Memories and the lifelong lessons they evoke are powerful influences.  43 years ago this week, I was dropped off at my Cambridge college by my parents - who then drove home, over nearly 4 hours, in an emotionally charged silence, too upset to speak until they were home and dry.  My twin brother and I were my family's first to go to university - and we chose 2 at opposite sides of England, separated full-time for the first time since we were born.  I remain convinced, decades later, that I got into Cambridge by a combination of entrance papers so poor they thought they ought to see this girl who was chippy enough to think she could make it, and the chippy girl's defiance of prejudice at the interview she was asked to attend.  Or because, throughout my schooling I met, almost unfailingly, adults whose key questions were  "Who says you can't?" and "Why would you think that's not for you?"  My family was incredibly ordinary - indeed by today's standards, whilst we weren't living in poverty, there were times when we weren't far off.  But we were also very close, parented by two people whose line was that the sky is NOT the limit, and we were kept busy and engaged in all sorts of pursuits as well as being settled in good Comprehensive schools.  We also lived in a working class community in the South Yorkshire coal field, where we were no different from our neighbours or their children with whom we went to school.  Where I came from, you did what you did.  You kept going. You reached.  But how my parents felt as we took my trunk up to my first-year room at Newnham College, stowed my bike, and they watched me go back inside the college as they prepared to drive away?  I have no notion of what that was like for them, though we did discuss it as the years after my 1978 graduation passed.  My now-long-widowed mum still reminisces about it.  Cambridge colleges are, as is rightly well-publicised, still engaged in a continued struggle to hold fast to very high entry standards yet widen access to people like the just-turned-19 year old 1975 me.  I was part-confident young woman, part-innocent abroad.  I was also, having entered with no coaching, out of my depth with what Cambridge wanted from me until nearly Christmas in my first year.  I was close to giving up then, before I realised that actually, if I let myself go into this place and its learning rather than edging round it out of a lack of confidence in the company of other students who were so much more at ease, I loved the study of history I was given a chance to do.  I loved the phenomenal Cambridge-brain-stretch challenge.  I came to  relish the equal challenge of reading deeply and widely for, and then constructing, a good enough 5,000 word essay, every week for eight weeks a term, three terms a year, then being supervised and quizzed on its contents for 90 minutes a week in sessions led 1 to 1 by a world expert very likely to have been a named author on that week's reading list.  I was equally nervous of, but realise now I also relished, sitting crazily-difficult exams at the end of each of the 3 years of my degree.  My finals almost finished me off however, an experience not repeated until, 30 years later, I was examined by Viva Voce on my Doctoral thesis.  My point in thinking back over the degree experience, as an alumna in ulfilling and ongoing contact with my College?  It's this.  If I overcame my sense that others deserved their place more than me when the fact was they just had more "side" than I did, not more brains?  Anybody can.  If it was for the likes of me in 1975?  It's surely for the likes of any bright determined talented young person now.  Elites are broken into by those who qualify and those who support them, as well as having to break themselves open and admit the unusual suspects.  I should know, I was one.