Luke at University Pt. 01

[This story continues 'Luke's early years.' All persons and institutions in the story are fictitious. Some places are real, others are fictitious.]

Chapter 13

Buckingham College, Camford

As I stood there on the pavement in Buckingham Street, looking at the golden-yellow stonework of the seventeenth-century frontage of the college, beautiful in the October sun, I began to re-evaluate the city in or near which I had spent most of my life. I tried to see it through the eyes of most eighteen-year-olds who had set foot in it only once or twice before. I was struck with its beauty, albeit impaired by the masses of cars, buses and bicycles that passed through it daily, and was thankful that I was joining a community going back hundreds of years. I picked up my suitcase and went to find my room allocation.

My room was rather old-fashioned. It was a first-floor room in the second quadrangle of the college, in the centre of which was an eighteenth-century fountain, surrounded by a flower-bed. It was a duplex room of the type commonly allocated to freshman students: a shared spacious sitting room/study with two desks, and two separate single bedrooms opening off. Each bedroom had a washbasin, but no toilet. Consequently, it was fairly universal practice after a night's drinking to use the washbasin to piss into. The room shared a bathroom, which had two toilets and two showers, with two other similar student rooms on the same level of the staircase, for a total of six students. My roommate had not yet arrived, so I had a choice of bedrooms. I unpacked my suitcase, put the bed-linen etc. into drawers in my chosen bedroom and my clothes in other drawers.

I then went out and did what dozens of freshman students have traditionally done at universities over the whole land, I went into a men's outfitters and bought a dark green hoody, embellished with a Buckingham College crest. The days of college scarves and ties were gone in those early years of the twenty-first century and hoodies were in. The college crest (armorial bearings) was: 'argent, a pile inverted gules encircled by a ducal coronet, between two bezants.' This was intended to symbolize the ducal foundation of the college, but it was evident if you had the right kind of mind (a dirty one) to see it as a symbol of fellatio! The motto beneath the armorial bearings, 'Virtus virilis' (manly strength or virtue) could also have a gay interpretation.

In 1623, to mark his elevation by the king to the Dukedom of Buckingham, George Villiers, regretting his lack of a university education, had founded Buckingham College. 'The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,' as a contemporary described him, was an appropriate description of the founder of what became notorious as a gay college. King James VI/I had taken a fancy to Villiers from the moment of their meeting in 1614, and while there is not a lot of strong evidence, apart from a hidden passage linking their bedrooms, he was almost certainly James's lover.

This association of the college with man-man sex was never forgotten. College accounts from the Restoration era record fines and rustications of undergraduates for supplementing their beer money by soliciting as rent boys. In the eighteenth century there was a series of scandals about sexual relationships between the fellows and teenage undergraduates. The prudery of the Victorians led to attempts to sweep this reputation of the college under the carpet, particularly after Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, commonly known as the Labouchère Amendment, criminalized sexual acts between male persons ('gross indecency'), and it was the better part of a century before this injustice was removed. In the twenty-first century, the resolute determination of both the Governing Body and the undergraduates not to admit women students, reinforced the gay reputation of the college.

Chapter 14

The first few weeks

I was of course extremely interested to see what my roommate was like. It was the next day before he turned up. He was quite attractive-looking, but seemed very quiet and reserved. He had short, crew-cut dark hair, was very tall (a good 2 metres), broad shouldered and pretty muscular. I hoped that he would not be into rowing, rugby or boxing, and was relieved when he said that was not a sporty type. He told me that he was reading chemistry. It was not easy to get him to talk, I had to smile and make a big effort to get him to say very much. I asked him if he swam, and he said that he was very keen on swimming and hoped to get into the water at least once a week. I was pleased that we had at least one thing in common.

I will skip over the first few days in which the freshmen were recruited to various college and university clubs and activities, and just relate that I joined the chapel choir. My new roommate, whose name was Thomas Appleton, did not tell me about any new activities that he was going to try. His taciturnity decreased somewhat after the first week, and we started going into dinner together. Most evenings before dinner we had a drink in the college beer cellar and after his first drink, Tom always became much more communicative.

My choice of two languages to study meant that I had a much more hectic timetable than most humanities students. I had two tutorials per week, one in French and one in Italian. These were not always one-to-one tutorials, often they were small groups, and in Italian involved students from other colleges. The assignments were not always essays: sometimes they were translation exercises. The tutorials also were varied, with conversation classes and interpreting classes, as well as essay reading and criticism. We were expected to attend a selection of lectures: some of our own choice, others heavily recommended by our tutors, and were expected to read at least five books per term. This meant that I spent a lot of time working in our room, whereas Tom was out at lectures or lab classes most of the day, which was a happy arrangement.

You might wonder why I had chosen such a relatively obscure discipline to study at university level as Italian. There were a number of contributing factors. Firstly, my mother had studied Italian and lived in Italy, second, my unknown biological father, the man responsible for my Mediterranean complexion, had been Italian, thirdly both my fathers spoke the language, as of course did Uncle Marcello. But the most influential factor is what happened when we were young. After the adoption of Cathy, my parents were essentially confined to the house in the evenings for several years with two young children. At that stage they already spoke quite a lot of the language already, having been to a summer school in Emilia-Romagna. They asked Marcello if he knew of an Italian tutor who would come to the house and give them language tuition. Of course Marcello did know such a person and for five years they both had weekly lessons in Italian. As a result of this, whenever they were in Marcello's company they spoke Italian, and in order to practise, they spoke it between themselves at home. They did this a lot, and we kids started to pick up bits of the language, and before long could say a lot of everyday words and sentences. I missed these conversations when I was at boarding school, and when I got into the senior school and found that I could study Italian to both GCSE and A Level, I jumped at the opportunity. I felt very strongly that if both my fathers could speak two other languages apart from English, when they had both been educated as chemists, I should have no problems doing the same when the languages were my main field of study.

My fathers had another language too, the language of gay endearments, which used to embarrass me when I was in my early teens, but as I got older and discovered that I was gay myself, I began to appreciate their use. Dad used to call Pop 'stud-boy' and Pop used to call Dad 'fag-boy'. Along with more usual terms like 'love', 'darling', 'Ganymede' and 'pretty youth', they seemed to me, as an adult, perfectly normal terms for a man. They did not use such terms in public, of course.

I was a keen and conscientious student, so I was not aware of any great need for sex that could not be satisfied by a good wank, and my social life was quite low key. I did not feel the need to chat up my fellow students during dinner, though I did look round at them appraisingly. On Saturday mornings I went swimming with Tom, and got the chance to see him undressed. He looked pretty good, but I did not feel any desire to make advances. We used to go to the Camford Olympic Pool, because Tom could not afford to join the Men's Fitness Club. My parents had paid for my membership as soon as I became eighteen. They had been instrumental in getting the Club started, and Pop had contributed a million towards its construction costs, and he sat on the committee. I used to go there at lunchtime on my own a couple of times a week and swim twenty or so lengths. If I had been looking for sex, it would have been a good place to go, because it had been designed to be gay-friendly. Occasionally, if he was free at lunchtime, Pop would join me in swimming. Although now in his early fifties, he was extremely fit, though I could easily have overtaken him if we had been swimming competitively. I sometimes wondered if the gay regulars at the Centre thought that I was his male toy-boy rather than his son! One evening a week I had choir practice, which was always followed by a session at a nearby pub. The choir's repertoire of music was very limited by the lack of women's or boys' voices, and placed a heavy reliance on tenors, and those rare species, male altos. I regretted that I had not inherited Dad's tenor voice (then it struck me, could I have inherited such a thing from him? My Y-chromosome was Italian! But that may merely reflect my poor knowledge of genetics.)

After a culture-starved couple of weeks, I persuaded Tom to come with me to see an Italian film at the Rialto on a Saturday afternoon. Saturday dinner in Hall was always a cold meal, as it was the kitchen staff's night off, so we signed out of dinner, and after the film, went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Tom was not affluent, and was, being a Yorkshireman like Dad, careful with his money, but hungry students got a good meal at the Hang Zhou Restaurant. To my surprise, Tom said how much he had enjoyed the film, and could we go regularly to the Rialto each week. I assented enthusiastically, as I did not find going to concerts or the cinema on my own much fun. To my disappointment, there was of course no hand-holding with Tom, as he seemed to be rather straight, or maybe just inhibited. But he did go out with his fellow chemists on Friday nights after Hall.

My parents had ensured that I had been properly educated in the matter of beer. Although I had not been one for visiting pubs under age, Dad and Pop had trained me to drink proper cask- or bottled-conditioned beer, which is unpasteurized and contains live yeast. To my delight, Buckingham College beer cellar stocked two kinds of traditionally brewed and served beer, and I spent my first month at college educating Tom to enjoy proper beer. No-one, male or female, likes beer the first time that they taste it, and practice and proper education are essential to learn to appreciate beer fully. Moreover, Dad had told me where in Camford I could get Belgian beer, and Tom and I explored the amazing variety of bottled beers from Flanders and Wallonia in the comfort of our college room. I was never short of money. My parents made me an allowance of £1000 per month, to pay for my food and clothes, drink and travel, but they paid my accommodation costs separately. I spent quite a lot of my allowance on beer, and Tom was quite happy to drink whatever I offered him. I was really buying his company, I suppose. We developed the habit of spending an evening each week visiting Camford's numerous different pubs and trying out their beers. With a drop of alcohol inside him, and it really did not have to be much, Tom became a different and much more likeable person. We soon became good friends. This was evidenced by the fact that we both felt able to fart in each other's company without any embarrassment or giggling.

Chapter 15

Honorary fellow

Normally Honorary Fellowships are conferred by a letter and certificate through the post and confer merely a title and the right to dine on High Table. But because Pop was actively teaching, and therefore on the college payroll, Dr Dan C and the President of St Boniface's felt that the certificate should be handed over in a personal ceremony and it was decided that a Sunday Evensong in chapel was a suitable occasion. So after consultation with my parents, the first Sunday in November was fixed for the presentation. Dad, Cathy and I were also invited to attend. So I gave my apologies to the Buckingham organ scholar for my absence from evensong on this special occasion, and took my seat next to Cathy in St Boniface's chapel, and after the sermon, the President handed the certificate over to Pop, with a two-sentence speech. Dad had put on his M.A. gown and joined his old choir for the evening, though he had not sung with them for nineteen years. They even got him to sing the solo part in the anthem ('This is the record of John,' by Orlando Gibbons). At the end of the service, our fathers stayed to dine on High Table, and I took Cathy out to dinner at a reserved table at the Venezia.

We didn't mind being left out of the party, because it was not really a family occasion. I always spoke Italian when we visited the Venezia and I ordered a bottle of Chianti, and let my sister have a couple of small glasses with our excellent three-course meal. She was now in the sixth form and hoped to go to Oxbridge to read mathematics and computer science. She had outstanding GCSE marks and everyone expected her to do well. Like me she could speak Italian, but much less fluently. Unlike me, although attending a segregated school, she had a number of boys chasing her, which surprised me, because although she was very attractive (as far as girls can be attractive: but that's the gay in me speaking!) I would have thought that she might be stigmatized as a swat. But girls are much more competitive in a girls' school. Wisely, she went out with several boys and did not show a preference for any individual. I escorted her home from the restaurant before riding my bike back to college.

Chapter 16

E-mail from l.c.scarborough@buckingham.camford.ac.uk to j.singleton@bonif.camford.ac.uk

Hi Pop

Just a note of thanks for the invitation to your Fellowship presentation. I am glad that Boni's has finally shown its appreciation of the cash that you have drip-fed into their finances over the years. Let's face it, the Gov Bod doesn't give a toss about the quality of your tutorials over the last 15 years. Only the students themselves and Dan C know the value of your teaching, as of course do I (in a different sphere). But I know that you do not want to become known as a substantial cash donor to the college, so your teaching is a good pretext to disguise the award. And at least they have now given you a teaching room of your own.

It seems silly to be sending an E-mail that could go across the world, to you who live 10 minutes walk away, but writing expresses more definitively how grateful I feel about what you and Dad have done for me over the last 18 years. I know that Dad has always considered that you are the most important and influential person in his life, and I know exactly how he feels. I know too that you like to keep a very low profile, so that whereas someone in the public eye like Dad can get a C.B.E, you don't get much opportunity to learn how much what you do is appreciated. But it IS appreciated and the country as a whole is a better one for your environmental work, and the men of Camford are great beneficiaries of the Fitness Centre that you in effect created with your funding.

Things are busy here, as well as the French and Italian, I am also your 'conjugating and declining grammar boy' (in the words of Sydney Smith) because I have a paper in Latin and one in Greek in my first-year exams, and I must pass them to get rid of them and concentrate on the French and Italian.

I have not (yet) fallen in love, so I can get on with my work without distraction. My roommate is a nice guy, we get on well and go out together a couple of times a week to swim or see a film or drink, but he is either deadly straight or unbelievably inhibited, and I don't want to upset him by making any advances, and no way do I want to invite him home to meet you!

Give Dad my love when he gets home from Antwerp.

Love

Luke. XXXX

Chapter 17

An interesting newcomer

My most interesting classes were my Italian group tutorials. There was a majority of female first-years in the class, which generally consisted of a dozen undergraduates. Had I been straight, it would have been a wonderful chance to meet intelligent unattached girls. Instead, in my first session of the term, I looked with great interest at the boys, with some disappointment. None looked bedworthy and most of them were as shy and withdrawn as myself or Tom, and I wondered how our tutor would ever manage to get a conversation going that was not monopolized by the girls, and usually a minority of them. But Dr Lorenzo Cagliari was very skilled at handling us. A rota was established and he made certain that in each session, every person made a vocal contribution long enough for him to assess his or her progress. There was a range of skills. Not all students had been able to learn Italian at school and some were starting from scratch. Others, like myself had done A levels and were familiar with the basic grammar, although we usually had very limited vocabularies.

Half-way through the Martinmas term, Dr Cagliari split us into two groups, meeting at different times, and this proved a great success. Our progress speeded up rapidly. One day to promote discussion in the more advanced group that I was in, he brought along a native speaker, a young man with a darker skin like my own, who was a Ph.D. student in the Music Department. He was introduced to us as Nicolà Aspergini, and he asked us to call him Nic. He was very attractive, with longish black hair, about 1.8 metres tall and weighed I guess about 75 kilos. I immediately fancied the guy. He was slim, not very muscular, with a nice rounded arse and an interesting bulge in the crotch of his stylish designer jeans. I estimated his age to be about twenty-five.

One respect in which I do not resemble the Scarborough men is in my interest in clothes. I think I must have inherited that from my Italian biological father, and of course I have a rather more generous income to live on than Dad had in his student days. Moreover, Pop who has always been a stylish dresser, has encouraged my interest in more expensive clothes by footing the bill whenever I asked him. This was something that Dad did not agree about. Dad felt that I should learn to live on a shoestring, but that is his Yorkshire roots manifesting themselves. People from Yorkshire love to talk about the hardships of their youth! But please do not think that I was always buying clothes. I did not wear designer clothes every day, I wore the same items as most students, though perhaps of a rather better quality. And although the college did provide a quite expensive laundry service, it also provided washing machines, and most of the time I used these facilities. I certainly did not take my washing home for Dad or our cleaner to wash! The labour-intensity of running two homes, in Camford and in Ixton meant that since our birth, our fathers had employed a cleaner in both places.