Second time around

09 Jan Second time around

The official photograph arrived in the post recently – University of Aberdeen, 2023. Got me thinking.

I spent an hour this morning looking for the photo from 1975, the formal one that had hung on my mother’s sitting room wall for all the years till she died in 2017. It moved house when she did, each time taking up its position alongside an official portrait of my sister when she qualified as a nurse. There I was, newly 22 years old, newly graduated, an expression of relative innocence on a face recovered from the tyranny of teenage and, as yet, unblemished by the years, a little coy beneath a pageboy hairstyle. I was often embarrassed at the sight of it up on the wall when I visited, especially as the distance grew between that version of me and the many that followed.

I was sure the photo would be with the other possessions I boxed up and took from my mother’s flat after she died but I couldn’t find it. In a blue plastic box marked ‘Family’ where she had stashed, in no particular order, some of the slides from my father’s huge and carefully curated collection that she’d saved before we cast the rest over a wall at the Council tip, I found some of the day’s moments captured by him. Me with my mother looking stiff and formal; with my grandmother, smiling, looking playful; and one flanked by my parents that my grandmother had taken – all sky and the three of us cut off at the knees! There was another one with me lounging on a bench, gown draped carelessly, mortar board at an angle, trying hard to wrest the formality from the day. Couldn’t find it either. It will turn up one day, I suppose…

All that rummaging around was, in a way, giving space to perhaps the most profound difference between then and now. The absences. My graduation in 1975 was a family affair, just as my four years of study had been, my parents and my grandmother deeply invested in it and in me, as I was in them and in wanting to make them proud. Images from a time before that investment started to pall; before I went off to London, before I lost faith or, in their terms, lost my way, before other, difficult stuff happened, before the need for secrets and small white lies. 

This time, the investment has been all mine. Being online, the study was, in any case, a solitary affair. And I had kept it a private thing, sensing that people often didn’t know what to say – though their faces posed the question: ‘Why on earth are you doing that?’ At first, I wasn’t too sure myself, sometimes telling myself it was just a perfect way to navigate my life through the pandemic. But really, I knew. I had studied history in Aberdeen all those years ago but never quite became the historian I wanted to be. It felt like something unfinished. As the three years unfolded, I began to feel more and more at ease, surrounded by books and notes, finding precious gems from the past. It felt like coming home.

Before the 2023 graduation, I spent three gloriously sunny days in Aberdeen. It was a sublime, hot weekend in September and most of the time I was on my own, able to walk the city at my own pace, take in the old haunts, be shocked by how much has changed but, in some ways, how little, and dismayed by how much I’d forgotten. There are moments when you step back into your past and barely recognise it – or yourself. You understand, for a moment, what it means when they say: ‘the past is another country’. It was disconcerting, unsettling but also, perhaps, naïve to imagine I would feel magically transported back. That sunny weekend, I was able to greet a few ghosts and talk things over with them. 

In the November 2023 graduation ceremony almost everything was different from 1975. The venue, a conference centre near the airport, had none of the grandeur and sense of history of the great hall at Marischal College where the 1975 event took place; it was just an enormous space of glass and concrete with multiple car parks and a Hilton hotel. It was a disappointment, a place that could have been anywhere in the world, but for the bitter NE wind that blew across the esplanade out front; that was recognisably Aberdeen.

Undeterred by the harsh modernity of the place, the University was sticking to its traditions. The ceremony was conducted in Latin, adding another link in an unbroken chain of largely incomprehensible but thoroughly quaint ceremonies dating back to 1495. There’s a replica foundation stone with that date on the stage, beamed there using some clever technology. A piper plays as the graduands walk in to take their seats. The audience is urged to a rendition of Gaudeamus igitur the words of three verses (in Latin, obviously) helpfully displayed on an overhead screen. This is all done with a light touch, the utter seriousness of the occasion delivered with tongue in cheek. There is gravitas and a sombre recognition of achievements but also a lot of north-east Scotland humour.

I stuck with a simple outfit: dark skirt, white shirt, sensible shoes. Probably about the same weight as the 1975 version, I looked just like the throwback to a different era that I was! It’s all hidden under the gown anyway so why make a big effort? The males of the 2023 cohort were relatively low-key: the occasional kilt and the odd outlandish ensemble, a bright yellow three-piece suit over a scarlet shirt the most striking. But the females were in a different class. Many of them, especially the younger ones, graduated with an (often ill-advised) sartorial bravura that took the breath away: short hemlines accompanied precipitously low necklines; others wore full-length ballgowns some with a split from hem to upper thigh, one assumes for ease of climbing the stairs; 7-inch heels with sparkly appendages completed some of the more flamboyant outfits. It was massively entertaining. It was also exuberant. The striking colours, the celebratory fist pumps and wild waves to friends and family in the audience would never have happened in 1975. We were all so much more restrained and sedate, the collective throwing of mortar boards into the air after the ceremony the most expressive thing we could muster back then. 2023 was a more joyful occasion.

It’s over in a flash, of course. You wait your turn, hear your name, climb up to the stage, the Principal taps your bowed head and confirms your new status with ‘Et te creo’ and the steward pops your hood over your head – white with a lilac trim in my case. Done in less than a minute. I wondered: had it really been worth it to come all this way for such a brief moment of … of what? Glory? But there is meaning in the ritual, in being present and taking part. I allowed myself to shine for a moment, to congratulate myself for something I’d achieved. Most unusual in a girl from a Scottish manse. I reconnected with that girl from 1975, saw her back there in the shadows, remembered how she’d loved the life of study but how uncertain she’d been. The girl who’d been a little daunted by her success, lacked the courage to continue that life and decided to leave it behind. It was good to be back.