Boys will be girls

Clive James

• Footlights! A Hundred Years of Cambridge Comedy by Robert Hewison
  Methuen, 224 pp, £8.95, June 1983, ISBN 0 413 51150 2

The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it. Even if there were room for doubt in this matter, however, there can be no question that an ex-Colonial transplantee who happens to have done some of his growing up in an English school or ’varsity should be slow to bring forth his cosy reminiscences, and very slow to hand them over to anyone else. So when the author of this book about the Cambridge Footlights approached me, in my capacity as one of the club’s numerous surviving ex-Presidents, I imitated the action of the clam. Judging from the relative sparseness of the acknowledgments list, a lot of other alumni did the same thing, for whatever reasons. Probably they were just being cautious. For a professional performer after a certain time, every interview he doesn’t give counts as a victory, on the principle that the label you help them lick is the one that will stick to you longest.