The day I fell in love

Until it happened, I didn’t know it was possible. Like most teenagers, by the age of 18 I’d been in love, or thought I had, but that was always with a person, and, sadly for me, he was usually completely ignorant of the fact. I had no idea whatsoever that one could fall in love with a place.

Growing up as I did in industrial east Lancashire, just outside a typical cotton town, I was very used to seeing mills and shops and rows of small terraced houses snaking up the hillside, or the sturdy, grey stone cottages in the scattered moorland village where we lived. What I was not used to was architectural beauty on a grand scale, at least not in a place where it was possible I might actually live.

In my mid-teens I was lucky enough to visit Paris and Arles on a school French trip, and later Hamburg on a German-language exchange, and was bowled over by their beauty and antiquity. But these were holiday destinations, not places where I could imagine myself living.

Everything changed when a couple of my teachers at the local grammar school encouraged me to consider applying for entrance to Oxford University, and believe me, I needed their encouragement.

We were a working-class family, with no experience of higher education, let alone Oxford; indeed my parents hadn’t even had the chance of a secondary education, but had to stay at their elementary schools until they reached school-leaving age at 14. Because of these missed opportunities they believed strongly in education for their daughters and supported me to the hilt when I said that I wanted to try.

As a family we knew no-one who had ever been to Oxford and thus had no idea which of the five women’s colleges I should apply to. In those days the colleges didn’t even produce a prospectus, so I felt completely in the dark as I tried to choose.

The decision was made for me one evening, when my father called me away from my homework to watch University Challenge.  The winning team was from Lady Margaret Hall and I took it as an omen. I sent in my application, in due course sat the entrance exams, and, to my amazement, was called for interview.

It was a cold, grey day in December when I arrived in Oxford by train. The taxi ride from the station to the college passed in a blur of excitement and nerves, and I couldn’t have told you anything about the town through which I’d just been driven. The college was welcoming and the interviews, though nerve-racking, were fair and encouraging, and by the next day I knew, without a shadow of doubt, that I desperately wanted to study there. What had been an abstract ambition had become an urgent desire.

When all the interviews were over, I had a free afternoon before catching my train next morning. So I decided to walk into the city centre and explore a little, before the short winter daylight disappeared. The weather was still cold and grey, indeed it was starting to become foggy. It was the worst possible day for discovering a new place, but it was the only chance I had and I took it. Having bought a town plan, I started to wander. What followed is still as vivid to me now as it was when I tried to describe it to my parents on my return home.  

As I wandered past the ancient college buildings and along the little back streets, walked up the majestic High Street or down Broad Street to Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre and the world-famous Bodleian Library and Radcliffe Camera, I fell hopelessly in love with Oxford.

I loved the extraordinary beauty of its buildings and the profound sense of history which permeated the place, an awareness that for 700 years at least people had been coming here to study and learn and increase the store of human knowledge and understanding.

I knew that it would be the most enormous privilege to be allowed to be part of it all for three years and I still feel this. When I was fortunate enough to be awarded a place, I was aware that life would never be the same again for me and so it proved. For it was in Oxford that I met DH and fell in love for the last time, but that is another story.

Even today, 46 years on from that unforgettable winter's afternoon walk, Oxford is still for me one of my most special places. We all have them, and our lives are the richer for them. I’ve told you one of mine, will you share one of yours?