Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘How far can you go? I thought we might go to Regent Street for a cup of coffee. Is that too far for you?’

I didn’t know where Regent Street was, but it seemed too much to hope that it was actually inside the college — might it perhaps be the nickname of the junior common room? I knew historic universities were full of charming bits of vocabulary. ‘No, indeed,’ I assured him. ‘A walk in the fresh air will do me good. It’ll give me an appetite for a nice cup of coffee!’

‘Well, I’m not sure I can quite promise you that,’ answered A. T. Grove. ‘But perhaps we’ll manage to choke it down.’

And so I prattled on in agony, telling myself that at least it would all be worth while if it got me away from Bourne End. After a while I realised that my conversation was beside the point — I didn’t need to hold up my side of it more than notionally, as long as I kept moving. So I asked Grove about the architecture and history of the college, and nodded and smiled at a ghastly angle while he answered. If I was hoping he would be distracted then I was deceived. He shot sharp little sidelong glances at me, while I drew on the last vestiges of my CRX-and-Vulcan personality, making a final effort to pretend that ankylosed joints were quite workable, really, once I got going. Piece of cake. Lovely tasty cake. I summoned up a tutelary spirit from the past, Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swann, who had given such helpful advice in the dressing room of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in my childhood. I imagined Flanders’s rosy lips and burly beard in my ear, murmuring, ‘You’ve got to show them the fighting spirit now and then, more’s the pity,’ and then, even more softly, ‘ Damn that fellow Bader! Old Tin-Legs has a lot to answer for! ’

The effect of this phantom pep-talk was lessened by my knowledge that Michael Flanders had himself been an able-bodied undergraduate, who contracted polio at sea during the his war service. He could still be a hero of mine, but he wasn’t entitled to inspire me at this stage of a ritual ordeal he hadn’t shared.

By the time we got as far as the college gates I was light-headed with pain. I suppose a Cambridge college was bound to have a more worldly attitude than a grammar school. The idea must have been that if I was going to fall down anyway, it should ideally be now, before any institutional liability had been created, rather than after I had been admitted, when litigation against the college might bloom along with my bruises. As things stood, I was an outsider, responsible for my own risk. At least the gravel didn’t extend to the street — it was a strictly intramural torture. Beyond the college gates the world was stone, which wouldn’t normally be reassuring.

The coffee bar was called Snax. By this stage I could hardly stand up, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if A. T. Grove had expected me to carry my coffee mug to our table. Perhaps his as well. Luckily he told me to sit down. ‘I’m going to have a sandwich,’ he said, ‘to take away the taste of the coffee. And vice versa. Can I get you something to eat?’ I was hungry but couldn’t see anything suitable. I asked for some chips and he looked at me rather strangely. ‘Not something they usually serve in sandwich bars, but I’ll make enquiries.’ He came back in a few moments with a packet of something called Chiplets, which were miniature chip-shaped snacks, notionally based on the potato, greasy of feel and salty in taste. He opened the packet politely and laid it on the table in front of me. Now I was really in trouble.

By good fortune the mugs in Snax had their handles conveniently mounted, so that I could drink my coffee without drawing attention to myself. A. T. Grove, though, looked at me closely to see how I managed. I hold mugs with their handles towards me, then lift from the shoulder. It’s not elegant but it gets the job done.

Eating sandwiches was quite impossible in front of a stranger, one who just happened to have the power of educational life or death over me. Chips would have been manageable with a fork. The hateful Chiplets were no sort of substitute. Throwing titbits into your mouth is a handy party trick, though I wasn’t sure I could bring it off accurately with these little salted javelins as opposed to the peanuts I was used to. I would need a few undignified tries to get my hand in. Any display of the sort would have been wildly at odds with the mood of an interview, if it was ever going to start. A. T. Grove was taking an awfully long time getting round to any sort of test for this mind as opposed to this body. When would he be turning on the X-ray machine that measured the mental apparatus?

I leaned forward and sniffed the air above the packet of Chiplets, saying, ‘Stale, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’ll bother after all. But thank you very much anyway, sir.’ I had to raise the stakes with a bluff rather than admit the truth. I wasn’t going to admit that I couldn’t manage to eat the bloody things. The one thing I couldn’t do was admit that there was anything I couldn’t do. In this context it was perfectly fine to be disabled as long as you could participate fully across the board.

If I couldn’t master a bag of snacks at Snax how would I be able to master a course of study at Downing? My legs were still registering aftershocks of agony, and I felt I had been humiliated enough already.

I seemed to be doomed to alternate polite and prickly patterns of behaviour, first demanding delicacies out of season and then refusing them with a hint of apology. No wonder A. T. Grove looked at me rather oddly.

He ate his sandwich with every sign of pleasure, while my tummy muttered to itself. Then he pushed his plate away and drank down the dregs of his coffee with an expression of sour determination. Now perhaps we would arrive at the intellectual portion to the day. He was nodding and murmuring, ‘Mmmmm … Mmmmm … Yes I think we know where we stand now.’

Where did we stand? I hadn’t the faintest idea. My interviewer had asked no relevant questions. For all he knew I had intellectual marvels up my sleeve, spanking-new proofs of the existence of God. Then he said, ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me?’

I was very thrown by this. ‘Not really,’ I blurted, ‘but isn’t there anything you want to ask me ?’

He became vague, perhaps embarrassed. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Cromer. I had to see for myself what the difficulties were.’ Later I discovered that he was a geographer who simply happened to be handling admissions that year. His specialism was the desert. He might have been able to ask me about Thomas Mann’s prose style, but he wouldn’t have been able to assess the quality of the answer (which would have been another piece of bluff, since I had got stuck on the first few pages of Buddenbrooks , like so many thousands before me).

By the end of our meeting, I would hardly have been surprised if A. T. Grove had said, ‘I have just one more educational question to put to you,’ reaching into his pocket to produce a handful of ball bearings to scatter at my feet. Then when I went arse over apex trying to leave that hellish coffee bar he could murmur sadly, ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to meet the academic standards for a course of study at the university. As we’ve always said, exams don’t give the whole picture. An interview is required to plumb the candidate in depth.’

I thought that back at Downing A. T. Grove might pass me on to someone else for Assessment of Candidates’ Abilities Part Two. No. The intellectual part of the interview, the part that addressed capabilities of mind, never materialised. The specialist in deserts had conducted an interview that was a desert in its own right, a place where nothing could grow. All that had been proved was that I could go for a cup of coffee on Regent Street. Just barely.