‘I suppose there isn’t. But isn’t it a matter of our no longer being exactly kids? Being on our own, and so forth?’
‘Fair enough, so far as it goes. But the main point’s patent. Dons just aren’t interested in the young at large to the extent that schoolmasters are. Listen, Pattullo! I may be talking dogmatic balls. But accept it for the moment as true. How would you account for it?’
This seemed a reasonable challenge. I felt that Buntingford, who had devoted just ten minutes to the state of my latinity, was laying on a copy-book tutorial after all. These widely- ranging discussions are frequently referred to in nostalgic reminiscences of university life.
‘I suppose they’re cleverer,’ I said. ‘Dons, I mean. Or, at least, they’re more interested in abstractions and intellectual issues and things. And also’—I added this hopefully—’in research.’
‘What in God’s name is that?’
‘Making knowledge, as opposed to just transmitting it.’ I felt Buntingford’s interruption to have been a shade oafish. ‘It probably becomes extremely absorbing – and it’s also likely to be a way out, so far as undergraduates are concerned. Too tough or technical or recondite for them – so it doesn’t really constitute a substantial common interest. I can see all that. Still, they have plenty of time on their hands – haven’t they? One can be aware of that without much inquiring around. They’re not kept at routine jobs to anything like the extent schoolmasters are. And they have those enormous vacations thrown in. No, I haven’t really found an answer. There must be something else. Perhaps some sheerly temperamental difference.’
‘Perhaps so. Dons are shy. I’m extremely shy and retiring myself. You must have noticed it.’
‘Yes, sir. But I’m doing my best to coax you to talk.’
‘Young Pattullo is an infant satirist, a mocker in the making. But think! I do feel you’ve overlooked something. That specialisation.’
‘Like six subjects – or at least three or four – at school, and really just one here for years on end? Yes, I see.’
‘Enormously important. Mind you, specialisation doesn’t much insulate don from don; they get chattering away to each other, all right. Nor undergraduate from undergraduate; you’ll find your closer acquaintance won’t more than half of them be reading English. But it does affect the get-together business between old and young. It’s as I was saying in my own case. A tutor does his stint with his own pupils, and that’s it. I don’t suppose it matters all that. Interesting phenomenon, all the same.’
‘Do you think things have changed much?’ I asked. ‘I know your own memory can’t go back all that far.’ This was fair enough, since Buntingford could not have been more than four or five years older than myself. ‘But from what you’ve heard about before the Kaiser’s war, or about just between the wars.’
‘Less and less celibacy around, for one thing. Or at least I rather feel so, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen any statistics. Curious, if it’s true. One doubts whether the proportion of males not much drawn to the eternal womanly alters from period to period. Obscure subject. Then money – less of that going, without a doubt. Your old-style college fellow tended to have something quite comfy of his own. Surprising number still do, for that matter. More and more of us near the bread-line, all the same. Nosing round for honest subsidiary employments. Writing reviews for sixpenny papers. This new highbrow programme on the radio: out-relief for dons, that’s going to be.’ Buntingford put away the madeira, which I took as a sign that my tutorial was coming to a close. ‘I’ll tell you another thing. It’s something that wouldn’t occur to an undergraduate. These places – Oxford colleges, that is – get all cluttered up administering themselves. They have what are called Governing Bodies – meaning nearly everybody you’d call the dons. Endless debate on matters utterly frivolous from anything that could be called an academic point of view. How much we can discreetly pay the chef, and whether motor-cars should be allowed in the Great Quadrangle, and who should be empowered to say what where about bugger-all. Desperate stuff, and people get hooked on it. Like a drug. Time- consuming isn’t the word. Still, not a headache of yours.’
I concurred in this. Buntingford’s last remarks had failed to claim much of my attention. I had something else in mind.
‘Do I gather,’ I asked, ‘that when I’ve finished doing these bits and pieces this term I’ll just be with Mr Talbert all the time?’
‘That’s right – or Talbert and Timbermill. You won’t have met Timbermill yet?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, I imagine that will be it.’ Buntingford grinned at me maliciously. ‘A weekly hour with each of them for the rest of your days.’
‘Shall I bore them terribly?’
‘I shouldn’t like to guess.’ Buntingford’s grin broadened. He must have approved of my putting my question that way round. ‘Time will show,’ he said. ‘Well, thank you very much.’
In one of Galsworthy’s novels there is an elderly character who regularly complains that nobody ever tells him anything. It was to be my own feeling, I remember, when I eventually returned to live in the college. The fellows, now my colleagues, were attentive and conversable, but were so anxious to avoid anything in which there might be detected an instructive note that it was almost impossible to extract information from them. In this they were observing, in their own fashion, a courtesy as rigid as Uncle Rory’s: a codified and somewhat patrician attitude endemic to the place, and existing there in a mysterious independence of the social complexion of a majority of the individuals composing what would elsewhere have been called the staff.
To some extent, at least, this convention obtained in the reception of new arrivals of the most junior sort as well. My earliest undergraduate days in college were full of mysteries and perplexities which it appeared to be nobody’s business to resolve. Perhaps the assumption here was that one had been told all that it was necessary to know by a grandfather who had become familiar with the minutiae of undergraduate life while himself resident in the college sometime in the 1880’s. Until I had Tony Mumford to appeal to I had to spend quite a lot of time and ingenuity in working things out on the mere basis of one casual hint or another. Occasionally I got my answers badly wrong. This was certainly so in the matter of Timbermill.
At the time of my encounter with Buntingford I was already being taught by Albert Talbert. This expression is not, indeed, the first that would occur to me by way of indicating what went on in Talbert’s tutorials. I doubt whether it existed at all in undergraduate currency. ‘I’m going to Talbert this term’, and not ‘I’m being taught by Talbert this term’, would have been my natural way of speaking. Dons, however, were, and are, quite clear that they ‘teach’.
‘Dr Timbermill,’ Talbert said huskily at the end of one of our contemplative sessions, ‘would like to see you tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. I am very glad indeed that he finds it convenient to take you for your work in Anglo-Saxon. Various possibilities have been in my mind. But nobody could better meet your needs than Dr Timbermill. Eleven o’clock.’
‘Thank you very much, sir.’ There was no chance of not being impressed by Talbert when he said this sort of thing. I knew by now that he intermittently entertained mistaken notions about my identity, and would in consequence make obscure plans to prepare me for some totally irrelevant examination. But he was certainly a most eminent scholar; I had checked up on this and there could be no doubt of it; and he thus so completely embodied the archetypal conception of the absent-minded professor that it was difficult not to feel him as having, magically and alarmingly, scrambled into three- dimensional reality from the surface of a comic strip. He had given me this information about Dr Timbermill with a gravity suggesting the considered resolution of a problem of the greatest complexity and significance. Thus – I was made to feel – had Talbert, brooding long upon the destinies of Pattullo, maturely pronounced that it should be. But was it Pattullo who was really in his head? Was it Pa
ttullo that Dr Timbermill veritably wanted to see? Had Buntingford not happened to mention the name of Timbermill in the way he had, I should have had no assurance upon this point at all.
On the following morning I put on my scholar’s gown – a garment still inducing both self-consciousness and self-satisfaction – and went in search of Timbermill. I had no idea in what part of the college he would be found, and a list I had been given headed ‘Gentlemen in Residence’ held no mention of him. So I made my way to the porter on duty at the main gate; there was a team of these bowler-hatted men, and all were known to be equally omniscient. But the porter had never heard of Dr Timbermill. In a kindly enough way, he was even a little dismissive of my inquiry; he seemed to regard me as seeking knowledge about a mere outer darkness beyond the walls of the college. It was still only a quarter to eleven, so I didn’t panic. I remembered another address-list – quite a fat directory, with the whole university included – which was to be found in the Junior Common Room. So I made my way there, and consulted it. I think I had a lurking fear that Timbermill – so apt for my learned purposes and progress – didn’t really exist. Perhaps he had died ten or fifteen years before. Perhaps Talbert was imagining him.
The directory was reassuring. ‘B. Timbermill’—it read—’M.A., D.Litt., F.B.A. (Balliol, New College, Merton.), 20 Linton Road. Tel. 54320’ I wrote all this down before I saw how perplexing it was. The elusive Timbermill seemed to share himself out between three colleges, none of them my own. Balliol, Merton, and New College were all within five minutes on my bicycle. Ought I to scurry frantically round the lot? Or should I ring up 54320, offer many apologies, and beg for instructions? Thus in doubt, I became aware of the presence in the J.C.R. of a second-year man whom I knew to be a pupil of Talbert’s. There was not, as at school, held to be any absolute impropriety in taking the initiative in addressing someone unknown and senior to oneself. A mild aura of indecorum hung over such an act, all the same. How did I begin? I couldn’t very well say ‘I beg your pardon’, or ‘Excuse me’: these were impossible formalities in such a place. On the other hand, ‘I say!’ seemed on the breezy and familiar side. There wasn’t any time to be lost. I opted for ‘I say!’ – uttered, if possible, in a tone suggestive of humility and diffidence.
‘I say, can you tell me where to find a don called Timbermill? Talbert says I’ve to go and see him about Old English.’
‘Oh, yes. One or two of our crowd are occasionally farmed out to him. He’s an old creature somewhere up in North Oxford.’ The man I had nerved myself to address was perfectly amiable, and I was rather pleased with ‘our crowd’ as including the two of us. ‘Farmed out’, on the other hand, had an odd ring. I suppose it was the first time the expression had come my way. It was vaguely suggestive of sinister things happening to babies.
‘Would Linton Road be in North Oxford?’
‘Yes. And that’s where the chap is. I remember now.’
‘He does his tutes at home?’ This, for some reason, struck me as strange and irregular.
‘I’m sure he does. I think I’ve been told he never goes out.’
‘You mean he’s some kind of invalid?’ As I asked this I was looking at my watch.
‘I don’t think so. Or not exactly. Just a nut-case, I imagine.’
‘Thank you very much. How long on a bike?’
‘Ten minutes with luck. On the right, off the Banbury Road. I say, are you Pattullo?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name’s Badgery. I’m your predecessor on that Ruskin ticket. Do come in and have a drink one evening.’
‘Thanks – I will.’ Although properly gratified, I was making for the quad and its subterranean bicycle-place. The big bell was striking eleven almost directly overhead.
I pedalled up St Old’s like mad. When you’re in a hurry it’s quite a hill. Carfax was a chaos. The traffic was less dense but more haphazard than it was to be in a later period. So far as bicycles went, a final battle was on. The university still claimed to command the streets with them. Particularly, as now, on the stroke of the hour, undergraduates hurtling from tutorial to lecture or lecture to tutorial wove in and out as they pleased, ignoring new traffic-lights, and jerking cars and buses to a halt. You stuck out an arm and in the same instant executed a right-angled turn. It was a fight against increasing odds, including a progressively firm police-force. As it happened, I encountered this last phenomenon now.
Somebody had told me that, if confronted by a red light and the eye of a bobby at the same time, I had only to jump off my bike, shoulder it, and march confidently ahead. Pedestrians didn’t have to heed the lights unless they pleased. So that was that. I put this doctrine into practice at the George Street corner, with the result that I found myself arguing with a young constable. He seemed no older than I was. I had been told that the police kept as aloof as they could from all undergraduate goings-on, and I wondered whether I was making history. My line was to offer various learned remarks about the law. His turned out to be an appeal to common sense; he was just pointing something out for my own good and safety. Unless I was prepared to tell him he was wasting the time of an important person, this cut the ground from beneath my feet. So I apologised and rode on. Of course, time had been wasted. It was already eleven-ten.
St Giles’, which is as broad as a meadow and ought to have been easy going, turned out a disaster. At the far end of it there were more policemen, some of them on motor-bikes. There was also a file of very grand cars, and into one of these was stepping an old gentleman in fancy dress. He might have been Father Christmas on his way to take up his duties in a department store. In fact he was the Judge of Assize, emerging from his Lodging on the way to court – which was why there was also a line of trumpeters, at this very moment trumpeting like mad. Meanwhile, the stoppage was complete. It was clearly the idea to hold the populace in awe by making as much bother as possible out of getting the old person safely sat on his bench at the other end of Oxford. A detour was my only resource. I executed it with decision, but unfortunately at the expense of losing my sense of direction. It was eleven-twenty by my watch by the time I was back on the Banbury Road.
By this time I was really worried. I imagined Timbermill (D.Litt., F.B.A.) pacing furiously up and down a massive library while waiting for D. Pattullo (nothing at all). It didn’t strike me that turning up half-an-hour late for an appointment on which I had been inadequately posted couldn’t be the end of the world. All sense of proportion had deserted me. I began to feel as if I was in one of those anxiety-dreams in which an endless sequence of obscure impediments attends upon some vital journey, and in which (in my own experience, at least) the tension can mount to a totally irrelevant sexual climax. I wondered, as I pedalled, whether an awful humiliation of the sort wasn’t actually going to befall me now. When my back tyre suddenly punctured with a small pop I positively had to take a grip on myself.
Could I go on riding? Within yards, that proved to be impracticable, for the road was in need of repair and the wheel would have buckled in no time. Ought I to abandon the bike and run? This would certainly be the quickest course, and I’d have adopted it if there hadn’t been a number of people around: it was confusedly in my mind that such behaviour would be judged bizarre or laughable, and I feebly shrank from that. I therefore continued at a rapid panting sort of walk, shoving the bike along in the gutter beside me. Eventually I found myself in Linton Road.
There wasn’t, I saw with relief, all that of it. There were large, solid, rather ugly villas well set-back on either side, and at the far end the road left off before the drive of what was presumably a dwelling of yet more substantial pretension. Near me as I paused to look for house-numbers a small group of children had chalked out a species of pitch on the pavement, and were playing a street game such as one associates with the humbler inhabitants of great cities; the accent in which they called the score to one another, however, was uncompromisingly upper-class. Several older people were also in evidence. I glanced a
t them as I hurried forward again, thinking that I might inquire of one of them about Dr Timbermill. My scrutiny revealed that their seniority was, in fact, extreme. That they were residents in this superior suburban quarter was evident from the circumstance that they were without exception pottering in or out of doors and garden gates – most of them with the help of multipedal devices designed to promote the locomotion of the infirm. I might have been outside an old folks’ home, but for the fact that these octogenarians and nonagenarians plainly belonged to the same superior rentier class as the infants playing hop-scotch or whatever it was.
I hadn’t come to Linton Road, however, in the interest of sociological observation. It seemed to me quite a weird locality for tutorials to be conducted in, and I was strongly persuaded that I was the victim of some ludicrous misapprehension. Nevertheless, I had better inquire. Approaching me now, as it happened, was an aged figure, at once tottering and commanding, and wearing what was then known as an Anthony Eden hat. I put him down as a retired colonial governor or Indian civil servant (in which I was probably quite right, since I had in fact penetrated within an enclave of such persons) and judged that he might still sufficiently command some of his faculties to be able to answer a simple question.
‘Excuse me,’ I said – breathlessly and perhaps imperatively. ‘Can you tell me where a Dr Timbermill lives?’
‘The last house on the right, sir.’ The aged figure, as he produced this reply, gravely saluted me. As I had never been addressed as ‘sir’ by an octogenarian before, nor had a hat doffed to me in such circumstances, I was considerably abashed, mumbled my thanks, and hastened on. At least I had made it at last. My goal was no more than twenty-five yards away: an enormous and brutally hideous house, standing in the middle of an untidy garden. I hurried forward, and had just propped my useless bicycle against the kerb when my attention was arrested by a new and untoward appearance. The carriage-drive before which Linton Road terminated was no longer empty. Rather oddly, a cow was ambling down it. This cow was closely followed by a second cow, and the second by a third. In fact there was a compacted mass of the creatures. As I stared at them in astonishment, they ceased to amble and charged.
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