When We Talk of Tendrils

Poetry, fags and Rodney Edgecombe.

Professor Rodney Edgecombe was a distinguished literature scholar and a respected senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town. He was also quite possibly the most eccentric character I have ever encountered. As far as I could tell, Rodney had three major passions: literature, ballet and his two darling cats.

Over the years (he was nearing retirement), Rodney had developed an odd intolerance for Shakespeare in performance. He couldn’t bear any sort of production of the plays, be it on stage or screen. Actors raced through the text, he claimed, and whole lines were lost to his ear. Textual analysis was everything to Rodney. That and his feline companions.

Clearly the professor had an aversion to Shakespearean productions, but there was nothing in the world he detested more than a smoking habit. If Rodney detected the hint of a fag in the vicinity, he’d be up like a shot, midway through explaining the difference between iambic and trochaic pentameter, and he’d trace the scent of nicotine to its source with the dedication of a bloodhound.

The perpetrator tended to be an unlucky undergrad puffing away beneath the window of our seminar room. Rodney would poke his head out of the window and declare in the finest Oxbridge tones: “Excuse me, yes you down there. Please refrain from polluting the air in my classroom… Yes, would you kindly move away from this window. Further, further. Thank you.” He’d return to his seat with the grace of one who is ballet minded, soliloquising about the hazards cigarettes posed to the clean-lunged.

Rodney had one other notable health concern and it was linked to his conspicuously short shorts. His GP had warned him that his vitamin D levels were low - he needed more sun. Rodney wasted no time addressing this deficiency, and from then on the professor was clad in jodhpurs that bordered on the inappropriate.

Such were my enthusings about Rodney that my mother got it into her head that she simply had to meet the man. For weeks she begged if she could sit in on one of my seminars. Eventually I submitted and asked Rodney if he wouldn’t mind a guest attendee. If she sat quietly at the back, the professor said, he’d allow it.

And so it came to be that my mother joined our seminar on Shakespeare’s influence on the poetry of John Keats. Keats happened to be one of her favourites, which I should have known would incite in the woman dangerous levels of enthusiasm.

We were analysing a line in ‘I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill’ and Rodney asked if anyone understood the meaning behind “...taper fingers catching at all things”. Silence fell. Mental cogs whirred. My mother’s hand shot up at the back, and Rodney’s eyebrows with it. “Um yes… Mrs Morris?” With cheerful gusto she answered, “Tendrils!”.

Thanks to all the powers that be, she was right.

After the seminar my mother thanked Rodney profusely, going so far as to offer up two cans of Whiskas finest Casserole Fish Delights. That was the last time I was going to allow family on campus.

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