I wasn’t totally sure it was me. Wasn’t it, well, a tad sensible? Didn’t I want to be Bohemian? (Not that I knew what Bohemian was.) I wore it with a black nylon polo neck sweater and my black intellectual squared-off glasses. Not a bad look, now I think about it, and I must have appeared more mature than I was.
But at Cambridge, naïvety and ignorance told. I was interviewed at Newnham by a Mrs Leavis, a name that meant nothing to me. She opened the door with a yapping white dog which made my fear intensify. I was unused to dogs. Dad had forbidden them. It yipped and leaped and smelled damply alive, distracting me when I needed to think.
(Would it bite my fingers? I dared not pat it. I became a bundle of naked fingers.) Mrs Leavis herself was also, in my memory, small, white-haired and puggish in appearance, with a crop of white hair that matched her dog’s. Her room was large and dark. She did not seem to like me. What would I prefer to talk about? Innocently, I volunteered ‘Keats’, not knowing that her husband, the god-like FR Leavis, had published a major ‘re-evaluation’ of Keats. (I must have heard of FR Leavis, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me that they were related, that critics had wives, and dons had dogs. For me, the world of books was so far from the real one, where real people lived in boxes, in Billingshurst.) I rambled effusively about the poet while the dog barked and Mrs Leavis looked stern. Which secondary sources had I read? The names I cited did not include ‘Leavis’. Time slipped away. I was drowning in words. Her questions were sparse and irritable. My suit and polo neck were very hot. At last, thank God, she had heard enough. By then, I was drenched with sweat under my layers. When I came out and reported to my fellow candidates, the more knowledgeable ones were aghast. Hadn’t I heard of QUEENIE LEAVIS? You talked about Keats? You didn’t!
At Oxford, however, things went better. These interviews were spread over a whole weekend. Once again, some girls had inside information. For example, a thrilling rumour spread that we were all up for entrance awards. I remember the drunken feeling of pleasure, spreading through my veins like adrenalin, followed swiftly by unease. This phenomenon has shadowed me all my life; a path to glory opens, then I am afraid. An emptiness starts to spread in my ego when it is inflated by something outside, something that is not part of my essence. Something is overtaking me.
Did it mean I would have to be clever for ever? Would I have to go on jumping through hoops, a never-ending tunnel of flaming hoops? Would I lose my self in the lights and the noise? My secret self, who liked bikes and clouds, a silent happiness which could not be destroyed — unless I let myself be lured away.
I was letting myself be lured away.
Who was I really? Should I be here? I was trying to please my parents and the teachers, as I too often tried to please. Doing it had brought me to this strange hall, these long dark tables lined with fluting girls. Did I belong with these flower-like sophisticates, in these elegant buildings with their endless corridors? (They seemed elegant to me, but this was before I saw the older, richer, men’s colleges. I thought all the girls had come from private schools; some had, of course, but some were frightened, like me. Some of them were probably spotty, and plain.)
Yet I had been a child who liked to win races and come top in school exams. Part of me, coarser, hungrier, longed to do well, burned to do well. Part of me was competitive, and this was a bigger, better competition. (Yet burning, surely, meant you were in hell.) And these were interviews, not honest competitions. I was going to need social skills, alas. In social matters, I was utterly unskilled, though my ego couldn’t wait to go out and bat.
All social situations, then, led to shame. I was horribly aware of getting things wrong; sometimes at the actual moment when my foot, with aberrant energy, lurched into my mouth, but always during the replays, and I was never short of replays. I made one gaffe I still blush to think about. Miss Woolf, the medieval specialist, was entertaining another proto-Scholar and me to sherry. It was evening; the general atmosphere was congratulatory. Though nothing was spelled out, the rumour was true, we were being considered for awards. But the other proto-Scholar was more charming than me, livelier, prettier, more graceful. I wanted to show I had gravitas, or wanted, perhaps, to say something, anything, probably grandiose with sherry, which I don’t suppose I had drunk before (I hate my young self: I pity my young self.) Something enormous burst out of my mouth. ‘Are there opportunities to do research?’ I had levered myself into the light conversation, sounding Germanic and oppressive. They were looking at me. The only way was forwards. ‘I would like to do — like to do — a doctorate.’ My ambition thwacked down on to the subtly shaded carpet. It sat there like a great pie, unwanted, a pink pork pie lobbed in through the window. My fellow proto-Scholar giggled charmingly, and raised and lowered her mobile dark eyebrows. Her mouth was full, her teeth were white. A gulf yawned before me. Then Miss Woolf replied.