Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

In those days supervisors, like pharmacists, prided themselves on their ability to decipher illegible scrawls. If handwriting truly became impossible to make out, a supervisor always had the option of getting you to read your essay aloud. This was also the choice of supervisors who hadn’t found the time to give your prose even a once-over.

It wasn’t a tightly policed system. As long as you kept your supervisors (and your director of studies) happy, the question of how you worked was left up to you. This was almost an academic version of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching: many ways up the mountain, some steeper than others, all leading to the same peak.

I, on the other hand, didn’t enjoy having the freedom to construct my own course. I wanted to be roped in with a like-minded group, climbing under escort. I had only been a schoolboy in any real sense for the two years at Burnham, and I wasn’t ready to move on so soon to a more solitary version of the learning process, clambering up above the tree line where the academic air is thin.

I had wheels galore, what with the wheelchair and the Mini — nine in all, counting the spare in the boot — but mobility was still in short supply. I was snookered on a regular basis. I needed to have the wheelchair in my room, or else I would be reduced to tottering pathetically about. Without it I would have gone arse over apex before the end of the first week. The Parker-Knoll was for special occasions.

But if I left the chair in A6 Kenny and drove somewhere in the Mini, then I was helpless to go any further once I had arrived wherever the car could take me. What I lacked was regular help to load the wheelchair in and out of the car.

What would solve the problem at a stroke would be another wheelchair, one that lived in the car, so that the amount of furniture-moving could be reduced. I was too proud to spell out my needs to Granny (for instance), but I’m not sure it would have done any good even if I had nerved myself to it. No one could describe her as a soft touch, but she had stumped up the bulk of the funds for the electric wheelchair that had made life easier at Vulcan, for the car that had replaced it, and even the reclining chair now occupying pride of place in A6 Kenny. Better not to go to the well too often, or the lid would slam down and catch you a nasty biff on the way. Putting it more simply, Granny would click shut the clasp of her handbag, in a judgement against which there was no appeal.

I had already realised that the Parker-Knoll was both an amenity and an obstruction, something that clogged the wheels of daily life even as it oiled them. It was hopelessly oversized for that little room. Visitors would not rest until they had explored the mechanism, and their long legs were taking up most of the little space remaining. To prevent this I would sometimes occupy the P-K myself, but then visitors would help themselves to the wheelchair and we were only moments away from wheelchair races or attempts to use it as a sort of Jeep on the stairs. Meanwhile the little chair provided by the college, hopelessly surplus to requirements, was often placed on the bed, or outside the door, to keep it out of the way. I began to feel about the Parker-Knoll roughly what Ramana Maharshi felt about his tiger skin, and if a visitor had asked to take it away I would have been tempted to say yes.

Egos in bantam display

There was an immature side of me which was still waiting for the world to understand me, to tune in to my wave-length. Surely in this ancient university town, crammed with the best brains available, young and old, there would be somebody capable of imagining what it was like to be John, someone who would ask, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to manage with another wheelchair?’

I had the wrong idea about universities. They were not institutions dedicated to the development of integrated personalities, light and holy tipples notwithstanding. They weren’t even places where intellectual adventurousness was encouraged. They were forcing-houses for the ego. At Cambridge the ego was fed and watered, preened and fluffed up, and then pitted against other egos in bantam display. This was apparent even at mealtimes.

I didn’t have a set place to sit in Hall. It was rather a matter of where I was plonked by whatever volunteer made himself available, though the awkwardness of the wheelchair made it easiest to put me at the head of a table. Over time I was exposed to a fair cross-section of the student population, though I listened idly more than I joined in. The simplest conversation had a competitive edge. It didn’t seem possible to like a book or a record without becoming embroiled in a whole set of arbitrary alignments, empty convulsions of status. Slaughterhouse- Five. A Rainbow in Curved Air. Hot Rats. The Glass Bead Game. Bitches Brew. The Wretched of the Earth . Any of these could polarise a group. These artefacts were timeless masterworks, or they were pitiful trash. Endless arguments could rage on such subjects, arbitrary disputes being much more congenial to brains inflamed by egotism than sweet admissions of indifference. Not to have an opinion was seen as a sign of personality disorder, when in fact the opposite is the case. Every opinion is a rut in the road.

The way Ramana Maharshi put it (in the supplement to the Forty Verses on Reality ) is that for unpretentious folk there is only one family to be resisted — spouse, children, dependents. Among the learned, however, there are many other families: families of books, families of theories and opinions, all of them obstacles to understanding. ‘What is the use of letters,’ he goes on, ‘to those lettered folk who do not seek to wipe out the letters of fate by enquiring, “Whence are we born?”? They are gramophones, Oh Lord Arunachala. What else can they be? They learn and repeat words without realising their meaning.’ Cambridge was more than anything a city of human gramophones, playing the same records over and over again, mental needle in plastic groove.

I don’t know if television played a major part in other undergraduates’ lives. On me it hardly registered. There was a set in the Junior Common Room, theoretically available (as long as your choice of channel wasn’t outvoted, presumably) but I never bothered. I can’t imagine that many students watched more than half an hour a week. If someone at Hall said to a friend, ‘I’ll see you at the usual place,’ it was likely to mean a rather shame-faced conclave convened in the JCR for Top of the Pops or Doctor Who . I hadn’t come to Cambridge to be an overgrown schoolboy, so I didn’t take part — which was a shame, since that lovely old ham Jon Pertwee was starting his run as the Doctor, and I’d have enjoyed dropping the name. There was something called Monty Python’s Flying Circus which people seemed to enjoy without embarrassment (one of the performers was apparently a Downing man), but the series had finished without my seeing any of it. I lost interest when I learned that it featured no snakes.

Since I was too insecure to concoct my own course of study, I would obviously have to go to lectures, and this involved its own set of hazards. I hated the help I needed. I needed the help I hated. It wasn’t much use finding somebody who would be at my lecture if they weren’t also in Downing. Ideally of course they should be somebody in Kenny, though this was a bit much to hope for. Since students of Modern Languages were not a strong presence in Downing, the odds were stacked against my teaming up with a fellow freshman on any sort of regular basis.

In fact there was one suitable person on my own staircase, the same nice tall Pete — P. D. Hughes — who had escorted me to the Societies Fair. He was reading Russian, which he always pronounced Rooshian like a Smersh operative in a Bond film, and had lectures at the Sidgwick Site, where mine mostly were. He was my trump card, but then again he was my only card. Trump cards wear out when played too often.