Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

In the meantime I needed a neutral question. I asked her about the clock I had heard in the night. She put her head on one side and gave it some thought. When she said she thought it must be the Catholic Clock — I suppose she meant the clock from the Catholic Church — her eyes just barely grazed my face. Progress enough for one day. I didn’t even know her name yet. She would tell me in her own good time. I told myself with feeble bravado that I wasn’t in a hurry. Time was on my side, and I would wait it out. Her name wouldn’t change between now and the time she told me what it was. I’d be seeing her often enough. I had the patience of water, and would wear her petrified face down into a smile.

The bedmaker makes the bed. That’s all there is to it. She does some low-level tidying-up and some low-level snooping. She’s supposed to report you if you haven’t slept in the bed allotted you by the college, or if you’ve infringed regulations in some other way. Perhaps you have been cooking gourmet meals on your gas-ring. Traces of feathers and scales on the Formica reveal that you have been stuffing swans with sturgeons — two slaps in the face for the Queen if you’ve only been poaching them, a third for the college if you’ve gone mad with the frying pan. Your bedmaker will prepare a dossier.

The gas-ring is intended for the boiling of water — milk at a pinch. Any dish more complex or whiffy than a boiled egg amounts to infraction. Frying is a mortal sin, as I had been warned well ahead of time. Time would tell if I was capable of staying on the right side of such pettifogging regulations. Meanwhile I would try my luck in the dining hall.

Of course it wasn’t easy to get into Hall, physically — there were the usual couple of massive Downing steps. It was as if the architect had wanted to set up regular barriers against me personally, ritual road-blocks in my path, to remind me I was only there on sufferance and must constantly apologise for my presence by asking for help.

There was a ticket system for Hall, with everyone being issued a little book of vouchers. Eating in Hall wasn’t compulsory, but undergraduates were charged for one book of tickets a term, whether they used them or not.

The vouchers were collected when you queued for your meal, and that was where I had the advantage. I wasn’t expected to queue, and the staff rarely bothered to collect my tickets. Perhaps once a week a waiter would murmur, ‘Better take a ticket from you today, sir, eh?’ and give me a nice wink. Outrageous, really. Quite unfair on the other students, the wheelchair-deprived.

Three of us were vegetarians, out of a student body of three hundred. Three! It’s an astonishingly low figure, with all the cultural upheavals of the 1960s still echoing, but there it is. Perhaps engineering and medicine, the traditional Downing subjects, attract the deep-dyed carnivore. Any reference in conversation to Gandhi’s vegetarianism would be countered by a reference to Hitler’s. One-all. Student culture, wavering between ideologies of diet, was waiting for the decider.

I soon made friends with one of the other dissidents, a third-year medical student called Alan Linton, and after that he sometimes helped me up the steps to the Hall with a mighty hoick. As an able-bodied third-year he didn’t live in college, or else I’m sure he would have been my mainstay in terms of getting around the college at mealtimes.

I was a rather hard-line vegetarian in those days. I would call carnivores (since flesh is flesh) cannibals by proxy. I called fish ‘sea flesh’ or ‘meat-that-swims’. Of course as a child I myself had been fond of (whisper it) cold tongue, which I had chosen to think of as a close-textured vegetable bearing no resemblance to the talking muscle installed in my own head. Perhaps I was atoning for that now, in some contorted fashion, by being so doctrinaire. I was so much at sea in my new surroundings that I made rather a meal of the few certainties I thought I had.

The standard vegetarian meal was a cheesy ratatouille-y concoction, usually served on toast. It was tasty enough, certainly not bad. Monotonous — but I was used to monotony, having grown up in its bosom. Relentless variety would have been a more searching test of character. The college meat-eaters seemed to think that what they were served was actively inedible, so we in the grazing minority weren’t badly off in relative terms.

The choice of Downing hadn’t been initiated by me but by Klaus Eckstein, but I’m happy to detect a deep logic to it. Downing wasn’t a glamorous college, not a Cambridge icon — not famous for age or beauty, for façade or choir, student princes or Nobel laureates. It was central but tucked away, since a hedge of shops had grown up around it. It had roughly the status of a prominent recluse. The only well-known scandal in its history was of a bursar who had run off with vast sums, requiring the college to sell off a substantial tract of its holdings to the university. Hence the Downing Site of faculty buildings just next door.

Downing was mainly a slow-working factory for turning out engineers and medics. Unforeseen side-effects of the manufacturing process seemed to be drunken shouting late at night, wild laughter and a certain amount of scuffling.

Some mornings I would see half-skeletons left out in the courtyard, suggestively posed. A little later their owners, red-eyed and stumbling — the present owners, rather than the original inhabitants — would retrieve the bones from these tableaux of post-mortem dissipation.

A good joke never grows old. I soon got used to the sight of skeletal arms waved in my line of sight by giggling students crouched below the level of my window.

On her second visit the bedmaker must have been looking about her in a more relaxed fashion than before, because she got an eyeful of something even more outlandish than me. There was a tropical millipede, a nice brownish colour and about a foot long, on the windowsill. In a plastic box, mind you, not roaming free. It had cost me £1 in Maidenhead. What with the millipede and the stereo, Maidenhead had yielded quite a trove of bargains.

Actually the reason she hadn’t seen it the first time was that I had stowed it in a drawer beforehand. Just being tactful, like Bluebeard not wanting to mention the wives on a first date, knowing there would likely be complications later, and wanting to get off on a good foot. Or two feet. But no more than that.

When my millipede curled up it looked very much like a Catherine wheel, though I didn’t like to see it in that position too often, curling up in such creatures being an indicator of stress. This particular morning, though, it was feeding very happily. Millipedes do very well on rotten fruit.

My bedmaker stared at it. ‘What on earth is that Nasty Thing?’ I tried to explain the beauties of the creature, but I could make no headway. There’s something about segmented arthropod bodies, legs that dance in squadrons, that seems to upset people. Coördination which would produce wild applause in a chorus line and enthusiastic cheering at a sports ground — there’s something called a Mexican wave, where people raise their arms in raucous sequence — just gives people the horrors in an inoffensive giant insect.

There was only one thing my bedmaker wanted to know about this beautiful creature: whether she was expected to clean out its box. I reassured her. I myself was the millipede’s bedder. She could relax.

There were no signs of relaxation as yet, but it was early days. At least she was dividing her alarm between two objects, now that she had seen the millipede, so logically she must be feeling more at ease with me. We were on our way.

I knew my millipede was bisexual and hoped it would breed, not realising that you need two of them for that — any two, but you do need two. So my knowledge was curled up round a core of ignorance. Any passing biologist (and there must have been a few such at Downing) could have put me right.