This Much Is True

I had joined the Jewish Society because my parents wanted me to, and I did, in fact, have a Jewish boyfriend too, called Michael. He was studying Law, and in my second year he invited me to the Pitt Club Ball. The Pitt Club was the Cambridge equivalent of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford, full of snotty, ex-public-school boys. Michael had been to public school; he was a tall, chunky Sephardi, belonging to a good family. He spoke well and might have been considered ‘a catch’ from the social point of view. But he also had very bad breath. There was no groin excitement on my part. I knew that my parents would have loved him, but it was never going to happen. The Pitt Club, however, attracted me; I was my mother’s daughter after all. I was curious to see for myself just how snobbish it was. So I accepted his invitation.

That year of 1962, I actually went to three May Balls — the Pitt Club Ball with Michael; the Kings May Ball, the grandest of all, with Saam Dastoor (now Sam Dastor); and then to Caius, with David. That was quite a good tally for a girl who didn’t sleep with any of them. Saam was particularly gorgeous. He read English and wanted to be an actor. He had fine dark eyes, a slender figure and a superb speaking voice. The only drawback from an acting point of view — he looked Indian. He was a Parsee and wore his Nehru suit — white and high-necked. We stayed up all night and went down the river to Grantchester in the early morning for breakfast. Sam is still my friend; he constantly refers to his ‘disastrous career’ and feels English racism deprived him of the roles his talents merited. He’s quite right. He played the Fool opposite Paul Scofield’s Lear, but he should have been Leading Man at the RSC and the National. Even more frustrating was not being cast as Gandhi in the film. He would have acted Sir King Bensley off the screen.

Liz, naturally, joined the Labour Club and CND. The shadow of a nuclear war weighed heavily on all our imaginations. I remember the Cuban crisis of April 1961 when the US invaded the Bay of Pigs. It was spring term in my first year away from home. We were all terrified, that weekend in particular, when the political commentators really thought that an atomic armageddon was about to be unleashed. Our considered reaction to the horror? We queued up for the Newnham phone box to call our parents. That was the measure of our political consciousness. Liz said of those days: ‘We were certain that the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust. And when it didn’t, nothing has seemed quite so bad ever since.’

We undergraduates were not left to deal with our terrors alone, however, as each college had a moral tutor, in loco parentis, whose role was to support us. The aforementioned Lesley Cook was the moral tutor of Old Hall. She was a dashing woman with vibrant, strawberry-blonde hair, and was very tall and athletic: she sailed, she rode — her Dalmatian, Rubble, bounding along behind. I thought about her most of my time in Cambridge — I desired her fiercely. To this day I still do not know whether Lesley Cook was of my persuasion. I suspect that she probably was, and I did tell her repeatedly that I loved her. The avowal of my passion must have been awkward for her because she was a moral person; sleeping with a student would have been unthinkable. My way of reaching her was to bring her bags of fudge from the Copper Kettle, the much-loved tea shop on King’s Parade. At midnight, I would knock on her study door when I saw there was a light under it. She would let me in and I would give her the fudge, then I’d sit on the floor, and talk and listen. She dazzled me. She was an economist; her specialist subject was cement. Cement was not particularly dazzling to me, but we managed to range beyond it. We would talk about the world, politics, Cambridge, sailing, drama — everything. I was never happier than gazing up at her, trying to engage and amuse her. I think she liked me but, alas, never more than that.