Not King’s College Chapel

The picture above is of a ruined 1960’s building, standing alone out west of Cambridge, in an area which is gradually being built up. I pass it on the way out to the Parkrun on Saturday morning. I think it was at one time a university laboratory, and it now looks like the sort of place where in days gone by, boffins bred monkeys with three heads and whatnot. Anyway, the point is that Cambridge is not all dreaming spires (yes, I know, that’s Oxford) and classical architecture, and I thought I would show a couple of Cambridge buildings that are less well known and that stimulate some memories for me.

 

This is the back of Frank Young House, which as I understand it contains student residences for Darwin College. I like it because it looks like the superstructure at the stern of an ocean liner, or at least it does so to me. There are so many things evoked by ships or the sea. Around fifteen years ago, I had agreed to teach a workshop to French PhD students in St Malo. It was a morning event, planned to take place from nine am to 12 noon. However, the body funding one of our studies sprung a meeting on me the day before in London, ending about two in the afternoon. There was no possibility of a train to Paris which would get me there in time for the last train to St Malo that evening. So instead, I took a train to Portsmouth, and sailed on an overnight ferry, in some luxury, arriving at St Malo at seven in the morning, in plenty of time for my workshop. I should say that the workshop itself was three hours long, all in French with plenty of verbal exchanges in both directions, and at the end of it I needed to go to bed for an hour or two. But I was quite proud of the fact that I had found a way to get there on time, and sailing across the channel is always fun.

The seagoing theme also reminds me of a poem, The Maldive Shark, by Herman Melville, better known for his authorship of Moby Dick. The poem is technically brilliantly written and lovely to read aloud. I used to read it to our Bill when he was only weeks old, and he loved it. The metre and the sound of the words is such that you don’t need to understand it to like it. Look it up and try reading it aloud to yourself.

 

There is a convention that the best view of Cambridge is from the University Library, as from there you can’t see the University Library. This is a bit unfair. As Linda pointed out, while it is monumental and forbidding, it has, if not majesty, at least an elegance and symmetry of its own, and its very size is impressive in itself. It was designed in the 1930’s by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the red telephone boxes and the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, also built on a terrifyingly large scale, about which I have waxed lyrical in a previous blog. Two recent attractive additions are the bronze piles of books and the classic red phone box outside the imposing front door. Cambridge University Library is the setting for The Tractate Middoth, a very creepy story by MR James, featuring the ghost of a recently dead (and not very nice) clergyman. The date of writing means that the library referred to was the previous building in the centre of town, but in the further reaches of the current library, it can feel quite eerie.

 

 

 

Here is the Seven Stars, Newmarket Road. This is now a respectable establishment serving Indian food, but used to be a very traditional east of England pub. When I first arrived in Cambridge in early December 1986, I set in motion my usual procedure for making friends. I went to the pub. The first pub I went to was gaunt and almost deserted, so I moved on to the Seven Stars, arriving there half an hour before closing time. After gulping my first mouthful of lager, I looked around and noted that my fellow-revellers were a right bunch of bonny bairns. This was not the Cambridge of Lord Byron, Bertie Wooster, Rupert Brooke or the Footlights funsters. This was a rogues’ gallery of an East Anglian town. However, no-one bothered me as I finished my pint. I was getting ready to leave when I realised that time had not been called. The front door had been locked and the merriment was continuing. So on my first night in Cambridge I got a lock-in and wandered home at half past one in a roseate glow of benevolence towards my new chums. Not that I had exchanged more than half a dozen words with anyone during my evening’s carousal.

 

This is what used to be the St Rhadegund, closed down for the last three or four years, once the smallest pub in Cambridge and the headquarters of the Hash House Harriers. The pub was presided over by an idiosyncratic and irascible landlord, Terry, whose Hash name was Bunter. Everyone associated with the Hash is eventually christened with a Hash name. I had somehow avoided this until a few weeks ago. I have already told you that one of the Hash traditions is the Down Down, in which an offender has to down a glass of beer in one go, while the rest of the gang sing an off-colour song, as a penalty for some real or imagined infringement of protocol. Why they think getting a free glass of beer is a punishment is utterly beyond me. Anyway, at a recent hash, a young Scottish woman was due to have a Down Down for some arcane offence, but she had gone home. Since I was the only other Scottish person there, I had to stand in for her and drink the beer. It’s a hard life. As a result of this, I was at last given the Hash sobriquet, Sporty Young Lady. So that’s me, Sporty Young Lady. It could have been a lot worse. Hash names include Penis Beaker, Fence Fucker, Hold it for Me, Beef Curtains, Sausage Slipper, and my all-time favourite, Fuck Off Bald Guy. I got off rather lightly.