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achieved was about what you might expect from the thing that squirts a car windscreen, but without the wipers to spread the water round.
    There was something typical of my university in this, I thought. At some places, the senior dons go on television. They sit on panels and give opinions on the news, write columns in the papers or get paid to travel the world explaining the origins of language, minerals or cave paintings. They turn up at the Prime Minister’s birthday party or at the opening of a new play at the National Theatre. They’re pictured at the Ritz or driving down Piccadilly with a slightly intellectual actress. But the most famous philosopher from my university spent the last ten years of his life in his college room designing the lettering for his headstone.
    I sleep late in the morning, and the woman who’s meant to clean my room, the bedmaker as she’s called, doesn’t disturb me. I’ve only met her once. She looked like a female impersonator. Now I lock the outer door when I go to bed. This means that my room is not very clean, but then again the terms are quite short. And if I know I’m going to sleep out somewhere, I leave the outer door open, so this woman can come in occasionally and change the sheets.
    When I was young, I used to worry a good deal. We lived in a red-brick terrace in a dingy part of town where the malt smell from the brewery hung over us. My father worked in a paper mill and suffered from asthma. He also had a heart murmur and we were afraid he might not be able to go on working. Disability pay, early retirement, chronic invalidity . . . These were the phrases I overheard; I didn’t know what they meant, except for one thing: no money. My mother worked as a receptionist at a hotel called the Waverley on the Bath Road. She tried to be at home when I came back from school, but from the age of ten or eleven I was given a key and told to make my own tea. This was fine by me, as I could watch television without fear of being nagged to do homework. I also read books which I took out of the library on my way home, and there was no charge for them. This struck me as inexplicable, but good.
    I knew we were poor, but I also knew there were people poorer than us. The Callaghans, for instance. There were twelve of them in a house smaller than ours, two streets away. It smelled damp and stale. They had an outside toilet – a double-seater, as I knew from having used it when my mother left me with Mrs Callaghan one afternoon. And all those places by the railway. You’d see the laundry flapping in the soot-grimed yard. How would it ever be clean?
    There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I was worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.
    I was concerned about West Germany as well. I’d seen newsreel pictures of how their cities had been bombed by our planes in the War and wasn’t sure how they could manage to get going again. Then they were occupied by us and the Americans and this must be humiliating because it wasn’t as though they were savages in far-off islands who knew no better. It was like being in permanent detention. It was like being forced to wear short trousers even when you were a man. I wondered how I’d feel if I was little Hans or Fritz in Düsseldorf or Hanover. I didn’t think I’d like my life to be restricted by the consequences of what my parents had done.
    I waited for my father’s step on the path every night and the rattle of his key in the lock. I ran out from the kitchen to see how he looked in the light of the sixty-watt hall bulb. I became an expert in summing him up. By the time I’d reached him to say hello I knew by the movement of his ribs beneath his work shirt whether his breathing was constricted or relatively free.
    It bothered me that people had so many children. There didn’t seem to be enough food in the world for