The Misgivings of Working for a Scholarship

The play has nothing to do with my contemporaries, only a couple of whom were historians anyway. But it does draw on some of the pains and excitement of working for a scholarship at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were as daunting and mysterious to me as to any of the boys in the play. The first hurdle, more intimidating to me than any examination, was having to go up to Cambridge and stay in the college for the weekend. My social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until long after my education proper was finished. I thought I'd never seen or imagined a place of such beauty.