Lost Paradise

Memories of Cambridge

I taught myself to read when I was four.  It was 1946 and there wasn’t much else to do at the time, what with the war being just over, and no TV.  

My first vivid memory of myself reading is as a new pupil sitting at the back of the first form of the Stacey Road Elementary School in Cardiff and trying, not for the last time, to blend into the woodwork. One part of my mind was urgently focused on my bladder and the other on the lesson we were being taught--the first chapter of the gospel according to Saint Matthew in the King James version. This chapter will always be linked for me to the exquisite humiliation of wetting my pants in front of the whole class. By the way, I do not claim that I understood St Matthew’s gospel, only that I was able to decode it—and that no one, including myself, thought me in any way remarkable. 

Up to the age of nineteen, I was pretty much what I read. Reading was my passion, my escape from a troublesome, tedious world, and my inadequate status symbol as a shy, skinny, introverted child.  And finally reading paid off since it won me a place at New Hall, Cambridge.

In 1960, New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) was very new and not even an actual college yet. It was an experimental foundation run on a shoe string by two pioneering Oxford-educated women,  and looking for a slightly different kind of student.  Thus, New Hall’s entrance exam was unique in that it did not test candidates in their selected subjects but was a single three-hour paper in which candidates were required to write three esaays chosen from a brief list of general topics. The New Hall exam was taken about a month before all the entrance examinations for the other women’s colleges at Oxford, Cambridge, and London.  

Reasonably, given that New Hall could accept only about twenty students a year, my teachers at Cardiff High School for Girls saw the New Hall exam as a kind of rehearsal and urged me to concentrate on improving the Latin and French I would be tested on in the conventional exams. But Catherine Carr, an inspirational English teacher I had for a couple of years, had taught me how to write a goodessay, and perhaps the fact that so little seemed to hinge on New Hall gave me the courage to experiment and take risks. Certainly, the one topic I remember choosing from the list was on the scientific method, which was counterintuitive given that the great British educational system had allowed me to abandon the whole world of number and experiment at the age of fourteen. Ignorant of science I might have been, but I had recently read an essay on the scientific method by Bertrand Russell and I proceeded to summarize the great philosopher’s clear and cogent arguments in my own words. 

Well, hey presto, much to my teachers’ amazement and my family’s awe, I got a telegram asking me to come to New Hall for an interview. From that time on, I have had a soft spot for Bertrand Russell, and I wonder if it is incidental that both my husbands have been passionately devoted to the scientific method. Let me add that the ability to take hold of a text, grasp a line of argument, and make it my own would be, thirty years later,  a key to my success as a writer of non-fiction.  

 The main thing I remember about that first visit to Cambridge, was the smart sage green tweed skirt-suit with elbow length sleeves my mother and I anxiously purchased--that and a sense of ecstasy. I stayed in the home of our one Cambridge connection, a neighbor’s brother who was a college fellow, and I discovered that Cambridge was not just a name reverentially invoked by aspirational Welsh school teachers but a beautiful city where people actually ate and slept and got around on bikes.  In their interviews with me, the New Hall fellows Miss Murray, the head of the college, Miss Hammond, her second in command, and Mrs. Coleman, Director of Studies in Modern Languages, were as charming as they were cultivated, and I was prepared to kneel down and adore them. On the other hand, the glimpses I had of the other girls being interviewed frightened me to death.  Speaking with “posh” accents and wearing casual skirts, mousy twin sets, and flats, they seemed to know everyone and feel perfectly at home. The smart green suit with its attendant high-heeled pumps had obviously been a mistake. Cambridge was something I would have to learn to “read”.

I returned to Cardiff from the interview in a state of giddy delight and sick anxiety. All my life, my reading habit had made me an alien being, but at Cambridge everyone seemed to be lexotropic like me. For the first time I knew what I wanted from life. Now I saw what all the school work had been about, and I was terrified that the Eden I had glimpsed would not be mine. My provincial high school sent one girl a year to either Oxford or Cambridge, and it was far from clear to anyone that I would be THE ONE for my year. So, I settled down in quiet desperation to swot, as we used to say, for the next, the real exams. Miss Faulkes, my French teacher, told me we could only hope that, when I sat the exams for Girton and St Hilda’s, I would have one of my good days. This was the kind of positive thinking our teachers used to motivate us in those days.

And then, on the eve of those dreaded exams, I got the letter—New Hall was offering me a place, and I, without hesitation, accepted it. Getting that letter was the most wonderful moment in my life because was so desired and yet so unexpected-.  Admittedly there were a few glitches. I think I must have been one of New Hall’s experiment as Mrs. Coleman wrote kindly that trying to straddle the Classics and Modern Languages Triposes would be difficult for me, given my less than stellar “A’ level results.  She recommended I start Italian from scratch and get it up to A-level in six months, but this was just the small print on a contract I was ready to sign in blood. 

And so, in October 1961, I “went up” to New Hall, Cambridge to “read” French and Italian for the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos. I deliberately use this Cambridge jargon because it so delighted me at the time. As the first person in my family to go to college, much less Oxbridge, I was entering terra incognita, and my strategy was to, as it were, sit at the back of the class and hope no one noticed me, just as I had tried to do at the Stacey Road Elementary School, when I ws four.  My goal was to blend in and make no more mistakes of the smart green suit variety. What I found , however, when I actually arrived at the university was that blending in for a woman undergraduate at Cambridge was both easy and impossible. After eleven years in an all-girls schools, after a lifetime of seeing the women in my family rule the roost, I was entering a proud bastion of male supremacy,  and nothing in my education had prepared me for it.

Male undergraduates at that time outnumbered us women eight to one so we  both stuck out like sore thumbs and left no mark.  The two established colleges for women, Girton and Newnham, dated back to the late nineteenth century, at which point girls, suitably chaperoned, were allowed to attend the same classes and take the same exams as Cambridge undergraduates—i.e. men. It was not until 1945, however, that Cambridge University agreed to confer degrees upon its female students. In many ways, the Cambridge I entered in 1961 was the same university Virginia Woolf had cast an acerbic eye on in 1929. Woolf reported being shooed indignantly off the sacred lawns of Trinity by a college porter, and dryly contrasts the French cheese and aged claret served her at High Table in an ancient (i.e. male!) college with the mince and thin cocoa served she and the women fellows got at a women’s college, She wrote up her Cambridge experiences in “A Room of One’s Own”, an essay that today is a foundational part of the feminist canon but which none of my teachers thought to mention.  

 In retrospect, the foundation of New Hall in 1954 with just sixteen students can be seen as a leading indicator that Cambridge was finally entering the modern world,  but,  as a feminist historian, I am too cynical not to see here a tactical move in a very ancient and hard-fought game, men V women.   Newnham and Girton were still among the newest and the poorest, but New Hall, chivalrously (and minimally) financed by rich gentlemen colleges,. made her sister institutions look rich--and, as I can testify, the food we women were served  had not changed much since 1929.  In 1978, Trinity College, the richest and most prestigious Cambridge college, would admit its first women undergraduates but in 1961, the very possibility that a young woman might one day “sport the oak” (close the outer door) to Newton’s hallowed set on Trinity Great Court was only a nightmare for the “old boys” on campus and off. 

In a way it was lucky that none of this academic history impinged on me in my six (undergraduate and postgraduate) years at Cambridge University. I, quite literally, knew nothing about it. The fight to win access to higher education for women was not on the history syllabus at Cardiff High for Girls, and, unlike Virginia Woolf, I had no father or brothers who had gone to Trinity or King’s and so could not compare my experience with theirs. There are advantages in being a first-generation college student, and when my little black trunk and I arrived in Cambridge, for the first time in my life, I felt rich and privileged. The beauty of Kings College chapel and the Backs in bloom were mine. For the first time in my life, I had a room all to myself, with a gas fire to toast crumpets, and a State Scholarship to provide the crumpets and the shillings for the gas meter.  I could go to the ART for a play and see movies like L’Avventura and The Seventh Seal whenever I had two bob to spare--as long I was back by ten. New Hall felt radical and romantic to me, and I was a pioneer with a bicycle instead of a covered wagon.

Today, thanks to a generous donation by an American alumna and her husband, New Hall has been reborn as Murray Edwards college. Its inexpensive but radical white concrete buildings are now considered architectural treasures and it  boasts an important art collection of works by women and an ambitious garden. Most importantly, under the enlightened leadership of its fourth president, Dorothy Byrne, it is still a women’s college and a national leader on such issues as the low representation of women in STEM disciplines. 

I am extremely proud to be a Murray Edwards alumna and celebrate all that the college now is and aspires to be. All the same, I do not regret knowing New Hall when it was still in the making and more like a family than a college. When I was an undergraduate, New Hall consisted of about sixty students and fifteen or so senior members, including the fellows and administrators. 

The 1961-1964 class at New Hall, in a photograph shot on the back lawn at the main house on Silver Street. I am fourth from the left in the back row. 

e all lived in small groups in rented houses close to the center of Cambridge and squeezed in for communal lunch and dinner at the administrative center on the corner of Silver Street. I remember the then Senior Tutor, Miss Murray—later Dame Rosemary, first President of New Hall—turning up to fix the plumbing in the hostels., and, on summer evenings, she would descend from her first-floor set to retrieve the cushions we undergraduates had left out on the lawn.  This house on Silver Street, along with the Old Granary a few houses down, belonged to the Darwin family—Virginia Woolf records going there to visit her friends the Darwin sisters—and these buildings had great charm as well as a superb location.  It was my understanding that Miss Murray and Miss Hammond had hoped that New Hall would find a permanent home there, but the Darwin family had other plans and today the site is owned by the postgraduate Darwin College.

In the summer between my graduation and the beginning of my life as a graduate student, I volunteered to work at Silver Street as a cook. I think I was taken on as a lark by the two ladies who ran the kitchen--Miss Dufferin, a tiny Scottish lady of the old school, and Mary (I never learned her name), a tall, broad countrywoman who did most of the hard labor around the place.  Those two women took me on knowing I couldn’t so much as boil an egg, but under their tutelage I learned basic meat cooking, three kinds of pastry, sponge cakes from scratch, and even such exotic desserts as peche Melba. The three of us had a halcyon time, and I wonder if the food New Hallites ate that summer has ever been bettered.

But let me backtrack to my three undergraduate years and highlight the key thing about university life in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s—the small percentage of women taking degrees. Today in the U.S.A. it is usual even at elite colleges and universities for women students to outnumber. men At Cambridge, in my day (though not now, of course) the male-female ratio was, to repeat, a whopping eight to one. This disproportional representation was finally getting attention, and it was during my six years in Cambridge that the fight to open the Cambridge Union to women was won, and New Hall students were leaders of the push to put women crews on the river. 

I regret to say that I took no part in any of this proto-feminist activism. even though the two other Modern Languages Tripos students in my year at New Hall, Jean Stadler and Judith Weltman, got involved. In my defense, I would say that, whereas Jean and Judith were both daughters of cosmopolitan graduates and exposed to radical political ideas, I was still only an embryonic intellectual, suffering from imposter syndrome, and too busy trying to play this new university game to question the rules. If I had an opinion on women and education it was  a dim belief that equality of the sexes had been won somewhere back in the nineteenth century, I remember my mother telling me in my teens that the suffragettes had been attention-seeking, upper-class bitches who needed just to wait until. at the appointed and appropriate time, the vote would be given them. 

To illustrate my passivity, let me cite the small but everyday irritation of being obliged to wear skirts on the street during term because it was forbidden for a woman to wear trousers under her gown. At that time, the short black undergraduate academic gowns were mandatory for dinner in hall, for all university classes, lectures, and “supervisions” (Cambridgese for tutorials), for entry to the University Library, and at all times after dark. To enforce the gown-wearing rules and the college curfew, proctors in their long swishing M.A. gowns patrolled the streets at night accompanied by bowler-hatted “bulldogs”—college porters, rumored to be capable of running down errant young gentlemen. 

Old Oxonian Wilfred Sheen once wrote that a man must finally, regretfully, give up the dusty old gown and the cycle clips—the small metal semi-hoops men used to keep their trouser legs from flapping in the wheels. . Well, we women undergrads in 1961 had yet to inherit the bicycle clips.  Most of the academic year, as we got around the city on our bikes, and we would have been safer, and warmer in pants, but I do not remember us complaining much. Gowns were the outward sign of the inward grace of being Members of the University. There was a glamor to them, and we were hungry for glamor. The ending to Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night when Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey, both in their M.A. gowns, exchange Latin quips and passionate kisses as the horrified proctors look on, perfectly captures that glamour.   

Me emerging from the Senate House in June 1964 in my short gown and rented rabbit fur hood, after receiving my Bachelor of Arts degree. In the simple and ancient degree ceremony at Cambridge, groups of five undergraduates formed up inside the Senate house, were led up to the Vice Chancellor, each holding a finger of the hand of their  Director of Studies and being declared members of the university in Latin. No caps, no bands playing “Pomp and Circumstance”, no speeches.

As I remember it, rather than protest or complain, most of us Cambridge women undergraduates were content to work our tails off and prove we belonged at the university by conspicuous success, and, in my field of study, we did not feel intellectually inferior to men, rather the contrary. Women fellows and university lecturers in French like Odette de Mourgues and Alison Fairlie were acknowledged to be at the top of their academic tree and actually published books, a rather subversive, almost American, thing to do at the time. Inspired and instructed by these dons, women undergraduates took a disproportionate number of firsts and upper seconds in the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos.

I have since been apprised by the memoirs of other old Cantabrigians that women excelled in my Tripos because reading modern languages was considered “infra dig” by the top (i.e. old public school educated) humanists. I am told that real literati—with an accent on the masculine plural there—read English or Classics, while, of course, possessing full reading knowledge of the modern foreign languages that female drones such as myself were trying to “master.” I count it lucky that as an undergraduate I was too humble to be aware of these academic hierarchies, and too busy living up to the expectations of the brilliant and fascinating women who taught me.  Now, of course, I am too cynical to be surprised when a system derogates an area in which women shine.

And yet, if the best students and best teachers in Modern Languages in the Cambridge of my day were disproportionately women, almost all the books we spent our lives reading were written by men. In my whole undergraduate career, I remember being assigned only one book by a woman—La Princesse de Clèves, the novel which, I now know as a feminist historian, Madame de Lafayette published anonymously, and which literary historians long preferred to accredit to her friend, Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld. This story has a moral, but not one I was aware of until much later, and certainly not the one that was pointed out to me.

The all-male canon was largely imposed but partly self-inflicted. Madame de Staël and George Sand were authors who got a half-question devoted to them in Tripos every other year or so. I could have read them had I or my female supervisors thought it worth my while, but we didn’t.  For students and teachers so intent on success, there was no time for “minor” authors. Simone de Beauvoir’s novels we did read, but only for pleasure, since, for Tripos exam purposes, the twentieth century ended in 1939, and so Beauvoir did not come into our “period.”  As for Colette, she was too minor even to get mentioned.  I was to read Beauvoir’s The Second Sex only in the mid-seventies when I was teaching French at Wellesley College.  My love of Colette came even later, and I see now that her subversive eroticism was radically out of joint with the Britain of the 1960s.  Reading her at twenty would probably have taught me nothing.

But while, on the surface, my days at Cambridge were still as dedicated to reading as they had been in high school, deep down something was changing. Life was taking over from literature, and my life was no longer largely what I read.  I was, as it turned out, female, and, since literature, as defined at the time, was male, it had less and less to say to me. Dimly, very dimly, the message was coming through that, whereas it was thrilling to read Chateaubriand and Stendhal and imagine being René or Julien Sorel, none of those gentlemen writers and heroes could possibly have imagined being ME! –a young, upwardly mobile woman intellectual. 

Today, I can see that my sexual development was very delayed, by nature and by my literary habits, and, while this delay tortured  me in my teens, it proved a vast stroke of luck in the long haul. In high school I was a skinny wallflower who found parties a torment, but, looking back, I see that my popular and attractive classmates were facing tougher problems. I remember the wonderfully intelligent Christine, who got hooked on sex and meths and left school at sixteen. And Carol, the poet who in the sixth form dazzled us all with her brilliance--and then suddenly upped and married an Italian waiter instead of going to university.  Carol was bearing her second child as I was preparing my first Tripos examination. 

As a sexually backward girl in an all-girls school, I was both shocked and impressed when my headmistress—herself unmarried—advised me to try for Oxbridge because I would find a good husband there. The funny thing is that my old headmistress knew me better than I knew myself, and things turned out pretty much as she had predicted. At Cambridge, my heterosexuality blossomed, and I sallied forth each day to that exciting social center, the University Library tearoom (!), in padded bra, fishnet stockings, and tight, straight skirts expensively at variance with my tiny college grant, and my bicycle saddle. The former bluestocking became a blackstocking, and the first sight my future husband had of me was when I hit a pothole and fell off my bike outside his hostel. The Politically Correct will reprove me for saying it, but this was one of the occasions when it probably helped to be wearing a skirt.

Perhaps the major difference between my 1960s college friends and me, on the one hand, and the American college student described around the same time by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique on the other, is that we Brits assumed we would have a husband and a career, not marry and retire to the suburbs to raise kids and play Mah Jong. We saw, with all the gratitude of ill-dressed and unkempt Cinderellas, that Cambridge was providing us with a bevy of young May Ball princes who would both love our brains and desire our bodies, and allow us to metamorphose into princesses, i.e. chic, successful professional women, living in Kensington or Leamington Spa, with proud hubby and achieving children. Though we did not put it in words the way Wendy Wasserstein’s cohort of Vassar women did some ten years later, we wanted to have it all., and--this is the killer—we didn’t think it would be hard. 

My assumptions about the future were shaped by two young Cambridge women who taught me--Dorothy Gabe Coleman, my main supervisor at New Hall, and Rhiannon Harries Goldthorpe of Newnham, who was my doctoral thesis advisor. Both were Welsh like myself, both were outstandingly clever, and both differed from other Cambridge women dons I encountered, notably Miss Murray and Miss Hammond, in being young and obviously attractive to and attracted by men. Of the two, I was closer to Dorothy. She had come, like myself, from an obscure Welsh high school, and I have a strong feeling that it was she who saw potential in me and argued for giving me a place at New Hall. When I first knew her, Dorothy was twenty-six or so, still completing her doctorate for a Scottish university—an act of rebellion in itself in self-satisfied Cambridge--and already a college fellow and a university lecturer. More importantly, as it seemed to me, she was married, to a most delightful man, a fellow in Classics at Emmanuel. With her full bosom, tightly belted waist, three-inch stiletto heels, and nicotine-stained fingers, with her brilliant mind and reputation as one of the legendary “starred firsts” in Tripos, Dorothy represented just about everything I wanted to be in life. 

I got my first inkling that becoming Dorothy Coleman would be difficult in my third year as an undergraduate. In that year I won a one-year English-Speaking Union fellowship to Bryn Mawr College but I was also heavily involved with the man I was pretty sure I wanted to marry and he was a post graduate tied to his lab and his experiments. A man in my place, I am pretty certain, would have kissed his girlfriend goodbye and gone off to the U.S., assuming that he and she would work things out one way or another--and that is certainly what Miss Murray thought I should do. I shall always remember the disappointment verging on disapproval with which Miss Murray greeted the news that I had decided not to go to Bryn Mawr. I see now that Miss Murray understood far better than I that, if Cambridge was indeed Paradise for me, I was in danger of losing it as soon as I began to subordinate my intellectual ambitions to my husband’s. 

But, at this point in my life, Miss Murray, whom I venerated but to whom I felt no personal connect io had no influence over me. She seemed someone from a bygone era and I was convinced, on the one hand, that I had to choose between getting married next year and spending a year in Amiercia, and, on the other hand that I could still have my cake and eat it if—to mix my metaphors—I played my cards right. If I managed to ace Part 2 of Tripos, I would get a State Studentship, stay on at Cambridge to my Ph.D. and also marry my man.  So I used the Bryn Mawr offer to jump start a marriage proposal, and when Mike did propose, I felt an old atavistic kind of female satisfaction. 

Despite the charming little sapphire and diamond ring that Mike had bought for me in Hatton Garden, I was aware i was taking a risk. My back up plan if I did not get a First was to fall back on a teacher training course at Homerton, a college that was not then part of the university.  I remember the whiff of despair I felt when the interviewer at Homerton smugly remarked that I could look forward to teaching some nice academic sixth forms. Was I to be forced out of my Cambridge Eden so soon, back into a version of my high school?

Fortunately, the academic gods continued to smile on me. I got my First  and both a State Studentship and a college studentship, n the spring of 1985, Mike and I were married, and I entered a halcyon time when it was poossible to that I could  be both wife and scholar. I had finally licked some of my old sexual and social hang-ups and, having slogged away diligently all my remembere, life, as a graduate student. I took things easy   I reaped the rewards of success, plucking the day and careless of the morrow, and I cannot regret it.  For three years, at the British taxpayer’s expense, I was permitted to browse through the recent acquisitions in the University Library, my home from home, chat about the dialectic and the parvenu in the UL tearoom, punt on the river and play croquet, drink shandy in smoky pubs, and treat my dearest friends to under-cooked Elizabeth David recipes. My thesis advisor Rhiannon Harries, now Mrs. Goldthorpe, was leading me into the fields of existentialist philosophy and Marxist politics, and with her by my side, I tasted the giddy pleasures of the young intellectual. 

In my second year of graduate studies, at the time of the great and unprecedented expansion of the English universities, I was approached about an assistant lecturer’s job at the University of Warwick. Well, I never even considered accepting the offer. The idea of leaving Cambridge a year early seemed simply ridiculous—especially to go to A New University (withering scorn!). How was I to know that this was the kind of professional opportunity that I—along with successive generations of Ph.D.’s in Great Britain and the United States—would look back on with envy.

In the last year of my student life I was pregnant, and that seemed a wonderfully original, picturesque, almost exotic condition.. Reading was still my profession as well as my passion, and one can read perfectly well with a baby inside. As for hurrying to get my thesis written and my doctorate secured, that seemed almost irrelevant. When my beloved former Director of Studies Dorothy Coleman suffered a stroke during her first pregnancy, lost speech, and became permanently paralyzed down one side of her body, I was upset for her, but unshaken in my assumptions about the future. It was not so much that I believed that I could beat the odds, as that I didn’t understand what the odds were, or how the race was run in which I was entered. 

My son Christopher was born on October 3, in Cambridge, England. It was a difficult birth and a difficult time since on the day after the birth Mike along with all our worldly goods sailed off to Boston where he was due to  take up a post doc position at MIT . Five weeks later, I arrived in America not with a an English-Speaking Union fellowship but a baby in a Moses basket   I had not even bothered to apply for a job since American colleges begin the academic year in early September, three weeks before my due date. Before we embarked on parenthood, it had not even occurred to Mike and me to try and plan the arrival of our first child in the long vacation, much less to postpone pregnancy until I had finished my Ph.D. and got my first job. From this point on, the euphoric cloud of achievement that had borne me up in my Cambridge years was gone. I was out of Eden, and for me, as for Eve, there was labor ahead. 

*

So, in conclusion, do I regret the choices I made with my gonads and my womb, not my brain.? 

NO! 

Forced out of my passive self-absorption at the age twenty-five, obliged to care for someone else, I gave love and was received it in abundance.  Forced out of my black and white print cocoon, As a mother of small children, I opened my eyes to a technicolor world full of music and drama--like Dorothy does in The Wizard of Oz. 

Do I feel bitterness about the academic bait-and-switch game played on me in my thirties—and which I will recall in another chapter in this memoir?

YES!

If you love teaching as I did, and are as good at it as I was, the life as a tenured professor in an American college with a guaranteed salary is, or at least was in my day, a very pleasant and satisfying one. Academia, I can say in all honesty,  lost a good thing in me but in the end its loss was my gain. At the age of fifty, I published my first book and discovered that, I could reach minds old and young by turning my passion for reading into a habit of writing,. 

So, beloved family and friends, the moral of this long winding story is that ignorance can be bliss, and even useful for a while--but don’t count on it for the long term.

And to you, my five beloved granddaughters—Bronwyn Mako, Fiona Amane, Delia Kotone, Kalkidan, and Susannah-- be proud daughters of Eve, bite deep into the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, pick out some really killer fig leaves, and look forward to Eden as a future to shape, not a past to regain.