Coming Up Trumps: A Memoir by Jean Trumpington

Author:Jean Trumpington [Trumpington, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447265351
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Cambridge and Eton

When I had first met Barker at Yale, he had been a master at Eton, but during our courtship, he had taken up a history fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge. So it was in Cambridge that we began married life together. Our little house on Richmond Terrace cost us £800 – which was nothing, even then – and was tiny and sweet and perfect. It had a little sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom downstairs, and three bedrooms: one became our room, one Barker’s dressing room and one the spare room.

Those were very carefree days. Alan had an enjoyable job as a don, and since he had been both a master at Eton and an undergraduate at Cambridge not many years earlier (his studies having been interrupted by the war), he knew simply everyone. Consequently, I had lots of young men around and I played tennis madly with them all at the public courts at the end of the road. I knew a lot of people myself too, from my time at Bletchley, because Bletchley had been full of dons from Oxford and Cambridge. I’d been so dreadfully naughty there though that if ever a don from Bletchley saw me on the street he would say, ‘Oh no, not you!’ and run off in the other direction.

To my delight we got a dog: a simply adorable longhaired dachshund whom we named Sherry-Netherland Barker, or Sherry for short. (The Sherry-Netherland is a big hotel in New York, near Central Park.) I did put Sherry in for a show once because she was so pretty but we sat on the floor of the Guildhall for hours and hours and then she bit the judge. I can’t remember whether we got any certificates, but I rather suspect not.

One small fly in the ointment was that my early attempts at cooking were a bit hit and miss, and sometimes dropped as well. My first tossed salad was tossed straight in the dustbin because I made it with a cabbage and not a lettuce. But I practised, and I got better. I discovered I had a talent for making things taste good, and with time I learnt to make them look good as well. My early attempts at entertaining were similarly disastrous. The first thing I did was to invite the porter to tea, confusing the college porter with the college master. They are, of course, very different things. There were a lot of undergraduates around when I issued this invitation and they killed themselves laughing. I had no idea I was doing anything peculiar. To his great credit, the porter still came to tea and a jolly nice time we had.

This easy, pleasant life lasted about a year. Barker and I had married in March 1954 and by March of the following year I was pregnant. Barker spent a lot of time in his rooms at Queens’ College and I was alone in our little house, either feeling sick or craving porridge.

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