DURING MY SECOND year at college I had begun to develop a more mature critical approach to literature, shedding the expressive, highly metaphorical style which Malachy Carroll had tended to encourage, and giving my essays a tighter argumentative structure. My marks improved, and so did my confidence. At the end of that year I had to submit a long essay related to the course on the History of Literary Criticism, which I had chosen in preference to the History of the English Language. T.J.B. Spencer gave us back our essays in the last class of the session. I had never had any personal contact with him. He began by pronouncing my name interrogatively as he looked round the room, and when I identified myself he handed me my essay with some congratulatory words. The mark was a straight A, and evidently the best of the set. This was a pleasant surprise, and made me think that I was capable of getting a very good degree, perhaps a First, though like most students with the same ambition I kept the thought to myself, except for telling Mary. She herself had been told by her tutor of that year, George Kane, that her sessional exam results had been ‘borderline First’, and she was awarded a prize for her performance in Old English.
In the early 1950s, and for some time after, British higher education in the humanities was still what might be called a ‘First-degree’ culture. A young man’s or woman’s intellectual calibre was judged primarily by their performance in the final undergraduate examinations. A First-class Bachelor’s degree was the gateway to coveted careers in the civil service, the professions and academia, and some older university teachers had never bothered to obtain a postgraduate degree, though by now it was expected of new entrants to the profession. (The Oxbridge MA was, and still is, a mere title obtainable on payment of a nominal fee some time after the award of the Bachelor’s degree; and the Scottish MA is a degree equivalent to the English BA.) Among the first things one learned as a fresher were the five classes of the bachelor’s degree: First, Upper Second, Lower Second, Third and Pass (which was not an Honours degree). And there was, of course, Fail – a rare occurrence, given the competition for university places at the time. Such a finely calibrated degree classification is, I believe, unique to Britain and countries where higher education was shaped by British influence. Historically, it reflected our national obsession, which has somewhat abated during my lifetime, with fine distinctions of social status, and the terms ‘Upper’ and ‘Lower’, which derive from the terminology of class, have been largely displaced by the more neutral ‘2.1’ and ‘2.2’. Happily there was never a fixed equivalence between the two scales, and clever young people of low degree socially could overcome this disadvantage by getting a very good university degree, given the opportunity. The five tiers of a Bachelor’s degree remain in place today, but the same drama does not attach to the means by which they are earned and awarded. Continuous assessment has taken much of the risk out of the process, and grade inflation, driven by a buyer’s market in higher education, has made First-class degrees and Upper Seconds commonplace. Postgraduate qualifications have correspondingly become more important.
In aspiring to get a First I was not motivated by desire for an academic career. In our third year some of us received a form letter asking if we wished to be considered for a postgraduate scholarship, should our Finals results warrant it. For me it would have been a way of postponing National Service for another two or three years, but I wanted to get that over with. In fact I could have avoided it altogether, by training as a schoolteacher after graduation and undertaking to work in that capacity for at least five (I think it was) years, under a scheme devised by the government to make up for a shortage of teachers. But I didn’t want to be a schoolteacher, and I had a feeling that to be a writer I needed a broader experience of life than academia could provide. Military service, though I did not look forward to it, would be a start in that direction. So I returned the form with a negative answer, and worked hard to get a First just to prove that I could.
In those days Finals were a test of character and stamina as well as knowledge, three years’ work being assessed in a series of three-hour written examinations (eight, in our case) taken in a period little longer than a week, sometimes two on the same day. Three years of learning were judged on the evidence of twenty-four hours of writing. It was the antithesis of the legendary examination system for entry to the Imperial Chinese Civil Service, when candidates were locked in a hut and told to write down everything they knew. At UC we had plenty of practice in the art of writing examination answers, having mid-sessional and sessional exams in our first and second years, and were required to write long essays (as well as our regular tutorial essays) in connection with certain courses. But none of this written work counted towards the final degree result. So you could study industriously for three years, receiving good marks, and still get a disappointing degree if at the time of your final examinations you were physically unwell (but not too ill to sit them), or suffering from acute nervous stress, or bereavement, or other possible misfortunes. The system was particularly hard on women (who were of course excluded from higher education when it evolved) because they might be menstruating or suffering from PMT at the crucial time.
Today very few British universities, if any, award degrees exclusively on the basis of three-hour written examinations taken at the end of three years. There is normally a considerable element of continuous assessment and perhaps a short dissertation or project. To succeed in the classic version of Finals it was essential to be able to write fluently under pressure, and with that facility it was theoretically possible to do well by preparing just a few topics in the run-up to the exams; but if you were unlucky with the questions you could be scuppered. To be confident you had to store much more knowledge in your memory than you could possibly demonstrate. An extreme example was the Shakespeare paper which all candidates for English Honours at London colleges had to take. Five plays were set for special study, and the final paper had a compulsory section on those five which required the candidate to paraphrase a long speech from one of them and comment on a number of shorter passages from others, putting these in context and elucidating problematical expressions and textual cruxes (disputed readings of specific words and phrases, which sometimes varied between the early Quarto and Folio editions). ‘Paraphrase’ meant rendering Shakespeare’s densely metaphorical, idiosyncratic, allusive and often archaic language into modern English prose which made clear that you understood every nuance. It is a very demanding exercise. To be ready to perform it under exam conditions on any passage taken from any one of five plays, and to answer the commentary questions, you had to read those texts very closely and ensure that you understood every line. Nowadays there are numerous annotated editions cheaply available which would assist students in this task if anything like it were required of them, but in the early 1950s there were very few in print, and none in paperback. The Penguin Shakespeare and similar series did not yet exist. Only two of our set plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard III, had recently been published, in expensive New Arden and New Cambridge editions respectively. For the others we had to make do with plain texts which we annotated ourselves from the old Arden editions and other sources in libraries, sometimes buying a plain text edition, removing the binding, and putting the pages in a ring binder interleaved with pages of handwritten notes. All that preparation for just one exam question! Not that I resented or regretted it in the case of Shakespeare – I found preparation for the paraphrase question fascinating and highly educative – but the dissociation of our broadly spread coursework from the drastically condensed assessment of Finals examinations was a constant source of anxiety and complaint.
Another grouse was that the main literature syllabus ended at 1880, roughly when modern English literature began. We were, however, allowed to choose a special subject in our third year from a range of options, and, having discovered that the University of London syllabus offered an optional course in Modern English Literature which was taught at several other colleges, we petitioned the UC Department to offer it, and they agreed to do so. Two authors were set for special study, and questions on them, of which at least one had to be answered, occupied the first half of the Finals paper; the second half consisted of questions on a range of other writers and topics in the period from 1880 to the present. The two set authors for our year were Henry James and W.B. Yeats. Of Yeats I’d known nothing until I started reading his poetry then, but I have been grateful ever since for the incentive to do so. His interest in the occult, and the elaborate system he developed out of bits of Neoplatonism, theosophy and his wife’s automatic writing, to explain life, the universe and everything, was alien to my orthodox Catholic mindset, but he made great poetry out of it. Lines of his I learned then have stayed with me ever since: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? . . . That is no country for old men. The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees / – Those dying generations – at their song . . . O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance? . . . I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart . . .’ I was impressed by the remarkable extent of change and development in Yeats’s work over his lifetime, from the wistful romanticism of his early poetry (‘Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams . . .)’ to the frank sensuality of the late poems (‘Belly, shoulder, bum, / Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs / Copulate in the foam’). It was also reassuring to learn that this author of great poetry about sexual love did not lose his virginity until he was well into his thirties.
But as an undergraduate I didn’t get on at all well with Henry James. Since I have written extensively about him in later life – not only literary criticism but also a long biographical novel, Author, Author, very sympathetic to its subject – this may seem a surprising confession, but there were several reasons. My first acquaintance with his work was unfortunate. His name was on the list of modern authors Malachy Carroll advised me to read in the sixth form. Knowing nothing about his work, not even a title, I went to the Deptford public library and from the books by James on the shelves I plucked The Sacred Fount, because it seemed to be the shortest. This novel, first published in 1901, just before two of his late masterpieces, The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, is the most obscure and eccentric piece of fiction Henry James ever produced. A deeply unreliable narrator observes a number of people at a country house party. Noticing a striking disparity in physical vitality between the partners of a married couple, he develops a bizarre theory that one is draining a ‘sacred fount’ of energy from the other, and then begins to detect the same phenomenon linking male and female guests who are not married to each other, suggesting illicit relationships. It is impossible to believe in or make sense of the story, and even the most devoted Jamesians regard The Sacred Fount as a misbegotten work. Needless to say, I was totally baffled by it at the age of sixteen, and read no more James until I discovered he was a set author for my final exam in Modern Literature. I read several of his novels in the long vacation before the start of the course, but I chose badly. When people who have had unhappy experiences with James, or been put off by his intimidating reputation, ask my advice on what to read by him I always direct them first to Daisy Miller, and to other short and accessible works such as Washington Square, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. But I started with James’s first attempt to make his mark as a novelist, Roderick Hudson, which I found uninvolving, and moved on to The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse. The first of these was obviously a great improvement on Roderick Hudson, but it seemed to me to move painfully slowly, and the other two enormously long books even more so. Frankly, James bored me, as he bores many young readers: he is a writer for mature minds. But my basic mistake was trying to read him quickly, in order to acquire an overall sense of his oeuvre for examination purposes. Henry James did not write page-turners. You have to match your reading speed to the leisurely tempo and complex syntax of his narrative style, relishing every nuance, waiting patiently for each periodic sentence to deliver up its meaning. I learned that lesson some six years later, when in my first year as an assistant lecturer at Birmingham University I was required to give a lecture to first-year students on The Ambassadors. I had never read it before; I did so then, very carefully, and was overwhelmed with admiration for the subtlety of its rendering of consciousness and the beauty of its prose, and my serious engagement with James’s work began then. In the autumn of 1954 I decided I was not going to ‘do’ James for Finals because I was not enjoying his work. Instead I would prepare to answer a question on James Joyce (I took a calculated risk that there would be one, or one that could be answered with reference to him, in the second part of the paper). It was a project which entailed reading Ulysses, and that was a seminal experience.
All I had read of Ulysses up till this time was the chapter about Leopold Bloom’s attendance at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, in a short selection of Joyce’s work, Introducing James Joyce, edited by T.S. Eliot. In his very brief Introduction, Eliot mentioned that every chapter of the novel is connected in some way with Homer’s Odyssey, but gave no other help to the reader. The title of the book is the only textual clue to that fact, but when it was serialised in The Little Review prior to completion each section was named after an episode in Homer’s epic poem, and that is how they are referred to in criticism. Although I was unable fully to appreciate ‘Hades’, as the funeral chapter is known, out of its context, it was fascinating enough to leave me with a desire to read the entire book one day. Now the moment had come; but obtaining a copy was not straightforward. The ban imposed for many years in Britain and America after the novel’s publication in Paris in 1922, on grounds of obscenity, was lifted in the USA by a legal judgment in 1933. It was published in Britain by John Lane, The Bodley Head in 1937, and had a limited circulation henceforth. By 1954 it was available in some libraries, but only on request and at the discretion of librarians. Respectable bookshops did not display it and most did not stock it. I bought my copy from one of the slightly louche bookshops in Charing Cross Road that had in their windows illustrated books on the Nude and treatises on exotic sexual customs. It cost £1 sterling – equivalent to just over £23 in 2013, based on the retail price index, and nearly £60 in purchasing power, based on average wages, so a formidable investment for a student; indeed for anybody who wasn’t well off. The high price was a form of voluntary censorship by the publisher. I’m fairly sure that if Bodley Head had issued a cheap edition there would have been a legal challenge, and possibly an anticipation of the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, although anyone seeking to use Ulysses as pornography would have to search through a great deal of densely allusive experimental prose to find what they were looking for, and would probably give up in bafflement long before they got to the most sexually explicit episode, Molly Bloom’s monologue, at the very end.
The copy I bought, and laid reverently on my desk at home, was the sixth reprint of the Bodley Head edition. It had a distinctive squarish shape, the width of a normal octavo but shorter, with 740 closely printed pages that gave it a chunky feel in the hands. It had a green paper dust jacket which carried a generous tribute from – rather surprisingly, for he was generally regarded as a popular middlebrow writer – J.B. Priestley: ‘As a literary feat, and example of virtuosity in narration and language, it is an outstanding creation. Nobody who knows anything about writing can read the book and deny its author, not merely talent, but sheer genius.’ No doubt the publishers thought Priestley’s approval would carry more weight with the great British public than, say, T.S. Eliot’s, but the former’s words were well chosen. The cover bore the image of an ancient Greek longbow, which was also impressed on the green board beneath, this being the favoured weapon of Ulysses, the Latin name of Odysseus. Like all decent hardback books in those days, its pages were gathered and stitched, not glued together, so that when opened it stayed open, without the need for any digital pressure on the pages as I began reading:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
– Introibo ad altare Dei.
These words (‘I will go in unto the altar of God’) were spoken by the celebrant at the beginning of the Latin mass, which Buck Mulligan travesties, substituting his shaving bowl for a chalice, and a few lines later mocking the Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation by comparing it blasphemously to a conjuring trick:
He added in a preacher’s tone:
– For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
Immediately I was hooked. This prose, combining humour, religious allusion, archaisms (ungirdled, ouns [wounds]), colloquialisms (Shut your eyes, gents), scientific terminology (corpuscles) and mimetic syntax (that long predicate concluding the second sentence imitates the way the skirt of the dressing gown is lifted by the morning breeze) endowed the familiar with the shock of the new. It was like nothing I had encountered before – except to some extent in ‘Hades’. But Leopold Bloom, whose narrative point of view Joyce adopts there, is l’homme moyen sensuel, the average man of average sensuality (though of course, like every human being, he has a unique personal identity), and his perception of the world is quite different from that of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s portrait of himself as a young man, through whose consciousness the opening chapter of Ulysses (known as ‘Telemachus’, the name of Odysseus’ son) is narrated. Its style is complex, allusive, intellectual, literary. ‘Hades’ is in a quite different register, homely and colloquial in diction, using repetition and redundancy which would be a fault in conventional prose to imitate actions and attitude:
Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane.
One of Joyce’s great achievements in this novel was to create distinctive styles for his two main characters, Stephen and Bloom, not just in the way they speak, but in the way they perceive and think, and then to find a third, quite different and equally expressive one for Molly Bloom. But as well as evoking the physical and mental life of these personages with unprecedented fine-grained realism, he shows them to us in the course of the book through the distorting lens of various specialised and artificial kinds of discourse – newspaper journalism, literary parody, surrealism, catechism, cheap romantic fiction for women, and several others – so that the novel is as much about its own medium, language, as about the world. That is why, when literary novelists are asked to name the work of fiction they most admire, Ulysses so often comes top of the poll; and why readers simply in search of entertainment seldom get very far in it.
With Ulysses, as with medieval literature, I found my Catholic background immensely helpful in picking up its religious references, but for details of the Homeric parallels, and other kinds of allusion and patterning (each episode, for instance, has its own special colour, art and symbol), I needed the assistance of Stuart Gilbert’s guide and commentary, James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book written with Joyce’s blessing and co-operation. I also read Herbert Gorman’s biography, the best available at the time, and was impressed by the determination with which Joyce pursued his vocation in his early adult life, in the teeth of all kinds of discouragement, condemnation and bad luck. From that time onwards he was my literary hero.
Joyce’s direct influence on my own writing is not observable until my third novel, The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), with its parodies of various modern writers and hommage to Molly Bloom’s monologue in the last chapter. The style of the first section of Out of the Shelter (1970) owed a good deal to the corresponding section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in acknowledgement of which, when I issued a revised edition of that novel in 1986, I used an introductory dash at the beginning of direct speech, which Joyce preferred to what he scornfully called ‘perverted commas’. And in Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), like other authors before me I took a tip from Joyce and used precursor texts as structural scaffolding for stories of modern life: the Grail Legend and chivalric romance in the former, and Victorian industrial novels in the latter. But I would like to think that the most important lesson about writing I learned from reading and teaching Joyce over the years, and have tried to implement at my own level of literary endeavour, was to take pains to make the work as good as one is capable of making it. Joyce, meeting his friend Frank Budgen in the street one day, told him that he had spent all day working on a single sentence in Ulysses. When Budgen asked if he had been searching for the right words, Joyce replied: ‘No, I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.’ That anecdote has become for me the literary equivalent of a Zen parable. From my first reading of Ulysses I also learned a lot of interesting and surprising things about sex; certainly more than I would have derived from further reading of novels by Henry James. (I have revised and rearranged the words of that sentence thirteen times.)
In the Easter vacation of 1955, a couple of months before Finals, I took part in an event called Student Cross. This pilgrimage (which is still performed annually on a larger scale, along several different routes) consisted of a group of Catholic students from various colleges walking in Holy Week from St Etheldreda’s church in London to the Marian shrine of Walsingham in Norfolk, a distance of about 120 miles, carrying a large wooden cross. It was described as a penitential act of reparation for the sins of students everywhere – a tall order, one might say – and a demonstration of Christian faith. We set out on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, and to get to Walsingham by Good Friday, where the last mile was customarily walked barefoot, we would have to average about twenty miles a day. There were a couple of dozen of us, all male, and a Dominican friar who was chaplain. I sent the principal character of my first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), on this pilgrimage, and the diary Mark Underwood keeps is probably a more accurate account of it than anything I could summon up from my ageing memory now. These are some extracts from his record of the first day:
First there was Mass in the crypt, with the Cross standing before the altar. A plain wooden cross, about twelve feet tall, and six feet from arm to arm. It weighs, I believe, about 120 pounds. It is grubby from the sweat and dirt of several pilgrimages. We walk in a column, in lines of three. The Cross leads, carried horizontally on the shoulders of three students, one to each arm, and the other at the foot. You carry it for the duration of the Rosary (about ten minutes) recited by the trio immediately behind. Then they move up to take the Cross, and you drop back to the end of the file. The body of the column sing hymns now and again, led by the Dominican chaplain Fr Courtney. Otherwise we talk quite freely . . . On the whole I enjoyed the day. It has certainly been a curious experience to flaunt one’s religion in the face of London . . . The reaction of spectators was less marked than I had expected. Plenty of curious stares of course, but quite as many people would look hastily away, more embarrassed than we were.
Soon, however, Mark is sorely afflicted with suppurating blisters on his feet, which make walking agonisingly painful and do not respond to treatment. On the third day he gives up and returns ignominiously home by train from Cambridge. Exactly the same thing happened to me, and not surprisingly. I was slight of stature and, having given up playing football, not particularly fit. My walking experience consisted of a few easy rambles with the youth club. I had never done a hike of twenty miles in my life, let alone a series of them, carrying a rucksack with clothing, etc. on my back, plus an additional 40 pounds of wood at regular intervals. But I might have struggled on if it hadn’t been for my soft and vulnerable feet, unprotected by proper walking boots and socks.
Why did I do it? There was a mixture of motives. I did not want to spend the entire Easter vacation at home revising for Finals, with a risk of becoming stale and jaded. On the other hand, I would not have felt easy about taking a purely recreational break, and Mary would not have been willing to join me. It so happened that the first overnight stop of Student Cross was in her home town, Hoddesdon, and that was how I first heard of it. The pilgrims slept in the parish hall there, and she told me how in past years she and her sisters provided an evening meal for them. I rather fancied the idea of impressing her and the rest of the Jacob family by appearing there as a pilgrim. This pilgrimage was an ostentatious example of what theologians call supererogation, the performance of religious acts in excess of what is required for salvation, and I nourished a secret hope, barely acknowledged even to myself, that if I did it the God of Roman Catholics would look kindly on me when I took my final examinations. It seemed to offer an ideal combination of healthy exercise, relief from studying, enhanced esteem, and supernatural grace. I just miscalculated the physical stamina it would require. But I did not feel too bad about my failure: after all, God would know that I had tried.
In late May or early June we took our final examinations in a huge hall in South Kensington, on which candidates from all the constituent colleges of the University of London converged. It was not a convenient venue for someone living in south-east London, but as the appointed day for the first exam drew near, the problem of getting there in time for a morning session starting at 9.30 suddenly became critical, when service on the Southern Railway was halted by a strike. The railway was my only fast and reliable means of transport to central London – travelling by bus from Brockley in the rush hour could take for ever. What to do? Fortunately Mary’s sister Eileen had a friend and colleague at the school where she taught, Bill Carlos, who had a flat in Highbury with a spare couch where he kindly offered to put me up for the duration of the exams. I gratefully accepted, travelling to and from South Kensington by Tube, which was running normally. So far from disturbing me, this sudden change of routine had a positive effect: my confidence was boosted by circumventing the effects of the strike, and the company of Mary, Eileen and Bill in the evenings removed the temptation to solitary brooding at home on my performance in the day’s exams. Mary and I agreed to avoid inquests on the papers we had taken, and exchanged the minimum of information with fellow students as we poured out of the examination hall at the end of the three-hour sessions.
There was widespread dismay about the passage set for paraphrase in the compulsory section of the Shakespeare paper. It was taken from Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s late plays sometimes called tragicomedies, a tortuously complicated story about the eponymous Ancient British king, which so outraged Dr Johnson that he refused ‘to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation’. The play is not quite as bad as that – it is very rewarding if you are prepared to go with the flow of its romance structure – but its language is often challenging. The passage sadistically chosen by the examiners was the long speech of the disguised Posthumus in Act V describing the battle in which Bellarius and his two sons (actually Cymbeline’s lost offspring) rallied the fleeing Britons and defeated the Roman invaders. It is one of the knottiest pieces of bravura rhetoric in the whole of Shakespeare. Of our five set plays, this one had been given least attention in lectures, and some students had skimped their revision of it, so were unprepared to cope with lines like:
Our Britain’s harts die flying, not her men.
To darkness fleet souls that fly backwards. Stand,
Or we are Romans, and will give you that
Like beasts which you shun beastly, and may save
But to look back in frown.
At this distance in time I need the help of an annotated edition and the OED Online to construe the speech,1 but as an examinee in 1955 I was fairly confident I had got it right.
There is nothing quite comparable to the relief that follows the last Finals exam, like the lifting of a weight that one has been carrying for a very long time. Did we celebrate? I suppose we must have, but not in the usual bibulous fashion. Mary let her hair down literally not metaphorically: she released her ponytail from its fastening, had her hair cut and shaped, and bought herself a new summer dress. She never wore the ponytail again. I borrowed Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim from Deptford library (the first paperback edition did not appear until 1959, and the hardback would have been an unthinkable extravagance) and read it thirstily, a treat I had been saving up for more than a year since it was published. I knew from reviews and word of mouth that I would love it, and I did. It articulated perfectly, and hilariously, the suppressed rebellious feelings of many first-generation university students in the post-war period towards the social and cultural norms of what would soon become known as ‘the Establishment’. (The term was put into currency in September 1955 by Henry Fairlie in an article in The Spectator.) In its way, Lucky Jim was to be as important an influence on my own writing as Ulysses, though antithetical in artistic aims and literary form, a paradox I would recognise and wrestle with later.
We had a couple of months to wait for our results. Not long after that I would be called up into the Army – I had passed my medical – and Mary would begin earning her living. Like me, she’d had enough of studying for the time being, and had not considered doing a postgraduate course. She applied for a job as a teacher at a convent school and for a place on a graduate management training scheme with Marks & Spencer. She was offered both, and chose Marks & Spencer as more challenging. While we waited for these significant new chapters of our lives to begin, we felt we owed ourselves a holiday, preferably abroad. I noticed a small ad in the Evening Standard which ran something like: ‘A group of students driving to the Costa Brava in a Bedford van in late July/early August are looking for two more passengers to contribute to the cost of petrol.’ I phoned the number that was given and Mary and I met the organiser of the trip, Ron, and his big, blonde girlfriend who I think was called Lynn. They seemed much older than Mary and me, more like mature students, and I never did quite grasp what or where they were studying. But they seemed pleasant enough and maturity was a desirable attribute to lead such an expedition, so we decided to join it. The Bedford van was a model later converted to make a camper or mobile home called a Dormobile, but ours was more like what is now called a people carrier, with windows on each side and bench seats on which the passengers sat facing each other. The party that finally assembled for departure numbered nine or ten, mostly female. There was another vehicle, a saloon car driven by a fat man who also looked like a mature student, if indeed he was a student at all. Perhaps he was a medical student, because the passengers in his car were two nurses.
I had never been to France before and still remember the shock of the hole-in-the-floor lavatory at the café where we first stopped for refreshment after crossing the Channel. Our route took us down through France to Perpignan and then into Spain at the foot of the Pyrenees. There were no autoroutes, progress was slow, the weather was warm and the Bedford became increasingly uncomfortable the further south we travelled. Leaving the sliding door open was our form of air conditioning, dangerous for Lynn in the front seat because the vehicle had no seat belts. But the tedium and the discomfort all seemed worthwhile when we reached the Costa Brava. The first place we stopped at was Cadaqués and I remember strolling along the seafront there, past brightly illuminated food stalls and cafés and bodegas and barber shops, relishing the wonderful velvety warmth of a Mediterranean evening for the first time, that warmth which continues after the sun has set and darkness falls, unlike the damp chill that nearly always overtakes summer evenings in Britain.
We drove along the beautiful coastline in easy stages, stopping at different places for two or three days. The Costa Brava was completely unspoiled by commercial development in 1955, and picturesque little seaside resorts like Tossa de Mar and Lloret de Mar, soon to be swamped by package tourists from Britain and disfigured by high-rise hotels, were frequented mainly by Spanish families and retained their pristine charm. The beaches were inviting, the sea was blue, the food and drink and simple accommodation were astonishingly cheap and the sun shone unfailingly day after day. There were tensions within our party that made the holiday less than totally euphoric, partly due to the gender imbalance. Ray and Lynn were obviously sexual partners, though I can’t remember whether they shared the same room. Mary and I were the only other couple, and of course did not. The fat driver of the saloon car tried to get off with each of his passengers in turn and was rebuffed by both nurses, who said he was horrible. There was another young man travelling with us in the Bedford who was pleasant enough, but he didn’t seem to be interested in girls, and the female members of the party had little opportunity to find other male company as we were constantly on the move.
Our last destination was Barcelona. Spain was ruled by Franco at this time, and the atmosphere of the city was repressed and gloomy, very different from the vibrant, elegant, hedonistic place it is today. Apart from the Ramblas with its colourful flower market, the streets seemed drab and dusty, the expressions of people on the pavements serious or sullen, and I was struck by the number of women who wore all-enveloping black clothes in the summer heat. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets and squares, watched warily by beggars and vendors of American cigarettes. But the cheerful young woman who ran the cheap pension where we stayed spoke some English and was friendly and helpful. Her first name was Montserrat, a metonym for Mary, being the name of a mountain about thirty miles from Barcelona where there is a Benedictine abbey that houses the Black Virgin, a statue of great antiquity venerated throughout Catalonia. Mary and I took a bus to the spectacular site of this shrine, perched on a bare mountain top, and paid our respects to the Black Virgin in the abbey church. Montserrat has long been a popular place of pilgrimage, and the abbey has accommodation for visitors. According to a brochure I picked up in the church, many Catalonian newly-weds spent their honeymoons there. I remember thinking it would be an inhibiting venue for what I imagined honeymoons were about.
When we set off on the return trip Mary and I were well aware that our Finals results would have been published by now, and letters conveying them to us would be waiting at our respective homes; but we did not think of phoning our parents to enquire. Aside from the difficulty and cost of making international calls in those days, we preferred to remain in suspense rather than risk getting disappointing news on the road. In fact the road nearly prevented us from getting news of any kind. On our way through the foothills of the Pyrenees, Ron, who was our only driver, pulled into a lay-by for a break. After we had stretched our legs and admired the panorama for a while, we boarded the van and set off again. Ron pulled out into the road and proceeded up the gradient – on the left-hand side. It is easily done when you emerge from an exit that has no central dividing line, and none of us immediately noticed. A minute later a car came round the sharp bend ahead of us, travelling fast on the same side of the road. Ron wrenched at the wheel of the Bedford just in time to avoid collision and the Spanish car passed us with an outraged blast of the horn. We had narrowly escaped a very serious accident, and all felt very shaky for the rest of the day.
I don’t have any memory of the rest of the return journey through France, which I imagine was even more tedious than the one out, but once we got off the ferry at Dover, the idea of home and the letter waiting for me there began to exert a kind of magnetic attraction. Millmark Grove is less than a mile from the old Dover road, so Ron was happy to drop off Mary and me at number 81. I phoned ahead from a callbox to tell Mum we were on our way, and to ask if I could invite the others in for some refreshments. It was getting dark by the time we arrived. The group squeezed into our lounge, and Mum served up tea and sandwiches, which were much appreciated. (Dad, as usual in the evening, was at work.) I slipped into the dining room, found the envelope I expected propped up on the mantelpiece, opened it and read it. I had got a First. I went back into the lounge, told the others, and received their congratulations; but it was only after they had all gone, apart from Mary, that I began to realise how pleased I was.
Mary phoned home to tell her parents that she was back in the country, safe and sound, but did not want them opening her mail. The next morning we went to the college, where she read on a noticeboard that she had got an Upper Second. She would have been bitterly disappointed by anything less, but in those days an Upper Second was a real distinction, as the university-wide list comprehensively demonstrated. It also revealed an astonishing dominance by the forty candidates from University College. A hundred and forty-two internal students at various colleges in the University of London had sat their final examinations for the BA Honours degree in English that year. Only six First-class degrees were awarded (just over four per cent of the total) and five of them were to students at UC. We also accounted for fifteen of the thirty-three Upper Seconds (which were just over twenty-three per cent of the total). These figures were impressive evidence of our collective ability, and are also an index of the grade inflation that has occurred since then. As previously noted, our friend Derek Todd had got a First, but Tony Petti, who had worked himself almost into a nervous breakdown in the run-up to Finals, had to be content with a 2.1, which was, however, good enough to earn him a postgraduate scholarship. Mary’s 2.1 would certainly have been a very good one too, but we received no details, officially or unofficially, about how we had performed in our final examinations. In due course I was informed that I had won the Morley Prize, which gave me a clue. Founded in honour of Henry Morley, Professor of English Literature at UCL from 1865 to 1869, it was awarded to the ‘best third year student of English Literature’ and took the form of a handsome bronze medal with the bearded professor in relief, and £5 in cash ‘to be spent on books’. I invested it all in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a condensed version of the multi-volume OED in a single enormous book of 2,500 pages that cost five guineas. I made up the five-shilling balance and this magnificent reference book served me well for many years.
Students who obtained First-class degrees were automatically offered postgraduate scholarships by the University, so I was given a second chance to consider this option. I decided to accept but to postpone the scholarship for two years while I did my National Service, reasoning that I had nothing to lose by doing so, and might change my mind about not pursuing an academic career. It was a very wise decision. A few weeks of Basic Training was enough to convince me of the desirability of an occupation in which one was paid for reading and thinking and talking about books, while writing some of one’s own.
1 The lines quoted mean something like: ‘British deer die when running away, not British men. Souls that fly backwards vanish into darkness. Make a stand against the enemy, or we will act as the Romans have done, and like wild beasts give you the treatment you shrink from like cattle, a fate which you could avoid if you would only look back at the enemy with grim resolution.’