The Day Gone By (32 page)

One hot summer night in July, a few days before the end of term, I was lying in bed in my ‘single' (senior boys had single rooms) when the door opened quietly and a low voice said ‘Adams, are you awake?'

It was Michael Paine. What on earth? I thought. It was out of the question that Paine, of all people, could come to another boy's single for sexual reasons.

‘Yes,' I replied in some apprehension.

‘Then let me congratulate you,' said Paine, ‘on being awarded your house tie. Good night.' And with this he shut the door and departed.

The award of a house tie at Bradfield was nothing to do with seniority or with being a prefect. A prefect did not automatically merit it. In fact, only a minority of boys who became prefects were awarded their house ties. Conversely, it was possible, though rare, for someone not a prefect to be awarded it. Prefect or not, you had to have distinguished yourself outstandingly at work or games or both. I seem to recall that Martin Ryle, later Sir Martin Ryle, the great astronomer, had the award before he was a prefect. The tie was in no sense a consolation prize for not being a prefect. In fact, as I have explained, in a certain sense it was more illustrious than being a prefect. I rather think that at this time there were only about four in the Close (including Paine, of course).

I wonder who exactly was behind this? I have never known. Did Paine persuade the housemaster, or did the housemaster himself undergo some change of heart? Subjective reactions are strange. Little in my life has given me more pleasure and satisfaction. I still have the tie and sometimes wear it when I go to Bradfield.

I must be fair to Mr Arnold. Before I left he spoke warmly and kindly to me, and he wrote nice things on my final school report. Poor chap, he was trying to do his best, I expect, and conscious that he'd got the job only because of his wife's pull with the Headmaster. Well, he was lucky in one respect: he got what Pallas Athene promised Odysseus. ‘From the sea shall thy death come, the gentlest death that may be.' He was fond of sailing, and often went to the Channel Islands. One day his boat - ship - whatever it was — was anchored a little way out, and he was rowing ashore in the dinghy. As the dinghy glided up to the quay it could be seen that all was not well. The housemaster sat dead at the oars.

Munich. The name resonates, a name of unease, foreboding and, retrospectively, shame. What can I add to all that has been said on the subject of those terrible days during the high summer of 1938? Only this: that whoever you were, business-man, bobby or bootblack, it came piercing into your personal life like no other occurrence for nearly twenty years past. There was going to be a war: there wasn't going to be a war: there was. The news obliterated everyone's personal preoccupations, rolling over them like a fog. It was like driving along an open road and suddenly coming upon a terrible accident, with flashing lights and peremptory policemen.

I was only eighteen, but old enough, when Mr Chamberlain came back to London waving his piece of paper, to feel two things. The first was that while he was clearly fooling himself, he didn't fool me and he didn't fool a lot of other people. It was too good to be true. Did he really suppose that Hitler, after taking the Rhineland, Austria and now the Sudeten areas, was going to stop at that? If he did, he could only be the victim of wishful thinking. I remember laughing bitterly at the cartoonist David Low's summary: ‘The Führer gave his solemn promise that there would be no further trouble until next time.'

The second was that I felt ashamed. I had been brought up to feel pride in Britain - in the British Empire. Britannia ruled the waves. No one could dictate to Britain. But now they had. Underneath all the waffle about ‘negotiations' remained the fact that Hitler had demanded, with threats, the Sudeten areas. We had begun by saying ‘No' and had ended by saying ‘Oh, all right'. And we had sold Czechoslovakia, a country which
had
been ready to fight. We had sold them without any representative of theirs being present. Of course, I had no reliable knowledge - no one had, really — about our preparedness for war. Even today, people are still arguing about whether or not we could practicably have gone to war in 1938. But I believe that if we had felt sufficient determination, we probably could. The main reason why we didn't was an imponderable: we didn't want to, we weren't in the right collective state of mind, and everyone over thirty or thirty-five had memories they couldn't bear to face, of the Great War of 1914-18.

All the same, after Munich everyone felt virtually certain that there
was
going to be a war. The only question was when and how it would start. Hitler's taking over of the whole of Czechoslovakia early in the following year should, as far as our honour was concerned, have been the
casus belli.
All it seemed to give rise to, however (as a friend of mine remarked), was a lot of casus belli-aching by Mr Chamberlain. He had been made to look a fool. His piece of paper was worthless, his credibility gone. All his defenders could say now was ‘Well, 'e done ‘is best, didn't he?'

I remember someone writing of the American Confederacy of 1861-65 that its whole life was war. The whole period of my life
in statu pupillari
at Oxford was passed in preparing for war, in war itself or in its exhausted, threadbare aftermath. This certainly made unique - each in its own way - the two periods of time, before mobilization and after demobilization, that I spent as an undergraduate.

When I went up to Worcester in October 1938, the life of an Oxford undergraduate, even a relatively impecunious one like me, resembled that of Evelyn Waugh and not that of Philip Larkin or Kingsley Amis. It must be hard for a modern undergraduate to imagine. You were required to have your own silver and glass, for you were going to do a lot of eating and entertaining in your own rooms. During the two winter terms, Michaelmas and Hilary, you had a coal fire in your sitting-room as a matter of course, and it was part of your scout's job to bring up the coal. In the mornings, round about quarter to eight or half past seven, your scout would enter your sitting-room, clear out the dead fireplace, lay a new fire and light it. Then he would lay the table for breakfast and boil the electric kettle. After this he would carry in a can of hot water, enter your bedroom and wake you (if you needed waking). He would put the can in your wash-basin and cover it with a towel. While you were getting up he would go down to the kitchen and bring up your breakfast under a dish-cover; eggs and bacon, kippers or whatever you fancied, together with toast and all the milk you reckoned you would need for the day. This concluded the proceedings for the time being, but later on in the morning he would ‘do' your room, make the bed and empty your overnight piss-pot. Similarly, you had lunch brought up to your rooms - whatever you ordered - while tea - crumpets, anchovy toast, cucumber sandwiches, cake, biscuits, etc. - you ordered on a prepared slip of paper: and that lot was brought up, too.

Dinner was in hall; and if I remember correctly, you had to dine in hall a minimum of four evenings a week. For this, of course, everyone wore gowns. The scholars sat at their own table, just below the dons' high table on its dais. Each scholar, in rotation, had a week of reading grace before everyone sat down. The grace was in Latin and of considerable length. I have it by heart and can repeat it now. The scholar who read grace for the week also had the duty of reading the lesson during the short daily service in chapel at 8.15. (You had either to attend chapel or else answer morning roll-call in one of the lecture-rooms for a minimum of four mornings a week. You also had to attend one service in chapel on Sundays.)

Dinner consisted of four courses - soup (or fish), meat, pudding and a savoury. To drink you could order anything you liked (charged to your battels) but for some reason no one ever ordered wine. Nearly everyone drank beer, though a few drank stout or cider. These were served in the beautiful College silver tankards, dated either 1715 or 1745.

The custom of ‘sconcing' was honoured very much in the observance and not often in the breach. Certain offences were ‘sconceable': being improperly dressed, mentioning a living woman by name, using bad language (e.g., ‘damn' or ‘bloody'), singing, or speaking more than three consecutive words in a foreign language. The decision whether or not a man should be sconced lay with the senior member of the table. A sconce, or lidded silver tankard, held three pints. It could be filled with anything the culprit liked - almost always beer - and was charged to him. He drank as much as he wanted and having done so, passed the sconce to his left. The next man then drank likewise, and so on until the sconce was empty, whereupon the lid was closed. Very occasionally, the culprit might ‘floor' the sconce, i.e., drink the lot at one go, and if he did, it was chargeable to the man who had sconced him. I saw it done only twice.

‘Do well at Worcester, Adams. It's a nice place: you'd like it.' I did, from the start. Apart from having your own money to spend (I had £10 per eight-week term) and going to bed (or not) whenever you liked, the first thing that filled me with a rush of surprised, unexpected delight was that everyone — to put it simply - was nice. Gone were the boors and morons up with whom,
inter alios,
one had had to put at Bradfield. Here, everybody seemed to like, or at least to respect, Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt and Co., and was ready to talk about them all night if you liked. Some writers about Oxford, e.g., Evelyn Waugh and John Wain, have laid it on thick about the bullying and wrecking ways of the hearty set, but although I can remember a few people at Worcester who might be thought of as a bit philistine, I recall them only as being very likeable in their own way and never doing anything rough or violent at all. Everyone seemed quite ready for your company, and to dislike anybody was simply not done. Within the first day or two there was a stream of callers to my rooms. ‘Do you row/play football/fives/squash/tennis/golf/hockey?' ‘Would you care to join the Conservative Club/Labour Club/Liberal Club?' ‘Are you interested in Eastern mysticism, classics, music, poetry, jazz, archaeology, birds?' There was a society for everything, and to join it you didn't have to be any good.

Apart from societies and their organized activity, people were always in and out of one another's rooms. You could drop in on anyone you knew and unless he was working he was always glad to see you. Tea would be made and conversation pursued. Groups of friends would sit up half the night, discussing, arguing or listening to music. Mostly, people found their ‘set' and lived in it, but the society was fluid and a common interest was enough to make a friend. The big difference from a public school - apart from the circumstance that we were all a little older - was that everyone
wanted
to be up at Oxford and found the easy, unregimented life most congenial. In a word, everyone was happy. I have always gone along with Max Beerbohm's witticism: ‘A university is a place where all the nonsense that was knocked out of you at school is gently put back in again.'

So far as girls were concerned, we saw none or few. All the colleges, except the four women's colleges, were exclusively male. Most people didn't bother themselves about girls, and for those who did (such as myself) it was a stony and difficult road. One way or another you could probably, if you wanted to, get to know one or more girls in the women's colleges: I, for example, was able to invite round to tea a rather beautiful White Russian girl whom my sister had taught when she was at the Frances Holland. Natalia might have proved a good thing, since she was more emancipated and less conventional than the average female student of the day. However, she showed herself rather too much emancipated for my purposes, since she proved to be in love with someone who wasn't at Oxford at all, and after one term went down and married him.

I became acquainted with one or two other girl students, but it was clear enough that sex was something they simply didn't want to know about. In those days, it was out of the question for any respectable girl to go in for sex with anybody to whom she was not married or at least engaged. You might just possibly achieve an exception to this rule (that was why you kept trying), but if you did, the girl would almost certainly start pressing you to marry her, and if you refused break off the relationship. I personally never knew of any ‘affairs' (as they were called) involving sex (my own or those of friends) which didn't end, sooner or later, in recrimination and regret on the part of the girl (unless they ended in marriage). I suspect (in the face of assurances to the contrary) that in a lot of cases things may not be all that different now.

The rules applicable to girl students were strict. All female visitors had to be out of College by seven in the evening, and had to be in their own colleges by eleven, unless they had special leave, which was not lightly granted. As far as we ourselves were concerned, if your scout found your bed unslept-in, he was supposed to report you to the authorities. What happened then I don't know, for I never came across a case myself.

The set-up regarding pubs. was a strange one. The rule was that no undergraduate was allowed to drink on licensed premises. This meant all pubs. as well as the bars of hotels. In practice, of course, we all did go to pubs., and this was where the proctors came in. The proctors were dons of the university, serving in rotation in this disciplinary capacity. In academic dress - dark suits, white tie, flowing gown and mortar-board hat - they perambulated the city in the evenings, accompanied by ‘bulldogs' - two bulldogs per proctor. The bulldogs were selected from among the younger and fitter college servants. On duty they wore dark lounge suits and bowler hats.

When the proctorial team got to a pub. or bar that they were going to raid, the proctor would stand outside and the bulldogs would go in. If they saw one or more people, recognizably undergraduates, drinking, a bulldog would approach and ask courteously ‘Are you a member of this university, sir?'