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By Root 450 0

out the necessary tidbits of bug and were duly recording away. I hadn’t any idea what I was doing, my tutor knew this, and I was wondering yet again why the university had placed me at this level of science studies. I had gotten as far as picking out the locust from his cage—because it was kept warm, I prolonged my stay in the insect room for a rather lingering time—and had finally narrowed down its body regions into wings, body, and head. This was not going to get me very far. I felt my tutor’s tall presence behind me and turned to see a sardonic smile on his face. He went to the chalkboard, drew what certainly looked to be a locust, circled a region on the animal’s head, and said in his most elaborate accent, “For your edification, Miss Jamison, he-ah is the e-ah”; the class roared, so did I, and I reconciled myself to a year of being truly and hopelessly behind—I was; but I learned a lot, and had great fun as I did so. (My laboratory notes for the locust experiment reflect my early recognition that I was in over my head; after detailing the experimental method in my lab report—“The head, wings, and legs were removed from a locust. After exposing the air sacs by cutting the metathoracic sternites, the auditory nerve was located and cut centrally to exclude the possibility of responses from the cerebral ganglion,” and so on—the write-up ended with “Due to a misunderstanding of instructions, and a general lack of knowledge about what was going on, a broader range of pitch stimulation was not tested and, by the time the misunderstanding was understood, the auditory nerve was fatigued. So was I.”)

There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters—fresh from the sea and delicious—were especially popular. We cooked them in beakers over Bunsen burners until one of our lecturers, remarking that “It has not gone unnoticed that some of your subjects seem to be letting themselves out of their tanks at night,” put a halt to our attempts to supplement college meals.

That year I walked for long hours along the sea and through the town and sat for hours mulling and writing among the ancient ruins of the city. I never tired of imagining what the twelfth-century cathedral must once have been, what glorious stained glass must once have filled its now-empty stone-edged windows; nor could I escape the almost archetypal pullings of Sunday services in the college chapel, which, like the university itself, had been built during the early fifteenth century. The medieval traditions of learning and religion were threaded together in a deeply mystifying and wonderful way. The thick scarlet gowns of the undergraduates, said to be brightly colored because of an early Scottish king’s decree that students, as potentially dangerous to the State, should be easily recognized, brought vivid contrast to the gray buildings of the town; and, after chapel, the red-gowned students would walk to the end of the town’s pier, further extending their vivid contrast to the dark skies and the sea.

It was, it is, a mystical place: full of memories of cold, clear nights and men and women in evening dress, long gloves, silk scarves, kilts, and tartan sashes over the shoulders of women in elegant floor-length silk gowns; an endless round of formal balls; late dinner parties of salmon, hams, fresh game, sherry, malt whiskies, and port; bright scarlet gowns on the backs of students on bicycles, in dining and lecture halls, in gardens, and on the ground as picnic blankets in the spring. There were late nights of singing and talking with my Scottish roommates; long banks of daffodils and bluebells on the hills above the sea; seaweed and rocks and limpet shells along the yellow, high-tided sands, and ravishingly beautiful Christmas services at the end of term: undergraduates in their long, bright gowns of red, and graduate students in their short, black somber ones; the old and beautiful carols; hanging lamps of gold-chained crowns, and deeply carved wooden choir stalls;