The dream in which exams loom but you have done no work, not only have failed to prepare for them but scarcely know what the subjects mean or the answers to the kind of questions likely to be put to you, was becoming my reality. In June we would be assessed on our year’s work and that assessment would be taken into account when degrees were awarded. The more I thought of it, the more I avoided setting foot on campus—or, to put it more accurately, the wasteland between the canal and Wormwood Scrubs. I never dreamed of GUP. I dreamed of Daniel, the sounds he made while he hung in the latticework of the pylon and I held him till I could hold him no longer.

When parents take their children on holidays abroad in term time, they make the excuse that the children learn more in those few days in the Maldives or Costa Rica than they ever would in school. I acquired more knowledge in Maida Vale that spring than GUP could have taught me. The trouble was that it wasn’t the sort of knowledge I was here for and it wouldn’t help me to pass exams. I didn’t much care, I blocked GUP off and tried to close my mind to it. I looked at buildings, I looked at churches. I even went to church on Sunday mornings to see what these buildings were like inside, to see what Street had done for the interior of St. Mary Magdalene, its clerestories and its walls of striped brick and stone, and Comper for St. Cyprian’s, Glentworth Street, white and gold with angels on the altar. The Irvingites at the Holy Catholic Apostolic in Maida Avenue were unwelcoming, didn’t throw me out but made me cover my head with a rather nasty chiffon scarf they produced from a collection kept for that purpose. I joined the library and read books on architecture. I read Ruskin in a spirit of amazement and doubt. “Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.” That was all right, I agreed entirely. But as for some of the rest of it, did he really mean all this? “There is nothing magical about a salvia leaf”? Was he mad? Or was it all a colossal send-up?