Iwas recently astonished to come across my diary for the second half of 1948 and all of 1949, our freshman year. Somehow it had survived countless moves and clear-outs. It's so detailed, so enthusiastic, so full of excitement (and nerves) at the dizzying pace of new experiences, that I hardly recognized myself.
It's clear that after freshman year I found I had to work, so diary-keeping dwindled to scrappy notes and a few mood pieces. But there's so much detail that I never got around to reading it fully and in the right order until last year-and was then amazed as well as touched by some of the things I found. Memory does play tricks!
It is not given to everyone to keep a happy-or a painful-memory at the back of the mind, and then come upon the true circumstances set out clearly in black and white. Indeed it's rather like a novel, because you have the advantage of knowing what happened "afterward." But England's endless hot, dry, Mediterranean summer of 1995, in its strangeness, was perfect for spending long late evenings in the garden, ostensibly watering the flower beds, but really doing a lot of remembering, pondering, with some laughter ... and some wishful thinking.
In 1948 the College was just coming out of those undoubtedly traumatic war years, and everything was battleship gray or grubby cream. When my parents came up to give the College a once-over, they were favorably impressed by what they saw as a shabby austerity that must surely be conducive to "plain living and high thinking." But the presence of so many veterans still on campus gave the student body a much broader aspect and a fascinating, special quality that I can't believe could be equaled today.
It also may have forced a bending of some College rules and the end of others, deceptively and gradually starting the machinery of change. Arriving at Swarthmore was such a Great Escape, such an exciting New Adventure! There was I, barely 17, naive, overawed by all these Brilliant Brains, keeping up that facade of self-confidence, easily taken aback by that supreme insult "Bourgeois!" eager to meet everyone and find out everything (has to be done in the freshman year, you know, or not at all). A day had about 48 hours, and a week was almost forever.
We took life so seriously that I'm trying to keep this on a determinedly frivolous level. Clothes! Not for us the one-rucksack approach: Two or three trunks apiece lined the halls of the girls' dorms on arrival in fall, contents including the obligatory long evening dresses, and (whisper it) a few fur coats. Money! So long before the word processor era, not everyone had typewriters, and we who did picked up a little extra cash typing papers. I didn't keep accounts, but many of the minutiae are detailed in the diary: $8 for two Pol.Sci. textbooks ("outrageous!"), 75 cents for dinner at the Ingleneuk, or budgeting $l per person for quite a substantial dinner that six of us cooked for our dates the first WSGA weekend.
And the dances! Informal dancing almost every evening, including Thursdays in Commons, preserving the last vestiges of old-fashioned etiquette (cutting-in and all that), danceable-and usually live-music. Or the jukebox that formed a perpetual background for those of us who were Commons habitués. Food! The dining hall's output was so disgusting, I actually noted down when it was edible. We seem to have existed on druggie snacks, subbies, and calorific Italian food on weekends. The men trying to prove that beer is all the brain food a guy needs. Beer and booze! No shortage of either in the fraternity lodges or around bonfires along Crum Creek, this on an officially "dry" campus. The rules on booze followed the well-known principle of "don't ask, don't tell." And it really was beer or the hard stuff. There was no "designer water" and no diet cola either.
Smoking! Most of us did-a useful social ploy: Pause in the doorway and light a cigarette while sizing up the talent within. There was a whole social culture built around smoking, especially the chatting-up techniques: bum a cigarette or a light from that good-looking stranger....
We used to go into fits of laughter at those old Quaker rules that prohibited both sexes from occupying the same sled to slide down a snowy hill, but although the night watchmen in the men's dorms were reported to be lenient, men were only gradually and grudgingly admitted to the women's premises. In mid 1948-49 there was a relaxation of the rules, allowing men to remain in the Parrish parlors as late as 11 p.m. (gosh!). It wasn't till the fall of '49 that the occasional and separate Sunday afternoon open house was extended into general permission, I think, and of course "with open doors only!"
Our actual studies ... they go without saying, being the background to our lives, starting with that agonizing morning moment when that suspiciously dicey alarm clock might not wake us for the 8 o'clock! Mostly classes and seminars were great, although there always seemed to be just one more book, just one more article we couldn't manage. I'm immensely grateful to have had the opportunity, even when Honors meant two papers a week and Larry Lafore's history seminar a fast-paced evening breaking midway for a lavish supper (how we ate!) and then going on till the last allowable moment and sometimes beyond, following which I invariably had a violent migraine that lasted well into the next day. But I did it, we all did, with time for the "extracurricular"-somehow!
And what about all those official extracurricular activities provided with the (erroneous) hope of keeping the students too busy to get into mischief. I'm rather a nonsporting type now, but back then I went enthusiastically to the games and cheered raucously for Our Side. That celebrated institution, the "Finx," judging its success by how many of the faculty it had offended that week, and copying the energetic chaos of a "Front Page." And our own, our very own, our wonderful radio station! Much borrowing of Frannie's superb record collection that first year, and a never-to-be-forgotten evening on which Jay Finkel '52 decided, between records, to read some of Millay's saddest and loveliest poems, causing floods of tears among female students homesick or lovesick. And we also went to the movies a great deal. One particular year Professor Klees selected, in perfect innocence, a little film by Buneul about an Andalusian dog to accompany an evening of Harold Lloyd comedies. I arrived late to find all hell had broken loose and grim parents were marching their startled infants out of the place.
There's a funny but predictable imbalance in the diary. In pure Swarthmorese language of the mom-ent, I would breathlessly detail some hilarious prank from breakfast, then sigh over a romantic possibility/impossibility, and bring myself down to earth with the day's, or week's, ration of world news, jumbled together good and bad.
Visiting Greats. Despite the loss of so much memorabilia, I can still flourish my copy of W.H. Auden's poetry, which, very gauchely, I got him to autograph on that memorable day when a special friend to whom I shall always be grateful smuggled me into the poetry seminar. And that too was what Swarthmore was all about, meeting The Great (faculty included!) to enjoy their company and to learn, with luck, without having to feel, "Oh gosh, here's the great ________." (Not all of The Great were terribly pleased with such informality.)
And no campus novel would be complete without a huge quota of love stories, some happy, some turbulent, some disastrous, some coming unstuck sooner or later. How thrilled we were when the two assistant deans got married! And wasn't there at least one faculty-student marriage? On the other hand, how bitter was the jar when we came off that emotional rollercoaster in full flight, especially if a third party put a deliberate spanner in the works, with the resulting splat! That was something to ponder on a long summer evening, I can tell you.
Memory and the past. In the course of chasing these memories, I collected far more than I really need of wistful, dreamy, or tart quotes on the subject. Take your pick according to mood. The Times (on a new Ayckbourn play): "that haunting and haunted underworld of the mind where you fantasize about the past.... Is there such a thing as a second chance?" I like novelist Fay Weldon: "The past may be another country, but there are frequent international flights from there to here, especially over the public holidays...."
True, true. My son the publisher really put me in my place. I was telling him I'd burn the diary so that my family wouldn't learn the full extent of their mother's silliness, and he was horrified: "You can't do that! It's a Historical Document!" Right, so now we know. It was a very long time ago, when, as Tom Lehrer recently told a BBC interviewer, "Back then, there were words you were not allowed to use in front of a girl. Now, you are not allowed to call her a girl." The past is another country, and they do do things differently there. It was a great time, and we had a great time, when all is said and done!.
Suzie