It’s October 1958, and a nearly 19-year-old Melvyn Bragg is on the platform at Wigton railway station, saying goodbye to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah. He is off to read history at Wadham College, Oxford, one of the youngest in his cohort because national service is being phased out. Another World starts here, picking up the story left off in Back in the Day, Bragg’s previous memoir about his childhood and youth in this small Cumbrian town.
Oxford to Bragg seems “more a theatre than a city, a spectacle rather than a habitation”. After his prelims, the weeding-out exams in his second term, he is left alone until his finals. He discovers Ingmar Bergman and has many earnest pub conversations about whether Pasternak will get the Nobel prize, or jazz is superior to rock’n’roll. He goes on the Aldermaston march and joins the anti-apartheid movement – although in hindsight he sees this as inspired by a residual faith in empire, with South Africa as Britain’s moral responsibility. Even after Suez, he owns a pencil sharpener in the shape of a globe on which the empire is “a continuous governing blur of pink”.
Fortunately for the student Bragg, but less fortunately for this book’s narrative jeopardy, he fits right in at Oxford. The city’s cat’s cradle of narrow streets and ginnels reminds him of Wigton. The “shovel them in, feed them up and usher them out” ethos of Wadham’s dining hall evokes family holidays at Butlin’s. He soon abandons his Presley quiff for the same neat crop as everyone else, and adopts the unofficial undergraduate uniform: grey flannels or cords, sports jacket or blazer (the student body is overwhelmingly male). He has a knack for getting on with everyone, from dully decent Tories to artier types.
Apart from a brief bout of homesickness when he hitchhikes back to Wigton and is treated as “a messenger from Olympus”, the three years pass without calamity. Our hero’s worst ordeals are an out-of-body experience while reciting the Latin grace before dinner at Wadham, and a brief depressive episode after he breaks up with Sarah. His tutor, the early-modern historian Lawrence Stone, is scrupulous and kindly, although the college warden Maurice Bowra’s explanation of his admissions policy (“Clever boys. Pretty boys. No shits!”) would raise eyebrows today.
There is still the class system to negotiate, evident in subtle variations in the dress code (cavalry twills are the giveaway for the toffs) and the rooms allocated in college. One day Bragg bumps into the future TV dramatist Dennis Potter, who declares in his ripe Gloucestershire tones: “They say there’s three real working-class men here. There’s me. And you. Where’s the other bugger?” But Bragg demurs from the class chippiness of Potter’s 1960 book The Glittering Coffin (mentioned twice and confused, I think, with the Potter-fronted BBC TV documentary Between Two Rivers, one of a few repetitions and misrememberings in a book that could have done with a firmer edit). Mostly, aside from the Bullingdon Club’s casual nastiness, he finds the class system suspended for the university’s scholarly purposes. The snobbery, he decides, is “neither bruising nor even mildly offensive” and “easy to ignore”.
Another World is at its best when viewing the university with the outsider’s eye of an amateur anthropologist. For this Oxford truly is another world, before the great university expansion of the 1960s, when the word “student” was not even much used. Bragg is an astute reader of the semiotics of his rooms overlooking the quad, and of the weekly tutorial, where he reads an essay out loud to Stone and awaits a reaction, like “the versicle and responses in medieval prayer”. The book would have been better for sticking to this anthropological impulse throughout, instead of turning, as it does, into another volume in the autobiography of Melvyn Bragg. Digressions on the subsequently stellar careers of his peers blur the focus. Still, the young Bragg is a winning protagonist, who presents much like his older self: thoughtful, open and generous in celebrating his contemporaries’ talents, while forgiving their foibles.
• Another World by Melvyn Bragg is published by Sceptre (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
