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 c
louds 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.’
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 deaf
ened. ‘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.
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