Champagne immediately, then cocktails. Gin and tonic four ways, a disco in a sixteenth-century courtyard, roast hog, standup, grilled kangaroo, barbershop, Cabernet, cabaret, Stilton, bumper cars. Broken glass underfoot, vomit in the Hall, strings of guests, green and stooping, up the winding staircases to the toilets off New Court. Flashbulbs, fireworks, and the distant splash of spectators’ punt poles under the Bridge of Sighs. “Dancing in the Moonlight”, crooned by the chapel choir at dawn’s first breaking.
But all this comes later. I spend the first six hours of the St. John’s College May Ball assembling glass tumblers with three ice cubes, twenty milliliters of Jack Daniel’s, and Coca-Cola poured to fill three quarters of the remaining volume.1 Though the bar is positioned near the entrance to the ball, I’m spared the initial press of guests, who arrive with hands already occupied by glasses of bubbly. They eventually return to the Backs for the pyrotechnics and immediately thereafter begin their assault. I am everywhere sticky with whiskey. At some point in the evening flies, attracted by the light in the tent, commit mass suicide in our ice bukets; I quickly rearrange the lamps and change the ice.
It is a relief, at one o’clock, to shed my sweat-soaked shirt and muddy pants and don a clean tuxedo—to metamorphose from insect-scabbed worker to elegant guest. Champagne immediately.
Class distinctions are thrown into sharper relief by formalwear. Across demographics at Cambridge, clothes worn day-to-day seem to come from the same handful of stores.2 Only when everyone’s in a tuxedo is it easy to identify the students who grew up in them: French cuffs and silk scarves, or, on the other end, clip-on bowties and polyester suits. The balls are also among few occasions in Cambridge where the split between server and client doesn’t follow the town–gown line—here students clean up after students, tourists and productive members of society consigned to shake heads or snap photos from behind a chain-link fence.
The scandalized treatment of May Week in the popular English press seems to derive from two sources: the outrageous price of ball tickets (John’s started at £310 a pair), and general booze-fuelled disorderliness on the part of the guests. The second of these seems to be less in evidence than on an average Cambridge Friday night; as for the first I suspect Columbia spends about the same per capita on Bacchanal and related expenses (though it hides the cost better). But the ball—pink floodlights on ancient ivy, midnight string quartets—nonetheless seems to be a unique kind of scandal: that these students, already so favored over their peers, should also be allowed to celebrate the end of exams in this fashion; or that the citizens of Cambridge, uninvited, should for a week endure rock concerts in the dead of night without complaint. Guilt seasons the kangaroo burgers. Attendance is transgressive—this is part of the thrill.
Owing to the extreme latitude, the sky has already begun to lighten by three. I am miraculously wide-eyed—thanks, no doubt, to the fortifying effects of the cappucino stand in Chapel Court. The various entertainments change so frequently that one is assured unrelenting novelty simply by strolling back and forth along the major axis of the college. I remember music, mostly, and food—song on clear voices from all directions, the crackle of a particularly crispy fragment of hog, the dull bell-chimes of bottles against wine glasses filled to overflowing.
This goes on for hours more. We miss breakfast and make our way to the bleary fringes of the survivors’ photo, then stagger past the morning press of commuters on Madingley Road, home, to sleep.