Not a city of dreaming spires but bare ruined choirs
Last weekend in Oxford I realised with a pang that another summer had gone. ‘It is typical of Oxford,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh, ‘to start the new year in autumn. Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot, and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.’ Or 50 years? It is now nearly half a century since I ‘went up’, and I am still finding new charms in this ancient place. Behind the Quaker Meeting House in St Giles, for instance, there is a delightful garden: ancient trees, low shrubs, tended lawn, unusual flowers in bloom, and evidence of a fine eye for proportion. I had just come from a charming exhibition of botanical paintings at the Ashmolean, and studied the vegetation with a new enthusiasm. What incredible artistry there is in a single blossom as it displays itself in season, shyly like a virgin, truly a jeune fille en fleur.
There are many such gardens hidden away behind high stone walls. I wandered down a little lane, which led me behind St John’s College, where I used to go to murky lectures on some impenetrable aspect of mediaeval ecclesiastical history by the college’s formidable head, Austin Lane Poole. Was it he who said, ‘Lady undergraduates are permitted here but not welcome’? Today he would be hauled off to Oxford jail for that. The rain, which had been falling in torrents, diminished to a mere sprinkle, and I peered into a magic garden whose elaborate castiron gates stood invitingly open. An old man, tending his first bonfire of the year lovingly, said, ‘You are not supposed to come in here, sir, but please do, and enjoy what we have to show. I have tended this garden for 40 years.’ I commended a giant beech tree, and he said, ‘Under that tree once sat Cecil Rhodes.’ ‘But this is not Rhodes House.’ He laughed: ‘I should say not.’ Wandering in these Oxford back purlieus, I encountered no tourists. Their coaches are ubiquitous in the main Oxford arteries, but they dare not venture into the alleys, just as they avoid all the minor canals in Venice, fearing to get lost. I inspected yet another private garden, and sat on a damp bench, hoping to do a quick watercolour sketch of a dark doorway swathed in Gothic fantasygargoyles, but a sudden flurry of enormous raindrops drove me on. In my experience, the underbellies of Oxford colleges and other public buildings abound in unusual notices, remarkable for their obscurity and unexpected vocabulary. I found one or two: ‘No entrance here. Proceed further.’ This would have delighted Wittgenstein, and even Heidegger. Deeper in the labyrinth was this: ‘The tethering of bicycles to these railings has become habitual and must be discontinued.’ I also liked this display of diaconal authority: ‘Bill Posting and other depredations are forbidden. Perpetrators will be prosecuted. By Order of the Dean.’ Oxford gardens delight in minatory notices. All the same, they have witnessed curious events. In 1825 Frederick Madden recorded in his Diary: [Mr Young] told me he had been in St John’s Gardens, the most beautiful spot in Oxford, and had witnessed a curious scene about one o’clock in the day, namely in a sly corner he surprised one of the very revd Fellows of — college in flagrante delicto with Miss Brown, eldest daughter of the Rev. Proctor! So much for Oxford morals! He said the man was old enough to be her father, and the girl a very pretty, fair creature! Oh, shame! The old fellow buttoned up his inexpressibles and set off with his inamorata to Trinity gardens, where he probably renewed his games.
I’m not sure I believe this story. Last week I looked around the gardens in both St John’s and Trinity and could find no part of them which might be termed a sly corner, let alone one containing an elderly don deflowering the proctor’s daughter — just puddles, sodden foliage and wet dogs. If the story had got around, the don would have lost his fellowship. As recently as the 1930s a fellow of Balliol was so punished for being caught in flagrante ‘on college premises’, the place rather than the act being determinant. J.B.S. Haldane was dismissed in 1925 from a readership in biochemistry for being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case. But that was in Cambridge, a rather stricter place, where one don lost his job merely because his college servant found contraceptives in his rooms and reported it.
Reflecting thus, I reached Longwall and the walls of my old college, Magdalen. I noticed that the spikes which, 50 years ago, were placed halfway up the lamp standards to stop undergraduates swarming up them and so climbing the wall after midnight, had been removed. The spikes did not make climbing in more difficult, but easier. In fact, Magdalen was a cinch. More exacting, I found, was getting a girl in full evening dress into St Hilda’s, across the bridge. In fact I was pounced on by a policeman while so doing. But when I explained what I was up to, he not only gave me a hand but called me ‘sir’. Those were the days.
Longwall has been cleaned, and its creamy yellow stones would have glittered in the sun, had there been any. The most obvious visual change in Oxford since my time has been the cleaning of the buildings, which have ceased to be ‘grey’, as in Waugh’s 1920s, and are now a sumptuous gold. When I was up, they were not only dirty and black, they were actually crumbling before your eyes. Large flakes detached themselves and fell off. Edmund Wilson, who came on a famous visit to Oxford in the second half of the 1940s, and was pointed out to me — I was not important enough to be introduced described the condition of the Oxford stone as ‘leprous’. He was delighted, of course, hating England and the English as he did. But now all is changed. Physically, Oxford is repaired and renewed, bronzed and burnished, rich and bursting at the seams with numbers and talents. But it is also irreligious and philistine, materialist and overwhelmingly secular, with atheists and scoffers in the key jobs. The shades of Newman, Pusey and Keble haunt the bare, ruined choirs, ghostly hands raised to heaven in horror. What Oxford needs is to be born again.
Previous page
