Matriculation

Up in Oxford for the day, ahead of a visit to my mother-in-law later that evening, it took me a while to figure out what was amiss. It was the sort of cold, sharp afternoon that could hoodwink you into thinking that the seasons had decided to skip autumn completely and make a beeline for winter. Not quite breath-in-the-air stuff, but fairly close. And Oxford was pretty much as it always is; beautiful poky lanes, grand if slightly oppressive college buildings, chained bicycles swarming against railings, cosy looking pubs, the Covered Market full of butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers, cafés, tourists. Almost as it always is, but not quite. Gradually, I noticed the hordes of students in gowns, white shirts and mortar boards, callow penguins, and I realised, It must be matriculation today.

Matriculation is the ceremony, right at the beginning of your academic career at Oxford, when you formally become a member of the university. I don’t remember much about mine, to be honest. It involved traipsing along to the Sheldonian Theatre, a particularly handsome edifice right in the centre of the prettiest part of the city, near to the glory of the Bodleian Library, itself a building I never went anywhere near during the rest of my time there. As far as I recall, in my case it consisted of wandering into the chamber in single file, a spot of Latin, sitting down, some more Latin, wandering past someone important looking, again in single file, while he said some more stuff in Latin and then leaving by one of the exits wondering why everybody else looked so euphoric and I didn’t. It was a bit like being in church, except that nobody expected you to sing.

By that stage I had been at Oxford for a week and I was already largely convinced that I had made an awful mistake. Being left to fend for myself was a complete anathema to me, as was being surrounded by a bunch of supremely confident people who were patently relishing the prospect of doing exactly that. On my first day, after my family had said goodbye and left me in my reassuringly huge room, I remember going to somebody else’s room and sitting there largely mute while a braying throng compared notes about their gap years. I on the other hand had been too chicken to go on the French or German exchange or take part in the school trip to the Peak District, let alone spend a year finding myself in Thailand. Where, for that matter, did they all get the money from? I can’t recall how I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, except that I was on my own. After eleven o’clock I lay in bed, weighed down by the crisp municipal sheets, and listened to the music coming from somewhere else on my staircase. There were clearly all manner of parties going on, and I hadn’t been invited to any of them.

If you wanted a decent metaphor for the entire three years, you could do a lot worse.

On my second or third day my college “parents” came to my room to introduce themselves. This was the college’s rather sad attempt at providing moral support, and not a very successful one at that. My definition of moral support would probably not have included two people from the year above, who were also doing my subject, paying me a social visit to tell me at length that my degree was going to be unbelievably hard work and I might as well kiss goodbye to any idea I might have had about parties, or indeed having any kind of social life. That, I was told, was for people studying things like English or History, not for the likes of me. Of course, that wasn’t the sum total of our interaction. They also tried to sell me some textbooks they didn’t need any more. I don’t recall speaking to them again.

Having got used to the idea that my social calendar was likely to be even emptier than the little black book I didn’t have, the next thing to come to terms with was the dress code, and matriculation was my first opportunity to do so. The standard Oxford uniform for formal events is a plain white shirt, white bow tie and dark suit, otherwise known as sub fusc. I always felt like it ought to be an anagram for something disgusting, but disappointingly it never was. You also had to pop on your gown, a useless waft of black cotton with pointless dangly bits, called a “commoner’s gown” - as if I hadn’t felt common enough already. The icing on top was the mortar board, to be carried with you at all times. Only the very confident, or very drunk, actually tried putting it on their heads. I eventually found, on my way to my exams later that year, that it was just the right size to hold a bottle of Quink.

I say exams, because that formal attire was also compulsory for all your exams. And the exams were hellish; Oxford didn’t believe in coursework either, so they were your entire degree. If you failed any of your papers, you failed the whole degree and your three years had been for nothing. Not just that, but your exams came at the end of your final year at which point they tested you on over two years’ worth of things you’d studied, many of which were just a distant memory by then. For years afterwards I had bad dreams about being back in the middle of revising for my Finals, and I found out from some of my friends that I wasn’t the only one. One girl sitting next to me in one of my final papers had a loud, ugly, conspicuous breakdown halfway through the exam. In total silence her shuddering sobs echoed through the big hall, and she was led away to the toilet. Ten minutes later she came back pale and shaking, no fight left in her. It was awful to watch, and more than a little distracting.

There were other rules, too. You weren’t allowed to have any kind of part time job while you were studying there, something which was met with total incomprehension when I told all my school friends who had gone to proper universities. And then there were the special names for everything, a whole new language to learn. You paid your rent to the college in arrears, but it was called “battels”. Your mock exams were called “collections”, which made them sound even creepier than they were. Competitions - like sporting tournaments or drama festivals - were called “cuppers”. It all sounded ridiculous to me, but listening to my peers bandy those phrases round it was as if they’d been born to them. Really, if they’d deliberately tried to pick names which intimidated and excluded comprehensive schoolboys like me they couldn’t have done a better job.

Another thing my friends at “normal” universities were incredulous about was the food. You had to purchase meal tokens if you wanted to eat in the college halls, which everybody had to do because there were virtually no self-catering facilities whatsoever. The hall was grand and beautiful, the food absolutely atrocious. The gammon steak was a particular low point, the colour of a highlighter pen and the taste of an incinerated mattress. We heard rumours about other colleges which had restaurant quality food every night, but none of us had friends there so none of us could ever confirm or deny. The kitchen wasn’t open on Friday nights, so I got used to watching my M&S sweet and sour chicken spinning on the microwave turntable in the kitchen, or trekking to “Carfax”, Oxford’s main chippy, for something greasy and sustaining. All around me on the high street were people having what I could only imagine was fun.

What I don’t think I fully appreciated was the contrast between the odd mix of rules and regulations on the one hand and being left to quietly fold and go bonkers on the other. Every year there were suicide attempts, an inevitable consequence of the highly able, highly strung and highly stressed receiving very low levels of pastoral care. In my first term a student at another college fell from a third floor window, dying immediately on impact with the cobbles of New College Lane below. When we found out that it had not been suicide but that drugs had been involved, nearly everybody was surprised. The former seemed prevalent, but none of us had been anywhere near the latter.

My college had a proud record of mental illness, too; we even had one student known as “Mad Bob” who was sectioned more than once. I dimly remember him having a huge Russian army overcoat and a total inability to make eye contact with anyone. At one stage he was shut up in a room waiting for an ambulance to turn up, only to break out and rush across the quad at the exact point the Dean was looking out the window. He interrupted his tutorial without batting an eyelid to say “Oh my god, he’s escaped” and call the authorities.

But it wasn’t just an abstract, comedy thing, it hit closer to home than that; one of my friends spent a lot of our first year self-harming - pills and knives and tricyclic antidepressants. Outside my circle of friends, totally oblivious to that kind of suffering, the chosen ones hawed away to mummy and daddy on the payphones at the bottom of the stairwells, while high above we were all taking it in turns to sit with her, a vigil I can safely say none of us was equipped for. We were even less equipped for having to visit her in the psychiatric hospital the following term. If she’d seemed a bit strange in the context of our ivory tower, she seemed positively normal in comparison to her fellow inmates. It should have been a wake-up call, but somehow it wasn’t. The following term I caught her in the middle of taking an overdose, and sat uselessly with her sobbing on my shoulder until the ambulance arrived.

She’s married to a management consultant now, and I haven’t seen her in years. She probably wouldn’t recognize that person any more, and I still have no idea whether it was something to do with her, the result of being in that environment, or a bit of both. If I’d asked her when she was eighteen if she’d liked to have got better and married a management consultant, I fully expect she would have told me it wasn’t a price worth paying.

You must be reading this thinking how silly it all sounds and I can’t say I blame you. It was university after all, not Vietnam, and yet they have something in common because, if you weren’t there, I’m not sure I can properly explain it to you. The goldfish bowl of gossip and scrutiny, living in a confined space with a few hundred people, many of whom with egos which dwarfed even mine. The pressure cooker of expectation, of competition, of feeling like you had to justify your presence there. Just as there were children starving in Africa who would have loved your leftover gammon steak (although I always found that a bit hard to credit) there were students resenting you, who would have birched their grandmothers to get a place at Oxford. And, of course, the implication - especially from the third year onwards - was that your future in the world of work was only going to be even more cut-throat.

On the day that I matriculated I was hung over, probably from an evening spent in the college’s cellar bar doing my best to alienate anybody who bothered trying to talk to me. Apart from the dawning realisation that I had gone somewhere awful surrounded by people I couldn’t stand, I was also out of sorts because the girl I fancied had decided she fancied someone else. It wasn’t to be my first such disappointment that month, let alone that year. In fairness, it was also something most people aged eighteen had got used to long before then. They probably had their first brush with it on the French exchange.

Totally unaware of the ceremonial nature of matriculation, I also hadn’t realised that most people had used it as an excuse to get their parents to witness the event and take them out for lunch afterwards. So they all gleamed on the long benches as they took the official photo in the quad, knowing they were about to be whisked off to the Randolph or Brown’s. I by contrast was slumped, miserable and white as a sheet, contemplating throwing up into my mortar board. Less than a week, and already I wanted to leave. Not that you could ever tell anybody that, because anyone who found out you were going to Oxford waxed lyrical in no time about what a fabulous opportunity you had. It was those starving kids in Africa again.

I still have the matriculation photo, though I don’t tend to look at it very often. The women I’d eventually marry happens to be in it too, though I didn’t know her well back then, which is probably the only reason I kept it. Finding out, many years later, that she had some of the same misgivings as me about the place was one of the things that helped to heal some of my feelings about it. It was years before I could go back to Oxford and just enjoy it at face value without remembering the gloom, the awkwardness and the perpetual feeling of missing out. It was years after that before I could think of it fondly, but I think I’m there now.

None the less, seeing the matriculants on Saturday was a sharp reminder of all of this, things I’ve never really written about before. It’s frightening to think that half my life ago, that would have been me. Frightening, too, that so little changes; Oxford is a machine that processes thousands of students, and all of us want to be different but ultimately none of us are. Looking at them I could see all the archetypes, as true today as they were in 1992. The healthy, laughing Sloanes, completely convinced of their own entitlement. The state school nerds whose social skills will never catch up with their mathematical ability. The pretentious drama types. The loud Americans, here for a term and completely in awe of buildings many times older than their own country. The shiny-haired, shiny-toothed heartthrobs. The political animals. You could write a field guide, and maybe somebody should.

They’ll only start to become interesting when they leave anyway, and maybe that will be in spite of Oxford, not because of it. I feel like any success I’ve ever enjoyed has had nothing to do with my alma mater, and take great pleasure in turning them down when they cold call me asking for donations. If anything, I feel like they should be giving me compensation for all those nights spent wired on caffeine and stressed out of my mind in the college library, not to mention the psychological distress brought on by the hairy chicken chasseur.

In any case, I’m sometimes happy in my own skin now and I enjoy the looks of surprise when people find out I went there. That might be all the legacy it’s left me. I can’t say I lose sleep over it any more, and as Kelly and I walked down St Giles that day dodging the latest generation of England’s greatest minds, en route to the Covered Market for an appointment with Ben’s Cookies, I found myself thinking that they were welcome to it.