UNDERGRADUATE ARTICLE
Aftermath
THE door was opened by Nicholas. He was six. " I'm looking for Miss Self," I said. " Is this No. 63 ? " Oh, I suppose you mean Jackie," replied Nicholas condescendingly. Five minutes later I was pacing sternly up and down a toy-littered nursery, reading to Anthony, aged four. ' ... And. then Piglet did a Noble Thing ... " I heard myself declaiming, while to my consternation Jackie dissolved in giggles and hastily left the room, leaving Anthony staring pop- eyed at me. But I carried on until, just as we were getting really immersed in Eeyore's search for the Wolery, there was a gargantuan rumble of thunder. I looked at the window and it was blind with rain. The sky was grey and leaves were scuttering over the lawn. Then I realised how strange it was, and how typical of Oxford at the end of term, that only five minutes after I had been wandering aimlessly down the sunlit High, I should find myself reading Winnie-the-Pooh in a thunderstorm to the children of the Vice-President of Magdalen. And the thunder- clouds seemed so very appropriate, for this was the end of my three years at Oxford. So I stared miserably through the rain, while the wind tore the red roses from their stalks and Anthony played with his woolly bear. The thunder bellowed, the evening darkened into storm, and I realised with horror that for the first time I was in the grip of black, sickening nostalgia. It was no use trying to evade it. As my eye automatically followed the raindrops running down the pane I remembered my Final Schools and thinking five minutes before the first paper how like the start of a steeplechase it was. The vast, marble-floored lobby was crowded with candidates, their intensely individual anxieties masked by the uniform correct- ness of sub-fuse : the men very formal in white bow ties and dark suits, the women very attractive in black stockings and skirts, with white blouses and black bows tied at the throat. All wore cap and gown, some wore a carnation or a rose. And with four minutes to go we were each privately convinced that for us, and for us alone, all was lost. A bell shrilled and we surged forward. False alarm. Three minutes to go. " My God, when was Magna Charta ? " Two minutes to go. And the final bells ring before we are ready and the clerks shout and the steel gates across the passages are swung back, and we stumble hurriedly, nervously, along the corridors and round the corners and up the stairs to the examination rooms. We walk fast, very fast—the three-hour paper has officially begun and we have yet to find the right room and the right desk. While some of us search frantically, others have already glanced down the list of questions, found not a single one that they can do, prayed desperately that the questions on the back are better, taken a deep breath, and turned over to find that there are no questions on the back. A heavy, heavy silence settles. Schools have begun. ,. When three years' work. has to be examined in eleven three- hour papers over seven days, to be followed a month later by a viva-voce examination on what you have, or have not, written, the strain is unforgettable. There are always break- downs. A girl was led out sobbing. A man fainted. The desk next to mine was ominously empty one morning. And those who had done no work drove themselves fanatically, working through the night on black coffee, glucose, drugs, even coming in half an hour late for every paper—preferring to be white-faced and crying for sleep in the morning than to have slept and done no revision. We took comfort from the similarity of our sub-fuse. We laughed at the dandy who remarked with pleased surprise, " But, my dear, how fashionable—why, positively everybody's here." We enjoyed the awed looks of others, and just as Charles I wore two shirts for his execution so that he should not tremble from the cold and be thought afraid, so we-wore white carnations and walked with ostentatious unconcern. Schools, even Schools—the nightmare that lived with us for three years and whose reality proved worse than the dream— even Schools in retrospect seemed stimulating, memorable, almost enjoyable. And how much more was this true of all my other memories. How much more did it hurt to know that soon I would forget the very taste and smell and sound of Oxford. Never again would it be possible, either to do nothing for a whole day, or on the other hand to miss break- fast, correct magazine proofs over coffee while talking politics to a Jew, go to hear Lord David Cecil lecture, or Mr. Alan Bullock, or Mr. Asa, Briggs, have lunch in a snack; with a published poet, tea in Balliol with an adopted politician, invite an American to dinner in Worcester; go to a party in, the cellar of St. Anthony's and then to a Debate in the Union; meet a Cabinet Minister, a Malayan barrister, a girl from Girton; sit up all night over Clausewitz's theory of War, and end the day by once again missing breakfast because my essay had to be ready for my Tutor at ten. Never again would I be able to spend a morning in either the jostling, intimate, caf6- confusion of the Kemp, or the echoing silences of the Radcliffe Camera. Never again would I be able to occupy an evening with Green Chartreuse, " Citizen Kane," Chartism, and fried whelks. " Never again . . . ," surely these were the cruellest words in the world. And all at once, out of the kaleidoscope of the last three years, against a background of Colleges, river, and red roaring traffic, at first elusively and then in a swift rush of bitter-sweet recollection, came the faces and the voices and the incidents that had really meant Oxford to me. Like most imperishable memories they were snapshots of detail. A girl's bare white feet, clinging to the snow-covered railings of Somerville at three in the morning; the dazed face of a member of the Union Standing Comthittee, later President, after he had broken down in a big speech; the steep climb up a rickety iron ladder to the roof of St. Mary's on May Morning, followed by a sudden overwhelming view of Oxford. Pink ices in Bights Week, the home-truths of Collections in Hall at the end of term, Commemoration Balls with long lines of baby candles twinkling along the edges of the lawns. The girl I took to a Commem, who had such lovely brown eyes, and who, when, the straps began to hurt, kicked her slippers high in the air above the lawn and watched them fall in a curving glitter of gold. There were so many memories—tries seen against the floodlighting in St. Giles; endless, all-night conversations over the accumulating coffee-cups; vividly remembered faces which laughed and frowned and smiled . . . The door slammed behind me and •I jumped. " Whatever are you doing ? " asked Jackie. My eyes were still watching the rain running down the window, the thunder was directly overhead, the roses had been ripped to shreds. But my nostalgia had gone. Like most moods and emotions it had been overwhelming and quite unreliable. Like all nostalgia, it had made me hunger after false romantic memories. Later I would be cold and objective and appraising. later I would remember the mistakes I had made and the times I had been weak, the empty shabby days of depression and failure, the shadows thrown by the bright lights. But by then I would be older, I would have changed, I would no longer be able to remember what it felt like to be twenty-one and up at Oxford, I would know that I was craving for a past that had never really existed. Nostalgia ? Nonsense. I was glad, to be going down. But whether I was down or whether I was up, there was no point in not making the best of the present. And I picked up Winnie-the-Pooh from the floor, and Anthony .was told to sit still and listen, and Jackie did her best to keep •a straight face, while once again Eeyore and I began our search for the Wolery.
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