I don’t know why people felt such animosity to Dr Leavis, although he was caustic. He would make cutting remarks about the Master of St Catherine’s College, Brigadier Tom Henn, who was very much an army man. He’d seen active duty during the war, and used to give his lectures with a swagger stick under his arm. He would point it at the blackboard and say, ‘Today we’re on the Symbolists,’ and strike the board with a resounding thwack. He and Leavis sniped at each other in their lectures. Leavis was wittier: the hall was always packed when he gave his lectures. He spoke with a curious, slightly dying cadence to his sentences — the opposite of theatrical, but in its very opposition to theatricality, it was unbelievably dramatic. He fascinated me. It was when I was listening to Dr Leavis that I felt I was drinking in knowledge, that I was with the best people, that I had fulfilled my mother’s dream.
It was a heady time; I loved the Leavises: I think they knew it, because they were always extremely nice to me. Queenie gave me a photograph of them together, captioned ‘Creative Quarrelling’. Dr Leavis had been her tutor. They had met when he was a young academic and she was his student, and they fell in love and got married. Of course, her family was against the union because he wasn’t Jewish, and his family were against it because she was. They were used to opposition from the very beginning, therefore, and were never defeated by it.
My new supervisor, Jean Gooder, head of English at Newnham, who is still alive, said that when I came up for my entrance exam, the marks I got were Alpha Gamma, which are unusual marks, because they’re both the top and the bottom mark. I think it means they weren’t quite sure whether I was going to be very clever or very stupid. I am never quite sure myself!
Jean Gooder was a Leavisite too, so she managed to get Queenie to tutor our year: not everybody had that pleasure. We used to go to their house in Bulstrode Gardens, and she would not only teach us, but she also cooked for us: at the end of every term, there was always a wonderful array of goodies to eat at teatime. As well as being a renowned academic, Queenie Leavis was also a Jewish housewife and, accordingly, the most fantastic baker. She fed us scones and strudel and cheesecake.
All in all, the Leavises had a profound effect on me. They taught me that literature has a crucial moral dimension, and I believe that too. I wasn’t just a theatrical butterfly: I did concentrate on certain aspects of my work, but I have to admit I didn’t spend hours in the university library, because, more often than not, I was rehearsing: in my three years at Newnham, I took part in twenty productions. But I’m a more serious person than people give me credit for — I’m not just a funny little bundle. In fact, quite recently Jean Gooder sent me Queenie’s critique of me as a student and I was gratified to discover it was extremely positive.
I remained in touch with the Leavises. Frank Leavis was never made a Professor at Cambridge. He was never elected to a higher status than Reader at the university, because there was such combined opposition to him. He had to fight every step of the way. But to his students, he was, and is, a hero. Dr Leavis was, above all, a superb teacher. He opened the delights of English literature to me and thereby enriched my life. At his final lecture, the hall was packed, people standing in rows when all the seats had been filled. His slight figure, gown billowing, came out. He gave the lecture, and then paused. ‘I’ve come to the end,’ he said, with his characteristic dying cadence. ‘And this is the End.’ Not a dry eye in the house.
I always felt that Cambridge belonged to me — to me, personally: it was my Cambridge. Cambridge gave me everything that I have. It gave me knowledge, friends, emotional excitement; it was an extraordinary time — exactly as it should have been. And in a professional sense, it was the study of Dickens that I undertook whilst there that would prove vital to my career, leading to the show I wrote with Sonia Fraser, Dickens’ Women.
I feel emotional about Cambridge and Newnham. Whenever I return to the city I’m in tears, because I see around every corner the ghosts of the people I knew, the ghost of myself riding down Sidgwick Avenue on my bicycle. It was a time when I was fully alive, when I became fully myself — it gave me the person I am.
Footlights
My Cambridge days were not a time of unadulterated joy, however. I lost my smile a little when I performed in the Footlights review of 1962, which was called Double Take. I didn’t like the Footlights boys, and they really didn’t like me. They made that obvious. At that time, and indeed the whole time I was at Cambridge, a woman could not be a member of the Footlights Club: girls were not welcome; we attended as guests. The first female member of the Footlights was Germaine Greer in 1964, the year after I left the university.
It’s a club with a fine reputation and powerful professional influence in the world of light entertainment. Many great comedians started at Footlights: Stephen Fry, Peter Cook, John Cleese, David Frost, Hugh Laurie, Eric Idle, all the Goodies. Every summer term a revue is produced and goes to the Edinburgh Fringe, and often to Broadway and further afield. Throughout the year, ‘Smokers’ are held: informal concerts where students try out their material and hope to be noticed for possible inclusion in the revue. It is intensely competitive.
When I was asked to audition for the revue, I was delighted if apprehensive. Mummy was overjoyed. She phoned the Oxford Mail and gave an interview to them about my brilliance. That didn’t make me popular with the lads! I wasn’t sure what my role could be. I can’t sing or dance, I wasn’t beautiful, but I knew I could be funny. The trouble was, they didn’t really want ‘the girl’ to be funny — and that’s all I knew how to be. The publicity photo was of me emerging from a gents’ loo with a finger to my lips. Good photo, silly idea.
I was the only girl in the show. I was a pert little madam and I thought I was as good as they were — and they didn’t. They thought I was a jumped-up, pushy, over-confident, fat little Jew. But I was funny, and they didn’t like it. If you think about it, their Monty Python programmes didn’t feature funny women, only the occasional dolly bird. And I certainly wasn’t that.
Their attitudes towards women stemmed from the minor public schools most of them had attended. They weren’t used to dealing with strong, opinionated women. This was before feminism: women were not meant to be funny; they were meant to be decorative. These chaps wanted to sleep with women, not compete with them. I was neither decorative nor bedworthy, and they found me unbearable. The problem was exacerbated by my excellent notices, which were resented. It was actually tangible — the level of competition sharpened. They acknowledged each other’s cleverness, but only just, and there was considerable class antagonism. David Frost was looked down on, for example, because he was merely a middle-class lad from Gillingham, and they were not happy when Clive James arrived during the Sixties. His brilliance was unstoppable, but they disparaged his Australian roots — a shortcoming that allowed Clive to be the object of their disdain. But it was like water off a duck’s back with Clive; he had no respect for any of them. And they quickly changed their minds about his acceptability.
Cambridge was a competitive place; in Footlights, that became toxic. It was the first time in my life that I experienced that sort of competition. During the entire run of that 1962 revue directed by Trevor Nunn, they treated me as if I were invisible and did not speak to me at all. I was sent to Coventry: someone had decided I was not to be spoken to offstage. I would go on to do my bits, and then the minute I stood in the wings, I was ignored: silence and cold stares. Initially, I had no idea why. It hurt a lot. When I say ‘they’, I refer to that most distinguished group of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie, Humphrey Barclay (who became the Head of Light Entertainment for ITV), Tony Hendra and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Only two cast members continued to talk to me: Robert Atkins and Nigel Brown.