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  So it was with a certain sense of already having thrown in the towel that I settled down to college life. The JCR in Exeter at that time was more central to the life of the college than in other colleges I visited. At the heart of it was the institution of the Suggestions Book. As a repository of actual suggestions, the Suggestions Book was useless, but it served besides as a college newspaper, a diary, a forum for discussion, and a space in which those who were so inclined could attempt to amuse and even paddle in the direction of literature. The result was a volume (in time a succession of volumes) that was parochial, silly and obscene, but to me, and possibly to others, of a particular value. A family atmosphere, a captive audience and a set of shared references are good conditions in which to learn to write, and I think it was through my contributions to the JCR Suggestions Book that I first realized I could make people laugh and liked doing it.

  At the end of each term the JCR held a smoking-concert. These smokers were really just a dramatized version of the Suggestions Book: vulgar, private, silly – all the things my literary friends abhorred. They were uproarious drunken affairs, confined to members of the college and in the direct line of those camp concerts POWs spent their time acting in when they weren’t busy tunnelling under the foundations. One regular feature was a Queen’s Christmas Broadcast; very tame it would seem now, but in those pre-satirical days, when HMQ’s annual pronouncement was treated with hushed reverence, the very idea of it seemed sacrilegiously funny. And it was for one of these smoking-concerts that I wrote a cod Anglican sermon, something I found no problem doing as I’d sat through so many in my youth. It took me half an hour to put together, and, since it later figured in (indeed earned me my place in) Beyond the Fringe, it was undoubtedly the most profitable half-hour I’ve ever spent. At the same time, having written it I had no sense that a corner had been turned.

  I had always been a late starter, so, friendly though the atmosphere was, I didn’t pluck up courage to take part even in these JCR smokers until my third year, by which time my days at the university seemed numbered. However, after I’d taken my degree I found myself able to stay on as a postgraduate, doing research on Richard II. I also began to teach a little, first for Magdalen and then for Exeter. I had some sense, I think, that making people laugh was not a proper activity for a postgraduate and that I ought somehow to be acquiring more dignity; except that by now I was being asked to perform in other colleges and do cabaret for dances and Commem Balls, and was sometimes even paid. The situation was more delicate because I was supervised in my research by the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane. McFarlane was a man of great austerity and singleness of mind. He was shy, very kind, and the most impressive teacher, and in some ways the most impressive man, I have ever come across. One could go and chat to him without seemingly ever touching on the subject of one’s research and come away convinced that studying one’s tiny slip of a subject (mine was Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1399) was the only thing in the world worth doing. He knew a little of my cabaret performances, but they were never referred to. Around this time I recorded some sketches for BBC radio, and told him when they were due to be broadcast; ‘I listened,’ was all he ever said.

  By this time I had been at Oxford some five years, and it was plain to me, if I did not quite admit it to myself, that I was not going to make a don. To begin with I had no memory to speak of, and the notes of my research proliferated without ever congealing into anything approaching a thesis. As for teaching, I could never find sufficient comments to fill the necessary hour, and nor could my pupils. If I ventured on argument I was soon floored, and the tutorials ended in awkward silence. Eventually I took to putting the clock on before my pupils arrived, so there was less time to fill.

  Deliverance came in the summer of 1959. In that year the Oxford Theatre Group first put on a revue on the fringe at the Edinburgh Festival. Feeling immensely old and foolish at twenty-five, I nervously auditioned for the writer and director Stanley Daniels. He was an American, also a postgraduate, who appeared (so much for my qualms) at least forty, with no dignity at all nor seeming to want any. I see his name nowadays in the credits as one of the producers of the excellent American TV series Taxi. We performed at the Cranston Street Hall in Edinburgh, where in the same hall the previous year the Oxford Theatre Group had premièred Willis Hall’s The Long, the Short and the Tall and where another première a few years later was Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In any account of university theatre the OTG should figure largely. Our contribution in 1959 was called Better Late. It was a great success, to the extent that the official Festival took note and the following year decided to put on a revue of its own, inviting Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge and Dudley Moore and myself from Oxford to write and perform it. This we did firstly in Edinburgh in 1960 and subsequently in the West End. Though Dudley had been an organ scholar at Magdalen and we had even appeared on the same bill, I don’t think we had ever met until the first script conference for Beyond the Fringe.

  While I was writing this I was puzzled why, when I’d performed so little at university and not been an avid playgoer, I yet remembered Oxford as a place of theatrical excitement. I think it was that I somehow regarded the nightly experience of dining in hall as a kind of theatre, a theatre in which the undergraduates were the audience and the actors were the dons. At Exeter they entered – climbed almost – on to the stage from the mysterious backstage of the Senior Common Room, a room dimly remembered from one’s scholarship interview and not seen again until three years later, when one entered it before one’s Schools Dinner. Fanciful perhaps to compare the bang of the block for grace with the knocks that signal the rise of the curtain at the Comédie-Française, but there was, as there is in every college, a regular repertory company enlivened at weekends and on guest nights by visitors and the occasional star. Auden I remember seeing once, hearing that quacking voice without recognizing the face, which in the mid-fifties had just begun to go under the harrow. Richard Burton was there one night, Dennis Healey, Harold Wilson – hardly fabled names but still names one had read in the papers, creatures from a world elsewhere. Nowadays dining arrangements at Exeter are different. The undergraduates are halfway through their meal when High Table comes in, so they don’t have this sense of a nightly performance that I had – and feel it faintly ridiculous to have had.

  When I moved to Magdalen, as the most junior of junior lecturers, it was rather different. Whereas Exeter was still in the era of the proscenium arch with the dons entering stage left in single file, at Magdalen it was altogether more dramatic and the choreography more fluid. There the fellows made a swift dash around the cloisters before entering in a crowd through the body of the hall, streaming through the standing assembly and up to High Table as if directed by Ariane Mnouchkine or some fashionable young man from the RSC. At Magdalen too the visitors were grander and the regular repertory company more distinguished: C. S. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. P. Taylor, daunting neighbours at dinner, my memories of those meals as vivid and painful as any embarrassment that happened to me subsequently on the stage. The first or second time I dined there I sat down and, as I pushed in my chair, caught the sleeves of my BA gown under the legs. Despite the fact that my movements were thus severely restricted I was too shy to get up and free them. It was a particularly delicious dinner that night, but I saw little of it. The scouts kept lowering dishes towards me but hovered tantalizingly out of reach of my pinioned arms. As I thus appeared to wave away dish after dish my neighbour leaned over solicitously and said, ‘You know, if you’re a vegetarian, they’ll do you something special.’

  Much of the time I was at Magdalen I was playing in Beyond The Fringe in London and commuting to Oxford three days a week in order to teach. Or not to teach, because I wasn’t getting any better at it, though the celebrity of the revue to some degree compensated my pupils for the shortcomings of the tuition. This period came to an end in 1962, when the show went to Broadway, thus puttin
g an end to my dwindling hopes of being a historian. The rest, one might say pompously, is history. Except that in my case the opposite was true. What it had been was history. What it was to be was not history at all.

  * On ‘The History of the University since 1945’, held at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1986.

  Uncle Clarence

  Once we have located the cemetery, the grave itself is not hard to find, one of a row of headstones just inside the gate and backing on to a railway. Flanders in April and it is, not inappropriately, raining, clogging our shoes the famous mud. The stone gives the date of his death, 21 October 1917, but not his age. He was twenty.

  He was always twenty all through my childhood, because of the photograph on the piano at my grandmother’s house in Leeds. He was her only son. He sits in his uniform and puttees in Mr Lonnergan’s studio down Woodsley Road. Lonnergan’s, a classy place that does you a good likeness. Less classy but still doing a good likeness, Mr Lonnergan takes pictures of my brother and me in 1944 in the closing stages of the next war. An artier study this, two boys aged twelve and nine emerge from a shadowy background to look unsmiling at Mr Lonnergan under his cloth. My brother is in his Morley Grammar School blazer, his hand resting unselfconsciously on my grey-flannelled shoulder. In his picture Uncle Clarence is on embarkation leave from the King’s Royal Rifles. In 1944 we too are going away, though not to certain death, only ‘Down South’ to fulfil a dream of my father’s. He has answered an advert in the Meat Trades Journal and, having worked twenty-five years for the Co-op, is now going to manage a family butcher’s in Guildford. Uncle Clarence never comes back but we are back within the year, his photograph still standing on the piano on its lace doily, and now ours has been put beside it.

  The piano itself does not belong to Grandma. She gives it house room at 7 Gilpin Place for her sister-in-law, Aunt Eveline. Aunt Eveline has never married and has beautiful handwriting. Her name is on all the music in the piano stool, and in her time she accompanied the silent films at the Electric Cinema, Bradford. Come the talkies, she turns housekeeper and now looks after a Mr Wilson, sometime chairman of the Bradford Dyers’ Association, who is a widower with a fancy woman, whom Aunt Eveline dislikes because she has dyed hair and is not Aunt Eveline. On Sundays there are musical evenings in the front room at Gilpin Place. The children are warned to keep back as a shovelful of burning coals from the kitchen range is carried smoking through the house to light the fire in the sitting-room before we sit down to high tea in the kitchen. After tea, the sitting-room still smelling of smoke, Aunt Eveline arranges herself on the piano stool and with my father on the violin (‘Now then, Walter, what shall we give them?’) kicks off with a selection from Glamorous Night. Then, having played themselves in, they accompany Uncle George, my father’s brother, in some songs. Uncle George is a bricklayer and has a fine voice and a face as red as his bricks. He sings ‘Bless This House’ and ‘Where’er You Walk’, and sometimes Grandma has a little cry. These occasions go on until about 1950, when Grandma dies.

  Grandma, whose name is Mary Ann Peel, has three daughters, Kathleen, Lemira and my mother, Lilian. Clarence is the eldest child, and the only son. Whenever he is talked of it is always ‘Our Clarence’ or, to my brother and me, ‘Your Uncle Clarence’. But he is only our would-be uncle, an uncle-who-might-have-been, not like my father’s brothers, uncles of flesh and blood, two of them veterans of the same war and very much alive. We are his nephews by prolepsis and he our posthumous uncle, protected even in death by the convention that children do not refer to relatives by anything so naked as their name.

  When Uncle Clarence’s name comes up it is generally in connection with the undisputed nobility of his character. What is disputed is which of the sisters resembles him most. It is accepted in our wing of the family that this role belongs to my mother, who certainly looks most like him. The prettiest of the three, she marries early and does not get on with the other two, who marry late. Clarence, later to become a silly-ass kind of name, a name out of farce and, like Albert, never revamped, remains in our family the name of a saint. If my mother is asked about Uncle Clarence the reply is always ‘He was a love. He was a grand fellow.’ What job he did in the few years given to him to have a job, whether he had a dog or a bike or a girlfriend, none of this I know or bother to ask, and with both my aunties dead there is no one now who does know. My mother lives, but she does not remember she had a brother, or even what ‘a brother’ is. When asked, she still says, ‘He was a grand fellow.’ She says the same now about my father. I am a grand fellow too. In these her flat, unmemoried days she would probably say the same about Adolf Hitler.

  In the front room at Gilpin Place is an elaborate dresser, with mirrors and alcoves and fretwork shelves. Stripped of its warm chestnut varnish, it will have gone up in the world now, moved from Leeds 12 to Leeds 16 to grace the modish kitchen of a polytechnic lecturer or a designer at Yorkshire TV. In my time this dresser is laden with ornaments housing Grandma’s hoard of silver paper, and the drawers are stuffed with bundles of seaside postcards: Sunset across the Bay, Morecambe; The Illuminations, Blackpool; The Bandstand, Lytham St Annes. Glossy, deckle-edged cards in rich purples and browns. To my brother and me, who have never seen fairy lights along the prom or the sands without tank traps and barbed wire, they are what the world was like Before the War. We take the cards and steam off any Edward VII or George V stamps to use as (pretty mediocre) swaps. Among the picture postcards are photographs on stiffer card: Grandma on outings with the ladies’ bowling club, striding along some promenade in a long, laughing line, big ladies in cloche hats and black duster coats on trips to Bangor or Dunoon.

  The cupboard in the dresser has more mysterious artefacts: old scent sprays, cigar-cutters, some candle-snuffers and a pile of ten-inch 78s in torn brown-paper covers. One is ‘I Lift up My Finger and I Say Tweet Tweet, Hush Hush, Now Now, Come Come’. I find some needles in the cupboard and play it on the wind-up gramophone in its red Rexine cover. In theory the dresser is out of bounds and I can only look in it if my brother is out playing with his pals or swimming at Armley Baths and Grandma and I are alone in the house. This is generally on a Saturday afternoon. She dozes in front of the kitchen fire while I investigate the cupboard in the front room. ‘Rooting’ she calls it. From time to time she wakes up. ‘What are you doing in there?’ I say nothing. ‘Are you rooting? Give over.’

  In the first year of the war there is a tin of biscuits in the dresser. The biscuits have long since gone but the legend of them remains, and I always think if I can get to the very back of the cupboard there will be another tin that has been forgotten. There are plenty of other tins. When I ask what’s in them my grandmother always gives the same answer: ‘Chums.’ It is a joke which never fails to amuse her. But before I know that chums are friends they are something mysterious, sweet and secret, that one should not look for because forbidden.

  Whereas the kitchen cupboard is dedicated to use, with the old familiar cutlery, threadbare tablecloths, and knives that years of sharpening have brought to the width of skewers, the front-room cupboard houses stuff that never gets used, often in sets: the set of trifle glasses with the green stems, the set of cake knives won at a whist drive, besides all the items no well-run household should be without (grapefruit knives, a cheese-slice) but which are never actually required. It is a museum, this cupboard, to a theory of domestic economy. But it is also a shrine. For somewhere among the packets of doilies and cake frills, the EPNS salad-servers, the packets of spills in violent colours, the whist scoring-cards and the enema in its black box, somewhere among all this is the box with Uncle Clarence’s Victory medal, ‘which’, the citation says, ‘would have been conferred on C7/044 Pte C. E. Peel, had he lived’. The letter is dated Winchester, 10 May 1921. ‘In forwarding the Decoration I am commanded by the King to assure you of His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered.’ Even as a small child rooting for biscuits, I can see that His Majesty’s high appreciation didn�
�t amount to much.

  Besides, what His Majesty’s high appreciation didn’t run to – could not be expected to run to – was that Uncle Clarence had been ruptured. So, while everyone who died in this war died needlessly, Uncle Clarence died more needlessly than most. My mother always says he should not have gone at all. I do not quite know what ‘being ruptured’ means. Some shame attaches to it, I know, because Mr Dixon, who takes Standard 5 at Armley National, where I go to school, is ruptured and all the boys think it is a joke. Mr Dixon is the first male teacher I have come up against. He is short and fat and said to wear a truss. What a truss is I don’t know either, but I think of it as a device to stop your balls popping out. I find it difficult to connect – still less reconcile – someone as noble as Uncle Clarence and a condition that is both shameful and comical and affects such as Mr Dixon, and maybe I pity Uncle Clarence less for his early death than for his earlier rupture. Though, as my mother says, the one should have prevented the other, because in that condition he could not enlist. With the risk attaching to any surgical operation at that time, he was under no obligation to have the rupture treated, so for a year or two the matter was left and he went on living at home with his sisters. But in the third year of the war he found himself jeered at in the street, taunted by girls from the munitions works, and so he went into St James’s, had the operation, and in due course joined up. And here he sits in the photograph, just three months before his death, a whole man again.