Taking The Law into my own Hands (1/2)

My mind was a perfect blank.

This was bad.

I looked beyond the thinning hair of my interviewer to the ranks of leather-bound books behind him, and out through the sash windows to the honey-comb architecture of Cambridge University’s Downing College.

I was hopelessly out of my depth.

In his tweed jacket and baggy brown cords, Downing College’s Director of Studies in Law cut an avuncular figure. Sunk deep in his leather armchair, John Hopkins retrieved his pipe, tapping the bowl against a glass ashtray, and waited for my reply.

I shifted on my wooden chair and fiddled with the cuffs of my suit jacket. An anglepoise lamp craned up from his desk towards me in an attitude of creaking expectation.

If I stood any chance of being invited to study Law at Cambridge University, I needed to pull one out of the bag. The trouble was, I didn’t even understand Hopkins’ question – a looping, spooling monologue that had taken him fifteen minutes to deliver. He’d mentioned Churchill, the Second World War and something about legal precedents but after about ten minutes he’d lost me completely.

He tapped his pipe again and looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

Fen, Gabe’s girlfriend who was in her final year at Cambridge had described Hopkins as warm, quick and brilliant. In his scuffed and faded brogues, lopsided tie and air of benevolent dishevelment, he was the archetypal gimlet-eyed, Cambridge don. In the drive down to Cambridge, we nick-named him Lightning Hopkins, after the legendary, country-blues guitar sideman.

But no amount of pithy nick-names was going to save me now.

For my sixth form college pals and I, a raggedy bunch of wannabe boho-intellectuals, getting into Oxbridge represented a type of anointing. We’d be following in the footsteps of our musical and literary heroes, of melancholy folk enigma, Nick Drake, acerbic wunderkinds, Martin Amis and Will Self, and my teenage hero, the visionary Aldous Huxley.

Right now, in another room in another college, an assortment of friends were going through their own Oxbridge grilling. Were they fairing better than me, I wondered? Would I be able to hide my misery if they got in and I flunked it?

Over the other side of the country in Oxford, Nick was being put through his paces on an interview residential. Brilliant, charming and self-deprecating, I was sure he would nail it.

A few months earlier, we’d spent the weekend with his brother who was studying at Worcester College, Oxford. Undergraduates in flowing black gowns had served us ‘supper’ in a massive, Hogwarts-style wood-panelled dining hall, whilst we tried to look nonchalant and disguise our awe. Nick had the best chance of getting in, I thought to myself. Besides, his dad was an Oxbridge graduate, too. It was a shoe-in.

A few hundred metres from where I sat contemplating Lightning Hopkins’ impenetrable question, my own dad sat parked up in his workaday Vauxhall, doing word searches or worrying the paint and grime from under his perpetually dirty nails.

His own dad was a forklift truck driver who had lived and died in a council house on the outskirts of Birmingham, his mother a cleaner for a wealthy family the other side of the tracks. My dad had left school on a Friday aged fifteen with no qualifications and was at the Labour Exchange on the following Monday looking for work. Ten years later he left the factory assembly line, set up his own car body repair business with a £1000 loaned off a dentist friend with a split-level living room (and repaid within the year) and moved us out of Birmingham and into the same town Nick lived with his Oxbridge-educated father, and where my grandmother had once been a cleaner.

What must he made of me, my father? Aged seventeen sitting under a tree writing terrible poetry and reading Dostoyevsky or watching Truffaut films and learning French to impress the girls?

At the very least, he was bemused.

Where did this child come from?

And now I was holed up in a stuffy room, interviewing to read law at Cambridge University (to be honest, this ambition owed as much to the over-estimation of my own talents together with a fondness for the hit TV show LA Law, than to any innate aptitude or capability or knowledge of what it meant to be a lawyer. I was in it for the sharp suits and hair gel – something that was about to become glaringly apparent when Lightning prompted me for an answer.