Free An Education by Lynn Barber Page A

and started a satisfying bonfire. My normal rate of productivity was about five letters a day – and I was considered an exceptionally efficient worker, highly praised and recommended by my agency. People would work in these offices – the same offices, with the same spider plants – all their lives and I believe it was seeing these offices that gave me what little ambition I have. Just as my father was driven by fear of the workhouse that he remembered looming over Bolton in his childhood, I always had this memory of the copy-typing room at the Prudential insurance office, High Holborn, to act as my spur. I panicked as the end of Oxford approached, thinking that I would be swallowed by the Prudential and never seen again. Luckily I met my husband just in time.

David
    I met David in the last month of my last term at Oxford and knew immediately that he was The One – the man I must marry. It wasn't just that I fancied him, or wanted to go out with him; I felt I wanted to spend my life with him. I don't know why I was so sure, but I was, and that sureness carried me through more than thirty years of marriage. Even in the bad patches when I thought I might be happier not married at all, I never for one moment thought I could be happier married to someone else. David was the best husband I could ever have or wish for. And I somehow knew that from the moment I met him.
    He just appeared in my room one day, with his friend Tim Jeal. I'd met Tim Jeal a few times at parties and maybe he fancied me – at all events it was his idea to bring David to call on me in St Anne's. They had picked up some ticker tape from somewhere and pretended to read it out, they were laughing and shouting, possibly drunk or stoned, and Tim Jeal was talking nineteen to the dozen and running his hands through his sandy blond hair, but I looked at the dark-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed man who came with him and thought, He's The One. He made some reference to ‘going back to Mexico’ in the holidays so I assumed he was Mexican. He had slicked-back hair which looked vaguely Mexican – most undergraduates in those days had Beatles haircuts or long flowing locks. He seemed exotic, mysterious, slightly sinister. I resolved to capture him.
    But pursuing him was difficult because we were both frantically revising for finals and moreover he was living in a village outside Oxford, and seldom came into town. It meant I had to spend a lot of time studying bus timetables and hanging round the bus station but, even so, I only managed to bump into him a couple of times. I also met him at a party, and bullied him into taking me to a poetry reading at the Albert Hall, but by the time we left Oxford for good a few weeks later I had made very little progress. I knew he liked me and found me amusing but that was all – he hadn't so much as held my hand.
    And then he went off to join his parents in Mexico, and I went back to my parents in Twickenham and worked as a temp typist. I didn't even have his address; I despaired. But one day I ran into an Oxford friend, Nic Mudie, and moaned about the miseries of living in Twickenham and he said, ‘Well, actually I've got a house in Stockwell you could live in but it's practically derelict.’ He explained that the lease on his mother's house in South Kensington had run out and she'd bought this shell in Stockwell. He was meant to be doing it up but couldn't get a bank loan to start work so it was standing empty. He said casually, ‘There's one other person living there – David, that artist bloke from New College – do you know him?’ Aaaagh, I sputtered, incapable of speech.
    I moved into Groveway, Stockwell, the same day. The house was huge – four floors, at least a dozen big rooms, but many of them uninhabitable with missing windowpanes or broken floorboards. The basement and ground floor were crammed, literally floor to ceiling, with furniture from the South Kensington house. I had to squeeze between wardrobes