There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of late middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the lights. Most of the male medical students gave her a wide berth. None of us had seen a naked woman of our mothers’ age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority in her face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was drawn to her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons; her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue on her chest, and many of the students assumed she was male. But I was intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on her hands she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to reconstruct the life she had led, the long years as a medical student, her first affairs, marriage and children. One day I found her dissected head in the locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be reshuffled into another life.
And all the while, in a wooden box under my bed at King’s, slept the bones of a small Asian farmer who had once planted rice, smoked his pipe in the evenings and watched his grandchildren grow. After his death his body had been boiled down to the white sticks that were sold on to an English medical student who had once boiled a rabbit to its bones. His skeleton, in the same pine box, has probably guided generations of Cambridge students, who have sat at their desks and explored his ribs and pelvis, feeling the bony points of his skull as if assembling the armature of a soul. Patiently, he has lived on.
My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century. Or it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means.
At all events, by the time I completed the anatomy course I had really completed my time at Cambridge. It had supplied me with a huge stock of memories, of mysterious feelings for the dead doctors who in a sense had come to my aid, and with a vast fund of anatomical metaphors that would thread through all my fiction. The hours in the dissecting room were backed up by the anatomy lectures and the time I spent reading in the anatomy library, where I became friends with an émigré Pole who was an assistant librarian, had served in the Polish Army and escaped to the West through Iraq.
By comparison, college life seemed like a quaint and overly folkloric pageant. Where the Cambridge science faculties (Rutherford and the Cavendish, Crick/Watson and DNA, Sanger and so on) were powerfully oriented towards the future, the Cambridge colleges looked back to the past. King’s was dominated by its chapel and the musical events that surrounded it. The provost was a classicist, a pantomime parody of the eccentric don. In the dining hall we listened to a long Latin grace that I still know by heart, and sat on benches to eat execrable meals, wearing gowns after dusk and being overseen in the streets of Cambridge by a proctor and his bulldogs (his bowler-hatted aides). We had to be back in college by ten, or perhaps earlier. The colleges may have begun as religious foundations, but they had evolved into bizarre public schools with the boys played by adults and the masters by overgrown boys. The French and American students I knew were mystified by it all. I found it rather sad and all too typical of England at the time.
A drawback of the collegiate system is that it is difficult to make close friends in other colleges. There were no more than nine or ten medical students at King’s across all three years, and I was forced to find friends who were reading other subjects. One Kingsman I knew was Simon Raven, whom I would meet in the Copper Kettle after dinner. He told me many years later that he thoroughly enjoyed his time at King’s. But he was actively homosexual, and King’s was an openly homosexual college, famously home to Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster, with close connections to the painter Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group. A few years earlier a number of its dons had come very near to being prosecuted for offences against the little troupe of choirboys (in miniature top hats and bum-freezer jackets) who arrived in a crocodile every day from the King’s choir school. The complaining parents who threatened to go to the police were said to have been paid for their silence from the deep King’s coffers.
The ethos of the college was homosexual, and a heterosexual like myself who brought in his girlfriends (mostly Addenbrooke’s Hospital nurses and free-livers all) was viewed as letting the side down, as well as having made a curious choice in the first place. This was an era when most public schoolboys met no women for the first twenty years of their lives other than the school matron and their mothers, with the result that women in general remained forever in a dead perceptual zone (like vertical stripes to kittens only allowed to see horizontal stripes). I have known women married to unresponsive men they suspected of being repressed homosexuals, but most were probably victims of a special kind of English deprivation.
Otherwise, I enjoyed myself like other students, punting on the river, playing tennis, writing short stories, getting drunk with the Addenbrooke’s nurses, who generously provided me with an education not even the dissecting room could match. They were interesting young women, some with remarkably rackety lives (the syringes in the bedside table drawer?) and I liked them all.
I also, with everyone else, went to a great many films. I relished hard-edged American thrillers with their expressive black and white photography and brooding atmosphere, their tales of alienation and emotional betrayal. Already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work. The modern movement had demonstrated this from its start, in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the willing engagement of the audience’s own psychopathy is almost a definition of modernism as a whole. But this was strongly denied by F. R. Leavis and his notion of the novel as a moral criticism of life. I went to one of Leavis’s lectures and thought how limited his world was, and remember saying to the English literature student who had taken me: ‘It’s more important to go to T-Men (a classic noir film) than to Leavis’s lectures.’ It sounded preposterous at the time, but less so now.
I briefly met E.M. Forster at a King’s sherry party, already an old man or convincingly posing as one, and often drove in a friend’s car around the US airbases. No one seemed aware that the nostalgic pageant called ‘Cambridge’ was made possible by the fleets of American bombers waiting in the quiet fields around the city.
At the end of my second year I knew that I had absorbed all I needed from the medical course. My interest in psychiatry had been a clear case of ‘physician, heal thyself’. I never wanted to walk the wards as a trainee doctor, and friends ahead of me at their London teaching hospitals warned that years of exhausting work would postpone for at least a decade any plans to become a writer. Varsity, the student weekly newspaper, staged an annual short story competition, and my entry, a Hemingwayesque effort called ‘The Violent Noon’, won joint first prize in 1951. The judge was a senior partner at a leading London agents, A.P. Watt, who commended my story and invited me to call on him.
This was another green light, and I told my father that I wanted to give up medicine and become a writer. He was dismayed, especially as I had no idea of how to bring this about. He decided that I should study English literature, the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career, which he may well have suspected. I managed to get a place at London University, at Queen Mary College, and started the degree course in October 1951.