Is it 700 years already?

I managed to turn my first attempt at getting a university degree into quite an experience. Rewarding, except in the sense of actually obtaining the qualification. Ostensibly, I was studying Maths and Physics, but convinced myself that it was irrelevant, since the working class would rise in socialist revolution long before I reached finals.

It wasn’t a time without achievements. I managed to get myself elected president of the student union, the first and, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover, the only left-winger to hold that position in King’s College London, a college famously right wing in its very being.

As well as politics I also enjoyed an active leisure life. You know what they say, subvert hard, play hard. It’s probably best to draw a veil over the details of my pleasures, but you can probably guess what a young man gets up to, and little of it was salubrious.

Anyway, as you probably know, the revolution didn’t happen before my final exams. So I found myself facing the baleful (if metaphorical) glare of the examiner without having adequately prepared for the ordeal. To tell the truth, my preparations weren’t so much inadequate as, frankly, non-existent.

Surprisingly, I got on well with the college principal. He, who had been the youngest brigadier in the British Army in World War 2, was no left winger. He told me that he enjoyed our chats, because he knew that either of us would gladly sign the death certificate of the other if the circumstances arose. Would I really have signed the warrant, though? I think I liked him too much. He probably would have, on the other hand: he’d had the training.

In response to the results of my exams, he told me:

“Well, David, you did well to fail the degree altogether. Better to do that and be thought an idiot than get a lousy result and confirm it beyond doubt.”

Still, I wasn’t happy about things. I really rather wanted to be a graduate. An appropriate response might well have been “You should have thought of that earlier, while there was still time to do something about it”, but by then that ship had well and truly sailed. There was only one solution: I had to sign up for another degree course. And this time I had to qualify.

On the other hand, I was tired being a financial drag on my parents. As were they. I needed a job. That ruled out a full-time course. Fortunately, London’s Birkbeck College offered degrees by evening classes. I applied there.

My mother had always told me that I should never have gone for the sciences, so I decided to go for a French degree this time. That, however, meant I needed a subsidiary subject. I chose Italian.

I was called for an interview in the Italian department. As I was about to enter the office where it was to take place, I heard the Professor exclaiming “hold on! This chap doesn’t even have Italian A-level.” 

It was true. Because I’d decided to go for sciences but kept my options open a bit, I’d taken an A-level (Advanced level, school leaving exam) in French, but nothing else in the humanities.

“I lived there for a time,” I told them.

They nodded but took the subject no further. I decided to wait for an opportunity to add a little more to my statement later. It came eventually.

“So how long did you live in Italy?” asked the Professor.

“Thirteen years,” I replied.

There was a stunned silence for a moment until we all said simultaneously:

“The first thirteen years.”

So I got onto the course.

That led to some new challenges. One of them a challenge that was new because it was so old. I learned with dread that my Italian reading would include Dante. 

He’s one of those characters who are so famous they can be referred to just by their forename, like Rembrandt, Napoleon or Madonna.

The present British Prime Minister would like to pull off the same trick, but there’s no place in such rarefied company for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Dante with his guide in Purgatory, 
the Roman poet Virgil, as imagined by Gustave Doré

Dante was born in Florence in the thirteenth century. He’s best known for an extraordinary poem which remains the great classic of Italian literature. It includes a full book describing his pilgrimage through each of the realms of the Afterworld, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. 

We were going to study Purgatory.

I bought a copy and opened it with trepidation. Was I going to be able to get into this at all? Wouldn’t it be just too heavy?

Then I read the first few lines. It starts with the image of a sailing boat scudding across water. Dante’s mind is lifting its sails to run across better waters and leave the cruel sea of Hell behind it. He will now sing of that second realm, where the human soul purges itself and makes itself worthy of rising to heaven. 

Instead of the dull winter street scene in London, my mind’s eye filled with Dante’s painting. A perfectly flat sea, where a soundless breeze is filling the sail of a boat travelling quickly but calmly from dark behind it with the brightness of a sunrise alongside it. It’s the scene I picture every time I think of the opening of Purgatory, as strangely I do from time to time. Not many writers have written so clearly and indelibly in my mind.

I was hooked. Our lecturer claimed magnificently that he’s one of three ‘altissimi poeti’, highest of poets, in Western Culture (the other two being the Roman poet Ovid and Shakespeare). It’s an honour as well as a pleasure to have dipped a little into his astonishing work, hard though it was to study.

It amazes me that today, 14 September, is the seven hundredth anniversary of his death. He seems strangely alive still. His voice echoes on.

This evening, I’ll raise a glass to his memory, and to the memories he gave me, as I struggled from the cruel sea of failure to the pleasanter waters of success in my second attempt at a degree. 

Because, with Dante’s help, I achieved my wish and did indeed become a graduate.