Read Online A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat - Free Book Online

earned a small Exhibition scholarship on the strength of his entrance exams. Socially and academically he found his first year “bewildering.” He seemed to view himself from the outside. In November 1897, after he had been in Cambridge a month, Lily requested a photograph of him in cap and gown, but he was “unsure of my clothes,” and anxious about his hair—“as I have my cap on, I don’t think my hair will matter.” Two months later he tried a new and unconvincing persona: golfing for the first time in his life, with some Tonbridge School acquaintances. In nine holes, he shot 133. The following week, he worsened his score.
    For many young people, going off to university is the time when grown-ups become characters—it is possible to step away from them sufficiently to walk around them, so to speak, and ascertain or at least speculate on their motives. By practice and pretense, a young person can become a self, thinking through what he really believes and knows. So slowly Morgan became a character too, who found himself best when he was alone. Years later, heobserved that “it is difficult for an inexperienced boy to . . . realise that freedom can sometimes be gained by walking out through an open door.”
    In Morgan’s case, this feeling of freedom was achieved by cycling through a college gateway. Fluid movement on a bicycle gave this suburban boy his earliest sense that he had discovered the taproot of real traditions, the
real
England. The geography of Cambridge became a kind of psychic landscape, alternately claustrophobic and liberating. Walking or cycling in the city, Morgan squeezed through the pinched wet alleys between the stone walls of college buildings, down the narrow streets that wound to the river Cam or ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac of a college gatehouse. From these confined spaces he found himself plunged without warning into astonishing vistas—the green expanse of Parker’s Piece, Jesus Green, the Midsummer Common, or the marshland at the backs of the colleges, where the sky hung broadly like a Dutch painting, the weather scrolling across it like a film projected at high speed. Even within sight of the bridge at the back of King’s, docile cows lifted their heads from grazing to watch cyclists and students bustling by. The colleges huddled together tightly. Many turned their faces to the street, the market, and the town, but their backs were exposed to wide watermeadows that reached as far as the eye could see, with only the tiny spire of the church at Grantchester visible in the distance.
    In the spring of his first year, Forster rode his bicycle out into the open countryside west of the city, alone. Near the village of Madingley he came upon a strange feature in the landscape, an abandoned open chalk pit that had sprouted a copse of pine trees. In the “shelter of the dell” he felt as if he had entered a separate magical world. At the time Morgan recorded the discovery prosaically: “Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees.” But within a decade, the sensation blossomed into a narrative: “The green bank at the entrance hid the road and the world,” and from within the circle he “could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the firs.”
    In
The Longest Journey
, Morgan would step back and use what Cambridge had taught him to shape his younger self into the anxious, priggish character of Rickie Elliot, who retreats to the safety of this place to “tell most things about my birth and parentage and education.” And, most important, in the novel Rickie would not be alone. Morgan would populate the dell with sympathetic friends. The first third of his novel was a valentine to Cambridge.
    During the long vacation that summer, Morgan went house hunting with Lily, who had no further ties to Tonbridge after he had left school there. She settled into a semidetached house in Tunbridge Wells—to Morgan a town even more stultifying than Tonbridge had been.