The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.
I leave the village. Except I don’t.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.
NORMAN MACCAIG, ‘Notation of Ten Summer Minutes’
One of the last evenings I spent in Luke’s room was with Daniel and Sophie, when the four of us argued about whether or not lasting social equality was possible. We were bandying Gramsci on decadence, and Dostoyevsky, and while Luke and I were pessimistic, the other two insisted it could be done. None of us knew what we were talking about but the argument became so fierce that when Sophie and I parted in the bus station we were both crying and she sobbed, ‘This won’t affect our friendship, will it?’ Perhaps we cared about the world and what was going to become of us in it after all.
However much my parents left me to manage my own education, it was a given that I would go on studying. Sophie’s father had been the first in his family to go to university. Several of my friends would be the first to go in theirs because they had grants and could sign on in the holidays. We had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives, but university seemed like the right place to go to think about it.
The day we went to get our results, I understood that everyone else knew how to write essays and take exams. They could think clearly. I got what I’d predicted, CCD, and as I stood there with that slip of paper, I decided that I wanted a real education after all and I knew that it was too late. My parents seemed not to mind my failure, which was a kindness, only I wanted someone to ventriloquise for me, to say, ‘This is terrible! Something must be done!’ Only Julia warned me that it might be worth retaking my exams and reapplying. When I saw Daniel, I wept and he was astonished – more so because he had never seen me cry. ‘I didn’t think you cared,’ he said. Neither did I. (A couple of years later we would finally be able to talk of what had passed between us: ‘I didn’t think you cared,’ he would say then too.)
I missed my university place by one grade but I wasn’t going to waste time trying to improve on things. My imperative remained to get out and back to the city where I felt I’d left myself behind. Daniel was going to art school in London. Sophie went off to Lancaster.
CCD. I played it on the piano. It sounded neither here nor there – two side steps and a toe in the future. I had to be prepared. I didn’t have my own record player so I bought a cassette player and set about making tapes.