Back To Manchester

I Went There On My Bike: Part 6 -

After an uninterrupted absence of eleven months, I returned to England at the end of August 1961.

Manchester 3

After an uninterrupted absence of eleven months, I returned to England at the end of August 1961. Before I left Plouha, I received a letter from my father to say that I needed to go to the customs at Newhaven to import my bike. Accordingly, I travelled back home via Dieppe and Newhaven. On arrival at Newhaven, I was able to go along to the Customs House, complete the formalities and still catch my train to Victoria. My bike then went on its way to Loughborough Midland station.

When I arrived home in Wymeswold, my mother said they wanted to buy me a “proper” 21st birthday present. I decided I would like a transistor radio, the one I had in Pontarlier having been lost in my suit-case in Paris. At that time, we expected to pay about £14 for a radio, equivalent to a good weekly wage for a highly skilled worker. Accordingly we got on the bus to Nottingham. We went into a shop in the Old Market Square. There was a sale in the shop and they had a mahogany radiogram on offer for £21. This was a “piece of furniture” and, from my mother’s point of view, a much better present than a mere transistor radio. So she bought it and it was delivered to Wymeswold.

I was not very knowledgeable about music, but I decided that I ought to buy some records to play on the radiogram. Accordingly I bought 45rpm records by Acker Bilk and Chris Barber. Fairly soon thereafter, I acquired LPs by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. A little later – I don’t remember how – I acquired EPs by Gilbert Bécaud, Yves Montand and Georges Brassens. I later acquired some records by Edith Piaf and the Shadows, but that was about all I had for many years.

During the month of September, Margaret Lifetree came to see me. She was staying with her parents in West Bridgford, Nottingham. She had been on the same course as me at Manchester for the first two years, but had returned in October 1960 to complete her degree. She had then decided to apply to work as an assistante in France. She had been allocated to … the lycée de Pontarlier! I gave her all the information I could, but I couldn’t help thinking that the pions at Pontarlier would tease her unmercifully.

The radiogram was transported to Manchester (along with my bike). Bryn James had got his degree – a B.A. Honours Degree (2.i) in French Studies. He had enrolled in the Education Department for a one-year course to obtain a post-graduate Teaching Diploma. We decided to get a flat together. He found one at 14 Swinbourne Grove, Withington. The flat was on the top floor of a Victorian house. We had two reasonable-sized rooms: a living room with a kitchen area behind a curtain and a bedroom with two single beds. [I have just looked up the address on the internet and a modern care home has been built on the site.]

The flat was well situated. Withington was a pleasant suburb and there were a number of buses that went along Wilmslow Road straight to the University. Bryn and I continued to get on well together. We each put an equal amount of money in a kitty and bought food and other essentials from the kitty. I don’t remember us ever having a serious row about anything.

My private life took a turn for the better. I went back to the Saturday evening dances in the Students’ Union, which still followed the same format as three years earlier. The boys wore suits and ties. The girls wore pretty dresses. One of these girls was called Margaret Coleman. She was a pretty Irish girl, with dark hair and blue eyes. She came from Lisburn in Northern Ireland, but, at that time her father was stationed at Wymondham in Norfolk. She was a year older than me and was studying for her final year in Chemistry. We met at one of the dances in October 1961.

I was terrified at that time of being sued for “breach of contract”. I made it clear, right from the start that I did not want a permanent relationship. I was, nevertheless, invited round to her digs in the evenings in Levenshulme, where we indulged in heavy petting, along with two or three other couples under the benign surveillance of the youngish landlady. This was the early sixties, however, and there was never any question of “going further”.

We spent most Saturday evenings and Sundays together, but hardly ever met in between. The relationship lasted until we both left Manchester in June 1962. I arranged to go to Wymondham to meet her parents just after Christmas. I was a little uneasy about this, but, conveniently, I caught a bad cold and decided I wasn’t fit to travel. Modern technology had reached both our parents’ houses, so I was able to telephone her. She was not best pleased. Her displeasure was compounded by the fact that Danièle Borgazzi, who was studying in England at the time, came to stay with us for a few days in Wymeswold. Even if I had wanted to, Danièle was not the sort to permit any “shilly-shallying”, but Margaret remained unconvinced by that argument.

Bryn also kept me on the straight and narrow. He had a long-term relationship with his girl-friend from his home in Sheffield, Christine, which he maintained was chaste. He also made it clear that he would not approve of any inappropriate behaviour in our flat. By this time, Christine was at Teachers’ Training College at Warrington. The four of us went out for walks in the Derbyshire Dales on a few occasions.

Most of the people that had been on the same course as me in the first two years at Manchester had completed their course, though many of them, like Bryn, had stayed on to do a Teaching Diploma. But I made new friends and life carried on as before.

I did not return to the Manchester Football Association as a referee. I did, however, referee a couple of matches “for” the French Society. I was still very young looking. On one occasion I got on a bus at Withington togged up in my football gear and the bus conductor charged me half fare (i.e. under fourteen). I was 22 at the time. A similar thing happened to me two or three years later. Jennifer, my fiancée at the time, and I walked from Wymeswold to Hoton two miles away. We stopped for a drink at the Packe Arms. That, incidentally, had been the pub where I had had my first half pint of mild beer – it cost me 7 pence halfpenny – when I was seventeen years old. When I went with Jennifer the landlord asked us whether we were old enough: I was nearly 25, Jennifer was 20!

Having just completed his final year successfully, Bryn was in a strong position to lecture me on what I needed to do in order to get a good degree. And he did! He also lent me his university notes, because I had lost mine in my suit-case. They were better than mine! Following his advice, I resolved to work for nine hours a day, Monday to Friday: three hours in the morning, three in the afternoon, and three in the evening. I carried out this programme religiously throughout the University year.

In the day-time, I did my private study in the Arts Library, usually in the stacks. As I said earlier, these looked out on to poor back-to-back houses in the Hulme district of Manchester. It was strange to go back after eighteen months to see the same poor dog barking in the back “garden” of one of the houses.

The Library was closed in the evening. I went instead to the Students’ Union, which had a quiet room on the top floor; this was open until 10 o’clock. There were two related problems with it: it was very warm; and I had a tendency to fall asleep. This had already become a problem in France, beginning in Besançon, but exacerbated in Pontarlier. Whenever I went to the cinema there, I almost invariably went to sleep. From time to time Marcel Queney and others organised evening lectures in the school, all of which I went to. Most of them were very interesting. One was on Teilhard de Chardin, which I found particularly interesting. But it didn’t stop me going to sleep! In Pontarlier, this had been a minor embarrassment, but in Manchester, it presented a serious threat to the achievement of my work programme. At first I tried to fight against it, but after a time I decided that it was better to allow myself to fall asleep for twenty minutes or so and then carry on refreshed.

I decided that I needed to re-read all the books on the literature courses at least once, which I think I did, though I can’t imagine that I re-opened Le Sursis. Consequently, whereas it had taken me eighteen months to read two books, I was now reading some of the shorter books, like La Porte Etroite by Gide, in two days.

Towards the end of 1961, I was persuaded to subscribe to a special volume of Studies in French Literature which was presented to Professor P Mansell Jones. The cost was 42 shillings – a not insignificant sum in those days. It contained 27 essays, including one by my tutor, Graham Daniels, entitled ‘The sense of the past in the novels of Malraux’. Other contributors from Manchester were: L.J. Austin, Anne Churchman, Gilbert Gadoffre, Jean Gaudon, F.W. Saunders, F.E. Sutcliffe and Eugène Vinaver. The volume has my name in it, along with other subscribers. These include the following members of staff not mentioned above: Fanni Bogdanow, W Mansfield Cooper (Vice-Chancellor), GE Gwynne, N Hampson, Elspeth Kennedy and Frederick Whitehead; and the following student contemporaries: Howard Abbott, Michael Buckby, Jeffrey Coulthard and GR Murray – quite a select band, really! (I was at Loughborough Grammar School with Graham Murray; Mike Buckby and Jeff Coulthard were at Besançon with me.)

The Final examination had a number of elements, each of which had one three-hour written examination at the end, and each with equal marks. We also had to write a thesis on our special subject. Finally there was an oral examination, which was only used in borderline situations. There was only a very limited choice of broad options. The only subject that I had chosen not to take at the beginning of the second year had been Morphology and Phonology. The subjects I did take were French History (taken at the end of the second year) Syntax and Semantics (based on lectures at the beginning of the first or second year, translation to and from French and English, a dissertation, Old French, Poetry, Drama and Novels and the special subject.

For the dissertation examination, we studied three authors: Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal. Professor Sutcliffe, a forbidding Yorkshireman, lectured us each week in preparation for this. He rattled out his lectures at a fast dictation speed. All we could do was to sit there and write down as much as we could. I had the advantage that I also had Bryn’s notes to fall back on, if I couldn’t understand my own.

The set book for Old French was La Chanson de Roland, the story of Charlemagne’s foray into Spain to fight against the infidel Moors. As mentioned earlier, in the first two years we had learned the basics of mediaeval French grammar and read La Chastelaine de Vergi, which was written in the thirteenth century in a purer form of French. La Chanson de Roland was written two centuries earlier and was therefore more difficult to understand – but we managed!

We also had lectures on François Villon, Rabelais, and the Pléiade poets, though I don’t now remember where they fitted in. I liked all of these, in particular Villon, a fourteenth century reprobate, who recounted his misdeeds in long poems. One of his most famous lines is: Où sont les neiges d’antan? ‘Where are the snows of yester-year?’

Dr Elspeth Kennedy was the lecturer on Rabelais. She was a middle-aged woman with protruding teeth. She was an unlikely-looking person for the purveyance of more earthy stories. The main thing I can remember about her lectures is the way she pronounced the ‘R’ in Rabelais. She tried to reproduce the guttural French ‘r’, but sounded as though she was trying to cough up some nasty substance from her bronchial tubes. Nevertheless the stories of Gargantua and Pantagruel appealed to my juvenile sense of humour. He was given the name Gargantua, because his father, Grandgousier, looked at him after he had been born out of his mother, Gargamelle’s, ear, saw that he was big and exclaimed to her: Que grand tu as ! His father’s name, like his mother’s, is fairly easy to interpret. I particularly liked Rabelais’ explanation of the origin of the word ‘Beauce’, which is a productive agricultural area in the centre of France. Gargantua was riding through the area on his horse, when he exclaimed: Est beau ce !

For all three literature courses, the prospectus read the same each year: There are no set books, but the following are recommended. There followed a long list of authors. A fairly cursory inspection of previous examination papers revealed that there were usually one or two questions on each of the authors listed. In order to make the most efficient use of time, I decided to concentrate on three authors in each category, with a fourth in reserve in case I couldn’t answer the question on one of my chosen authors.

For Drama I chose Corneille, Racine, Beaumarchais and Marivaux. Under the distant guidance of Professor Vinaver, I became quite an expert on Racine.

As I was a slow reader and my special subject included many long novels, length was my main criterion for the choice of texts to study. So I chose the shortest ones I could find: La Princesse de Clèves (Madame de La Fayette), Adolphe (Benjamin Constant, René by Chateaubriand and L’Immoraliste and La Porte Etroite by André Gide. Much to my surprise, I really liked La Princesse de Clèves, which was a 17th century novel with many of the classical attributes of Racine’s plays. I also liked Gide very much.

I chose the poems of Ronsard, Baudelaire and Mallarmé with Leconte de Lisle as my fourth option. I particularly liked Ronsard’s poetry. The choice of Mallarmé was a bold one. His poetry is very difficult to understand. So I decided that I either had to put a lot of work into studying him or leave him alone. I decided to put the work in. Having said that, I don’t think I ever had an original thought on his work, but I learned pretty thoroughly what other people had written about it. The recommended poems were all reproduced in Modern French Verse: An Anthology.

The Mallarmé poems were:

Apparition

Brise Marine

Toast Funèbre

O si chère de loin et proche et blanche

Victorieusement fui le suicide beau

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui

Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe

Toute l’âme résumée.

I found detailed critiques of all the poems in that selection, save one. An inspection of previous examination papers revealed that each year there was a question requiring an explication de texte of one poem in the selection. A more detailed inspection revealed that over the previous seven years there had been a question on each of the poems in the selection for which I had found a critique. I forecast correctly that the eighth poem would come up in 1962. I also knew that, if it did, I wouldn’t be able to answer the question, because I had not been able to find a critique of it. Nevertheless, I told myself that it would be in my interest, if the other question on Mallarmé in the final examination was difficult, because I thought I would be better prepared than most. It so happened that the poetry examination was the very last examination I sat. There was only one day when I had two three-hour examinations on the same day, but that was it! When I saw the question, my heart sank: it was too difficult. Nevertheless, I managed to write something. I can still remember that warm June afternoon, singing silently to myself: I’m tired and I want to go to bed!

Thanks to Mallarmé, by the end of the year, everything had come together in my head. I formed a clear idea of what constituted true literature and what was mere writing. There existed a Platonic Ideal. The closer writers and other artists could get to that ideal, the more they produced true art. Ronsard, Racine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence among others were able to do that; C.P. Snow, who was a literary bête noire at the time, definitely did not.

The pièce de résistance of this final year was the thesis. This had to be between 12,000 and 15,000 words long and had to be typed. After some hesitation I plumped for Saint-Exupéry. I then knew what I wanted to write about, but struggled to find the right title. Eventually I settled for Saint-Exupéry and the Meaning of Human Existence. I am still quite proud of the way I organised my writing. This being long before the days of word-processors, I decided to write one or two paragraphs on one sheet of paper. This meant that I could move the paragraphs around, if I wanted to. It also meant that, if I wanted to change something, I had only half a page or so to rewrite, rather than “messing up” a number of pages. Jennifer has retyped the thesis and I have reproduced it as another post on this website.

When it came to sitting the Final examinations I was well prepared and fairly relaxed. The first examination was on Syntax and Semantics. The examination took place on a fine late spring day. It was held in the Whitworth Art Gallery, just along the road from the Arts Building. I remember writing what I thought were amusing examples to illustrate the difference between connotations and denotations.

All that was to change the following day. Our itinerary took us that afternoon to a new Science or Mathematics building on the opposite side of Oxford Road. It was a hot day and the room we were in was on a high floor and had a lot of windows. We were there for three hours to write a dissertation in French. We were well drilled in the rules for writing a dissertation, which were much more constraining than those for an English essay. And we had all carefully studied our notes from Professor Sutcliffe’s lectures. An inspection of previous years’ papers revealed that there had always been two questions on Descartes, two on Pascal and one on Montaigne. As with most other subjects I concentrated on one of the three: Pascal’s Pensées. The examination papers were distributed. As far as I can remember there was only one question relating to Pascal. We were mostly working-class lads and lasses from the Midlands and North of England. The question (in French) was something about the beauty of the thought. What on earth was that all about? I was usually good at written examinations. But then, for the first and only time in my life, I just panicked and froze (I don’t remember in which order). For a full half hour I just sat there and wrote nothing. I looked round and saw that most of my colleagues were in the same boat. I then sat down and wrote something and handed it in at the end of the three hours. I seem to remember that at least one of my fellow students gave up the contest long before that.

That was, of course, a wake-up call. I realised that from then on I was playing catch-up and that I couldn’t afford any more slip-ups. I don’t remember anything about the remaining examinations until the last one, which I have already described.

The results of the examinations were put up on a notice board some days later. Throughout the final year at least, and possibly longer, I had realised that I was working hard to get an Upper Second Bachelor of Arts Honours Degree in French Studies (Second Class Division One or “two-one” in the vernacular). My analysis was as follows. People who were really clever and worked got Firsts: there were three or four of them out of 70; we knew who they were and I was not one of them. The really clever people who didn’t work generally got two-twos. The vast majority of ordinary mortals got a two-one if they worked and a two-two or very occasionally a Third Class Degree if they didn’t. (I think there was only one in my year.) There were two further categories: an Ordinary Degree and failure. I think there was one Ordinary Degree in my year and one failure in the year before – one of the chaps, who started at the same time as I did. These three are interesting case studies.

In the case of Barry who got a third, it was a bit of a shock and disappointment. He was a very sociable chap – I used to play table tennis with him. Like me, he had done a year in France, so he spoke good French. He was reasonably intelligent. He obviously didn’t work too hard, but didn’t give the impression of a layabout. I think, in the end, he probably didn’t have the exam technique.

I don’t think the same excuses could be made for Geoff. He was intelligent, but played harder than he worked. He was never short of female admirers. He had an easy manner and a good fluent turn of phrase. He had many more job offers than all the rest of us.

Dave was a disappointment. He was a big lad from the West Midlands with a matching personality. He came to Manchester in 1958 with a County Major Scholarship. From the start, he consumed large quantities of beer and other alcoholic beverages. He used to recite a ditty in a West Country accent:

I likes cider

Cider makes I fat

When I’m fat I’m happy

When I’m happy, I drinks more cider

I likes cider …

He went to one or two lectures in the first few weeks at University. After that, someone else signed in for Dave and he was never seen in lectures again. I was still in France when he completed his three-year stay in Manchester. I was told that the authorities pleaded with him to write “something” for his thesis, so that they could award a degree, but he declined to do so.

I don’t know where the results of the Final examination were posted, but I remember the moment of ecstatic relief when I read that I had indeed got a two-one. I immediately hugged a female fellow student, who had also got a two-one. I told the vicar of Wymeswold sometime later that I had got a two-one. He said that was what he got too and added that the beauty of that is that you can always think that you might nearly have got a first. I dismissed that at the time, but on occasions since, I have thought well, maybe, I wasn’t far off getting a first. This pipe dream is reinforced by a conversation I had some years later with my tutor, Graham Daniels. I went to enquire about doing an MA on my own. I asked Graham whether my degree was good enough. He replied that they would only refuse if my degree was borderline two-two, “which was certainly not the case with you”. (For the record, I started the MA under the direction of Professor Gilbert Gadoffre, but didn’t get very far.)

My parents came to Manchester for the degree award ceremony. They stayed with Uncle Will and Aunt Alice in Barlow Moor Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy. We got a bus from there to All Saints’ Square. On the way back, there was a queue for the bus and my father nearly got left behind. I think his only recollection of the day was of me shouting to the bus conductor: “Don’t forget my Dad!”

Getting a job

Fairly early on in my final year, it occurred to me, and most of my friends, that at the end of the year we were going to have to go out in the big wide world and get a job. The idea of staying on for another year or two to get a Master’s Degree did cross my mind, but only briefly at that point. For one thing, I did not think I was good enough – it never occurred to me to ask! More pertinently, having had a job in Pontarlier with a comfortable salary, I had had enough of the student existence. (Nevertheless a year later I would look back with envy on those golden years!)

The obvious option was to go into teaching. Accordingly, along with many of my colleagues, I applied to the Education Department to do a one-year Teaching Diploma. This was the same course as Bryn James was doing. I was accepted for interview. Most of my colleagues really wanted to do this course and were very nervous. I had more or less made up my mind that that was not what I wanted to do. Consequently I was not at all nervous and had one of the best interviews I ever had. I was offered a place, but declined it.

Having burnt that particular boat, I went along to the University Appointments Board and had an interview with the head man, Mr Holloway. (My memory tells me his name was Stanley, but I fear that my memory may be playing tricks on me!) Having asked me a few questions, his first suggestion was: What about the Home Civil Service? To which I replied: No way!

There were about seventy of us at Manchester University and similar numbers at dozens of universities round the country. Most of us wanted jobs “where we could use our languages”. Outside teaching, such jobs were few and far between. Whether or not I could use my languages, I wanted to be able to travel abroad. I bought a thick book entitled Directory of Opportunities for Graduates. This listed all the companies with graduate recruitment schemes. I applied to some of them.

I went for an interview at Coates at Glasgow. Before I went any further I was asked to do a colour-blindness test. As the firm dealt in cotton, it would have been pointless to carry on if I couldn’t distinguish between the different colours. I passed the test, but wasn’t offered a job.

I also went for an interview with Kalamazoo in Birmingham. I then went for an interview with BOAC (British Overseas Air Corporation) at Heathrow airport. My experience of airports at that time was limited to tiny aerodromes at Beauvais and Lympne in Kent. Even in 1962 Heathrow appeared huge to me – it even had its own telephone exchange with a dedicated prefix. It was a warm day. When I eventually reached the interview room, I was hot and sweaty. There were several people on the panel, most of whom had their backs to a window through which the sun was shining brightly. I was invited to sit facing the window. This was possibly designed to see how I reacted to pressure. Not very well, it seems. I was not surprised not to be offered a job.

My final interview in this context was with the Bata Shoe Company. They were a company that had shoe shops world-wide. The jobs on offer were as sales managers mainly in Africa. They had shops in England. As I pointed out in the interview the shoes were not of the highest quality. The interviewer replied that not everyone could afford high quality shoes. I was offered a job.

The other areas that I was encouraged to explore were banking and insurance. There were opportunities with the domestic banks, but they did not appeal to me. There was, however, also a company called Barclays DCI, which had an overseas banking network, and which appeared to have had many jobs. My friend, Cyril Woodberry, went to work for them. With hindsight, Barclays DCI had more to offer me than most of the other avenues which I pursued, but for some reason I never applied.

The father of my friend, Godfrey Shaw, worked for an Insurance Company in Manchester. Through him, I went for an interview. I was offered a job, but they did not have a graduate recruitment scheme and the salary on offer was only £450 per annum, whereas the “going rate” was between £700 and £750. Nevertheless the offer was there.

Returning to my interview with Mr Holloway, after I had rejected the Home Civil Service, he said: What about the Foreign Office? I replied that I would like that, but they wouldn’t want people like me. To which he retorted: You’ll never know, if you don’t apply! Accordingly, I sent off for the application forms for the Foreign Office. When the forms arrived a few days later – there was no email, but the post was efficient in those days – the same application form was used for:

The Foreign Office Administrative Class

The Foreign Office Executive Class

The Home Civil Service Administrative Class

The Home Civil Service Executive Class; and

The Special Departmental Class.

I decided to tick the boxes to apply for them all. I was already qualified for the two Executive Class competitions by virtue of my A Level results. I did not get a positive response from the Foreign Office, but I did from the Home Civil Service. I was invited to go to Manchester Airport at Ringway to talk to the Immigration Officers there. At that time Ringway was quite a small airport, but it was sufficiently big to employ three or four Immigration Officers. A number of people, including my doctor in Wymeswold, had suggested to me that employment as an Immigration Officer would be a good way of using my language skills. The chaps who interviewed me were a lively bunch and clearly enjoyed their work. They also pointed out that the irregular hours brought additional financial rewards. By 1962 immigration had already become a burning political issue in the UK and indeed had culminated in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act enacted in April 1962. So the job of Immigration Officers was to stop foreigners coming in, whereas, having spent 18 months or so in France, my inclinations were to allow as much free movement as possible. Whether explicitly or implicitly, I no doubt transmitted my unease to my hosts. Sometime later, I received a letter to say that I had been allocated to the Ministry of Power.

I also had an interview with a man – a very nice man! – from an organisation which I had never heard of before, called GCHQ, which was based in Cheltenham. These letters stand for Government Communications Headquarters. He told me that the work involved was secret and he could not tell me much more unless I was really interested. I told him I was not. Nevertheless he encouraged me to pursue my interest in the Foreign Office.

The paths of the two administrative class and the special departmental class competitions were the same: interviews in London, plus an Oxbridge type honours degree level examination in one’s chosen subject, in my case French. The interviews and the examination papers were to be given a mark; places were to be allocated on the basis of the total marks received. Thus, for example, if there were 10 posts available in the Foreign Office, they would be offered to the 10 people with the most marks who had applied to the Foreign Office.

I went for an interview for the Administrative Class. This was a very daunting affair. I was ushered into a large room where about ten distinguished-looking middle-aged men were sitting round an enormous semi-circle of polished wooden tables. I think I acquitted myself reasonably well, apart from making an enormous faux-pas. I heard myself saying at one point that I thought patriotism was dead. Though I tried to wriggle out of it by saying that, of course we should put Britain first, the panel returned to the charge on a number of occasions.

I also went for an interview for the Special Departmental Class. This was designed to recruit potential managers for three Government bodies which had large regional organisations: the Post Office, the Inland Revenue and the Ministry of Labour. On the application form I put the three departments in that order of preference. In those days, the train journey from Manchester to London took many hours. On the way down, I reflected that I would prefer the Post Office, but I would prefer to be dealing with people in the Ministry of Labour, rather than taxes in the Inland Revenue. I will never know whether that was the right decision! The interview was much more informal – only one man from each of the three departments, plus one from the Civil Service Commission. I think they were quite amused to ask me why I had changed my mind, though the man from the tax office was possibly a little miffed that I had rejected what most would have regarded as a more prestigious position.

I sat the written examination in Manchester ten days or so after I had finished my finals. There were seven written papers for the Administrative Class, but candidates had to choose only five to count for the Special Departmental Class. There were the usual translation and essay papers, plus examinations in Poetry, the Novel and Drama and one on Mediaeval Literature. As was the tradition in Oxford and Cambridge there were no set books for any of these examinations.

I dropped Mediaeval Literature and one other from my Special Departmental Class choices. It was not long before I realised that had been a mistake, because, although I didn’t think I was particularly good at it, I probably had a comparative advantage. Manchester was one of the top universities for mediaeval French literature, so I was better placed than most to deal with any questions that were asked.

I don’t remember anything about the examinations apart from one question on the poetry paper. When I came to choose the final question to answer, there were none left on any poet whom I had studied. So I decided to answer the question about Paul Valéry. I knew half a line of his poetry: Un creux toujours futur. I spent the next three-quarters of an hour comparing him to Mallarmé!

I received the results of my endeavours by post in Belley in the middle of August. I did not have enough marks to qualify for the Administrative Class. I did not have enough marks to qualify for the Post Office. But I did have enough marks for the Ministry of Labour and the Inland Revenue. As I had chosen the Ministry of Labour, I was offered a post there at an annual salary of £709 (compared with £750 in the Administrative Class). I have written about what happened there in separate posts on this website Travels of a Civil Servant.

Continued to Part 7: The Final Fling

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