Gaudeamus

student days
(photos of buildings courtesy of Google search engine)

Botanic Gardens

Pleasantly hot and dry it was, in the cactus house of the Botanics in Edinburgh, a good place for the pre-exam swot. For this was the winter of 1947, the coldest since records began, and we students in halls of residence had one bucket of coal each a week to heat our bedrooms; we heard reports of a thing called central heating that happened way down in Englandshire but none of us had experienced it in person. The bucket of coal lasted two nights at best, and the rest of the week we searched for warm places. The cactus house was far and away the best: you could stay as long as it was open, it was light, it was free; in the evenings, the cinema took over, but it cost money and it was dark, not a lot of use for your frantic last-minute swot. There were not enough cinemas for a varied diet: we saw The Seventh Veil (James Mason, Ann Todd) so many times, that we knew the lines by heart and would chant them as the evilness of James Mason and the victimhood of Ann Todd unfurled yet again; strangely, no-one in the auditorium seemed irritated by us, probably everyone was there for the heat.

Smog (smoke+fog) has long ago vanished from Edinburgh, but during those years there were days when you could get lost crossing a street; in my first year I shared a large room with my sister: we couldn’t see one another across the room (not that we especially wanted to); one of our fellow-students was Susan Ofori-Atta, daughter of a Gold Coast (now Ghana) chief, who claimed to have 100 brothers; Susan was invisible in the smog, and all you could see as she came near were two rows of strong white teeth, for she smiled a lot and this was just as well when you were whizzing downstairs.

Food was limited, for rationing actually became more severe post-war, and did not end until 1954, years after my own student days were over. We had, for instance, 2oz (57g) butter a week and 12oz (340g) chocolate per month; I can easily eat these quantities in a couple of days now – back then I would have killed anyone who nicked it, but no-one ever stole the tiniest bit of anyone else’s food, the resulting carnage would have been frightful. On the other hand there were rich trading opportunities: I regularly traded clothing coupons, much desired by those rich enough to buy clothes, for 12oz of chocolate.

Masson Hall, George Square
(now demolished)

In the halls of residence they did what they could with the rations, but the milk and eggs were reconstituted powder, and most of the food was free of any recognisable taste, except for one pudding labelled “semolina snow” which tasted strongly of the antiseptic TCP. (Many years later, passing by a farm where they were dipping sheep, I smelt TCP pudding again and was instantly reminded of the wonders of student living.) But occasionally there would be eggaroni chish for dinner, a real taste of fish and cheese. Yum yum. It was billed as kedgeree, but I’ve had kedgeree many times since and it was never anything resembling eggaroni chish.

Lectures were on the whole uninspiring, and we whiled away the hour by fastening on any idiosyncrasy of the lecturer and counting the number of times it happened: the Murderer, a lecturer in Latin, put up a stonking 37 “ahem”s in the course of one 50-minute discourse on a Horace Ode. Personally, I whiled away the time by recalling the magic properties of Imaginary Numbers and the Argand diagram, since Maths was what I loved and would have been studying had it not been pointed out to my parents that there was no career for females in Maths, and Classics was the one thing that would assure their child of a good job and a comfortable life into the foreseeable future. My parents had no means of knowing what rubbish this would turn out to be.

Old Quad, Edinburgh University

Latin and Greek did not come to me as easily as did the world of the Imaginary Number; I was bored senseless with most of the stuff we were reading, and fell into a habit of sunbathing on the tiny south-facing balcony of my room in Masson Hall when I should have been with Odysseus careering to and fro on the Mediterranean, eventually  losing every last man of his crew (how about that for leadership? – he would never have been selected as an officer), or with Achilles sulking in his tent over the removal of his slavegirl (loss of status was what bugged him, not loss of girl).

Nor did I socialise with the rest of my class, for many of them were bound for the ministry, so clearly no light chat was possible there, and the rest were the demobs who had arrived in our second year after six years in the forces, some from Arctic convoys, some from being prisoners-of-war after capture in Africa, some from fighting with the partisans in Greece; they were old, old men, and all they wanted was to get their degree and a decent job and never have any more aggro at all, ever again.

And so it came about that in apathy and isolation I happened to read the wrong year’s allocation of set books, for instance the Iliad instead of the Odyssey, and never realised it until a few weeks before the final exams. Whereupon, sitting in the sunshine of my balcony or crouched through the night in my bedroom, I attempted to read a whole year’s set books, staying awake by means of black coffee. Sometimes, sleepless in the wee small hours and needing a break, I would nip out, across the Meadows, and up Arthur’s Seat, startling the dozing sheep as I went. To this day, the sharp smell of newly-excreted sheep dung evokes the student experience.

This was a time when I was suffering from a succession of boils, as were many others after all the years of food shortage, in spite of what the official propaganda tells us about how healthy those rations were; it took several more years and the end of rationing before the boils finally went away. When the weeks of the final exams came round, I had a boil on the end of my nose, swollen red and throbbing. It not the most enjoyable of experiences, and I feared disaster for me, and disappointment for my parents. In the event, it was not entirely a disaster, and the advantage of my field of study became clear - I could understand what the resultant scroll said.

The Murderer gave me a most charitable reference;"I was tempted" said he with a twinkle "to add 'Fortunate indeed will be the employer who can get Old and Idle to work for him.'"

In case all this reeks of Misery Memoir, I must add that the years at university were pretty enjoyable. We had spent most of our secondary schooldays in what seemed at the time to be the certainty that we would soon be under the rule of the Hun, if we hadn’t been killed by a bomb first; and we had forgotten what it was like not to be rationed, so that powdered egg and TCP pudding were just normal food. So this was the start of a time when the threat of defeat had disappeared and everything was gradually improving, yet many of the advantages of wartime still remained: a feeling of equality, derived from rationing and lasting a long time afterwards; roads almost free of traffic, so that cycling was easy and safe, and children could play in the streets without supervision; obesity, with its attendant problems, was easily avoided; I can’t remember seeing a single obese person during those years, though there were a few sporting big red suppurating boils.

And whereas much of our prescribed student learning was inevitably dull, we did come across some fascinating insights. For it was at this time that the Kinsey Report (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) first came out, and naturally we were off to the library hotfoot to look up the Index and find out who did what with whom.

A friend emerged from one of these research sessions looking dazed; “ducks,” she was muttering, “I mean, DUCKS!  Good grief! How on earth . . . ?”