You’ll grow into it…

I was remembering my school uniform last week. It was green, and generally quite pleasant, except for the fact that it seemed to be perennially too big for me. A blazer which had at least a few centimetres of give on each shoulder and a skirt which needed a belt for many months. This, coupled with the huge red coat my granny once gave me for Christmas, led one phrase to be burned into my mind as a symbol of childhood: ‘You’ll grow into it’ they would say, firmly, as yet another ill-fitting, hand-knitted cast off was passed down the line.

knitting needles

Generally, they were right, although there was that memorable pair of shoes which I decided I would never want to grow into and which I secretly, with little ceremony, buried in the back garden, never to be found again…hmmm. The point is that we do, eventually, grow into most things in life, however huge the jumper or large the shoes. What is sometimes so impossible is to believe that we will grow into what seems to be enormous, or that we would even want to. Being shown a too-large item of clothing can be disconcerting: do we really want to be the person who fits into that? Wouldn’t that mean that we were too large, too responsible, too grown up altogether?

Alice growing

Perhaps the strangest present in this category I ever received was from my great aunt Joan. She was actually my stepmother’s aunt but she seemed to be called ‘Aunt Joan’ by everyone. A fiercely intelligent woman, she had been well educated and had spent a life in worthy employment, although her career was much less stellar than it would have been had she been like her better educated brother. Given the restrictions of her generation she could have felt this as a frustration, and perhaps she did, but my abiding memory of her is one of demanding kindness: she expected everyone about her to be as determined and intellectually independent as she.

When I graduated I went to see Aunt Joan, keen to share what I thought of as my final academic achievement. Her congratulatory gift? The Oxford Companion to English Literature, a book I had never even heard of at that time. As a reference guide to the canon of literature, its authors and characters, I could not see why she would give it to me at the end of my degree course. When I asked her she smiled and told me firmly that she had no doubt about my future. I would go on, she said, to gain a PhD and one day I would write books of my own. ‘And that is why I have given you this book’ she said. ‘Because, whatever you think now, you have a long way to go and you will grow into it’. Aunt Joan was right, of course. I did have a long way to go and I am still ‘growing into’ her gift.

Book-pile

This last week I have seen lots of ‘growing into’ all around me. For the students who have just arrived with us, and equally for those who are entering their later years, the first couple of weeks of teaching seem alien. There are so many things to get used to: new teaching rooms, perhaps some lecturers you have never met before, a whole new set of expectations about the way you work and what you can achieve. For our new students you can add to that the practical newness of the place: working out where the cheapest coffee can be bought, knowing when the queues tend to form at the library, hoping that you haven’t spent too much in your first couple of weeks.

Coffee

If you are in this position you can take comfort from something that has just happened to me. This morning I asked a first-year student if she could move away from the coffee machine so that I could use it. She was so busy chatting with her friends that she just hadn’t noticed me standing behind her. It made me smile to myself: last week she was standing quietly in the queue with nobody to speak to and looking very new and anxious. This morning she proved that she is growing into it, and you will too.

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