Quite a Good Time to be Born by David Lodge

Author:David Lodge [David Lodge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

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1 The wooden figure of Phineas Maclino, a kilted Jacobite, stolen by students from outside a tobacconist’s shop in Tottenham Court Road, was a UCL mascot earlier in the century. The magazine, originally called Phineas, became defunct, probably because of the war, and was revived in the mid-fifties with the addition of the epithet ‘new’ to its title.

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‘IN THE FIFTIES, everyone was waiting to get married, some longer than others,’ observes the authorial narrator of How Far Can You Go? Nobody in our circle of friends waited as long as Mary and I. Tony Petti married Lorna, a Classics student at UCL who was the star singer of his choir, and their wedding was one of two Mary and I attended on the same Saturday in 1957, Tony’s in the morning and that of a relative of mine in the afternoon. In 1958, the year that Martin and Jeswyn got married, Derek Todd met a shy, gentle young woman called Iris with as yet hidden talents as an artist, and after living together discreetly in a flat in Old Street they married too. That summer Mary and I at last got formally engaged, and together we chose a second-hand ring, platinum with a small sapphire set in a circle of diamond chips. Mary was now almost as impatient as I was to bring this inordinately long courtship to a conclusion, having overcome whatever doubts she had once had about marriage or me. She was securely settled in her career, having obtained her PGCE by part-time study, and was enjoying the challenge of teaching English at Eltham Green Comprehensive, a huge new school on the borders of south-east London and Kent, where she demonstrated her quality by turning a notoriously delinquent class known as ‘4F4’ (the very sound of which would make colleagues shudder) into her devoted pupils. She had moved from the flat in Endsleigh Street to a bedsitter in Brockley near the St John’s railway station, which was on a direct line to Eltham; and at the end of the working day I would often pop round on the Vespa for cocoa and a cuddle and to talk about future plans. We decided on a Whitsun wedding in 1959. Mr Jacob asked Mary if we could wait another year or two so he could save up enough money to host the wedding, but she firmly refused and we undertook to meet the cost ourselves.

This meant that I had locked myself into a tight timetable. To obtain my MA in the summer of ’59, I would have to submit my thesis in April. At that point I had got as far as the 1890s in writing my history of the Catholic novel. When I drew up a list of the novelists I still had to cover I realised there was no question of writing first drafts of these chapters and returning to them later: there simply wouldn’t be enough time. I therefore compiled a calendar allotting a precise number of weeks to reading and writing about each author according to their importance.

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