During my first winter in Cambridge in 1981, it snowed so heavily that my self-assurance crumpled. I regarded the icy mess that was the Huntingdon Road in dismay — to get to lectures, I have to cycle two miles on that? My new friends were patient. Their bikes flanked mine on either side and back and front as I teetered along. We quickly became a close-knit group, those of us who read economics at Girton, spending most of our waking hours together, moving in a pack. When I first met David and Alan, they announced to me that they’d come to Cambridge for “excellence, excellence, excellence,” but a few months later, David was skipping lectures with me so we could listen to Our Tune on Radio One. Lester, who was a year above us, would sometimes try to hide his East London heritage during Formal Hall by pretending, unsuccessfully, that he was a Nigerian prince. Clive impressed us all, he’d had a gap year and gone busking with his fiddle in Mexico. Seok, who was from Singapore, and I were the foreigners. Not only was she more skilled on a bicycle than I was, she wore punk makeup and Goth clothes. I wore a bright blue Michelin Man — looking jacket given to me by my aunt.
In that first year I had a lot to learn. Grasping Keynesian critiques of monetarism was the relatively easy part. I struggled more with Life of Brian, my first Monty Python film. I didn’t get half the jokes. I persuaded myself to like The Clash just because David did, I bought Combat Rock. My friends and I were heady with our recent initiation into left-wing politics, hardly taking time to sleep for discussing the crises of capitalism. To protest against Thatcherite policies of cutting public spending at a time of high unemployment, in the Cambridge Union I sat next to a young man wearing polka-dot trousers and threw eggs at Sir Geoffrey Howe.
I’d been in Cambridge a year when Steve arrived. He’d also came to Girton to read economics.
“Does it rain here often?” This was the first thing Steve said to me. Except he said “rhine,” not rain, and I stared at him thinking, What? He was standing behind me in the lunch queue, a tall and skinny eighteen-year-old, with a wooden tray in his hand. He repeated his question in response to my blank look, scarlet-cheeked now. When I figured out what he’d said, I still thought, What? I gave some uninterested reply and turned to the curly-haired boy who was with him — Kevin, he told me his name was — hoping for a more inspiring chat. Steve later told me he thought then, you arrogant cow.
Steve and Kevin relied on each other to navigate Cambridge, an untried terrain for these two working-class boys, Steve from East London and Kevin from Basildon in Essex. So at the sherry reception to meet the Mistress of the college, Steve nudged Kevin as he told her, “Me and me friend want to …” but too late, she corrected him and said “You mean, my friend and I.” Kev tried to stop Steve picking out and eating the leaves from the cup of green tea he’d been served by their economic history professor during a tutorial—“No, mate, you don’t do that, no.” In those days Steve wore a green bomber jacket, Doc Martens boots, and a West Ham football scarf. This look of urban toughness was at once defeated because his grandmother had knitted STEPHEN across his scarf, as you would for a five-year-old.
The two of them quickly became the comics in our group. They regaled us with wildly exaggerated impersonations of characters from their local neighborhoods, savoring the knowing that in Cambridge they would not be maimed for this, as they would be back home. So they’d act the thief who stole his neighbor’s TV and displayed it in his own living room — even though the neighbor was a friend who often popped over for a chat (and probably to watch Crimewatch UK, who knows). Or “hard men” who strutted the streets saying, “You lookin a’ me or chewin’ a brick?” and were affronted if you looked them in the eye. And those with ambitions to make it big in the world of crime — wannabe bank robbers and bare-knuckle fighters who lived by the code of not “grassing up” friend or foe to the law. This was the first I’d heard of Cockney rhyming slang and learned that tea leaf was “thief” and butcher’s hook meant “look” and trouble and strife was, of course, “wife.”
Every evening Steve and Kevin were drunk, vomit arcing over Trinity Bridge or dripping down shut windows that hadn’t been opened fast enough. I kept my distance. “Her ladyship,” they’d tease me. “Look, she’s miffed, she’s turning her nose up at us.” Two rowdy boys, I thought, not yet fully formed.
So I wasn’t seeking Steve’s interest when each morning I sauntered down the hallway we shared wearing a transparent white kurta and no underwear — I’d only just woken up and was going to the bathroom. But this encouraged him to come to my room with his copy of The Complete Poems of John Keats and read from it. That book was stained with black grease, he’d taken it with him on his travels across Europe in his father’s lorry the previous summer. He told me he read Keats’s “Lamia” sitting on a crate in a warehouse in Milan, and not even the din of unloading trucks could distract him from Lamia the serpent transforming herself into a woman, writhing and foaming—“her elfin blood in madness ran.” Now from “Lamia” he read me the lines “Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars” several times over. You could be a tad more subtle, I thought.
But he had glossy black hair that fell across his forehead and very distinct, slanted dark eyes and a pointy chin. Sweet. So I enjoyed the occasional hours we had together, just the two of us, without Kevin or the rest of our friends. We went for long walks on a dirt track by fields where the veterinary science department kept deviant-looking bulls with oddly shaped heads. And through St. John’s playing fields at dusk. I was still unaccustomed to how early daylight caved in on English autumn afternoons. We hurried to the tearoom of University Library when the hot scones were served. I was bored with the economics I had to study that year and readily gave up grappling with Sraffa’s theory of value to linger with Steve among the stacks in the North Wing, reading pamphlets on party games in the British colonies or books on East End villains like the Kray twins. Steve told me that not too far from where he lived, in Whitechapel, was the Blind Beggar Pub where the Krays shot someone.
Steve was full of stories about his family and his childhood and about the London he knew. He’d grown up in Manor Park, on the outer edges of East London—“growing up on the Manor,” it was called locally. It was here that Steve played football with his brother, Mark, late into the night under streetlamps. He loitered with his friends outside the sweet factory nearby, imagining the rich pickings inside. They ate tomatoes that grew wild by the sewage works near the Roding River, a trifling tributary of the Thames, and their faces broke into a rash. One day Steve’s father told him that he’d smash his kneecaps if he saw him hanging around too many street corners. Steve knew his dad wouldn’t but was thankful for the threat. It allowed him to stay in and do his homework when his friends called round, yet again, to go hurl milk bottles against the wall of the social club at the end of their street. “Na, not tonight, mate, me dad’ll kill me.”