PERSONAL COLUMN

Oxford revisited

KENNETH ALLSOP

I originally went up to Oxford feet first— doubtless an appropriate posture in the eyes of those who see it as a crypt of dead salues. I was carried into the Examination Schools by two strong men. My prostrate state upon a stretcher was not because of catatonic terror at facing my invigilators. The university's normal self-absorption had been rudely intruded upon by some vulgar brawling on the Continent; it was 1942 and that ominous building—the High's Lub- yanka—had been seized for an emergency hospital. It was offered to the Americans. Possibly adjudging the atmosphere too radio-active with impregnated anguish for housing the wounded, they recoiled and briskly erected their own hygienic establish- ment. The British military (no pamperers they) crammed the reject full of casualties.

I noticed over the porch carvings depict- ing a scene then familiar in wartime anti- Nazi films, a gang of brutal ss officers grilling a captured underground hero. It was, in fact, three mortarboarded exami- ners holding a Finals viva. It seemed to bode no better.

For months I lived in a narrow metal bed slotted tightly among many others in the cavernous hall. The windows were coated with black-out paint; a few forty- watt bulbs seeped discouragedly into the galactic dusk. Food came on tin plates pustulated with solder. Mice scampered in the powerful frigid draughts. Apart from being in pain, I was consummately un- happy, unconsoled by experiencing, as near as could be, a mediaeval scholar's ascetic life, the essential Oxford. After departing, I felt none of the nostalgia with which Ox- ford is supposed to infect you evermore. I understood perfectly Paul Pennyfeather. in Decline and Fall, answering the prison medical officer's inquiry if he had been de- tained in a mental home or similar institu- tion: `I was at Scone College. Oxford.'

Having spent most of this year back there I can, however, report improvements. Not perhaps to the point of that decadent, port-swilling, idle luxury of the popular myth—of which some at any rate of the working public were disabused last winter. During the vacation the college where have been living lodged the railwaymen delegates to a union conference, and after one night in the unmotelish quarters of our educational elite, the sturdy sons-of-the- footplate walked out huffily—they weren't going to put up with those conditions.

Central heating has not yet wormed behind the gorgonzola-like ashlar of the famous facades; in some of the obscurer colleges, I believe. scouts still trudge flagged passages on frosty mornings with jugs of shaving water. But once I had acquired a hot water bottle (it was a hard early spring) I was content in my rooms overlooking Christ Church Meadow, and the scars of my earlier stay were not re-opened. Still, very Oxfordy is a rather ostentatious fruga- lity. At splendid St John's as at bijou St Edmund Hall, under the patchy caparison of elegance there is the shabbiness of a country vicarage, or possibly the equivalent to the worn, leather-patched tweeds of an immensely rich landowner, arrogantly indif- ferent to display. As for the renowned gour- mandising, I dined at half a dozen other colleges, and although the food was good, with variations, it would not be thought ambrosial by the average London advertis- ing man expense-accounting around WI and swl. Silver Georgian candelabra still flicker mellowly on antique boiled shirts, gleaming like old ivory as the port circulates be- neath the murky oils of benefactors, as in Osbert Lancaster's Zuleika Dobson paint- ings. But the overall atmosphere is plain rather than pearl. At High Table are but- ton-down shirts and suede jackets under the still obligatory gowns, and the vapours of more menacing modernisation — cafeteria service, undergraduettes, longer terms—steal odiously across the last ditch into the secur- est senior common rooms.

Any consolidated student protest was elu- sive. I went to an Oriel gathering, forecast as the cadre of Oxford's coming revolution —it was a mildly pleasant wine-and-cheese party. One all-purpose exhortation was chalked up at Queen's: SUBVERSIVE SLO- GAN; the right's reply, equally whimsical, was HANG TOM PAINE. I was there when the Hart report recommended disciplinary re- laxations and student participation in rule- making. It excited no more than a ripple of grumbles. One undergraduate, asked in a poll, 'Would you like to sit on a committee with dons?' replied: 'May I answer that with another question—would I like to be buried alive?'

Change is more seriously evident in a per- ceptible deflection from aristocracy to meri- tocracy. To call upon Waugh again, he would not, if up today, be later recollecting, as he did in A Little Learning of the 'twen- ties: 'There was said to be a laboratory somewhere beyond Keble, but I never met anyone who dabbled there'. That composi- tion has certainly altered (and, agreed, it might be remarked 'about time') for at luncheon one is oftener sitting next to a young chemist or physicist on a research fellowship than next to a philologist. Oxford is still accused of enwrapping a velvety despotism around the northern grammar school boy, more numerous though he is: so awed is he at getting there, he is seduced into eagerly supporting the continuation of the ritual. Yet Oxford is accepting that it must be more exacting, more equitable; the making-over process is now two-way. The closed scholarship, long a backdoor for the favoured. really is closing. One don said: 'Last year we turned down all the boys offered by the three schools we have links with. They didn't like it at all, but 1 was rather tired of getting lumbered with speci- ally selected illiterates.'

And there is distinct change pictorially. Leaving aside the eternal hacking-jacketed Christ Church beagler, it is impossible in the town to tell a local hippie from an undergraduate. Within the college walls are as many Afro haircuts. psychedelic jeans and Regis Debray mustachios as outside. This blurring of class and style was most signal during Eights Weeks. To the wrinkled, blazered Blues on the tow path, the ap- proaching shells, manned by Lennon-maned, bearded oarsmen, in Donovan caps and sinister shades, must have looked like Vik- ing raiders bringing lire brands to their sacred ideals. Someone mentioned that the Lady Margaret Hall boat had just passed. I hadn't noticed. Perhaps they were all sin-

gularly flat-chested young women –but what should theoretically have been the simplest identification (length of hair. I mean) in these epicene times, and even on the hear- ties' home water, wasn't.

'Tradition', of course, still thrives. There is said to be a college servant who may be overheard sweeping around American tour- ists on a torrent of invention. 'These are the navigational instruments of Chaucer, the well-known Irish explorer', he trumpets authoritatively, and breaks off 'When Ras- putin was studying here' -- to hail a thin, grant-supported youth crossing the quad on split shoes: 'Did the caviar and champagne get to your rooms in good time for break- fast, sir?' Tips are thrust upon him by foreigners grateful for the authentic glimpse of the fabled Oxford life.

It is more actual than that. Resolved not to be inebriated by the old concoction of dreaming spires and magic summers, one might be. Yet, during a Trinity term such as this year's it would have required an iron-clad philistinism not to be penetrated by the insistent beauty: Magdalen tower beyond Merton Street's pink and white eigthteenth-century houses; the blazing afternoons when spotted flycatchers hawked under the limes around tutorials in shirt- sleeved Socratic groups: the long rose- drugged evenings when the cow-parsley was a vivid cream against the jade of the Cher- well groves: the fortress solidity of the quadrangle, a wanly lamp-lit crater in a Sea of Tranquillity after dark.

If the 'unreality' needed countering, a refresher course in reality was only two minutes away at Carfax, where, in a fog of fumes, lorries and ow workers' cars locked like stags' antlers, heaving an inch one way, then the other, tyre rubber burning on the tarmac between the chromium chain-stores. This is the greater Oxford - created. largely, by the cupidity of the colleges, which as late as the 'twenties could in Convocation have put down the imprimatur for a busy, but balanced and livable, university city.

Instead they cashed in on property sales which transformed all outside the univer- sity purlieu into a standardised smear of factory subtopia. How grievous, that change.

Back, for the time left, to the fragment of fantasy, preserved in the amber of sum- mer.