As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything to do with fear of flying. I was here for the Pembroke College gaudy. I had never attended a reunion before, and I had doubts about it. What if the people I really liked didn’t show up? What if I didn’t remember somebody’s name, while they remembered me? Above all, did I really want to see a bunch of old people claiming to be my contemporaries?
It turned out to be a delight. It was lovely to be woken again by the sound of the bell from Tom Tower, which used to be the view from my window; to take a morning walk around misty Christ Church meadow; to drink tea with the Master in the ancient Oak Room beneath the portrait of Dr Johnson, our second-most famous alumnus after J.R.R. Tolkien.
In the course of the weekend, a number of completely forgotten memories swum back into consciousness. Tiffany reminded me that she had once cut my hair for 50p, a concessionary fee for a penniless refugee. She had photographs to prove it. The sight of a few faces brought back the debates in the Junior Common Room about the miners’ strike, the deployment of US cruise missiles and the Greenham Common protests. A conversation evoked the first essay ever written on an Amstrad computer. And — how shall I put this: ‘Dear Mary, please help, what do you say when asked: “Do you remember goose-stepping in your jackboots across the Chapel Quad lawn at four in the morning?” ’
Pembroke was very left-wing and very broke when I attended it, but the latter at least has changed.
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