The Day Gone By (34 page)

It is late winter. We have had a lift in a don's car out as far as Great Tew. We walk in the gardens of the manor which was Falkland's, and I speak of the first battle of Newbury, of the burial mounds on the battle-field, and of how Falkland rode into the gap and was shot down. The sombre yews and box hedges seem entirely fitting to thoughts of Falkland and his circle, virtually rusticated to Great Tew by the obtuse foolishness of Charles I - ever a bad picker - who called Falkland to office only when it was too late. ‘I shall be out of it all by nightfall,' Alasdair quotes.

We've left our return rather late. We discover there isn't a ‘bus. Anyway, even if there was, we've hardly got a shilling between us. Alasdair says never mind, we'll hitch-hike. On the country road to Oxford it's already dark, and no lighting. A lorry comes grinding along — they went slowly in those days - and Alasdair bends down low into the headlights, almost under its wheels, thumbing for a lift. The lorry pulls up and we have a friendly lift back to Oxford. I've learnt something. This is the first time I've ever hitch-hiked. It won't be the last, to say the least.

It is getting on for midsummer, 1939. The O.U.D.S. are rehearsing
The Tempest
in Worcester gardens, with Leslie French directing and playing Ariel. We lie lazily on the grass, watching. The Prospero - Robin Benn, of Exeter - has a magnificent presence and a beautiful speaking voice.

‘You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed: be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits . .'

Neither Alasdair nor I have as yet seen
The Tempest
on stage. The lake makes a perfect background, and they have built a large model ship which glides across the view at a distance of about fifty yards. Later, at evening rehearsals, it is discovered that the swans are attracted, like moths, by bright light, so that when the goddesses in the masque arrive by barge across the lake, the swans swim behind of their own accord, creating an effect which astonishes everyone, including the director.

‘You sunburned sicklemen, with August weary …'

This marvellous line casts a fascination over me, so that I feel I could come to every performance just to hear it spoken.

At the end, Prospero really does ‘drown his book' in the lake as they sail away for Milan.

A chilly March afternoon on the Isis. Torpids week is in full swing, and the Worcester first boat has been making bump after bump. This is the fourth day and they are confidently expected to bump again.

Alasdair and I don't ourselves row, but we have run with the Worcester boat every day so far, and are about to run again now. We form part of a little group of Vigornians (Worcester men) clustered on the towpath a little below the New Bridge. The minute gun has gone, and we keep glancing at the second-hands of our watches. The fellows in the Worcester boat -
Ann of Oxford Street,
after De Quincey's girl-friend (he was up at Worcester) - have taken off their scarves and sweaters and are bending to their oars. The boatman holds the stern steady on a boathook, but ready to cast off in a few seconds' time. Looking downstream, we can see the long line of other college boats similarly tense and ready. People begin chanting ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven …'

The gun goes and instantly everything is in turmoil. The boats are cast off. The Worcester stroke sets a tremendous initial pace, to gain speed at the outset. We need to get right away from the boat behind and start gaining as quickly as possible on the boat in front. Everyone on the towpath is shouting, barging and stumbling over one another in their haste to keep up with the boat. ‘Worcester! Worcester!'

In and out of other people's feet: in and out of other people's coat-tails and pink-and-black scarves we veer and dodge, always keeping up with the boat a few yards away to our right. Under the New Bridge and on upstream into the Gut. There's a man on a bicycle - the coach - whose job it is to fire his pistol once when we are within a canvas of the boat in front, twice when we are bow to stern and three times when we are overlapping. Our cox is swaying forwards and backwards, shouting to his crew. ‘One - out! Two - out! Three - out!' We're gaining. The pistol goes once, almost in my ear, so that I'm deafened. ‘Worcester! Worcester!'

Alasdair trips and almost falls into the water. I grab him just in time and we pound on up the Gut. Some of our followers, winded, have dropped out now and the going is easier. The coach on the bike yells at us ‘Get out of the bloody way!' Two guns! We're bound to bump now. We're nearing the top of the Gut, where the towpath curves away to the left. In a few more yards we shan't be able to keep up with the boat: anyway, I'm blown.

The pistol goes three times, and the little following group, with what's left of their breath, become hysterical. ‘Three guns, Worcester! Three guns!' Our No. 2 oar is almost fouling the rudder of the boat in front, anyway. Our cox steers to port. Their stroke can't row now, because our bow is into him. Their cox raises his arm in acknowledgement of the bump. The oars, winners and losers alike, slump in their seats, dead beat. The coxes steer the boats in to the right bank - only a few feet away - as the boat behind comes past. ‘Well rowed, Worcester! Well rowed!' This is our fourth bump in four days. There will be a bump supper - the crew dining on High Table in dinner jackets with pink facings – with a bonfire to burn the boat and all the concomitant mayhem involved. Meanwhile, Alasdair and I set off for College in the early dusk, intent upon crumpets and anchovy toast.

October 1939. War has broken out during the Long Vac, but in a way it is almost an anti-climax, for in the first place everyone more or less knew it was going to, and in the second place nothing much has changed, except that everybody has been issued with gasmasks. We are now in the eight months of the ‘phoney war'. Hitler has conquered Poland in the first Blitzkrieg, and is left unhindered to prepare his next step. Upon the outbreak of war all undergraduates were enrolled as ‘potential cadets' and were instructed not to join up, but to await instructions. Alasdair and I, in our second year, are supposed to be reading for a ‘war-time degree', to be conferred at the end of the summer term of 1940. How much good will it ever be to us, we wonder.

The new academic year brings a fine crop of friends from among the freshmen scholars: William Brown, one of the classical scholars, a slim, pale, spidery Yorkshireman with a deadly wit; Mike Seale, from Fettes, a rather dashing, silk-scarf-wearing lady-killer, like Brian in Terence Rattigan's
French Without Tears:
and George Revnell, known as ‘Robey', from a fancied resemblance to the great comedian. (It's his eyebrows, really.) Our little set has expanded to absorb the new-comers. Everything, including the academic demands of the tutors, has become rather lax, as though both work and College discipline (such as it ever was) were now felt to be somewhat irrelevant to the mainstream of life. Arthur Klingler, of course, is no longer with us. We know he was anti-Nazi, and feel sorry for him, trapped on the wrong side.

Today, fifty years later, as I write, old St Ebbe's has gone for ever: all the area between Folly Bridge and the Botley Road has been ‘redeveloped'. No doubt this is a social change for the better, but those of us who used to frequent them will never forget those narrow lanes round the old castle, and the quiet little pubs. where Gown met Town and made friendships on Town's home ground. The Jolly Farmers, so much frequented by us that we were often invited to play in the Aunt Sally and shove-ha'penny teams, is still there, but not Paradise Square as it was in those days. And not Billy Iles the landlord, either, or Stan Roberts the taxi-driver, or Hilda Brown the Walton Street landlady, who used to play shove-ha'penny in silk gloves.

One summer evening in 1939 Clifford Scorrer was having a quiet pint in the Aunt Sally back-yard of The Jolly Farmers when a Town friend came dashing out to say that the bulldogs were in the pub. There was one stationed outside the yard gate, too. Clifford lay down full-length under a bench against the wall, and three good ladies from among the regulars sat in front of him with their skirts spread. The bulldogs walked through the yard, but found no ‘members of this university'.

A keen night soon after Christmas of 1939. Although we don't yet know it, we have entered upon what is going to be the great frost of early 1940 — weeks of snow and bitter cold. The stars sparkle and the east wind blows piercing sharp across the High, the Broad and the Giler.

Alasdair and I are sitting on a hearthrug, close to the fire, in the Turl Street flat of Baptista Gilliat-Smith. This is really a kind of undergraduate
salon,
frequented by people who like to think they are poets or artists. I have taken to coming here since some of my poems have been accepted by John Waller, a Worcester graduate who edits his own magazine, called
Kingdom Come.
Baptista, a freelance artist of considerable ability, designed the cover. She is sitting beside me.

There are about seven or eight people in the room, and all but two are sitting round the edges, since the gramophone is on and a rhumba is being danced in the middle. The music is exotic, repetitive, rhythmic, hypnotic. The couple are dancing apart - not embracing, as was usual in those days - but facing each other, close together, reciprocal, smiling, eyebeams intertwined.

The man is Baptista's fiancé, George Murre, a Syrian. He is a good dancer, of striking appearance, tall, quick-footed, black-curled, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, as Mediterranean as they come. The very figure of grace and virility, he is improvising his footwork as he sways and twirls opposite his partner. It is well-known - indeed, it is at the moment plain to be seen - that Baptista is nuts about him.

His partner, pretty, dark-haired, slim, expensively dressed, getting on for thirty — quite old by our standards — is a woman so notorious in Oxford that the Vice-Chancellor has exercised, exceptionally, his statutory power to forbid her to reside within the city. Millie lives out at Marston, and has to sleep there, too. It's about all she does do there, though. She spends all day and every evening in Oxford, often until after midnight, in the undergraduate world, moving from one casual love affair to the next. They last her three or four weeks, as a rule. Millie, herself of humble origin, once succeeded, some time ago, in getting married to a wealthy but dissolute and barmy undergraduate. Their incessant, violent quarrels, which as a rule seemed to take place in semi-public places such as the Cornmarket Hotel, led at length to a tarnished divorce and a financial settlement for Millie which has left her with more money than she really knows what to do with. What she likes is inexperienced undergraduates, but it never takes them long to discover how far she is out of her depth with people possessed of even a relatively modest intellect.

Let it not be supposed, however, that what Millie offers is sex — or at any rate anything beyond embraces and kisses. Sex hadn't really been invented in those days. Obviously, a statement like that needs qualifying, but I cannot be bothered to do it. Anyone who lived then as an adolescent knows what I mean. Though unquenchably hopeful, undergraduates did not really expect to have sexual relations with their girl-friends.

To be perfectly candid, I think that most of us, if our bluff had been called, would have felt weak at the knees and only vaguely and theoretically knowledgeable about what we had to do - let alone about the all-important business of playing it right emotionally, of oneself feeling spontaneously the proper emotions. The whole thing was too rare, too fraught, too unfamiliar. As I have said, most people simply didn't bother with it at all. Alasdair didn't. ‘I'm a non-starter,' William Brown used to say. He didn't actually add that it made life a lot easier, but the remark implied it. To persevere, you had to be ready to be humiliated and also to be driven by an inward demon, for all the lie of the land was against you, and there was no one experienced to whom you could talk — not your parents or your tutors or your adult friends.

One bitterly cold afternoon in the Hilary term of 1940, I came back to College to find that Millie had filled my rooms with flowering mimosa. The scent of mimosa has had that association for me ever since. Like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, I was adored once, too.

I don't think she did me any harm, beyond pleasantly wasting a lot of time. She hadn't really the capacity to effect a grip on what you'd call a mind. She looked nice, though, and I don't remember her ever being spiteful.

The frost went on until everything - walls, flowerbeds, fences - was like rock. Worcester lake was so hard frozen that the gardener had a job to keep a patch open for the ducks. I learned to skate. Everyone who couldn't already skate learned to do so. There were distinct advantages. No strangers could come into the College to skate - and you can't really conceal skates and boots - unless they had been invited and were accompanied by a member of the College. Every afternoon, the west end of Beaumont Street would get quite frequented by girls with their skates, hanging about in the hope that somebody would invite them in. Worcester men used to go out and look over the talent. The ice, of course, became crowded until the early darkness fell. Does a pretty girl ever look better than when she's skating?

The most delightful skating, though, took place among ourselves at night, by moonlight. Four or five of us - Alasdair, Clifford, Frank Schumer, myself and one or two others - Cullen Powell, perhaps; Jim Sharp or Victor Warren - would have a couple of glasses of College port after Hall (Fonseca '12? Graham '20?) and then wander down with our skates to the glistening, deserted lake. The moon shone bright. We were in College: we could skate all night if we wanted to and none to say nay. Everyone else seemed to have had enough for the day, but not we. I suppose we could have ordered hot mulled claret to be brought down, but it didn't occur to anyone. Clifford - always the sprucest of us at any time, and never more so than in his tan skating boots, plus-fours and tartan scarf - took off from among the frozen-in branches of the great, overleaning, chain-supported horse chestnut on the south bank, zipped down the length of the Provost's garden, turned in a half-circle and came back even faster. Alasdair, in old flannel bags and converted football boots, joined him, and the two cavorted and pranced while William Brown took photographs. Soon there were half a dozen of us out on the long lake shaped like a boomerang -each arm some eighty to ninety yards long - and all across the bare gardens rang the sound of skates upon deep ice. I remember how once we sang catches as we skated. I see Alasdair approaching, flickering in and out of the long shadows of the leafless boughs, starting ‘See, Bob, see, the play is done. Milady's chariot, run, boy, run.' I hear the others joining in and Clifford squealing ‘I've lost my watch! I've lost my watch!' until, having forgotten how to bring it to an end, our voices trailed off and we came in to sit side by side close by the ilex — that very ilex from which Ariel had leapt to obey Prospero. We had health and energy enough to skate till midnight and after; until moonset, once. Then we would repair to Clifford's rooms in the New Building and he would play us Beethoven while Alasdair made the tea. (He never really trusted anyone else to make tea.)