But the writing was on the wall. The editorship and appearance of Varsity changed constantly – the next term, under the joint editorship of the comic writer Andrew Nickolds and Laura Sparkes, later to become a rather inspirational teacher, the masthead adopted the Variety typeface and appeared on pink paper. Varsity limped on until eventually it was devoured a few terms later by a revived Stop Press. It now appears as a pretty good website plus a free paper edition, and boasts of being ‘The only independent student weekly newspaper of the University of Cambridge’ – which is possibly true, but isn’t much of a slogan.
The fate of Varsity was emblematic of what was happening in the university as a whole. Much of what is now generally called the sixties happened in the seventies – it was not until 1972, for example, that the first male undergraduate colleges became accessible to both sexes. In the suite of rooms I shared in the eighteenth-century main court, my room-mate could occasionally be found wearing a tweed thornproof suit, although I was by now in tie-dyed T-shirt and loon trousers. By comparison with the news sheets of the left that were appearing at the time, like the Shilling Paper, Varsity seemed – was – old-fashioned. In 1970 the military government in Greece spent a week trying to promote tourism in their country. Everyone, naturally, detested the Greek colonels, but when half a dozen students entered a travel agency and threw Greek Tourist Board brochures on the floor, Varsity’s report (I think it even appeared under my ‘byline’) included the sentence ‘A Greek tragedy was enacted on the streets of Cambridge,’ inserted by some smartarse (possibly me).
But demonstrations were definitely no laughing matter. Later that week protesters disrupted a dinner at the Garden House Hotel, also intended to promote Greek tourism. Eight of the demonstrators were sent to prison or borstal by a gouty old bully of a judge. The university was outraged, but still Varsity reported another sit-in at the university Senate House (this time about some urgently-felt, but more trivial, concern than the military takeover of a European government) as an action by ‘militants’. It was true that most students simply went about their normal lives during the demo, but the tone of the coverage left the newspaper uncomfortably straddling the fence. In fact the whole university was a bit like that.
There were demonstrations every other week about something or other. Many were led by a placard-waving Charles Clarke, with shoulder-length hair – like some Moses leading his people to a Promised Land whose precise map reference eluded most of us. There was usually a point at which another longhair, Bruce Birchall, would start marching back through the crowd with a chant of ‘Anarchy! Anarchy!’ A few years ago I read that he had died after a career spent playing chess and directing alternative theatre. He had been diabetic for some time, and there was some argument in chess chatrooms about whether that had been the cause of his personal hygiene problems, which were evidently serious.
Prince Charles had just spent a couple of years apparently studying archaeology and anthropology in the beautiful surroundings of Trinity, but St Catharine’s was a long way short of being the most glamorous college. Though it was also in the centre of town, it was unfashionable, built of brick rather than the honeyed stone of Trinity, had only one proper court, was sporty, and seemed to be dominated by geographers and engineers. But it was a friendly, straightforward place, and things were a great deal better than they had once been – there were three years at the start of the nineteenth century when the college had been unable to muster any students at all. In 1861 it had also been the scene of such a huge row between two Fellows, each of whom believed he should be Master of the college, that the university ostracised the successful candidate. Since the Master held his office until he died, the college did not recover until after the First World War. The august Victoria County History commented in 1950 that ‘the undergraduates shared the general odium, and not unnaturally came to be drawn in great part from an inferior stratum and to fall in number … Several of those still alive are gratefully conscious of the beneficial effect upon their characters of this struggle against adversity.’
The dozen of us from the inferior stratum who arrived to study English nearly twenty years after those comments were supposed to be answerable to a taciturn Cornishman who ran the Extramural Board. We realised what we were missing when we were invited to tea on our first Sunday by the great Yeats authority Tom Henn, who had retired from the college the previous term. A brilliant man from a down-on-their-luck Anglo-Irish family, Henn had risen to the rank of Brigadier in the Second World War, during which a bad landing in a military aircraft had left him with a severely arthritic hip. As we sat on the floor around his armchair he recited Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ from memory, pointed his stick at a pimply youth from Barnsley and asked, ‘Can you imagine, boy, can you imagine being fucked by a swan?’ He could not.
But then, most of us couldn’t imagine being fucked by anybody or anything. Every room had a ‘bedder’ who came in to clean each day – there were occasional, almost certainly invented, stories about students bedding their bedder. But they were generally matronly middle-aged women: mine was a bustling, motherly figure called Joy, and she lived up to her cheery name. Within the university, men outnumbered women by a ratio of about ten to one. As I discovered when I invited a girl I had met in an English lecture to supper, most of the women were much cleverer than the men. Though I suspect she had been as nervous as I was, there was no second date. Homerton, the Cambridge teacher training college, which was dominated by women, was a better proposition, as were the numerous language schools, which seemed to be full of glamorous Europeans – but then Joy arrived in my rooms one morning, sniffed the air like a questing Labrador and said, ‘You’ve ’ad one of them foreign women up here, ’aven’t you?’ On another occasion a pair of what were definitely girls’ knickers appeared in the sitting room, but neither my room-mate Peter nor I could think how on earth they had got there. One good friend who made occasional sorties to London in his Morris Traveller – generally with a tailor’s mannequin in a flat cap in the passenger seat – returned with tales of forbidden fruit, one of his insights being that the skin of a Japanese girl was softer to the touch than anything we could imagine. He later married one. Eventually, in my second year, I fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful girl who worked part-time in the Copper Kettle coffee shop. The relationship with Noel lasted for much of the rest of my time at Cambridge.
The system was quite clearly unsustainable. I had been asked to send in a mugshot for the college records before arriving in Cambridge. It was sent back to me with a letter from St Catharine’s saying that some ‘tonsorial adjustment’ was required, because my hair was too long. But once you were installed in college, there was nothing anyone could do about how you looked. Gowns were still required at college dinners, attendance at a set number of which was compulsory in order to be eligible to graduate. (Other meals were buffets, the most notorious components of which were chunks of mechanically recovered meat known as ‘pork nasties’, which I rather liked.) All the dons were men, a chaplain lived in college, and students could sign a chit for any number of bottles of gin or whisky – the first thing I did on receipt of my (quite generous) local authority grant was to pay off the previous term’s bar bill. We could rely on Wilf, a genial North Country night porter, to tie those of us who’d had too much to drink into an upright chair so we didn’t drown in our own puke. But the system only worked as long as everyone agreed on how it should work, and by the late sixties and early seventies fewer and fewer of us were prepared to agree that things were as they were because that was how they were.
To the ordinary undergraduate, the university hardly existed: you had applied to a particular college, and it remained the only place that really mattered. You ate there, slept there, and if you played sports, unless you were quite startlingly good, you played them for the college. The English faculty, to which the dozen of us studying the subject were notionally affiliated, was based in an expanse of concrete a ten-minute walk from the centre of town. It organised lectures on a very random basis (on one occasion my room-mate and I were the only people in the hall – we’d gone along because we felt sorry for the crumbly old figure who was speaking). Some of the lectures, though, were terrific, notably those given by A.C. Spearing, who used to act out Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English. The University Library served superb cheese scones which one could eat with much brighter girls from the women’s colleges, like Julia Cleverdon (now a dame, perhaps