We had a no-presents pact, though in the manner of such things it involved a certain element of suspense. Only at the last moment of the day would it become clear if we had held our nerve. I had some globes of bath oil in reserve, in case she reneged, just as Shirley kept a box of Maltesers handy. In the end we were doomed, for all our good intentions, to exchange small spheres.
Frank seemed depressed, not by the mild upsets of the night before but by something that had been announced on the radio. Clumsily I tried to cheer him up, and Shirley didn’t make a much better job of it. It doesn’t mean anything, we tried to tell him. It’s of no consequence. He thought the world was being overwhelmed by commercialism and bubble-gum. What chance was there for a third rack of New Wave & Progressive at Miller’s?
What caused all this soul-searching was the announcement on the radio that ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’ was Britain’s Christmas Number One. I thought it was par for the course, the world being what it is, Christmas being what it is, Little Jimmy Osmond being what he was. But Frank took it hard.
After lunch I proposed a visit to the Bot, knowing full well that it would be closed on Christmas Day, but needing to mount some sort of expedition. Frank came along, as I had guessed he would (unless perhaps I asked him to). He was fascinated by the orange cardboard indicator which went with my parking privileges. ‘That’s dead handy, that is,’ he said. ‘Everyone should have one of those.’ Rather missing the point, I felt, of the civic concession. ‘What do you call that? Your cripple clock?’ Well, no, I called it my orange thingy. I flinched at his phrase, though I don’t think it was meant aggressively. It was just the least attractive facet of a rough diamond catching the dim light of a winter’s day. I said those words to myself a few times, trying to neutralise them, cripple clock, cripple clock, but they were like a mantra in reverse, they refused to shed their meaning. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I call it the time machine.’ Hoping to override the appalling catchiness of his formula.
While Shirley and I went on our walk, Frank stayed in the car to have a smoke. It wasn’t immediately obvious why he couldn’t have done that while he walked with us, but it’s no news that men (in particular), though they hate to be excluded, prefer not to participate fully in other people’s lives.
For all the vividness of what I could show Shirley of the splendours of the Bot at that distance and in that season it would have been simpler to stay at home, ask her to close her eyes, and fearlessly describe. I was reduced to pointing vaguely with the stick, indicating the place where the Bot grew cannabis as an attractive herbaceous annual, with no sense of playing with fire.
When we came back there seemed to be a grin on Frank’s face, or somewhere near it. There was a preening twinkle that couldn’t be pinned to any individual feature but belonged only to the collective. He seemed to have cheered up in some way.
It was days before I noticed that he had embellished the orange thingy, the time machine, using a ball-point pen to change the units of measurement from hours to thousands of years. In all innocence he had recalibrated the instrument to help me navigate in the depths of the Dark Ages. Without in the least knowing what he was doing, he was reminding me that I was in it for the long haul. I was no time lord, but serving my time like everyone else in the Kali Yuga, unless my guru laid on a Tardis for my benefit, with modified controls.
Apricocks out of season
New Year was actually more traumatic than Christmas, not as an event but as a symbol. 1973 was the year in which my undergraduate exemption from life’s real demands lapsed and all bills fell due. I felt like Faustus towards the end of Marlowe’s play, when the soul on which he has borrowed so heavily must be repossessed. The bailiffs are on their way. O lente, lente currite noctis equi. In preparation for the Tragedy paper I had learned to admire the metrical skill of that interpolated Latin line, the dragging hooves of the first half while the reins are pulled back, the helter-skelter careering of the second. It wasn’t so enjoyable to be caught up in the same terrible rhythm, without having had any of Faustus’s fun. I hadn’t enjoyed legendary beauties or apricocks out of season, just a few fumbles. Nobody had even wanted me to sign on the dotted line in the first place. Slow down, my nightmares, galloping, galloping on.
Everyone else seemed remarkably calm about the end of their student lives, the deepening shadows in the academic grove. In my third undergraduate year I still took what everyone said at face value. It’s a good job I wasn’t reading philosophy, or this would have counted as an academic failing as well as a personal one.
An odd masquerade was going on as my contemporaries faced up to the end of their student lives. Academic work itself had been out of fashion for some time, thanks to the lingering effects of the ’60s. Application to books on any more than a casual basis went by the unsavoury name of ‘gnoming’. Everyone claimed to be aiming for a Third Class degree, though it was understood as a matter of brute mathematics that there weren’t enough of them to go around. Some unlucky folk would end up with Firsts. Life could be very unfair.
The incorrigibly interested or slyly ambitious would study in secret, working their way through books that they would defensively insist they had shoplifted. Everyone spoke the language of anarchistic disaffection in a cryptic counter-cultural Esperanto. Fashion demanded that those who had splashed out on tickets for a May Ball should claim to have gatecrashed the event by some providential set of circumstances, such as a stacked pile of chairs found by the river, handy stepping stones into the college grounds, while heavily armed porters patrolled elsewhere.
Any talk of jobs was disparaged, even by those who had quietly been making plans. At that period of all but full employment, when a Cambridge degree gave potential employers a throb of desire, any actual plan to enter the world of work was seen as a great betrayal. It meant selling out your dreams, giving in to what was variously called the System, the Machine, the Man, even (by those who imported their radical reading matter, buying it from an eccentric bookshop in town calling itself Cockaygne) Straightsville or Amerika.
As far as the rival party lines went, I was necessarily a dissident. I didn’t think that it would be a betrayal of counter-cultural values if I got a job. Nor did I think that it was my duty to make a contribution to the economic functioning of the country. I just thought it would be a bloody miracle.
My tutor, though returned from sabbatical, was aggressively neutral where my welfare was concerned, but I don’t mean to suggest that there was nobody paying me any mind. There was a definite sense of rallying round. Some of my supervisors started coming to A6 Kenny, rather than expecting me to toil over to their rooms. Not only that, a handful of fellow-students had mercy on me and started to take notes on my behalf (for the Tragedy paper, for instance) so that I was spared the ordeal of hitch-lifting to lectures. The only trouble was that there seemed to be an inverse relation between people’s helpfulness and the legibility of their handwriting. Often the simplest solution was to ask my helpers to read out their notes, and to make my own record of the re-enactment.
At the library I had those take-away privileges, while everyone else had to eat on the premises. Now I was benefiting from the academic equivalent of room service. It might seem that after three years the world had finally showed up in my room as promised, helpless to resist me, wanting its belly tickled. In fact these were emergency measures undertaken by kind people who rightly suspected I was close to throwing in the towel.