cult of saints

a personal reflection on academic staff-student relationships

I met him a few weeks before my twenty-second birthday. He was twenty-nine, a stipendiary lecturer on a one-year contract, his first job after his doctorate, covering for my college’s medieval history professor who was on a sabbatical writing about the apocalypse. I was just coming back from a year of medical leave, and he’d been assigned to ease me back into the pace of term-time with fortnightly tutorials. I remember shaking on his landing before I knocked. I remember the first time I saw him, opening the door, one hand running through his hair, looking harassed, tall and lean and long-limbed, smelling of coffee. His room was all white: thick curtains framing wooden sash windows with a view over the back quad and, beyond it, the spire of St Mary’s and the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the spiky turrets of All Souls. His mantlepiece was decorated with heavy, impressive volumes: Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine’s City of God, editions of Anglo-Saxon charters. In the centre of the room was a large, round table, piled high with books and disposable coffee cups. He would tell me later that the room had once belonged to notorious classics fellow and former warden Maurice Bowra, who would hold tutorials after dinner once students had a bit of wine of them. A statue in the college gardens, where his stout torso meets the base and seat of a four-legged chair, apparently gestures towards his habit of having students sit in his lap.