UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

Don Jan

By G. F. MAGEE (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)

jANALI was brought up in the twelfth century among the mountains of Western Persia, and came to Oxford in 194- to study agriculture. The dates are not entirely fantasy: he was born eldest son to the chief of a nomad tribe, khan of 300,000 souls and of a territory half the size of England. The only British upbringing to which his can be compared is that of a twelfth-century feudal baron. If there was one thing that Janali took more pride in than his own origin it was in giving an epic account of it to an audience whose origins were strictly twentieth century. As the rest of us could not compete as autobiographers or autobio- graphees, we listened.

The first chapter was fantasy, the second was Arcadian fable. Until he was eleven, his mother and her women had charge of Janali. They pampered him and made him the little khan of their tents. He in turn made himself a tyrant to the spinners and weavers, the milkers of flocks and grinders of corn—in fact, to all the women, who were half the wealth as well as half the numbers of the tribe. His haughtiness was guarded by the women from all restraint. He could waste and obstruct and destroy as he pleased, because always there was the sanctuary of his mother's tent, where he felt completely safe, like a voluntary prisoner in a world remote from that of men. " Another world " was often Janali's phrase for the tents of the women—never ruled by the male except when, as a child, he yapped like a pup at a smother of affectionate protectors.

The third chapter was like a Western film. The little Big Chief, banished from his comfortable kingdom, had to fight his way in the world outside. The rule was stern ; he learnt to shoot with a rifle as long as himself, to mount a nervous, frightening horse and, on migration, to ride with the men instead of following with the women. When the tribe was on the move the men might find themselves in a tight spot where hard riding and straight shooting were something more than princely attainments. Nomads, Janali explained, were outlaws. The Government aspired to Western ideals that left no place for such an Oriental anachronism. As yet the tribe had had the better of their occasional skirmishes with the Army ; but if worsted they could expect them to grow into a full-scale campaign. For Janali it was a choice of migration as a prince or settlement as a townsman. He preferred to be a prince.

The greatest surprise that Oxford and the twentieth century gave Janali (apart from the nickname Jan, which meant darling in his own language) was the mixing of the world of women with the world of men. He had seen this already in Tehran, the Westernised capital of his country, but had deduced that, for women, emancipa- tion meant giving up a world of their own and becoming a dccora- tion in that of men. A degradation regarded in Europe as typically Oriental appeared to Janali and his people as an import to Persian cities from the West. But the European idea that the mixing of the two worlds is a means for women's promotion rather than their degradation gave Janali a number of shocks. At the same time, he began to wonder what it would be like to fall in love, an exercise for which he had no opportunity at home. And in the spring, when at home admiration was going out to the flourishing of brides and lambs and almond blossom, he found out. Jeanette, quite un- intentionally, hooked him at one cast: "Jan and Jeanette—they sound nice together, don't they ? " He fell in love with this charm. A difficulty arose when he was persuaded that he wanted to marry Jeanette. It was not his family ; they would have nothing to do with a foreign wife, but they could not discourage Janali from becoming a married member of British society. Nor was it the thought of leaving himself penniless ; he realised that if he did not abdicate he would be ejected sooner or later by the Government. But how could he earn his living ? He was fitted for nothing but riding, shooting and ungrammatical narration.

" That's all right," said Jeanette. "I should have been holding on to my job in the Research Department in any case. I can keep us both while you carry on with your studies at home. You can make some of those wonderful rice dishes you've told me about." This arrangement struck Janali as quite perverted. That Jeanette should labour in the fields, even intellectual fields, while he stayed at home and cooked would be as exact a reversal of the worlds of men and women as if the pair of them should exchange clothes. Jeanette showed' him that a similar arrangement was common among their married friends ; she, argued ; she even made him read

books—Beatrice Webb's My Apprenticeship and Virginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own. But Janali could not see her side of the

question. For him there was a male world and a female world that differed not in degree but in kind, and that depended on one another for help. " Everybody depends," he said.

But afterwards Jeanette was jettisoned, and at Christmas I asked Janali home to Northern Ireland. "To that last backwater of the sanctimonious commercialism of the nineteenth century' ? " he quoted from Jeanette's Beatrice Webb. Strangely, it was whatever remained of the nineteenth century that appealed to Janali in Northern Ireland—perhaps because it was a step nearer his home in the twelfth. The men, he thought, were like his own people in their consciousness of family prestige ; the women appeared to accept the convention that the manufacture of homes was the only industry proper for them ; the worlds of men and women were once more distinct. Janali was elated and spent much of hii holiday visiting the world of a lovely Alison. In the " sanctimonious backwater " Alison's family had sunk to genteel decay. Alison typed in order to keep a crippled mother, and Janali had a nostalgic pleasure from this filial dutifulness. She could not leave her mother alone in the house, but he lightened the winter gloom with his talk of things outside

In the spring, when the tribe started to migrate towards summer pasture, Alison had a week's holiday, which she spent in Oxford at Janali's invitation. It was her first experience of freedom and England, and she commemorated the event by blossoming even more beautifully than she had done before. Janali had his second pro- posal of marriage accepted. Where to live was the question. Alison had had twenty-two years at home and one week of freedom ; she wanted to live in England and go to work that they might be more able to support her mother. Janali, on the other hand, wished nothing better than to stay in the garden where he had discovered his flower. He was more than willing to accept the mother's offer of the family home, and to keep mother and daughter in that state of decayed gentility to which they were accustomed.

" Mother will have an old-age allowance, so that if we pay for a companion she will be quite comfortable," Alison objected. But that meant moving her into a smaller house and so the end of both family prestige and home. " I don't see that it matters if we never go back home," said Alison in distress.

" Why, it's-as bad as becoming a villager."

Alison did not understand. Janali, apparently, had never been a poor slavey. " I want to live my own life while I'm young ; I have a right to. And the Government looks after old people nowadays— "

"The Government! You talk about the Government as if it was another world. I don't want to have things done for me by the Government. It's like being back in the tents of the women. like being a little boy."

" You and your villages and tents," wept Alison. " Haven't you ever heard— ? "

But that was the end of the spring. And what Janali had heard was more bad news ; the April migration had been held up by Government troops, so that his people were starving and their flocks dying in the plains where they had spent the winter. Janali felt himself to be a big failure, at his studies, with his Alison and in " living his own life." Perhaps he should be back at home where there was even bigger failure in the worlds of women and men. He packed up and went.

It was indeed a great failure. At Christmas-time a paragraph on affairs in the Middle East told of the end of a tribal war and the death of an infamous bandit.