This Much Is True

And so, thanks to Isaiah Berlin (and Mummy), I braced myself for the famously exacting grilling by the Oxbridge dons.

In those days, there was a direct train between the two towns; you would do your interviews at Oxford, then get on the train to Cambridge and do your interviews there. In my compartment on the train going to Cambridge, I met an interesting girl, Diana Devlin. She was going to Girton College and I was going to Newnham. We immediately hit it off, and she said to me, ‘What do you think you’ll do when you finish?’ ‘Well, I really would like to be an actress,’ I replied. And she said, ‘Oh, my grandma was an actress,’ and I thought, ‘How ridiculous.’ In an offhand way, I said, ‘Oh, yeah, who’s that?’ And she said, ‘Sybil Thorndike.’ I shrivelled with embarrassment; what a slap in the face. ‘That’ll teach you, Miriam,’ I thought to myself. Diana recovered from my gaffe; we continued to our respective colleges and remained close friends until she died last year. We often laughed about that first meeting and my crassness. I miss Diana deeply: after Cambridge, she had a distinguished career as an arts administrator at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and was Sam Wanamaker’s partner in creating the Globe Theatre. A rare and charming woman, irreplaceable in my life.

On arrival at Newnham, we were directed to the English department’s Director of Studies. I was nervous but armed with the information that if I used the word ‘ambiguity’ (that was a tip being passed around at the time), I’d be certain to get in, I felt I could deal with an oral examination. I’d stipulated that I wished to specialise in Anglo-Saxon, so was interviewed by Dorothy Whitelock. She was white-haired, a little fierce but seemed interested in why I’d chosen this more obscure part of the English Tripos. I didn’t really know — I wanted to understand the roots of the language, and I enjoyed the narrative power of Beowulf, which was the only Anglo-Saxon text I’d read. Somehow, I convinced her I would be worth her time.

Another scheduled interview was with the principal of Newnham, Ruth Cohen, at the principal’s lodge. This modern house, built in 1958, is in Newnham Walk, a quiet road near Old Hall. My appointment was for 3 p.m. The problem was that the house was so modern, I couldn’t find the front door, nor any bell to announce my presence. I banged for a while on what I thought might be a door, I walked around peering in high glass windows, I called out nervously and tapped on the walls, hoping to hear something hollow. Punctuality is important; I was already late and somewhat desperate. Finally, in an unexpected place, a door opened and Miss Cohen emerged. ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t find the front door.’ Luckily, she laughed. ‘It’s not the first time people have got lost,’ she said. I immediately felt at home and the interview became a genuine conversation.

At Oxford it was very different. My interviewer at Somerville was Rosemary Syfret. If ever there were a masculine woman, she was it. She had a loud bass voice, and wore tweeds. ‘Do you like Milton?’ she’d barked. I did like Milton and could honestly say so. ‘DAMN GOOD POET’ she’d boomed, slapping her thigh like a principal boy in pantomime. This convinced me Somerville would not be the place for me. I may have been a lesbian without knowing it, but that kind of academic was not to my taste.

Some months later, the day that we got the news was one of the happiest of my life. All of us who had been successful were summoned to the headmistress’s study to be told our fate. Miss Hancock was Miss Stack’s successor, a pleasant woman from Liverpool GPDST, but totally without her predecessor’s authority and presence.

The telegram from Newnham College had come to my house but I had already left for school. Mummy had opened it and seen that I’d been accepted, but she rightly guessed that I would want to hear the news with the other girls at school. So, instead, she rang the school, unselfishly allowing them to tell me.

We stood in a line in front of Miss Hancock’s desk and, one by one, she asked us to repeat our results aloud. We fully understood the importance of the occasion. We knew that it was a door opening, a moment of unalloyed happiness, undiluted by any other anxiety, an amazing sensation of triumph and fulfilment that I shall never forget. I had made it. I had got into university, alongside my closest friends, Catherine Pasternak Slater and Anna Truelove, who were the two cleverest girls in the class. I was never academically bright compared to them; I knew that I was a poor third, but now I could say, ‘Miriam Margolyes: Exhibition to Newnham, Cambridge.’ They were going to Oxford, I to Cambridge. But that separation did not dim our friendship, which flourishes and nourishes me to this day.