University days

Leaving home

From about the age of 14 or 15 I dreamed of leaving Mexico. I’m not entirely sure why this was, but it had something to do with feeling that I didn’t really ‘belong’ in Mexico, that I was living there as an alien. The school was small and limited, the family was loving but fairly inward-looking, we lived on the edge of nowhere and it took hours to travel to places where new friends might be made. There was no telephone at home. Once I was 18 and could drive it made a big difference. I did have quite an active social life, but it seemed like a small pool of people I mixed with.

From the age of 16 or so I definitely dis-engaged to a considerable extent from school. I’m sure Mr Foulkes did his best, but I drifted during my A Level years and lost interest in my key subjects. An inspiring teacher, Mr Highly, got me interested in English Literature, but he left after a few terms, and I dropped the subject. There were three of us, I think, in the A Level stream, and I don’t have any sense of collaborative learning or even of competitiveness.

It was a shock, and very distressing, when I got my A Level results which were very poor, and which meant I had no chance of going to any of the universities in England I had applied to. The idea of re-sitting the exams held no interest for me at all, and I felt quite adrift. I started to apply to universities in the USA and Canada. Trent University came highly recommended by James Joll, because one of his star pupils, Stuart Robson, taught there. I was offered a place by Trent, and in Sept 1970 I started there.

Traill College and new friends

I started off in residence at Traill College. I shared one of the two rooms at the very top of Scott House. My first room-mate was Randy “Toke” Rolofson, and he and I had very different diurnal schedules. He was usually getting back from partying around the time I got up for breakfast, and he would be getting up as I got home in the late afternoon and started thinking about dinner. My recollection is that this wasn’t at all a problem, quite the contrary: we both had the room to ourselves during the times we used it most. Randy never seemed to attend any lectures or tutorials that I was aware of, and yet he managed to be a straight-A student. Randy moved out in the second or third term and his replacement was Don “Veg” Williams, who was also more of a party animal than I was, and yet we got along quite well as far as I remember.

During my first couple of days at Trent I made several friendships. One was a very cheerful and extroverted Canadian of recent Slovakian origin: Fedor Zelina whom I met in the dinner queue at Traill College on the first night. The other was with a pair of very lively and obstreperous women who were in the same registration queue as myself, : Sherry White and Pat Jones. I was with Fedor and two other new friends, Michael Hussey and Fred Hendren, and according to Sherry the four of us were also being noisy and obstreperous!

A week or so later I saw Sherry sitting under a tree in the gardens at Traill College, and took a photo. This photo was to become the frontispiece in the Trent Yearbook for 1970. I ended up chatting with Sherry for a while, and she told me that her parents were fond of holidaying in Mexico. A short while after that one of my friends from the other room at the top of Scott House was at a party, and he sat down on a sofa next to Sherry. I’ll always remember her turning to him and saying in a voice which brooked no contradiction: “Michael Hussey, take your hand of my knee please.” In fact Sherry and I continued to be friends throughout the first and second term, but we didn’t see a lot of each other. She moved into residence at Lady Eaton College in the second term, and I used to go and visit for a chat and a cup of cocoa after an evening of work at the Bata Library. It wasn’t until the second year that we became ‘an item’ at which point we both gave up our rooms in residence and moved in together to an apartment on Brock Street.

Hard graft

I did well academically at Trent, no doubt as a way of recovering my self-respect after the shock of my A Level results. A lot of this was hard graft rather than innate cleverness: one of my tutors, the same Stuart Robson who had been recommended by James Joll, wrote a note on one of my essays damning me with faint praise: “… you have demonstrated your usual flinty diligence.” I enjoyed my courses, and focused in years two and three on History and Geography, eventually doing a double major. In Geography I especially enjoyed social geography, and took options which focused on urban and recreational geography. In History I became especially interested in the origins of the First World War.