The Junior Common Room of the School of Oriental and African Studies is a noisy, tatty, paper-strewn room with a curving wall at one end like the stern of a small liner. Tall windows let in plenty of wind and sky, and when I was studying there I used to imagine I was sailing steerage class on a slow voyage across Bloomsbury.
My train was due to leave Euston station — just up the road — in an hour. My old college was as good a place as any to wait on an afternoon of bitter cold. I took my packet of tangy-cheese-flavoured Doritos, my carton of cappuccino, and my subsidised copy of the Guardian newspaper and found a comfortable berth on a battered old sofa under one of the tall windows. A plain white T-shirt was laid out on the table in front of me. Across it, a student seated on my left was carefully thickening the words YARL’S WOOD — I AM ON HUNGER STRIKE with a green felt tip. On my right, a man who looked like a middle-ranking Foreign Office diplomat — dark suit, navy-blue striped shirt, navy-blue tie — was having an informal one-to-one tutorial in spoken Mandarin with a teenage Chinese student.
Finding yourself sandwiched between interesting or highly contrasting neighbours is quite the normal thing at SOAS, which draws students from all over the world. On my first morning as an undergraduate, I squeezed into the only available chair in a Swahili class, and found myself seated between Henry, the previous year’s whipper-in of the Eton beagle pack, and Mariam, a female Marxist Eritrean war veteran with scars to prove it. To get to the class, I’d had to push my way through a demonstration in the entrance hall, where representatives of the Islamic militant society Hizb ut-Tahrir were chanting ‘Death to Zion’, or something similar, at members of the Jewish Society, who had turned out to challenge them with a dignified silence.
Yes, cultural diversity is the name of the game at SOAS — or, at any rate, cultural diversity as it is manifested by a globe-trotting élite. You soon got used to it. In fact, I got so used to it that sometimes I chose not to be excited about cultural diversity at all, and in the JCR sat with my head in the sports pages of the Daily Mirror like a labourer in a crowded carriage on the Jubilee Line. But today wasn’t one of those times. Today my spirits lifted, as I’d imagined they would, at being back again in that exciting Tower of Babel.
The diplomat’s level of Mandarin vocabulary appeared to be at the same stage of development as a three-year-old native speaker. He was doing well. He was going to succeed: you knew it. There was no sign of the panic or demoralisation at the gargantuan feat of memory he’d set himself which afflicts so many. His approach was dogged. He was a sticker. If a word was new, he asked the tutor to repeat it, first slowly, then at normal speed, then he’d echo the new word into a voice recorder.
Owing to the clamour in the room, the diplomat was obliged to crane across the table in order to catch as completely as possible every inflection and intonation of his tutor’s words. And watching him, it struck me that he had one of the most captivating faces I’d seen for a long time. It was above all a lively face and, I thought, a surprisingly innocent one for a man in his thirties who wears a suit. It was also a face of immense kindness. Where he struggled to remember a word, or the meaning of a word, deep reserves of good humour could be discerned beneath the pensive expression. I thought perhaps it was a country face up for the day. But the lines were too fine and it was too pallid — it was almost etiolated — to be that.
As I was trying to figure out the man behind the face, the table between us sort of erupted then went sideways. A huge, male, black Labrador that had been lying under the table had caught wind of my tangy-cheese-flavoured Doritos, stood up, and made a clumsy lunge for the packet, which was open on my lap. The table had gone sideways because he was tethered by his harness to one of the legs. It was a guide dog — a typically dopey one, whose main interest was in snacks. He belonged to the diplomat, who was, I now realised, in spite of his thoughtful eyes, completely blind.
I threw the dog a Dorito. As he wolfed it down, I saw the hunger striker watching enviously. ‘Would you like one?’ I said, offering the bag. He shook his head miserably.
Comments