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years’ national service.
    I imagine the point may have come up in earlier sessions of this seminar, but the abolition of national service later in the fifties must have made an incalculable difference to the university in all sorts of ways. I speak only for myself. Although when I came up I was two years older than most undergraduates are now, and was here in all for some eight years, it took me all that time to hit upon what I wanted to do. I found my niche eventually, but if I’d come here straight from school I should probably still be looking.
    My college, Exeter, was in 1954 a fairly modest, not to say undistinguished establishment. Which was precisely why I’d chosen it, as I’d stand a better chance there, I reasoned, than at socially more exalted foundations such as Trinity, which I think was in the same group. My mother had actually suggested I try Balliol. (She mispronounced the name, of course, but I’m not sure I didn’t at that time.) My mother’s idea of a university owed less to Cardinal Newman than it did to Beverley Nichols, of whose weekly column in the Woman’s Own she was a great fan. Beverley had been to Balliol, my mother said, so why not me? There were plenty of reasons, the chief one being that it was so academically tip-top. It was also quite ugly. At seventeen I was a bit of an architectural snob. I was coming to Oxford hell-bent on going through a process I suppose I thought of as ‘blossoming’, and I saw as an essential ingredient in the blossoming process a nice period background. Exeter’s strong artistic suit was its connection with Morris and Burne-Jones, but the Pre-Raphaelites weren’t quite back in fashion by 1954 so even in this department I thought it no great shakes. Still it did have its picturesque corners, though not enough to attract the morefastidious and discerning applicants, who would, I hoped, be winnowed out by the glories of Magdalen or St John’s, thus leaving the field open to dowdy and devious creatures like myself.
    One jokes about these options now but they were no joke then, and it all had to be decided at home – the wireless off, the kitchen table cleared and wiped (no more certain way of being rejected, I thought, than jam on the entrance form). In the mystifying permutations of choice my parents stood by helpless; they scarcely knew what a university was, let alone the status of its component parts. The irony, of course, was that when I finally landed up at Exeter I found that in my callow assessment of college form I had not been unique. Others had reasoned in the same way, with the result that Exeter was far harder to get into than anywhere else.
    In 1954 Exeter was an inward-looking college. Few of its members figured in the wider life of the university, and it had a close-knit family atmosphere. This should have meant that in-college societies were that much more vigorous, but this certainly wasn’t true of drama. So far as I recall, Exeter’s dramatic society was in abeyance the whole of my time as an undergraduate. This was no doubt a relief to the college. Dons have always been dubious about drama. Though rowing, and indeed running, can scarcely be said to hone the mind, they have always been looked on more favourably than the stage. Acting is somehow thought to rot both mind and character. Whereas it would be inconceivable to stop someone rowing or running in their final year, it was (and perhaps still is) quite common to forbid him or her to act.
    None of which – acting, rowing, or running – bothered me much, as I wasn’t inclined to do any of them. I had carried over from national service (and in this I’m sure I wasn’t alone) a suspicion of volunteering, of joining, indeed of conspicuousactivity of any sort. So I became a member of no clubs; no cards decorated my mantelpiece; no societies met in my rooms. It was all very dull and, apart from the fact that I had to share a set with someone who had been in the same barrack room for