In 1985 I spent a brief period as Visiting Professor at the University of the South Pacific on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. These are some of my recollections. 'Palangi' is a somewhat contemptuous term for a Caucasian white man.
The South Pacific is indeed a pacific place. I was there in August, in deepest mid-winter, and the weather was warm, sunny and pleasant. White, puffy clouds graced the serene blue sky and green waves whelmed in a lulling rhythm on the sandy beaches.
Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian islands, is covered in island rainforest on the 'wet' side and straw-yellow savanna on the 'dry' side, where sugar cane is grown in extensive plantations. The University of the South Pacific serves nine island nations and the campus at Laucala Bay (a converted British Army barracks) is a restful place. Parrots sharpen their beaks on the guttering and the windows are made so that they cannot be shut: there is practically no need to close them.
The population of Fiji is almost evenly divided between Melanesians and Indians. The latter were brought there from South India in the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. They proved to be much better entrepreneurs than the Melanesians, but despite their economic success, they cannot own the land, which is held in tribal trusts by the indigenes. When I was there, USP had a student population that was more varied than this simple distinction implies. There were Polynesians and various outer islanders, as well as some Chinese and Japanese. But the most spectacular were the Indian women: the long, silky black hair, the electric blue tunics and clinging pants, the glittering anklets, the flowing scarves. There were times when a walk around campus felt like a journey through the Arabian Nights.
Viti Levu is served by buses that have the characteristic "Fijian air conditioning"--meaning no glass in their windows. This is a good thing, as the weather can be unbearably hot and humid. It also stops the windows rattling on the uneven tracks that are the only roads into the interior of the island. Bus drivers are great stars in Fiji, as they are the only men that Indian women are able to meet, such is purdah. And they live up to it by dressing like Bollywood film stars, shirts open to the waist, gold chains swinging at their necks.
And then there are the Melanesian women. On the surface they are submissive and welcoming. Beneath that beguiling exterior they are out to snare a man: any man who has a guaranteed stipend of more than 15 Fijian dollars a month will do. Their strategy is deceptively simple. Attentive, appreciative, available and affectionate, they offer themselves in the most disarming way, but once the offer had been accepted the only possible outcome is marriage. Patrick, the Englishman who was my host, was much taken by these tall beauties with their curly black hair and regal features. A year after my visit he sent me a photograph of his wedding to a tall, straight-backed Melanesian girl called Fipe. And six months later his daughter was born. I can imagine how he must have felt when he found she was pregnant and her family came to see him with long-bladed sugar-cane knives in their hands to persuade him to "do the decent thing". He ended up with two children and a messy divorce.
Unaware of this, on my first night I went to a disco. Before going in, my two companions, Melanesian stalwarts, stopped at a bush. Each of them clipped off a sprig of foliage and put it behind his ear, so I did likewise. They laughed and playfully punched me on the shoulders. Only later did I realise that the sprig of foliage was symbolic of an unattached man looking to mate an unattached woman. Fortunately, none of the ladies in the discotheque took me seriously enough to make an offer. I later found that when one met these girls socially their opening gambit was usually "are you married?" (I wasn't) and then "do you have a job?" (I did, and by their standards a stratospherically good one). Later during my stay in Fiji I was particularly taken by a young girl with a complexion the colour fo milky coffee and spectacular bosoms who was part of a dance troupe that entertained the tourists. She clearly registered my interest. But by then I was ready to go home to America and was not going to allow myself to fall into the trap. So when she asked me "Are you married?" I said "Yes!"
The highlight of the disco was a dance by a troupe of brown-skinned Melanesian men dressed in nothing but grass skirts and war paint, who wielded spears and bamboo shields. Under strobe lights and to the sound of pulsating disco music the impression they left was quite unforgettable, and their ability to do break-dancing with spears and shields in their hands was the stuff of legend.
Then we went back to Patrick's house and sat in his living room drinking small glasses of Fiji Bitter, the dark, potent beer of the islands, sitting there in a silent revery watching the geckos fight each other on the ceiling above our heads and listening to them cluck menacingly. At intervals the guttering outside would rattle as yellow-crested galars strutted along it, and all the time the leaves of the banana trees in the garden rustled in the breeze like soft, intense rainfall.
We went to Wainimala in the centre of the island. We took some gifts with us: a few tins of pilchards, bags of tea; some yaqona, the root of the kava plant. We stayed with the local school teacher, who very kindly gave up his house to us and spent the night sleeping on the floor of his kitchen, a building made of bamboo and banana leaves. I had the pleasure of sleeping on a damp, termite-proof piece of plywood, which I suppose was his bed. In the morning I got up and put on my sulu, a brightly coloured skirt. This reminds me that in Fiji it is the men who wear the skirts. The male soldiers of the Fijian Army who guard the Governor's Palace, the home of the chief Ratu, wear leather skirts. The typical Fijian businessman wears a jacket, waistcoat, old school tie and elegantly tailored pin-striped skirt, and he carries a briefcase. Ordinary people wear a piece of cotton, wound round their waists and stretching to just below their knees, which for modesty's sake must be covered.
I went into the kitchen and sat down on the floor next to the red-and-white checked tablecloth. On this, food was spread out for breakfast, mostly food left over from the night before. Fortunately there was no boiled tapioca, which I found could not be swallowed below the level of the Adam's apple. In the corner of the table cloth there was a hen which was laying an egg. To be honest, I had never seen a hen lay an egg and I did not realise it was such a painful and traumatic process. The hen clucked and crowed in a crescendo of sound that ended when the egg rolled out and the hen disappeared out the door of the kitchen in a flurry of feathers after running desperately across the tablecloth and plunging her claws into all the food on it as she went. Then we proceeded to eat the egg.
Walks in the forest were most elevating. The old, spent volcanoes of the centre of the island towered above it, slate grey in the distance. The foliage was an intense green, the leaves of some of the forest plants were as large as a sheet, a green sheet with deep, translucent veins in it. Dragon flies buzzed around them with their wings shimmering brilliantly. I picked up a seed that was the size of a medal, it gleamed a rich mahogany brown. Although the Melanesian Fijians are nominally Christians of various denominations, in the fields of yaqona plants I found a pagan idol carved out of that curiously dense and fibrous mass of roots that can be found on tropical islands. Its eyes were blindfolded.
At night the villages echo to the rhythmic thump of yaqona being pounded to dust so that it can be infused with river water to make 'grog', the drink of the ethnic Fijians. Yaqona (pronounced "yangona") is mildly soporific and has very little taste (most of that comes from the mud in the river water). It is drunk in half a coconut shell with much ritual clapping and cries of "Mahther!" ("down in one"). Yaqona is the root of life, and in fact it looks like a human figurine, rather as does the Ginseng root or the mandrake. Fijians are addicted to ceremony and as such a hundred years ago they found an unexpected affinity with their British colonists (the Fijian Islands annexed themselves to the British Empire in 1870).
Many protocols and conventions must be observed when entering a village: backpack lowered in the name of humility, knees covered in the name of modesty; never sit higher than you host. And take your gifts straight for the house of the village chief. Even if this is only one room, it will be divided into four parts: public, semi-public, semi-private and private. One enters, of course, into the public part. There will be furniture, but Fijians will not use it, for they are much more comfortable squatting on the floor, and that is what their visitors must do, however agonising it feels. Yaqona is infused in a carved dish of tropical hardwood called a tanoa. Coconut shells are filled and passed around, cupped hands are clapped, "Mahther!" is said (with feeling) and speeches are made. This is sevu-sevu, the Fijian welcoming ceremony. At one sevu-sevu I ended up drinking twelve helpings of yaqona and I must admit it had no effect on me whatsoever.
During a lull in one of these ceremonies, a tribal elder turned to us and said, reflectively, "You know, a hundred years ago.... we'd have eaten you!"--a comforting thought. Officially, the last person to be eaten on Viti Levu was the English Methodist minister the Rev. James Baker. He was an insufferable zealot and to some extent must have deserved his fate. His body was dismembered and pressure cooked in a hole in the ground. A thigh garnished with steamed spinach was presented to Matanitu, the chief of the islands. But Matanitu had by then obtained a B.A. from Oxford University and affected to be disgusted by the offer. "Take it away, old boy!" he said in his affected Oxford accept. On the way to the dump the thigh disappeared. This was somewhat strange, as the meat of the white man was considered inferior to that of the Melanesians: no one wanted to absorb the spirit of such a person. However, it was the end of an era, so perhaps this macabre gastronomic theft reflected nostalgia for an earlier way of life. But not quite the end, apparently, as I heard rumours that someone had been eaten, deep in the mountains, in 1957.
One day we went down to Nausori airport to catch a plane to Levuka. Patrick spent most of the waiting period trying to chat up the loquacious Fijian girl who sold newspapers in the terminal, but before he could get around to asking her for a date along came a farm tractor towing our aircraft. At $9.50 Fijian for a one-way ticket it was not an expensive flight, nor was it a very long one. We got into the plane and, as I was sitting with my knees pressed into the small of the pilot's back, I said to him "Do you realise you have a flat tyre?" He replied in a broad New Zealand accent "Nah nah mate, these tyres are low profile. If they were fully blown up we'd dig a trench in the runway."
The take-off went well enough and we soon reached our cruising altitude of 90 metres above sea level. This afforded a good view of the mangrove coasts of Motoriki Island and shortly after that we landed at a clearing in the rainforest of Overlau, the chief island of the Lau Group. The landing was bumpy, and I assumed this was because the runway was effectively a ploughed field, but when I climbed down from the aircraft it was immediately apparent that the right tyre was blown up and the left one was not. Before I could say anything the pilot had turned the plane around and taken off, with a rolling diagonal gait, for the next island on his itinerary.
Our first port of call was the Chief of Police's house. He proved to be quite welcoming and his house was remarkably western in style, with modern furniture and fittings. His wife invited us into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but as Melanesians do not like sitting on chairs we sat down under the kitchen table and looked up at the lady as she brewed the tea above our heads.
The guest house on Overlau was pure colonial in style. Most of the guests were mosquitoes, with whom we had quite a battle as they tended to get trapped in the acres of netting that we rolled into in a vain attempt to get to sleep. In recompense there were fresh papayas for breakfast, and they were as tangy as mangoes.
But Overlau was the first place in the South Pacific that I saw really poor people. Families of Indians lived in houses made out of flattened-out oil cans. The local restaurant had no furniture, no cutlery and only the smallest number of bowls: chapatis and chicken curry, balanced on one's knees, eaten with the hands, crouched in the corner of a large, empty cement room. We walked up a dirt track into the centre of the island, the ancient crater of an extinct volcano. The track wound its way through clamps of nicotine-yellow coconuts that gleamed in their giant husks. The road surface was pitted with the flattened bodies of frogs that had been run over and tanned by the midday heat. The island rain forest with which the crater walls were garlanded was a gorgeous deep green and the huge leaves of the plants dripped with sweet sap and crystal clear rainwater.
Back on Viti Levu I was introduced to Emosi, the Chief of one of the outer islands. I had hired a tiny car in the hope of driving right around the island. Emosi said he would come with me. He had no experience of travelling by car, as his island had no roads on it, only four fishing villages connected by boat journeys. We set off in grand style, whooshing past the colonial villas surrounded by palm trees and pineapple plantations. But after several hours of wrestling with the steering wheel, I had to give up. The road was too rutted to be travelled along in a Suzuki 800. On the way back we stopped at a local restaurant, a typical bamboo and banana leaf eatery, and Emosi ordered a plate of eka vaka lolo (fish with coconut sauce). It was made in the traditional way by boiling the fish, shaking the coconut down from the tree, splitting it open with an awl, throwing the juice away and grating the flesh onto the fish. The cook then added a garnishing of potatoes and large lumps of tapioca, the world's most indigestible vegetable. Emosi sunk his teeth into this shining example of Melanesian cuisine and said "Ah! That's real food!" He looked disparagingly at my chicken curry and added "I can't stand that fancy stuff you're eating."
Shortly before I was due to leave Fiji the Methodist community decided to celebrate its centenary on the cricket pitch outside the Ratu's palace. In the Pacific Grand Hotel the ceiling fans stirred up the moths and mosquitoes and the rattan chairs creaked much as they had in the colonial era. Crowds dressed in mud-daubed bark-skin licked at 'Tip-Top' ice-creams (whatever Tip-Top made its ice creams with, there was certainly no milk or cream in them). And outer islanders came by in troupes and phalanxes, designer glasses and grass skirts--real grass skirts, not the fluorescent plastic ones that were being sold down by the port for $2.95 Fijian.
My last night in Fiji was idyllic. I sat cross-legged in a bamboo and banana leaf hut drinking coconut-half after coconut-half of yaqona, clapping with cupped hands and listening to the members of the Viti Levu Rugby Club strum their ukuleles and sing in that sonorous harmony that is so hauntingly characteristic of the South Pacific (their team had just lost a match against Vatulele, the second island). The moon hung large in the tropical sky, the waves burst rhythmically on the shore nearby, fireflies shimmered in the night air, and next to me a tall, straight-backed Fijian maiden with frizzy black hair smiled at me in that disarming way that they have and looked beautiful in the moonlight.
Palangis are not often welcomed into island society in Fiji. In fact, the tourists, most of whom are brash Australasians, are rigidly segregated from the real Fiji. I was privileged to be allowed into the villages of the Wainimala and Levuka districts. I was perhaps not a perfect guest, but I tried to act with humility and show sensitivity to local traditions and a sincere appreciation for the hospitality that was given to me.
A year later there was a minor civil war on Viti Levu. The Govinda Hari Krishna restaurant in Suva appeared on television screens around the world with smoke and flames pouring out of it. That was such a pity as it was the cleanest and best restaurant in the country and the food was cheap and very good. It was more of a pity for the ethnic hatred and unrest that it symbolised. By demographic force of numbers the Indians had won the general election. The Melanesian Fijians induced the Army to stage a coup d'etat in order to ensure that the Indians did not dismantle the tribal trusts that held the land. It ushered in an uneasy period of partial and awkward political accommodation that unfortunately is still going on.
Saturday 29 December 2007
Universities I have known
There is a species of academic known as the 'gypsy scholar'. He or she is generally a competent teacher, perhaps an adequate researcher, but for reasons of character, personal history or something else the individual is unable to secure a permanent post and thus must move from one temporary job to another. Seldom is this a matter of choice, but it is instead dictated by cruel necessity. In the worst cases the scholar remains in this academic limbo for an entire career, but in any case most of us have had the experience, for there is often a gap between finishing one's studies and finding a suitable place to develop one's career.
As I currently lack continuity of employment I suppose I am close to returning to gypsy scholar status. If that is so, I can only blame myself, for I voluntarily left a comfortable, permanent position as a tenured full professor. It is hard to see any professional justification for this self-inflicted penitence, as I have already done my stint of moving from one university to another, and I have done it in more than one country.
As an unemployed PhD graduate I managed to garner some temporary work in various English universities. One of these was Cambridge. I started on a humble level teaching a short course at Homerton College, a nondescript establishment that trained teachers and was hardly considered authentic by the ancient and famous colleges of the University federation. Later, I gave a lecture at Emanuel, which was very different, especially when they invited me to evening dinner. This took place by candle-light in an oak-panelled hall that was constructed by the Puritan founders in 1584. We sat their in our gowns and ate with silver cutlery that dated from 1747 and is in the national historical register. The college staff served us cutlets of venison and glasses of vintage wine. It was all rather overbearing and, although it was picturesque, it left me feeling lucky that I did not have to socialise in that way every Friday evening.
Next I did some tutoring that was split between two sites: the Geography Department in Downing Street and Fitzwilliam College. The latter, known locally as 'Fitz', was founded in 1860 but housed in a modern version of the old monastic-collegiate arrangement created in 1970 by the architect Denys Lasdun. Though obviously monied, the students were no more brilliant than I had been used to in London (where as fate decreed, I worked in another of Lasdun's buildings, an overbearing pile that the University had insensitively built in place of one of the famous Bloomsbury squares). Yet in the breakfast room there were sketches by Picasso. At lunch there was an entire Stilton, king of cheeses, and the servants were deferential in a manner that made my skin creep.
Waikato was an entirely different kind of university. Situated in verdant countryside next to a small town on North Island, New Zealand, it was a haven of peace and contemplation. The students were a mixture of Kiwis, Aussies, Polynesians, Melanesians and Japanese, but all of them very deferential. Everything, from the buildings to the atmosphere in the common room it radiated conservatism. At this point I began to miss the vitality and confusion of my alma mater, the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For one term, while on sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, I taught in the Geology Department at the University of Urbino. The town of Urbino, situated deep in the hills of central Italy, is spectacularly picturesque. Its cobbled streets lead to the crest of a hill, upon which is situated a stupendous ducal palace, a sixteenth century fairy castle, packed with art treasures and visited in large numbers by those tourists who venture away from the main cities of Italy. Urbino is a small town and the university is hidden away inside its close-knit urban fabric. But it is a desperately provincial temple of learning. Its horizons extend no further than Ancona and southern Romagna, but a few tens of kilometres away.
When I was there, Carlo Bò was Rector. In Italy the rectors of universities accede to the title of 'Il Magnifico'. Many of them are far from being magnificent, but Carlo Bò at least had the advantage of being very tall and straight-backed. He was also very a well-known intellectual with a long history of participating in the nation's affairs. His university, at the time one of only four private institutions of higher learning in Italy, lacked a place where the academics could congregate and socialise. It was a typical "mordi e fuggi" university ('teach and flee'). Virtually none of the staff deigned to live in Urbino or the surrounding villages--too isolated. Instead, they came from Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and such places, taught, saw their students and rushed back home as soon as possible. But at lunchtime they needed a place to go, and by default it was the Ristorante da Franco, situated off the main square of the small town. Table no. 1 in this establishment was strategically reserved for the Magnificent Rector. On the rare occasions when Carlo Bò graced it with his presence, the academics would all rise and stand to attention as he strode in. The atmosphere was positively surreal and the menu was something I soon got to know by heart (the waiter, however, was Iranian, although Carlo Bò would be served by Franco himself, bowing and scraping his way back to the kitchen and muttering about what an honour it was).
I recall little of my contact with the Bangladesh universities. In one of these institutions, in Dhaka, the fierce tropical heat of summer had caused the brickwork to bloom with a picturesque efflorescence of precipitated salts. The facilities were adequate but rudimentary and the books were all printed on that curious pink paper that abounds in the Indian subcontinent and disintegrates as one turns the pages. The agricultural college at Comilla had this much in common with the institutions in the capital, but at its centre it had a huge lake, which steamed in the heat and wreathed the groves of mango trees with silky mist. There were armed soldiers in the corridors, even in the cafeteria, but whereas in the capital they would have been deployed to quell student riots, which are frequent there, in Comilla they were there to protect the students against the incursions of brigands which lived amid the jack-fruit trees in the surrounding rainforest.
At the University of the South Pacific I was briefly Visiting Professor. It was very difficult to teach the students, a mixture of Indians and Melanesians, about my experience, as this had mostly been garnered almost exactly on the other side of the world--to be precise 177 degrees away. I set myself to study Matanitù, the last of the great tribal chiefs, whose reign ended gradually with the annexation of Fiji to the British Empire in 1870. During the course of my studies I learnt much about Fijian traditions, for the people of the Pacific islands are enamoured of formality and are adept at blending it with ancient beliefs about spirits, ancestors and life-forces. Some of this was acted out in front of me while I was there, as the USP campus hosted a meke-meke, a tribal gathering. As the University was jointly owned by nine island nations (Vanua Atu, Samoa, Western Samoa, etc.) this traditional festival was colourful and varied. Much spear waving and dancing took place, with the men in grass skirts and the women attired in bark-cloth with traditional brown and black designs printed in it.
I visited the University of Kazan' in one of the Russian Republics of what was then the Soviet Union in Autumn when the weather was cold and snow had already fallen. The room in which Lenin had attended lessons was preserved exactly as it had been in his time and one could sit in his usual place--the third row of benches, on the extreme left (prophetically, perhaps?)--and absorb the atmosphere. The University was dusty and overheated, and it had more of an eighteenth-century feeling to it than one connected with October 1917. When I was there it had only two computers, both IBMs, which were jealously guarded in a small room.
I have known many other universities and all of them have had some essential characteristic that made them unique and particular, sometimes in a pleasant manner, sometimes in one that was difficult for an outsider to accept.
As I currently lack continuity of employment I suppose I am close to returning to gypsy scholar status. If that is so, I can only blame myself, for I voluntarily left a comfortable, permanent position as a tenured full professor. It is hard to see any professional justification for this self-inflicted penitence, as I have already done my stint of moving from one university to another, and I have done it in more than one country.
As an unemployed PhD graduate I managed to garner some temporary work in various English universities. One of these was Cambridge. I started on a humble level teaching a short course at Homerton College, a nondescript establishment that trained teachers and was hardly considered authentic by the ancient and famous colleges of the University federation. Later, I gave a lecture at Emanuel, which was very different, especially when they invited me to evening dinner. This took place by candle-light in an oak-panelled hall that was constructed by the Puritan founders in 1584. We sat their in our gowns and ate with silver cutlery that dated from 1747 and is in the national historical register. The college staff served us cutlets of venison and glasses of vintage wine. It was all rather overbearing and, although it was picturesque, it left me feeling lucky that I did not have to socialise in that way every Friday evening.
Next I did some tutoring that was split between two sites: the Geography Department in Downing Street and Fitzwilliam College. The latter, known locally as 'Fitz', was founded in 1860 but housed in a modern version of the old monastic-collegiate arrangement created in 1970 by the architect Denys Lasdun. Though obviously monied, the students were no more brilliant than I had been used to in London (where as fate decreed, I worked in another of Lasdun's buildings, an overbearing pile that the University had insensitively built in place of one of the famous Bloomsbury squares). Yet in the breakfast room there were sketches by Picasso. At lunch there was an entire Stilton, king of cheeses, and the servants were deferential in a manner that made my skin creep.
Waikato was an entirely different kind of university. Situated in verdant countryside next to a small town on North Island, New Zealand, it was a haven of peace and contemplation. The students were a mixture of Kiwis, Aussies, Polynesians, Melanesians and Japanese, but all of them very deferential. Everything, from the buildings to the atmosphere in the common room it radiated conservatism. At this point I began to miss the vitality and confusion of my alma mater, the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For one term, while on sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, I taught in the Geology Department at the University of Urbino. The town of Urbino, situated deep in the hills of central Italy, is spectacularly picturesque. Its cobbled streets lead to the crest of a hill, upon which is situated a stupendous ducal palace, a sixteenth century fairy castle, packed with art treasures and visited in large numbers by those tourists who venture away from the main cities of Italy. Urbino is a small town and the university is hidden away inside its close-knit urban fabric. But it is a desperately provincial temple of learning. Its horizons extend no further than Ancona and southern Romagna, but a few tens of kilometres away.
When I was there, Carlo Bò was Rector. In Italy the rectors of universities accede to the title of 'Il Magnifico'. Many of them are far from being magnificent, but Carlo Bò at least had the advantage of being very tall and straight-backed. He was also very a well-known intellectual with a long history of participating in the nation's affairs. His university, at the time one of only four private institutions of higher learning in Italy, lacked a place where the academics could congregate and socialise. It was a typical "mordi e fuggi" university ('teach and flee'). Virtually none of the staff deigned to live in Urbino or the surrounding villages--too isolated. Instead, they came from Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and such places, taught, saw their students and rushed back home as soon as possible. But at lunchtime they needed a place to go, and by default it was the Ristorante da Franco, situated off the main square of the small town. Table no. 1 in this establishment was strategically reserved for the Magnificent Rector. On the rare occasions when Carlo Bò graced it with his presence, the academics would all rise and stand to attention as he strode in. The atmosphere was positively surreal and the menu was something I soon got to know by heart (the waiter, however, was Iranian, although Carlo Bò would be served by Franco himself, bowing and scraping his way back to the kitchen and muttering about what an honour it was).
I recall little of my contact with the Bangladesh universities. In one of these institutions, in Dhaka, the fierce tropical heat of summer had caused the brickwork to bloom with a picturesque efflorescence of precipitated salts. The facilities were adequate but rudimentary and the books were all printed on that curious pink paper that abounds in the Indian subcontinent and disintegrates as one turns the pages. The agricultural college at Comilla had this much in common with the institutions in the capital, but at its centre it had a huge lake, which steamed in the heat and wreathed the groves of mango trees with silky mist. There were armed soldiers in the corridors, even in the cafeteria, but whereas in the capital they would have been deployed to quell student riots, which are frequent there, in Comilla they were there to protect the students against the incursions of brigands which lived amid the jack-fruit trees in the surrounding rainforest.
At the University of the South Pacific I was briefly Visiting Professor. It was very difficult to teach the students, a mixture of Indians and Melanesians, about my experience, as this had mostly been garnered almost exactly on the other side of the world--to be precise 177 degrees away. I set myself to study Matanitù, the last of the great tribal chiefs, whose reign ended gradually with the annexation of Fiji to the British Empire in 1870. During the course of my studies I learnt much about Fijian traditions, for the people of the Pacific islands are enamoured of formality and are adept at blending it with ancient beliefs about spirits, ancestors and life-forces. Some of this was acted out in front of me while I was there, as the USP campus hosted a meke-meke, a tribal gathering. As the University was jointly owned by nine island nations (Vanua Atu, Samoa, Western Samoa, etc.) this traditional festival was colourful and varied. Much spear waving and dancing took place, with the men in grass skirts and the women attired in bark-cloth with traditional brown and black designs printed in it.
I visited the University of Kazan' in one of the Russian Republics of what was then the Soviet Union in Autumn when the weather was cold and snow had already fallen. The room in which Lenin had attended lessons was preserved exactly as it had been in his time and one could sit in his usual place--the third row of benches, on the extreme left (prophetically, perhaps?)--and absorb the atmosphere. The University was dusty and overheated, and it had more of an eighteenth-century feeling to it than one connected with October 1917. When I was there it had only two computers, both IBMs, which were jealously guarded in a small room.
I have known many other universities and all of them have had some essential characteristic that made them unique and particular, sometimes in a pleasant manner, sometimes in one that was difficult for an outsider to accept.
The last days of the Soviet Union
It was 1990 and the Soviet Union was crumbling. I had the privilege of seeing it during its last days, when old conventions were falling by the wayside but the new market orthodoxy had not yet caught Russia in its iron grip.
When I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, I smiled at the passport official, a young lad who appeared to be about 17 years old, and he smiled back, involuntary, as he was obviously quite unused to people smiling at him. This exchange of joy was premature, as my luggage failed to arrive from Milan. Outside, the temperature was minus one degree and my coat was in my suitcase. Friends rallied around and managed to lend me a jacket that someone had acquired on a visit to Jugoslavia. It kept off the snow but did not keep out the cold.
The University Hotel was a classic piece of Soviet architecture. The rooms were Spartan and old fashioned, the lift creaked alarmingly, and the red plush in the lobby appeared to be suffering from mange. The dining room was spectacular. On acres of dark brown carpet stood 120 dark brown tables and 480 brown chairs. The ceiling was dark brown and there was a huge, furry brown wall hanging. When food arrived, it too was dark brown; presumably soup and stewed meat, it was difficult to tell. It was served with cavalier disdain by a group of young girls who evidently suffered from a chronic superiority complex. Upstairs, such was the soundproofing that when I sang Neapolitan songs in the shower I was applauded by other guests along the whole corridor
We retrieved my luggage a day later from the airport. As there was a shortage of cars (in fact, there was a shortage of everything), I had to borrow a 47-seater bus--and of course its driver--to get to the airport and back. We celebrated by eating in one of those exclusive restaurants near the Bolshoi Ballet where they served sturgeon and wild mushrooms--but to foreigners only.
There is a sort of brotherhood among academics and it soon had me invited to the house of two of the senior fraternity, Professor Sergei Myagkov and his wife. They lived in a tiny apartment at the end of one of the metro lines, an opportunity to find out that, although the central metro stations were very grandiose, the periphery was much like any other urban jungle, a wilderness of concrete and graffiti. The Myagkovs did not have enough space for two desks, and so Sergei gallantly let his wife have the study and did his work in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with a board strapped around his neck to serve as a desk. He was fortunately a man blessed with a keen sense of relativism and an equally strong sense of humour. He had great need of both. We sat down in their tiny dining room and they served us delicious food, but they had collected most of the vegetables and fruit in the woods around Moscow, for there was little to buy in the shops. It was an emotional celebration, as they gave us what they could and we appreciated it all the more for the depth of their generosity when they had so little to give.
One evening we set off for Kazan', the capital of the Tatar Russian Soviet Republic. The station was pleasingly oriental in design and the Tatarstan Express stood at the main platform with the steam heating hissing gently in its ornate, royal blue coaches. We bedded down in a 'soft' class sleeping compartment and the resident Babushka brought us tea in Delftware china cups from the samovar at the end of the corridor.
In the Soviet Union people married very early, often when they were barely out of childhood. This was apparent on a Saturday morning in Moscow when the weddings were being celebrated and the couples lined up on the heights above the city for photographs. They were all teenagers and probably had little idea what they were getting into. Our guide, Alsu Fedorovnaya, was one of those who had married absurdly young. She was a raven-haired beauty, at 24 more ravishing than she must have been at 16. But clearly there were pacts of conjugal non-interference, for on the train she disappeared for the night into the same sleeping compartment as Kostia Petrovski, a muscular Tatar, himself married to a girl in Moscow and the father of a small brood of children.
The railway line to Kazan' is anything but well-engineered. In fact the journey, only a few hundred kilometres, takes between ten and 13 hours and the train never exceeds 80 km/hr. There is constant jolting and grinding as it sways and rumbles over the poor quality track. Night came before we had reached the outer suburbs of Moscow and we slept fitfully, as the swaying, irregular rhythm of the train was anything but lulling. In the morning we pulled up the blind to see the pine trees of the Ural Mountains outside covered in crisp, white snow, which twinkled in the moonlight. We crossed the River Volga at dawn and it was an unforgettable sight: Mother Russia, freezing and brilliant in the pearly light; sentries with bayonets fixed to their rifles stamping up and down the bridge to warm their feet, their breath forming clouds in the still, cold air.
Kazan' gave a kaleidoscope of impressions: ancient wooden housing subsiding into the muddy land on the banks of the Volga, the Grecian splendour of the Opera House, the green onion domes of the churches, many of them abandoned. The Orthodox crosses on the cathedral glinted in the pale golden light of autumn. The lanes and fields next to the river looked exactly like something out of a 19th century Impressionist painting; indeed, the resemblance was uncanny. I visited an Orthodox wedding (somewhat insensitively, as my presence irritated the congregation, but I was too curious to leave). The sonorous and impassioned singing and clouds of incense wafting among the icons were unforgettable.
One morning I sat in Lenin's seat at the University of Kazan', a place with a remarkable 18th century atmosphere and ferociously tropical central heating. In the afternoon I was taken for a walk in the Taiga. There amid the majestic pines was an ancient monastery, used as a reform school for juvenile delinquents, whose shaved heads appeared over the parapet and stared angrily at me as I passed. Looking back, the towers and onion domes of this complex were outlined against the pale sky in the failing light of dusk, surrounded by a frame of pine trees. As darkness fell the taiga appeared to be suffused with infinite mystery and age-old dignity.
We ate dinner one night at Kostia Petrovski's parents house in the new quarters of Kazan', a cubist wilderness of Soviet new-age buildings. Like most other Soviet families they lived in large numbers in minimal space. In deference to we foreign guests they all retreated behind a screen in the corner of the room and refused to come out when we begged them to come and enjoy the food with us. In fact, we had paid for the food: it had to be purchased on the black market and only we had the funds to do that. The Georgian-style profiteroles in confectioner's custard were particularly excellent.
In the auditorium of the Lenin Museum, then still just about dedicated to Vladimir Illich Ulianov, I stood up and gave my speech to 360 delegates from the assorted parliaments of the Soviet Union. Having studied the language I managed to recite some of it in Russian, which they seemed to like. I was, however, somewhat hampered by the loss of my lecture notes, which I had used as toilet paper earlier in the day, as that particular commodity was practically non existent in Soviet conveniences. I was also disconcerted by the sudden departure of my translator in the middle of my speech. Tatars generally do not deserve their reputation for harshness and ruthlessness. She was a beautiful, black-haired girl with a soulful expression and large, dark eyes that positively oozed tenderness. But she was useless as a translator and on being stood down from the podium she disappeared for ever out of my life, before I could finish my speech and say a tender goodbye to her.
One morning we visited the Kazan' department store, but in its cavernous halls there was very little to buy. I came out with a Russian Soviet flag and a Tatar fez, and that was all. On walking around Kazan' at lunchtime we soon found that it was useless to look for a place to eat. Restaurants were open, but they did not have any food in them. As the satirical magazine Krokodyl wrote, the very best that was on offer was Soviet multiple choice: meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat.
Yet the Tatarstan hotel had a restaurant that we were invited to in the evening. Dinner started early and their was a band and dancing. The band played in a variety of styles, New York rap, Latin American rhythms, bossa nova, and so on, but with the words to the songs rigorously in Tatar, a Turkic language that sounded vaguely familiar from my time spent doing fieldwork in central Anatolia.
On the other side of the room lurked a bevy of Soviet academic women. They were massive battleships and gave the impression of being as strong as oxen. In short, they were the intellectual equivalent of the typical Soviet road-mending crew, which invariably consisted of beefy, muscular women. As soon as the music started they launched out, grabbed the nearest man, and steered him around the room with his hands firmly grasped in their huge fists. One in particular, a tall, powerfully built lady in a powder-blue dress, so scared me that I hid under the table.
The dinner consisted of an endless alternation of bottles of Georgian champagne and Stolichnaya vodka. About half way through the evening a bun was served together with a plate of watery broth, but that was all. At a certain point I went back to my room in the hotel to relieve myself and when I came back to the restaurant I witnessed a curious scene. In Kazan', a city of a million inhabitants, good quality alcohol was only to be had at the Tatarstan Restaurant. The only people who were allowed entrance to that establishment were foreigners, military officers, members of the Communist Party and people who were wealthy enough to bribe someone substantially. The entrance door was manned by an old war veteran, his chest covered with medals, who put a metal clamp on the handles to stop the hoi polloi from coming in.
But it was the end of the Soviet era. As I stood outside an Ordinary Citizen came up. He was dressed in standard issue Ordinary Citizen clothes: the regulation black leather jacket and baggy jeans with turn-ups (did they, I wonder, have a central stores where they issued Ordinary Citizens with these garments?). Angrily he rattled at the door, which was clamped shut. Suddenly the door flew open and there was the manageress, elegant in a navy-blue tailleur and awe-inspiring in her rage. Her foot was about level with the Ordinary Citizen's stomach and without hesitating she drew it back and delivered him a massive kick. He clutched his torso, retched and staggered back down the steps, whereupon two ex-KGB operatives delivered a well-aimed professional right-hook that laid him out until an ambulance could cart him away to hospital. I felt very sorry for him, but I must admit that since then I have dined out many times on the story of how the manageress of the restaurant kicked the customer in the stomach.
There were many things in the Tatar Republic that had not changed for at least a century. Perhaps one of these was the exploitation of ordinary people and a contempt for their welfare. The signs were everywhere. They were particularly apparent when we visited a mosque (the Tatars are predominantly Muslim). We were introduced to a young nuclear physicist who had been at Chernobyl on the fateful day of the meltdown four years previously. He was obviously dying of radiation sickness. It was a salutary and chastening experience to talk to him. Despite his obvious poor health he had received no official help whatsoever, not even with evacuation from the Ukraine. Only his brethren at the mosque had helped him, and there was little that they could do.
So we returned to Moscow and eventually I arrived back in Italy. I carried with me many memories. The mists coming off the Moscow River and swirling through the graveyards on its banks, fingers of vapour wrapping themselves around the Orthodox crosses and caressing the walls of the monasteries with their stacked towers and polished onion domes. Tatar music blaring out of the radios of dilapidated Lada taxis in Kazan'. The snow on the cart-tracks and sliding off the fir trees in the Urals, the reformatory-monastery dark against the indigo sky in the taiga. The sense of tragedy and exploitation in the people we spoke to. The dumpling-shaped Babushkas, with their hair tied up in spotted scarves, who ruled with rods of iron the landings and corridors of public buildings and hotels.
On one occasion in the Moscow University hotel we were sitting at a table, alone in the deserted restaurant when two friends of Kostia Petrovski came in. As there were 477 empty chairs, Kostia fetched two of them over so that the couple could sit at our table. But this broke the unwritten rule: only the waitresses were allowed to move the furniture and they marched out and snatched the chairs back. Kostia was furious at this absurdity and grabbed them again. There followed a protracted tug of war. Kostia pulled for all his might, his face black with rage. But although he was muscular enough to win prizes at weight-lifting, he lost the contest against these Soviet waitresses and was humiliated. So perhaps it is clear who really ran the mighty Soviet Union, in its day the world's second superpower. Even if we ignore the battle of the sexes, the different between capitalism and Soviet socialism was manifestly clear: under capitalism, man exploited man, while under Soviet socialism, it was the other way around.
When I arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport, I smiled at the passport official, a young lad who appeared to be about 17 years old, and he smiled back, involuntary, as he was obviously quite unused to people smiling at him. This exchange of joy was premature, as my luggage failed to arrive from Milan. Outside, the temperature was minus one degree and my coat was in my suitcase. Friends rallied around and managed to lend me a jacket that someone had acquired on a visit to Jugoslavia. It kept off the snow but did not keep out the cold.
The University Hotel was a classic piece of Soviet architecture. The rooms were Spartan and old fashioned, the lift creaked alarmingly, and the red plush in the lobby appeared to be suffering from mange. The dining room was spectacular. On acres of dark brown carpet stood 120 dark brown tables and 480 brown chairs. The ceiling was dark brown and there was a huge, furry brown wall hanging. When food arrived, it too was dark brown; presumably soup and stewed meat, it was difficult to tell. It was served with cavalier disdain by a group of young girls who evidently suffered from a chronic superiority complex. Upstairs, such was the soundproofing that when I sang Neapolitan songs in the shower I was applauded by other guests along the whole corridor
We retrieved my luggage a day later from the airport. As there was a shortage of cars (in fact, there was a shortage of everything), I had to borrow a 47-seater bus--and of course its driver--to get to the airport and back. We celebrated by eating in one of those exclusive restaurants near the Bolshoi Ballet where they served sturgeon and wild mushrooms--but to foreigners only.
There is a sort of brotherhood among academics and it soon had me invited to the house of two of the senior fraternity, Professor Sergei Myagkov and his wife. They lived in a tiny apartment at the end of one of the metro lines, an opportunity to find out that, although the central metro stations were very grandiose, the periphery was much like any other urban jungle, a wilderness of concrete and graffiti. The Myagkovs did not have enough space for two desks, and so Sergei gallantly let his wife have the study and did his work in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with a board strapped around his neck to serve as a desk. He was fortunately a man blessed with a keen sense of relativism and an equally strong sense of humour. He had great need of both. We sat down in their tiny dining room and they served us delicious food, but they had collected most of the vegetables and fruit in the woods around Moscow, for there was little to buy in the shops. It was an emotional celebration, as they gave us what they could and we appreciated it all the more for the depth of their generosity when they had so little to give.
One evening we set off for Kazan', the capital of the Tatar Russian Soviet Republic. The station was pleasingly oriental in design and the Tatarstan Express stood at the main platform with the steam heating hissing gently in its ornate, royal blue coaches. We bedded down in a 'soft' class sleeping compartment and the resident Babushka brought us tea in Delftware china cups from the samovar at the end of the corridor.
In the Soviet Union people married very early, often when they were barely out of childhood. This was apparent on a Saturday morning in Moscow when the weddings were being celebrated and the couples lined up on the heights above the city for photographs. They were all teenagers and probably had little idea what they were getting into. Our guide, Alsu Fedorovnaya, was one of those who had married absurdly young. She was a raven-haired beauty, at 24 more ravishing than she must have been at 16. But clearly there were pacts of conjugal non-interference, for on the train she disappeared for the night into the same sleeping compartment as Kostia Petrovski, a muscular Tatar, himself married to a girl in Moscow and the father of a small brood of children.
The railway line to Kazan' is anything but well-engineered. In fact the journey, only a few hundred kilometres, takes between ten and 13 hours and the train never exceeds 80 km/hr. There is constant jolting and grinding as it sways and rumbles over the poor quality track. Night came before we had reached the outer suburbs of Moscow and we slept fitfully, as the swaying, irregular rhythm of the train was anything but lulling. In the morning we pulled up the blind to see the pine trees of the Ural Mountains outside covered in crisp, white snow, which twinkled in the moonlight. We crossed the River Volga at dawn and it was an unforgettable sight: Mother Russia, freezing and brilliant in the pearly light; sentries with bayonets fixed to their rifles stamping up and down the bridge to warm their feet, their breath forming clouds in the still, cold air.
Kazan' gave a kaleidoscope of impressions: ancient wooden housing subsiding into the muddy land on the banks of the Volga, the Grecian splendour of the Opera House, the green onion domes of the churches, many of them abandoned. The Orthodox crosses on the cathedral glinted in the pale golden light of autumn. The lanes and fields next to the river looked exactly like something out of a 19th century Impressionist painting; indeed, the resemblance was uncanny. I visited an Orthodox wedding (somewhat insensitively, as my presence irritated the congregation, but I was too curious to leave). The sonorous and impassioned singing and clouds of incense wafting among the icons were unforgettable.
One morning I sat in Lenin's seat at the University of Kazan', a place with a remarkable 18th century atmosphere and ferociously tropical central heating. In the afternoon I was taken for a walk in the Taiga. There amid the majestic pines was an ancient monastery, used as a reform school for juvenile delinquents, whose shaved heads appeared over the parapet and stared angrily at me as I passed. Looking back, the towers and onion domes of this complex were outlined against the pale sky in the failing light of dusk, surrounded by a frame of pine trees. As darkness fell the taiga appeared to be suffused with infinite mystery and age-old dignity.
We ate dinner one night at Kostia Petrovski's parents house in the new quarters of Kazan', a cubist wilderness of Soviet new-age buildings. Like most other Soviet families they lived in large numbers in minimal space. In deference to we foreign guests they all retreated behind a screen in the corner of the room and refused to come out when we begged them to come and enjoy the food with us. In fact, we had paid for the food: it had to be purchased on the black market and only we had the funds to do that. The Georgian-style profiteroles in confectioner's custard were particularly excellent.
In the auditorium of the Lenin Museum, then still just about dedicated to Vladimir Illich Ulianov, I stood up and gave my speech to 360 delegates from the assorted parliaments of the Soviet Union. Having studied the language I managed to recite some of it in Russian, which they seemed to like. I was, however, somewhat hampered by the loss of my lecture notes, which I had used as toilet paper earlier in the day, as that particular commodity was practically non existent in Soviet conveniences. I was also disconcerted by the sudden departure of my translator in the middle of my speech. Tatars generally do not deserve their reputation for harshness and ruthlessness. She was a beautiful, black-haired girl with a soulful expression and large, dark eyes that positively oozed tenderness. But she was useless as a translator and on being stood down from the podium she disappeared for ever out of my life, before I could finish my speech and say a tender goodbye to her.
One morning we visited the Kazan' department store, but in its cavernous halls there was very little to buy. I came out with a Russian Soviet flag and a Tatar fez, and that was all. On walking around Kazan' at lunchtime we soon found that it was useless to look for a place to eat. Restaurants were open, but they did not have any food in them. As the satirical magazine Krokodyl wrote, the very best that was on offer was Soviet multiple choice: meat and potatoes or potatoes and meat.
Yet the Tatarstan hotel had a restaurant that we were invited to in the evening. Dinner started early and their was a band and dancing. The band played in a variety of styles, New York rap, Latin American rhythms, bossa nova, and so on, but with the words to the songs rigorously in Tatar, a Turkic language that sounded vaguely familiar from my time spent doing fieldwork in central Anatolia.
On the other side of the room lurked a bevy of Soviet academic women. They were massive battleships and gave the impression of being as strong as oxen. In short, they were the intellectual equivalent of the typical Soviet road-mending crew, which invariably consisted of beefy, muscular women. As soon as the music started they launched out, grabbed the nearest man, and steered him around the room with his hands firmly grasped in their huge fists. One in particular, a tall, powerfully built lady in a powder-blue dress, so scared me that I hid under the table.
The dinner consisted of an endless alternation of bottles of Georgian champagne and Stolichnaya vodka. About half way through the evening a bun was served together with a plate of watery broth, but that was all. At a certain point I went back to my room in the hotel to relieve myself and when I came back to the restaurant I witnessed a curious scene. In Kazan', a city of a million inhabitants, good quality alcohol was only to be had at the Tatarstan Restaurant. The only people who were allowed entrance to that establishment were foreigners, military officers, members of the Communist Party and people who were wealthy enough to bribe someone substantially. The entrance door was manned by an old war veteran, his chest covered with medals, who put a metal clamp on the handles to stop the hoi polloi from coming in.
But it was the end of the Soviet era. As I stood outside an Ordinary Citizen came up. He was dressed in standard issue Ordinary Citizen clothes: the regulation black leather jacket and baggy jeans with turn-ups (did they, I wonder, have a central stores where they issued Ordinary Citizens with these garments?). Angrily he rattled at the door, which was clamped shut. Suddenly the door flew open and there was the manageress, elegant in a navy-blue tailleur and awe-inspiring in her rage. Her foot was about level with the Ordinary Citizen's stomach and without hesitating she drew it back and delivered him a massive kick. He clutched his torso, retched and staggered back down the steps, whereupon two ex-KGB operatives delivered a well-aimed professional right-hook that laid him out until an ambulance could cart him away to hospital. I felt very sorry for him, but I must admit that since then I have dined out many times on the story of how the manageress of the restaurant kicked the customer in the stomach.
There were many things in the Tatar Republic that had not changed for at least a century. Perhaps one of these was the exploitation of ordinary people and a contempt for their welfare. The signs were everywhere. They were particularly apparent when we visited a mosque (the Tatars are predominantly Muslim). We were introduced to a young nuclear physicist who had been at Chernobyl on the fateful day of the meltdown four years previously. He was obviously dying of radiation sickness. It was a salutary and chastening experience to talk to him. Despite his obvious poor health he had received no official help whatsoever, not even with evacuation from the Ukraine. Only his brethren at the mosque had helped him, and there was little that they could do.
So we returned to Moscow and eventually I arrived back in Italy. I carried with me many memories. The mists coming off the Moscow River and swirling through the graveyards on its banks, fingers of vapour wrapping themselves around the Orthodox crosses and caressing the walls of the monasteries with their stacked towers and polished onion domes. Tatar music blaring out of the radios of dilapidated Lada taxis in Kazan'. The snow on the cart-tracks and sliding off the fir trees in the Urals, the reformatory-monastery dark against the indigo sky in the taiga. The sense of tragedy and exploitation in the people we spoke to. The dumpling-shaped Babushkas, with their hair tied up in spotted scarves, who ruled with rods of iron the landings and corridors of public buildings and hotels.
On one occasion in the Moscow University hotel we were sitting at a table, alone in the deserted restaurant when two friends of Kostia Petrovski came in. As there were 477 empty chairs, Kostia fetched two of them over so that the couple could sit at our table. But this broke the unwritten rule: only the waitresses were allowed to move the furniture and they marched out and snatched the chairs back. Kostia was furious at this absurdity and grabbed them again. There followed a protracted tug of war. Kostia pulled for all his might, his face black with rage. But although he was muscular enough to win prizes at weight-lifting, he lost the contest against these Soviet waitresses and was humiliated. So perhaps it is clear who really ran the mighty Soviet Union, in its day the world's second superpower. Even if we ignore the battle of the sexes, the different between capitalism and Soviet socialism was manifestly clear: under capitalism, man exploited man, while under Soviet socialism, it was the other way around.
The "Real World"
In Stevenage there was an industrial area, which was located on the other side of the railway tracks to the residential part of town. The largest factory made Polaris nuclear missiles. I remember quite clearly when they brought one newly assembled out into the open air, a long, sleek black-and-white tube that gleamed ominously in the sunlight. They were sent to Australia and exploded in the desert, where no doubt they irradiated the indigenous peoples.
My first serious contact with the industrial area came when I graduated and had a few months to wait before I started my doctorate. It was summertime and the local Kodak camera factory took on temporary unskilled staff, mostly students and graduates. Indeed, a veritable pot-pourri of subjects was represented: an art history graduate was driving fork-lift trucks, English and other language graduates were tending the injection moulding machines, while engineers and architects were working in the stores dishing out the camera components. I must have looked rather studious and technical at the interview because they assigned me to the computing department. It was a period when computers were vastly less developed than they are now, and I spent most of my time playing a primitive word-game called 'Bull's-eye' on a teletype terminal.
Occasionally, just to relieve the monotony, they sent me down to the stores to count nuts and bolts and do other edifying tasks. Indeed, monotony was the name of the game. Eventually, one of the other students became so bored with shifting pallets of cameras around that he tipped one straight into the plastic-grinding machine and twenty thousand dollars-worth of Kodak Instamatic cameras became plastic granules again, mixed in with a few wood splinters derived from the smashed-up pallet.
At university we were continually told that there was a difference between the cloistered life in an academic institution and that vague, menacing, formless place outside that our teachers liked to call "the real world". Ever since my undergraduate days I have harboured an aversion to that phrase: as if the world in a university were any less real! Life at Kodak was a good deal more surreal than anything we could dream up at King's College and the London School of Economics. For instance, a siren would sound at 10.30 a.m. and everyone would stop work for ten minutes to drink tea and coffee. The lads in my section would open copies of The Sun and The Daily Mirror, grotesque parodies of newspapers which to be fully understood required a reading age of only seven. Both were famous for their 'Page Three', on which there would be a girl with a good figure and large, naked nipples. Along came Dorris, the tea-lady with the urn and cups on a trolley. One of the lads waved his 'Page Three' at her and asked "Hey Dorris, can you match that?" The poor lady was about 55 years old and couldn't think of a suitably crushing retort.
Eventually, a few years after I had gone on to other things, the Kodak factory became a victim of the transfer of manufacturing industry to the Orient; its workforce was made redundant and the whole plant was swept away, the site laid bare as if it had never existed.
When I had finished both the doctorate and a post-doctoral fellowship, I was left with a few months to kill before setting off for a new life in America. I moved back to London with my southern Italian girlfriend and took the only job I could find--in the catering industry. I started working in a kitchen that produced Traditional British Food, a curious ritual of massacring essentially good ingredients to make a wholly inedible dish. Several things disgusted me about this. The first was that I had to scour out the pots after this dastardly act had been perpetrated and it was far from being a pleasant task. The second was that I went home each night smelling of cabbage, and that was thoroughly unpleasant too. Finally, I was completely revolted by the fact that when the miserable products of our labours were served up people on the other side of the counter evidently longed for this stuff and ate it with gusto. Truly, Britain is a place where people do not understand the concept of quality.
So I continued to cast my net around. After a very few days I found a temporary job in an up-market vegetarian restaurant. Again, it was full of unemployed graduates, washing floors, chopping vegetables, clearing away the dirty cups and plates, discussing Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emmanuel Kant. It was part of a long-established chain called 'Cranks'. A signboard at the entrance said that a 'crank' is a person who prizes his or her individuality. A quick look in the Oxford English Dictionary gave a less flattering definition: an eccentric person or monomaniac. All of this came from the time, in the early 1960s, when the restaurant chain was founded and to be a vegetarian was considered infra dignitatum and a possible sign of mental illness. In 1980 when I worked at Cranks two million Britons had stopped eating meat and vegetarianism could hardly be described as a fringe activity any more. But Cranks felt it had to preserve its individuality. In the modern world, once something has existed for a few years it is described as 'traditional', for traditions are manufactured overnight.
The branch of Cranks I worked in was situated (for it is no longer there) in a famous department store, Heals, of Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London's Westminster shopping district. Heals sold--and still sells--breathtakingly beautiful Scandinavian furniture at vertiginously high British prices. The clientele consisted of the rich (film directors, actors, business leaders and company) and people who simply came to look and imagine what it would be like if they could afford such luxuries. In any case, I was bound by the rules of my employment to reach the restaurant not through the store but by the back stairs, where there was an ancient and faded announcement, painted on the wall many decades ago, that informed Heals's employees that if they were found loitering out the back of the shop they would be "subject to instant dismissal". During the worst, most fraught times at the restaurant, "instant dismissal" seemed quite an enticing prospect. At least it was a painless way to go.
The catering business is a struggle and is very badly paid. It is very far from the pervasive myth of endless hospitality and bonhomie and is instead dominated with sudden rushes of hungry people demanding to be fed while the staff battle with endless rivers of food and landslides of dirty dishes. Cranks had pretensions to be folksy. It had deal tables and flagstone floors and its crockery was made by John Leach, a master potter from Somerset (I have various of his creations at home and they are truly beautiful). Indeed, the ceramics were clearly the most appetising part of the meal, because every day our fine, upstanding, staunchly middle-class customers pilfered large amounts of the crockery, especially the smaller pieces that could be slipped into handbags and carrier bags discretely without members of staff noticing. "Oh, I am so sorry! It must have fallen off the table into my bag. How odd!"
It was a self-service restaurant, but despite that its prices were sky-high. The food was organic and was dominated by stone-ground wholemeal flour, brown rice and such things. It was distinctly heavy and the majority of customers bought far more than they could eat. Either it was gluttony--which was more than likely--or it was a tendency to underestimate how filling such food actually is. As a result when we cleared the tables we ended up throwing away about half of what was purchased (but not consumed). Yet the great middle classes are always the first to decry poverty and hunger in the world and demand that other people be more frugal. The worst such cases were the young middle-class mothers. Their offspring systematically plastered food and drink all over the walls, floor, furniture and furnishings until someone was sent out from the kitchen armed with cleaning fluids, rubber gloves, buckets, mops and brushes. The young mothers would look at all of this with doe-eyes and shrug as if nothing could be done to avoid it. Working at Cranks did nothing for one's faith in humanity. However, on one occasion I was able to get my own back. A lady customer found a hair in her salad and protested to me as I was clearing a nearby table. She was quivering with rage and affront. I was able to trot out the old chestnut "don't shout about it, everyone will want one". It is a wonder I was not sacked, but anger had made her too inarticulate to inform the manager.
I shall always remember one warm Saturday lunchtime when a customer piled up his tray with a huge amount of food, but when at the end of the line the bill was presented to him he had what appeared to be a heart attack. First he went white as a sheet, then he went blue. He collapsed and as he fell over--stiffly, like a Scots pine being felled by a woodcutter--he instinctively put out his hands to steady himself. With his right hand he grabbed a potted geranium that was intended to add ornament to the cash desk and with his left he grasped a tray full of cutlery. He ended up flat on the floor covered with a large heap of knives and forks surmounted by a geranium with bright red flowers and the fragments of its pot. As he was quickly taken away in an ambulance we never found out whether he lived to tell the tale or not.
Meanwhile, someone had left the door to the fire escape open and one of that great breed of pests, the London pigeons, had waddled in. We found it next morning in the cold store, shivering but extremely well-fed. It had pecked holes in several large blocks of cheese.
Occasionally the monotony of constantly clearing tables, washing dishes and chopping vegetables would be enlivened if someone tripped while carrying armsful of plates, dishes and cups. There would be an almighty crash as the crockery hit the sturdy flagstone floor and another fortune's worth of John Leach's creations would have to be swept up and thrown away. Once, I tripped and fell when I went down to the store-room to fetch two large bottles of expensive wine. By dint of fast action with a bucket of water and a mop I was able to clear away the evidence before anyone found out, but the floor remained suspiciously sticky for days afterwards.
During this period I lived in a part of London called Little Venice. It was situated around one of the junctions on the old Grand Union Canal, a place where various long-boats were moored, the characteristic English canal transport with traditional, bright ornamental paintwork. It was the only apartment I could find on a short let and the rent was more than I earned. Had I not had savings to live off I could not have survived; and ours was the only house in the street that did not have a Rolls Royce parked outside. And to think that I was earning the sort of wage that ordinarily, or for long periods of time, would not have been enough to exist on in central London!
The one perk that Cranks allowed us was that we could eat the food that it sold. Most of us rapidly became heartily sick of it. However, we were not allowed to eat cream cakes, so many of those were consumed under the counter and in odd corners when the manager was not looking, more out of spite and vindictiveness than appetite.
We were only paid for half an hour after closing time. It was extremely difficult to finish washing up, tidying and cleaning in this period of time. First the last remaining customers had to be removed. Some of them became very obstinate about lingering over their cold cups of coffee. It soon became a psychological battle to get them to move, ostentatiously upending the chairs onto the tables and swabbing underneath with the mop, rattling the chains that were put around the front door, and eventually demanding that they leave. Eventually, the last customers would depart, giving us a look of wounded offence, and we could finish off and go home. After a while we became so fed up with finishing late that we started throwing the crockery and cutlery into large black polythene waste bags rather than waiting until it had been through the washing-up machine and stacking it away on the shelves. Anything was legitimate providing the manager did not get to know about it.
The plus side of this experience was the opportunity to take long, lazy walks in St James's Park or stroll around the London art galleries. But like so many periods of my life it was a time of transition, a period of waiting, before something quite different took place.
My first serious contact with the industrial area came when I graduated and had a few months to wait before I started my doctorate. It was summertime and the local Kodak camera factory took on temporary unskilled staff, mostly students and graduates. Indeed, a veritable pot-pourri of subjects was represented: an art history graduate was driving fork-lift trucks, English and other language graduates were tending the injection moulding machines, while engineers and architects were working in the stores dishing out the camera components. I must have looked rather studious and technical at the interview because they assigned me to the computing department. It was a period when computers were vastly less developed than they are now, and I spent most of my time playing a primitive word-game called 'Bull's-eye' on a teletype terminal.
Occasionally, just to relieve the monotony, they sent me down to the stores to count nuts and bolts and do other edifying tasks. Indeed, monotony was the name of the game. Eventually, one of the other students became so bored with shifting pallets of cameras around that he tipped one straight into the plastic-grinding machine and twenty thousand dollars-worth of Kodak Instamatic cameras became plastic granules again, mixed in with a few wood splinters derived from the smashed-up pallet.
At university we were continually told that there was a difference between the cloistered life in an academic institution and that vague, menacing, formless place outside that our teachers liked to call "the real world". Ever since my undergraduate days I have harboured an aversion to that phrase: as if the world in a university were any less real! Life at Kodak was a good deal more surreal than anything we could dream up at King's College and the London School of Economics. For instance, a siren would sound at 10.30 a.m. and everyone would stop work for ten minutes to drink tea and coffee. The lads in my section would open copies of The Sun and The Daily Mirror, grotesque parodies of newspapers which to be fully understood required a reading age of only seven. Both were famous for their 'Page Three', on which there would be a girl with a good figure and large, naked nipples. Along came Dorris, the tea-lady with the urn and cups on a trolley. One of the lads waved his 'Page Three' at her and asked "Hey Dorris, can you match that?" The poor lady was about 55 years old and couldn't think of a suitably crushing retort.
Eventually, a few years after I had gone on to other things, the Kodak factory became a victim of the transfer of manufacturing industry to the Orient; its workforce was made redundant and the whole plant was swept away, the site laid bare as if it had never existed.
When I had finished both the doctorate and a post-doctoral fellowship, I was left with a few months to kill before setting off for a new life in America. I moved back to London with my southern Italian girlfriend and took the only job I could find--in the catering industry. I started working in a kitchen that produced Traditional British Food, a curious ritual of massacring essentially good ingredients to make a wholly inedible dish. Several things disgusted me about this. The first was that I had to scour out the pots after this dastardly act had been perpetrated and it was far from being a pleasant task. The second was that I went home each night smelling of cabbage, and that was thoroughly unpleasant too. Finally, I was completely revolted by the fact that when the miserable products of our labours were served up people on the other side of the counter evidently longed for this stuff and ate it with gusto. Truly, Britain is a place where people do not understand the concept of quality.
So I continued to cast my net around. After a very few days I found a temporary job in an up-market vegetarian restaurant. Again, it was full of unemployed graduates, washing floors, chopping vegetables, clearing away the dirty cups and plates, discussing Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emmanuel Kant. It was part of a long-established chain called 'Cranks'. A signboard at the entrance said that a 'crank' is a person who prizes his or her individuality. A quick look in the Oxford English Dictionary gave a less flattering definition: an eccentric person or monomaniac. All of this came from the time, in the early 1960s, when the restaurant chain was founded and to be a vegetarian was considered infra dignitatum and a possible sign of mental illness. In 1980 when I worked at Cranks two million Britons had stopped eating meat and vegetarianism could hardly be described as a fringe activity any more. But Cranks felt it had to preserve its individuality. In the modern world, once something has existed for a few years it is described as 'traditional', for traditions are manufactured overnight.
The branch of Cranks I worked in was situated (for it is no longer there) in a famous department store, Heals, of Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London's Westminster shopping district. Heals sold--and still sells--breathtakingly beautiful Scandinavian furniture at vertiginously high British prices. The clientele consisted of the rich (film directors, actors, business leaders and company) and people who simply came to look and imagine what it would be like if they could afford such luxuries. In any case, I was bound by the rules of my employment to reach the restaurant not through the store but by the back stairs, where there was an ancient and faded announcement, painted on the wall many decades ago, that informed Heals's employees that if they were found loitering out the back of the shop they would be "subject to instant dismissal". During the worst, most fraught times at the restaurant, "instant dismissal" seemed quite an enticing prospect. At least it was a painless way to go.
The catering business is a struggle and is very badly paid. It is very far from the pervasive myth of endless hospitality and bonhomie and is instead dominated with sudden rushes of hungry people demanding to be fed while the staff battle with endless rivers of food and landslides of dirty dishes. Cranks had pretensions to be folksy. It had deal tables and flagstone floors and its crockery was made by John Leach, a master potter from Somerset (I have various of his creations at home and they are truly beautiful). Indeed, the ceramics were clearly the most appetising part of the meal, because every day our fine, upstanding, staunchly middle-class customers pilfered large amounts of the crockery, especially the smaller pieces that could be slipped into handbags and carrier bags discretely without members of staff noticing. "Oh, I am so sorry! It must have fallen off the table into my bag. How odd!"
It was a self-service restaurant, but despite that its prices were sky-high. The food was organic and was dominated by stone-ground wholemeal flour, brown rice and such things. It was distinctly heavy and the majority of customers bought far more than they could eat. Either it was gluttony--which was more than likely--or it was a tendency to underestimate how filling such food actually is. As a result when we cleared the tables we ended up throwing away about half of what was purchased (but not consumed). Yet the great middle classes are always the first to decry poverty and hunger in the world and demand that other people be more frugal. The worst such cases were the young middle-class mothers. Their offspring systematically plastered food and drink all over the walls, floor, furniture and furnishings until someone was sent out from the kitchen armed with cleaning fluids, rubber gloves, buckets, mops and brushes. The young mothers would look at all of this with doe-eyes and shrug as if nothing could be done to avoid it. Working at Cranks did nothing for one's faith in humanity. However, on one occasion I was able to get my own back. A lady customer found a hair in her salad and protested to me as I was clearing a nearby table. She was quivering with rage and affront. I was able to trot out the old chestnut "don't shout about it, everyone will want one". It is a wonder I was not sacked, but anger had made her too inarticulate to inform the manager.
I shall always remember one warm Saturday lunchtime when a customer piled up his tray with a huge amount of food, but when at the end of the line the bill was presented to him he had what appeared to be a heart attack. First he went white as a sheet, then he went blue. He collapsed and as he fell over--stiffly, like a Scots pine being felled by a woodcutter--he instinctively put out his hands to steady himself. With his right hand he grabbed a potted geranium that was intended to add ornament to the cash desk and with his left he grasped a tray full of cutlery. He ended up flat on the floor covered with a large heap of knives and forks surmounted by a geranium with bright red flowers and the fragments of its pot. As he was quickly taken away in an ambulance we never found out whether he lived to tell the tale or not.
Meanwhile, someone had left the door to the fire escape open and one of that great breed of pests, the London pigeons, had waddled in. We found it next morning in the cold store, shivering but extremely well-fed. It had pecked holes in several large blocks of cheese.
Occasionally the monotony of constantly clearing tables, washing dishes and chopping vegetables would be enlivened if someone tripped while carrying armsful of plates, dishes and cups. There would be an almighty crash as the crockery hit the sturdy flagstone floor and another fortune's worth of John Leach's creations would have to be swept up and thrown away. Once, I tripped and fell when I went down to the store-room to fetch two large bottles of expensive wine. By dint of fast action with a bucket of water and a mop I was able to clear away the evidence before anyone found out, but the floor remained suspiciously sticky for days afterwards.
During this period I lived in a part of London called Little Venice. It was situated around one of the junctions on the old Grand Union Canal, a place where various long-boats were moored, the characteristic English canal transport with traditional, bright ornamental paintwork. It was the only apartment I could find on a short let and the rent was more than I earned. Had I not had savings to live off I could not have survived; and ours was the only house in the street that did not have a Rolls Royce parked outside. And to think that I was earning the sort of wage that ordinarily, or for long periods of time, would not have been enough to exist on in central London!
The one perk that Cranks allowed us was that we could eat the food that it sold. Most of us rapidly became heartily sick of it. However, we were not allowed to eat cream cakes, so many of those were consumed under the counter and in odd corners when the manager was not looking, more out of spite and vindictiveness than appetite.
We were only paid for half an hour after closing time. It was extremely difficult to finish washing up, tidying and cleaning in this period of time. First the last remaining customers had to be removed. Some of them became very obstinate about lingering over their cold cups of coffee. It soon became a psychological battle to get them to move, ostentatiously upending the chairs onto the tables and swabbing underneath with the mop, rattling the chains that were put around the front door, and eventually demanding that they leave. Eventually, the last customers would depart, giving us a look of wounded offence, and we could finish off and go home. After a while we became so fed up with finishing late that we started throwing the crockery and cutlery into large black polythene waste bags rather than waiting until it had been through the washing-up machine and stacking it away on the shelves. Anything was legitimate providing the manager did not get to know about it.
The plus side of this experience was the opportunity to take long, lazy walks in St James's Park or stroll around the London art galleries. But like so many periods of my life it was a time of transition, a period of waiting, before something quite different took place.
Student life in London in the 1970s
On the last day of September 1971 I loaded my few belongings into the family car and my father drove me to Streatham, south London, where I took up lodgings with eight other university students. Before my father left, he shook my hand. It was the first time he had ever done it and I was dumbfounded: it was a symbolic parting. Although in the following months I went back to my parents for one weekend in two, on that September day I was ceremoniously pushed out of the nest. Now I was supposed to live like an adult. It was a peculiar sensation, neither pleasurable nor distasteful, merely something I was unaccustomed to, like walking on a pond covered in ice.
On the one hand, the delights of London were on my doorstep, and I had a season ticket from Streatham to Waterloo, right in the centre. On the other, I had a student stipend of £485 on which to live for the whole academic year. Nowadays such a sum would hardly last a week, but I made it last the full nine months. I had no choice: I was a full-time student.
For the first time I was sharing a room (it halved the rent: £3 a week) and living with other people my age. I had recently taken up the flute and was making steady progress with the aid of a book of exercises and a few pieces of easy sheet music. After a few days, progress was halted when the other eight members of the household solemnly presented me with a petition asking me to stop making such a hideous noise, or at least to go somewhere else to make it. There was nowhere else, and that effectively ended my career in woodwind.
London in the early 1970s was a dynamic city: obsessive, driving, self-absorbed, all-embracing, varied, noisy, dusty, cluttered, colourful, cosmopolitan. It is still all of these things, but it is now also prohibitively expensive, and less safe than it was nearly 40 years ago. Yet it remains more a collection of villages than a single city, and this is an important aspect of its charm. It has many different aspects, hidden corners, unexpected delights, astounding contrasts; indeed, it probably offers more than any other city in the world. But not all that it offers is salubrious.
I soon learned to move with the rhythm of the city. In the streets, on the underground, people move around quickly and efficiently. They waste no time. Faster, more agile people adeptly weave their way between those who tarry. Yet there was still time for student pranks. At school many of us had had to learn long quotations from Shakespeare's plays by heart, and late in the evening we would wander around the streets and shout them menacingly at passers by--soliloquies from the Tempest or the Merchant of Venice, or rousing speeches from the historical dramas. Once, at midnight I ran all the way up the down escalators of Warren Street tube station, a long distance from the Victoria Line to the surface, 40 metres vertically. Fortunately there were no passengers coming the other way. It was all part of being a student, like keeping one's neck wrapped in the purple, yellow and black scarf of the College. How we despised those who adopted the red, white and blue colours of the University, the federal structure which encompassed ours and 32 other colleges! Better the colours of the 'enemy' from King's, Birkbeck or Queen Mary (I was studying at the London School of Economics).
Occasionally, the College would put on a social event to which students were invited. The 1970s were less prohibitionist than current times, and there would sometimes be beer. It would be served by robust ladies in white uniforms, whose brawny arms would dish it out in quarter pint rations, an amount that any self-respecting student would find embarrassingly small. So we queued up for it drinking as we queued, and by diligently waiting our turn managed to sup the regulation couple of pints and regain our self-esteem.
After a term in Streatham I became disaffected with the southern suburbs. I come from north of the River (the Thames, that is, which in London is merely called 'the River') and have inherited that sense of superiority to the benighted neighbourhoods on the southern side. In simple terms, I did not feel at home there. So I moved back to my parents' house for six months and did long-distance commuting. Then I moved into halls of residence and remained in them for a three years. They were noisy places, beery and leery, but they had the advantage of being very central. Carr-Saunders Hall was at the time all male (and a real temple of testosterone it was, too). One night the fire-alarm went off and more women than men came out of the dormitory rooms.
The first two halls I lived in were situated on the long road that starts off as Charlotte Street and ends under the Post Office Tower (later renamed the Telecom Tower) as Fitzroy Street. In its time it was the restaurant street par excellence of London, with a remarkable variety of ethnic eating places, none of which I could afford to patronise. There were first-class Indian restaurants, from which the smell of oriental spices wafted in clouds. There were also excellent Indian sweet shops, which sold brilliantly coloured gelatinous concoctions and dollops of spicy batter that looked like fried toads. Every year there was an ethnic festival, a street-long carnival, called Fitzrovia. Caribbean steel bands danced up and down the road, Jews played animated klezma on strings and accordion, Brazilian dancers waved their feathers and threw paper streamers, and Anemos, the local Greek restaurant, brought out all its crockery and invited passers-by to smash it (they did, with much gusto).
And then there was the Provisional Irish Republican Army. I studied in London from 1971 until 1980, which encompassed virtually the whole span of the bombing campaign that followed 'Bloody Sunday', the day in 1971 when British troops opened fire on peaceful Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland. As a first-year student I marched on Parliament in a protest demonstration against this episode of history. It was the first and last time I have done such a thing. I was particularly impressed by the aggressive hostility of middle-aged and old people, who seemed to be objecting to the very act of demonstrating--the folly of youth--and paying little attention to the issues that were being contested. I was also much impressed by the solid line of policemen who cordoned off the approaches to Parliament. There were scuffles and one of my companions, Elizabeth Fish, was arrested and bundled into a police van. She was quite proud of this achievement. Being rather timid and accustomed to showing respect for anyone in uniform, I kept a low profile and came out unscathed.
But then there were the bombs. Sitting in my dormitory room one night listening to music we heard one go off. It maimed two sorters in the local post-office. On another occasion, I was ushered away from a section of Oxford Street by the police. A bomb disposal artificer drew up and proceeded into a restaurant. After a brief interval there was a massive explosion. He left a widow and three young children. Finally, towards the end of my time as a resident in central London I was living in a dormitory above the stores at the western end of Oxford Street, which is London's busiest shopping street. Just before Christmas 1975 the Provos parked a car packed with explosives outside it. Miraculously, the resulting blast killed no one, but it blew in very many windows. Fortunately, my room did not face Oxford Street and hence was undamaged. The cut-price clothing store underneath opened up the next day with no glass in its frontage and a large hand-painted sign that said "Save a Bomb!"
More than the bombs themselves, the unpredictability of the attacks caused a pervasive psychosis. Everyone was on edge. I took to walking rather than using the buses or underground trains. I walked along back-streets rather than the main thoroughfares, as that seemed the safest thing to do. When I went back to my parents I hurried through the concourse of Victoria Station looking about me apprehensively. Everywhere, people were on the alert for suspicious behaviour, unattended packages; indeed, anything that was out of the ordinary. During one journey a passenger got off the train and left his briefcase behind. A porter came and took it away to a secluded spot at the end of the platform. As he picked it up he shook with fear. Fortunately, the briefcase did not contain anything noxious.
Despite these anxieties, and the pressure of studying to get good qualifications at a top university, there were many compensations for having chosen to go to university in the capital city. The parks, gardens and stately homes of London are marvellously relaxing. There are many galleries and museums. When I could afford them, there were concerts and plays (fortunately I had a good friend who was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and he had plenty of free tickets to good West End theatre productions).
The years passed quickly. Twice I attended the University of London graduation ceremony, held in the Royal Albert Hall. As a BSc graduate I wore black, but as a PhD graduate I wore a claret-coloured gown with yellow silk facings. I have one in my wardrobe at home, made by Ede and Ravenscroft of Chancery Lane, where the same company has been selling such gear, in the same shop, since the 1600s (Ede was a tailor and Ravenscroft a wig-maker: their descendants made the coronation robes of Queen Victoria, which are conserved in the shop).
Aristocrats and commanders of the armed forces attended the graduation ceremonies, and so did 5000 graduates, all of whom were individually presented to the Chancellor of the University of London, who was then the Queen Mother. The student newspaper commented rather uncharitably that "the pink of her dress contrasted with the yellow of her teeth", but someone had written her a suitably witty academic speech, which she delivered with reasonable aplomb, and so everyone was happy. Like thousands of others I was photographed in my robes in front of the Albert Memorial.
All that was merely the start of a long association with universities. It was, in the American sense, truly a Commencement.
On the one hand, the delights of London were on my doorstep, and I had a season ticket from Streatham to Waterloo, right in the centre. On the other, I had a student stipend of £485 on which to live for the whole academic year. Nowadays such a sum would hardly last a week, but I made it last the full nine months. I had no choice: I was a full-time student.
For the first time I was sharing a room (it halved the rent: £3 a week) and living with other people my age. I had recently taken up the flute and was making steady progress with the aid of a book of exercises and a few pieces of easy sheet music. After a few days, progress was halted when the other eight members of the household solemnly presented me with a petition asking me to stop making such a hideous noise, or at least to go somewhere else to make it. There was nowhere else, and that effectively ended my career in woodwind.
London in the early 1970s was a dynamic city: obsessive, driving, self-absorbed, all-embracing, varied, noisy, dusty, cluttered, colourful, cosmopolitan. It is still all of these things, but it is now also prohibitively expensive, and less safe than it was nearly 40 years ago. Yet it remains more a collection of villages than a single city, and this is an important aspect of its charm. It has many different aspects, hidden corners, unexpected delights, astounding contrasts; indeed, it probably offers more than any other city in the world. But not all that it offers is salubrious.
I soon learned to move with the rhythm of the city. In the streets, on the underground, people move around quickly and efficiently. They waste no time. Faster, more agile people adeptly weave their way between those who tarry. Yet there was still time for student pranks. At school many of us had had to learn long quotations from Shakespeare's plays by heart, and late in the evening we would wander around the streets and shout them menacingly at passers by--soliloquies from the Tempest or the Merchant of Venice, or rousing speeches from the historical dramas. Once, at midnight I ran all the way up the down escalators of Warren Street tube station, a long distance from the Victoria Line to the surface, 40 metres vertically. Fortunately there were no passengers coming the other way. It was all part of being a student, like keeping one's neck wrapped in the purple, yellow and black scarf of the College. How we despised those who adopted the red, white and blue colours of the University, the federal structure which encompassed ours and 32 other colleges! Better the colours of the 'enemy' from King's, Birkbeck or Queen Mary (I was studying at the London School of Economics).
Occasionally, the College would put on a social event to which students were invited. The 1970s were less prohibitionist than current times, and there would sometimes be beer. It would be served by robust ladies in white uniforms, whose brawny arms would dish it out in quarter pint rations, an amount that any self-respecting student would find embarrassingly small. So we queued up for it drinking as we queued, and by diligently waiting our turn managed to sup the regulation couple of pints and regain our self-esteem.
After a term in Streatham I became disaffected with the southern suburbs. I come from north of the River (the Thames, that is, which in London is merely called 'the River') and have inherited that sense of superiority to the benighted neighbourhoods on the southern side. In simple terms, I did not feel at home there. So I moved back to my parents' house for six months and did long-distance commuting. Then I moved into halls of residence and remained in them for a three years. They were noisy places, beery and leery, but they had the advantage of being very central. Carr-Saunders Hall was at the time all male (and a real temple of testosterone it was, too). One night the fire-alarm went off and more women than men came out of the dormitory rooms.
The first two halls I lived in were situated on the long road that starts off as Charlotte Street and ends under the Post Office Tower (later renamed the Telecom Tower) as Fitzroy Street. In its time it was the restaurant street par excellence of London, with a remarkable variety of ethnic eating places, none of which I could afford to patronise. There were first-class Indian restaurants, from which the smell of oriental spices wafted in clouds. There were also excellent Indian sweet shops, which sold brilliantly coloured gelatinous concoctions and dollops of spicy batter that looked like fried toads. Every year there was an ethnic festival, a street-long carnival, called Fitzrovia. Caribbean steel bands danced up and down the road, Jews played animated klezma on strings and accordion, Brazilian dancers waved their feathers and threw paper streamers, and Anemos, the local Greek restaurant, brought out all its crockery and invited passers-by to smash it (they did, with much gusto).
And then there was the Provisional Irish Republican Army. I studied in London from 1971 until 1980, which encompassed virtually the whole span of the bombing campaign that followed 'Bloody Sunday', the day in 1971 when British troops opened fire on peaceful Catholic demonstrators in Northern Ireland. As a first-year student I marched on Parliament in a protest demonstration against this episode of history. It was the first and last time I have done such a thing. I was particularly impressed by the aggressive hostility of middle-aged and old people, who seemed to be objecting to the very act of demonstrating--the folly of youth--and paying little attention to the issues that were being contested. I was also much impressed by the solid line of policemen who cordoned off the approaches to Parliament. There were scuffles and one of my companions, Elizabeth Fish, was arrested and bundled into a police van. She was quite proud of this achievement. Being rather timid and accustomed to showing respect for anyone in uniform, I kept a low profile and came out unscathed.
But then there were the bombs. Sitting in my dormitory room one night listening to music we heard one go off. It maimed two sorters in the local post-office. On another occasion, I was ushered away from a section of Oxford Street by the police. A bomb disposal artificer drew up and proceeded into a restaurant. After a brief interval there was a massive explosion. He left a widow and three young children. Finally, towards the end of my time as a resident in central London I was living in a dormitory above the stores at the western end of Oxford Street, which is London's busiest shopping street. Just before Christmas 1975 the Provos parked a car packed with explosives outside it. Miraculously, the resulting blast killed no one, but it blew in very many windows. Fortunately, my room did not face Oxford Street and hence was undamaged. The cut-price clothing store underneath opened up the next day with no glass in its frontage and a large hand-painted sign that said "Save a Bomb!"
More than the bombs themselves, the unpredictability of the attacks caused a pervasive psychosis. Everyone was on edge. I took to walking rather than using the buses or underground trains. I walked along back-streets rather than the main thoroughfares, as that seemed the safest thing to do. When I went back to my parents I hurried through the concourse of Victoria Station looking about me apprehensively. Everywhere, people were on the alert for suspicious behaviour, unattended packages; indeed, anything that was out of the ordinary. During one journey a passenger got off the train and left his briefcase behind. A porter came and took it away to a secluded spot at the end of the platform. As he picked it up he shook with fear. Fortunately, the briefcase did not contain anything noxious.
Despite these anxieties, and the pressure of studying to get good qualifications at a top university, there were many compensations for having chosen to go to university in the capital city. The parks, gardens and stately homes of London are marvellously relaxing. There are many galleries and museums. When I could afford them, there were concerts and plays (fortunately I had a good friend who was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and he had plenty of free tickets to good West End theatre productions).
The years passed quickly. Twice I attended the University of London graduation ceremony, held in the Royal Albert Hall. As a BSc graduate I wore black, but as a PhD graduate I wore a claret-coloured gown with yellow silk facings. I have one in my wardrobe at home, made by Ede and Ravenscroft of Chancery Lane, where the same company has been selling such gear, in the same shop, since the 1600s (Ede was a tailor and Ravenscroft a wig-maker: their descendants made the coronation robes of Queen Victoria, which are conserved in the shop).
Aristocrats and commanders of the armed forces attended the graduation ceremonies, and so did 5000 graduates, all of whom were individually presented to the Chancellor of the University of London, who was then the Queen Mother. The student newspaper commented rather uncharitably that "the pink of her dress contrasted with the yellow of her teeth", but someone had written her a suitably witty academic speech, which she delivered with reasonable aplomb, and so everyone was happy. Like thousands of others I was photographed in my robes in front of the Albert Memorial.
All that was merely the start of a long association with universities. It was, in the American sense, truly a Commencement.
Spanish interludes
In addition to a month in Ugijar, as a student I made two other visits to southern Spain. These three trips abroad were my first contact with the Mediterranean world and I was enchanted. I was enchanted despite some of the things that happened on these trips, for memory tends to be selective. It filters out suffering, and it puts other experiences into different categories--the romantic, the absurd, the tedious--so that they can be remembered in a manner that is a good deal more tidy than the ways in which they happened.
We set off from Gatwick Airport, London a week before Christmas, the nadir of the year for the package holiday firms, which is why our trip to Malaga was cheap enough for students to be able to afford it. Right from the airport to the hotel the Costa del Sol had a gimcrack, unfinished air to it. Buildings had been flung up, hastily plastered over, and a coat of whitewash slapped on. And Spanish plaster smelt of marzipan--I wonder why? It did not seem to augur well for structural integrity. Everything felt so different to the classic idea of the Mediterranean as a place of age-old charm, where things survived virtually unchanged for millennia. But the sun was shining, and the low, watery skies of London were far away. The balcony of my hotel room gave a panoramic view of a long strip of sea, an intense aquamarine blue, its very horizontality emphasised by the jagged profile of the concrete jungle that had sprouted up along the shore--hotels, residences, bars, viaducts.
Having inhaled a lung-full of salty ozone and traffic fumes, I went back into my room to have a shower. For some reason I left the towels in the bedroom. Once I had finished showering I blundering out of the bathroom with soap in my eyes and water dripping from my naked, 20-year-old body, and my outstretched hands encountered flesh--it was the maid, who had come in to make the bed. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked maiden of about sixteen years. She took one look, went a darn sight more rosy in the cheeks, muttered something quite Baroque in Spanish about the Madonna and a variety of Saints, and fled. I took it in my stride (as it were), reflecting that after all I hadn't invited her in or known of her presence.
Travel is as much about personalities as it is about places. In some accounts it is one's own personality that has to be dealt with, on others it is that of the people one travels with or meets. We were 30 students and we had two professors with us. John Thornes was a taciturn Yorkshireman, with a spitting, biting turn of phrase and a brilliant scientific mind. Nevertheless, he had something of the baby about him: in fact, his wife had sewn his mittens to a long piece of tape that she passed through the arms of his jacket so that when he took them off he would not lose them. Denis Brunsden, who later became the President of the World Association of Geomorphologists, was a flamboyant son of Devonshire, with the accent to match. He was decidedly vain and cultivated an academic demeanour that was entirely fake and was larded with earnest mock-sincerity. It was, however, amusing, especially at dinner table when he started reminiscing--providing one didn't take him too seriously.
Our first encounter with these two senior academics occurred when we attended an introductory field course in the Surrey hills, and they pushed us into a river "to find out what it was made of". The things that one could do with students in those days! Well, this time they took us to the coast at a place called Rincon de la Victoria. The beach was covered in a mysterious white deposit. Denis lined us up in front of him facing the distant mountains of the Alpujarras, while he stood gazing thoughtfully out to sea and lectured us on the origin of this deposit. Was it a sign of climatic change? What had made it so white? Could there have been chemical reactions associated with the post-Pleistocene cooling and warming phases? What he failed to notice was that behind his shoulders there was a very large cement works, which was belching out white fumes. In fact, everything was covered with a white deposit, and if we had stood there much longer we would have turned white as well. The coach-driver strolled over, pointed at the ground and said "cemento!" with a broad grin.
On our first day of seeing the geological sights we stopped for lunch at a roadside cantina. We were young, wet behind the ears and we had never been in a situation in which for an absurdly small sum of money one could buy a litre of rough, red peasant wine. So we all did, and we all drank it. Rather than making us drunk, it made us extremely tired. Spontaneously, the whole party fell asleep. Eventually, we awoke from this post-prandial nap and dragged ourselves back to the coach with throbbing temples and dry mouths. John Thornes had something of the Puritan in him, and as we were driving across the playa he decided to wake us up and suddenly shouted out, in a special voice that he reserved for such occasions "I hope you're all looking at that Miocene stratigraphic in-fill over there!" Unfortunately, the effect of this stern reproof was immediately ruined. His wife had forced him to bring his small son along with him, and Christopher immediately piped up "I can see it Daddy!", which made everyone else laugh.
We were taken to El Torcal, a spectacular massif of eroded limestone, wreathed in mist and haunted by flocks of crows. On the way we again stopped at a roadside cantina, but this time to buy chocolate. This was a heaven-sent occasion for the proprietors of this establishment. They sold about 30 chocolate bars at wildly inflated prices, but it was not until we were back on the coach and far down the road that we realised that they were extremely ancient confections, riddled with maggots and hardened to marble by extremes of heat and cold.
Our final lunch-stop was interrupted by one of those thunderstorms that make the Mediterranean landscape so wild and mobile. Within minutes we found ourselves up to our knees in water laced with a rich helping of terrarossa, that cascaded and bubbled around our legs and turned the landscape into a frothing russet-coloured morass. Local orange groves were devastated by the violence of nature, with broken branches and masses of colourful fruit strewn across the muddy ground. There was nothing left to do but wade back to the hotel and enjoy a glass of sangria on the terrace, looking at the watery sky and the grey mass of the sea.
Despite the difficulties there were many things to remember about these visits to Spain: in particular, the Roman aqueduct at Nerja, three arrays of arches spanning a breathtaking V-shaped ravine with the azure line of the sea as a backdrop; women singing ancient melodies as they did the housework in the small Andalusian towns with their cobbled streets and whitewashed walls, evenings of dancing to flamenco music and drinking sangria and Fundador brandy.
On the way back after the first trip the pilot of our charter flight announced that we would be diverted because of fog. He said we might end up in Scotland if we had enough fuel to get there. In all my years of flying I have never met a pilot who was so pessimistic about his chances of getting home. It left quite an impression on me.
We set off from Gatwick Airport, London a week before Christmas, the nadir of the year for the package holiday firms, which is why our trip to Malaga was cheap enough for students to be able to afford it. Right from the airport to the hotel the Costa del Sol had a gimcrack, unfinished air to it. Buildings had been flung up, hastily plastered over, and a coat of whitewash slapped on. And Spanish plaster smelt of marzipan--I wonder why? It did not seem to augur well for structural integrity. Everything felt so different to the classic idea of the Mediterranean as a place of age-old charm, where things survived virtually unchanged for millennia. But the sun was shining, and the low, watery skies of London were far away. The balcony of my hotel room gave a panoramic view of a long strip of sea, an intense aquamarine blue, its very horizontality emphasised by the jagged profile of the concrete jungle that had sprouted up along the shore--hotels, residences, bars, viaducts.
Having inhaled a lung-full of salty ozone and traffic fumes, I went back into my room to have a shower. For some reason I left the towels in the bedroom. Once I had finished showering I blundering out of the bathroom with soap in my eyes and water dripping from my naked, 20-year-old body, and my outstretched hands encountered flesh--it was the maid, who had come in to make the bed. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked maiden of about sixteen years. She took one look, went a darn sight more rosy in the cheeks, muttered something quite Baroque in Spanish about the Madonna and a variety of Saints, and fled. I took it in my stride (as it were), reflecting that after all I hadn't invited her in or known of her presence.
Travel is as much about personalities as it is about places. In some accounts it is one's own personality that has to be dealt with, on others it is that of the people one travels with or meets. We were 30 students and we had two professors with us. John Thornes was a taciturn Yorkshireman, with a spitting, biting turn of phrase and a brilliant scientific mind. Nevertheless, he had something of the baby about him: in fact, his wife had sewn his mittens to a long piece of tape that she passed through the arms of his jacket so that when he took them off he would not lose them. Denis Brunsden, who later became the President of the World Association of Geomorphologists, was a flamboyant son of Devonshire, with the accent to match. He was decidedly vain and cultivated an academic demeanour that was entirely fake and was larded with earnest mock-sincerity. It was, however, amusing, especially at dinner table when he started reminiscing--providing one didn't take him too seriously.
Our first encounter with these two senior academics occurred when we attended an introductory field course in the Surrey hills, and they pushed us into a river "to find out what it was made of". The things that one could do with students in those days! Well, this time they took us to the coast at a place called Rincon de la Victoria. The beach was covered in a mysterious white deposit. Denis lined us up in front of him facing the distant mountains of the Alpujarras, while he stood gazing thoughtfully out to sea and lectured us on the origin of this deposit. Was it a sign of climatic change? What had made it so white? Could there have been chemical reactions associated with the post-Pleistocene cooling and warming phases? What he failed to notice was that behind his shoulders there was a very large cement works, which was belching out white fumes. In fact, everything was covered with a white deposit, and if we had stood there much longer we would have turned white as well. The coach-driver strolled over, pointed at the ground and said "cemento!" with a broad grin.
On our first day of seeing the geological sights we stopped for lunch at a roadside cantina. We were young, wet behind the ears and we had never been in a situation in which for an absurdly small sum of money one could buy a litre of rough, red peasant wine. So we all did, and we all drank it. Rather than making us drunk, it made us extremely tired. Spontaneously, the whole party fell asleep. Eventually, we awoke from this post-prandial nap and dragged ourselves back to the coach with throbbing temples and dry mouths. John Thornes had something of the Puritan in him, and as we were driving across the playa he decided to wake us up and suddenly shouted out, in a special voice that he reserved for such occasions "I hope you're all looking at that Miocene stratigraphic in-fill over there!" Unfortunately, the effect of this stern reproof was immediately ruined. His wife had forced him to bring his small son along with him, and Christopher immediately piped up "I can see it Daddy!", which made everyone else laugh.
We were taken to El Torcal, a spectacular massif of eroded limestone, wreathed in mist and haunted by flocks of crows. On the way we again stopped at a roadside cantina, but this time to buy chocolate. This was a heaven-sent occasion for the proprietors of this establishment. They sold about 30 chocolate bars at wildly inflated prices, but it was not until we were back on the coach and far down the road that we realised that they were extremely ancient confections, riddled with maggots and hardened to marble by extremes of heat and cold.
Our final lunch-stop was interrupted by one of those thunderstorms that make the Mediterranean landscape so wild and mobile. Within minutes we found ourselves up to our knees in water laced with a rich helping of terrarossa, that cascaded and bubbled around our legs and turned the landscape into a frothing russet-coloured morass. Local orange groves were devastated by the violence of nature, with broken branches and masses of colourful fruit strewn across the muddy ground. There was nothing left to do but wade back to the hotel and enjoy a glass of sangria on the terrace, looking at the watery sky and the grey mass of the sea.
Despite the difficulties there were many things to remember about these visits to Spain: in particular, the Roman aqueduct at Nerja, three arrays of arches spanning a breathtaking V-shaped ravine with the azure line of the sea as a backdrop; women singing ancient melodies as they did the housework in the small Andalusian towns with their cobbled streets and whitewashed walls, evenings of dancing to flamenco music and drinking sangria and Fundador brandy.
On the way back after the first trip the pilot of our charter flight announced that we would be diverted because of fog. He said we might end up in Scotland if we had enough fuel to get there. In all my years of flying I have never met a pilot who was so pessimistic about his chances of getting home. It left quite an impression on me.
Siena
Siena: no medium-sized town in the entire world is more spectacularly beautiful. But can you imagine what it is like to live in such a place and experience its beauty every day? Siena di ogni cosa piena--"Siena is full of everything", as the saying goes.
The origins, and therefore the underground parts, of Siena are Etruscan and thus predate the Romans. The superstructure dates from 1200-1700, perhaps with its apogee in the 1400s, before the Sienese Republic was subjugated by Florence.
Siena is divided into 17 contrade--neighbourhoods, or parishes. There were once 23, but some were amalgamated. They have names like il Leocorno 'The Unicorn', l'Onda 'The Wave', la Tartuca 'The Tortoise', la torre 'The Tower', la Selva 'The Wilderness'. Each one has a parish church, a social centre, a fountain for civil, non-religious baptisms (i.e. for being received into the community), a bar, a Captain, a Prior, and a small army of people dressed in colourful mediaeval costume who are extremely good at playing the snare-drum and throwing flags up into the air--because they do it every day of the year. It is a matter of pride. I worked in the contrada of the Tartuca and the contradaoli practised every afternoon under the portico of the cavernous church Sant'Agostino, where that they could be satisfied by the drums' reverberating echo.
Young men will carry a baby's bottle at their belts, full of fizzy Vernaccia, to show that as infants they were weaned on the white wine of San Gimignano, in Sienese territory.
There is an extremely elaborate heraldry, as each contrada has its own colours and ornate flag. All the flags are on sale at stalls around the centre of Siena. Tourists buy those that they think are most attractive and wear them as scarves when they walk around the city. This is a big mistake, for wearing the colours of an 'enemy' contrada is a serious misdemeanour in Siena. A person may be jostled, insulted or liquid may be poured onto his head. Barmen will refuse to serve a person in the 'wrong' colours.
All of this rivalry stems from the Mediaeval need to mobilise the parishes in order to provide a Sienese army against the Florentines, Perugini, Viterbesi and any other potential invaders. It still functions in much the same way. On the façade of the city hall in Perugia (a historical ally of Florence) there are the hinges of one of the gates to the city of Siena. Things have not been right between the two cities ever since. At present the Strada dei due mari, a road that runs straight between Siena and Perugia, does not have signs saying 'Perugia' in Sienese territory, nor does it have signs saying 'Siena' in Perugino territory.
The Sienese were finally conquered by the Florentines in 1556. There is a painting in Palazzo Pubblico, which dominates the Piazza del Campo, of prominent Senesi expiring under the Florentine onslaught. It is redolent with shame. In an effort to compensate, the Senesi will take visitors to Montaperti, an unassuming hillock with a shrub on top of it, visible from the Strada dei due mari, and they will point to the River Arbia and say that Dante recorded in the Inferno that it ran red with the blood of the Florentines, but that was in 1297. Once, I parked briefly in one of the squares of Siena. The inhabitants came out and kicked my car--because it had a Florence numberplate.
A visit to the Rector of the University of Siena is an experience. In his room there are the shields and portraits of previous rectors dating back to about 1310. When I visited, the incumbent was Luigi Berlinguer, who was later Minister of Education, a member of one of the most famous contemporary Italian political families, though Sardinian in origin, to be exact from the windy peninsula of Stintino in the far northwest of the island. It was a Sienese who got me my current job, Piero Tosi, Rector and President of the Italian Council of Rectors, who was sufficiently friendly with the Florentines that they could prevail upon him for a favour. I was lucky: shortly afterwards he was impeached and removed from office, the victim of a political manouevre.
Senese life hinges on the Palio, a horse race that purports to be Mediaeval, but in reality dates from the 1600s. In any event, no doubt there were such races before the seventeenth century. Thousands of people cram into the Piazza del Campo and, after four hours of mediaeval pagentry, there are three laps of the square. There are eleven horses, all highly-strung Arab stallions ridden by Sardinian jockeys dressed in the heraldic costumes of the contrade (which of the 17 run is determined some days before by drawing lots). The Palio is run on 2nd July and 16th August each year. It is one of the most symbolic events of any kind anywhere in the world. The politics of it occupy the entire year, daytime and night-time, every day. There are usually false starts and it is not always shown olive on television if it is not run to time before the 8 o'clock news. In the piazza it is followed by mass hysteria and fighting between victorious and losing contrade. The winning contrada holds a dinner for 1600 people, and those who eat at high table are the Prior, the Captain, the Jockey and the horse. Before the race each horse is taken into the parish church and blessed. A guard is mounted on it overnight to avoid doping by enemy contrade. Much betting and bribing do nevertheless go on. Jockeys have been badly mauled by contradaioli who accuse them of conniving with the enemy in order to lose the race (for a big but secret payment, of course).
Anthropologists who have studied Siena have never found anything remotely similar anywhere else in the world. The city is divided rigidly into people who belong and those who don't. Even people from two kilometres outside the city limits will specify non sono contradaiolo--"I am not one of them"....or conversely "I am...". To those who don't belong, the attitude of the true Senesi is incomprehensible, frustrating, weird. Some who have had to deal with it in terms of personal offence find it enraging.
Food and drink have a primacy in Siena that verges on religious fervour. Every day at ten minutes to one in the afternoon the traffic goes mad as people struggle to get home in time, or to a restaurant, and install their legs under a table with a damask tablecloth on which there is a plate of pici alla lepre, thick Sienese spaghetti with hare meat sauce. From the Province of Siena come the Nobile da Montepulciano, a strong, noble red wine, and Brunello da Montalcino, probably the most seductive wine in the world, and riotously expensive (especially the hundred-year-old bottles that are opened each year to celebrate the new vintage).
Siena has many secret places, and there are even more in the surrounding countryside. For example, few tourists are aware that in the grand marble stairway up to the baptistry of the cathedral there is a point where a small basalt cross is inlayed into the white marble, about 4 cm square. This is where Saint Catherine of Siena fell over and hurt her leg. Her house is on the other side of the hill, and it is a shrine. Piazza del Campo has the form of a cape: it is reckoned to be the form of her mantle, laid down to protect the city.
Siena invented capitalism. The world's oldest bank is the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472 (it was followed three years later by the RoLo, the Savings Bank of Romagna and Lombardia). The Monte dei Paschi has a mediaeval headquarters that resembles the council chamber of a castle. It is partly owned by the city of Siena and it owns half of the property in the city. The relationship is a very odd one. It leads to immense riches and an unbearable smugness. The Senesi genuinely believe that the world revolves around Siena. The southern Italian journalist Orlando Ruggero told Michael Foot, who was then the leader of the British Labour Party, that "my people are vain, but they are not proud". Well perhaps the Senesi are both vain and proud. They have a superiority complex which comes directly from pure, undiluted provincialism, the refusal to consider anything beyond the bounds of the Province of Siena in anything other than Sienese terms. Such is the wealth in Siena that of a winter's morning the shop assistants can be seen sweeping the front steps of their shops, dressed in expensive furs, their fingers encrusted in gold.
The Monte dei Paschi finances the concerts at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. This baroque concert hall is a place where some of the world's finest classical musicians play; the harpsichordist Kenneth Gilbert, for example, is a frequent visitor. But it is almost impossible to get tickets. They are given away by the bank on a 'grace and favour' basis. All that is available to the music lover is a place in the 'gods' where, from the third terrace one can stand and look down from an oval hole in the wall at a sea of fur coats far below. The Sienese are obdurate philistines and those who go to concerts do so in order to flaunt their wealth and be seen.
I was married (though not for the first time) in Palazzo Pubblico, in the Hall of the Tapestries. It was hard to keep the tourists out during the ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Ristorante Marsili. This is located in Palazzo Marsili, which is a 14th century building with an ancient Etruscan cellar full of rare wines in dusty, cobwebby bottles. The meal was without exception the best I have ever eaten. It was a tour de force of the highest gastronomic calibre and the choice of wines was inspired by genius. If nothing else, I shall remember that meal with satisfaction.
In Siena a hospital was founded in the 1300s in front of the cathedral. It was frescoed by the Sienese masters of the 15th century. It is now a museum of breathtaking beauty, but until a very few years ago the only way to see the frescoes was to fall ill, or be a doctor or nurse.
The hue of the bricks of Siena has given its name to a russet brown colour used by artists throughout the world. It is particularly elegant. But what is it like to live in such a city? For the non-contradaiolo it is extremely difficult. The beauty is oppressive, and so is the provincial routine of daily life. Siena will never admit it, but it lives under the cloud of the oppression of Florence, which is a much less provincial place. So the Sienese have turned southwards. Everywhere there are the signs of Romulus, Remus and the suckling she-wolf, and 'SPQR', all of which are visual references to Rome, which Siena has adopted as an ally against Florence. It is a curiously one-sided alliance, as Rome does not need Siena, a provincial city--too far away to be part of Rome's orbit, which does not really extend into Tuscany and peters out at Viterbo, still in Lazio.
Yet there are so many enchanted places around Siena. Down the Cassian Way, there is Buonconvento, four-square walls and a tiny but exquisite art museum with splendid mediaeval paintings; branching off to the west there is the Monastery of Monteoliveto Maggiore, serene and beautiful amid the cypress trees. Further south still there is the vast panoramic extinct volcano of the Amiata, with its thousand-year-old villages, such as Arcidosso. Then there are the outliers, such as Radic fani, neck of an eroded volcano, which sticks out of the clay plains like a thumb, and has a ruined castle perched on top. Montepulciano, with its four-square palazzi and streets that follow the contours around the hill on which the town is built (for many years it was my favourite town in the whole world). There are so many such places, and all of them have superb food--and good food leads to conviviality, a Senese virtue.
The origins, and therefore the underground parts, of Siena are Etruscan and thus predate the Romans. The superstructure dates from 1200-1700, perhaps with its apogee in the 1400s, before the Sienese Republic was subjugated by Florence.
Siena is divided into 17 contrade--neighbourhoods, or parishes. There were once 23, but some were amalgamated. They have names like il Leocorno 'The Unicorn', l'Onda 'The Wave', la Tartuca 'The Tortoise', la torre 'The Tower', la Selva 'The Wilderness'. Each one has a parish church, a social centre, a fountain for civil, non-religious baptisms (i.e. for being received into the community), a bar, a Captain, a Prior, and a small army of people dressed in colourful mediaeval costume who are extremely good at playing the snare-drum and throwing flags up into the air--because they do it every day of the year. It is a matter of pride. I worked in the contrada of the Tartuca and the contradaoli practised every afternoon under the portico of the cavernous church Sant'Agostino, where that they could be satisfied by the drums' reverberating echo.
Young men will carry a baby's bottle at their belts, full of fizzy Vernaccia, to show that as infants they were weaned on the white wine of San Gimignano, in Sienese territory.
There is an extremely elaborate heraldry, as each contrada has its own colours and ornate flag. All the flags are on sale at stalls around the centre of Siena. Tourists buy those that they think are most attractive and wear them as scarves when they walk around the city. This is a big mistake, for wearing the colours of an 'enemy' contrada is a serious misdemeanour in Siena. A person may be jostled, insulted or liquid may be poured onto his head. Barmen will refuse to serve a person in the 'wrong' colours.
All of this rivalry stems from the Mediaeval need to mobilise the parishes in order to provide a Sienese army against the Florentines, Perugini, Viterbesi and any other potential invaders. It still functions in much the same way. On the façade of the city hall in Perugia (a historical ally of Florence) there are the hinges of one of the gates to the city of Siena. Things have not been right between the two cities ever since. At present the Strada dei due mari, a road that runs straight between Siena and Perugia, does not have signs saying 'Perugia' in Sienese territory, nor does it have signs saying 'Siena' in Perugino territory.
The Sienese were finally conquered by the Florentines in 1556. There is a painting in Palazzo Pubblico, which dominates the Piazza del Campo, of prominent Senesi expiring under the Florentine onslaught. It is redolent with shame. In an effort to compensate, the Senesi will take visitors to Montaperti, an unassuming hillock with a shrub on top of it, visible from the Strada dei due mari, and they will point to the River Arbia and say that Dante recorded in the Inferno that it ran red with the blood of the Florentines, but that was in 1297. Once, I parked briefly in one of the squares of Siena. The inhabitants came out and kicked my car--because it had a Florence numberplate.
A visit to the Rector of the University of Siena is an experience. In his room there are the shields and portraits of previous rectors dating back to about 1310. When I visited, the incumbent was Luigi Berlinguer, who was later Minister of Education, a member of one of the most famous contemporary Italian political families, though Sardinian in origin, to be exact from the windy peninsula of Stintino in the far northwest of the island. It was a Sienese who got me my current job, Piero Tosi, Rector and President of the Italian Council of Rectors, who was sufficiently friendly with the Florentines that they could prevail upon him for a favour. I was lucky: shortly afterwards he was impeached and removed from office, the victim of a political manouevre.
Senese life hinges on the Palio, a horse race that purports to be Mediaeval, but in reality dates from the 1600s. In any event, no doubt there were such races before the seventeenth century. Thousands of people cram into the Piazza del Campo and, after four hours of mediaeval pagentry, there are three laps of the square. There are eleven horses, all highly-strung Arab stallions ridden by Sardinian jockeys dressed in the heraldic costumes of the contrade (which of the 17 run is determined some days before by drawing lots). The Palio is run on 2nd July and 16th August each year. It is one of the most symbolic events of any kind anywhere in the world. The politics of it occupy the entire year, daytime and night-time, every day. There are usually false starts and it is not always shown olive on television if it is not run to time before the 8 o'clock news. In the piazza it is followed by mass hysteria and fighting between victorious and losing contrade. The winning contrada holds a dinner for 1600 people, and those who eat at high table are the Prior, the Captain, the Jockey and the horse. Before the race each horse is taken into the parish church and blessed. A guard is mounted on it overnight to avoid doping by enemy contrade. Much betting and bribing do nevertheless go on. Jockeys have been badly mauled by contradaioli who accuse them of conniving with the enemy in order to lose the race (for a big but secret payment, of course).
Anthropologists who have studied Siena have never found anything remotely similar anywhere else in the world. The city is divided rigidly into people who belong and those who don't. Even people from two kilometres outside the city limits will specify non sono contradaiolo--"I am not one of them"....or conversely "I am...". To those who don't belong, the attitude of the true Senesi is incomprehensible, frustrating, weird. Some who have had to deal with it in terms of personal offence find it enraging.
Food and drink have a primacy in Siena that verges on religious fervour. Every day at ten minutes to one in the afternoon the traffic goes mad as people struggle to get home in time, or to a restaurant, and install their legs under a table with a damask tablecloth on which there is a plate of pici alla lepre, thick Sienese spaghetti with hare meat sauce. From the Province of Siena come the Nobile da Montepulciano, a strong, noble red wine, and Brunello da Montalcino, probably the most seductive wine in the world, and riotously expensive (especially the hundred-year-old bottles that are opened each year to celebrate the new vintage).
Siena has many secret places, and there are even more in the surrounding countryside. For example, few tourists are aware that in the grand marble stairway up to the baptistry of the cathedral there is a point where a small basalt cross is inlayed into the white marble, about 4 cm square. This is where Saint Catherine of Siena fell over and hurt her leg. Her house is on the other side of the hill, and it is a shrine. Piazza del Campo has the form of a cape: it is reckoned to be the form of her mantle, laid down to protect the city.
Siena invented capitalism. The world's oldest bank is the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472 (it was followed three years later by the RoLo, the Savings Bank of Romagna and Lombardia). The Monte dei Paschi has a mediaeval headquarters that resembles the council chamber of a castle. It is partly owned by the city of Siena and it owns half of the property in the city. The relationship is a very odd one. It leads to immense riches and an unbearable smugness. The Senesi genuinely believe that the world revolves around Siena. The southern Italian journalist Orlando Ruggero told Michael Foot, who was then the leader of the British Labour Party, that "my people are vain, but they are not proud". Well perhaps the Senesi are both vain and proud. They have a superiority complex which comes directly from pure, undiluted provincialism, the refusal to consider anything beyond the bounds of the Province of Siena in anything other than Sienese terms. Such is the wealth in Siena that of a winter's morning the shop assistants can be seen sweeping the front steps of their shops, dressed in expensive furs, their fingers encrusted in gold.
The Monte dei Paschi finances the concerts at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. This baroque concert hall is a place where some of the world's finest classical musicians play; the harpsichordist Kenneth Gilbert, for example, is a frequent visitor. But it is almost impossible to get tickets. They are given away by the bank on a 'grace and favour' basis. All that is available to the music lover is a place in the 'gods' where, from the third terrace one can stand and look down from an oval hole in the wall at a sea of fur coats far below. The Sienese are obdurate philistines and those who go to concerts do so in order to flaunt their wealth and be seen.
I was married (though not for the first time) in Palazzo Pubblico, in the Hall of the Tapestries. It was hard to keep the tourists out during the ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Ristorante Marsili. This is located in Palazzo Marsili, which is a 14th century building with an ancient Etruscan cellar full of rare wines in dusty, cobwebby bottles. The meal was without exception the best I have ever eaten. It was a tour de force of the highest gastronomic calibre and the choice of wines was inspired by genius. If nothing else, I shall remember that meal with satisfaction.
In Siena a hospital was founded in the 1300s in front of the cathedral. It was frescoed by the Sienese masters of the 15th century. It is now a museum of breathtaking beauty, but until a very few years ago the only way to see the frescoes was to fall ill, or be a doctor or nurse.
The hue of the bricks of Siena has given its name to a russet brown colour used by artists throughout the world. It is particularly elegant. But what is it like to live in such a city? For the non-contradaiolo it is extremely difficult. The beauty is oppressive, and so is the provincial routine of daily life. Siena will never admit it, but it lives under the cloud of the oppression of Florence, which is a much less provincial place. So the Sienese have turned southwards. Everywhere there are the signs of Romulus, Remus and the suckling she-wolf, and 'SPQR', all of which are visual references to Rome, which Siena has adopted as an ally against Florence. It is a curiously one-sided alliance, as Rome does not need Siena, a provincial city--too far away to be part of Rome's orbit, which does not really extend into Tuscany and peters out at Viterbo, still in Lazio.
Yet there are so many enchanted places around Siena. Down the Cassian Way, there is Buonconvento, four-square walls and a tiny but exquisite art museum with splendid mediaeval paintings; branching off to the west there is the Monastery of Monteoliveto Maggiore, serene and beautiful amid the cypress trees. Further south still there is the vast panoramic extinct volcano of the Amiata, with its thousand-year-old villages, such as Arcidosso. Then there are the outliers, such as Radic fani, neck of an eroded volcano, which sticks out of the clay plains like a thumb, and has a ruined castle perched on top. Montepulciano, with its four-square palazzi and streets that follow the contours around the hill on which the town is built (for many years it was my favourite town in the whole world). There are so many such places, and all of them have superb food--and good food leads to conviviality, a Senese virtue.
Shark's fin soup in Kowloon Tong
In 2001 I was invited to the Baptist University of Hong Kong as part of a Commission convened to advise on a new master's degree. I set off from Hartford, Connecticut, changed planes in San Francisco and eventually arrived at Chek Lap Kok airport after 17 hours of flying. Here are some of my impressions of that short visit to the territory.
Asian 747s lumber into the sky laden so heavily that it seems like a miracle that they will ever get off the ground. The flight lasted 14 hours and there were five in-flight movies. United Airlines is world famous for the poor quality of its catering and its instant noodles really hit the nadir: lukewarm water poured into a waxed paper cup to produce a gluey mass that could only be swallowed by making contortions reminiscent of the tortured postures of a Gaudia-Brezhka statue.
I arrived on a wet Sunday evening. My instructions were clearly laid out on a sheet of paper. I got off the metro at Prince of Wales Square and confidently walked out of the station into the tepid drizzle of a spring evening in Kowloon Tong. The instructions said "walk down the road with the bridge above it to Renfrew Avenue": and what a comforting British name, betokening order, propriety and well-swept middle-class suburbia. Well, to begin with there were three roads, and each one of them had a bridge above it. I turned back to the station. All metro stations have maps of the local area in them, and of course this one did too. Where was Renfrew Avenue? Unfortunately, all the street names were printed in Putong Hua. Eventually, by waving some more instructions printed in Chinese at a taxi driver, I found the Baptist University hostel and my room for the night.
Next morning, I drew back the curtains and there, from the ninth floor, was a splendid panoramic view of the Waterloo Barracks. The British forces had, of course, gone, but there was a detachment of the Chinese Red Army, resplendent in their olive-green uniforms, with their hands clad in white cotton gloves that swung rhythmically from side to side as they marched. The first day was spent at the University in briefing meetings and tours of the Biology Department. This had its greenhouse on the top of the nine-storey science building. The structure was heavily reinforced against typhoons and had the sort of glass that looked as if it could resist a bazooka attack. The greenhouse was used for growing seedlings, which looked curiously weedy and pathetic in this translucent strongroom. Likewise, when we received a guided tour of the University's bonsai collection it felt as if we were venturing into a Liliputian forest.
The other foreigner on the Commission was an ecology professor from John Moores University in Liverpool, England. He was the perfect Scouser (which is what people from Liverpool are called): gregarious, down-to-earth, humorous and a good companion. When the day was over our host, Professor Ming Wong, took us to the local pub, which was a bold oriental attempt to imitate the traditional English hostelry, all black beams and white lath-and-plaster. It bore the unlikely name of "The Billy Boozer". A Chinese waiter brought us glasses of Tsing Tao beer, brewed on the mainland, and my Scouse companion looked intently at him and asked "United or City?" The waiter looked back impassively and quietly replied "United". How the Liverpool lad knew that our waiter was a fan of Manchester football will forever remain a mystery to me.
The Special Economic Territory, or former colony, of Hong Kong is a marvel of vertical building. But it is also remarkable for its transportation. The buses, for example, have 161 seats in them. Some are open-topped vehicles and one can sit on the upper deck and gaze up at the forest of skyscrapers in an aerial panorama that changes its perspective like a kaleidoscope every time the bus rounds a corner. Below ground, the metro runs with extraordinary efficiency and stops in the stations with millimetric precision. Perhaps it is the height of the buildings and the efficiency of the transportation that makes Hong Kong seem much less cluttered than one would expect given the density of population.
We took the ferry across the bustling, steamy stretch of water between Kowloon Tong and Hong Kong Island, and then the Swiss-built funicular railway to the top of Lion Peak. The walk around the park situated on this lowly mountain affords some spectacular views of the collection of skyscrapers, with the steep tropical slopes that seem to plunge into their bases. In fact, such is the wetness of the climate, steepness of the slopes and fragility of the natural environment that the Hong Kong Government has gone to enormous lengths to protect slopes. The Geotechnical Engineering Department remains one of the most powerful agencies in the territory and everywhere there are signs of slope stabilisation work. On the most humble level it seems that every patch of undergrowth is home to a person in a large, conical hat who stumps around making sure there are no signs of instability.
Hong Kong Chinese tend to bear adopted British names, which are decades, if not centuries behind the fashions in Britain. For the women these are Milly, Prudence, Priscilla, Maude and so on, giving impressions of ladies with coiled hair and 1940s dresses. Our host was Mrs Pauline Ma, a severe matron with a job in university quality assurance. A rather more affable person was the Rector, who took us to lunch in an up-market restaurant where the revolving table served us pieces of a roast piglet that had been glazed and carefully cut into cubes so that it resembled a porcine mosaic.
The search for the exotic led us to the six-storey shopping centre in Kowloon Tong, but it contained the same drably uniform chain stores as one can find anywhere else in the world. Marks & Spencer differed from Paris or London only by having the prices of the same goods in Hong Kong dollars, not euros or pounds. Even the obligatory Italian restaurant differed only in the inability of whoever wrote the menu to spell 'tagliatelle'. So we retreated to a proper Chinese restaurant and had watery soup with fibrous pieces of shark's fin floating in it. At our next meal, in a Japanese restaurant, I photographed the page of the menu that offered "Japanese flied beancrud with melted cheese". The transmogrification of the edible bean-curd to the disgusting beancrud, appropriately flied in a pan, certainly gave a new aspect to an old dish.
Clearly, for commerce it was necessary to find a few locales less influenced by the crushing hand of international standardisation, so we headed for the Chinese quarter. And there the shops were small and picturesque, full of silks and carvings, half-made suits and hand-crafted shoes. Yet at the entrance to the quarter there was an Irish pub in which one could buy a tee-shirt with 'Guinness' written on it in Putong Hua, as well as a glass of the Irish 'Liffey-water' that tasted just as it would in Europe.
I found the Hong Kong Chinese to be formal, hospitable and industrious. The only thing they seemed to lack was a sense of relativity and irony, both very necessary when dealing with the contrasts of the modern world.
Asian 747s lumber into the sky laden so heavily that it seems like a miracle that they will ever get off the ground. The flight lasted 14 hours and there were five in-flight movies. United Airlines is world famous for the poor quality of its catering and its instant noodles really hit the nadir: lukewarm water poured into a waxed paper cup to produce a gluey mass that could only be swallowed by making contortions reminiscent of the tortured postures of a Gaudia-Brezhka statue.
I arrived on a wet Sunday evening. My instructions were clearly laid out on a sheet of paper. I got off the metro at Prince of Wales Square and confidently walked out of the station into the tepid drizzle of a spring evening in Kowloon Tong. The instructions said "walk down the road with the bridge above it to Renfrew Avenue": and what a comforting British name, betokening order, propriety and well-swept middle-class suburbia. Well, to begin with there were three roads, and each one of them had a bridge above it. I turned back to the station. All metro stations have maps of the local area in them, and of course this one did too. Where was Renfrew Avenue? Unfortunately, all the street names were printed in Putong Hua. Eventually, by waving some more instructions printed in Chinese at a taxi driver, I found the Baptist University hostel and my room for the night.
Next morning, I drew back the curtains and there, from the ninth floor, was a splendid panoramic view of the Waterloo Barracks. The British forces had, of course, gone, but there was a detachment of the Chinese Red Army, resplendent in their olive-green uniforms, with their hands clad in white cotton gloves that swung rhythmically from side to side as they marched. The first day was spent at the University in briefing meetings and tours of the Biology Department. This had its greenhouse on the top of the nine-storey science building. The structure was heavily reinforced against typhoons and had the sort of glass that looked as if it could resist a bazooka attack. The greenhouse was used for growing seedlings, which looked curiously weedy and pathetic in this translucent strongroom. Likewise, when we received a guided tour of the University's bonsai collection it felt as if we were venturing into a Liliputian forest.
The other foreigner on the Commission was an ecology professor from John Moores University in Liverpool, England. He was the perfect Scouser (which is what people from Liverpool are called): gregarious, down-to-earth, humorous and a good companion. When the day was over our host, Professor Ming Wong, took us to the local pub, which was a bold oriental attempt to imitate the traditional English hostelry, all black beams and white lath-and-plaster. It bore the unlikely name of "The Billy Boozer". A Chinese waiter brought us glasses of Tsing Tao beer, brewed on the mainland, and my Scouse companion looked intently at him and asked "United or City?" The waiter looked back impassively and quietly replied "United". How the Liverpool lad knew that our waiter was a fan of Manchester football will forever remain a mystery to me.
The Special Economic Territory, or former colony, of Hong Kong is a marvel of vertical building. But it is also remarkable for its transportation. The buses, for example, have 161 seats in them. Some are open-topped vehicles and one can sit on the upper deck and gaze up at the forest of skyscrapers in an aerial panorama that changes its perspective like a kaleidoscope every time the bus rounds a corner. Below ground, the metro runs with extraordinary efficiency and stops in the stations with millimetric precision. Perhaps it is the height of the buildings and the efficiency of the transportation that makes Hong Kong seem much less cluttered than one would expect given the density of population.
We took the ferry across the bustling, steamy stretch of water between Kowloon Tong and Hong Kong Island, and then the Swiss-built funicular railway to the top of Lion Peak. The walk around the park situated on this lowly mountain affords some spectacular views of the collection of skyscrapers, with the steep tropical slopes that seem to plunge into their bases. In fact, such is the wetness of the climate, steepness of the slopes and fragility of the natural environment that the Hong Kong Government has gone to enormous lengths to protect slopes. The Geotechnical Engineering Department remains one of the most powerful agencies in the territory and everywhere there are signs of slope stabilisation work. On the most humble level it seems that every patch of undergrowth is home to a person in a large, conical hat who stumps around making sure there are no signs of instability.
Hong Kong Chinese tend to bear adopted British names, which are decades, if not centuries behind the fashions in Britain. For the women these are Milly, Prudence, Priscilla, Maude and so on, giving impressions of ladies with coiled hair and 1940s dresses. Our host was Mrs Pauline Ma, a severe matron with a job in university quality assurance. A rather more affable person was the Rector, who took us to lunch in an up-market restaurant where the revolving table served us pieces of a roast piglet that had been glazed and carefully cut into cubes so that it resembled a porcine mosaic.
The search for the exotic led us to the six-storey shopping centre in Kowloon Tong, but it contained the same drably uniform chain stores as one can find anywhere else in the world. Marks & Spencer differed from Paris or London only by having the prices of the same goods in Hong Kong dollars, not euros or pounds. Even the obligatory Italian restaurant differed only in the inability of whoever wrote the menu to spell 'tagliatelle'. So we retreated to a proper Chinese restaurant and had watery soup with fibrous pieces of shark's fin floating in it. At our next meal, in a Japanese restaurant, I photographed the page of the menu that offered "Japanese flied beancrud with melted cheese". The transmogrification of the edible bean-curd to the disgusting beancrud, appropriately flied in a pan, certainly gave a new aspect to an old dish.
Clearly, for commerce it was necessary to find a few locales less influenced by the crushing hand of international standardisation, so we headed for the Chinese quarter. And there the shops were small and picturesque, full of silks and carvings, half-made suits and hand-crafted shoes. Yet at the entrance to the quarter there was an Irish pub in which one could buy a tee-shirt with 'Guinness' written on it in Putong Hua, as well as a glass of the Irish 'Liffey-water' that tasted just as it would in Europe.
I found the Hong Kong Chinese to be formal, hospitable and industrious. The only thing they seemed to lack was a sense of relativity and irony, both very necessary when dealing with the contrasts of the modern world.
Santa Barbara
In 1983 I was an Assistant Professor without tenure-track. At the time I had no prospects of a permanent job. I possessed a J-1 (temporary) visa to the United States, half an office at the University of Massachusetts, a fairly short curriculum vitae, and an optimism born of desperation. I was in America and there was no going back to Europe: my life in Italy, living off my savings, had been cut short by earthquake, while in Britain I had a sheaf of 319 job applications and 319 rejection letters: "Dear Dr Alexander, ...thank you for applying ... we regret to inform you ... hope you find an alternative position, etc. etc." How dreary it all seemed! But now I had a humble apartment in North Amherst and a heavy teaching load to keep me busy. Like good Assistant Professors everywhere I never said 'no' to anything my superiors told me to do.
In the meantime I looked around for a job. I applied for every position that was advertised in the academic press, and that I felt remotely qualified to do. Thus I ended up being invited for interview at the University of California at Santa Barbara, for a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.
A former student of mine, who came from the Los Angeles area, offered to pick me up at LAX airport. But then the hassles started. On Saturday it snowed so abundantly that there was no going anywhere. Fortunately, there was enough of a thaw that on the Sunday I could drop down to Hartford International Airport (proudly called 'international' because it had one flight to Canada per day and one to Mexico per week) and catch a rescheduled flight to the West Coast. There was considerable confusion in the terminal but I ended up on the plane and in a seat, which is more than half the passengers managed. In the end, a stewardess came along and asked: "for a bonus of $150 who will get off and travel tomorrow?" There was a tense silence. She went away, consulted with someone, came back and asked "For a bonus of $200 who'll get off?" There was another tense silence, which was eventually broken by a passenger from the back, who said in a level tone: "five hundred dollars". After some negotiation the matter was sorted out. Some passengers got off, to the sound of applause from the rest of us, and we began the journey to California.
Much of the journey across the great heartland of America offers little that is worth seeing: agribusiness farmland, a few homesteads and the occasional small town. But after Denver there is the great crevice of the Grand Canyon, and eventually one flies down Death Valley, very dry, dusty, eerie and deserted, with no roads or buildings anywhere to be seen.
I arrived in the evening and my obliging student and I spent most of the night driving around Hollywood (so that I could put my foot in the shoe-prints of the stars on the Boulevard pavement), walking along the sands of the Pacific shore at Santa Monica and otherwise soaking up the laid-back West Coast atmosphere. It took much driving to get around Los Angeles--twenty suburbs in search of a city.
At six in the morning I went back to LAX to catch a flight to Santa Barbara. I travelled on Golden West Airlines flight 2028. How Golden West managed to have such a high flight number is a mystery, as I am convinced that they only had one aircraft, or at the most two. I sat in a small waiting room with four middle-aged ladies and eventually a man in uniform came in, shook our hands and introduced himself as the pilot. We carried our luggage onto the runway and he produced a key, opened the baggage hold of a small turbo-prop aircraft and put the bags in. We climbed aboard and the plane took off, roaring furiously.
It was an interesting flight. The aircraft was piloted by a diminutive blond girl who appeared to be under instruction. The four middle-aged ladies, who were all travelling together, became very excited at the sights of southern California. When one said "Wow! Look at that!", they all scrambled over to one side and the aircraft tilted precariously as the pilot shouted above the roar of the engine "Left hand down a bit!" to the girl who was flying us. Our altitude was quite low and in the early morning light it was a good opportunity to see how landslides were eating away at urban subdivisions and how these were eating away at the chaparral vegetation.
We landed and I reclaimed my luggage in a very few minutes. It was almost 9 a.m. and a colleague was waiting to pick me up. The University at Santa Barbara is five minutes' drive from the airport and that was the amount of time it took between arriving and having my first brush with the hyperactive, competitive, exploitative culture of Southern California. We cruised into the parking lot behind one of the lecture theatres and I was ushered through the door into a room filled with 175 undergraduate students. I knew I was expected to give a demonstration lecture and was prepared, though I was not exactly ready to start lecturing within ten minutes of getting off the plane. Nevertheless, it went sufficiently well and after 50 minutes I stopped and the students asked a few questions and then all trouped out. Several of them left pieces of paper on the seats, and idly I picked one up. It said: "This candidate is (a) excellent, (b) good, (c) mediocre, (d) bad, (e) terrible". I never did find out what my average score was.
The University of California at Santa Barbara is an odd institution in an odd city. Santa Barbara is somewhat isolated from the rest of southern and central California. It is the playground of the rich and has sky-high property prices, which effectively exclude the vast urban proletariats of Los Angeles further to the south, the blacks and hispanics of Watts and Sherman Oaks. In the 1980s its most famous resident was Ronald Reagan, and one could go and admire the heavily guarded entrance to his ranch. In the late 1700s the Spanish settlers of the original California had built a mission, an imposing, whitewashed stone building in the style of Mexican adobe. However, this was the only man-made structure in Santa Barbara that predated 1935. Surprisingly, the city had a thriving Historical Society, though one that was forced to concentrate on the previous half century, as that was all the history there was.
The University is situated, in effect, on the beach: it is a University of surfing, a place of perpetual sunshine, the Beach Boys, dolphins, palm trees, and all the impedimenta of Pacific Coast recreation. At least, that was what it looked like. The reality was somewhat different. To begin with, there was a seismically active fault with a surface expression that ran diagonally across the campus, and it was slowly pulling apart the corner of the building that contained the Geology Department, which at any time it could have demolished in a high magnitude tremor. Moreover, the University was a place of ferocious competition. Throughout my two-day visit I found that most of my possible future colleagues were too harassed and under pressure to devote time to chatting with me. This formed an odd contrast with the air of slow, credulous hedonism that California likes to cultivate.
I finished the first day of my two-day visit without particular difficulties and retired to motel on a freeway somewhere outside the city to spend the night. I woke early with the sun streaming through the blinds of my room and the telephone on the bedside table monotonously ringing. Two colleagues (an elderly gay couple who shared a post in the Environmental Science Department) were waiting in the lobby to continue the interview. It was barely 6 a.m.
On the second day I was hosted by the late David Simonett, an Australian geographer who was Dean of the Faculty of Science. He had the classic antipodean brashness--or straight-talking manner if you prefer. Yet somehow the British colonial connection worked and we got on quite well together. At lunchtime I gave a research seminar and completely misjudged my audience. I also went on too long--the classic mistake of the neophyte. Worse still, I was not aware that I had to give up the seminar room to the next class until a professor barged in wearing an expression of high indignation and practically shouldered me out of the room. Afterwards, Simonett turned to me and said "Well, you blew it then!" So with that abrupt valediction I knew I would never get the job, and I must admit I was considerably relieved. I suspect that when a situation is not right a self-protection mechanism causes us to screw things up, and that is certainly what happened in this case.
The West Coast was not for me and after flirting for a while with the highly prestigious Johns Hopkins University I ended up being taken onto the permanent staff of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a good, capacious public "multi-versity" and one that has produced its share of Nobel Prizewinners.
After the visit of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain to Santa Barbara the red carpet she alighted onto at the airport was cut into small squares and sold to the Santa Barbarans. How tacky can you get! One of the last things I saw before I left the city was a bar, situated directly outside the gates of the University and called "The English Department". It was started by a British man who was denied tenure in the English Department, and that was his poetic revenge.
In the meantime I looked around for a job. I applied for every position that was advertised in the academic press, and that I felt remotely qualified to do. Thus I ended up being invited for interview at the University of California at Santa Barbara, for a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.
A former student of mine, who came from the Los Angeles area, offered to pick me up at LAX airport. But then the hassles started. On Saturday it snowed so abundantly that there was no going anywhere. Fortunately, there was enough of a thaw that on the Sunday I could drop down to Hartford International Airport (proudly called 'international' because it had one flight to Canada per day and one to Mexico per week) and catch a rescheduled flight to the West Coast. There was considerable confusion in the terminal but I ended up on the plane and in a seat, which is more than half the passengers managed. In the end, a stewardess came along and asked: "for a bonus of $150 who will get off and travel tomorrow?" There was a tense silence. She went away, consulted with someone, came back and asked "For a bonus of $200 who'll get off?" There was another tense silence, which was eventually broken by a passenger from the back, who said in a level tone: "five hundred dollars". After some negotiation the matter was sorted out. Some passengers got off, to the sound of applause from the rest of us, and we began the journey to California.
Much of the journey across the great heartland of America offers little that is worth seeing: agribusiness farmland, a few homesteads and the occasional small town. But after Denver there is the great crevice of the Grand Canyon, and eventually one flies down Death Valley, very dry, dusty, eerie and deserted, with no roads or buildings anywhere to be seen.
I arrived in the evening and my obliging student and I spent most of the night driving around Hollywood (so that I could put my foot in the shoe-prints of the stars on the Boulevard pavement), walking along the sands of the Pacific shore at Santa Monica and otherwise soaking up the laid-back West Coast atmosphere. It took much driving to get around Los Angeles--twenty suburbs in search of a city.
At six in the morning I went back to LAX to catch a flight to Santa Barbara. I travelled on Golden West Airlines flight 2028. How Golden West managed to have such a high flight number is a mystery, as I am convinced that they only had one aircraft, or at the most two. I sat in a small waiting room with four middle-aged ladies and eventually a man in uniform came in, shook our hands and introduced himself as the pilot. We carried our luggage onto the runway and he produced a key, opened the baggage hold of a small turbo-prop aircraft and put the bags in. We climbed aboard and the plane took off, roaring furiously.
It was an interesting flight. The aircraft was piloted by a diminutive blond girl who appeared to be under instruction. The four middle-aged ladies, who were all travelling together, became very excited at the sights of southern California. When one said "Wow! Look at that!", they all scrambled over to one side and the aircraft tilted precariously as the pilot shouted above the roar of the engine "Left hand down a bit!" to the girl who was flying us. Our altitude was quite low and in the early morning light it was a good opportunity to see how landslides were eating away at urban subdivisions and how these were eating away at the chaparral vegetation.
We landed and I reclaimed my luggage in a very few minutes. It was almost 9 a.m. and a colleague was waiting to pick me up. The University at Santa Barbara is five minutes' drive from the airport and that was the amount of time it took between arriving and having my first brush with the hyperactive, competitive, exploitative culture of Southern California. We cruised into the parking lot behind one of the lecture theatres and I was ushered through the door into a room filled with 175 undergraduate students. I knew I was expected to give a demonstration lecture and was prepared, though I was not exactly ready to start lecturing within ten minutes of getting off the plane. Nevertheless, it went sufficiently well and after 50 minutes I stopped and the students asked a few questions and then all trouped out. Several of them left pieces of paper on the seats, and idly I picked one up. It said: "This candidate is (a) excellent, (b) good, (c) mediocre, (d) bad, (e) terrible". I never did find out what my average score was.
The University of California at Santa Barbara is an odd institution in an odd city. Santa Barbara is somewhat isolated from the rest of southern and central California. It is the playground of the rich and has sky-high property prices, which effectively exclude the vast urban proletariats of Los Angeles further to the south, the blacks and hispanics of Watts and Sherman Oaks. In the 1980s its most famous resident was Ronald Reagan, and one could go and admire the heavily guarded entrance to his ranch. In the late 1700s the Spanish settlers of the original California had built a mission, an imposing, whitewashed stone building in the style of Mexican adobe. However, this was the only man-made structure in Santa Barbara that predated 1935. Surprisingly, the city had a thriving Historical Society, though one that was forced to concentrate on the previous half century, as that was all the history there was.
The University is situated, in effect, on the beach: it is a University of surfing, a place of perpetual sunshine, the Beach Boys, dolphins, palm trees, and all the impedimenta of Pacific Coast recreation. At least, that was what it looked like. The reality was somewhat different. To begin with, there was a seismically active fault with a surface expression that ran diagonally across the campus, and it was slowly pulling apart the corner of the building that contained the Geology Department, which at any time it could have demolished in a high magnitude tremor. Moreover, the University was a place of ferocious competition. Throughout my two-day visit I found that most of my possible future colleagues were too harassed and under pressure to devote time to chatting with me. This formed an odd contrast with the air of slow, credulous hedonism that California likes to cultivate.
I finished the first day of my two-day visit without particular difficulties and retired to motel on a freeway somewhere outside the city to spend the night. I woke early with the sun streaming through the blinds of my room and the telephone on the bedside table monotonously ringing. Two colleagues (an elderly gay couple who shared a post in the Environmental Science Department) were waiting in the lobby to continue the interview. It was barely 6 a.m.
On the second day I was hosted by the late David Simonett, an Australian geographer who was Dean of the Faculty of Science. He had the classic antipodean brashness--or straight-talking manner if you prefer. Yet somehow the British colonial connection worked and we got on quite well together. At lunchtime I gave a research seminar and completely misjudged my audience. I also went on too long--the classic mistake of the neophyte. Worse still, I was not aware that I had to give up the seminar room to the next class until a professor barged in wearing an expression of high indignation and practically shouldered me out of the room. Afterwards, Simonett turned to me and said "Well, you blew it then!" So with that abrupt valediction I knew I would never get the job, and I must admit I was considerably relieved. I suspect that when a situation is not right a self-protection mechanism causes us to screw things up, and that is certainly what happened in this case.
The West Coast was not for me and after flirting for a while with the highly prestigious Johns Hopkins University I ended up being taken onto the permanent staff of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a good, capacious public "multi-versity" and one that has produced its share of Nobel Prizewinners.
After the visit of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain to Santa Barbara the red carpet she alighted onto at the airport was cut into small squares and sold to the Santa Barbarans. How tacky can you get! One of the last things I saw before I left the city was a bar, situated directly outside the gates of the University and called "The English Department". It was started by a British man who was denied tenure in the English Department, and that was his poetic revenge.
Academic life in the Pioneer Valley
As I write I pause and look up at a framed, professional photograph that hangs on the wall of my study. It shows a rural scene on a clear autumn day just after the sun has set and before darkness supervenes. In the middle there is a broad, placid river that winds, mirror-like, across a flat expanse of farmland dotted with maple trees that have begun to turn golden brown and russet red. In the background there is a range of slate-blue mountains. It is the Connecticut River in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. The mountains are the Holyoke Range, which separates the Amherst-Hadley-Northampton area of Hampshire County from the metropolitan sprawl of Holyoke and Springfield further down valley. Amherst is where I lived for more than two decades.
The Pioneer Valley was settled in the 1600s and 1700s. In the 1800s it began to acquire institutions of higher learning. By the 1970s it had a network of five colleges: Amherst and Hampshire in Amherst town, Smith in Northampton, Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, and the University of Massachusetts flagship campus on the outskirts of Amherst. Students could use a frequent, free bus service to travel between the colleges and could choose from a total of more than 5000 courses offered at the five institutions.
Despite this sense of unity, the five colleges are very different places. In the Amherst area the diversity is extraordinary. The University of Massachusetts began life in 1860 as an agricultural college and became a general state university in 1970, following the post-War expansion of higher education in the United States under the so-called 'GI Bill'. It has a pleasant campus made up of architecture that varies from undistinguished to downright bad. The central focus is a small lake and the adjacent library building, which is 28 storeys high and suffers from structural faults. With typical American pragmatism the campus is known as UMass-Amherst. The working class people from lower down the valley put the accent on the second syllable: U-Máss. They send their sons and daughters there and these young people dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to five things: sex, drugs, beer, sport and entertainment. When, fearing that they will be kicked out for having too low a grade-point average, they actually start to study, they creep into the lecture halls looking cadaverous and with grey complexions. The academic staff despise them but cannot afford to show it, as in America undergraduate higher education is a consumer-driven product.
UMass-Amherst is the only one of the five institutions with a thriving Graduate School, and that is its glory. Nevertheless, it is a place where, in true American tradition, the basketball coach earns a salary 30 per cent higher than that of the Chancellor. In fact, the ordinary people of Massachusetts, that terse breed of Yankee with an insatiable demand for consumerism, tend to think of UMass primarily in terms of basketball and football. Several of my students were basketball players--black, well over two metres tall and, in one case, a millionaire immediately on graduating, for he found a place with the leading team in Toronto and became an instant superstar.
During my time at UMass I lived through the terms of office of several chancellors. One was a slippery-mannered, Oxford-educated Scot. Several were inarticulate or incompetent. Best of all, I remember Joseph Duffey, a Chancellor who was distinguished only by his all-inclusive smile. He was adept at beaming. He graced any academic occasion--concerts, degree ceremonies, convocations--with his ultra-violet sun-lamp of a smile, which he seemed able to turn on and beam at whoever he was talking to, introducing, giving a prize to, or whatever. It was not an insignificant gift for a chancellor to have.
Higher education in the United States is broadly divided into public and private kinds. Few public institutions have much prestige (though Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and several of the University of California campuses are clear exceptions). Moreover, there are second- and third-tier public institutions such that, at poor state colleges tucked away in odd corners of the least important states miles from the last vestiges of civilisation, educational standards are truly atrocious. Therefore, rich, powerful, influential parents send their children to private colleges and universities. A colleague at UMass sent his son to Brown University in Rhode Island. The fees were so high that he said it was like buying a new car every six months: in four years that is a sizeable fleet, and such costs explain why ambitious parents start saving for their children's undergraduate education as soon as their offspring are born. It reminds me that I once visited a doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, who at the end of the consultation begged me to come back to him for my next visit because he needed the fees: he had two children to support at private universities and was at his wits' end about how to pay for them.
The difference between a college and a university in America is that the former does not offer a graduate programme and its professors are not particularly encouraged to do research, given that teaching is their primary function. It is a curious paradox that, however prestigious a college is, a better education can be obtained from a much less chic public university that has a thriving programme of graduate studies and research. I emphasise the word 'can' as very few students have the maturity and initiative to obtain such an education, and of those who do, many are foreigners born and bred.
Amherst College is just about the most prestigious of the U.S. colleges. A four-year degree there costs about as much as the professional salary of a successful middle-ranking executive in a big American corporation. Prince Albert of Monaco went there, and so did various men who went on to be presidents of the United States. The poet Robert Frost taught there, although it is said that in one of his exams he merely wrote on a blackboard "Do something". I have no information on what the examinees actually did, but knowing Amherst College students I would suspect not very much.
I taught in the Geology Department at Amherst College for a semester. I found the students to be lacklustre performers, but I appreciated the privileges that came with the assignment, one of which was free lunches in the dining commons (which I actually had no right to, but I always walked in with an air of authority as if I had the necessary entitlements). In general, the experience showed quite clearly that all the advantages of an Amherst education were social: the particular handshake in the board room, or perhaps the Oval Office, the whispered question "So we were both class of 79, eh?" It was a very effective form of freemasonry and it clearly depended on wealth and power much more than academic ability.
Amherst College is located on a site in the centre of Amherst town. Indeed, such is the rationalism of American urban planning, that it is one quarter of the centre of town, and it owns a sizeable proportion of the rest, including Emily Dickinson's homestead, a national monument. Further down the road, on the outskirts of Amherst, is the leafy, windswept campus of Hampshire College. This was founded as an experimental institution on land donated by an apple farmer called Bob Atkins. It has retained its experimental, 1960s and 1970s counter-culture ethos. Students do not exactly take courses there, but are politely asked what they would like to do, so that they design their own 'portfolio of learning'. This delicatessen approach encapsulates what is wrong with American higher education. It ascribes too much power, too much choice and too much discrimination to a group of school-leavers who have no self discipline and no idea about what will be useful to them and what will not be. In the average degree transcript in America, the graduate has taken courses in Chinese, bible study, scuba diving, sociology of rock music and a variety of other things that fit badly together and have little or nothing to do with the alleged focus of the degree, the 'major'. At Hampshire College this tendency reaches epidemic proportions. Cynics have suggested that the best way to graduate from such a place is to write a thesis on some aspect of sex, while simultaneously playing the saxophone and roller-blading backwards. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it acquired the nickname 'Hamster College'. What is curious is that this dated pedagogic experiment has survived and continues to charge astronomically high fees which 1600 parents are willing to pay each year.
I found its professors to be an odd group. One, a colleague in Philosophy, was hardly convinced that he or anything else actually existed. He would always finish a sentence about something or someone with the words "if it is what it is", or "if he is what he is". Another, a rugged, bearded outdoorsy type in the regulation check shirt, was Professor of Geology. One summer afternoon he and I took a trip on the Connecticut River in the Hampshire College boat so that he could do some sonar studies of the river bed. Typically enough, the boat was poorly maintained and the outboard motor caught fire, which would have ended with the craft sinking and us having to swim for our lives if the Professor's student had not had the presence of mind to sling a fire-extinguisher in when we launched it. A placid type, this lad spent most of the expedition diving down to the river bed, where he mesmerised large, bewhiskered catfish with a torch and then speared them with a clasp knife and brought them up to be cooked for his dinner.
Hampshire was co-educational from its foundation, but Amherst was an all-male college until the 1980s. Indeed testosterone was its hallmark and remained so even when women were admitted. The other two colleges were all-women institutions. The reasoning behind this was that it enabled young women to realise themselves without suffering the pressure to compete with men. This may have had some resonance in past times, but by the 1980s it seemed decidedly anachronistic. If Amherst, the leading college in the entire country, could open its doors to the other sex, why could not Smith and Mount Holyoke? In any case, as soon as the young ladies left the cloistered environments of South Hadley or Northampton, they had to compete with men. Why not train them to do it sooner? The answer is that exclusivity, in whatever form it took, was always the essence of the American colleges. Here it meant female exclusivity. It was the wives of presidents of the United States who went to Smith, people like Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan.
State Route 9 is the axis of the Pioneer Valley. It runs through Northampton, under Interstate 91 to Amherst and down to the Holyoke Range. At a certain point in the (relatively) ancient township of Hadley, there is a large billboard that advertises Budweiser beer. On the back of it someone spray-painted the slogan "Let them eat Smithies... and choke!" Smithies are the female students of Smith College. Smith is rolling in money (its art museum displays a fabulous collection of relics from Renaissance Europe, the Roman and Ottoman Empires; the Orient and all over the world). The Smithies tend to be gushing types who never even think about money--they don't need to, they radiate the stuff. For some years the president of the Smith College Italian Society was the Pirelli heiress, a woman who one didn't even presume to talk to unless one turned up in a thousand-dollar suit. The vaguely revolutionary reference to Marie-Antoinette was quite appropriate to the majority of Smithies. Not all: for a while I dated a German-American Smithie (before deciding that large, heavy blondes were not my type, however good their aesthetic sensitivities were) and she was refreshingly free from the Smith College ethos of gushing conversation and trailing clouds of glory.
Mount Holyoke College was a fairly distinguished place, all cloisters and quadrangles and visual references to the 1800s (the Protozoic Era of American higher education). It's official symbolism was decidedly masonic, which was clearly the intention of its founder, Mary Lyon, who wanted to create something that would put women on the same power footing of men, as much as on the same intellectual plane. But Holyoke always had a chip on its shoulder about Smith: it was always number two when compared with the campus in Northampton.
I occasionally gave lectures at Holyoke and for a few months I had a liaison with a girl who taught Italian there. She was a physically unattractive woman who came from peasant stock in the mountains of the neglected southern region of Molise. Indeed, when I visited her at home I discovered to my surprise that her parents, who farmed the hills, spoke no Italian, only a totally incomprehensible dialect. She also invited me to the graduation day celebrations at Holyoke and I found I was the only man among at least 3000 women gathered there on that day. But they did not roast me or eat me alive. It did give me a strong sensation of being completely out of place.
One of the professors of geology at Holyoke was an intrepid woman volcanologist. For much of her adult life, before turning to academia, she had been a cowgirl in the Cascades Range of Oregon. It was said that she showed no fear, only professional interest, when confronted with an erupting volcano, an enraged steer or a bucking wild horse. Apparently she was a crack shot with a .45 magnum and an excellent rider. But when she and I ran a Five College field trip to Scotland I found that she was absolutely terrified of being abroad. Aged 47, she had never been outside the United States. She clung to me (embarrassingly) at Oxford Circus on the London Underground and begged me not to leave her there (I had other things to do than be a tourist guide). I remain perennially surprised by how little understanding Americans have of The Rest of the World. So many of them have little idea even of where it is, let alone what it is about.
So those are the Five Colleges according to my personal impressions. Founded with much earnest New England idealism, run with the Puritanism of the staff and hedonism of the students, a truly American institution.
The Pioneer Valley was settled in the 1600s and 1700s. In the 1800s it began to acquire institutions of higher learning. By the 1970s it had a network of five colleges: Amherst and Hampshire in Amherst town, Smith in Northampton, Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, and the University of Massachusetts flagship campus on the outskirts of Amherst. Students could use a frequent, free bus service to travel between the colleges and could choose from a total of more than 5000 courses offered at the five institutions.
Despite this sense of unity, the five colleges are very different places. In the Amherst area the diversity is extraordinary. The University of Massachusetts began life in 1860 as an agricultural college and became a general state university in 1970, following the post-War expansion of higher education in the United States under the so-called 'GI Bill'. It has a pleasant campus made up of architecture that varies from undistinguished to downright bad. The central focus is a small lake and the adjacent library building, which is 28 storeys high and suffers from structural faults. With typical American pragmatism the campus is known as UMass-Amherst. The working class people from lower down the valley put the accent on the second syllable: U-Máss. They send their sons and daughters there and these young people dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to five things: sex, drugs, beer, sport and entertainment. When, fearing that they will be kicked out for having too low a grade-point average, they actually start to study, they creep into the lecture halls looking cadaverous and with grey complexions. The academic staff despise them but cannot afford to show it, as in America undergraduate higher education is a consumer-driven product.
UMass-Amherst is the only one of the five institutions with a thriving Graduate School, and that is its glory. Nevertheless, it is a place where, in true American tradition, the basketball coach earns a salary 30 per cent higher than that of the Chancellor. In fact, the ordinary people of Massachusetts, that terse breed of Yankee with an insatiable demand for consumerism, tend to think of UMass primarily in terms of basketball and football. Several of my students were basketball players--black, well over two metres tall and, in one case, a millionaire immediately on graduating, for he found a place with the leading team in Toronto and became an instant superstar.
During my time at UMass I lived through the terms of office of several chancellors. One was a slippery-mannered, Oxford-educated Scot. Several were inarticulate or incompetent. Best of all, I remember Joseph Duffey, a Chancellor who was distinguished only by his all-inclusive smile. He was adept at beaming. He graced any academic occasion--concerts, degree ceremonies, convocations--with his ultra-violet sun-lamp of a smile, which he seemed able to turn on and beam at whoever he was talking to, introducing, giving a prize to, or whatever. It was not an insignificant gift for a chancellor to have.
Higher education in the United States is broadly divided into public and private kinds. Few public institutions have much prestige (though Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and several of the University of California campuses are clear exceptions). Moreover, there are second- and third-tier public institutions such that, at poor state colleges tucked away in odd corners of the least important states miles from the last vestiges of civilisation, educational standards are truly atrocious. Therefore, rich, powerful, influential parents send their children to private colleges and universities. A colleague at UMass sent his son to Brown University in Rhode Island. The fees were so high that he said it was like buying a new car every six months: in four years that is a sizeable fleet, and such costs explain why ambitious parents start saving for their children's undergraduate education as soon as their offspring are born. It reminds me that I once visited a doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, who at the end of the consultation begged me to come back to him for my next visit because he needed the fees: he had two children to support at private universities and was at his wits' end about how to pay for them.
The difference between a college and a university in America is that the former does not offer a graduate programme and its professors are not particularly encouraged to do research, given that teaching is their primary function. It is a curious paradox that, however prestigious a college is, a better education can be obtained from a much less chic public university that has a thriving programme of graduate studies and research. I emphasise the word 'can' as very few students have the maturity and initiative to obtain such an education, and of those who do, many are foreigners born and bred.
Amherst College is just about the most prestigious of the U.S. colleges. A four-year degree there costs about as much as the professional salary of a successful middle-ranking executive in a big American corporation. Prince Albert of Monaco went there, and so did various men who went on to be presidents of the United States. The poet Robert Frost taught there, although it is said that in one of his exams he merely wrote on a blackboard "Do something". I have no information on what the examinees actually did, but knowing Amherst College students I would suspect not very much.
I taught in the Geology Department at Amherst College for a semester. I found the students to be lacklustre performers, but I appreciated the privileges that came with the assignment, one of which was free lunches in the dining commons (which I actually had no right to, but I always walked in with an air of authority as if I had the necessary entitlements). In general, the experience showed quite clearly that all the advantages of an Amherst education were social: the particular handshake in the board room, or perhaps the Oval Office, the whispered question "So we were both class of 79, eh?" It was a very effective form of freemasonry and it clearly depended on wealth and power much more than academic ability.
Amherst College is located on a site in the centre of Amherst town. Indeed, such is the rationalism of American urban planning, that it is one quarter of the centre of town, and it owns a sizeable proportion of the rest, including Emily Dickinson's homestead, a national monument. Further down the road, on the outskirts of Amherst, is the leafy, windswept campus of Hampshire College. This was founded as an experimental institution on land donated by an apple farmer called Bob Atkins. It has retained its experimental, 1960s and 1970s counter-culture ethos. Students do not exactly take courses there, but are politely asked what they would like to do, so that they design their own 'portfolio of learning'. This delicatessen approach encapsulates what is wrong with American higher education. It ascribes too much power, too much choice and too much discrimination to a group of school-leavers who have no self discipline and no idea about what will be useful to them and what will not be. In the average degree transcript in America, the graduate has taken courses in Chinese, bible study, scuba diving, sociology of rock music and a variety of other things that fit badly together and have little or nothing to do with the alleged focus of the degree, the 'major'. At Hampshire College this tendency reaches epidemic proportions. Cynics have suggested that the best way to graduate from such a place is to write a thesis on some aspect of sex, while simultaneously playing the saxophone and roller-blading backwards. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it acquired the nickname 'Hamster College'. What is curious is that this dated pedagogic experiment has survived and continues to charge astronomically high fees which 1600 parents are willing to pay each year.
I found its professors to be an odd group. One, a colleague in Philosophy, was hardly convinced that he or anything else actually existed. He would always finish a sentence about something or someone with the words "if it is what it is", or "if he is what he is". Another, a rugged, bearded outdoorsy type in the regulation check shirt, was Professor of Geology. One summer afternoon he and I took a trip on the Connecticut River in the Hampshire College boat so that he could do some sonar studies of the river bed. Typically enough, the boat was poorly maintained and the outboard motor caught fire, which would have ended with the craft sinking and us having to swim for our lives if the Professor's student had not had the presence of mind to sling a fire-extinguisher in when we launched it. A placid type, this lad spent most of the expedition diving down to the river bed, where he mesmerised large, bewhiskered catfish with a torch and then speared them with a clasp knife and brought them up to be cooked for his dinner.
Hampshire was co-educational from its foundation, but Amherst was an all-male college until the 1980s. Indeed testosterone was its hallmark and remained so even when women were admitted. The other two colleges were all-women institutions. The reasoning behind this was that it enabled young women to realise themselves without suffering the pressure to compete with men. This may have had some resonance in past times, but by the 1980s it seemed decidedly anachronistic. If Amherst, the leading college in the entire country, could open its doors to the other sex, why could not Smith and Mount Holyoke? In any case, as soon as the young ladies left the cloistered environments of South Hadley or Northampton, they had to compete with men. Why not train them to do it sooner? The answer is that exclusivity, in whatever form it took, was always the essence of the American colleges. Here it meant female exclusivity. It was the wives of presidents of the United States who went to Smith, people like Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan.
State Route 9 is the axis of the Pioneer Valley. It runs through Northampton, under Interstate 91 to Amherst and down to the Holyoke Range. At a certain point in the (relatively) ancient township of Hadley, there is a large billboard that advertises Budweiser beer. On the back of it someone spray-painted the slogan "Let them eat Smithies... and choke!" Smithies are the female students of Smith College. Smith is rolling in money (its art museum displays a fabulous collection of relics from Renaissance Europe, the Roman and Ottoman Empires; the Orient and all over the world). The Smithies tend to be gushing types who never even think about money--they don't need to, they radiate the stuff. For some years the president of the Smith College Italian Society was the Pirelli heiress, a woman who one didn't even presume to talk to unless one turned up in a thousand-dollar suit. The vaguely revolutionary reference to Marie-Antoinette was quite appropriate to the majority of Smithies. Not all: for a while I dated a German-American Smithie (before deciding that large, heavy blondes were not my type, however good their aesthetic sensitivities were) and she was refreshingly free from the Smith College ethos of gushing conversation and trailing clouds of glory.
Mount Holyoke College was a fairly distinguished place, all cloisters and quadrangles and visual references to the 1800s (the Protozoic Era of American higher education). It's official symbolism was decidedly masonic, which was clearly the intention of its founder, Mary Lyon, who wanted to create something that would put women on the same power footing of men, as much as on the same intellectual plane. But Holyoke always had a chip on its shoulder about Smith: it was always number two when compared with the campus in Northampton.
I occasionally gave lectures at Holyoke and for a few months I had a liaison with a girl who taught Italian there. She was a physically unattractive woman who came from peasant stock in the mountains of the neglected southern region of Molise. Indeed, when I visited her at home I discovered to my surprise that her parents, who farmed the hills, spoke no Italian, only a totally incomprehensible dialect. She also invited me to the graduation day celebrations at Holyoke and I found I was the only man among at least 3000 women gathered there on that day. But they did not roast me or eat me alive. It did give me a strong sensation of being completely out of place.
One of the professors of geology at Holyoke was an intrepid woman volcanologist. For much of her adult life, before turning to academia, she had been a cowgirl in the Cascades Range of Oregon. It was said that she showed no fear, only professional interest, when confronted with an erupting volcano, an enraged steer or a bucking wild horse. Apparently she was a crack shot with a .45 magnum and an excellent rider. But when she and I ran a Five College field trip to Scotland I found that she was absolutely terrified of being abroad. Aged 47, she had never been outside the United States. She clung to me (embarrassingly) at Oxford Circus on the London Underground and begged me not to leave her there (I had other things to do than be a tourist guide). I remain perennially surprised by how little understanding Americans have of The Rest of the World. So many of them have little idea even of where it is, let alone what it is about.
So those are the Five Colleges according to my personal impressions. Founded with much earnest New England idealism, run with the Puritanism of the staff and hedonism of the students, a truly American institution.
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