But as she sits down in the light-filled room’s big bay window, looking out onto Newnham’s gardens, she falls silent for a moment. “It feels overwhelming,” she says. “It feels emotional. And it feels a touch sad, because so many of my friends have died. And when I look around the College and these rooms, I see the shadows of those who’ve died. And I remember them. But it’s such a wonderful place, isn’t it?”

The room’s current inhabitant, Amelia Bell (History and German, Third Year), agrees. “I think Newnham in particular is such a special community,” she says. “It feels so lovely to be here in this beautiful room. I have felt like I’ve become myself here, and I’ve met people I really care about. I feel very lucky.” “And you’ll have those friends for life,” says Margolyes. “How old are you? 20? Well, I’m 83, and my love of College has lasted. It just shows: some things can last.”

The two then fall into a detailed discussion about the books they brought to Room 301. Margolyes came with the works of Charles Dickens, Bell with “far too many books in a great big box. I think I imagined that I’d have a lot more time for reading for pleasure than I actually do.” They both enjoy holding a book: Kindles, they agree, are strictly for planes only.

Not that Margolyes got much reading done, she admits. “Everybody makes their own Cambridge world, and mine was the world of the theatre: rehearsing, talking about plays, being jealous of people who were cast.” Bell’s Cambridge, by contrast, is rather mixed. “I’ve tried rowing, with little success! Rather bizarrely, I’m in the Ancient Literature Society, which is mostly just because I knew some people in it.”

While today’s Newnham students have the Iris bar and café to meet and chat – “I think there was a cocktail named after you once!” says Bell, to Margolyes’ delight – in Margolyes’ day, the room was where you met. “We would gather, put the fire on and make cocoa and pass around the chocolate McVities. And we would sit and talk. And so I primarily think of this room as a room where I talked and listened to my friends. And all the rooms were like that. It was lovely.”

But there were darker times, too. “We were all very vulnerable, because we didn’t know how to live our lives. We were finding out and sometimes it was very painful. I think we were very young for our ages.”

She remembers a student who took her own life at the end of Margolyes’ first year. “We all knew she was unhappy. But she was in the third year, and I was in the first year, and you did not speak to people in years which weren’t your own. After that, I decided that I was going to speak to people in other years, and that in future, if I knew someone was unhappy, I must never just walk on by.”

Bell nods. “I think there is a lot more support for people these days,” she says. “It must have been a lot harder for you and your peers, especially when it wasn’t as normal for there to be women in Cambridge.”

The shadows are lengthening across the lawns: it’s time for Margolyes to make the long trip down Newnham’s stairs. “I feel that I’m trespassing in a world that is no longer mine,” she says. “But when I was here, it belonged to me. It’s where I became me.”