Chapter 1: Welcome to Westy

{3c}The View from the Cello Section

{c}cellolana.tumblr.com

{c}by Lana Carrington

Welcome To Westy

Monday 23^rd September 2013

I am writing this from my desk in Campus Heights, listening to somebody three rooms away attempt to play the opening of ‘Seven Nation Army’ on an acoustic guitar.

This means I have officially survived moving to university. More importantly, all of my possessions have survived moving to university, although one wine glass has acquired a crack. I have no idea how.

I cannot tell my mum.

University teaches you things immediately.

I arrived on Friday, and I’ve now been here for long enough to know where my room is, which shelf in the fridge is mine and which of my flatmates leaves wet teaspoons beside the sink rather than putting them in it.

This apparently qualifies as settled.

Lectures start tomorrow.

That sentence has been sitting at the back of my mind all day in a slightly menacing fashion, and I’m trying to decide how I feel about being here.

The short answer is: excited.

The longer, more accurate answer is: excited, apprehensive, curious, slightly overwhelmed, and already suspicious of anybody who claims these will be the best years of my life. That seems an unreasonable amount of pressure.

For those who have asked, I am studying Law at the University of Westmouth, known to everybody here as Westy. Nobody has been able to tell me whether the nickname is affectionate, insulting or merely shorter. I suspect it is all three.

I’ve been here for several days now, so the flat is starting to look less like a group of strangers who’ve been simultaneously burgled, and more like somewhere people actually live. Campus Heights is an eight-storey block near the northern entrance. It is the second-tallest building at Westy and possesses a lift that reaches the fourth floor by means of determination, mechanical distress and what sounds like prayer.

Moving a cello into it was an experience.

Every time the lift juddered, I became less concerned about my own survival and more concerned about whether the instrument was adequately insured. This is probably a useful indication of my priorities.

There are eight of us in the flat, which means that every ordinary domestic activity now requires diplomacy. Fridge shelves have been allocated. Cupboards have been negotiated. Milk has already become a contested resource.

Someone suggested we could simply share everything, and a bottle of milk appeared in the fridge that somebody had written COMMUNAL on in large black letters. Apparently we had discovered socialism.

The milk lasted approximately six hours before somebody finished it.

Make of that what you will.

The flat’s bedrooms are arranged along a corridor, and there are two bathrooms and a large kitchen at the far end. Calling it a flat feels slightly misleading. It is more like a very small hall of residence which has declared independence.

I am sharing the flat with Lily, who went to the same school as me and who is also studying Law. She was in the year above me and has spent the last year travelling and working abroad, which means she approaches new people with confidence, enthusiasm and a quantity of physical affection that should probably require advance warning.

I approach new people by observing them until I have sufficient evidence to form a preliminary judgement.

We are, therefore, well balanced.

One of Lily’s friends from school is now a second-year Law student here, so he offered to show us around.

I say, ‘one of Lily’s friends,’ but I knew exactly who he was when I answered the door to him on Friday evening. And it was the last person I expected to see. I may have been slightly ‘off’ with him. Lily would probably dispute the word ‘slightly’.

She may not be wrong.

There were technically two tours.

The first took place on Friday night and involved several campus bars, far too much alcohol, very loud music and a Freshers’ Welcome Party at the Union. This established that the university has an impressive range of social facilities, somebody will inevitably play ‘Mr Brightside’ wherever six or more students have gathered, and that unhealthy alcohol consumption is mandatory.

The second tour was on Saturday morning. It was a proper tour and was considerably more useful than the first, and not just because it took place in daylight but because the official maps appear to have been designed according to the principle that if you are intelligent enough to attend university, you should also be capable of navigating using only contour lines and instinct.

I am not.

Westy is much bigger than I remember it being when I came here for the open day.

Or perhaps it just feels bigger when you know that you actually have to live here.

The campus sits at the top of Westmouth Hill, overlooking the town, and appears to have been designed by several generations of architects who were forbidden to consult one another.

Some buildings look exactly as a university should look if your understanding of them comes entirely from television and American movies: dignified red-brick buildings, stone steps, ivy, and windows that make you expect somebody in a gown to appear carrying a collection of Greek philosophy.

Other buildings look like an insurance company or local council built them in 1998—glass-and-steel and white-washed breeze blocks.

There is also one tower that appears to have been constructed merely so physics students can look down upon everyone else in the manner to which they aspire.

It should not work.

Mostly, it does.

The campus is divided into rough quarters, although the boundaries are not particularly obvious when you are standing in the middle of it with a map upside down.

The academic buildings occupy most of the eastern side. The sports facilities are in the south-west, and student accommodation fills much of the north-west. The centre of campus is the Grand Plaza, with the main library, Students’ Union and Arts Centre along three of its edges. Presumably, that is so nobody can claim they got lost on the way to any of them. The close proximity of the library and the Students’ Union is convenient because it allows students to move quickly between acquiring knowledge and forgetting it again, which I’m told is essential to the university experience.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about the Grand Plaza. The university clearly wants it to be its Big Important University Space, and it succeeds. You come through one of the paths between the buildings, and suddenly everything opens out, with the clock tower above you and students crossing in every direction.

Then you look beyond it and remember the entire campus sits on top of a hill overlooking Westmouth and the bay beyond.

That is the bit I wasn’t prepared for.

You can see the town falling away beneath you, then the water stretching out toward the horizon. Saturday was one of those bright autumn days when the sea looked almost metallic in the distance. There were people sitting around the Plaza pretending not to be cold because apparently being a university student means September sunshine renders coats ideologically unacceptable.

Paul—our guide—turned out to be irritatingly useful and frustratingly charming. Inconvenient qualities in somebody one has already taken an irrational dislike to.

That man represents everything I wanted to leave behind in Micester: old pain, casual cruelty and the strange certainty that knowing somebody’s reputation means knowing them. He has suffered perhaps more than anyone else I know of. Not that I know him. I merely knew who he was. Everybody did.

He had no idea who I was.

Why would he?

But now he does, and I may not have made a particularly good first impression.

He showed us the Law building, the lecture theatres, the seminar rooms, both libraries, the Union, the registration marquee, and the sports complex, plus several places selling coffee and at least three different routes that Paul insists are shortcuts.

I have therefore discovered an important rule about university: When a second-year student says something is a shortcut, what they mean is that they know where they are going.

This is not the same thing.

The Law building stands in the north-eastern corner of campus. It is five storeys high, mostly glass and steel, with two large red-brick lecture theatres attached to it. The effect is as if someone has pushed two traditional institutions into the side of a modern office block and is waiting to see which survives.

I like it.

There is a dedicated Law Library on the top floor, as well as another Law section in the main library. Paul assured us that most of the material we need is available online, but I am not yet ready to trust three years of education to a website and a password I will inevitably forget.

Paul also explained the history of the university, although he admitted that most of his knowledge came from an essay he was required to write last year.

I have therefore learned two things from his experience.

First, Westy began as a college long before becoming an independent university.

Second, lecturers occasionally set assignments in the hope that the resulting information will be passed down to future students during informal campus tours.

The main library is named after Owain Hughes, one of the founders of the modern university. It has multiple floors, long rows of desks and the distinctive silence of a place containing several decades of accumulated knowledge and hundreds of people who would rather be somewhere else.

I found it reassuring.

Libraries are one of the few places where being alone in a crowded room does not require explanation.

The Students’ Union is less reassuring, although considerably more entertaining. The same large room serves as a canteen during the day and a nightclub in the evening. This seems unhygienic but economically efficient.

There is also a pizza hatch in the bar. We stopped there for lunch and sat beside the windows overlooking Campus Green.