Student Love

I was christened in Trinity Hall Chapel in 1959. The priest taking the service began with the following words:

‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he falleth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay…’

‘Noel,’ my father hissed. ‘That’s the funeral service. This is a baptism.’

‘Sorry Bob,’ replied the befuddled Dean, switching to the correct, but equally miserable, introduction; ‘Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin…’

The Holy Water was poured over me and remains, I think, to this day, part of the Proustian, Wordsworthian, and Freudian memories I associate with the College. I can still smell the first spring cutting of grass on the lawns and picture the way in which the light falls on the honey coloured stone of the front court. I can taste the warm I.P.A of nights spent drinking after the plays had finished, and hear the optimism of the chapel bell when waking on Sunday mornings. I can still see Ginty’s encouraging eyes as he gave me a sherry at ten in the morning, and I think of him every time I drink it alongside the boat club member who once spat:

‘Sherry! What are you doing? Only vicars and women drink sherry.’

When I went up in 1978 people often referred to Trinity Hall as the warmest, friendliest, college in the University; ‘I deal’, my tutor told me ‘in everything from broken windows to broken engagements.’ ‘Cripes!’ I thought, ‘engagements, I’ve only just got here, what kind of a place is this?’ Well I suppose it was, and still is, a glorified finishing school where you can do almost anything; direct a play, row a boat, jump off roofs, learn the libel laws, anything. But this very freedom means that when I look back on my time as an undergraduate the prominent feeling is one of deepest embarrassment. Oh God, what on earth was I doing? What mistakes there were – sub Beckettian plays about nightmares in the day; the impersonation of a chicken in the college revue; a breathless production of Romeo and Juliet for May Week; and Ann Jellicoe’s glorious sixties comedy about picking up girls – The Knack. I remember peeling ‘Smile, Jesus loves you’ stickers off bicycle saddles all over Cambridge and replacing them with ‘Have you got the knack?’

The plays I directed were all about burgeoning sexuality, their choice influenced by the presence of so many fabulous women in the college. Debbie Wolsey! Isla Rowley! Sue Swift! Louise Croker! Amanda Galsworthy! Olivia Fane! I remembered my last school report: ‘James has, at last, adjusted to the presence of girls in his life.’ Now I would have to start again – but my God, who were these goddesses? It was impossible to concentrate, and drama was the perfect excuse to meet them. One could be sensitive and authoritative simultaneously – it would only be a matter of time before one of them cracked, just as the Christian society had been at school (‘I’ve been having doubts, Emma…’).

But no drama could disguise my great, and utterly unrequited, university love for Anne Louise Jennings, who was, and is still, beautiful, who cooked duck a l’orange, and who didn’t mind when I ate the skin as well as the fruit of an avocado. She took pity on me and let me take her to movies at The Arts Cinema like On the Waterfront, and we went to parties and danced, bizarrely, to Eddie and the Hot Rods singing Do anything you wanna do.

Except I couldn’t.

‘Look,’ I said when it was clear I was getting absolutely nowhere. ‘The fact is you find me physically repulsive.’

‘I wouldn’t quite put it as strongly as that.’

Such little hope in that ‘quite’!

I never got anywhere of course, not even a kiss – and I still can’t really understand it. Twenty years later I met her with her husband – a charming, short sighted, once red headed man.

He looked exactly like me.

Where had I gone wrong? And as I looked at him I thought: ‘I could have been someone. I could have been a contender!’