青年文學獎協會 Youth Literary Awards Association
第四十三屆青年文學獎翻譯文學公開組比賽文本
UniversityCollegeLondon is the oldest, largest and most prestigious of the London colleges, and now a university in its own right. It was founded in 1826 to provide higher education for those who were not members of the Church of England, then obligatory for students and their teachers at Oxford and Cambridge, and was open to freethinkers as well as members of other sects and faiths, earning itself the soubriquet of “the GodlessUniversity”. The mummified body of Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher regarded as “the spiritual founder” of the college, is famously preserved, and occasionally displayed, in a wooden cabinet in its main building. It was always a visual thrill to come into sight of this building, but as a student I seldom entered the college by the main entrance. The English Department was reached by a less impressive side entrance known as Foster Court.
On fine, sunny morning in late September 1952, in the largest of the teaching rooms, I joined my fellow “freshers” for the first of several days of initiation into aspects of the college, the Department, and the courses we would follow. After some speeches of welcome and briefings by members of staff, there was an interval when coffee was served and we milled about, excited and nervous, trying to take the measure of the group of strangers to whom we now belonged. Some seemed to know each other already, and chatted with enviable ease. I approached a girl who had caught my eye: she had flawless features, blonde hair drawn back into a ponytail, and a shapely figure. She responded with a spontaneous friendly smile when I spoke to her. Her name was Mary — Mary Jacob. I can’t remember what we talked about — banal things, no doubt, such as where we came from, and what aspects of the course before us seemed most interesting or most forbidding. She seemed very nice. Later on that day I was lingering outside the Foster Court building before the afternoon session of our programme, and wondering where she had gone in the lunch break, when I saw her with two or three other girls walking abreast towards me, the autumn sun bathing them in light. I was struck more powerfully than before by her beauty, though she seemed quite unselfconscious about it. She looked strong and confident, glowing with health and a simple happiness at being where she was. As I moved towards her she flashed a pleased smile of recognition. The group stopped as I came up to them. “Where have you been?” I asked Mary, and she said, “We’ve been to join the Catholic Society.” “Are you a Catholic?” I said excitedly, hardly able to believe my luck. “I am too.”
I suppose I fell in love at that meeting, at second rather than first sight, though I didn’t define my feelings in those romantic terms. But I remember thinking, if not at that precise moment, then not long afterwards, that Mary had a kind of beauty that would last — a rather extraordinary reflection for a seventeen-year-old, as if I were already sizing her up as a possible wife. Perhaps I was, unconsciously. Consciously I was only aware that she was an exceptional girl, and that I wanted urgently to attach myself to her before someone else did, having sensed the vibrations in the air emanating from clever young people on the threshold of adult life and away from home for the first time, eager to make relationships with the opposite sex. I kept close to her in the days that followed, sat next to her at lectures and accompanied her to the bazaar-like events at which various student societies solicited membership. I signed up for the Catholic Society, of course. We explored together the various facilities of the college, including the Students’ Union, a large smoky basement with a bar, its walls festooned with hand-painted posters, furnished with battered armchairs and sofas where young men argued noisily and uninhibited couples necked. I asked Mary if she would like to go to a gallery one evening. She looked puzzled until I explained that I meant the gallery of a theatre, not an art gallery, and then she agreed readily. Mary was obviously very intelligent — she had won a State Scholarship, without going on to a waiting list — but she was unsophisticated, and her experience of theatre-going was limited to being taken with her older sister by a friend of the family to see variety shows and Christmas pantomimes. She had been brought up in Hoddesdon, a small town about twenty miles north of central London, and had attended a convent secondary school in Enfield, where she had been head girl and captain of games. I gathered that both her parents were Irish. She had hardly any knowledge of London, which gave me a great advantage in securing her friendship, since I was able to be her guide to aspects of metropolitan life, such as how to reserve gallery seats.
I was of course conscious of a disloyalty to Peggy as soon as I began to seek Mary’s company at college. Very soon — about a week after I first spoke to Mary — I went round to Peggy’s house to tell her that I had met another girl and was going out with her. I don’t remember details of our conversation, which as usual took place in the porch of her house, and was brief. She looked at her feet as I spoke, with an expression both sad and wry, and said little. I had a feeling that she had feared this would happen, but perhaps not quite so quickly. I felt pity for her and some remorse, but there was no honourable alternative. I was quite sure that Mary was the girlfriend I wanted, and although I had no reason to suppose she was as strongly attracted to me, I had known from the moment she gave me that smile of recognition in Foster Court that she liked me. She was nine months older, but even more innocent as regards sex — of knowledge about it, never mind experience. She had lived as a boarder in her last eighteen months at the convent school, since her home was so crowded that she couldn’t study properly there. At the school, I would learn in due course, she had been the unwilling object of schoolgirl crushes and the embarrassing embraces of an intense young nun, but had little contact with boys as a teenager. She had learned to dance and went to parish socials on occasion, but I quickly established that she had had no boyfriend before she met me, which for so attractive a girl in her eighteenth year was remarkable. That summer she had spent a month as an au pair with a wealthy family in south-west France, which was her first experience of Abroad, and something like a rite of passage for her. Apart from that, family, school and parish had defined the limits of her world. Now she was free, at least in term-time, of her ties and duties to all of them, an independent adult in a big city, and — you could see it in her clear blue-green eyes — expectantly open to new experiences and new friendships. My desire to be the most important of the latter was of course greatly helped by the fact that I was a Catholic and therefore shared the same moral code. She had come up to London early to settle into her digs, and gone to a Union dance at the very beginning of Freshers’ Week which I had skipped, and been affronted by the behaviour of a boy who had danced with her, holding her too tight and trying to lure her outside for a snog. Mary was happy to accept me as her first boyfriend.
[David Lodge, Quite a Good Time to Be Born (2015)]
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