The heady news that my old college was in the running to win University Challenge reached me in the St Hilda’s newsletter just before Christmas. With mounting excitement I read that ‘our unstoppable foursome’ had an ‘effortless 160 point lead’ and ‘trounced’ the opposition! For the first time ever, I had a taste of what my son – a Chelsea supporter – has felt most Saturdays for the last forty years.
That I should get caught up in the excitement about St Hilda’s victory makes no sense at all. Oxford had been a major disappointment and, though I retain a mild affection for St Hilda’s itself, it is no more than that and it hasn’t increased over the years, in spite of my managing to ward off their requests for money. Anne Elliott – my tutor, and also Val McDermid’s (more of this later) – would surely have found those begging phone calls unseemly. Her handwritten letter, sent to each one of us as she approached retirement (or perhaps, some other occasion that threatened a present) asked that no one contribute more than three pounds.
This delicacy is typical of one of the gentlest of people and least effective of teachers. Those one-to-one tutorials (actually, one-to-two) in front of her fire, which always ended with her greeting that week’s essay with the exact same words: ‘That’s about the size of it,’ as she rekindled her cigarette in the embers, were to be recalled by generation after generation of Eng Lit students, Katherine Duncan Jones, the distinguished Shakespearean scholar, among them.
Also among them was Val McDermid, now captain of the victorious team. She was brilliant. Four square, as wholesome as a ripe apple, the answers bubbled out of her: high culture, popular culture, whatever was thrown in the ring. Not that she hogged the show. She just held it together.
Even as I watched this now celebrated alumna of St Hilda’s, I remembered her account – come across, I know not where – of arriving at Anne Elliott’s for the weekly tutorial, all fired up at having discovered the writings of Kate Millet, and Miss Elliott, who did not even consider the novel worthy of study, allowing her to let off steam before saying, gently, ‘Well, dear, perhaps it is time to get back to Wordsworth.’
Which she did. But that isn’t where she was to stay forever after: and if she hadn’t known who Oor Wallie and the Bruins were, I would never have experienced the thrill of my team winning.