Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Now I was free to install that questionable glow, to let my moral fibre loosen softly under its influence. Mrs Beddoes rather hesitantly installed a red bulb at my command, and soon I was happily basking in its rosy aura — the colour of life in the womb, on those sunny prenatal days — in my boudoir in Kenny Court, my yet-to-be knocking-shop.

There were ways for undergraduates to fill their calendars, short cuts to a social life — clubs and societies. These were on display at the Freshers’ Fair, to be held in the Corn Exchange. My tall staircase neighbour P. D. Hughes — Pete — said he was going, and didn’t mind giving me a push. I know I say ‘tall’ the way some people say ‘nice’, but Pete really was. He was nice and tall. He sometimes had to duck while going through a doorway designed for smaller folk. He and I lived in a constant state of amazement at the size of each other’s shoes.

The din at the Freshers’ Fair was astounding, a physical reminder that I was part of a massive intake of student flesh, perhaps the loudest noise I’d heard since The Who took the stage at Slough. I felt correspondingly oppressed and insignificant. I was hoping there would be a Ramana Maharshi Society, since Cambridge University was alleged to be a progressive environment, but I was out of luck. The closest thing to it alphabetically was Mah-Jongg Club — not close. The closest to it in content, at least as other people were concerned, was the Transcendental Meditation Society, of which I had a holy horror. How dare this sub-guru Mahesh appropriate (and garble) the name of Maharshi?

Pete seemed not to have interests or hobbies as such. He was drawn to stalls manned by women, no matter what organisation they represented, chess club or choral society. Men outnumbered women by a factor of ten at the university, something which neither gender ever forgot. Pete, though tall and nice-looking, was awkward, conscious of the odds against his being a winner in the sweepstakes for companionship. If there was a pretty face at a stall, he asked for details of the organisation concerned. With a little encouragement he might have signed up for anything. A smile could easily have drawn him in to satanism or even stamp-collecting.

He would park me at an angle while he made a play for a young woman whose looks he liked. I wouldn’t be able to see his target from my position, but I could follow the progress of the little flirtation from the behaviour of Pete’s hands on the handles of the wheelchair. Unconsciously he would rock me back and forth, like a mother pacifying the baby while chatting to a neighbour, but since his physique was large and strong — not to mention gripped by sexual tension — his movements weren’t as smooth as he must have imagined. They weren’t at all soothing. No baby could have been lulled by such agitated pushing and pulling. It would have woken and howled. I had to bite my lip myself.

Pete accumulated a lot of leaflets and fliers, smudgily printed on rough brightly coloured paper, which he dumped in my lap while he pushed the chair. After we had left the Fair, he gathered them up and thrust them into a rubbish bin. We had been warned against the temptation, common for freshmen, of signing up for every sort of society and voluntary organisation, rather than find our own way in a relatively denuded social landscape, but we seemed in our different ways to be immune.

After a few days at Cambridge, all the same, I began to have the nagging feeling that I had missed something. When the feeling clarified itself, it turned out to be a throwback to my first reactions at CRX. Then the question had been: I can see the hospital, but where’s the school? Now it was more complicated: I can see Downing College, the Senate House, King’s Chapel, Heffers, Lion Yard, the Corn Exchange, the Modern Languages Department, the Blue Boar and the Round Church, even the University Library (most of them, admittedly, only on the map, or while arriving in the Mini), but where’s the university? If the whole august institution had devoted itself to the vichara , to Self-Enquiry, asking constantly with full attention the arch-and only question Who Am I? , what would be its answer?

Holy tipples

The University had a motto, of course, but it was a bit on the cryptic side: Hinc lucem et pocula sacra . Roughly, ‘This is where we receive enlightenment and imbibe holiness.’ But the Latin doesn’t make a complete sentence and you have to supply the missing grammar. Hinc means ‘from here’. Good — I’m in the right place. And the next bit is about light and holy tipples ( poculum being a diminutive meaning a goblet or the liquid it contains, so ‘little drinks’) and it’s in the accusative, so someone is doing something to the light and holy tipples — or will do something or has done something. ‘Getting them’ is as good a guess as any, and I suppose it may as well be ‘us’ that does it. It’s all rather frustrating — or to put it another way, good practice for construing Sanskrit scriptures.

Oxford has a motto, too — Dominus Illuminatio Mea — also with the verb missing, but this is a pretty elementary conundrum since there aren’t hundreds of verbs which are followed by a noun in the nominative. Technically it’s called ‘taking the complement’. Verbs are shy beasts. Only a few can take a complement.

God — blank — My Light. It’s more or less on the level of Spike Milligan’s Crossword Puzzle for Idiots (One Across: first letter of the alphabet, One Down: the indefinite article).

Any guesses? You there, at the back…

And the winner is. Is.

Est . Though actually … why shouldn’t it be Sit , or Fit or Fiat ? Let God be my light, God becomes my light, Let God become my light. Not a bad little mantra, when I think about it. But given the cultural atmosphere in 1970 I suppose Sit would be the obvious candidate for runner-up. Let It Be.

Perhaps there was something subtler involved in the whole elliptical-motto business than I noticed at the time. It’s rather suggestive: if even the motto of the place doesn’t make sense unless you supply what’s missing, then perhaps this is a sort of manifesto for the education being offered, where nothing will be served up on a plate. Nothing in fact can happen until you throw yourself into the void. More things than verbs can be ‘understood’ even when they’re not there.

Bit late to understand that now! It wasn’t that I was expecting to be spoon-fed even at the time, in fact that was just what I didn’t want. And I was unusual as a freshman in that I had actually spent time in (theoretically) educational institutions where some of my fellow pupils had very much needed to be spoon-fed, helped to masticate and swallow.

I didn’t need a welcoming committee, but I wouldn’t have minded a welcome. No doubt this is an impossibly subtle distinction, and I was just being difficult.

If you encounter difficulties for long enough, you become ‘difficult’ yourself. Karma-particles migrate from situations to the persons who find themselves in them, and before long people are saying, ‘John’s a terrific character, of course … but he can sometimes be rather hard work , don’t you find?’ I hadn’t yet found the means to reverse the current, to install myself at a hub of radiant ease.

The first Saturday of term found me at a real loose end. I had great difficulty filling my time. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a feeling of confinement far more intense than I had ever experienced during the years when I was kept in bed. Entrapment clamped its lid down on me and sucked out all the air. Time crashed down on me in a tidal wave of stone. I would be struggling in this room — with this room — for a little eternity.