Having entered, he just stood. There wasn’t for the moment, of course, much else he could do, but he somehow managed to do it awkwardly. He must have been chronically aware of his outward man as unimpressive, since his figure was weedy and his complexion spotty. I saw that he was wearing his scholar’s gown – doubtless under some antique persuasion that this was enjoined upon him after dark by the discipline of the university.
‘Do sit down,’ I said. ‘And won’t you take off your gown?’ I detected this as sounding too polite. ‘And why are you wearing it, for heaven’s sake? I’m told you have to for lectures still. And when you go to your tutor, until he turns chummy and tells you not to. And, to the end of your honoured days as Provost, Bedworth, you’ll never be allowed a dinner without it. But that’s it. It’s not meant for impressing shopkeepers, or instead of a duffel-coat or an umbrella.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Bedworth acted obediently and spoke absently. He was still half-listening for renewed threats of violence from the quad. Then he looked about him. ‘The rooms down here have very high ceilings,’ he said disparagingly. ‘And extremely large windows. I shouldn’t wonder if they’re rather cold in winter.’
‘Probably they are.’ I was getting out the whisky. ‘Aren’t yours the same?’
‘No. They have the character of attics. The bedroom is rather small. But the study is quite commodious – only one has to be careful not to bump one’s head. I think they will prove to be quite warm when it turns chilly.’
‘I’m sure they will. Have some whisky.’ I saw that Bedworth was looking extremely surprised. ‘It’s just,’ I added hastily, ‘that my father gave me a couple of bottles to bring up with me. Adulthood, and all that. And he wants me not to drink gin.’
‘I’ve nothing against alcohol,’ Bedworth said guardedly. For a moment he appeared to ponder what followed from this, and he then accepted carefully the very small amount of my precious Glenlivet that I had poured for him.
‘It will do you good,’ I said. ‘You must have had a nasty time, hiding in that doorway. Did you find it terrifying?’
‘The rag?’ Bedworth queried cautiously.
‘Yes, the rag.’
‘It was a little discomposing. You didn’t yourself—’
‘Christ, I was in a blue funk, Bedworth. I was saying to Tony Mumford that it pretty well took the pants off me. I nigh beshat myself, as our older writers say.’
This facetious pedantry (to which I was no doubt assisted by the stolen champagne) quite pleased Bedworth. He smiled for the first time – a smile wary, or at least shy. He then sipped his whisky, and looked momentarily so disconcerted that I burst out laughing. It was abominably rude, and all I felt I could do was to jolly the thing along.
‘I say,’ I asked robustly, ‘surely I’m not the first person about the place to offer you a drink?’
‘Mr Talbert gave me a sherry.’ Bedworth paused on this. ‘Talbert,’ he said, ‘gave me a glass of sherry. But you offer me a whisky. It’s interesting, isn’t it?’
I was entirely at sea. We had not yet all been taught, by appropriately well-born professors, what hidden chasms divide U and non-U speech. Bedworth must have been something of a pioneer.
‘I think I’m right,’ he went on, obviously seriously involved with his problem. ‘One can’t say “Give me a sherry”, as I did a moment ago. That’s a solecism. But one can say “Give me a whisky”. You know, there must be the same exquisitely fine distinctions in French – and even perhaps in German. Think of setting out to master them! It’s absolutely fascinating.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I think of doing my research on something of that kind. Are you going to do research – after taking Finals, I mean?’
‘After taking Schools,’ I said maliciously.
‘Yes, of course.’ Bedworth was unresentful. I knew he would never speak of Finals again. ‘The B.Litt., for instance. Have you thought of that? I’ve been looking up the regulations. And after that there’s the D.Phil.’
I professed myself innocent of these ambitions, and even not too interested in them as animating other people. Bedworth, nevertheless, continued to discuss them for some time. He even accepted, in the course of his exposition, the second dram that I was sufficiently punctilious to offer him. All this occasioned a certain revulsion – or at least mild reversal – of feeling. Within seconds of grabbing him by the arm in the semi- darkness of the landing I had established him in my head as a wholly sympathetic character, a latterday Chaucerian Clerk of Oxenford, spending his grant exclusively on books, and much given to praying for the Minister of Education, whose bounty it was that enabled him to scoleye. What he had revealed about the exiguous head-room allowed him by the college augmented this impression. Now I was telling myself that he was a boring little man, a keelie out of a snot-school, concerned only with the mechanics of finding himself a dreary career as a pedagogue. Fortunately these unbeautiful feelings (which were never again going to visit me at all starkly in relation to Bedworth) didn’t affect my manners, such as they were. I don’t believe it was even with particular ostentation that I rammed the cork into the whisky-bottle half-an-hour later. And Bedworth seemed to retire to his upper regions contentedly enough.
I found myself lying awake for some time, endeavouring to check up on his philology. I thought I could hear Colonel Morrison saying, ‘Mrs Ogilvie, be a good soul, and pour me a whisky’. I was sure I could hear my uncle’s ‘Elspeth, please bring some sherry’. I certainly couldn’t hear my aunt saying, ‘I’ll have a sherry’. But then I couldn’t hear her saying, ‘I’ll have a glass of sherry’, either. Yet that might be only because she disapproved of drink entirely. I began to invent a scene in a play (a play rather in the manner of Colonel Morrison’s friend, Willie Maugham) in which two men in dinner-jackets stood in front of a sideboard. One said to the other, ‘I say, old chap, will you have a sherry?’ and was thereby exposed as an unspeakable outsider. When I had achieved this potential contribution to English dramaturgy I went to sleep.
IV
Because I was to be twice-born to Oxford in the manner I have described, my memories necessarily involve themselves with two generations of undergraduates. They differed in various ways. Nicolas Junkin of Cokeville Grammar School, whom I was to find occupying my old rooms in Surrey when I turned up for that college Gaudy which was so unexpectedly to feed a middle-aged playwright back into Oxford life – Nicolas Junkin and my own contemporary Cyril Bedworth came from very similar backgrounds. This didn’t, of course, prevent their differing in character. But of equal significance was a difference in their relationship to the college which was a consequence of that full generation lying between them.
The balance of the place had shifted. The deeper causes of this lay in social history and the drift of social legislation, but the immediate cause was simply a change in academic standards. When I came up after the war the conditions of entry – although I didn’t know it – had remained almost unchanged since the start of the century. The university’s requirements in the way of learned accomplishments were minimal to the point of the absurd, and once a boy had satisfied these it was open to any college to approve of him and take him on. This didn’t mean that the colleges were not in stiff competition with one another to secure able and industrious youths. They were. It did mean that most of them took for granted the validity of the proposition that a body of undergraduates ought to be a mixed lot; that some should read and some should row; and moreover that Uncle Rory’s ‘two universities’ owned a particular responsibility to educate, if remotely educatable, those boys whom inherited wealth or tradition was particularly likely to promote to positions of public responsibility later on. In a college like my own, these persuasions and contentions produced, class-wise, a very marked effect.
A good many years before Junkin’s time, however, the university – suddenly conscious, one has to suppose, of presiding over an unacceptably archaic scene – effected a cautious change of policy. A new matr
iculation standard was imposed: one falling not inordinately short of that required by the provincial universities. This sounds pusillanimous, but was quite sensible. The pitifully thick, the incorrigibly idle, even the pronouncedly inane: these, however socially acceptable, were now, except through error or chicanery, ruled out. But, as before, once the university tests of schoolboy attainment were satisfied, the colleges could do as they pleased. If still disposed to entertain a tenderness for the loitering heirs of city directors they retained a qualified liberty to do so. At the same time, they continued free to pay not too much attention to the marks and grades and ratings arrived at in huge public examinations. Their own traditional entrance tests went on as before, and they were thus able to engage in an activity dear to the heart of dons: that of distinguishing the gleam of future promise through the fog of present immaturity. This last exercise was not, I imagine, unproductive of fiasco. But it brought to Oxford occasional prizable eccentrics who would have stood little chance elsewhere.
There was nothing dramatic in the impact of these changes upon the college. The kind of young men, for instance, who so perturbed Bedworth and myself by their zeal in breaking windows were still well represented in Junkin’s time – Junkin’s neighbour, Ivo Mumford, having some claim to be among them. They were merely thinner on the ground. There were now as many Junkins as Mumfords, and their attitudes and tone became, accordingly, a more substantial part of the scene. I believe that – perhaps particularly during the 1960’s – undergraduate feeling as a whole evolved a good deal under the influence of this growing number of young men who possessed, among other things, a more adult grip than their fellows on the economic facts of life. Thus Ivo received a handsome allowance from his father, and when he had exhausted it he simply ran down to Otby and collected a large tip from his grandfather. When Nick Junkin was broke he got a vacation job on a building site. On the whole the public school boys (although scarcely Ivo himself) responded to the challenge of this sort of independence. They were soon on the building sites themselves.
Intellectual independence is another matter, and here I come back to Bedworth and Junkin as presenting a contrast referable in some degree to that quarter of a century lying between them. Bedworth was from the first a young man of intellectual habit, but it was a habit with a conformist bent. He was anxious to assimilate himself to what he conceived of as the academic spirit of the place. Hence his precocious interest in the B.Litt. and D.Phil, and his seemingly absurd persuasion that there was matter of learned substance in how a man asked for whisky or sherry. In fact, his instinct was not altogether at fault, and a line is probably traceable from these first researches into social nicety to that highly respectable monograph of his critical maturity, Proust and Powell. Cyril Bedworth was all set, one might have said, to become a conventional don, piously revering a status quo and devoting a good deal of doggedness to defending it. He was to turn out to be something rather different.
Junkin as an undergraduate lived more apart from academic things. Our first meeting – on that eventful Gaudy night – would reveal that he had been in the college for a year without picking up the slightest notion of how the place was run. The stamp which Oxford was setting on him (and I don’t doubt it was considerable) appeared in no immediate particular. It had not, for instance, affected his speech, which remained that of his own region, enriched by a close study of the more demotic texts of Harold Pinter. (‘Flake off’, he had said that night to Tin Pin, the forsaken mistress of a friend of his referred to as ‘that swine Julian’.) In their own way, Junkin’s interests were as distractingly extra-curricular as were Ivo Mumford’s, although he contrived in spasms to work a good deal harder at his books. The last fact is within my knowledge because he eventually became my pupil for a time. In this relation he was willing to show an occasional awareness (usually solicitous in tone) that I was more than twice his age. But his vision of society was distinctly unhierarchical, and he was quite without the youthful Bedworth’s disposition to treat his seniors with an anxious deference.
The relationship of teachers and taught makes a large theme. It is supposed to change radically between school and university, and I think it probable that – in Junkin’s time as in my own – freshmen were inclined to arrive in college with substantial expectations of a transformed social status vis-à-vis their elders. Here is the moment of growing up; restraints are to be removed and the forms of discipline altered; it is reasonable to suppose that along with this will go a more frequent and intimate commerce between old and young. I doubt whether I myself entertained this hope with more than average fervour, but early in my first term I was harangued on its fallaciousness by a man called Buntingford. Buntingford was a junior don who had been turned on in an effort to combat my scant ability to cope with Latin unseen translation. For some reason I was expected to ‘do’ Latin for a term before getting on with the job for which the late John Ruskin (or some unknown admirer of his) was presumably paying me.
‘Good God,’ Buntingford cried out despairingly as I entered his room for the second or third time. ‘It’s young Pattullo again!’ Tony’s ‘Young Pattullo’ had somehow caught on; Buntingford, who probably didn’t know of Tony’s existence, had gathered that it was the amiable way to address me.
‘Yes, it’s me, I’m afraid.’
‘It’s quite absurd, you know.’ Buntingford pointed to my effort at elucidating a chunk of Tacitus. It was lying inside his fender, as if only some stiff exercise of self-control on his part had preserved it from the flames. ‘That you should be required to address yourself to such mysteries! The result is like the gibbering of apes. But, no—I mustn’t exaggerate. Like the gibbering of Hottentots.’
‘You mean I’ve no chance of passing the exam?’ My voice must have betrayed genuine dismay.
‘Oh, no, you’ll pass the exam.’ Buntingford appeared surprised. ‘You see, there will be an English heading to the thing, just to give you a clue. Something like “An Unpredictable Element in the Movement of Public Opinion”. Or perhaps “Marcellus Offers Reasons for Rejecting the Proposals of Prudentius Clemens”. You must just offer a short prose meditation suggested by the theme. Make it a tolerable bit of writing. You write, as a matter of fact, quite well.’ Buntingford paused, and picked up my exercise. He seemed needlessly pleased with himself. He was a very new tutor, and I judged him to be in process of working out a technique for more or less simultaneously insulting, amusing, and flattering the young. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’d better go through your effort. Do you think?’
‘It would be awfully helpful, sir. If it’s not too much of a bore, this is.’
On this note of civil accommodation, we worked through my piece. Buntingford then tossed it aside.
‘Beta-query-minus,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘You’ll be perfectly all right. Come along for another couple of goes near the end of term, if you want to. Have some madeira. Can’t stand those gallons and gallons of ghastly sherry.’ We had some madeira, in an atmosphere of proper relaxation. ‘Has it come to you,’ he asked, ‘how much, in this place, you’re going to look up unfed?’
‘A hungry sheep? No, it hasn’t. And am I?’
‘Well, young Pattullo, just consider. Here’s me, for example, politely showing you the door.’
‘Isn’t that because I’m not one of your real pupils?’
‘You have a point there. But it’s my point too. I have about a dozen chaps at any one time, addressing themselves in a long-term way to real Latin and Greek. See?’
‘Yes – of course.’
‘I work quite hard with them, and do the proper fatherly stuff as well, when required. Bills, antagonistic parents, girl-trouble, phobias and despairs – the lot. But that’s just with my own little bunch – stray exceptions apart. Perhaps you’ll get the same hand-out during the next three years from Talbert and Timbermill. I don’t know. But hardly anybody else will have a word with you. So you see how different dons are from school-masters.’
‘I thought that about apes and Hottentots quite school-masterish.’
‘Have some more madeira.’ Buntingford showed not the slightest displeasure at what I now see to have been rather an impertinent remark. ‘And consider any decent school, such as your own. It’s an odd fact, by the way, that hardly anybody comes up to this intellectually undistinguished college except from markedly good schools. And you won’t think that when I say good I mean posh. Will you?’
‘Not if you tell me not to.’
‘Very well. Cast your mind far, far back, young Pattullo, and remember what it was like. You wander from form-room to form-room, being taught half-a-dozen different things by half-a-dozen different people during the week. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘They all know Pattullo from Mackonochie, and Mackonochie from Pattullo. Most of them chat you up a bit when they run into you. Some of them entertain you from time to time. Wives and daughters, and all that. Tea-parties when you’re youngsters; wine and cheese in your final year. Not an awful lot of it, but a general feeling of informed interest blows around. Right again?’
‘Well, yes – allowing for some regional differences.’
‘Let’s not allow for them. Let’s take a guess at your own school. Old fashioned and arid, curriculum-wise. But outside that: sailing, forestry jobs, a beginning to rock climbing in the Cairngorms, skiing ditto, parties going abroad every holidays. Masters with the know-how on hand – and rather interesting people, some of them. Agreed?’
‘Yes – I have to buy all that.’
‘Very well. And you haven’t done much inquiring around you here if you imagine there’s a lot of that sort of thing on tap.’
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