Rejects

Oxford is a busy town. ‘Busy’, in fact, doesn’t really cover it. Its narrow honeystone arteries are so sclerotic with people that it seems constantly on the verge of apoplexy. The stretch of Broad Street that runs between Turl Street and Catte Street – a distance of maybe half a kilometre – contains, at any given moment, about 5000 people, milling very slowly. Quite a lot of them are students. They are obviously students because they don't wear coats, and they never stand stock still to look at Apple Maps. They are also identifiable by their jeans, which are hecking massive, and I say that as someone who was young in the Madchester era.

To get a sense of the privilege conferred by University membership, you need only step off Broad Street onto the cool flagstones of a quiet college quad. On one side of the wall are the Outs, inching and pushing and gawping and paying. On the other are the Ins: those few upon whom the University has conferred access to peace and beauty, the space in which to stop and think, the deft ministrations of soft-footed staff, and the delicious sensation of being chosen.

This scene plays out around the corner from the Martyrs’ Memorial, which commemorates Cranmer (of Wolf Hall fame) and some other Protestant bishops who were burned for their faith under Mary Tudor. Protestants of that era believed themselves to be among the Elect; and this is, of course, what Oxford students are slyly projecting when they disdain coats and scarves on a cold midwinter afternoon. I'm just popping out quickly. From my college. This token in my hand opens this door in this ancient wall: watch me disappear. You can’t blame them for being delighted with themselves; who wouldn’t be? It’s basically Harry Potter. And anyway we all do this 'I'm-a-native' signalling, if we’re lucky enough to live somewhere that other people want to visit. And we all know what it’s like to hear a muted growl from somewhere behind you, emitted by someone who wants you to stop being so bloody slow and gormless. I did it plenty myself when I was at university in a tourist city.

But – and here we arrive at the point – I was at university in a different tourist city. I didn’t go to Oxford, and it was not for want of trying; I was rejected. And when I see a blameless young student disappear through the walls of their college, I still feel a pang of bitterness.

Because on a cold day in late 1988, having passed the entrance exam, I went to a dark old room in a dark old college to be interviewed by a dark old man who found me contemptibly stupid. Why had I written this in my essay? What on earth did I mean by that? Wouldn’t it be much more persuasive to have argued something else, literally anything else at all? Did I have anything to say for myself? I sat, determined not to actually cry, and wondered whether there had been an error. Was it possible that I had failed the exam, but been called to interview by mistake? I couldn't think of any other reason why this man was being so humiliatingly unpleasant.

Years later that I realised that Oxford's humanities tutors — at this time, at least — taught in an adversarial style suited to Parliament and the Bar. They were looking for candidates with a rapid, fluent, disputatious intelligence. But I am not disputatious by nature, and – honestly – my brain takes quite a long time to arrive at a point. I didn’t understand what my interviewer wanted from me; his behaviour just seemed like formal, calculated bullying.

So I waited silently for the ordeal to draw to a miserable end, said a prim ‘thank you’, and left his room. Then I went to my borrowed student's cell and packed away my belongings, knowing that I wouldn't be coming back. As I left the college, the porter was calling my name; it seemed the awful old man had passed my name on elsewhere, offering me the exciting opportunity to be beaten up by some other tutor in some other college. Fuck — I thought — that, and slipped out onto the street.

Apparently, I need people (including you, whom I've never met) to know this. I was rejected: yes. But I also — and this, of all things, appears to be critical to my self-worth — rolled over and gave up.

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And so just under a year later, like hundreds of thousands of rejects before and since, I went to an institution that felt like it might be the next best thing. In my case this was the University of York. It is situated just outside a famously pretty tourist city, and like Oxford it has a college-'n'-tutorials system (although the colleges turned out to be of limited utility, like the scaffold frontages of a frontier town). It quickly became apparent that I was one of many Oxbridge rejects at York. We all confessed within the first week, and then never mentioned it again.

Absolutely everything that happened next was entirely my own fault. I’m not expecting sympathy; I behaved with infuriating, snotty entitlement. I’m just trying to explain what it was like.

All of my life, up to that point, good things had happened to me without much effort on my part. I’d never had to fight to establish or defend myself. Robert Oppenheimer, talking about his idyllic childhood, said ‘It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard’; and while I don’t have anything else in common with Robert Oppenheimer, I know exactly what he meant here. I was not, to use a more contemporary educational buzzword, resilient. Not at all. The Oxford rejection shattered my young self-image, and I didn’t know how to get up off the mat.

I had been told by others that I was one of the clever people, and I had accepted that without question. So it stood to reason that I must accept this verdict too, given where it was coming from: I was not one of the really clever people. And if I wasn’t, then really, what was the point of going to university at all? And so I spent three years shuttling between the concrete blocks of the York campus: first of all telling myself that I didn’t care, and then telling myself that I wasn’t really interested in my subject anyway, and — eventually — telling myself that I was only at university to 'have a good time'.

I’m going to guess that some of you reading this are Oxbridge rejects too, and most of you would say you don’t give two hoots; you haven’t thought about it in years. But I wonder, often, whether you really don’t mind, or whether you’ve just learned that the expected thing is to 'put it behind you'. But I don’t so much put things behind me as gather them up and bring them along, occasionally taking them out and examining them when I should be doing something else. For decades after university I nursed a weird one-sided anti-Oxford grudge, shrinking from alumni and avoiding the city itself.

And now I visit Oxford regularly because – and I hope you’ll at least give me credit for getting deep into this piece before writing this – both of my sons are at the University. (Please imagine that gif of Brad Pitt doing the dance in Burn After Reading. I am exactly as obnoxious about it as you fear.)

One of the many bittersweet conversations I have had with my kids about this whole <gestures> business concerns what they say when talking to contemporaries who were rejected. They’re conflicted about it; they fear the awkwardness and they don’t want to be unkind, of course, but I suspect that they also – understandably – believe that there is a material difference between those who get in and those who don’t. Neither has ever expressed this to me in terms. They are, after all, talking to someone who didn’t get in, and who also controls the food shop and the car keys.

What rejects are looking for, I tell them, is confirmation that Oxbridge can make mistakes. What I really want, in fact, is for some black-crow don to come wheeling out into the street and say: Ms Davies! We convened a committee to review your case, and concluded that when we rejected you we committed a series of injustices including (but not limited to) class bias, intellectual narrowness, failure of educational outreach, employing capricious bullying dipshits, and probably misogyny; it’s usually in the mix somewhere. Here is a declaration to that effect, which I am about to post on the walls of the city, including that weird bit that goes through the back of New College.

I haven't given up on this (I'm not even joking), but I accept that it's not likely. One of the worst things about being rejected, once the initial shock has worn off, is that nobody cares. Nobody but you.

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Visiting Oxford on the regular over the last few years has been like aversion therapy; no longer 'here's what you could have won', which is upsetting, but instead 'here's what your kid won', which is delightful. And so it came to pass that last weekend Tobias and I went to a carol service in my older son's college. It was a scaled-down version of the famous Christmas Eve service at King's in Cambridge: dark pews, a painted ceiling, real candles under real glass, choristers filing into their seats while singing 'Once in Royal David's City'.

What I noticed at first was the absolutely charming amateurism. Not all of the high notes were perfectly hit, and it turns out that 'The Shepherd's Pipe Carol' is very difficult indeed to play on the organ. And then I noticed how young they all were, and how serious: just kids, really, but without a hint of a distancing, self-protective sneer. Everyone was solemn and committed. Every single one of them wanted to do the absolute best that they could.

As I know to my cost, there are few things quite so exposing as straining for a high note in a vocal solo. If anyone had screwed up, they would have had to stand there and carry on; if the ship was going down, they were going down with it. The older I get, the more I admire those who expend honest effort in the face of difficulty. Just as I had adjusted my expectations, they did a perfect ‘Coventry Carol’, and the alien medieval lament was like the music of the stars.

You have to have an unusual measure of commitment just to fit choir and organ practice around the punishing work schedule. I've been astonished by what I've seen of the Oxford workload; they seem to do five hours of work for every hour I did at York. I’m not saying that Oxbridge students are, always, more clever, although on average they definitely are. The real difference is in the extraordinary impositions, and the incentivisation of maximum academic effort. I think this is what my kids are picturing when they mutely resist my invitations to say that students at Oxbridge are just like students everywhere else. They aren't, because kids at Oxbridge are given so much more to do. Undergraduates at Imperial and the LSE are entitled to object to this generalisation, but to everyone else I say: ‘come on, now’.

And in trying so hard, they constantly risk exposure. At the end of it all, when they’ve left everything on the pitch, it might be definitively revealed that they are not quite top-drawer. This was, to put it mildly, not a risk I ran at York. Lectures were optional, so I simply did not attend them; if I didn’t try for a First, I couldn’t be exposed as not meriting one. The rejection didn't shape my life. What did shape my life was the dumb shit I did in response, and the fact that I am a lazy git.

Soon, in the cold light of January – fun times! – the Oxbridge decisions for the next academic year will be made. For every offer, there will be a handful of newly minted rejects. I might as well admit that this has been a letter I wish I could send to my seventeen-year-old self, so I will throw one more message up to the stars, in the hope that it will corkscrew through time and hit me on my stupid young head: just do the bloody work. Do it because it is worth doing well. Do it for the sake of your own soul. I can tell you for nothing that getting drunk, being a big name on campus and sleeping with unsuitable boys won’t make you feel any better. I’m sure it’s very nice to have the key to an ancient door, eat your breaded chicken in a 600-year-old hall, and sleep in Roger Bacon’s old room. But absolutely nobody is stopping you from trying to reach a very high standard elsewhere.

The fact that I didn't really want to, that I lowered my sights with such alacrity, suggests that the bitchy old don got it entirely right when he rejected me. Which is what I should have said to him when I left his room. Although, of course, if I had been the kind of girl who said things like that to men like him, he’d have bloody well let me in.

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For more unpleasant dons and honeystone streets, there’s always Morse: