By Julie Myerson, FT.com site
Published: May 18, 2007
Iwas still away on my gap year in Italy when the forms about my place at Bristol University arrived. It was hard for my mother to get hold of me - our only communications back then consisted of fortnightly telephone conversations that I queued for at the main post office in Florence - so she filled them in herself.
Faced with the choice of five or six different halls of residence and having no idea of the geography of Bristol (or indeed of university life), she did what any self-respecting mother would do and went for the one with the most washing machines. By the time I got back, it was all decided. I was going to be living in the middle of nowhere, a couple of unsociable miles out of the centre of Bristol, in a place with exceptional laundry facilities.
My mother and stepfather drove me and my trunk there on a blowy grey day at the beginning of October. I still remember the exact taste and smell and texture of that day. I know that the trees were blazing green and gold, that the air smelt cold and crunchy, and that I was wearing a knitted plum wool pencil skirt and a pair of leather Italian mules with wooden heels. My legs were bare. I was probably shivering but I felt incredibly sophisticated. It was so dismaying to see all these greasy teenagers shuffling around in tattered jeans and waterproofs.
A cream-and-grey 1960s block in the middle of Stoke Bishop, Badock Hall did have wonderful views and easy access to the rolling downs. It also - as my mother eagerly pointed out - had its own tennis courts. She had always believed that sport was the best way to meet boys - as though there was something inherently wholesome about a boy who understood the nature of good old physical exertion. But at 19, in my Italian mules and with my fast-fading Italian tan, tennis and healthy boys who exerted themselves were the last thing on my mind. I wanted dark rooms and clever, complicated people. I wanted to talk until the small hours about life and death and John Keats.
But maybe what I was really suffering from was gap-year-itis. For a whole year I'd mingled with Italian counts and countesses, developed a taste for strong espressos and learned to take for granted Brunelleschi's soaring spires against a perfect blue sky. I'd cloaked myself in a different language (conveniently masking all sorts of inexperience and awkward-ness) and I'd been called bella enough times to begin to feel it.
Suddenly here I was, surrounded by chemistry and geography students in a place where you queued up in a clattery dining hall for pale salad and queasy chips, a place where if you wanted coffee it was hot brown water from a machine, a place where if you wanted a bath you had to provide your own plug.
What on Earth had I done?
My stepfather told me to make sure I read the fire regulations on the notice board downstairs and my mum ran the hot tap in my basin-in-a-cupboard to check it really was hot. Then - a little teary - they kissed me and left.
It was 1979, almost 30 years ago, but I still remember exactly what happened next. I sat for a few moments on my single bed, picked away at the nail varnish on my (still Italian-looking) toes and thought about crying but decided not to. Then there was a knock on the door and a girl with long permed brown hair and a guitar stood there and asked if I wanted to come and have coffee and "Christian fellowship " in a room along the corridor.
"It's not only miles from anywhere, " I wrote to my best friend, who was at university in Manchester, "but somehow I've managed to end up in the one hall that's full of Christians. "
A few weeks passed and I remember that I did play some tennis on those courts with some boys. I also lost my tan; I ate too many chips; I looked in the mirror one day and realised I didn't look a lot different from the people around me who were eagerly sticking posters of Average White Band to their brown cell walls. Could it be that this really was my fate?
And then I made two proper friends. The first had long blonde hair, a chain-smoking habit and madness in her eyes - and told me she would definitely have a nervous breakdown if she didn't get out of that place. The second I first saw sitting on the floor of the student union wearing a pin-striped jacket she'd bought in a thrift store as she bummed around the US. She looked like she was just waiting for something real to happen. She looked like me.
And that was it. We found a big old house in Redlands with five bedrooms and got some other disaffected students (all boys - hurray) to move in with us. By the end of that first year, we were living life with a filthy kitchen, a ghost and no washing machine, juggling rent cheques and washing-up rotas when we could have been (as my mother kept pointing out) eating nice hot meals in Badock Hall and playing tennis.
But that's another story I'll tell you next week.
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