A Little Love for Lampeter

I went to a strange university. Of course I did.

St David’s University College, Lampeter is the third oldest university in Britain and the oldest university in Wales. It was founded in 1822 and began its life as a theological college. By the time I got there in October 1989 it had branched out to embrace the humanities and had a thousand students, less than my high school at home.

In the first year you had to study three subjects and if you passed your end of year exams, you could narrow it down to one or two. I had planned to do English lit, Greek and Roman civilisation and history. A kind second year pointed out that the reading would kill me and I would be better off doing something less text heavy, which is how I ended up dropping history and doing environmental issues. I still know a surprising amount of stuff about sewage treatment plants.

I did an English degree after a year of Greek and Romans convinced me that I would actually hate being an archaeologist and reading endless screeds about the Punic wars and Greek farming methods was not my jam. I also still know a surprising amount of stuff about olive farming and pig husbandry.

I graduated with a First because books are most definitely my bag, now and forever. I had plans to be an academic and went off to Oxford Brookes’ to do a masters in feminist literature. This was a bad idea for many reasons. Firstly, I went because of a boy who I had met and fallen for. This, ironically enough, is a bad reason to end up doing a masters in feminist literature. Secondly, the very real need to get a job ate into a considerable amount of time I should have been spending studying. Thirdly, it turned out that I had no idea at all about being an academic. Finally, the wild, strange life I had led at Lampeter was nowhere to be found once I washed up in Oxford and I was bereft.

Lampeter was a very analogue place. There was one IT lab with a handful of computers in it. I never set foot in it for the entire three years I was there. It was acceptable to hand write all your papers, including your dissertation, and footnotes were more of a serving suggestion. With the exception of the year I lived out, I never had a kitchen or a television. Bathrooms were always shared. There were a handful of phone boxes around the town which had a permanent queue of students waiting outside in all weathers. The main method of communication with the outside world was letters. My parents sent me off every term with a hundred first class stamps, and I would use them all.

It was hard to get out of Lampeter unless you had a car, and most of us didn’t. The nearest big towns, Aberystwyth and Carmarthen were a two bus ride journey away. There was one coach a day to Swansea which left at eight in the morning and returned at eight at night. Mostly we just stayed put in our tiny, eccentric town, making our own entertainment.

It was a place seething with magic. I had a friend who was a druid. I had a friend who was a Wiccan who lived in a horse box. I had a friend who had a visit from the Holy Spirit in the night and who gave away all his possessions and started talking in tongues. I had a friend who thought that God had restored his eyesight and threw his glasses away. We sent him back to the optician after he stepped in front of a car he hadn’t seen coming. The place was also seething with would be vicars. I had friends who did degrees in Latin and church history and did extra curricular Hebrew. I had friends who danced up on the circle at the top of the wooded hill when the moon was full. As well as theology, Lampeter was well known for being a centre for Islamic Studies. The Islamic students mostly kept to themselves, but the entire time I was there, people of all faiths, creeds and beliefs got along together on the world’s smallest university campus, which was a magic all of its own.

I knew a girl who thought she was a horse and spent her entire time galloping around. Sometimes she would pull a trolley with a goldfish in a bowl around behind her. I knew a boy who hated modernity, who dressed in tweed and wrote with an ink pen and refused to tangle with electricity. I knew another boy who, from time to time, thought he was a plane and could only get into his room by taxi-ing round the square to put his wheels down. I had just come out of the other end of a nervous breakdown and I needed this medicine. I found a place where, in the grand scheme of things, my weirdness was extremely dull. For the most part, I thrived.

There were people who dressed as Roundheads and Cavaliers or Prussian officers from the First World War. There was a guy who dressed in a cassock and pulled a gramophone on a trolley round with him playing hymns, or the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Every week I would go to the Cat’s Protection League charity shop and buy a carrier bag of clothes for a pound. I would dress however the mood took me. Lumberjack shirts and Victorian bloomers with the gusset sewn up, block print Indian kaftans, Jilly Cooper power dresses with shoulder pads and Docs. Anything, all the time, anywhere, and when the cupboard got full, I’d take it all back to the charity shop and start again. Crazy colour hair dyes became a thing while I was there, so we did that. We braided, we did dreads, I went through a phase of being the female Nigel Kennedy, hair wise. We hunted down bright coloured tights (which were not really a thing in the early Nineties), we bought hats of all shapes and sizes with ribbons and bibbons on every side. It was a riot of dressing up and we were always swapping clothes. Literally and metaphorically we tried everything on to see what would fit.

There were discos where Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues would segue into the theme tune from Rupert the Bear and we danced on regardless. Julian Cope’s oeuvre was permanently on the jukebox in the bar, which someone had petitioned to be called The Shangri-La Cocktail Lounge. Rave bands would come and use so much power they caused outages in the town. Doctor and the Medics came to boogie and handed out free kittens. You could go out all night for a tenner and built in weirdness was guaranteed.

There was a time when a band called The Ukrainians came to play and people found great coats and fur hats and we all cossack danced so hard that I lost my shoes, shredded my tights and had splinters in my feet for a week afterwards. I had a friend who dressed as a demon and who was commonly known as The Scourge. His best friend frequently dressed as a Bishop and they formed a rave band together. There was a group of anarchists who called themselves The Rockin’ Thundas and who raised money for the Merthyr Tydfil Volcano Disaster Fund. At Fresher’s Fair you could join the Pickling Society for two pence as long as you accepted there would be no meetings to go to and you had to make your own pickles. At Lampeter you could be anyone you wanted and it was amazing and delightful finding out who people actually wanted to be.

It was a place for outsiders. It was a place for creativity and play. One day, we woke up to find that someone had painted huge, pink polkadots on all the buildings in the night. There was a summer where we didn’t sleep at all and would spend hours playing a game of shoe golf across the campus on a course and with rules that became increasingly bizarre as the nights wore on and we became more deranged through lack of sleep. I met my first tree hugger at Lampeter. He greeted every tree like a friend and frequently howled at the sky when he got excited. We flew kites barefoot on the lawns one afternoon and I came back to find someone had filled my Docs with daffodils.

I wanted in. My friends and I made a giant papier mache tableaux of two people eating Christmas dinner and hoisted it onto the roof of the refectory on our first, annual Christmas Dinner Day. This was our first and also our last, due to the fact that things got so raucous there was a flaming Christmas pudding fight at lunch time where the refectory was at risk of burning down and the vicar was so alarmed by our carol singing he refused to host another Christmas service. Later that day we found that our tableaux had been raided and a group of people were playing football with the woman’s head.

We carved goldfish out of carrots and released them into the fountain (they sank). We stole a ladder from a building site and scaled the chapel wall to dress St. David in a pinafore, false beard and Christmas hat. We created an evil band of banana worshipping weirdos who menaced people with soft fruit. We created another evil band who would leave jelly babies in various tortured poses tied to people’s front door knobs.

We joined a choir where we all pretended we could sing in Welsh by learning the songs phonetically. We sailed off to take part in an Eisteddfod in Bangor where we couldn’t speak to anyone in case they found us out and had to make a quick getaway on the coach after the competition. Amazingly, we did not come last. We ran the English and Media Society so badly that we nearly got it banned because we were not respectful enough to the few, fringe eccentrics who washed up at our door wanting to host events. My best friend laughed so hard at Gillian Clarke’s poetic use of the word uterus at a reading that she started crying, which set us all off and we were roundly chastised by the head of department for disrespecting the National Poet of Wales.

Sometimes we commandeered a friend’s car and went further afield. Trips to secret beaches on the Cardigan coast where waterfalls cascaded onto the sands. Trips to Dolgoch falls outside Tywyn and the twisted, mossy woods around it. Trips to watch people navigating coracles at Cenarth Falls. There was an abandoned village in the woods above Lampeter. You had to park the car in a lay-by and cross fields to get to the woods. It was a magical place. We went there once in the snow, threading through close pines with the muffled sky above us falling silently on our heads in feathered flakes. Tumble down houses rose quietly out of the trees and the underlying sound of running water from a nearby stream was the only noise for miles. Not far from the village was a circle of standing stones where we once saw a sinister jester riding a giant hobby horse surrounded by closed face women in trad wife gear. They were in the midst of a ritual but stopped as we passed and stared at us in a silence so thick you could cut it with a knife.

When I got to Oxford I immediately began to fail at everything. Nobody understood why I couldn’t manage and I couldn’t explain that I had travelled from a different world to be there. I wasn’t managing academia, I wasn’t managing to get a job and I wasn’t managing real life very well either. I had come from a place of complete acceptance and ran hard into a world of no.

In the two years I spent attempting and failing to get my Masters’ I was miserable. I spent those two years trying to fit in and please everyone and failed spectacularly at all of it. My nascent career, my academic skills and my relationship crashed and burned spectacularly and I crawled from the wreckage to start again.

This post was supposed to be about Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the only book I studied at Oxford which I connected with in any meaningful way. I re-read it last week and it still casts its magic. In the elaborate, Rococo, shape-shifting world of the stories, where existence topples under the weight of magical, Chinese boxes, spilling reality after reality I came alive. In a place where what is known is frequently undercut by what is suspected, where the truth is questionable and where magic seeks the fastest way out from its source, destroying any pretence of respectability, I had found a place I knew. I did very badly indeed in a world of town and gown, Human Resources and work life balance. I failed to thrive. I realise now that what I recognised in The Bloody Chamber was the world I had been living in for three years already, and it was a world that suited me. I think I’ve been trying to get back there one way and another ever since.

Lampeter became part of the wider University of Wales after I left. It got tamer and safer and more like the universities other people went to. I was sad about that. Now there are plans afoot to take undergraduate teaching out of Lampeter altogether. If the powers that be get their way, soon there will be no chance at all that someone lost, like I was, might find their way home. That also makes me sad. There is a petition if you feel like adding your voice to protest the changes. You can sign it here.