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much of my national service and whom I loathed and who loathed me, I was quite happy.
    In the army one of my friends was Michael Frayn, subsequently the novelist and playwright. He was now at Cambridge, and his attitude was the opposite of mine. In the first week of his first term he was writing for Varsity , had enrolled with the Footlights, and had taken to university life with a large, unselfconscious splash. In those days we used to correspond, and whereas my letters accuse him of ‘selling out’, his letters to me, slightly more sensibly, urge me to pull my socks up. On one point in particular we differed absolutely and this was college life. Whereas I was happy to settle down in the cosy, undemanding atmosphere of the Exeter Junior Common Room, Frayn regarded his college, Emmanuel, as little more than an address – and not a very smart one at that. And since Exeter was to me all that I wanted in the way of a club, this was another reason for not joining any others. There was certainly no thought of joining either OUDS or the Experimental Theatre Club, both somehow sounding wrong: OUDS the plump, self-assured, good-mannered theatre of the Establishment; ETC the opposite – seedy, plaintive, out at the elbows. What there was not, of course, was anything like the Cambridge Footlights, with a tradition of revue and comedy-writing. I’m sure if there had been I would have failed to join that too.
    So it was with a certain sense of already having thrown in the towel that I settled down to college life. The JCR in Exeter at that time was more central to the life of the college than in other colleges I visited. At the heart of it was the institution of the Suggestions Book. As a repository of actual suggestions, theSuggestions Book was useless, but it served besides as a college newspaper, a diary, a forum for discussion, and a space in which those who were so inclined could attempt to amuse and even paddle in the direction of literature. The result was a volume (in time a succession of volumes) that was parochial, silly and obscene, but to me, and possibly to others, of a particular value. A family atmosphere, a captive audience and a set of shared references are good conditions in which to learn to write, and I think it was through my contributions to the JCR Suggestions Book that I first realized I could make people laugh and liked doing it.
    At the end of each term the JCR held a smoking-concert. These smokers were really just a dramatized version of the Suggestions Book: vulgar, private, silly – all the things my literary friends abhorred. They were uproarious drunken affairs, confined to members of the college and in the direct line of those camp concerts POWs spent their time acting in when they weren’t busy tunnelling under the foundations. One regular feature was a Queen’s Christmas Broadcast; very tame it would seem now, but in those pre-satirical days, when HMQ’s annual pronouncement was treated with hushed reverence, the very idea of it seemed sacrilegiously funny. And it was for one of these smoking-concerts that I wrote a cod Anglican sermon, something I found no problem doing as I’d sat through so many in my youth. It took me half an hour to put together, and, since it later figured in (indeed earned me my place in) Beyond the Fringe , it was undoubtedly the most profitable half-hour I’ve ever spent. At the same time, having written it I had no sense that a corner had been turned.
    I had always been a late starter, so, friendly though the atmosphere was, I didn’t pluck up courage to take part even in these JCR smokers until my third year, by which time my days at the university seemed numbered. However, after I’d taken mydegree I found myself able to stay on as a postgraduate, doing research on Richard II. I also began to teach a little, first for Magdalen and then for Exeter. I had some sense, I think, that making people laugh was not a proper activity for a postgraduate and that I ought