The Fry Chronicles Part 4

'It was fine,' I said, 'but the best bit was the man who came on as the lawyer at the end. I mean, even the way he took off his hat was extraordinary. Who was was he?' he?'

'But that was Olivier!' said my mother. 'Didn't you realize?'

I can still picture exactly the way he stood on stage, the angle of his head, the extraordinary ability he had to make you all look at each of his fingers one after the other as he tugged off his gloves with aching deliberation. He played a dry-as-dust solicitor in a small comic turn in the play's last scene, but it was astounding. Shameless exhibitionism, of course. A far cry from the honest gutsy endeavours of a thousand hard-working actors mining for the psychological and emotional truths of their characters in theatres and studios up and down the land, but d.a.m.n, it was fun. I was pleased at least that I found it amazing even without knowing who the actor was.

So, at Cambridge, although I loved the art and idea of acting, I had no theories about theatre as an agent of social or political change, and no ambition for it as a future career. If I had faith in my potential I certainly had no particular sense that it would be on comic roles that I should concentrate. Quite the reverse. Theatre to me meant, first and foremost, Shakespeare, and the comic roles in the canon fools, jesters, clowns and mechanicals didn't really suit me at all. I was more a Theseus or Oberon than a Bottom or Quince, more a Duke or Jaques than a Touchstone. But first there was the question of whether I would even dare put myself forward for consideration.

Cambridge had dozens and dozens of drama clubs. Each college had its own, and there were others that were university-wide. The major ones, like the Marlowe Society, the Footlights and the Amateur Dramatic Club, had long histories: the Marlowe was started by Justin Brooke and Dadie Rylands a hundred years ago; the ADC and Footlights were older still. Other were more recent the Mummers had been founded by Alistair Cooke and Michael Redgrave in the early 1930s and clung to a more progressive and avant-garde ident.i.ty.

Many at Cambridge will tell you that the drama world there is filled with ambitious, pretentious, b.i.t.c.hy wannabes and that the atmosphere of backbiting, jealousy and greasy-pole rivalry is suffocating and unbearable. The people who tell you this are cut from the same cloth as those who grow up these days to become trollers on internet sites and who specialize in posting barbarous, mean, abusive, look-at-me, listen-to-me anonymous comments on YouTube and BBC 'Have Your Say' pages and other websites and blogs foolish enough to allow s.p.a.ce for their poison. Such swine specialize in second-guessing the motives of those who are brave enough to commit to the risk of making fools of themselves in public and they are a blight on the face of the earth. 'Oh, but a thick skin is surely necessary in the acting profession. Actors and theatre people should get used to it.' Well if you want to be in a profession which accesses emotion and attempts to penetrate the mind and soul of man, I should have thought that what is more necessary is a thin thin skin. Sensitivity. But I am wandering off the point. skin. Sensitivity. But I am wandering off the point.

I thought, as I settled into my first term, that I should at least go to see some plays and decide whether or not I would be completely outcla.s.sed and out of my league. No point in going to auditions if I didn't have a hope of doing anything more than carry a spear.

I should point out for those unfamiliar with the world of British university drama, that none of this had anything to do with grown-ups with dons, lecturers, officials or the university departments and faculties. This was all as extra-curricular as drink, s.e.x or sport. I know that in American universities a lot of these activities actually give you points towards your degree, 'credits' I believe they are called. Not in Britain. Universities that offer drama courses do exist here Manchester and Bristol, for example. But not the majority and certainly not Cambridge. Drama and activities of that sort have nothing to do with your academic work, you find your own time to do them. As a result, such pursuits flower, fruit and flourish as nowhere else. If I had had to submit to some drama teacher casting me in plays, directing me or telling me how it was done I should have withered on the vine. The beauty of our way was that everyone was learning as they went along. The actors and directors were all students, as were the lighting, sound, set construction, costume, stage management, production crew, front of house and administration. All were undergraduates saying, 'Oh, this looks like fun.'

How did they learn? Well, that's the beauty of university life. You learn on the job and you learn from the second-years and third-years above you, who in turn learned on the job and from those above them. My G.o.d, but it is exciting. As exciting as I should find official drama training dull, numbing, embarra.s.sing and humiliating. All you need is enthusiasm, pa.s.sion, tirelessness and the will, the hunger and the need to do it. But within that range there is plenty of room for the amiable rugger player who thinks it will be larky to be in the chorus of a musical, or the nervous scholarly type who wouldn't mind a shot at a one-line role in a Shakespeare tragedy just for the sensation of experiencing a play from the inside. You don't have to be a professional in the making at all.

Where did the money come from to build sets and make costumes? From previous productions. Every drama club had a committee, mostly second- and third-years, and someone on that committee looked after the budgets and the money. It was not just a way of learning about drama, it was a way of learning about committee life, diligence, accounting and all the perils and pitfalls of business and management. Sometimes a don would be asked to sit on the board of a club to help oversee financial matters, but they had no more power over the committee than any other individual member of it. The Footlights, it was rumoured, was the only Cambridge club, in any field, big and profitable enough to have to pay corporation tax. I don't know if that was true, but the fact that such a rumour could have got about tells you something of the scale of some of these enterprises. The momentum of continuity was a huge part of it. These clubs had been running for so long that it was relatively simple to keep them going.

The first production I went to see was of Tom Stoppard's Travesties. Travesties. The play is set in Zurich and somehow combines in a farcical whirl Lenin, who had been exiled there for a while, Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, the novelist James Joyce and an English consul called Henry Carr who is in the process of mounting a production of Wilde's The play is set in Zurich and somehow combines in a farcical whirl Lenin, who had been exiled there for a while, Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist, the novelist James Joyce and an English consul called Henry Carr who is in the process of mounting a production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest.

The production was co-directed by Brigid Larmour, now artistic director of the Watford Palace Theatre, and Annabelle Arden, who directs opera around the world. At the time they were very smart first-years who had hit the ground running. The others in the cast will forgive me, I hope, if I fail to recount their own admirable contributions to the success of the evening. Although it was a truly excellent production in and of itself, what stood out for me above all else was the performance of just one of the actresses. The girl who played Gwendolen stood out like a good deed in a naughty world.

She seemed, like Athene, to have arrived in the world fully armed. Her voice, her movement, her clarity, ease, poise, wit ... well, you had to be there. One of the best things any performer on stage can do, whether stand-up comic, torch singer, ballet dancer, character actor or tragedian, is to relax an audience. To let them know that everything is going to be all right and that they can lean back in their seats happy in the knowledge that the evening won't be a disaster. Of course, another of the best things a performer can do is provoke a feeling of excitement, danger, unpredictability and instability. To let the audience know that the evening might fail at any moment and that they need to lean forward in their seats and watch intently. If you can manage both at once then you are really something. This girl was really something. Medium height with a perfect English complexion, she was gravely beautiful, extraordinarily funny and commandingly a.s.sured beyond her years. Her name, the programme told me, was Emma Thompson. In the interval I heard someone say that she was the daughter of Eric Thompson, the voice of The Magic Roundabout The Magic Roundabout.

Emma.

Fast forward to March 1992. For her performance as Margaret Schlegel in Howards End Howards End Emma has won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Journalists are ringing round all her old friends to find out what they think of this. Now, it is a kind of unwritten rule that when the press ask you to speak about someone else you never say a word unless that person has cleared it with you beforehand. If one wants to talk about oneself to a journalist that is fine, but it really isn't on to blather about a third party without their permission. One persistent journalist, having been more or less rebuffed by all of Emma's old friends, somehow gets hold of Kim Harris's number. Emma has won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Journalists are ringing round all her old friends to find out what they think of this. Now, it is a kind of unwritten rule that when the press ask you to speak about someone else you never say a word unless that person has cleared it with you beforehand. If one wants to talk about oneself to a journalist that is fine, but it really isn't on to blather about a third party without their permission. One persistent journalist, having been more or less rebuffed by all of Emma's old friends, somehow gets hold of Kim Harris's number.

'h.e.l.lo?'

'Hi, I'm from the Post Post. I understand you're an old university friend of Emma Thompson's?'

'Ye-e-es ...'

'I wonder if you've anything to say about her Oscar? Are you surprised? Do you think she deserves it?'

'I have to come right out and tell you,' says Kim, 'that I feel betrayed, let down and most disappointed by Emma Thompson.'

The journalist almost drops his phone. Kim can hear the sound of a pencil being sucked and then, he later swears, of drool hitting the carpet.

'Betrayed? Really? Yes? Go on.'

'Anyone who ever saw Emma Thompson at university,' says Kim, 'would have laid substantial money on her getting an Oscar before she was thirty. She is now just over thirty. It's a crushing disappointment.'

Not as crushing a disappointment as that felt by the journalist who for one second thought he had a story. Kim, as he so often does, put it perfectly. That really was all there was to say. Plenty of other students were talented, some prodigiously so, and one might guess that with a fair following wind, the right opportunities and a measure of guidance and growth, they would have decent, or even brilliant, careers. With Emma you just saw her once and you knew. Stardom. Oscar. Damehood. That last is up to her of course but you can guarantee it will be offered.

Men like their actresses, if they are superb, to be air-headed, ditzy and charmingly foolish. Emma is certainly capable of ... refreshingly different approaches to logical thought ... but air-headed, ditzy or foolish she is not: she is one of the most clear-minded and intelligent people I have met. The fact that her second Oscar, two years after the first, was awarded for a screenplay, tells you all you need to know about her ability to concentrate, think and work. If it is tempting to be cross with people for having so many gifts lavished on them at birth, she has an abundance of kindness, openness and sweetness of nature that makes envy or resentment difficult. I am aware that we have entered the treacly territory of 'darling she's lovely and gorgeous' here, but that is the risk a book like this was always going to run. I did warn you. For those of you who would rather take away some other view of the woman, I can tell you definitively that she is a talentless mad b.i.t.c.h sow who wanders the streets of north London in nothing but a pair of ill-matched wellington boots. She only gets parts in films because she sleeps with the producers' animals. Plus she smells. She never wrote a screenplay in her life. She chains up a writer she drugged at a party twenty years ago, and he is responsible for everything published under her name. Her so-called liberal humanitarian principles are as false as her b.r.e.a.s.t.s: she is a member of the Gestapo and regrets the pa.s.sing of Apartheid. That's Emma Thompson for you: the darling of fools and the fool of darlings.

Despite or because of this we got to know each other. She was at the all-women's college Newnham, where, like me, she read English. She was funny. Very funny. Also extreme with her fashion sense. The day came when she decided to shave her head: I blame the influence of Annie Lennox. Emma and I were both in the same seminar group at the English faculty and one morning, after a stimulating discussion of A Winter's Tale A Winter's Tale, we walked together down Sidgwick Avenue towards the centre of town. She pulled off her woolly hat so that I could feel the texture of her bare pate. In those days it was unlikely that anyone would have seen a woman as bald as an egg. A boy riding past on a bicycle turned to stare and, his panic-stricken eyes never leaving Emma's shining scalp, rode straight into a tree. I never thought such things took place outside silent movies, but it happened and it made me happy.

Emma Thompson's hair is starting to grow back.

The first term came and went without my daring once to attend an audition. I had seen that there could be actors, or one at least, as astonishing as Emma, but there had been plenty getting parts that I felt I could have played better, or at least no worse. Nonetheless I held back.

For the most part my life in college and in the wider university followed a blandly traditional course. I joined the Cambridge Union, which is nothing to do with students' unions, but a debating society with its own chamber, a kind of miniature House of Commons, all wood and leather and stained gla.s.s, complete with a gallery and doors marked 'Aye' and 'No' through which you file to vote after the 'Speaker' has put the motion to the 'House'. All a little pompous really, but ancient and traditional. Many in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet had been Cambridge Union hacks in the early sixties: Norman Fowler, Cecil Parkinson, John Selwyn Gummer, Ken Clarke, Norman Lamont, Geoffrey Howe ... that bunch. I was not politically inclined enough to want to speak or attempt to work my way into the inner circle of the Union, nor was I interested in asking questions from the floor of the house or contributing to debates in any other way. I watched a few Bernard Levin, Lord Lever, Enoch Powell and a handful of others came to argue about the great issues of the day, whatever they were back then. War, terrorism, poverty, injustice, as I recall ... problems that have now all been solved but which at the time seemed most pressing. There was also a 'comedy' debate once a term, usually with a fanciful motion like 'This House Believes in Trousers' or 'This House Would Rather Be a Sparrow Than a Snail'. I went to one where the handlebar-mustachioed comedian Jimmy Edwards, drunk as a skunk, played the tuba, told excellent jokes and afterwards so I was told fondled the thighs of all the comely young men at the dinner. I have since been invited many times to debate at Cambridge, Oxford and other universities and shiningly comely and shudderingly handsome have been some of the young men who have hosted the evenings. I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk and fondling the thigh business though. Whether that makes me a gallant and proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude I cannot quite make out. Thighs appear to be safe around me. Perhaps this will change as I enter the autumn of my life and I cease to care so much about how I am judged.

Kim had immediately joined the University Chess Club and was playing for them in matches against other universities. n.o.body doubted he would get his Blue, or rather Half Blue. You are perhaps aware that in Oxford and Cambridge there are such things as sporting 'Blues'. You can represent Cambridge, whose colour is light blue, on the hockey field, for example, for just about every game of the season and be far and away the best player on the pitch for all of them, but if you miss the Varsity game, the one match against the dark blues, Oxford, you will not be awarded your Blue. A Blue, for either side, means you played against The Enemy. The Boat Race and Varsity matches in rugby and cricket are the most celebrated encounters, but there are Blues contests between Oxford and Cambridge in every imaginable sport, game and compet.i.tive activity from judo to table-tennis, from bridge to boxing, from golf to wine-tasting. The minor pursuits result in partic.i.p.ants being awarded a 'Half Blue', and that is what Kim duly won when he represented Cambridge against Oxford in the Varsity chess match, at the RAC in Pall Mall, sponsored by Lloyds Bank. He played in that match for every one of his three years, winning the prize for best game in 1981.

Kim in Half Blue scarf.

Kim and I were the closest of friends but we were not yet lovers. He pined for a second-year called Robin, and I pined for no one in particular. Love had mauled me too violently in my teenage years, perhaps. I had fallen in love at school so completely, intensely and soul-rippingly that I had made some sort of unconscious pact with myself, I think, that I would neither betray the purity of that rapturous perfection (I know, I know, but that is how I felt) nor would I ever again open myself up for such pain and torment (exquisite as they were). There were plenty of attractive young men in the colleges and about the town, and a more than statistically usual ratio gave the impression of being as gay as gay can gaily be. I remember one or two drunken evenings in my own or another's bed, with attendant fumbling, frotting, fondling and farcically floppy failure as well as more infrequent feats of fizzing fanfare and triumphant fleshly fulfilment, but love stayed away, and, sensualist as I am in many regards, I seemed to miss neither the rewards nor the punishments of carnality.

A week or so towards the end of the first term I was approached and asked if I would sit on the May Ball Committee. Most universities hold a summer party to celebrate the end of exams and the coming long vacation. Oxford has what they call Commem b.a.l.l.s, Cambridge has May b.a.l.l.s.

'We get one fresher on the committee every year,' the President of the committee said to me, 'so that by the time the May Ball comes around in your last year, you'll know what it's all about.'

I never dared ask why they had selected me out of all the freshers to be the one to sit on the committee, but I took it as a great compliment. Perhaps they thought I exhibited style, savoir faire savoir faire, diablerie diablerie, dash and a graceful party manner. Or perhaps they believed that I was the kind of biddable sucker who would be prepared to put in the hours.

'In any case,' I was told, 'it means you will be President of the May Ball committee in your third year, which will look really good on the CV. Excellent for getting a job in the City.'

Already we were moving towards a time when getting a job in the City, rather than being looked at as an embarra.s.sing gateway to clerkly drudgery and dull worthiness, was beginning to be thought of as a glamorous, s.e.xy and desirable destiny for the elite of the world.

The members of the May Ball Committee were, as you might expect, public-school men. Many of them were also members of the Cherubs, Queens' College's exclusive dining and drinking club. I know I ought to have looked down on inst.i.tutions like May b.a.l.l.s and dining clubs with amused scorn, lofty disdain and impatient wrath, but the moment I heard of the Cherubs' existence I resolved that I would be elected. I once heard Alan Bennett say of sn.o.bbery that it was 'a very amiable vice', which I found surprising. 'That is to say,' he went on, 'the kind of sn.o.bbery that looks up with admiration is amiable. Daft, but amiable. The kind that looks down with contempt is not amiable. Not amiable at all.' I cannot deny that I am susceptible to a tinge of the amiable kind. I believe I have never looked down on anyone because they are 'low born' (whatever that might mean) but I cannot deny that I have been glamourized by those who are 'high born' (whatever that that might mean). It is a preposterous weakness and I could easily pretend that I am immune to it, but the fact is that I am not, so I may as well fess up. I suppose it is, once more, all part of the feeling I have always had of being an outsider, always needing the proof of belonging that those who truly belong never need. Or something like that. might mean). It is a preposterous weakness and I could easily pretend that I am immune to it, but the fact is that I am not, so I may as well fess up. I suppose it is, once more, all part of the feeling I have always had of being an outsider, always needing the proof of belonging that those who truly belong never need. Or something like that.

The Cambridge term is only eight weeks long. They call it Full Term, and you are expected to be in residence for all of it in theory the permission of a Dean or Senior Tutor is needed for an 'exeat' if you want to biff off; you can make up your time away during the two weeks that bracket either end of Full Term. I kept Full Term so that I could go straight up to Cundall and teach there for the three weeks they had left of their, much longer, school term. After Christmas with my family in Norfolk it was back to Cundall for a week and then to Cambridge for the Lent term.

The very fact of this being my second term seemed to release something in me, for I went to three auditions in the first week. I got the parts I wanted for all of them. I played Jeremiah Sant, an insane Ian Paisley-style Ulsterman, in Peter Luke's dramatization of the Corvo novel Hadrian the Seventh Hadrian the Seventh, the distraught Jewish tailor who sees a ghost in Wolf Mankowitz's The Bespoke Overcoat The Bespoke Overcoat and someone or other in the Trinity Hall lunchtime production of a play about Scottish nationalism. This set the pattern for a term which saw me running from rehearsals to auditions to theatres and back to auditions and rehearsals and theatres again. Lunchtime, evening and late night were the three usual slots for performance: if someone had suggested a morning production I would have put myself up for that too. I think I was in twelve plays in that eight-week term. I managed one essay on Edmund Spenser and went to no lectures or seminars. Supervisions, the Cambridge word for tutorials, were the only more or less compulsory academic intrusion on my new theatrical life. You would go alone, or occasionally with one other, to a don's rooms, read out the essay you had written, talk about it and then discuss some other writer, literary movement or phenomenon and leave promising an essay on that subject for the next week. I became adept at excuses: and someone or other in the Trinity Hall lunchtime production of a play about Scottish nationalism. This set the pattern for a term which saw me running from rehearsals to auditions to theatres and back to auditions and rehearsals and theatres again. Lunchtime, evening and late night were the three usual slots for performance: if someone had suggested a morning production I would have put myself up for that too. I think I was in twelve plays in that eight-week term. I managed one essay on Edmund Spenser and went to no lectures or seminars. Supervisions, the Cambridge word for tutorials, were the only more or less compulsory academic intrusion on my new theatrical life. You would go alone, or occasionally with one other, to a don's rooms, read out the essay you had written, talk about it and then discuss some other writer, literary movement or phenomenon and leave promising an essay on that subject for the next week. I became adept at excuses: 'I'm really sorry, Dr Holland, but I'm still trying to engage with the eschatology of Paradise Lost Paradise Lost. I think I'll take another week to come to terms with it.' It is shameful and lowering to confess how I would mine dictionaries of literary and philosophical terms for words like eschatology, syncresis and syntagmatic.

'Fine, fine. Take your time.'

Dr Holland wouldn't be fooled for a second. Being used to undergraduates, he would be familiar with their tiresome long-word displays (you will already have winced at plenty of them in this book I dare say: the felid remains incapable of permuting his nevi) and he had probably been in the audience of at least two of the plays I had acted in that week and would know perfectly well that I was spending every hour on drama and none on academic work. Cambridge was very relaxed about that kind of thing. As long as they didn't think you were going to fail your degree there was no danger of them playing the heavy. The chances of failing a degree were fabulously remote. It was perhaps a part of the inst.i.tution's arrogance that it believed anyone it selected for entrance was necessarily incapable of failure. For the rest the faculty and college very sensibly left it up to the individual. If you wanted to work hard for a first-cla.s.s degree any amount of help was given; if you preferred to spend your time pulling an oar through the water or striding about in tights roaring pentameters, why then that was fine too. A relaxed atmosphere of trust pervaded the university.

That Lent term pa.s.sed in a blizzard of acting. By the end of it I was an insider in the small world of Cambridge drama. The little microcosm reflected the esoteric coteries, cliques and factions (I only put the word 'esoteric' in front of 'coteries' because it is an anagram of it and that pleases me) of the wider world without. The bar of the ADC theatre was a-hum with talk of Artaud and Anouilh, Stanislavsky and Stein, Brecht and Blin. Many a strong-stomached aspiring sportsman, scientist or politico would have been unable to overhear our talk without vomiting. We probably used the word 'darling' for each other. I certainly did. If not honeybottom, loveangel or nippleface. Sickening I know, but there you are. The derogatory epithet 'lovie' had yet to be ascribed to the theatrical profession, but that's what avant la lettre avant la lettre we were, lovies all. History and precedent might be said to have encouraged us: Peter Hall, John Barton, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nick Hytner, James Mason, Michael Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen ... the list of theatrical giants who had leaned up against the same bar and dreamed the same dreams was inspiringly great. we were, lovies all. History and precedent might be said to have encouraged us: Peter Hall, John Barton, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nick Hytner, James Mason, Michael Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen ... the list of theatrical giants who had leaned up against the same bar and dreamed the same dreams was inspiringly great.

So how did I get to that position so fast? Was I really so talented? Or was everyone else really so talentless? I wish I knew. I can remember a great many images, occasions and solid experiences, but the emotional memory behind them is blurred and unresolved. Was I ambitious? Yes, I think in some secret way I was ambitious. Always far too proud to let it show, but hungry for Cambridge's silly microcosmic equivalent of stardom. I suppose when the captain of the college rugger team sees some fresher take to the field and get his first opportunity to make a run and handle the ball he knows straight away that this person can, or cannot, play rugby. For all my shortcomings as an actor (physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion) I suppose at auditions I showed that I at least had that thing in me that allowed an audience in. Through the occlusions of the past I can make out a tall, thin, dignified, rumbly toned student who could look either seventeen or thirty-seven. He knows how to stand still and look another actor in the eye. He knows how to deliver a line at least in such a way as to convey its meaning and, if necessary, its majesty. He can, as they say, 'pull focus' on to and off his own self. I am not so sure about his ability to inhabit a different personality, to live through the arc of his character's journey on stage and all that mother jazz, but he is at least unlikely to be a blush-making embarra.s.sment.

The moment I walked on stage for the first time I felt so absolutely and entirely at home that it was hard for me to remember that I had had almost no experience at all. I loved every single thing about acting. I loved the mockable sides of it, the instant camaraderie and deep affection one felt for everyone else involved, I loved the long conversations about motive, I loved read-throughs and rehearsals and tech runs, I loved trying on costumes and experimenting with make-up. I loved the tingle of nerves as I waited in the wings, I loved the almost mystical hyperaesthetic way in which one was aware of each microsecond on stage, of how one could detect precisely where an audience's focus was at any one moment, I loved the thrill of knowing that I was carrying hundreds of people with me, that they were surfing on the ebb and flow of my voice.

Taking such pleasure in being on stage really isn't about relishing love, attention and admiration. It is not about enjoying the power you (think you) have over an audience. It is simply a question of fulfilment. You feel perfectly alive and magnificently perfected by the knowledge that you are doing what you were put on earth to do.

Not so very long ago I accompanied some northern white rhinos on a journey to Kenya. They were being translocated from the zoo in the Czech Republic that was all they had ever known. It was immeasurably moving to watch these animals raise their top-heavy heads and take in the huge open skies of the savannah and the smells and sounds of a habitat to which their genes had taken millions of years to adapt them. The quick, unbelieving grunts, the waving of their horns from side to side and the twitching in their great hides told you that somewhere inside they knew that they were where they were supposed to be. I will not claim that the stage is my savannah, but I did feel something of the surge of relief and joy at finally having come home that the rhinos seemed to express as they nosed the air of Africa for the first time.

It is only a pity that the professional grown-up theatre won't allow you the same levels of fun and fulfilment. After three performances, or five at the most, student productions are over, and you move on to something else. Which I did. And again and again.

The Easter term is when Cambridge springs to life and becomes one of the most marvellous places on earth to be. As St John's College alumnus William Wordsworth put it: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!' He was writing less about May Week and more about the French Revolution, but the thought holds better for the first, and I bet that in truth he was thinking more about garden parties than guillotines.

The Head of the River compet.i.tion is held on the Cam twice a year, each college's boat jostling to b.u.mp the one ahead and move a place up in the order. The river isn't wide enough to allow a side-by-side regatta which is why these peculiar Lent and May Week b.u.mps evolved. Lining the river bank and cheering on my college is probably the most 'normal' Cambridgey thing I did in my three years.

Further upriver, the beauty of the Backs in late spring and early summer is enough to make the sternest puritan moan and shiver with delight. Sunlight on the stone of the bridges, willows leaning down to weep and kiss the water: young boys and girls, or boys and boys, or girls and girls, punting up to Grantchester Meadows, bottles of white wine tied with string trailing through the wake to cool, 'No kissing in the punt' careful how you say that, hoho. Revising finalists under chestnut trees, books and notes spread out on the gra.s.s as they smoke, drink, chatter, flirt, kiss and read. Garden parties on every lawn in every college for the two weeks in June that are perversely designated May Week. Dining clubs and societies, dons, clubs and rich individuals serving punch and Pimm's, beer and sangria, c.o.c.ktails and champagne. Blazers and flannels, self-conscious little sn.o.bberies and affectations, flushed youth, pampered youth, privileged youth, happy youth. Don't be too hard on them. Suppress the thought that they are all ghastly tosspots who don't know they're born, insufferable poseurs in need of a kick and a slap. Have some pity and understanding. They will get that kick and that slap soon enough. After all, look at them now. They are all in their fifties. Some of them on their third, fourth or fifth marriage. Their children despise them. They are alcoholics or recovering alcoholics. Drug addicts or recovering drug addicts. Their wrinkled, grey, bald, furrowed and fallen faces look back every morning from the mirror, those folds of dying flesh bearing not a trace of the high, joyful and elastic smiles that once lit them. Their lives have been a ruin and a waste. All that bright promise never quite matured into anything that can be looked back on with pride or pleasure. They took that job in the City, that job with the merchant bank, stockbroker, law firm, accountancy firm, chemical company, drama company, publishing company, any company. The light and energy, the pa.s.sion, fun and faith were soon snuffed out one by one. In the grind of the demanding world their foolish hopeful dreams evaporated like mist in the cruel glare of the morning sun. Sometimes the dreams return to them at night and they are so ashamed, angry and disappointed that they want to kill themselves. Once they laughed and seduced or laughed and were seduced, on ancient lawns, under ancient stones and now they hate the young and their music, they snort with contempt at everything strange and new and they have to catch their breath at the top of the stairs.

Goodness, Stephen, who rattled your your cage? Not everyone's life ends in misery, loneliness and failure. cage? Not everyone's life ends in misery, loneliness and failure.

Of course, I know that. You're right. But many do. The entropy and decay of age is dreadfully apparent when set next to the lyrical dream of a Cambridge May Week, hackneyed, outdated, unjust and absurd as such an idyll may be. It is that scene that cla.s.sical painters used to love: the golden lads and la.s.ses sporting in Elysium, throwing garlands, drinking and embracing, all unaware of the tomb on which a skull rests and never noticing its carved inscription: 'Et in arcadia ego.' Why should they notice it? Its shadow will be on them soon enough and they in turn will be wagging fingers at their children and saying, 'I too once lived in arcadia, you know ...' and their children will not listen either.

Many Cantabrigians might read the foregoing and recognize not a line of it. Plenty of students eschewed with contempt anything close to a blazer or a gla.s.s of Pimm's, most never lined the river on a May b.u.mps afternoon, never sipped planter's punch in the Master's Garden, never c.u.n.ted up the Pam to Grantchester, nor once had to be helped to an ambulance and a stomach pump on Suicide Sunday. There were a lot of Cambridges, I am just trying to remember mine, nauseating as it may be.

As well as all these parties there were plays. Queens' College's drama club was called BATS, supposedly because of the flittermice that wheeled and squeaked in the sky above the Cloister Court during its end-of-term outdoor presentation, one of the most popular and distinctive regular features of May Week. This year's production was to be The Tempest The Tempest, and the director, a Queens' second-year called Ian Softley, cast me as Alonso, King of Naples. Being tall and boomy I was nearly always given the role of a king or elderly authority figure. The young lovers, glamorous girls and handsome princes were played by students who looked their age. I never looked mine, but given that almost everyone was between eighteen and twenty-two, looking older was a distinct advantage so far as casting went.

Ian Softley now directs motion pictures The Wings of the Dove The Wings of the Dove, Backbeat Backbeat, Hackers Hackers, Inkheart Inkheart and so on but then he was a student with black curly hair and an appealing way of wearing white trousers. The cast included Rob Wyke, a graduate who was to become a close friend and, playing Prospero, a most extraordinary actor and even more extraordinary man, Richard MacKenney. In the middle of writing his PhD thesis, 'Trade guilds and devotional confraternities in the state and society of Venice to 1620', he could already speak not only fluent Italian, but fluent Venetian, which is quite another thing. While waiting for the cast to turn up (he was always exactly punctual himself, as was I) he would pace up and down at high speed, humming every note of the overture to Mozart's and so on but then he was a student with black curly hair and an appealing way of wearing white trousers. The cast included Rob Wyke, a graduate who was to become a close friend and, playing Prospero, a most extraordinary actor and even more extraordinary man, Richard MacKenney. In the middle of writing his PhD thesis, 'Trade guilds and devotional confraternities in the state and society of Venice to 1620', he could already speak not only fluent Italian, but fluent Venetian, which is quite another thing. While waiting for the cast to turn up (he was always exactly punctual himself, as was I) he would pace up and down at high speed, humming every note of the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni Don Giovanni. If we were still not quorate by the time that had been got through he would move on to Leporello's opening aria and keep at it until everyone was present, singing all the parts perfectly from memory. On one occasion Ariel was half an hour late owing to some confusion about time and venue (there was no way to text or call in those days), and when he at last arrived, red and gasping, Richard broke off from his singing and turned on him furiously.

'What time do you call this, then? The Commendatore's dead and Ottavio is swearing on his blood to be revenged.'

Richard was a magnificent actor, his King Lear was astonishing in one so young (a receding brow and faux-grumpy manner made him appear fifty although he can't have been much older than twenty-three or four) but he hid his artistry under an obsession with pace and volume. 'All you've got to do,' he said, 'is get down the front of the stage and have a good old shout.' He once gave the entire cast a b.o.l.l.o.c.king for adding five minutes to the running time. 'Unforf.u.c.kinggivable! Every extra second is so much p.i.s.s on Shakespeare's grave.'

I watched one afternoon as Ian Softley squatted in front of Barry Taylor, who was playing Caliban. 'Do you know the work of the punk poet John Cooper Clarke?' he whispered, sorrowful brown eyes gazing deeply into Barry's.

'Er, yes ...'

'I think, don't you, that we can afford something of that street anger in Caliban. Some of that rage?'

'Er ...'

'Oh forget about that,' said Richard, who had been pacing up and down, hands clasped firmly behind his back. 'Just get down the front of the stage and have a good old squeak and a gibber.' I don't suppose, with all due respect to Ian and John Cooper Clarke, that there has ever been better advice given to any actor playing Caliban in the 400 years since The Tempest The Tempest's creation.

One morning I noticed a poster in the street for an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. They were going to bring out some of the Blake drawings, paintings, prints and letters that usually, due to their marked sensitivity to light, were kept hidden away in dark drawers. I mentioned this to Richard and asked if he was going.

'William Blake?' said Richard. 'Couldn't draw, couldn't colour in.'

MacKenney is now a history professor at Edinburgh University. I hope they value him properly.

Dave Huggins stopped me in Walnut Tree Court one afternoon.

'My mum's coming to see your play tonight.'

'Is she?' I was surprised. Dave wasn't in the drama world, and it seemed odd for a parent to come to a production that her child wasn't in.

'Yeah. She's an actress.'

I consulted my memory to see if it could offer any data on an actress called Huggins. It had no suggestions. 'Er ... well. That's nice.'

'Yeah. So's my dad.'

'Might I know them?'

'Dunno. They both use acting names. She's called Anna Ma.s.sey and he calls himself Jeremy Brett.'

'B-but ... good G.o.d!'

Anna Ma.s.sey, coming to see me in a play? Well not expressly to see me me, but coming to a play that I was in.

'Your father won't be there as well, will he?'

'No, they're divorced. He's gay.'

'Is he? Is he? I didn't ... well, well. Goodness. Blimey. My word.'

I tottered off, numb with excitement.

We had our four or five performances under the fluttering bats; Ariel sprinted about, Caliban squeaked and gibbered, I boomed, Prospero got down the front and had a good old shout, Anna Ma.s.sey graciously applauded.

In the meantime I had been helping prepare for the May Ball.

It so happens that the Patron or Visitor of Queens' College is, appropriately enough given the foundation's name, whoever might happen to be Queen at the time: a position she holds until her death. From the 1930s to the 1950s the queen was, of course, Elizabeth, wife of George VI. After George died, now styled the Queen Mother, she remained in place. There's a point to all this.

We are at a meeting of the May Ball Committee. Much of the time is taken up with the particular details that you might expect how to run the roulette table without falling foul of the gaming acts, who will be in charge of escorting the Boomtown Rats to the tent set aside as their changing room, whether or not there will be enough ice in the champagne bar, the usual kind of administrative trivia. The President turns to me.

'Got your Magdelene and Trinity invitations yet?'

'Yup, and Clare.'

One of the perks of being on a May Ball committee was that you received free invitations to other May b.a.l.l.s. Aside from our own, I was going to the ball at Clare, one of the prettiest of the colleges, where my cousin Penny was also a fresher, and to the two grandest of all, Trinity and Magdalene. So grand were they that gossip columnists and photographers from the Tatler Tatler and and Harper's & Queen Harper's & Queen attended. You could get away with a dinner jacket at Clare and Queens', but Trinity and Magdalene insisted on white tie and tails. The hire companies did a roaring trade. Only King's, a mixed college and proud of its radical and progressive ethos, refused to hold a May Ball. Their summer party was called instead, with dour literalism, the King's June Event. attended. You could get away with a dinner jacket at Clare and Queens', but Trinity and Magdalene insisted on white tie and tails. The hire companies did a roaring trade. Only King's, a mixed college and proud of its radical and progressive ethos, refused to hold a May Ball. Their summer party was called instead, with dour literalism, the King's June Event.

'Good,' the President of the Committee says to me. 'Oh. One other little thing. Dr Walker sent me a note saying that if the Queen Mother dies the college has to go into mourning for a week, during which no entertainments or celebrations of any kind can be held, certainly not a May Ball. Perhaps you might look into insurance to cover that?'

'Insurance?' I try to sound casual and unconcerned, as if arranging insurance policies is something I have been doing since I was an infant. 'Ah ... right. Yes. Sure. Of course.'

The meeting ends, and I slip into the public phone box in the corner of Friar's Court and start ringing around insurance companies.

'Sun Life, can I help you?'

'Ah, yes. I'm calling up about getting a policy ...'

'Life, car, commercial or property?'

'Well, none of those really.'

'Marine, travel or medical?'

'Well, again. None. It's to insure against having to cancel an event.'

'Abandonment?'