La's Orchestra Saves the World Page 0,4

been heavily backed by her English teacher at school, a graduate of Girton. She knew the admissions tutor, she said; they had gone walking in France together as students, and she would make sure that any application would be sympathetically viewed. La wondered what that had to do with her; she did not want to be accepted because of some remote bond of friendship, the outcome of a walking tour.

“I’m not saying that,” said the teacher. “But you’ll learn as you go through life that friendship, contacts, call it what you will, lies behind so many of the decisions that people make. It’s just the way the world is.”

Girton accepted her, and she began the study of English literature in the autumn of 1929. It seemed that everybody in Cambridge was talking about Mr. Leavis, who was on the verge of publishing a great work of criticism, it was said. She met Leavis, and his new wife, Queenie Roth, who talked to her at a party about Jane Austen. It was just one of the heady experiences that Cambridge had in store for La, and it made the hill-top in Surrey seem irredeemably dull.

Her tutor, Dr. Price, was ambitious for her. “You could do a further degree. There’s so much to choose from.”

That was not how La saw it. In her view there was so little choice—if one was a woman. “It’s men who have all the opportunities,” she said. “Look at what they can do. At the most, we have their leavings, the crumbs from their table. It’s 1931 and that’s all we have. Still.”

“That’s because women haven’t learned their lesson,” said the tutor.

“Which is?”

“To live their lives as if men did not exist.”

That was easily said by a tutor in a women’s college. But La did not point this out.

“It breaks my heart,” the tutor went on, “to see all these intelligent girls come to us and then leave, more or less promised to some man. And they go off and marry him and that’s the end. What a waste. What a criminal waste.”

Seeing La’s reaction, the tutor offered a list of names. “Andrews last year; Paterson, too, such a brilliant person. Married. Buried away in some dim town somewhere, playing bridge and practising domestic economy. Is that what Cambridge is for?”

La agreed with Dr. Price, on that, at least, if not on other matters. She had not come to Cambridge to find a husband; she found it astonishing that there were girls who did just that—she had met some of them, and they admitted it. Our best chance, one said. You’d have to be a fool not to take it. La said nothing; she had come, she believed, to be taught how to think. At school she had been subjected to rote-learning intended to enable her to recite the opinions of others; now she wanted to form her own views, but was finding it difficult. What would these views be, she wondered, once she had formed them?

“Don’t you think it exciting, La, to be alive at a time of crisis?”

The speaker was Janey Turner, a young woman who had befriended her at a poetry reading and invited her afterwards to a tea-room. The young men at the reading were hopeless, whispered Janey. “They’re interested only in themselves. Have you noticed that, La? They’re all trying to look poetic. All terribly narcissistic and intense. Except for that one who read out the bit about the man in the factory. He understood.”

La wondered about the crisis. Everybody said there was a cultural crisis—that the old certainties had been so destabilised that they were no longer capable of providing any answers. But if that was so, then how were we to know what to believe in? Janey knew the answer, with a confident, complete certainty. The common man, she said. He’s the future. We must believe in what he believes in.

“Which is what?”

“The ending of oppression. Freedom from hunger. Freedom from the deception of the Church and the tricks of the ruling class. Flags. National glory. Militarism.”

La pondered this. She agreed that freedom from hunger was an admirable goal—who could take a contrary view on that? And oppression was bad, too; of course it was. But the Church? She thought of the college chaplain, a mild man with a strong interest in Jane Austen and in Tennyson, who was distantly related to Beatrix Potter and who would never have engaged in deception, surely. Or was Janey talking about a different