May Week Was In June
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Arriving in Cambridge on my first day as an undergraduate, I could see nothing except a cold white October mist. At the age of twenty-four I was a complete failure, with nothing to show for my life except a few poems nobody wanted to publish in book form.’
Falling Towards England – the second volume of Unreliable Memoirs – was meant to be the last. Thankfully, that's not the case. In ‘Unreliable Memoirs III’, May Week Was in June, Clive details his time at Cambridge, including film reviewing, writing poetry, falling in love (often), and marrying (once) during May Week – which was not only in June but also two weeks long . . . |
Extract
The Dean, whose name was the Reverend Meredith Dewey, was indeed a picture of inactivity as he sat back in a winged leather armchair and expended just enough energy to keep his pipe alight. But unlike the Master he had overt characteristics. For one thing, his room was full of rocks. The Dean was an amateur geologist who picked up souvenir rocks every time he travelled abroad in order to attend some less-than-crucial ecumenical drone-in. Indeed there were irreverent suggestions that he would accept the occasional invitation – like the one from the Pan-African Convocation of Pastoral Curators in Accra – just so that, between papers and seminars, he could go forth unto the hills and root around for chunks of granite. Doubtless these imputations arose from envy, but only a historian of mining engineering would have been envious: the Dean’s rooms were on the first floor and for many years had been arousing concern among the female staff in the linen room below. As they toiled over the ironing of our sheets and pillowcases, they had to live with the mental picture of the creaking ceiling finally bursting open and the Dean’s massive collection descending on them like the temple of the Philistines after Samson gave it the push. When you sat facing the Dean you were surrounded by about thirty million years of the Earth’s petrified history. While he dutifully enquired after your spiritual welfare you could fill the time by wondering how he got the stuff through customs. There was no problem about how he carried it. Though of only medium height, he had shoulders like Charles Atlas and could obviously lug a tote-bag full of pitchblende for miles. But when those decolonized douaniers opened up his luggage and found it crammed with unrefined ore, why didn’t they suspect him of stealing their uranium?
The sleepy holiness of his appearance was the only explanation. I told him about my atheism and socialism. His eyelids grew as heavy as sandstone, a large piece of which was poised on a sideboard for purposes of comparison. “Convinced about that beard, are you?” he enquired tentatively, then lapsed into silence while I explained about radical socialism.
The sleepy holiness of his appearance was the only explanation. I told him about my atheism and socialism. His eyelids grew as heavy as sandstone, a large piece of which was poised on a sideboard for purposes of comparison. “Convinced about that beard, are you?” he enquired tentatively, then lapsed into silence while I explained about radical socialism.
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