ABSTRACT
Slow train along the Welsh borders, steam, although soon to be overtaken by the unromantic diesel, fast, efficient, but no longer the living, snorting temperamental ‘horse’ of a dirtier, sootier past. Arrival at Oxford station, four or five of us all from our old school, but now, like the boys of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school, about to start a new life, away from home, parents, the solidly predictable school routine, with all its inevitable problems now by contrast in deep diminuendo. Some with the family’s old cabin trunks rescued from attics and a previous century, some like me, with old suitcases, bursting, roped tight. Shared taxi to colleges we knew not exactly where, hurried promises to meet again when we had found our college feet … My rooms high in an ancient building on Fellows’ quad, atop a narrow staircase, and a long, long way down dark stairs and across a quad from where one’s nocturnal plumbing needs could be accommodated. Can’t descend, can I, to purchase a potty, surely? Milk bottle? But there was a wash basin – which gurgled and kept me awake at night when someone else, below, met his own desperate needs in the same creative fashion, rinsed the basin, and created a vacuum in my own u-bend above. Keep plug in at night? No solution as on the basin there was a patent overflow. So knock small hole in lead pipe below my u bend, and keep chewing gum to hand whenever hole needs resealing. Hurrah! Study shared with fellow first-year student, ex-Winchester and national service, maybe a relative of one of the notorious spies who had defected to Russia; P, a delightful and cultivated fellow, with guitar and repertoire of just one song, with chorus, ‘I let a red-headed woman make a fool out of me’. Moral somewhere?
