Leicester — a lifetime and the blink of an eye.

Villiers Hall - 1980

The city of Leicester may stand roughly at the centre of England, but I doubt many people would describe it as one of our major – or most attractive – conurbations. Unless you live there, or are visiting for a purpose, it’s more likely you think of it as a junction on a journey to elsewhere.  In my case, having arranged my adult life to live as near to the hills and coast as possible, you might assume I’d give the place little thought.

And yet, the opposite is the case. 

Rather — for reasons that will become clear — there’s barely a day that goes by when I don’t think of its streets and parks and the people I met there as a student.  Having read that sentence, you’ll have gathered, it’s where I went to university.  It’s also where I had some of the happiest — and most formative — years of my life. 

Last week, entirely unprompted, my son’s fiancée sent me a WhatsApp message enquiring about my undergraduate accommodation. Was I resident at Villiers Hall, she asked?  Adding that a lady at her office, called Debra, had boarded there at around the same time — perhaps we’d been in the same friendship group?  

After a few exchanges, my phone pinged with a copy of the photograph above.  I’m on the third row, behind a chap wearing a red sweatshirt. Debra is on the far left, sitting on a wall, her face partially obscured by a girl in mustard trousers. There’s enough in her outline, though, for me to remember her, as I do almost all the faces, and many of the names.

The photo was taken at the end of my first year. That summer, I stayed alone in Leicester, working in a crisp factory and learning lessons that would, ultimately, serve me as well as any academic training. Not that I’m cynical about that, for I draw on it daily too. If university was ever intended as a comprehensive education, then I reckon my experience personified it.

Which is perhaps why I loved it so.  Indeed, when I was interviewed by the university some years ago (they were contacting alumni who’d had what they flatteringly described as ‘outstanding careers’), I remember saying it had taken me decades to move on. More truthfully, I never have… and I hope, never will.

For there’s more to this story than last week’s exchange of messages. 

Villiers Hall is no more — replaced by modern self-catering blocks with en-suites, fibre internet and all the rest. However, the grounds and footprint of the buildings remain largely the same. To the right of where the photo was taken is Ashcroft House, the former grace and favour home of the hall’s bursar, where we played snooker in the downstairs rooms.

I know this because more than forty years after I graduated, my youngest son is a resident there. Not only is he living in Ashcroft House, but he’s studying for the same degree that I did forty-five years ago... Talk about life coming full circle!  

Of course, he’s doing it his own way and in his own era; my connections to Leicester are, rightly, no more to him than the nostalgic memories of his old man. It’s a sobering thought, too, that in studying politics, much of his course examines world events that have occurred long after the shutter came down on the camera that captured the faces of my fellow students.

I often wonder what happened to my friends from that time. For all that I loved my time at university, I have precious few connections with the people who made it so special. Perhaps that’s something to do with the need, in those days, for writing letters to keep in touch; the absence of smartphones and messaging apps that we now take for granted.  

How ironic then — or perhaps appropriately serendipitous — that all these musings were triggered by the instantaneous sharing of a group shot that many of those pictured will have long since filed in a box of forgotten memories.  Can there be such a thing as 'forgotten memories'?  Or am I wrong in that assumption?  And would they, like me, smile as broadly on seeing it as they did on that bright spring day in 1980?

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P.S.
And in a spirit of coming full circle, here is me —and my son — standing in roughly the same place last Thursday.