MA interview at West Dean May 2010

West Dean College

I take a rather childish pleasure in walking through the "staff and students only "section. I revel in a guilty sense of privilege. Cowslips spangle the darker longer grass where the daffodils have flowered and the vista in front is pure classical English country house. I breathe in.

Happy times on the writing courses have attached themselves like the climbers on the knapped flint walls. Part of me dreams that the MA will be like short courses-only more so. Is it the glamour of West Dean that attracts me? The spring wind is cold and my new shoes chafe. I go inside - early because of the bus.

I sign in, receive a dispiritingly corporate Vistor Badge . I come over all fingers and thumbs trying to fix it on my new linen jacket .

I recall almost running away from the grand Oak Hall and the glorious chandeliers and the people who seemed to know each other and not me at the Writing Festival. I gather the memory of Kate Mosse's gentleness round me like a comfort blanket. I sit down, under the light chequered window. And there is Greg Mosse , greeting me with unexpected warmth, perhaps affection.

So positive and so kind - he renders me desperate to be teacher's pet.

In the interview, he bewilders me speaking highly of me. He is embarrassing, no, flustering me with praise. I am uncomfortable with praise. I demur. It is not sham.

I am conscious of my hesitancy. He looks at me so encouragingly - asking me, giving me space to shrine and I am muffled inside my own little cloud of fear. Fear that I'm just not up to it. He asks a subtle dever question. I think it may be about being too self critical, too analytical. I wheel out my longhand equals creative hat, pc equals editing hat idea - again. I sense he is disappointed.

I am too timid to ask for clarification. Roger Bown is quiet, thoughtful, attentive: I am aware that I am tilted toward Greg. I am leaning against a windscreen, peering for a landmark in the fog. Politeness demands I give respect to my other interviewer. I still find myself swivelling back to the familiar, the known.

Everyone I care about tells me I will be fine: I'll be accepted, So why will my guts not stop gurgling, my imagination not stop rerunning the interview, pausing at my failings, until the end of this month?

By the end even I realise that I'm flagging, spluttering like the last blasts from a dying Catherine Wheel.  I ask a question I know the answer to just because I had prepared it. Greg gently heads me off at the pass.

He is kind enough to have coffee with me, he tells me stories - interesting set-ups. I am too fluttery to grasp what is going on, He must feel like a winchman trying to get a dazed angler to take the hoist off the rocks. He has, of course, other things to do than distract me from my terror. He leaves. I hang about waiting for the bus.

Why could I not ask what I really want to know? It is the fear, the fear of any of the possible answers.