Taking the Law into my own Hands (2/2)

My best bet, I reckoned was to ask John Hopkins to repeat the question. It was, I realised also my only option.

With a little inward smile, the Director of Studies for Law at Downing College, Cambridge nodded, cleared his throat and began again.

Despite my neatly pressed suit and shiny shoes, I had not made a great first impression I realised. Redoubling my determination to at least understand the question, I screwed up my face, smoothed my thighs and listened.

Older brothers and sisters, girlfriends and boyfriends had sat where we were sitting and had made it in. From that moment, they seemed to possess a kind of mystique, an aura of intellectual self-possession. However they might go on to screw up their lives, this anointing could not be taken from them. And, they wore it lightly, with a kind of insouciance that we tried not to envy. Because, we could do it, too.

So when a letter arrived from Downing College a few months later, and despite my abject interview performance, a futile hope was still alive in my heart which stuttered as I tore open the envelope. My friends would have received their letters, too. Would we be commiserating together tonight, hiding our envy or would our lives be transformed?

Often when I’m browsing in bookshops and come across the work of an author I love, I turn to the bio on the back page. Invariably, it tells me that so-and-so, after graduating with a first in whatever from Cambridge (Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Coe), Oxford (Tariq Ali, Monica Ali), Princeton (Mohsin Hamid, Jonathan Safran Foer), Stanford (Nicole Krauss), Yale (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), Harvard (Mohsin Hamid, again) they went on to live a life of dazzling literary success. Often they are the children of journalists (Kamila Shamsie), political activists, (Nadeem Aslam, Arundhati Roy), lawyers (Dave Eggers), diplomats (Hisham Matar), avante-garde painters (Jonathan Lethem) or colonials (Lawrence Durrell).

Rarely are they the children of the love between a car body repairer and a legal secretary.

Or second year drop-outs from University College, London.

As I approach the car, my dad swings open the door, his strong, gnarly hands wrinkled with paint.

“How did it go?” he asks.

I shrug my shoulders.

“I didn’t even understand the question,” I answer, sliding into the passenger seat in my sweaty suit.

“Never mind,” he says, starting the car. “Mum’s made shepherd’s pie for tea.”

We began the long journey home. Rod Stewart’s Rhythm of my Heart is playing on the radio.

I gaze out of the window.

“You know what,” he says about an hour into the journey.

“Even if you were a street cleaner, I’d still think the sun shone out of your arse.”

These are words I’ll never forget.