College Record 2013

so, with a little gentle prodding, they could recollect what they once knew by heart.
I was not so lucky. My Greek was no better than my Latin or my Yiddish for that
matter. That is, they were all on life-support.
What I needed was a room of my own where I could study. I found such a place
in the attic of the house which Sara and I shared with nine other students at 10
Chadlington Road. If I am not mistaken, after renovations, various Presidents of
Wolfson have lived in this house. I would be willing to wager that not one of them
knew that an American once used a cupboard in their attic to study Greek. It was
no larger than an isolation cell at Alcatraz but, at the time, it was heaven.
A year passed, my Greek improved, and I finally found a job. My employer was none
other than Wolfson College; I was allowed to be a night porter. In the Americas,
a porter might have to carry something heavy. To my relief, at Wolfson a night
porter didn’t carry anything heavier than a letter or a key. This was good. One of
my jobs was to sell laundry detergent: 3p for one cup (rounded down from 3.4p a
cup). But if you bought two cups you would be charged 7p (rounded up from 6.8p
a cup), unless of course you bought the cups separately, in which case the total
amount owed would be 6p. If this confuses you, just think how I felt when I tried to
explain the economics of soap-selling to various Rhodes Scholars and their spouses.
I once dealt with an emergency. A distinguished Israeli academic (whose
magnificent lectures on the period between the two World Wars I had actually
heard in Jerusalem) had put his electric kettle on his electric stove and had turned
everything on. The smell of burning plastic filled his apartment. There was black
smoke. I defused the emergency by turning everything off and removing his melting
kettle. I left it to him to explain to the Domestic Bursar the next day how he had
managed to set his kettle and his stove on fire at the same time. A night porter, after
all, is not an engineer or a solicitor.
For my labours, I received about 75p an hour, the equivalent of maybe twenty cups
of laundry detergent, depending on how you count. There were, however, fringe
benefits. Once I got to stand in the lift with a young Emanuel Ax, who was about
to give a recital. Sara, who is an excellent amateur pianist, claimed that Ax played
too loud. ‘He’s a real banger’, she concluded. Maybe she was right on that particular
evening in that particular hall, which had not been built with acoustics in mind.
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