Fifty years after her first degree, Jennifer Selway, 68, is doing an MA. She’s still a swot – but university standards have vastly improved
Never too old to learn something new
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seem as thrilled to see me as I had hen I tell people that, at expected. And the lure of prancing about the age of 68, I’m doing on stage in a DramSoc production of an MA in Medieval What the Butler Saw seemed more fun Literature, they react as than doing The Faerie Queene for weeks though I’ve confessed to suffering from on end. Oh, how we toiled on that some unfortunate medical condition. interminable epic. There’s embarrassment, mixed with My tutors over three years were Frank mild concern. Then a furtive glance to Kermode, Stephen Spender and Antonia locate the nearest escape route in case I Duffy (the novelist A S Byatt). Did I start banging on about Beowulf. This was a big surprise to me as I had appreciate what a privilege it was to have foolishly imagined that, given the a one-to-one with these intellectual opportunity, anyone would want to do an giants for an hour each fortnight? And MA. Who wouldn’t like to spend a wintry for free? Not really. afternoon in the warm library at So now I’m having another go, London’s Birkbeck College, the pale topping up my BA with an MA. shafts of the setting sun breaking The Middle Ages have always seemed through a mullioned window, the peace like the blackcurrant fruit gums in the broken only by the sound of a scratching pack – desirable, delicious and slightly pen and the turning of pages? mysterious. I had hoped that one could Apparently lots of people wouldn’t. sink into that deep past, untroubled by I’ve always been a priggish swot. Aged the culture wars. I now know that’s eight, I played a blinder, doing the impossible. Hardly a day goes by without entrance exam to my independent day some angry nitwit calling on us to school, and was put in a class with girls a remember our Anglo-Saxon heritage, or year older than me. O Levels at 13 and 14. complaints that Chaucer was a rapist. By the age of 16, I had four A Levels and The COVID pandemic was no an S Level with distinction, and was out deterrent to my academic plans. If we the other end of the school system. had to do everything online, so be it. As it Exam stress? What is that, actually? happens, we meet once a week in the Summer was to me the heady scent of flesh in an actual classroom, wearing mown grass and Quink ink, the crisp masks. I’m decades older than cotton of my school shirt, the everyone else but I’m deeply satisfying heft of my remembering how much I liked ring-binder revision folder, and the sitting with a group of moment of breathless anticipation like-minded people, when the invigilator announced, teasing poetry apart. ‘Girls, you may turn over your Having taken for papers.’ Bliss it was in that granted the teaching I had dawn to be alive. as an undergraduate, I’m now What an insufferable in awe of the way my course child. But, after such a supervisor leads each week’s flying start, the groves of seminar with such elegance academe (the English and erudition. department of University In the 1970s, when very College London) didn’t My medieval guide: Chaucer few went to university, the 26 The Oldie January 2022
guiding principle was that of benign neglect. Nobody even told you where the library was. The English department at Foster Court rarely felt like an engine room of the intellect. As in Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, it was a land where it seemed always afternoon. You were left to your own devices and, after all, we were technically adults. Times have changed. I should have realised how much – in terms of reading material – would be accessible online. Almost everything is. And there’s an awful lot of institutional ‘support’. Rather too much for my liking. In my attempts to be a model student, I’ve attended online seminars on using the library and on how to write in the ‘correct’ academic manner, cite references and avoid plagiarism. I’ve been told that if I have any mental-health issues, I can contact someone or other. I’ve been invited to a careers fair. The internet makes everything almost too available, sending you down endless rabbit holes of enquiry. In the era of the book, you felt you’d done a day’s work by strolling to the library, unpacking your bag and settling down to an hour’s leisurely reading before seeing someone who’d suggest going for a coffee. Anyway, I’m in for the duration. My greatest difficulty isn’t deciphering Old English – it’s all come back to me like how to ride a bike. It’s deciphering the messages I get from the tech help department when I beg for assistance with Moodle, whatever the hell that is. Long ago, when I was a newspaper executive, I used just to phone Tony in IT. Now the university techies answer my questions with supplementary questions that I simply do not understand. Or perhaps this is the Socratic method of learning, subtly adapted to the 21st century…
