Free The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry Page B

superior air of assurance and belonging. Imagine that they too had compensated for such feelings of nervous inadequacy by choosing to ‘see through’ everyone else, by choosing to believe that those around them were pitiful poseurs. And imagine finally that without their noticing it they somehow became absorbed and naturalized into the place to such an extent that now, to an outsider, they are the ones who look like arrogant tossers. Inside, you can take my word for it, they are still shrinking and shrivelling like salted snails. I know, because I was one, just as you would have been too.
    It is true that I was a scholar. It is true that I was older than my first-year contemporaries. True also that I had more experience of the ‘real world’ (whatever that might be supposed to be) than most. True as well that, unlike a surprising number of those arriving at university, I was very used to being away from home, having been sent to my first boarding school at the age of seven. True too that I had an apparently assured manner and a deep, resonant voice that made me sound as if I belonged to the place quite as much as the wooden panels, shaved lawns and bowler-hatted porters. I concede all that, but it is very important that you understand nonetheless how very scared I was inside. I lived, you see, in quivering dread of being at any moment
found out
. No, it wasn’t my status as a convicted criminal on probation that I wanted kept secret, nor my past history as thief, liar, forger and gaolbird. As far as I was concerned those home truths were perfectly fit for broadcast, as was my sexuality, my ethnicity or any other thing of that nature. No, the terror that gripped me during those first few weeks at Cambridge was all about my intellectual right to be there. My dread was that someone would approach and ask me, in front of a crowd of sneering onlookers, my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would prevaricate and palter in my usual plausible way, but, this being Cambridge, such stratagems would cut no ice with my remorseless and (in my imagination) gleefully malicious interrogator, who would stare at me with gimlet eyes and say in a harsh voice that crackled with mocking laughter: ‘Excuse me, but do you even know who Lermontov
is
?’ Or Rilke or Hayek or Saussure or some other name my ignorance of which would reveal the awful shallowness of my so-called education.
    At any moment it would come to light that my scholarship had been wrongly awarded, that there had been a muddle with examination papers and some poor genius called Simon Frey or Steven Pry had been cheated of their proper place. A relentless public inquisition would follow in which I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake who had no business at a serious university. I could even picture the ceremony in which I was formally ejected from the college gates, slinking away to the sound of jeers and whistles. An institution like Cambridge was for other people, insiders, club members, the chosen – for
them
.
    You may think I am exaggerating, and perhaps I am. But by no more than 5 per cent. All those thoughts truly did spin around in my head, and I really did fear that I had no right to be a Cambridge undergraduate, and that this truth would soon become obvious, along with academic and intellectual deficiencies that would reveal me to be entirely unworthy of matriculation.
    Part of the reason I felt all this is because I think I had a much higher doctrine of Cambridge than most undergraduates. I believed in it completely. I worshipped it. I had chosen it above Oxford or any other university because … because of … oh dear, there is no way of explaining this without sounding appallingly precious.
    My favourite twentieth-century author in those days was E. M. Forster. I hero-worshipped him and G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles and their associated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Lytton