The Day Gone By (33 page)

‘Yes, sir.'

‘The proctor would like to see you outside, sir.'

The bulldogs waited politely while the victim ‘drank up'. They then accompanied him outside and he went up to the proctor, who again said ‘Are you a member of this university, sir?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Your name and college, sir?' And, when this had been noted down, ‘Will you please return to your college now, sir?'

Within the next day or two, the culprit would receive a summons to the proctors at the Bodleian Library, and report thither in academic dress, white tie, cap and gown (known as ‘sub. fusc.'). For a first offence you were fined £5. For a second you paid £10, and for the third you were rusticated - sent down - though not permanently: probably for the rest of the current term, or for the whole of the following term.

The system was a kind of elaborate game, only with real forfeits. You were not held morally to blame for having a drink in a pub. (you could drink yourself silly in college, as long as it was on college drink), but the whole charade was taken seriously by the authorities and perforce by us too, for a £5 fine was no joke. If you fled from the proctor, the bulldogs' job was to chase and catch you. A good runner could sometimes get away, but it wasn't often attempted.

The odds were against being caught in a pub. (I never was), but the official ban on having a quiet pint, together with our enforcedly celibate state, meant that we lived the delightful life of undergraduates in a kind of artificial, half-unreal society. Since virtually everybody had come up straight from school and had never lived as an adult in society, we accepted these restraints unthinkingly and as a matter of course, just as we accepted the ‘gate fines' system.

Gate fines worked like this. At five past nine every evening Great Tom, the big bell at Christ Church, would be rung 101 times. When it stopped, college gates were closed. It was all right to be out of college, but when you came back you kicked the heavy door and the porter came and opened it. Then you had to write your name in a book in the porter's lodge. If you came in before ten, you were charged a penny on your battels. Between ten and eleven, it cost you (I think) threepence, and between eleven and midnight, sixpence. After midnight you couldn't be admitted; or if you were, you were in trouble. However, you could clandestinely climb into college if you knew where and how, and people constantly did this. I often did, and was caught only once (I walked right into the law tutor), for which I was duly fined by the Dean.

It was during these two academic years, from October 1938 until June 1940, that I made the warmest and deepest friendships of my life. I will just mention here - to get it out of the way - that I personally never came across any homosexuality at Oxford. As far as my set were concerned, that was something that no one felt inclined for.

There weren't many wealthy undergraduates up at Worcester. It wasn't a wealthy college; rather, a beautiful and admired though unpretentious one. Everyone I knew lived on relatively little money - no champagne parties, no cars, or dinner parties at the Mitre. My £10 a term - enough for beer, the occasional meal out and for hiring punts on the river in summer - was probably, I think, about the average or perhaps a trifle below. Once, when I stayed up an extra two days at the end of term to give a friend moral support through a dicey exam., my mother rebuked me for such unjustifiable extravagance and bade me come down forthwith.

As I have said, Worcester elected four scholars a year, two classical and two historical. The two classical scholars of my year were Kenneth Irwin and Frank Schumer. The other history scholar was Alasdair Christison.

Irwin, from King's College, Canterbury, was a gentle, quiet, self-effacing fellow, of a pious disposition and inclined - at this stage of his life, anyway — to be a little lacking in humour and to hackle up if his leg was pulled. He was not a friend of mine, since he didn't care for a pub. and was not particularly outgoing or warm in manner. At the beginning of the war he was a conscientious objector, but later he saw things differently. Indeed, the war years changed and matured Kenneth. After the war he revealed himself as much more human, and we became better friends.

Frank Schumer, from Giggleswick, was one of the most delightful people that I have ever known in my life. Warm, amusing, clever, bold in manner — nay, well-nigh swaggering — he played rugger for the College and acted in the O.U.D.S. When he discovered that I wrote poetry, he became a just and perceptive critic, very ready to talk about it. Among other things, he was a member of the University Air Squadron, which had premises down on the Cherwell. I sometimes went there as his guest, and I remember how, one perfect summer evening, we sat with our beer on the grassy bank and poured a libation to Isis as we talked about Gray and Collins. During our first term, Frank fell in love upon sight, not acquaintance, with a strikingly beautiful girl student called Barbara Horsfield, who used to come to lectures in Worcester hall. He was a handsome, dashing fellow and I'm rather surprised, looking back, that he didn't get anywhere with her. Anyway, by Guy Fawkes Day he had reluctantly given it up as a bad job, and I remember him getting drunk in College and moodily tossing one lighted firework after another, like spent matches, into the Pump quad. outside the buttery. He wore his heart on his sleeve if anyone ever did, and was always up to something flamboyant, such as shouting ‘Arms for Spain! Arms for Spain!' as the Dean was crossing the quad. (The Dean, Colonel Wilkinson, was notoriously reactionary and right-wing.) Frank's well-known and much imitated chuckle - ‘wer-her!' - at anything mischievous was often on his lips. He, perhaps, more than any of them all, typifies for me the world that disappeared in the war. He was likely, had he been set on, to have proved most royally.

Alasdair Christison, my fellow history scholar, became the closest friend I have ever had. He was the only child of a smalltime garage proprietor in Jesmond, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and had been at Dame Allan's School, Newcastle. He was intensely proud of being Scottish, though he had none of what is too often wrongly thought of as the Scotch character, being warm, generous, full of wit and humour, and anything but pedantic. It was he who first alerted me to the magic of Montrose. In appearance he was stocky and very dark, with black hair, a pale complexion, great dark, brooding eyes and so strong a beard that he sometimes had to shave twice a day. He was a true Celt, imaginative and sensitive by nature, quietly spoken and inclined to indolence. ‘I could sleep my life away,' he once said to me. On another occasion, when asked by the Senior Tutor why he hadn't read more in the vacation, he answered ‘Well, chiefly laziness, I'm afraid, sir': which caused the Tutor to remind him that it was in the power of the College to withdraw his scholarship. Indolent he may have been, but he had a remarkable brain. He told me that before he came up for the Worcester scholarship exam., his school had been in two minds whether to put him in for history or for mathematics.

We pursued our friendship and our passionate enjoyment of Oxford modestly, for we had little money, no social connections and no particular ambition to ‘get on' in games or in undergraduate society. We listened to a great deal of music together, sharing many happy discoveries. I remember particularly the March evening when Mr Pickard-Cambridge took us as his guests to the Holywell music rooms to hear Schubert's
Octet.
It bowled us over, of course: but when we began to stammer our thanks to Pickard-Cambridge, he replied (in his squeaky voice) ‘Oh, my dears, haven't you heard that before?' After we had left him, we went for a walk down the Isis towpath to Iffley Lock in the full moonlight. A skein of swans flew over, their wings sounding the characteristic ‘whaup, whaup'. The scene possessed a kind of resplendent melancholy entirely in accord with the Schubert we had heard.

A winter night, late in 1939. Alasdair and I are strolling idly back from a meeting of the Classical Society at Christ Church, having listened to an amusing paper about Odysseus's trick of shooting through the axes. Our way lies down St Michael's Street, and as we pass a house near the corner with George Street, the sound of someone playing Chopin most beautifully halts us in our tracks. We stop and listen, unmindful of the cold, and when the player ceases applaud vigorously. He comes out and asks us in. He is a Polish refugee, middle-aged, lonely, none too coherent in English. He used to be a musical journalist. He gives the impression of having lost everything but Chopin. He goes on playing, and after a time plays some of his own compositions, including a mazurka written in deliberate imitation of Chopin. ‘But dis is not - oh -Chopin, ‘e is not for imitating.' It is the first time either of us has met a refugee Pole.

It is a blazing morning in June. We have a tutorial with Vere Somerset at ten o'clock, and are strolling, demure and gowned, in the shining College gardens, dew on the grass and the lake rippling in the sunshine. We are arguing about Henry II, but soon Alasdair's conversation turns (by association with another Henry II) to Mary, Queen of Scots, and her lovers, Rizzio, Bothwell, Darnley, and to the Babington plot. ‘The poor fool will never cease till she lose her head.' Alasdair is soaked in Scottish history, a new world to me. He goes on to talk of the Covenanters, of Montrose, Alasdair Macdonald and the great victory at Inverlochy, ‘a dawn trumpet from the hills'; of youth hostelling in Scotland and of the well-known warden, the Scots-Italian Don Capaldi. ‘The warrden doesnae approve o' people who get up ower airly in the morrn.' After a time he begins singing to the ducks.

‘There was a wee cooper that cam' fra Fife,

Nickety nackey noor na noo.

And he has gotten a gentle wife,

Hey wully wallachy hoot John Doogle alleyn quo

rushety noor na noo.'

It takes some time for me to learn this so that I can do it fluently. We lie on the dewy grass of the cricket field, protected by our gowns, and play clouds in the sky, like Hamlet and Polonius, until nearly ten. On the way back, we decide we ought to be recognizably Plantagenet for this tutorial, and deck ourselves with sprays of flowering broom from the herbaceous border.

Mr Somerset greets us as friends should greet on a June morning. The scent of the broom begins to fill his warm, sunny room. Soon Alasdair is quietly defending Henry II against Becket. On the Papacy, Mr Somerset resorts to Funck Brentano and other authorities. His scout, Eton, comes in with coffee. Outside the window a blackbird is singing in the Provost's garden. I am thinking that we might well pick up some sandwiches and beer from the kitchens and the buttery, get a punt and have lunch on the river.

It is a summer evening in 1939, the last summer of peace. Toscanini is conducting all the Beethoven symphonies, week by week. Not many of our little set possess wirelesses, but mine (hired) happens to be one with a really good tone, and four or five of us have met in my room for the weekly broadcast: Alasdair, sitting at the wide-open windows, looking out on the darkening gardens and the huge copper beech almost up against the wall; Arthur Klingler, a big, handsome Bavarian, sprawled on the carpet, smoking his pipe, with which he is forever tinkering with a little bunch of probes and sprays like a small pocket-knife: Clifford Scorrer, neat and dapper, a fine pianist, rather High Church and soon to become an ordinand; Peter Townsend, a quiet fellow with a passionate social conscience, a Quaker and an incipient sociologist: and Victor Warren, a tubby, red-haired, good-natured, easy-going friend. Tonight Toscanini is conducting the fourth and fifth symphonies. Perfect happiness and contentment fill the room. How could anything be better than this? Yet only a few days ago we have been to a meeting where veterans from Spain - Tom Wintringham's people - have spoken of the Nazi support for Franco and the inevitability of the coming war with Fascism. Forget it - forget it for a little, as the slow movement of the fourth symphony rocks on in its affirmation of joy and seligkeit.

Alasdair and I, with a few friends, are having a pint in the Turf Tavern, back of Hertford, before dinner in Worcester hall. The beautiful scent of lily-of-the-valley drifts in from the garden outside, as we sit and chat in the snug parlour. The talk is of Durham Cathedral, which I have never yet seen. Alasdair describes the unique beauty of the Galilee chapel. Someone else speaks of Chartres, which hardly any of us have seen.

After a while it's time to go. The others precede me out into Hell Passage. I loiter behind to talk to the pub. cat and tickle its ears. The others walk straight out into a proctor and all have their names taken. With the connivance of the landlady, I hide in a cupboard and escape.

The proctor has difficulty with Alasdair's name. He explains it as ‘Christ, is, on.' The next day, down at the Bodleian to pay his fine, he is reprimanded and told that if that was intended as a joke, it was a joke in very bad taste. Alasdair, five pounds poorer, reckons this to be adding insult to injury. He was not trying to be funny at all.

Four of us are punting on the Cherwell, with a picnic in a hamper and a four-pint stone bottle of cider trailing astern. We have come upstream from Magdalen Bridge and now we are playing with the little Marston weir at the end of Mesopotamia. Arthur Klingler drives the punt head on into the weir again and again. At last he drives it in so forcefully that the punt is flooded, cushions and all, and nearly sinks. We are all soaked. There are only about two inches of freeboard. We daren't move. We let the punt drift down to the island below the weir and, under Arthur's Bavarian direction, scramble out, haul the punt ashore (‘One, two, three,
heave
!') and turn it upside down to drain it.

The picnic is soaked through. We make the best of it in the May sunshine, nibbling on the bank. Everyone's soon more or less dry. ‘You know,' murmurs Alasdair meditatively, ‘what I like about these sandwiches is their subtle flavour of Thames Conservancy.'