Back to university at 68

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

When I tell people that, at the age of 68, I’m doing an MA in Medieval Literature, they react as though I’ve confessed to suffering from some unfortunate medical condition. There’s embarrassment, mixed with mild concern. Then a furtive glance to locate the nearest escape route in case I start banging on about Beowulf.

This was a big surprise to me as I had foolishly imagined that, given the opportunity, anyone would want to do an MA. Who wouldn’t like to spend a wintry afternoon in the warm library at London’s Birkbeck College, the pale shafts of the setting sun breaking through a mullioned window, the peace broken only by the sound of a scratching pen and the turning of pages?

Apparently lots of people wouldn’t.

I’ve always been a priggish swot. Aged eight, I played a blinder, doing the entrance exam to my independent day school, and was put in a class with girls a year older than me. O Levels at 13 and 14. By the age of 16, I had four A Levels and an S Level with distinction, and was out the other end of the school system.

Exam stress? What is that, actually? Summer was to me the heady scent of mown grass and Quink ink, the crisp cotton of my school shirt, the deeply satisfying heft of my ring-binder revision folder, and the moment of breathless anticipation when the invigilator announced, ‘Girls, you may turn over your papers.’ Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

What an insufferable child. But, after such a flying start, the groves of academe (the English department of University College London) didn’t seem as thrilled to see me as I had expected. And the lure of prancing about on stage in a DramSoc production of What the Butler Saw seemed more fun than doing The Faerie Queene for weeks on end. Oh, how we toiled on that interminable epic.

My tutors over three years were Frank Kermode, Stephen Spender and Antonia Duffy (the novelist AS Byatt). Did I appreciate what a privilege it was to have a one-to-one with these intellectual giants for an hour each fortnight? And for free? Not really.

So now I’m having another go, topping up my BA with an MA.

The Middle Ages have always seemed like the blackcurrant fruit gums in the pack – desirable, delicious and slightly mysterious. I had hoped that one could sink into that deep past, untroubled by the culture wars. I now know that’s impossible. Hardly a day goes by without some angry nitwit calling on us to remember our Anglo-Saxon heritage, or complaints that Chaucer was a rapist.

The COVID pandemic was no deterrent to my academic plans. If we had to do everything online, so be it. As it happens, we meet once a week in the flesh in an actual classroom, wearing masks. I’m decades older than everyone else but I’m remembering how much I liked sitting with a group of like-minded people, teasing poetry apart. Having taken for granted the teaching I had as an undergraduate, I’m now in awe of the way my course supervisor leads each week’s seminar with such elegance and erudition. In the 1970s, when very few went to university, the

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 My medieval guide: Chaucer 21st century…