Morning placed his misty paws on the window sill and peered in through the latticed casement.
Stephen May (2 yr Maths) was asleep with his mouth slightly open like a baby. He groaned, awoke, and looked at the ceiling. Then, with a heavy sigh, he turned over – and touched something.
Instantly a smile of utter contentment caressed his face, a golden glow dawned behind his eyes, warmth and intimacy rippled through his whole body… The soft little thing beside him stirred. He slipped his arm awkwardly beneath her head and was about to draw her towards him, when (O wonders!) she nestled closer in her sleep, and her lips pouted into a kiss… He closed his eyes blissfully. Could anyone be happier?
In these Elysian Fields, however, he was visited by spectres.
The tubercular pink cover of The Freshman’s Manual of Reproduction, Contraception and Family Planning floated up before him. It was sent free to everyone in their first week. He opened it, and the pen drawing that leapt from the front page put him off all thought of girls for the rest of the term…
Now titles in fat red letters crawled across his brain: NAUGHTY COALMEN – SWEDISH MONIKA 7 – DO YOU WANT TO REMAIN A VIRGIN FOREVER?..
He hadn’t been able to get out of going to one of them with Big Ernie, Pete and the Maths crowd.
He sat in the tense darkness and watched blankly, as though they were the writhings of strange machines… It was more than an eye-opener – it was a thunderbolt. Was that what people actually did?! Was this what was expected??? Overcome by heat and smoke, he stumbled out into the foyer and was sick in a Fire bucket.
Poor spotty Philip Potter. Now his chinless form appeared before him, in graph-paper shirt, greasy tie and jacket, his hands round a cup of coffee. When Stephen stopped going with the Maths lot, Philip was the only one who came to see him in his room – evening after evening…
Not, of course, that there was anything wrong with men’s company. It wasn’t as though he wanted to ‘get off with’ somebody as everyone put it – on the contrary, he gulped at the very thought of what that might mean. But…couldn’t you just meet girls? Couldn’t you just talk to them? One day he had a strange experience: plodding up Petty Cury, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, as it came home to him how sweet a girl’s voice sounded, literally – sweet…
But now the bed seemed to fill with icy water as he slept. He saw all those Sunday afternoons alone in his ‘attic’, with the bells ringing out over an empty city, and one Sunday in particular when he took a desperate step: he wrote a ‘Hello-how-are-you-getting-on’ letter to Fiona Flytes, whom he’d gone out with once at school. Mercifully, mercifully, she didn’t answer; and when he was home at Easter he heard she’d got engaged to an accountant.
So a whole bright Cambridge Spring came and went.
What had happened between then and June, what??? Watching it unroll again in his dream was like flying over endless tundra…
Potter called every evening, to talk with emaciated mien of one thing: exams, exams… And he saw more clearly than ever now that the way he had ‘existed’ the term before had gradually settled into a pattern, then a habit, and then a norm; and he’d come to accept this daily round so completely that he couldn’t conceive of life being any different after the exams, or indeed ever for the next two years…
But he was wrong. After the exam, Withers (their Director of Studies) gave a sherry party.
He jumped in his sleep as the well-packed seat of a pair of jeans thrust into his face – and another… Then the gentlest tickling rose through his throat and nose as he saw Her sitting beside him, in her fawn jumper and flowered shirt-collar, holding her glass in her lap. And he re-heard his first, hesitant words:
‘Hel-lo…erm… Horrible about Potter wasn’t it?’
Yes, there she was as he saw her for the first time! Short, a tiny bit plump, but with the darkest dark blue eyes, such as babies have. He had turned round – and there she was! And somehow they had hardly got onto Paper 24B and how long it took her to bike to lectures, when everyone was queuing up to thank Mr and Mrs Withers, she was whisked away by a friend, and it wasn’t until he was brushing his teeth that evening that he suddenly, vividly recalled her voice, and her small, soft-looking mouth, and understood that, without knowing it, he had been doing exactly what some months before (when was it exactly?) he had longed for so much!
It was simply destiny, then, when a week later Chubb threw a wine and cheese party and there she was again. Goodness knows what gave him the courage – maybe it was Chubb’s claret – but all of a sudden he invited her to a play…
When they returned that evening, there was a May Ball on in the college.
It was quite weird, dodging the staggering couples everywhere – and the men in their black and white all seemed so tall – but how marvellous it was sitting in the ‘attic’ with the music wafting in from below, and agreeing how strange Cambridge was really!
And now the events of the last few weeks rolled themselves into one brilliant, dazzling ball: tea in her room on the first Saturday of term – then the river, bleak and deserted, with large leaves floating down delicately into it – then their first kiss – feeling her warmth against him – Big Ernie shouting out in the college bar ‘How’s your sex life, then, May?!’ and Pete crooking his arm and leering ‘Whoooor!’ – and, finally, discovering last night that for some reason the porters had clanged shut the gates at one – deciding that she would have to stay – and writing out as if in a dream: Dear Mrs King, Please do not disturb. Thank you. Stephen. – and…
Suddenly (you don’t meet this word very often in modern stories, but life does still have its surprises!), suddenly…there was an unmistakable knock at the door.
They woke up staring at each other.
‘Mr May! Are you in there?’ called a gruff voice.
‘Y-yes…’ Stephen replied faintly. ‘The wardrobe,’ he whispered to her, ‘the wardrobe!’
She jumped out of bed just as she was, crouched inside, and Stephen closed the door. Trembling all over, he found his glasses, put on his dressing gown, and opened up. Two college workmen were standing there.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ began the first, touching his cap. ‘It’s the new furniture… We’ve come for the wardrobe.’
Morning smiled to himself, turned from the curtains, and swirled off to where another thousand lovers were awaking – or, at least, a couple of hundred…
© Patrick Miles, 1979
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
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‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
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A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Thank you Patrick for your Monday morning entertainment — we certainly need some these days, other than the daily diet of human hideousness which actually taps on the window, and creeps over the sill.
But my dear Sir, prepare to find yourself as stuck full of arrows as Saint Sebastian. I have to say, with respect and with regret, that this (very early) story has many things wrong with it; some of which are attributable no doubt to the small and shuttered world of Cambridge studenthood. How ridiculous it (now) seems that examinations loomed like cliffs around us, blocking the view. And those intolerable sherry parties! Even rigid old Coriolanus learnt, ‘There is a world elsewhere.’ And should that world not be more present, at least by implication, even in a student story? As later revised?
But to begin at the beginning. I know the works of Chaucer have now been digitalized in the British Library, but this does not provide and excuse –even then– for starting your story with a medieval personalization of Morning at the window, disturbing your lovers. Or is this Phoebus, opening one of Spenser’s cantos in The Faerie Queene? Or Donne’s ‘busie unruly Sunne’? The strategy smells of the lamp, and this first sentence (with the symmetrical, bracketing last), surely has to go.
A further source of confusion: I first thought that Morning was going to be the name of the character; a doubt not entirely removed when his actual name turns out to be May!
Then it’s part of the ‘small world’ sense that the story itself brings to mind that of small animals in a cage, or young fish in an aquarium (both Stephen and the unnamed young lady later are described as babies). This is confirmed by the horror — yes, it is almost like Kurtz’s horror–of adult sexuality, which is fended off by the grotesque headlines that freeze poor Stephen, and never entered upon, even by implication, by the young lovers themselves. As we shall see, the story has another, comic denouement reserved for them; this being the moment that rescues the story, right at the end.
A couple of details. What is supposed to have happened to spotty Philip Potter? We are never told; though his fate is used as an ice-breaker between the young couple. And why does Fiona Flyte (the name is from the comedy drawer) have to marry an accountant? Accountants, and lawyers, turn up regularly as the off-stage villains in your stories!
More significantly, why are we never told the name of the girl in the wardrobe (where she is no doubt more comfortable than she was in bed)? This cannot have been an oversight…
But there are perhaps a few oversights in the writing itself, very unusual with you, which I will have the temerity to point out. In the paragraph with the horrible headlines, Stephen confesses to ‘going to one of them’ (where he is literally sick). One of what? I can detect no antecedent here. Then later, in the paragraph ‘Yes, there she was…,’ the word ‘suddenly’ is used, without chaperone, to be followed by ‘all of a sudden’ in the next paragraph; whereas a little later, the use of the word in modern stories is self-consciously castigated. What of the two earlier instances?
But I descend to small details here, and poor Saint Sebastian must be suffering unduly. So let me end by saying that the conclusion of the story is wonderfully comic, and I hope can be rescued in any redrafting you may be driven to. The theme of the strategies used by surprised lovers is a venerable one, with examples in Chaucer no less; though one thinks of countless examples in 18c novels and 19c farces (you will be able to call more to mind than I can). I recall Poe’s chilling version, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’; but normally the scene is used for comic effect. There must be at least one in Chekhov (an inverse of the one about the bed that collapses under the unfortunate, legimate couple on honeymoon); and in Maupassant; and in any short-story writer worth their salt.
Any knocking on the door tonight will be kids for Hallowe’en…
What a piece of archery this is, Damian! Thank you for all your time, effort, finesse, patience and diplomacy! I always relish a close reading.
I wish I could think of this story as having the perfect body of a Renaissance St Sebastian, but in fact it is more a crumbling old straw target down from the attic… And most of your shafts hit the bull.
You know my ingrained habit of preferring not to ‘tell’, merely ‘show’, but there is evidently a need to provide some info. here, much thanks for pointing it out. The ‘Phoebus’ (I imagined him as a kind of pink candyfloss) was intended to frame the story with a frivolity and corniness that you have certainly appreciated (similarly, the word ‘suddenly’). Poor old Potter threw himself off the end of his graph — an event horribly too common in my student days. No-one today, I suppose, would associate ‘titles in fat red letters’ with porn films advertised on the front of an Odeon or La Scala, but I actually took those titles down from the front of a fleapit in Edinburgh in 1974. Fiona Flytes? Yes, I nearly changed that name in 2023, but this is not a ‘realistic’ story…on the other hand, those girls did all marry accountants, car salesmen or estate agents!
Certainly I saw Stephen as physically and mentally oppressed (‘caged’) by the little university world (monsters in evening dress at May Balls, stiff ‘parties’, obsessive people etc); and She too, perhaps; might they together have just found their way out? (Through a magic wardrobe?)
All in all, dear Damian Archer, you have made me acknowledge that this ‘very early story’ (I have taken a closer look at the evidence and redate it 1979) is too context-bound now to make much sense to people. In fact, re-reading it this year I found it so ‘of its time’ that I felt I couldn’t touch a word of it, starting and ending with Mr Candyfloss.
My dear contrite Patrick: you make me almost ashamed of what you kindly call my ‘archery’, so ready are you to own up to some youthful infelicities (or in-FionaFlytes?). Perhaps I should try throwing some boomerangs instead, to expose some of my own?
I thought of Pope’s account of his own reaction to criticism: ‘Did some more sober critic come abroad? / If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.’ (Although Pope himself never did, of course.)
I sympathise and agree with your conclusion, looking back (and over), that there is not much that can be done to ‘correct’ one’s earlier work. The repair always shows; and doesn’t even have the merits of a good, self-declared piece of darning. And there’s something almost dishonest about it too; one thinks of the notorious case of Auden’s systematic rewriting (and occlusion) of his earlier work. Whatever one thinks of ‘cancel culture’, it is worse, I think, to replace a statue, or a story, with something that pretends always to have stood on the same plinth. The best thing, no doubt, is to accept that flies in amber are really flies, not butterflies; and to set out again, reheartened, with a new net. And it is good to know that this is precisely what you intend to do.