fetch them. That’s how much they loved me.
After the party, I stayed at Countess Elisabeth von Rietberg’s house in Adams Road. She was a generous, rather lonely divorcée, who seemed to enjoy spending time with students. In the morning, the headline in the Sunday papers was ‘Marilyn Monroe found dead’.
Adventures in Academia
When I first arrived at Cambridge, my Exhibition to Newnham College was for Anglo-Saxon. About three weeks into my first term, I realised that Anglo-Saxon was not a language anybody spoke. I thought, ‘What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing reading Anglo Saxon? That’s bollocks. I want to communicate with people.’ I don’t even know why I’d plumped for it in the first place. I think I imagined it was special and different, whereas English seemed a rather predictable subject, but I was wrong. I went to see Dorothy Whitelock. I asked if I could change. Professor Whitelock was very understanding. The college authorities even allowed me to keep my Exhibition — and my long superior gown, the outward manifestation of my award.
So I switched course and I never regretted changing. I was, however, surprised by the level of academic vituperation that the academics had for each other. I was always a Leavisite: Dr Frank Leavis and his wife, Queenie Leavis (who was Jewish, by the way), embodied the intellectual fulcrum of Cambridge for me, but they were loathed by most of their colleagues.
Lady Lee, the wife of the Master of Corpus Christi and mother of my great friend Susan, gave a party for the Faculty; and when the Leavises walked into the room, everyone else walked out. It was a demonstration of hostility and contempt the like of which I’ve never heard. That was the sort of thing that could happen at Cambridge, especially in the English department, which was riven with bitterness, recrimination and back-stabbing.