Alumni profile

My first home at Trinity was K5 Whewell’s Court
(‘Blackstained as if by bathroom mould / The Gothic annex made of rain / Rises high through clouds across the road / In central Transylvania …’), where I discovered I was on Wittgenstein’s old staircase. Dazed and confused by Cambridge grandeur and personal self-doubt, I changed from Classics to the sunny uplands of English almost straightaway – a world of Redpath and Ricks, Prynne and Poole – then wondered if I’d made a mistake. I also didn’t know whom to hang out with, or what to wear. I ditched my post-hippie claret corduroy jacket and pink loons for tweedy Pitt Club garb, for at least six weeks. That didn’t work. I wore this and that, even Footlights-style dungarees.

I bumbled along in English Literature, finding my first ray of inspiration in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – but only through a passage of Boethius he had translated about providence, fate and fortune. This inspired me to write The New Oracle, a short play about computer dating (very new in those days!). Trinity’s Dryden Society accepted it for production, and, lo, my writing career began. Yet the world of drama didn’t suit my temperament. Too many accidents lurked (missed lighting cues, forgotten lines), and I turned to poetry, prompted by the Powell Prize for Poetry, a College competition founded by Enoch himself. My first-ever poem (about St Patrick getting rid of the snakes in Ireland) came first equal, and that was enough to encourage me, after I left Trinity, to write poems on the island of Crete.

The Magic Theatre describes my three-year journey through Trinity – at a time when the country was beset by industrial unrest and the Troubles, and morphing from Prog Rock to Punk and Disco. It tells of scary tutorials (Mr Salingar, and Dr Casey in Caius), a broken love affair, crashing May Balls, Bacchic parties, theatrical pratfalls, discovering poetry, and most of all, friendships. My era was that of The Whim restaurant, the Arts Cinema in Market Passage (I saw Death in Venice nine times); Broadsheet (for which I drew cover illustrations and cartoons) and Stop Press; Belinda’s and its cherry cheesecake; the Sidgwick Site to hear Ricks on Bob Dylan and Jeremy Prynne on ‘Jack and Jill’; playing ‘Pong’ in the Baron of Beef; seeing the Footlights parade the likes of Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath, and Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson tread the boards of the ADC.

In retrospect I feel as if I had wandered into a play with a backdrop of palaces or atmospheric local settings (Kettle’s Yard, the Eagle), not knowing what my role was and who the director or playwright was. Perhaps that explains my obsession with acting on stage (from the ADC to the Shirley Society), for which I had no talent at all? I hope the book will stir memories of what were, in my case at least, three chequered, topsy-turvy, bamboozling and, most of all, formative magical years.