I did not suggest that I was not fit to go up immediately; in any case, at that time children by and large did what they were told over something like this, and I longed to get back into the mainstream of life. Nonetheless, the fact was that after 7 June I had been laid out for a long time, and the doctors had warned about brain bruising and its effects. Yet here I was, clocking in at Cambridge in the first week of October. It was hardly the moment for me to start a new life in much more of a man’s world, where I was likely to struggle on several fronts. Also, my one strong point, namely cricket, had been at least partly taken away, although I was certainly not ready to admit this. I am sure that Tom and Grizel must have agonised for ages about what I should do next. Maybe they felt it would be psychologically bad for me not to be allowed to carry on as normal.
I played a few games for Norfolk in August with little success, which was another thing I should never have done. I had become a less confident chap, and it was probably a bit much to expect me to hold my own in Minor County cricket so soon after my accident, even though I was desperately keen to play.
Although I was alarmed at the prospect of starting out in a new, more grown-up world, I was happy that Cambridge was to be my lot. Plans were laid, and I was allotted rooms in a lodging house in Newnham Terrace, run by a Mr and Mrs Hughes. She was large and tough, bossy and without much humour; he was small, with a faint moustache, and was generally a rather grey character who did precisely what he was told. I had a decent-sized sitting room and a small, pokey bedroom up two flights of gloomy stairs in a house that smelled mildly but permanently of stale cooked cabbage. It was into this far from prepossessing milieu that I was dumped by Tom and Grizel, not in the old Rolls, which had been put on ice, but in a new and sleek dark-green Jaguar which Tom sometimes liked and at other times felt rather ashamed of. His friends in Norfolk mischievously pulled his leg for buying such a fast car.
They decanted me into my rooms with a few pictures, which they helped me hang, and the odd suitcase. Then it was a quick peck on the cheek and they jumped into the Jaguar and drove off to Harwich, where they boarded the ferry to spend a few days in Holland to visit some antique-dealer friends in Amsterdam.
Thus began two years in which I never felt fully at ease, and which I did not enjoy as I should have done. National Service had not quite come to an end, and I had been heading for the Rifle Brigade, but when I had a medical the quacks all threw their hands in the air with horror when they heard the details of that encounter with the bus. Almost every other undergraduate had done National Service, and was two years older than me. I was just eighteen, and at that age two years is a lot. At school you were a trifle subservient to boys two years older than you, and at first I found it hard to realise that in spite of the age gap we were on level terms. Another sea-change was that I was expected to call my tutors and supervisors by their Christian names, which was difficult after ten years in the world of ‘sir’.
I was reading history, the subject I had specialised in at Eton after scraping through eight O-levels. Those, incidentally, were the last exams I ever passed in my life. King’s was an intensely academic college, and I didn’t fit in on that score. My supervisor, Christopher Morris, made some allowances because I played cricket (his son Charles had played against me while he was at Marlborough), but otherwise I was some way from being his favourite pupil. I had heard he took a dimmish view of Old Etonians, but I suspect the main reason was the awfulness of my weekly essays.
I soon found that I loved the social side of life at Cambridge, which, not unhappily, took me away from King’s. I became a member of the Pitt Club, which was founded in the memory of William Pitt the Younger. I would have loved to have eaten lunch and dinner there rather more often, but I was not as well off as some of my friends, and was forced to lunch and dine in College, where the standard fare still had a marked post-war flavour to it and it was much cheaper. For a number of my King’s contemporaries a non-academic, Old Etonian, Pitt Club member was not quite the flavour of the month either.
Anyway, life progressed, and Christopher Morris gave me a list of lectures I should attend. I started off by going with bated breath to Mill Lane to listen to John Saltmarsh’s opening discourse about Medieval European economic history. Saltmarsh himself looked discouragingly medieval. There was a good deal of facial hair in one place and another, a voice with a strong underlay of chalky, ecclesiastical tones, and if he had a sense of humour, it went way over my head. His mind was brimful of every aspect of the medieval condition, but sparkling stuff it was not. For about ten minutes I took feverish, indecipherable notes, but I was soon wondering what on earth I was doing there, being lectured to on a subject about which I knew nothing and cared even less. I saw a pretty bleak future for me with Medieval European history. I was too young, too naïve and too unsure of myself to be seriously rebellious, so I sat through a fair number of these sessions. I listened as attentively as I could to the offerings of a good many other lecturers too, who as far as I was concerned were also dreadful bores. It was not all bad though, for there was one don at King’s called Hibbert, with an agreeably unsolemn way of putting things across, who made American history come off the shelf at you. But that was about it.
I didn’t have a car of my own, or indeed a driving licence for much of my first year, but I found myself getting lifts up to London from various chums for deb dances, although I was not certain how or why the invitations kept turning up. I fell in love with just about every girl I met at these dances, but sadly I was no competition for the swaggering chaps who were three or four years older than me and had just come out of some famous regiment or other. I did get one or two of the crumbs that fell from the rich men’s tables, but that was about it. Generally speaking, of course, one’s expectations from sorties such as these at that time, even from the crumbs, were not anything like as high as they would have been a few years later, when the joys of what was to become a hugely permissive society were chucked into the mix.
As the summer of 1958 approached, I felt both excited and anxious. Cricket was very much on my mind, but so was the memory of that short one from Edward Scott. I went to Fenner’s early in April for net practice with the main candidates for a place in the university side that year, which included a formidable body of old Blues. The magisterial figure of Ted Dexter, the captain, towered over everything. He was tall and good-looking, but an aloof figure to those of us who were not his special friends. Watching him bat in the nets was extraordinary, and I needed no more than that to tell me I was entering a completely new cricketing world. There was Ossie Wheatley, tall and blond and a wonderful fast-medium seam bowler who went on to Warwickshire and Glamorgan; Michael James, always approachable and friendly and a fine striker of the ball, who in 1956 had scored a hundred as a freshman against the touring Australians; and Ian Pieris from Colombo, who bowled at a sharp and mean medium pace and was more than useful in the lower middle order, if a man of few words, to newcomers at any rate. He was to become an influential figure in the development of Sri Lankan cricket, and was always extremely hospitable whenever cricket took me there. Another old Blue was Ian McLachlan from Adelaide, the oldest son of a huge landowning family in South Australia, who in later years would take care of this visiting Pom with a nonchalant and generous ease. The most genial of men, and an opening batsman who like Dexter was at Jesus College, he was once twelfth man for Australia, but never made it beyond that. In the 1990s he would be a member of Malcolm Fraser’s Australian government, and he is still very much the patriarch of Adelaide and South Australia. Then came the also-rans, of whom I was one.
The two pros who came up to Cambridge to coach that year were the redoubtable Tom Graveney, ever elegant and charming, just like his batting, who made me feel very much at ease, and ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, the leg-spinner from Derbyshire who went on one England tour to the subcontinent, but never played a Test match. He was a small man, with a vermillion face which was not only the product of many days spent