Cambridge was hard enough to get into. The women’s colleges were all women, as Newnham still is, and we were girls straight from school. But this was 1947. So all the chaps had done national service, and many of them had served in the war. So whereas we were immature girls, we had real men to relate to. And all the people I was involved with while I was at Cambridge were considerably older than me and very interesting people.

That one of my closest friends was son of a Jewish refugee from Vienna. He married my best friend from school and I know them all that long. Another was... the guy I was engaged to had been in the army. Well everybody had been in something. Because if they were of an age to be at Cambridge at all after the war they would have been in it. It was... I think one of the things that was different then was that there was still the ethos of us being very good girls. We weren’t, naturally, of course. But there was... and Newnham has suffered fairly badly from the general ways the world looked during the war. Everything was a bit seedy, the food was a bit mere.

But the men’s colleges, of course, immemorial grey stone. In any case, full of men. I had far less of a feeling that Newnham itself was important. Being at Cambridge was important. And I just see that it’s been voted the best university in the world. I'm not surprised.