Leaving Grange Road Number 6

The next day Ms Jones introduced me to Susan. We had a very nice talk and Susan tried to make me feel at home. Her unfailing smile and her sing-song voice was a blessing as she moved around the place. Unfortunately for me it was summer time, and as Susan said, most researchers at the RCEAL were either on holiday or on seminars in America. So I did not discuss my topic with researchers from the center but finding myself all alone made me work harder on my thesis.

By the late afternoon, I heard loud voices in the kitchen, and I thought for a while that there might be some people with whom someone can talk. I made my way to the kitchen saluting them but they simply made me have a second thought. I could not stand it any more and after a few days I went to the porter’s lodge at Pembroke College and asked if it would be possible to have a switch to another place. The very polite man asked me to talk to Ms Adams, so I made my way to her office. I told her about my situation but I could see she was not very keen to help. I tried to explain my purpose behind spending all that money on a study trip to Cambridge but again she did not seem to get my point. I told her that I am Tunisian, and that we Tunisians are talkative and that finding myself in a place where you cannot talk to anyone would simply mean me being dead; a strategy which come to fruition.

In the first view, Grange Road Number 6 seemed perfect. It was calm and beautiful. It had a character of its own. For a hard-working person, that would be the right place, and may be that’s why all residents there were PhD students. I remember my first night there. I could not sleep well, and it was so cold even though it was the second of August. The cold was more of an internal feeling than of weather itself. It might be the feeling that I did not belong there, that I was the odd man out, the wrong one in the wrong place. An outcast, as it were.