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We were watching Wonka this weekend, which is lots of fun and full of spectacle and Hugh Grant steals the show. At the end of the film (spoiler alert) it is discovered that the lost mother of Willy Wonka's friend works in the town library. And the library that features in the film is the Radcliffe Camera, the impressive round building that forms part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The mother of my niece, the acclaimed author Emily Herring used to work in this building, so I think that makes my niece the inspiration for the character. She should put that on the back of her serious books about philosophy.
The Radcliffe Camera has mixed memories for me from my student days. It's fair to say that I was not the most fastidious of students. I worked very hard to get to University, but once there pursued my seeming pipe dream of becoming a comedian and so spent nearly all my time doing sketches, plays, drinking, eating chips and failing to talk to women. I didn't trouble the University's fine libraries very much (I think I went to one lecture the whole time I was there), which is something I partly regret now (though as it turns out concentrating on comedy would be more beneficial to me than the effect on Anglo-Papal relations of the murder of Thomas a Beckett).
Anyway I had always done well at exams before I got to University and was always well prepared, so as the Final exams approached it was quite a terrifying time for me. I had only been really inspired by the Victorian Intellect and Culture module that I had worked hard on (ironically none of my top subjects came up on the paper and it was one of the ones I did worst on - though I did use some of the info on English History III and got a first on that paper). But there were 10 papers and a thousand years of history to catch up on in about six weeks and I was never going to do it.
I turned up at the library most days, but was overwhelmed by the task at hand and that led to inertia and staring off into the distance and feeling increasingly desperate. I still dream about this time every now and again, asking my tutors if I can defer my exams for a year (even thoug in the dreams I am my age now and wondering if it's worth giving up my career just to do well at some exams that I never needed). It was a dark time and I felt pretty depressed, sometimes a little dangerously so. It seemed a much bigger deal that I did OK than it turned out to be.
I remember the only book I read from cover to cover was one about whether the Rudolph Hess in Spandeau (prison not pop group) was the real Rudolph Hess or a double. The book (incorrectly) thought not and was a stupid bit of fluff. More pertinently this was not even a period that any of my exams would cover.
I also became a little bit obsessed with a fellow student in the library, a young woman with a striking profile that I thought made her look like someone from a medieval painting. I spent quite a lot of time drawing pictures of her profile. I was not a good artist and did not do her beauty any justice. I was certainly too shy to ever go and talk to her.
I am not sure if one of my friends told her about this or if she just noticed the weird, increasingly unhappy man staring at her a lot, but we did end up meeting up outside the Radcliffe Camera for a chat or a date or something. I was drinking a fair amount at this time and though I think this was an afternoon meet up, I brought some cans of beer and we had a drink rather than working or reading about Rudolph Hess. She knew about the pictures or I told her that I'd been drawing her and she wanted to see the pictures, but I knew they were terrible and not flattering in any way and so it just became an awkward hour or so where she realised I was a weirdo. We didn't have a second date. But nor did she call the authorities and have me locked up, so it's all good.
It was a desolate and terrifying time for me. I managed to borrow notes and revise a the three subjects that I thought would come up on each paper and when I couldn't get a copy of England in the Late Middle Ages, I shoplifted it from Blackwells (the first time I shoplifted and the only time I took something that I couldn't afford but actually needed) and got to a zen like state where I knew everything was hopeless so there was no point in worrying about anything. When we turned up for the exams the other students remarked how cool and collected I was. But it was only because I'd accepted that I was definitely going to fail. Just like people could calmly walk to the scaffold to be hanged.
I still tried. My punts on what might come up had been largely successful, I was much cleverer than I realised and occasionally I was able to use knowledge from my A levels (my memory was very good back then and I could still remember quotes from books that I'd learned four years before) to bluff my way through. I was always good at exams, though there were some papers I was totally out of my depth with (there was one general history - about the theory of the subject itself rather than stuff that happened- paper which I still don't understand and which we hadn't been taught, which felt like the kind of thing you'd know about if you'd been to public school.
Subsequently I had an incredible range of marks over the ten papers. I think I somehow passed them all and got an unlikely first on one of them (which just makes me wish I'd worked properly all the time - I had no clue that I was capable of getting a first) and ended up with the flukiest possible 2:1 (I have a feeling I might have been bottom of the 2:1s but had done just enough to sneak in and make it look like I was a diligent if unexceptional student). If I'd know I could get a 2.1 I would have worked much harder and still get a 2.1. To think I had considered deferring for a year (and in darker moments deferring from life itself forever) this was a crazy result. And one that has had no impact on my life.
So the Radcliffe Camera is the symbol of that awful final term and the despair and emptiness I had to endure. But it's where I learned that Rudolph Hess might not have been the real Rudolph Hess so it's not all bad.
It was also the scene of one of my happiest University memories when the Seven Raymonds, the comedy sketch group I was part of, performed a medieval shepherds play. We had a cart and went round Oxford performing this funny, weird and religious text in medieval English in various locations. One of which was the lawn next to the library (near where I'd later drink cans with an unimpressed woman with a medieval face). It was ridiculous and sublime. The sun shone, the audience laughed and were moved, we made some money for charity and it was the kind of thing you could only do at University. As magical as Wonka and I probably ate about as much chocolate as well.
