Occidental Adam, Oriental Eve by John Cadet

Author:John Cadet [John Cadet]
Language: eng
Format: epub

*****

I’d been back a month when I went up to Liverpool. Under the pressure and intensity of enforced silence the images of travel had hardened and become burnished, like vessels of bronze, and as I walked through the gates of the college, it wasn’t the grimy lawns and drab brick of the admin block that I was seeing but the towers of Trabzon and the blue expanse of the Van Golu. In fact I might have walked right through the grounds and out at the far side if I hadn’t been accosted by Wilkes the caretaker, a man soured by long contact with student depravity.

“Greene?” he said in a graveyard voice. Beads of moisture hung from his walrus moustache and I was suddenly conscious I was back in England and that it was raining persistently. “Certainly I remember you. Drove into the greenhouses one night, thinking they was the parking sheds. Found in a state o’ nature in the women’s hostel, claimin’ to ’ave lost yer way. Sent down fer…”

“Quite, quite,” I said hastily. I explained what I’d come for.

“Yer unlucky, then,” he said with satisfaction. “They’ve all gone down fer the ’alf. All but Prof. Martin, that is. ’E was geography lecturer in your time, but now ’e’s Vice Principle. Always likes to ’ave a gas with old students, the Prof. does.”

He was right about that too.

Dr. Martin, greyer at the temples, but still urbane and expansive, opened the door himself.

“God bless my soul!” he said roundly. “How very nice to see you again, Mr…er…don’t tell me…Grey. Do come in, my dear boy, do come in”.

He led the way through to his den, waving his arms and booming forth in his old manner.

“You’ve no idea what pleasure we old dogs get from hearing how you fellows are getting on. Now I do insist you sit right down and tell me everything, everything. Just start at the beginning - where you’ve been and what you’ve done and so forth - and don’t stop until you come to the end. I’m sure it’ll be fascinating.”

“Well,” I said, “I left England in…”

“Did you, by George!” he said gravely. “What a truly remarkable thing. I was observing to the Principal only the other day that no-one knows where you fellows are going to plant the college flag next - Leeds, Huddersfield, the Isle of Man, the whole darned globe. It’s astonishing, upon my soul, it really is! At the time, if I might digress a little, we were on our annual excursion, a two-day affair this time, to look at the Lake District Ordovician. And although I say it who shouldn’t, it was the best excursion we’ve ever mounted - not a single student unaccounted for when it was over.”

“We started at five in the morning, the sky just flushed with the rosy-fingered dawn, and drove north through Warrington, Wigan and Preston. At Lancaster we were held up by a puncture, but soon we were on our way again, driving at a steady fifty miles per hour.

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