grandmother and I decided we should stay in Oxford until I was twelve. Then we moved to Avignon, where she had been offered a job cataloguing some of the exquisite work left behind by the scribes who lived there during the hundred years of papal occupation until 1409. I attended a lycée while she worked in the Livree Ceccano, the municipal library, which was housed in what had originally been one of the many sumptuous palaces built by the cardinals who came to take up expedient residence near their pontiff.
In two years her task was complete and our next destination was the German university town of Heidelberg, where she led a restoration programme, which brought some of the earliest Reformation documents back to light.
‘Finally the boss, eh, Jasper – at sixty-three,’ she said. ‘Who says that women are held back in this clever old world of ours? And all because I bothered to learn German in the war.’
I never noticed how much money my grandmother had, which suggests she had enough, but we were by no means well off – a librarian’s salary is thin, even at the best of times. Nor is restoration exactly lucrative. I seem to remember that we spent a lot of time waiting for buses and persuading one another that second-hand clothes lent a person an air of bohemian charm unavailable to those lesser folk whose imaginations could not travel beyond the high street.
In Heidelberg, as in Avignon, our flat was small, designed for one not two. However, because the old universities always own the best property, the building we shared was both characterful and well situated. We lived at the top of an old house on Plock, an oddly named medieval street, that ran parallel to the Hauptstrasse and was overlooked by the castle. I should also mention that on the ground floor was the finest delicatessen in Germany – run by my two friends, Hans and Elke. They are still there now although Hans has grown a moustache to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and Elke is refusing to allow him into the shop until he relents. My first real job – Saturdays and late-night Wednesday – was behind their counter.
As a hollow-cheeked, fourteen-year-old English boy, now with a French accent and ever darker hair, I devoted the next four years, with increasing success, to the twin joys of reading and the pursuit of my pretty Rhineland classmates.
At school, I was never popular with the other boys in the usual kinds of ways: I was not a natural team captain, I did not draw an appreciative gang around me at the back of the class, and I never got around to beating the shit out of anyone. In fact, from about thirteen onwards, as far as I was concerned, male company was a complete waste of time. What can one boy teach another? Very little. Conkers perhaps.
No. The only thing that ever got me thinking, got me wondering, got my heart kicking with the sheer excitement of life, was the girls.
The girls were everything – their opinion, their glances, their moods; the way they walked or changed their hair; what they said, did, wanted to become; where they lived, how they had their bedrooms; which film stars they liked and why; who they read, who they imagined themselves with at night, which clothes they preferred at weekends; what they liked boys to say, why, and how often; what they wanted to buy; what they disliked about their brothers, fathers, uncles, each other; what amused them, what sickened them; how they put their socks on, how they took them off; when and how often they shaved their legs; what they thought about school, tangerines, Goethe, their mothers, holding hands, history, rivers, Portugal, and kissing strangers – all of it mattered. I had to know. To my mind, the girls were the point of being alive.
Two days after we arrived in Germany, I discovered that it was possible to walk along the narrow wooden balcony outside my bedroom window, climb over the end and swing across without too much peril on to the fire escape. Persuading my female classmates to accompany me up those skeletal steps at night was, I think, the first serious labour set for me by that merciless taskmaster whom Donne refers to as the ‘devil Love’. But I was always a good student and I studied hard.
I learned, for example, that a young lady who has just emerged, blinking, back into the forbidding glare of the real world from, say, a cinema would adamantly refuse to scale a precipitous iron stairway merely to clamber into the bedroom of an over-eager adolescent male.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Too dangerous,’ claimed Agnes, an even-tempered girl with dark corkscrew hair, who sat as close to me as possible in chemistry lessons.
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I do it all the time.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I mean I climb up there by myself all the time.’
‘I was joking. I know what you meant.’ She smiled.
‘Oh.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘Anyway, why not, Agnes?’
‘My clothes would get covered in rust.’ She ran her finger along the handrail as if to prove her point.
‘Not if you took them off.’
‘Jasper!’
I grinned. ‘Why not then?’
‘We might get found out. What if I got stuck?’
‘You won’t. It’s dead easy – I’ll help.’ I made as if to start up the first step. ‘Who’s going to find out?’
‘Your grandmother for one –’
‘She’s gone to bed early. Professor Williams is coming tomorrow. And her room is on the other side. Anyway she doesn’t mind.’
I stood, stalled on the lowest rung. Agnes looked suspicious again: ‘How do you know she doesn’t mind?’
‘She told me.’
Frank disbelief. ‘She told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Once. Anyway, Agnes, why not – just for a bit?’
She said nothing for a moment – vacillating perhaps – then she shook her head. ‘Because I have to be home by midnight or Dad comes out looking for me.’ She made a pretend-serious face: ‘We’re Catholics.’
‘What has that got to do with anything?’
‘Plus he knows I am with you so he’ll probably set off at quarter to.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘He thinks that girls are in danger the minute it turns midnight.’ She widened her eyes histrionically.
I took the step back down. ‘OK then – it’s only eleven-thirty, so I could rush you home now, get myself in his good books and bank an extra half an hour so that we can stay out until twelve-thirty next time. That way if you do suddenly turn sex-mad next Friday, you’ll have someone to talk to about it.’
‘Who says I am free next Friday?’
Sure enough, the next Friday but one I learnt another lesson: that the most efficient way from the cinema to my bedroom was not necessarily the most direct. Take lovely Agnes first on a walk up the crooked steps
