Here and There – Cambridge
For the eight years I lived in Cambridge, I was both ‘town’ and ‘gown’. Gown was the university, the colleges, and I think there were only two students in my undergraduate year who didn’t live in the college. We were both married, but the other was both married and ‘mature’ (which I seem to recall meant aged over 25 years old). So I lived in town for my undergraduate years, close to the city centre and the railway station. It was where my first two children were born (they were born at home), and then for the remaining years we lived outside the city, first in a satellite town, and then in the middle of nowhere! It was a half-and-half life, with activities centred on the college, and everything else centred on my home.
Let’s go back to the beginning. On October 1, 1963, the first day of Michaelmas Term, I had joined a throng of new students, all there to collect a copy of the Cambridge Reporter from outside the college dining hall, to discover where classes would be held and at what time. Unlike the others gathered by the dining hall entrance, I was about to be married. I wasn’t entirely clear as to how the college and university system worked. I wouldn’t be eating in college every day, I wouldn’t be worrying about meeting young women (of which there was a shortage in the university back then!), but I would have to find somewhere to live, surviving on the income from scholarships which were intended to cover life in term time only. Perhaps it was a form of avoidance but I focussed on what I had to do in the short term: the longer term would have to look after itself. It was a habit of mind that has never left me.
That October day I had no clear idea about what I was going to do for the next three years, and no sense that my life was to continue to change in dramatic and unexpected ways. For the first eighteen years of my life, it was as if I had been travelling up a series of escalators. Each one had narrowed my vision of life, and my interests. At each landing, several people left, while, in a smaller group, I continued up. Now I was about to study for a science degree, in geology, which would lead to an academic career. My mother, my geology teacher and my school headmaster had pushed me along, relieved I had made it so far, and almost certainly worried about what would happen next. They weren’t concerned about my academic progress, so much as to what else might eventuate. Whatever expectations they had entertained, by the end of those three years they would turn out to be confounded.
I should be more precise. In fact during the first month of Michaelmas Term I did live in college. It was an illusion, of course, and my real life in Cambridge was yet to begin. After one month in a college room, I went back down to London for my wedding! We left London on our wedding day, caught a train and then a taxi to stay one night on the Norfolk Broads before arriving ‘home’. We were carrying two suitcases, which were packed, not with clothes but with wedding gifts! In those days, little use was made of the ‘registry model’ to help guests choose wedding presents. I think we scored no less than five casseroles. We spent a fair bit of that first honeymoon night unpacking all that we had been given.
In my first year at King’s, I studied Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy and Crystallography. The Cambridge system was, and probably still is, hard to understand. A student applies to a college, and a place in a college is a place at the university. At the same time, each student is enrolled in a course of study in a discipline area (UK education is narrow). The formal teaching is offered by staff in the relevant faculty and takes place in the departmental teaching spaces. Since Chemistry was a separate department from Geology, there was always a chance timetables would conflict, but, luckily for me, it worked out. The teaching department sets the exams at the end of each year: back then, there was no continuous assessment, except lab work was marked. At the end of the first or second year you would take a major exam, with several papers to be completed, Tripos Part I. At the end of the third year, you would take Tripos Part II, the exams this time determining your final class of degree. Tripos? That was the name of the three-legged stool on which a student sat for oral examinations – centuries earlier!
How does a college fit into this system? Each college has senior members, fellows, or dons as they are known, many of whom also held a position in one of the university departments. Within the college, a student would have a tutor for each area of study, usually one of the college senior members. Some tutors were members of a department, but not all. Tutors were key to learning, setting essays, discussing lectures, and extending your understanding.
The system was archaic in many ways. Colleges at that time had a curfew, and the gates were locked. It was an offence to have a visitor in your room after lock-up hours. However, as with so many things, the rule was followed by exception. Many young women would be in the College after hours, a fact that was ‘studiously’ ignored. However, the accepted informal protocol required they needed to be away before the morning. No women at breakfast time! Since the front gate was locked, the only other exit from King’s was out via the ‘backs’, the land that ran alongside the River Cam at the back of several colleges.
How could a young woman get out? There was a locked gate, but it was possible, with a little difficulty, to clamber around the gate while carefully avoiding the risk of falling into the small stream below. If you happened to be in that part of town in the early hours of the morning, you could catch the sight of at least one or two young women (and young men?) climbing around. However, it wasn’t easy, and one day a student wrote to the College Council to complain. He pointed out that this means of exit was not just risky, but expensive. Each time his girlfriend had left, she had laddered her stockings on the metal frame.
Without any announcement being made, the College arranged to have a small ledge attached to the barrier on either side of the gate. It was now easier to exit, and far less likely to incur outrageous costs! The ledge was still there when I was back visiting Cambridge in 2011. As I was writing this, I used Google to look at the back gate, and it’s still there; although no longer needed, that cost saving thin ledge is just visible.
Back in the 1963, Cambridge was a world of traditions and rituals, from wearing gowns at dinner in college and outside in the town, to being able to buy superb wines at rock bottom prices in the Pantry, thanks to the College’s astute wine committee. For much of the 20th Century my college had been a safe haven for homosexuals, of whom E M Forster had been one of the best known. I met Forster just once, early in my time at King’s. Standing outside the Porter’s Lodge, admiring a fine old vintage car, parked on the forecourt, I saw another figure, transfixed by the same sight. ‘Fine car”’ I said (betraying my amazing insight and wisdom!). “It was”, said E M Forster, and he walked off into the college! My first brush with someone really famous: even if it was rather brief.
Traditions and rituals? King’s had a reputation for nurturing new ideas and new thinkers, people like Alan Turing and John Maynard Keynes; writers like Rupert Brooke, J G Ballard, and Steven Poliakoff; political analysts like Anthony Giddens and Tony Judt; and musicians, of course, from Orlando Gibbons to David Willcocks, together with John Eliot Gardiner, Simon Preston and Stephen Cleobury in more recent times. At the same time, it was a hothouse of radicalism in the time I was there, with debates and resolutions thrown around the Junior Common Room as freely as the beer flowed. We wanted an open university, we wanted a free university, we wanted to overthrow the bourgeois rulers of the country, we wanted … we wanted so many things, and some who left King’s around that time were to go on to make changes along the lines we had discussed.
In terms of my undergraduate studies, that first year wasn’t a good one. The chemistry lectures were to a huge group. Even the lab work was undertaken with so many other students that I began to feel disengaged. That feeling was aggravated in Lent Term when my first daughter was born, and my attention wandered on to more personal matters. I knew I had passed my exams, but I knew I hadn’t tried as hard as I could or should have done, nor did that seem so pressing at the time. At the beginning of my second year, I transferred to Social Anthropology, and never looked back.
Let’s abandon gown and get back to town. Childbirth in England in the 1960’s was mostly at home. An expectant mother had a midwife allocated, who would visit regularly, and was ‘on call’ for when the child was about to be born. The father-to-be was expected to organise equipment, and, on the day, boil prodigious quantities of water (it was a good way to keep him out of the way). My wife started contractions on 19 April, and our daughter was born on the morning of the following day. The midwife was great, although she did need to pop out regularly for a quick cigarette; our doctor came by later in the morning, briefly inspected the newborn, and seeing all was good left a few minutes later. She weighed just 5 pounds 9 ounces, right on the edge of requiring transfer to hospital on weight grounds.
We had been to ante-natal classes, but I can still recall our worries when my wife and I were left with our daughter for first night. The book we had, Dr Spock’s famous guide to baby and child care, advised that after the birth mother and daughter would sleep peacefully for at least 8 hours. Who was he kidding? Yes, our daughter slept, but my wife was caught in an agony of worry. I must have looked every ten minutes to check our tiny baby was still breathing! She, and we, survived, and within a couple of weeks, we had settled down into a routine.
I’m sure you don’t want to read about my years of study, nor even about the time my wife and I went to a ‘May Ball. However, after a couple of moves, our final home in Cambridge (well, fairly close by to be precise) was a house in the Gog Magog Downs, about a mile off the road to Wilbraham, and about a mile away from the other houses at Wandlebury Hill. The top of the hill is now known as Wandlebury Country Park, a nature reserve owned by Cambridge Past Present and Future.
Wandlebury was already inhabited in the Bronze Age and 2500 years ago there was an Iron Age hill fort there, now known as Wandlebury Ring. “The hill fort once had concentric ditches and earthen walls which were kept in place by wooden palisades. Although the fort has vanished, the ditch (the Ring) dug around the edge can clearly be seen and walked along, being as much as 5 metres deep in places and offering an adventurous route along its edge. There is no evidence that it was ever used in defence.” (Thank you, Wikipedia!)
Wandlebury House originally stood within the ring: at one stage it was the home of Francis Godolphin, a graduate of King’s College, and an earl, who eventually became Lord Privy Seal. The house had been demolished long ago, but the monumental stable block remained. This was an important landmark, as it was where the famous Godolphin Arabian horses were stabled, although by now it was used for accommodation. The grave of a horse, the Godolphin Bard, one of the three that founded the country’s thoroughbred racehorse bloodstock, is under the archway leading to the stable block, which was converted into rather smart apartments, (the horse died in 1753!).
The road to our house was a dirt track, and there was just a narrow path that took us up to the homes at the top of the hill, where the warden of the complex lived. Our house had about an acre of land around it, together with a donkey. Jack the donkey lived in a small stable on one edge of the property, one wall of which was an old upright piano, which he was slowly eating. This wasn’t like our previous homes: we were out in the country and that was brought home to us in the first few days when we discovered the house was full of mice. I recall my wife wasn’t too pleased. We found the holes in the walls that allowed the mice in, and eventually by stopping up the holes I was able to ensure we saw them no more.
The house itself had a small round room, the original 17th Century cottage, with a fireplace in the centre. Over time, the first addition had been a kitchen, complete with a massive Aga cooker, and a large living room. A more recent addition was an upper floor, with four bedrooms, probably completed about fifty years earlier. A rambling house in the country. The gate to the house and garden faced a long straight walking track, an old Roman road, that joined up with a much longer Roman road that ran all the way from Cambridge to Haverhill, a popular walking track some 16 miles long. A great home for two adults and three children.
It was an idyllic home in many ways. Off the beaten track, set among the woods at the bottom of the Gog Magog Hills, it was peaceful. Well, most of the time. Unfortunately, the back of the house faced on to a popular walking track. At the weekend and in good weather, on most Saturday and Sunday’ afternoons we would have to put up with the noise of a steady stream of people passing by. As well as their noise, we made ourselves unpopular with many walkers, and especially children, by trying to discourage them from feeding Jack. Despite my grumbling, it was one of the best places in which I have lived, second only to Pfafftown 40 years later. We were lucky. When we lived there, it was still a quiet place, despite those weekend walkers. Indeed, for a young family, it was close to idyllic. Now Wandlebury Country Park is a site for weddings, lunches, festivals, and other events.
Jack was more like a thorn in my side than a lovely pet! I was told that he would allow the children to ride on his back as we went up the track to the old stables to collect our post and milk. He hated going up the hill, and often refused to budge if a child was on his back. Returning was a different matter, and he would almost fly back down. We had to watch Jack, as he could sense the brief period when the gate to the property was open and would shoot out and be gone in no time at all. Once escaped he would run, usually down the Roman road. The outcome was always the same. His collar had an identifying brass medallion. Within a few hours the phone would ring. “Er, do you have a donkey called Jack?” “Yes, where is he?” Usually in someone’s garden; once, famously, in the centre of Cambridge eating flowers at the entrance to Addenbooke’s Hospital. I would get in my car, drive to where he was, tie a rope to his collar and the other end to the back bumper of the car, and slowly, slowly, drive him back to Wandlebury, often to the scandalised expressions of onlookers!
Perhaps all that is enough on Cambridge. After eight years, we moved to Edinburgh, and nearly five years later went on to Australia. I loved my years in Cambridge, but it was a case of “the right place at the right time”. I didn’t want to be a traditional academic. As I’ve confessed in other blogs, I have always been something of a wanderer. However, Cambridge gave me a strong basis in and appreciation of research, teaching, innovation, and exploring challenging ideas, and they’ve remained, wherever I’ve ended up. Great foundational years.
