But the governing body of St Catharine’s wasn’t entirely sure that English was an academic discipline at all. Perhaps they had a point – it often seemed to me that the main consequence of studying the subject was to remove most of the pleasure of poetry and prose, in order to make whatever point suited the fashionable school of the time, whether ethical, linguistic, philosophical or political. It probably had something to do with the decline of religious belief that English literature could be co-opted into the service of Freudianism, Marxism, Situationism, Structuralism, or almost any other kind of ‘ism’. To dullards in the senior common rooms, the schisms that splintered the English faculty did nothing to enhance the academic credibility of the subject. But the opportunities offered by three years in which nothing more was required of you than to read and think and write were wonderful. More supposedly ‘respectable’ fields of study, like law or engineering, seemed drudgery by comparison.
Inside college, separate societies were expected to encourage a diversity of interests. The literary society was the natural one for me. Trinity had Byron and Tennyson after whom it might name its literary society. King’s had Rupert Brooke and E.M. Forster. Queens’ had T.H. White. All our college had was James Shirley, a minor seventeenth-century playwright of whom most of us had never heard. True, there was a rather unexpectedly distinguished modern theatrical tradition at the college – Ian McKellen, Howard Brenton and Peter Hall (and later his daughter Rebecca) had all been Cats students. But since we were mainly a sadly unliterary college, the job of organising the talks of the Shirley Society was not sought after. My room-mate, Peter Davies, was driven at one point to invite the General who had just commanded the British Army in Northern Ireland. He arrived unsure where Shirley was, and delivered a recruiting speech to a roomful of truculent longhairs, one of whom exclaimed ‘Horseshit’ before leading a small walk-out.
We found a better – if much thirstier – speaker in the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, a lovely man who finished his poetry reading with a suggestion that we all go to the bar. When the bar closed an hour or so later Peter, the poet and I adjourned to our shared sitting room, where we had laid in a bottle of whisky. It did not last very long, and sometime around midnight Peter and I were reduced to breaking into the drinks cabinet of one of the Fellows and helping ourselves to another bottle. We returned to our third-floor rooms to find the great poet standing on the windowsill and pissing into the street far below, periodically shouting at angry passers-by to hold their whisht.
How harmless it all seems now. But the older you get, the harder it is to recapture the intensity of youth. The university was wonderful, but the Black Dog was still around. An email from Peter the other day reminded me of how it often seemed at the time:
You had discovered Nietzsche and it was very fashionable to be in a semi-permanent state of what was called ‘ID crisis’. You managed to marry your ‘search for self’ and nihilism in a quite alarming and quietly dramatic way. ‘Jeremy’s down on Silver Street Bridge, again,’ someone would burst in on me. And there you would be perched on the parapet in your long regulation coat like one of Dylan Thomas’s forlorn, angst-racked cormorants. You would usually send us all away, but sometimes you would look at me and say, ‘It is completely and utterly meaningless, isn’t it?’ I would nod rhetorically and suggest a final pint of Greene King at The Anchor. You would usually oblige and your cormorants would die as we got sozzled at a ‘lock in’.
There is no denying it was a privileged life, and why ordinary tax- and ratepayers should have been expected to fund it was just another absurdity in an already rather preposterous life. The arrangement was hardly sustainable when – as then – just over one school leaver in ten went to university, but it became completely impossible once a political judgement had been made that half of school leavers should have a higher education. The charging of fees was inevitable, even if it is unjustly applied. And since when has a mountain of debt been considered a sound basis for adult life? It is not surprising, perhaps, that many students try to reduce the burden by living at home. But the great skill of the older universities is that the students teach each other – in an ideal world that would be true of all institutions of higher education. There is something about communal living which can encourage thought, tolerance and understanding.
University teachers complain that twenty-first-century student fee arrangements have turned higher education into a business, and students into customers. They are right, of course, and they belong to a trade that has seen its status plummet dramatically. In the late sixties and early seventies the universities still clung to the notion that they were communities of scholars, implying an entirely different relationship between old and young. If universities are to function as businesses, young people are surely entitled to give consumer assessments of what they are getting for their money. Is it acceptable to be charged £9,000 a year simply to hear a not-very-good-lecturer recycle the same talks he has given for the last decade? That was a question which would never have occurred to us. But then, we were getting it free of charge.
* Many years later I received a letter which began, ‘Dear Mr Paxman, I know you are Jewish. But have you ever considered the virtues of Roman Catholicism?’ I replied that I hadn’t, and furthermore, I wasn’t Jewish. When I made the story public, the author Chaim Bermant wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he argued that I was indeed Jewish because I had a large nose, was successful, had a name which ended in the suffix ‘–man’, and – the clincher – ‘he denies it’. You can’t win.
4
Towards the end of my last term at university I was summoned for a glass of dark, horribly sweet sherry with my tutor, who was responsible for my ‘moral welfare’. Augustus Caesar (really – his father was called Julius) was also the Senior Tutor of the college. He taught geography at Cambridge for thirty years – rather well, apparently – seemed the height and shape of a cruiserweight boxer, spoke with a growling Hampshire burr, smoked a pipe more or less permanently, and wore a series of shapeless tweed jackets. He was also rumoured to be the recruiting officer at the university for MI6.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ll soon be gone. Have you got a job yet?’
I hadn’t, and he asked what sort of thing I was looking for.
As I had at school, I still had a feeling that somewhere there was a party going on to which I had not been sent an invitation. But the fact that organisations were actively soliciting applications indicated that I might at least get into contention. The problem was what happened next – I had by this time been turned down for every job in the civil service, in commerce, in business and in journalism for which I had applied.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘something with a bit of foreign travel, perhaps. Somewhere I could serve my country. Somewhere I could maybe use my intelligence.’
‘Oh,’ he said idly. ‘Like MI6?’
I tried to assume an expression which might be interpreted as either innocence or worldliness. To no effect.
He smiled. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said with a genuinely worldly shake of the head.
Looking back on it, I suppose I should applaud the intelligence services for their selection skills. A couple of friends got much further in the recruitment process, even having meetings at a so-called Liaison Department of the Foreign Office, before dropping out, one of them explaining to Gus Caesar, ‘I don’t fancy all that cheesewire stuff.’ (Which drew the response, ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, there are people to do that sort of thing for you.’) At least one other contemporary went the whole way – when I looked him up years later he was listed as a trade attaché somewhere unlikely. I would have been a useless spy. Curiosity, the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, is common to both journalism and intelligence-gathering. But a spy finds things out in order to keep