MY ROOM, YOUR ROOM ROOM 6, 23 WEST ROAD, SELWYN
Words Lucy Jolin Photograph Marcus Ginns Robert Harris (Selwyn 1975) is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has worked on BBC programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight and for newspapers such as the Sunday Times. His novels have sold more than 10 million copies.
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Rumbi Makanga is a second-year land economist who, like Harris, is addicted to buying books. “I leave all my books at home so I have to buy new books to fill up my bookcase. My mum visits and says, ‘You’ve been buying books again!’ But I really can’t help it.”
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e all gathered here to watch the Frost-Nixon interviews because I had the only TV in the building,” remembers Robert Harris, standing in the tranquil, light-filled surroundings of Room 6, 23 West Road. “I remember hanging out of the window with the aerial.” The television was not, he hastens to add, a perk of the room. “I knew I wanted to be a journalist and at the time, National Union of Journalist (NUJ) rules were very strict. If you wanted to work in London, you had to work on the Financial Times or at the BBC. Otherwise, if you wanted to be a journalist, you had to start in the provinces. I was born and bred in Nottingham. I’d had my fill of the provinces, and I had no interest in finance. So I rented a TV so I could see what was going on at the BBC.” Sadly, those raucous gatherings (which involved, at various times, a future senior Conservative MP and a future top advertising executive) are no more, thanks to the TV room downstairs. “Though my friends did come back here for my birthday, which was really nice,” says Rumbi Makanga, the room’s current
Our music was on enormous reel-to-reel magnetic-tape recorders, with Elton John and Cat Stevens.
The best...bookshop inCambridge Henrietta Kelly is reading History of Art at Trinity Hall It is a truth universally acknowledged that Cambridge students love books. Nowhere else have I heard people so vehemently defend their favourite book or speak with such passion about reading rooms. But when days buried in the pages of the latest reading list melt into weeks, even the most dedicated bibliophile can start to feel weary. And that’s when it’s time to visit the Haunted Bookshop. Hidden just off King’s Parade and dwarfed by surrounding buildings, this unassuming shop is easy to bypass. Step inside and inhale deeply, and you may just detect the aroma of sweet violets, the perfume worn by the ghostly figure said to guard the stock at this most unusual of bookshops. Be prepared: this is no Waterstones. Specialising in children’s and illustrated books, the shop was taken over by its current owner in 1994 and has remained unaltered for decades. The minuscule space is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases that spill their contents onto a faded red carpet. At the top of a narrow staircase is another room of ramshackle shelves, with books heaped precariously and crammed into cardboard crates. Just visible among this haphazard
arrangement is an ornate mantelpiece, a reminder that the building was once student accommodation. In the corner hangs a sign warning thieves that they will be – rather unconventionally – castrated. The best time to visit? Dusk. Then, as the light fails, a mysterious woman clad in white has been spotted scaling the stairs. I like to think she was a guest at an undergraduate party and had such a good night that she just can’t keep away. But even in the daytime, the place has an unnerving atmosphere. In dark corners the temperature seems to drop dramatically. Odd playthings adorn the walls: a toy acrobat, a glow-in-the-dark skeleton, a voodoo doll. But despite this, the bookshop is not a scary place. How could it be when childhood comforts such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Rabbit and the Famous Five adorn its shelves? And perhaps it is these lost delights, rather than its ghoulish history, that make up the Haunted Bookshop’s real pleasure. As in childhood, I have lost whole afternoons wandering among its stacks. I invariably leave with some new curiosity, and my love of books firmly restored. Marcus Ginns
occupant. “But we just don’t do drunk antics. I think Robert’s generation were far worse for that, whatever the Daily Mail says!” Her laptop sits on the bookshelf by the window where Harris’s TV (“which would be a museum piece now,” he says) was once positioned. There’s no need to risk her life hanging out of the window to make it work, either. “Although we do complain that the Wi-Fi is slow and doesn’t cover everywhere,” she says with a grin. “And that’s the biggest change – technology,” says Harris. “Our music was on enormous reel-to-reel magnetic-tape recorders, with Elton John and Cat Stevens. I used to have to find a phone box to call my parents on a Sunday evening. But I think that gave us more independence as students. You weren’t being hassled by texts. You were more on your own.” Being allocated one of the largest rooms wasn’t an accident, says Harris, who read English and lived in “a garret room” on the second floor during his first year. “I was editing what was then called Stop Press [now Varsity] when the allocations for second-year rooms came up. So I swung a line – I knew about this room and I could say that I needed the space to hold editorial meetings. I was here for two years. I loved the space, the big windows and the high ceiling.” Makanga is originally from Zimbabwe and says she likes to surround herself with things that remind her of home. “I have a little Zimbabwe table, with ornaments that I’ve picked up. I also have my jewellery out on display. I like having it out as it cheers me up. It reminds me of formal events when you have to dress up, as it can get a bit depressing just working.” Harris says he was rather less organised. “All I remember having in the room was books – I still have them all. A lot of people used to take books out of the library but I liked to buy them. I used to make shelves for them out of planks and bricks.” He and Makanga agree that what you have in your room doesn’t matter – it’s what you take away that counts. “Though I always leave my hangers,” says Makanga. “When you come to university you never have enough.” “There’s nothing that was in my room then that I feel I’d like to pass on,” says Harris. “Student rooms are temporary. You take everything with you, like a snail. And I don’t think you leave anything behind.” Nonetheless, Room 6 has nothing but good memories for him. “I was the first in my family to go to university,” he says. “And because of that, I sensed that coming here was playing with the casino’s money, and there was nothing to lose. Cambridge, for me, was the gateway to the world.”
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