An Audience with an Elephant by Byron Rogers Page A

particular direction, who never lost his nerve in chemist shops like the rest of us and bought Horlicks tablets. Now, 30 years on and up for a college reunion, we were staring at the contraceptive machine as though we had come on some terrible tribal juju in a jungle clearing.
    ‘So they’ve had it put up at last,’ said the retired don, with weariness in his voice. It was now noon, the sherry hour. ‘Twenty years ago, that was one of the great confrontations of my time. The Dean refused point blank, which was a mistake. The matter went to a committee and then to a meeting of the fellows. They asked the Chaplain for guidance but he talked about the moral responsibility of the undergraduates. We were running scared, they were so militant.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Oh then, there were the holidays,’ he chuckled. ‘By the time they came back the undergraduates had forgotten all about the thing. Of course, this was after your time.’
    My time. . . The 100 men who met that weekend have probably never been so conscious of time. It was a great shock for a man to go back, Dr Johnson said towards the end of his life. He had gone back to Lichfield, where he had met men who were boys when he was a boy and, seeing they were now old, it had occurred to him he was old too. Some of these men were old.
    We met at tea in the Master’s Lodge on Saturday afternoon, walking round and round each other like strange dogs and talking loudly to dispel the thin wind of mortality we must all have felt. Men who had lived on the same staircase failed to recognise each other, and one man had to introduce himself to his former roommate. The average age must have been around 50, yet one man said he was reminded of a station on one of those days when British Rail offered concessionary fares to pensioners. And then a face appeared with all the woes of the world upon it, these being his stock in trade: the newsreader had arrived.
    There were bankers, lawyers, doctors, academics, men who had lost themselves to careers or tried to find themselves on Scottish islands, who, in the intervening decades had discovered God or homosexuality or wives. And now for this weekend all these were offstage.
    Why had they come? Nostalgia, curiosity, the chance to swank or merely the opportunity of a free meal? Perhaps it was in search of the most mysterious being anyone will encounter, the man he himself once was. He survives in photographs, in suits which no longer fit, in things he wrote. You know everything about your varnished self but in a biographer’s way; if the man you once were came through the door, you might not even recognise him.
    ‘Remember the time you went to see the doctor because you thought your nipples were different sizes?’ I asked a Doctor of Philosophy, trying to break the ice.
    ‘I’ve learnt to keep secrets now,’ he said. ‘This will be a disappointment to you.’
    Some men talked about their children and one about his impending divorce (‘No, don’t sympathise, I’ve been planning this’). He looked so happy and so young I began to suspect there might be a correlation between youth and a bad marital track record.
    The head of Scotland Yard’s Forensic Science Laboratory scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me (‘Now be careful what you do with that’). I reproached a stipendiary who, when I appeared in front of him on a motoring charge (with a discreet little wave), had promptly disqualified himself from hearing the case.
    ‘You could have got me off.’
    ‘You were pleading guilty, you fool.’
    ‘Oh yes, so I was, but you could have done something.’
    ‘And what do you think the Lord Chancellor would have done to my career then?’
    The old Head Porter, treasured by generations for his unblinking range of obscenity, held court, while the Master, who did not recognise anyone, kept materialising uneasily in various parts of his parlour like Doctor Who.
    Many had flown to be there. I shook hands with