Making History

MAKING READY

The pigeon-hole

Bill the Porter looked up from his window as I struggled in with the bike. I had suspected for a long time that he disapproved of me.

‘Morning, Mr Young.’

‘Not for long, Bill.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Forecast’s good.’

‘Not “Mister” for long,’ I said with a small blushing smile and held up the briefcase that housed the Meisterwerk. ‘I’ve finished my thesis!’

‘Ho,’ said Bill and looked back down at his desk.

Too much to expect him to take pleasure in my triumph. Who will ever penetrate the embarrassment of the late twentieth-century servant-master relationship? Even to call it a servant-master relationship is going a bit far. The porters had their Sirs, Ma’ams and bowler hats and we had the foolish, hearty and sycophantic grins that tried to make up for it all. We would never know what they called us behind our backs. They, presumably, would never know what we actually got up to all day. Perhaps it was the porters’ sons and daughters who wrote Killagrad 83 up on walls. Bill knew that some students stayed on, wrote doctoral theses and became fellows of the college, just as he knew that others flunked or went into the world to become rich, famous or forgotten. Maybe he cared, maybe he didn’t. Still, a bit more of Denholm Elliott in Trading Places and a bit less of Judith Anderson in Rebecca would have been welcome. I mean, you know? Yeah? Exactly.

‘Of course,’ I said weighing the briefcase in my hands with what I hoped was rueful modesty, ‘it has to be examined first…”

A grunt was all I got out of that, so I turned to see what the post had brought me. A thick yellow parcel was poking from my pigeon-hole. Cool! I pulled it out tenderly.

Printed on the address label was the logo of a German publishing house that specialised in history and academic texts. Seligmanns Verlag. I knew their name well from research, but how the hey could they know my name? I’d never written to them. It seemed very odd. I certainly hadn’t ordered any books from them…unless of course, somehow, by reputation they had heard of me and were writing to ask if I would consent to their publishing my Meisterwerk. Coo-oool!

For my thesis to be published was naturally the greatest, deepest, dearest, closest wish of my entire bosom. Seligmanns Verlag, woah, this was going to be a peach of a day.

Whole dreams, visions and imaginative constructions of the future were building inside my head like time-lapsed film of skyscraper construction; timbers and king-posts, girders and joists winking into place to a cheeky xylophone track. I was already there, in the fully furnished and fully let Michael Young Tower, accepting awards and professorships and signing elegantly produced Seligmanns Verlag copies of my thesis (I could even see the colour of the book, the typeface, the jacket illustration and the dignified author photo and blurb) in the infinitesimal fraction of time between first seeing their label on the parcel and subsequently registering, with a squeal of brakes, a screeching of tyres and a billowing of airbags, the name of the actual addressee. Bit of a metaphorical shit heap there, but you know what I mean.

‘Professor L H Zuckermann’, it said. ‘St Matthew’s College, Cambridge. CB3 9BX.’

Oh. Not Michael Young MA, then.

I looked at the pigeon-hole immediately beneath mine. It was crammed to overflowing with letters, flyers and notes. Alphabetically the last, below even ‘Young, Mr M D’ came ‘Zuckermann, Prof. I stared at the dymo label, hot with disappointment.

‘Damn,’ I said, trying to wedge the package into its proper home.

‘Sir?’

‘Oh, nothing. It’s just that there’s this thing in my pigeon-hole for Professor Zuckermann and his pigeonhole’s full.’

‘If you’ll give it to me, sir, I’ll see that he gets it.’

‘It’s all right, I’ll take it to him. He might be able to help me with…with an introduction to some publishers. Where’s he hang out?’

‘Hawthorn Tree Court, sir. 2A.’

‘Who is he, in fact?’ I asked, sliding the package into my briefcase. ‘Never come across him.’

‘He is Professor Zuckermann,’ was the prim reply.

Officialdom. Teh.