Parson's Displeasure
John Wain
The Cherwell is a pleasant river, flowing down towards Oxford through placid farming country to the north. It doesn't take on much volume of water until, at Islip, it is joined by the little River Ray, which comes across the green silent solitude of Otmoor. Thereafter, it gathers presence until as it enters Oxford and flows, for ex- ample, through the Parks it is a strong, characterful stream twenty to thirty feet wide. That is its moment of glory. Before it joins the Thames at the corner of Christ Church Meadow, the Cherwell is converted by engineering into two streams, one at its original height, the other considerably lower. The pleasant tree-lined path between them is called Mesopotamia.
No one who has spent any time in Ox- ford, on a BA, a Summer School or even a weekend course, can have failed to walk along Mesopotamia and to enjoy the banks of the Cherwell northward through the Parks and southward under Magdalen Bridge and past the Botanical Gardens. And in my youth it would also have been true to say that no one, at any rate of the male gender, had failed to take a swim at Parson's Pleasure.
Parson's Pleasure was situated exactly at the point where the river divides into two • streams. It had a row of simple cubicles and two or three metal ladders going down into the water. (Anybody who bathes in rivers knows that getting in from the bank, and worse still getting up on to the bank, are the least pleasant features of the experience.) On the landward side it was screened by a high corrugated-iron fence, painted green so as not to clash with the bosky surroun- dings; on the river side, upstream, it had a
large timber screen round which boats had to zig-zag. It was impossible to enter Par' son's Pleasure by accident. And large notices proclaiming 'NO LADIES' gave the explanation. It was where the men bathed' all summer long, without troubling to we'le costumes. I put all this in the past tense; although Parson's Pleasure is still there, it hhai; nowadays, a flavour of the irrecovere'd past and of decline. One day last Au to went there for a swim myself, as 115ed .re do as an undergraduate, but I did so Me.„' to gather material for these notes that' because I really wanted to. As an inst111 tion, a pleasant minor characteristic of dot ford life, it has fallen on dark and seas days. The timber screen across the river 1/,, fallen down, leaving only a few folic" stakes in the water. And on the downstream side, the green iron fence displays Prby minently the words, savagely scrawl SEX the aerosol of righteous indignation, •S'
1ST POSEURS'.
The indignation is, of course, feminist in origin. As a lifelong believer in equal (11''in. for women, horrified at the tale of rheed justices and insults they have endTbe through the centuries, I suppose I mu nog' prepared for the pendulum to swing, rif;at and then, too far the other way. No gam. reform, or series of reforms, was ever tied through without occasional lapses frol a sense of proportion. Nevertheless,,, mourn Parson's Pleasure. If I am the c' person alive who mourns it, I mourn it. ,e The idea of having a bathing-place University Parks is obviously a good 10; Oxford in summer becomes hot and srle„ii there are days in July and August gotil'e one's clothes feel unendurable and is thought of cool, lapping river water be delicious, even life-saving. What could_ more natural than for young men, str°1; in the park in twos and threes or Perlike having just played tennis or some the game, game, to strip off and plunge into Cherwell? In my youth, you could hir.ce towel for, I think, twopence; the cabh;f1 was convenient for your clothes; Y°13 watch and wallet were safe with ahead about; and there was no need to Plan ahead panasdtobrraiingdaayslostume. Oh, innocence! 011
Then, if a punt approached
feminine passengers the fact is that it was the chaps who did all the poling and the girls who lay back decoratively on the cushions, the girls stepped daintily ashore before the boat negotiated the screen, and walked round by the path, a distance of some fifty yards, to where they could with don't daintiness step on board again. I ,u on't recall that anyone minded or thought unnatural. Rut then came the Sixties, and of course 1.10 Sixties girl was going to get out of a punt lust because a lot of stupid men were bathing their stupid bodies in the stupid r,iver. There had been, towards the end of the Fifties, a compromise period when the girls did not get out of the punt but, as. a 01111.1.?; lay flat and looked up at the sky while siding past the relevant stretch of water. ;!:-it Your Sixties girl had to sit bolt upright iiKe a Victorian governess, and perhaps the teserriblance did not stop there. From that moment, the atmosphere of Parson's Pleasure changed. Bathing together in the nude was one of those un- selfconscious things that Victorian and Ed- wardian males were good at; not because they were all a lot of homosexuals, but ,precisely because they had not been condi- --u always to see a sexual aspect in everything. It was, of course, part of a male-dominated Oxford that I don't think I would have liked much if I had known it.
in
butt e ,lY were women very f number, t on was thought bad form et to take much notice of the few there were; so that an undergraduate who was dubbed a womaniser' might find himself debagged thrown in the lake. Obviously this was ,s111Y and repulsive. But now? Are we any lei silly? Or has the baby, once again, been hrown out with the bath-water?
To suggest that Parson's Pleasure now iattracts 'the wrong type' ulting would be grossly n
to those of my fellow-citizens who .s go there regularly. But certainly it can e observed that on a summer weekend afternoon, when punts with girl passengers me going by virtually non-stop, some of the seem to take a distinct pleasure in stan- s:ng on the bank displaying their intran- .getice. Since 'flashers' exist, one must c cinelude that this is, for a certain tPathological type, a temptation. If so, it is a eiinPtation to which the old Parson's Sweasure never subjected anyone, and erefore no one thought of it. We just wain, sunbathed and went away refreshed. wit' Parson's Pleasure closes down, Oxford n have lost a priceless amenity. Since it is the University Parks, it is, I suppose, ad- ministered by the Curators. What ought they to do? Decree that in future costumes "Mist be worn? that would take the, so to r)eak, heat out of the situation but would he be a denial of the original purpose of tt„ Place, which was casual and tigeer.emonious. What else? My own solu- h°4 .1s that they should keep it as a naked seathing-place but throw it open to both plNes. If the girls really resent Parson's c,easure, let them come and swim there. I "n assure them it's very pleasant.
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