Sex in Oxford

By DOM MORAES

MLIE towery city was misty between towers.

1 The young men in the quadrangle imitated polar bears: they were swathed in parkas, and a Nigerian, no doubt feeling the cold more than the rest, had furnished himself with a radiant blonde as well. My host tapped out his pipe and consulted his watch. His eyes were on the young woman, but I had misconstrued his motive: 'It's a bit early,' be said querulously, 'for a woman to be in college.'

'But it's nearly lunch-time.'

'They're not supposed to come in till after. Ah, well. What was I saying? Yes: the university doesn't disapprove of an undergraduate having a sex life.'

It was a curious remark, but apropos, since I had just asked him about the recent kerfuffle in Oxford, when Worcester rusticated a young American who was discovered by his scout. one morning, to have a girl in his cupboard. The popular press had taken the matter up joyfully, and for a while undergraduates, apparently pre- ferring chic to comfort, threw cupboard partieS, in which couples conversed. drank and did whatever else the proctors permitted them, while seated inside these useful articles of furniture.

The tumult and the shouting had now died: but a recurring murmur of unrest is still audible amongst the undergraduates. Strangely enough (and this reflects the change in Oxford since the Waugh years when Christ Church men in Daimlers took leopards to lunch at the George) the protest is largely about the fact that the rusticated American had already paid his fees for his rudely interrupted term: 'He hasn't,' said an undergraduate in the Randolph bar, 'had his money's worth.'

Having listened to the undergraduates, I had come to my friend, the don, to find out what the authorities felt about the matter.

'We feel,' he said, in an inexorable lecture- like way, 'as Graham Midgley* said in his sermon, that this is a Christian university, and undergraduates ought to conform to the Chris, tian ethic. We cannot have them—ah—fornicat- ing all over the place. But it's a matter for their own consciences. We do not interfere.'

'It seems to me a very dubious idea,' I said. 'That this is a Christian university, I mean.'

'Humph,' said my friend.

It is true that the university doesn't, accord- ing to the proctors' memorandum to under- graduates, have any actual ruling about sex. However, 'conduct liable to bring the name of the university or any of its members into dis- repute is a serious offence,' says the memoran- dum, and an uninhibited sex life could, I suppose, constitute such conduct. But the fact is that cases of undergraduates being sent down for sexual misconduct are extremely rare (the proof being the fuss made of each one by the popular press).

The statute under which the young American was rusticated had nothing to do with sex as such, or that is what the dons say: he was rusticated for breaking the college rule that women should not be in a man's room after ten p.m. or before ten a.m.

But it isn't true that the university doesn't interfere with the sex lives of undergraduates. Quite obviously the authorities cannot cheer the young lovers on, but they are by no means neutral.

For Instance, undergraduates are not allowed to have locks on their doors. There can be * Dr. Midgley is Dean of St. Edmund Hall.

only one reason for this, apart from kindness to petty thieves. The absence of a lock not only permits the scout or the Junior Dean to pop into the bedroom in the small hours, it also paves the way, during the day, for the multi- tude of uninvited visitors whose constant arrivals teach the Oxford undergraduate the virtues of patience and that savoir-faire for which I be- lieve he is known outside the city. While savoir- faire can be maintained in the face of a stream of acquaintances, of course, love cannot. But it tends to find out a way. A case much talked of in my day was that of a young man (who was not only connected with the university theatre but adored women, a rare combination in Oxford) who, having smuggled a girl into his rooms in college, proceeded to live there with her for several weeks. Inevitably, he was found out: but though all lesser evasions of the law pall before this, it is, if not easy, not unduly difficult to arrange for female company over- night in most colleges.

Mine, for instance, had three gates. The main one opened into the lodge, where an unbribable porter memorised all women who came into college after dusk. But there were also two side gates, which were closed at 8 p.m. and opened at 8 a.m. At 7.30 p.m., therefore, the young lover, having previously purchased enough food and alcohol to last the night, ushered his lady in through a side gate and got her, unobserved, to his roams. Here they dined d deux, in what was necessarily, in case anybody came by, near- darkness: candlelight and conspiracy are ele- ments many have striven for to get an affair off to a flying start, and at Oxford they were provided, so to speak, by the authorities.

The next hurdle was, of course, the morning, unless the lady was willing to climb out of college in the dark over a barrier of rotating spikes, scarcely a fitting end to a romantic pas- sage. The scout tended to invade the bedroom at dawn, with atrocious jokes and a cup of tea. The answer was that the young lover drooped out to intercept him with an account of an epic hangover, thus ensuring that the scout didn't come in. Thereafter he invited two friends who lived nearby to coffee, and then produced the girl, by this time fully clad. The side gates were now open, which meant that hypotheti- cally she could have entered college unremarked by the porter. An intruding official would only have been able to find the undergraduate guilty of a very minor infraction of college rules.

If the girl was unwilling to put up with all this, an understandable reaction, or if she was herself an undergraduate compelled to return to her own rooms by a certain time, there was another solution: which led, as somebody ex- plained tq me, to the curtains of several bed- room windows in women's colleges being drawn for some hours in the early afternoon.

One verifiable fact is that sex, like the sea, obeys no orders, and when the university assumes the posture of Canute it becomes both ludicrous and wet. If the authorities are as neutral as they say they are about the sex lives of under- graduates, they should have taken a, different course in the case of the young American: they should have fined him for a breach of college regulations and left it at that. Otherwise they will take on the air of rather bigoted cstriches, or come to resemble the woman undergraduate whom I asked about her reaction to recent events. 'Why have you come to Oxford to write about sex?' she asked, and turning her large, beautiful, mirror-like eyes round the pub filled with (ad- mittedly rather horrible) young men from Christ Church, she said sadly, 'Sex is dead.'