While at secondary school, I decided I was going to be a scientist. But, alas, my O-level grade for Chemistry sank from 80% in the mock exams to 50% for the real thing: so, the headmaster offered me the choice between taking French, Latin and English Literature at A-level or leaving the school and getting a job. Naturally, I allowed myself to be persuaded by his rhetoric. I can't say I enjoyed being a frustrated scientist that much -- but at any rate, I did well enough at my A-levels to be offered a place at Trinity College Cambridge. I applied to study French and Latin, but they intimated at my interview that my after-dinner conversational skills in Latin weren't up to par (even though I'd been listening to Vatican Radio for practice) and invited me to pick another language instead. I picked Italian (out of an emotional attachment to Italian film stars, cars and footballers, and in spite of my dislike for pasta, olive oil and garlic) and so ended up studying French and Italian.
Well, the language work was OK, but I really didn't get turned on by studying French and Italian literature. So, I scratched around for something else -- anything else -- to do instead. I started studying Romance Philology with Joe Cremona, and took up Spanish to relieve the boredom: but a couple of weeks into the Spanish course, Joe persuaded me to take Romanian instead, on the grounds that the University had a visiting lector offering a course in Romanian which nobody wanted to take. My favourite Philology course was The History of the French Language -- 9 o'clock lectures three times a week, going through the Chanson de Roland, translating it and commenting on it line by line; the audience comprised 20 women in the front two rows, then a gap of five empty rows, then 80 men in the back 3 rows. The most exciting part of that course was discovering that Peter Rickard had actually missed out 4 lines of the text one week. So, of course, I had to check... It turned out to be a passage extolling the virtues of putting mustard on one of the more delicate parts of one's anatomy. (No, I didn't try it.) I also took a course in Linguistics, but found it terminologically traumatic: no sooner had you written down the first syllable of 'taxonomic phonemic phonology' than John Trim was already half-way through the next unintelligible piece of jargon. Definitely not for me, I thought!
Of course, I have lots of fond memories from my undergraduate days at Trinity. I used to upset my late mother no end by glottalising the medial |t| of Trinity when the neighbours asked what college I was at. And how can I forget being locked out of College after midnight and having to swim naked across the river and clamber over some rather rusty spiked metal railings to get back in? How can I also forget the threat of being fined 6 shillings and 8 pence for walking on the grass in the College courtyards, and the absurd menace of being excommunicated if you didn't wear a gown when you ventured onto the streets of Cambridge after dark? Of course, gowns made you an easy target for townies whose main thrill in life was beating up gownies: and sure enough, a week before my final exams I was set on by a dozen townies, one of whom slashed me with a knife (fortunately only ripping my gown and jacket) while the rest gave me 'a good kicking' -- and all within the admiring gaze of a nearby policeman who did absolutely nothing. When I finally turned up at the College gates covered in blood and with my clothes in tatters, the porter simply said 'Good evening, sir' as if nothing had happened. Well, boys will be boys, won't they? I ended up revising for my finals in the College sick bay.
Next, my graduate years.