Making History

MAKING GOOD

Parks

It had been a big error to have neglected socks. By the time I passed the Mill my feet were sweaty and bruised. As, when it came down to it, was I.

First years, as I pounded wearily over the bridge along Silver Street, bubbled merrily, skipping to avoid the traffic and exhibiting that blend of world-weariness and bragging bounce that is their foolish birthright. I could never do all that when I was an undergraduate. Too self-conscious. That way the studentry have of calling out each other’s names across the street.

‘Lucius! D’you go to that party in the end?’

‘Kate!’

‘Dave!’

‘Mark, catchalater, guy!’

‘Bridget, woah, babel’

If I weren’t part of it all I’d puke.

I remembered a huge piece of graffiti along Downing Street, done round about the time of the collapse of Communism and still defiantly and screamingly legible on the brickwork of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

THE WALL IS NOT COMING DOWN HERE. KILLAGRAD 85

You could hardly blame any kid who grew up in Cambridge for redesigning himself as a class warrior. Imagine being surrounded your whole life through by all those floppy-haired Fabians and baseball-capped Brians with money and complexions and money and height and money and looks and money and books and money and money. Wankers.

Wank-us! The class warriors shouted at you in football crowd chorus. Wank-us! With accompanying hand gestures.

Killagrad 85. The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology should restore that faded lettering and treasure it as their most prized acquisition, an alfresco exhibit saying more than all their collections of plinthed Celtic amulets, spotlit Incan jars and Borneo nose bones.

A colleague in Oxford (how wonderful to be a graduate, a Junior Bye Fellow and to be able to use words like ‘colleague’) a colleague, yes a colleague, a Fellow Historian, told me about a photograph he saw on show in a gallery there. It was really two photographs, side by side, of two different bottle-banks, for the recycling of glass. The picture on the left was taken in Cowley, on the outskirts of the town, near the car factory. This bottle-bank was, as most are I guess, built in three sections, colour-coded to represent the three varieties of glass destined for each bin. There was a section painted white for clear glass, a green section for green and, three times the width of the other two, a brown section. The photograph next to it, which at first glance you thought was identical, showed another bottle-bank, but taken this time in the centre of Oxford, the university quarter. After a puzzled look, the difference hit you. A white section, a brown section and, get this, three times the width of the other two, a green section. What else do you need to know about the world? They should screen that photograph of those two bottle-banks at closedown while the national anthem plays.

Not that I’m from a generation that gets angry at social injustice, everyone knows our lot don’t care. I mean bloody hell, it’s get-a-job city here and the devil take the wimp-most. Besides, I’m a historian. A historian, me. An historian if you please.

I sat up, folded my arms and freewheeled past the University Press humming an Oily-Moily number.

I’ll never be a woman

I’ll never be you.

I must have lost count of how many bicycles I’d been through in the last seven years. This model, as it happened, was balanced enough to allow me to take my hands from the handlebars, which is a waycool thing I like to do.

Bicycle theft at Cambridge is like car-radio theft in London or handbag snatching in Florence: which is to say en-bloody-demic. Every bike has a number elegantly and uselessly painted on its rear mudguard. There was even a time, which ought to have been humiliating for the town, when they tried a Scheme. God save us from all Schemes, yeah? The town fathers bought thousands of bicycles, sprayed them green and left them in little bike-parks all over the city. The idea was that you hopped on one, got to where you wanted to be and then left it on the street for the next user. Such a cute idea, so William Morris, so Utopian, so dumb.

Reader, you will be amazed to hear, astonished you will be, thunderstruck to learn, that within a week all the green bicycles had disappeared. Every single one. There was something so cute and trusting and hopeful and noble and aaaah! in the Scheme that the city ended up prouder, not humbler, for the deal. We giggled. And, when the council announced a new improved Scheme, we rolled over on the ground howling with laughter, begging them between gasps to stop.

Trouble is, you can’t blade in Cambridge, too many cobbles. There’s a sad little In-Line Skating Soc and a Quad Soc which tries to pretend that Midsummer Common is Central Park, but it won’t wash, kids. Bikes it has to be and mountain bikes — in the flattest region of Britain, where a dog-turd excites the attentions of the Mountaineering Soc — they won’t wash either.

Cambridge councillors love the word ‘park’. It is the one thing you can’t actually do in the town, so they use the word everywhere. Cambridge was just about the first place ever to offer Park ‘n’ Ride buses. It boasts a Science Park, Business Parks and of course the late lamented Bike Parks. I shouldn’t wonder if by the turn of the century we have Sex Parks and Internet Parks and Shop Parks and perhaps, as a wild throw, Park Parks with swings and slides.

You can’t park in Cambridge for a number of reasons. It is a small medieval town, whose street widths are delimited by the lines of colleges facing each other, resolute and immovable as a chain of mountains. It becomes, in vacation months, stuffed with tourists, foreign students and conventioneers. Above all, it is the capital city of the Fens, the only serious shopping centre for hundreds of thousands from Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire,

Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, poor sods. In May however, in May, Cambridge belongs to the undergraduacy, to all the young dudes in their little scrubby goatees and neat sideburns. The colleges close their gates and one word rises above the centre of town, and swells to bursting like a huge water-filled balloon.

Revision.

Cambridge m May is Revision Park. The river and lawns, libraries, courts and corridors bloom with colourful young buds busting their brains over books. Panic, real panic, of a kind they never knew until the 1980s, washes over the third years like a tide. Examinations matter. The class of degree counts.

Unless, like me, you did your final exams years ago, swotted like a specky, got a First, have completed your doctoral thesis and are now free.

Free! I shouted to myself.

Fur-reee! answered the coasting bike and the buildings whip-panning by.

God, I loved myself that day.

Enjoy the itch and bruise of your feet on the pedals. What the heckety have you got to be down about? How many, like you, can stand up and call themselves free?

Free of Jane too. Still not quite sure what I felt about that. I mean, I have to admit she was, as it happens, my first ever real girlfriend. I was never like, one of the great and groovy studmuffins of the world as a student because…well, there’s no getting round it…I’m shy. I find it hard to meet people’s eyes. As my mother used to say of me (and in front of me) ‘he blushes in company you know’. That helped, obviously.

I was only seventeen when I started at Uni, and being baby-faced and blushy and not confident with anybody, let alone girls, I kind of kept myself to myself. I didn’t have school friends already there because I went to a state school that had never sent anyone to Cambridge before and I was crap at sports and journalism and acting and all the things that get you noticed. Crap at them because they get you noticed, I suppose. No, let’s be honest, crap at them because I was crap at them. So Jane was…well, she was my life.

But now, way-hey! If I could complete a doctorate in four years and personally recaffeinate Safeway’s natural decaff, I didn’t need anyone.

Every Fiona and Frances frowning over her Flaubert looked different to the new, free me as I freewheeled and freely dismounted at the gates of St Matthew’s and wheeled the freely ticking 4857M into the lodge, feeling free.