There were eight of them in the seminar room, six women and two men, varying in age from Mary O’Shaugnessy, a sixty-five year old grandmother, who hailed, as she said, from Cork via Kilburn, to Kenny Bridges, a plasterer in his mid-twenties, who always arrived straight from his work, carrying his canvas bag of tools, and wearing a dusty donkey-jacket, the capacious pockets of which bulged with well-thumbed volumes of poetry.
Such a range of ages and stages is typical of Warbeck College. It admits only mature students to its undergraduate degree courses. Established by a wealthy Victorian philanthropist specifically to educate only the working man and woman, whose access to the established routes to education had been denied by the necessity to earn a living, this mission continues, even though the concentration of resources on such a class of individuals no longer accords with modern educational notions.
Undergraduate courses at Warbeck were still taught mainly in the evenings, hence the college’s motto, Sub Stellis Discere. Catriona, a night owl, without commitments of partner or family, was ideally suited to this nocturnal existence. Furthermore, she had chosen Warbeck, when she had had the offer of other more obviously prestigious institutions, because she had been so impressed by the atmosphere of discipline and dedication she had found, and which resonated strongly with her own disposition. There was no sense that standards had been relaxed here. Quite the reverse. The students who embarked on such a rigorous combination of work and study had to be tough as well as bright. It seemed as though it would be a privilege to teach them.
After ten years, she had not lost that initial enthusiasm. She felt genuine warmth that evening as she regarded her nineteenth-century literature class. They were a good year, but then there had been no bad ones. Every intake displayed the same qualities. She admired them enormously for the families they raised, the consuming work they endured. She was touched by their belief that knowledge was the holy grail of life’s purpose. She was moved by their humility in seeking it, their often despairing agony in the quest, and their wonderful faith in her as the teacher who would aid them. She was the crone by the wayside who whispered the solution to the magic riddle, or told of the secret entrance to the ogre’s castle, and whose reward was to see them emerge triumphant, the fair prince or damsel clasped in their arms.
And emerge triumphant they did, on the whole. They studied in every spare moment, making up for the time they had lost through lack of opportunity, in youths ill-spent, or better spent than in the pursuit of academic honours. Without exception, afterwards, they wrote wonderful letters of gratitude and thanks, praising her for what they themselves had achieved. When had she ever been thanked before she came to Warbeck? They made the ordinary students she had taught elsewhere, fresh from school or from some pointless circumnavigation of the less comfortable parts of the globe seem spoiled and immature.
Not the least good thing about Warbeck students was their punctuality. They arrived a polite few minutes before the specified time. They didn’t breeze in halfway through. And they were always prepared, with the right text, which they had read and thought about in advance.
Of course, there was always the exception that proved the rule, and tonight’s group contained the biggest exception of all, in the unruly shape of Alan Urquhart. He was late again, of course.
She took off her watch and set it on the table in front of her. It was time to begin, whether or not the massive Scot had managed to get himself here.
She said, ‘Good evening, everyone. This week’s text, as you know, is Wordsworth’s Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, begun in the Spring of 1802, when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were living at Dove Cottage, Grasmere.’ There was a rustling as eight copies of the Collected Poems, in various editions and states of repair were opened at the poem, when the door creaked ajar, and a large red face appeared in the crack.
‘Och, late again. I’m really sorry, Catriona.’
‘Yes, we’ve already started.’ But she could not help accompanying the disapproving words with a smile. It was impossible to be truly annoyed by the endearingly bear-like figure.
He squeezed his large frame around the table into the only vacant chair, which happened to be directly opposite her. His arrival produced a certain amount of coughing and shuffling and scraping of chairs as the women at each side of him budged along to make room for him. There was another pause while he fished around in the very battered leather briefcase for his Wordsworth and his notebook, which he dumped onto the table higgledy-piggledy, so that the notebook slid off onto the floor and had to be retrieved with a great deal of bending, heavy breathing and more chair-scraping. Finally, from an old-fashioned hard spectacle case lodged in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, he produced a pair of rimless reading glasses which he settled upon his great beak of a nose, tucking the ear-pieces into the mane of grey hair around his face, in which could be faintly discerned the fleshy tips of his red ears.
Catriona took a deep breath and said, ‘Well, then, who’s going to begin?’
Marilyn spoke. ‘This Wordsworth. Was he a Buddhist?’
She was a thin-faced woman in her thirties, with lank mousy hair, who wore long, floral print dresses and baggy cardigans. She had a nasal twang which indicated an antipodean origin. At the beginning of the course, Catriona had found her intensely irritating. Her wincingly gauche, uninformed and beside-the-point comments delivered in her whiny voice had set Catriona’s teeth on edge. But, gradually, she had come round. Marilyn was not stupid, merely ill-educated. Whatever outback apology for a school she had attended had left her in complete ignorance of the most basic aspects of English literature and history, making the Canadian students Catriona had taught seem prodigies of knowledge in comparison. This realisation had shamed her. Marilyn was more stunningly uninformed on her course of study than any student Catriona had ever come across, but her role as a teacher was to cure that defect, not to despise it or be embarrassed by it.
And Marilyn, to give her credit, worked hard and learned quickly. Catriona had learned something, too. Marilyn’s oddball remarks, viewed without the prejudice of received academic wisdom, occasionally had the effect of a liberating insight.
So, the typical Marilynism yoking Buddhism, which she undoubtedly did know something about, with the poetry of Wordsworth, which she didn’t, which a few months ago might have made Catriona inwardly squirm, seemed on that evening, fresh and interesting.
One of the essential qualities in a teacher, Catriona had also learned, is to know when not to answer the student’s question. A factual answer can kill the lively thought that gave birth to the enquiry. So she didn’t reply dismissively that of course Wordsworth wasn’t a Buddhist, which was the strictly correct answer, but which, like all strictly correct answers, was actually quite misleading.
‘A Buddhist? Perhaps you’d like to expand on that observation, Marilyn.’
Marilyn flushed. ‘Well, like this bit here.’ She quoted:
‘“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”
‘I mean, what he’s saying is that we’ve had another life. You know, Buddhists believe that you’re reincarnated. You come back to the world, to samsara, they call it, over and over again.’
Catriona smiled, ‘Until you become perfectly enlightened. Yes, I think Marilyn has a point. Do we agree that there is a sense here of having come from elsewhere, and of forgetting what has happened in that previous existence?’
Urquhart, who, as usual, was shifting in his seat, fiddling with his pen, and from time to time blowing noisily through his nostrils like a spouting whale, gave the hacking cough which announced he was about to contribute.
‘Ay, there’s a