The single moment in your life which most changes all that follows should be easy to record. But over the years, the event becomes so encrusted with memory that the simple truth of it is then hard to uncover. This one, in mine, exists outside any sense of time, though in fact I can date it exactly, for it was New Year's Eve of 1951.
I was in Oxford, staying in a rented room in the town, for the college had closed down for the holiday. Almost the only person around I knew was my college's only openly homosexual undergraduate: in the idiom of the time, the college queer.
No one had a syllable to say against him, for he was regarded protectively, a kind of mascot. Tiny, odd-looking, Jewish, he was also acknowledged as having one of the sharpest intellects of his generation. Learning that I was planning to be alone on New Year's Eve, he invited me to spend it with him. I liked him and so accepted, with no inkling that he was, in fact, arranging a blind date. He had nothing to gain from it. But do it he did, and that celebrated brain certainly knew what it was doing that day.
We arranged to meet in the bar of the Randolph hotel, where he presented to me one Dick Chapman, a student in another college, a little younger than me.
Decades later, when we lived near Cambridge, some university students asked Dick to write an account of that evening. Many of them were then at the stage that Dick and I had been at in 1951. They wanted to hear, for a change, a story with a happy ending for people like them and us. This is part of what he [Dick] wrote for their student publication.
'We were in different colleges, different years, and had completely different groups of friends. The odds were stacked against us ever meeting. He American. Tall, dark, rangy, cowboy-style intellectual. Me, your typical wet-blond English rose. The two of us stranded in Oxford over the Christmas vacation. Oxford was glacial that winter and nobody we knew was left in town - apart from one slightly weird classics scholar, with a brilliant brain but a bad reputation. He might have been shunned by one and all because of the way he flaunted his orientation, but, in fact, he knew everyone, the two of us included. And he had guessed my secret.
'To me he said, "Oxford is dead this time of year. Nobody, but nobody in town, let alone anybody to get off with. There is this tall American. We call him the Texas Ranger. He's stuck here through the vacation too. Would you like to meet him? I'm sure he's straight, but you never know, he might oblige." I don't know what he said to him.
'He arranged an evening, the three of us drinking beer in a hotel bar. And the cowboy and the rose met. And hit it off. Fixed to meet again the next day. Eventually, overcame shyness, eased themselves out of their closets and into each other's lives. And it seemed to work. And it still seems to work...'
I WOULD like to give an account of our first meeting that glows and glimmers with romance, hints of promise. The truth is that, when the classics scholar had left us alone, claiming another engagement, conversation faltered. Dick said little, and even my customary southern flow seemed to fail me. We both sat, numbed, staring first at our glasses of beer, then at each other, then at the floor. I took in blond hair, blue eyes, the legendary English schoolboy complexion, a slender shape in a faultlessly tailored country suit.
We spent most of the evening talking prosaically of set texts, essays, tutors and my looming exams. I managed at last to grab on to the fact that he found the Anglo-Saxon part of the syllabus the easiest. I expressed my amazement and hinted that some help, during this holiday, would be welcome. The offer of this came back readily. As the bells of the churches in St Giles rang out, we did not hug or kiss. We formally wished each other a happy 1952. We solemnly arranged to meet the next day to do some Anglo-Saxon together.
My rented room was tiny, with one chair and a bed that occupied most of the space. Side by side we sat on this, and opened Beowulf. Less than a page later, Beowulf lay neglected on the floor, along with the splendid country suit.
I would like to have reported a more golden-tinted New Year's Eve. I would prefer, if I could truthfully, to tell now of days spent in long, soulful conversations. But for the next few days, to try to put it blandly and politely, we simply could not keep apart.
We did, indeed, quite genuinely try to work at Anglo-Saxon, and at the other assignments we shared and both badly needed to be doing. My room had proved itself ill-suited for the purpose, so we repaired to Dick's family home.
Dick's father was a professor and a fellow of Queen's College, and occupied a pretty old house in Queen's Lane, opposite the college. For some weeks after Christmas, Dick's parents were away, so we agreed to do our work there, staying strictly in different rooms, only meeting to discuss the most pressing academic questions.
These urgent matters, and the instant consequences of getting within sight of one another, began as a joke, then became a worry. We made solemn vows. We assigned each other rooms as far apart as possible in that house. Each in his room would try to concentrate. But one creak on the floors of the ancient house would alert the other, who would creep guiltily out of his room toward the sound, to meet the other creeping guiltily toward him. We fell, wordlessly, groaning, on to chairs, beds, the floors, the stairs.
We made serious commitments to limit ourselves to twice a day, then constantly broke them. We really believed we were going to wear ourselves out, become ill, that our bodies would become so exhausted they would, somehow, give up.
Fed on the guilt, the uncertainty we both felt about what we were doing so wholeheartedly, our conviction grew that we were, actually, killing ourselves.
We were wrong. Two healthy men in their twenties can survive a lot of what we were doing, and we did.
· Ben Duncan is a writer and broadcaster based in Cambridge. This an extract from his newly revised memoir (first published in 1962 when he could not tell the full story) called The Same Language (University of Alabama Press). Dick Chapman's biography of Dallas Pratt was published earlier this year by the American Museum in Britain, Bath.
