I arrived at Oxford in autumn 1955 wearing a duffel coat – a hoodie before hoodies were heard of. The coat not only kept me warm, but was something of a status symbol. It reminded people that I had done my national service in the Navy, the proud senior service, while the vast majority of my contemporaries had had to plod through their two years as what we cuttingly called ‘pongos.’ Although I had hardly ever been out of sight of land, except when my submarine was dived, and never heard a shot or saw a torpedo fired in anger, some of these ex-pongos had seen real fighting in the scattered parts of what remained of our empire. Someone in my college had even been mentioned in despatches fighting the Mau Mau in Kenya.  Soldiers and sailors alike, we national servicemen regarded ourselves as very much more knowledgeable in the ways of the world than those who had come straight from school. We could usually hold our liquor, for instance, while they were still vomiting about like teenagers – which many of them literally still were. So there was, at least at first, a significant difference in experience as well as age, between us and those who still had their service to come – if indeed they wouldn’t avoid it altogether, which, as it was soon abolished, many of them did.

National service was not the only form of class distinction at Oxford. My college had few public schoolboys and prided itself on its left-wing reputation; it was soon made clear to me that if I thought my Winchester schooling had made me superior to someone from Bradford Grammar School, then I could think again – hard. The porter’s lodge was often full of brown-paper parcels for those who couldn’t afford the college laundry system and sent their washing home to their mothers; I was rather shocked by this, but no one commented on it, which made me feel out of touch with real life. In 1954 Nancy Mitford had written her notorious essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, about ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ – supposedly a great joke for the middle classes, but sometimes a worrying anxiety. Even genuinely ‘U’ students would sometimes compete with each other for the most proletarian ancestor, as though this made them more respectable. Against this, Dennis Potter, one of the most charismatic of my Oxford contemporaries, and who came from a mining family in the Forest of Dean, questioned the whole value of our education. It was making it impossible for him to talk properly to his own father, he said. The part of Imaginary Toys which deals with class is, I think, quite accurate.

One of the advantages of doing national service before university was that, bored almost to extinction by service life, we had had time to decide what we wanted to do and be when it was over. My Oxford, I’d decided, was going to be all poetry and acting. My father, however, was deeply suspicious of both. He was a solicitor, and he hoped I would adapt my theatrical ambitions, at least, to the drama of the courts and become a barrister, so he wanted me to read Law. I wanted to read English, but he belonged to the pre-war world where gentlemen did not need instruction in their own literature – they knew it by instinct, and if it was by P. G. Wodehouse then they had probably even read it. After fierce argument he and I eventually compromised on Law for my first year, after which I could switch to English if I still really wanted to. So after I’d hung up my duffel coat, and sent off a batch of poems to the Isis, I went to see the Law tutor. When I told him of my plan, he rejected it out of hand. It was either three years of Law, or none at all. I woke my father from his after-dinner sleep to give him this news and he, not in the best of tempers, said ‘Oh, do what you bloody well like, so long as it’s not English.’

So I read PPE for my first year, a poor choice, as the E stood for Economics, a subject no less opaque to me now than it was then, and though I did a bit of acting and published a few poems, I failed my Prelims. This meant a summer of slogging to get through at the second attempt, and though there were one or two drunken cricket matches with a different kind of slogging, the arts were put aside. I then switched to History, where I was happy. I read the prescribed books with increasing eagerness, wrote three essays every two weeks, and spent what now seems a glorious amount of spare time writing poems and stories, editing a magazine, making friends, falling hopelessly in love – but generally staying clear of the theatre.

As a result I got a First, and decided I would have an academic career to support my literary one. As a subject for research I looked for something which could take me to America, which seemed a much more exciting place to be than post-Suez Britain, and I decided on early seventeenth-century political verse. The poems, often quite rude, were almost all in manuscript, having been passed around among the parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I when it would have been extremely dangerous to print them. There were large collections in the British Museum and the Bodleian, but also in libraries all over America, and they duly got me a very generous Harkness fellowship for two years, during which I travelled from east to west and back again, did a little properly laborious scholarly work, had my first unhappy love affair, and wrote my first two published novels. I abandoned the thesis soon after my return to Britain, but years later my unfinished work turned out to be useful to younger and more devoted scholars than myself, and they used it in their books, so I don’t feel as guilty about wasting my benefactors’ money as perhaps I should.

There were few of these poems at Yale or Harvard, so I’d filled my autumn in these welcoming places by reading a lot of American novels. I was on my way to the Folger Library in Washington when I spent a cold January night in New York, at the overheated YMCA. I couldn’t sleep, and suddenly found myself thinking of a very elaborate plan for an Oxford novel. It was to have thirty-six chapters, exactly divided between four narrators, each of whom had a completely different style. When I got to Washington I settled in a basement near the Folger Library, sat down, opened my portable typewriter and wrote for, I think, fifteen, perhaps seventeen, days and nights, going out only to eat. It snowed a lot, but I hardly noticed. The book completely absorbed me.

Three of the four narrators are based (at a considerable distance) on real people, though they, I am sure, if still alive, would be the first to say they are not accurate portraits. The fourth, Nicholas, was pure invention. I had never met anyone like him, and I’m not sure I have since. The events, such as they are, are also based, at a distance, on reality; the baleful influence of Pusey House, for instance, on the happiness of believers. The original scheme turned out far too ambitious for the subject, or at least the writer, and in the end there were just half of the planned thirty-six chapters (plus an epilogue). I simply didn’t have the story for more, indeed I didn’t perhaps have enough for the eighteen I managed. But the book was written. I then went to the Folger and did my work.

A few weeks later, I was driven down to North Carolina by my friend the novelist Reynolds Price, who’d been at Oxford and now taught at Duke University. I stayed with him a few days in his then semi-mobile home, before going on down to Florida and then New Orleans for Mardi Gras, ending up in Austin, Texas, with its famous library of English literary manuscripts. And there, when I unpacked, I discovered my novel was not in my luggage. It would, I’m afraid, have been no great loss to literature if it had never been found, but in fact it had been put for safe-keeping in an old fridge which Reynolds used as a cupboard, and there he found it and posted it on. The Texas library turned out to be too modern for my thesis, but if none of my own manuscripts has ever been acquired, I can at least claim I rewrote a book there. It went off to England, and Raleigh Trevelyan at Hutchinson decided to make it one of the series of New Authors. However uncertainly, my career as a novelist had begun.

Julian Mitchell

February 2013