Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “What did you think of Japan?” I asked.

  “Brilliant,” he said. “But a little uptight. I challenged my father’s boss to a drinking contest, and my father almost spit up his whisky. He said if I didn’t lose the contest he could lose his job.”

  “…Higham, Grocock, Gill Leech, Frye…”

  Simon did indeed lose the contest and thus won over his Japanese hosts. They set him up for tennis matches, took him to tour a Toyota plant, and even invited him to drink with them on an all-night trek to the top of Mount Fuji.

  “…Flannigan, Feiler, Farrady, Deeks…”

  “We better get going,” I suggested.

  As we moved toward the sixth tier of bleachers, Simon warmed to his audience. He was cocksure and proud, taller than I by just the wisp of his greased brown hair and the polished way he straightened his back so it looked like the sterling handle of an antique knife.

  “…Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? Please stop talking. Cross your arms in front of you, look directly at the camera, and, whatever you do, don’t move….”

  “Yes, Japan is fascinating,” Simon said as we turned our attention to the wide-angle lens. “You should really go there sometime. Of course, most of your countrymen over there never stop talking. They don’t know how to behave. But you should try it anyway. I’m sure you could learn a lot.”

  “I know—”

  “Are you ready? Three, two…”

  “I lived there for three years.”

  “One.”

  As soon as I spoke, Simon turned toward me and dropped his jaw in embarrassment as the camera before us winked into the eyes of all the bats except for one. While the rest of us were dining on mutton that evening, Simon Farrady was still digesting his foot.

  II

  ROWING

  Trumpeters and Swans

  You may tell the sweet raptures of courting a lass,

  And shooting a bolt from a lover’s quiver,

  But what in the world can these pleasure’s surpass

  That we boating gents find on the river?

  —John Leavis

  “A Boating Song,” 1849

  The cream had yet to be skimmed from the milk and the bedders had yet to stir when Halcyon knocked on my door at a quarter to morning and dragged me into the fog. I searched for my sweats, which my crew called kit, and slipped them on outside in, then found my sneakers, which they called trainers, and dragged myself from upstairs down. In the basement room of Memorial Court we boarded our bikes, which had recently been dredged from the Cam before we bought them at a police auction, then pedaled over the public bridge next to Clare and headed into the mist.

  At that hour Cambridge was shrouded by clouds of fog and had the unearthly feel of a neverland trapped in the daze of time and reborn as a mute, medieval everytown. Farmers in the marketplace were busy unpacking racks of pheasant and legs of lamb, crates of carrots and barrels of cheese. The scent of boiling hops from local breweries lingered in the air. Up above, red brick chimneys and ginger stone spires faded into the woolly sky, which was punctured in various balding spots by silhouetted cruciforms reaching toward heaven and charcoal gargoyles lunging toward hell. Down below, the one-way warnings and no-entry beacons were thoughtfully covered over by the lawless haze as we made our way through the maze of college halls to the far side of the Cambridge myth. Here, at a wide-open pasture called Midsummer Common, cyclists from across the university converged like supplicants to a biblical feast and streamed in a silent crusade to the open cathedral of the Cam. The students had come to immerse themselves in the last surviving religion of the Oxbridge elite. They—and we—had come to pray in the Holy See of rowing.

  “Gentlemen, on your knees!” cried the coach as the anxious eight gathered before the two-story, Tudor Clare Boat House on a slope leading down toward the river. “From this day on, you’ll worship only me. That’s the only way to win…. Now give me fifty push-ups while I flirt with your cox.”

  A week earlier, in a fit of youthful bravado and Olympian delusion, Halcyon and I had ducked into the Clare Boat Club Fresher Squash, a highly disorganized convocation at which drunken Old Boys from the “largest club in college” tried to squash as many freshers (the sexless term for freshmen and -women) into an unventilated room and hoax them into getting up at five-thirty every morning, strapping themselves feet first into a banana boat built for eight, and breaking ice with their blistering hands while frostbite grew on their hungover noses, all for the chance of bringing glory to the house of Lady de Clare. “We don’t care about your politics or your physical condition,” they said. “Anybody can make the team.”

  The first promise proved to be dubious, the second an absolute lie. Even though Cambridge has a special competition in the fall reserved for novice rowers (both graduate and undergraduate), the competition among the neophyte boats is as great as that in the veteran divisions. The next morning, when I arrived for the tryout with several dozen other dupes, I had to prove first that I could row by tugging on an oar in a floating bathtub, then that I could get in shape by chasing a coach on a bicycle for several miles, and finally that I could pull my weight by sitting on a seat and yanking on a stick that turned a wheel that triggered a machine—called an ergometer—that measured my physical condition, and, for all I know, my political beliefs. Upon seeing this, Halcyon decided to forgo the rowing and become a coxswain, or steerer, instead.

  When the results were announced at the end of the week, I had been placed in the Second Boat in the number-five position—the seat in the center that is usually reserved for the person with the brawniest arms, but in this case had been misassigned to the person with the boniest legs. Halcyon had been chosen as the cox for our boat.

  “What have we done!?” she cried after reading the announcement. “We have sentenced ourselves to go out on the river before dawn every morning with a band of overzealous seventeen-year-olds.”

  “Don’t worry,” I kept saying as her eyes stretched wide and she pretended to pull out her hair. “It’s only for one term; it’s only eight weeks. And besides, you get to go along for the ride. We have to do all the work.”

  “Get up off the ground, lads. That was pitiful. If you even hope to touch the First Boat, you’ll have to do better than that. Now pair up with a teammate and give me fifty sit-ups.”

  At Clare, teaching the new recruits was a job coveted by senior members of the Boat Club, for it offered free reign over first-year men and free access to first-year women. Our coach was a third-year geography student named Peter, who had during the course of his college career attained two of three prizes most coveted by Cambridge men: a “Blue” and a “Babe.” He earned his Blue, an official blazer in Cambridge baby blue that is the local equivalent of a varsity letter, by rowing against Oxford in a lightweight crew. He earned his Babe, a slightly less official but more desirable distinction, by flashing his blue-blood smile and princely good looks and bedding the most beautiful girl in college. He failed, however, to earn a First, the most official badge of all, by not scoring in the top 10 percent of his class. Instead, he scored a Third on his second-year exams, the academic euphemism for “Nice try, son. Better marry money.”

  On our first day of practice, still a day before classes began, Peter came prepared to assert his prowess. He started off dressed in a sweater and sweats, befitting the crisp autumn chill that skipped across the flue of the river and swirled around the crowded Boat House, but as he led us through a battery of exercises and warm-up drills, he slowly began to shed his clothes until he stood before us—and all others on the river—in a citrus yellow short-sleeved, short-legged spandex body suit that bulged in every conceivable place with his well-toned majesty.

  “Hey, coach, aren’t you cold?” asked Andy, the smallest rower in our boat, who had curly black hair, a Charlie Chaplin mustache, and none of the evident virility of Peter de Clare.

  “No,” he said. “And you should take after me. I want this crew to be sty
lish and mean.”

  “Stylish and mean,” Halcyon repeated, barely concealing a giggle. “That can be our motto.”

  After we completed our wake-up call, Peter summoned us all together in a circle and issued our battle plan.

  “Lads,” he said, in a tone he had evidently practiced in front of the mirror. “Welcome to the hardest six weeks of your life. You should not worry that you haven’t made the First Boat, but there are a couple of things you should know. First, there’s a tradition that the Second Men beat the First Men in a boat race at the end of the year. It has happened three years in a row, and I expect it will happen again. They are bigger than you are, so you have to work harder.”

  Some of the boys shuffled their feet, but they were captivated by his charm.

  “Second, you are going to have to get up early. About five times a week, I reckon. When I was a novice, we were on the water at five forty-five. There is still ice on the river at that hour, so we may have to send a small barge to break it. Also, it’s dark, so some of you will need to buy portable bicycle lights we can attach to the front of the boat. The final thing is that if you’re late for practice, you have to buy everyone—including me—a pint. If you miss practice altogether, then the penalty is two pints.”

  This rule brought relieved applause.

  “But you can’t drink them yet,” Peter warned. “The highlight of the year is the Crew Meal with the Ladies’ Second Boat. All bets must be paid that night.”

  “Look out, ladies. Here we come!” burst a particularly mealy redhead behind me.

  “One last item,” Peter said. “I’ll try to arrange some weightlifting sessions and some fun runs—about four miles.”

  The elation turned to groans.

  “That’s what it takes to win, I’m afraid. Everyone has to do it.”

  “Even the cox?” Halcyon asked.

  “Even the cox,” the lads shouted together.

  “Now,” Peter said, “hands on the boat.”

  Inside the darkened Boat House about a dozen boats were stacked upside down on the shelves like caskets in a mortician’s shop: fiberglass for the upper classes, mahogany for the middle, and layered oak for the underclasses, including the Second Novice Men. On command from our coach, relayed through our cox, we heaved the heaviest shell onto our shoulders, quivered down the concrete ramp to the edge of the river, flipped the boat right side up, and laid it to rest in the water with a gentle slap on the surface. One by one, we retrieved our oars—giant wooden poles with yellow blades, roughly the shape of iced-tea spoons and the height of walking stilts—and locked them into the riggers. With the sun now winking off the river and other crews careening around the bend, we were finally ready to board.

  “Stroke side, hold the boat. Bow side, in.”

  Starting from the bow of the boat and counting every other seat, those of us with bow-side blades sat down on the sliding seats and strapped our shoes to the back of the trusses that supported the seat directly in front.

  “Bow side, steady the boat. Stroke side, in.”

  As we tried to balance the tottering boat, the other four rowers assumed their seats.

  “Madame, take your seat and push off from the bank.”

  Halcyon slid into her perch at the stern of the shell and grabbed the ropes that controlled the tonguelike rudder. The boat wobbled back and forth as it eased toward the center of the river. Wobbling along with the boat, we waited in anticipation as Peter boarded a borrowed bicycle and prepared to follow us on a path along the river and bark instructions at every stroke.

  “Gentlemen, are you ready?” he shouted. “Count off.”

  “Bow, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Stroke…”

  “Cox!” Halcyon punctuated at the end in a slightly anxious British accent.

  “All eight,” Peter cried in cadenced staccato. “At backstops. Stern four, sit in the boat. Bow four, follow your stroke. Full slide, half pressure. Are you ready? Row!” As soon as he issued the command, Peter jumped atop his bicycle and began pedaling as fast as he could down the path. “Hurry up, lads!” he cried. “Concentrate!” But when he looked over to check on our progress, he noticed that we were not moving quite as fast as he. In fact, we were not moving at all. At the sound of his nuanced, crew-hip command, all nine of us had frozen in utter ignorance and erupted into unifying laughter.

  “Hey, coach,” called Charlie Chaplin when Peter returned. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but we ain’t understood a word you said.”

  “Bloody hell,” he cried. “You boys are daft. Let’s take it from the beginning.”

  Like many new students, especially those from afar, I arrived at Cambridge with stars in my eyes. I had reviewed the list of distinguished alumni—Milton, Byron, Newton, Darwin. I had rented the twelve-part televised homage to Oxbridge, Brideshead Revisited. I had even filled my suitcase with random books about England: Return to Albion, The Glittering Prizes, and, from Cambridge alumnus A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six. Arriving with even more expectations than luggage, I vowed to do Cambridge the way it was meant to be done. Along these lines I had three goals: I wanted to row, to debate at the Union, and to have a date for the ball.

  From long before I came up to Cambridge, I viewed rowing as an upper-class sport. In England, after all, where the sport was born, the greatest clubs were at Oxford and Cambridge; in America, where it was replicated, the greatest practitioners were at the likes of Harvard and Yale. I assumed in my middle-class naïveté that rowing, like fox hunting or polo, was somehow passed down through the blood and thus genetically denied to me. But when I began to row for Clare, I soon discovered that the story of rowing, like that of the universities that raised it to an art, is a far more scrambled social tale.

  According to legend, the first organized rowers were not kings, but slaves—like Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. The Romans used banks of indentured servants to propel their double-decker war boats, called biremes, by chaining rowers to their thwarts and whipping them to greater effort. Julius Caesar probably utilized such a crew to propel the biremes that he used to invade the island of Britannia in the first century before Christ. The small size and numerous rivers of Britannia assured that rowing would be a popular method of travel for both traders and invaders for the next two thousand years. In the great Stourbridge Fair, for example, which was held every Michaelmas season in Cambridge from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, all manner of goods—from Scandinavian herring to German wine—were rowed up the Cam from the Continent and rowed down again when the trading was done. But what was good for the merchant was well beneath the gentleman. When the lord mayor came to the fair, which later inspired the fictional Vanity Fair, he often arrived by boat—but he never touched the oars.

  Like its most popular sport, Cambridge itself was not always an exclusive upper-class retreat. The earliest students may not have been slaves, but they were not all gentlemen either. During the first five hundred years of the university, students were divided into three classes: a majority were fee-paying members, a few paid higher fees for the right to eat with fellows, and a third group paid no fees at all. These students, among them Spenser, Wordsworth, and other icons in the Cambridge Hall of Fame, were known as sizars, because their sizes, or meals, were given to them in return for waiting on their wealthier classmates. Ironically, the reputation of Cambridge as a place of privilege was not sealed until sizars were eliminated in the nineteenth century, at almost exactly the same time as rowing became an organized sport of leisure.

  Following the lead of the exclusive public schools, Oxford and Cambridge set up rowing clubs in the early 1800s. The two universities first competed against each other in 1829 in a widely publicized race that ended underneath the bridge at Henley-on-Thames. The shift in rowing from work to sport coincided with the shift in commerce from river to rail. With the waterways freed of commercial barges, rowing quickly spread as a recreational activity and trickled up from red blood to blue. During those formative years th
e sport was not simple: boats were a cumbersome six hundred pounds; oars were long and difficult to rotate; seats were narrow and stationary, forcing participants who wished to increase their leverage to grease their leather shorts with oil or smear their hind ends with oatmeal. Regardless, the sport still flourished, with professional leagues on both sides of the Atlantic and, in 1900, a berth in the Olympiad.

  Modern times, however, were much less kind. Like Her Majesty’s Empire itself, rowing was unable to retain the glory it enjoyed at the end of Victoria’s reign and continues today mostly in the few elite schools and universities where tradition is most coveted. But even there the tradition has changed. The devastation of World War One brought an end to the gilded age of Oxbridge. By the 1930s, half the students required scholarships; by the 1950s all students received free sizes from the state; and by the 1990s over half the student population came from state-sponsored secondary schools. Today rowing remains the most popular sport in Cambridge, but like so much else it seems to be a case of the pampered middle classes trying to recreate a faded past. The rowers at Clare were the sentimentalists, chasers of a bygone dream. Like me, they could easily join the Boat Club, but the true-blue members of the university had already moved far upstream where they could stay well out of the way of the reckless up-and-coming.