Untold Stories (69 page)

‘You're from Yorkshire and he's from Yorkshire. You're from a state school and he's from a state school. You're reading history and he's reading history. You seem to me,' and Rector Barber gave what I took to be a smile, ‘you seem to me to be very well suited.'

So my first disappointment with Oxford was finding I was going to have to share. But the disappointment turned to consternation when I found I had been put in with someone with whom I had intermittently shared a barrack room and a bedroom for much of my two years in the army. He was amiable enough, much more so than I was (and far more convivial), but he was no more anxious to share with me than I with him. It was this depressing prospect that had emboldened me to knock on the door of the Lodgings the first day I arrived and ask to be moved.

Though a kindly enough man, Rector Barber had an air of death-in-life about him that is caught well in the Annigoni portrait, now hanging in Exeter College hall; a classicist from the age of Housman, he made even that austere figure seem jolly and certainly I got no joy that day. I came away thinking, ‘Well, I'm here for three years and that's put paid to the first year.'

It hadn't, of course, but I have to say that, though I ended up staying at Oxford not for three years but for eight, the place inspires little nostalgia. Still, it was at Oxford that I first had a room of my own.

When, in Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead
Revisited
, Charles Ryder decorates his college rooms at Oxford he puts up a reproduction of Van
Gogh's
Sunflowers
, a poster by E. McKnight Kauffer and a screen painted by Roger Fry, bought at the closing-down sale of the Omega Workshops. Later, when Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte and is exposed to a more sophisticated and idiosyncratic taste, these slightly shaming objects are put away.

They're not shaming today, of course, when both the screen and the McKnight Kauffer would be thought eminently ‘collectable'. Still, Waugh catches well the uncertainty of a young man called upon to stamp his personality on a room but who is not sure what he likes or what he should like.

For many undergraduates, though, and certainly in the mid-fifties when I went up to Oxford, the problem did not arise. In my own college, Exeter, most undergraduate rooms were papered in beige and even rooms with eighteenth-century panelling were painted an unprepossessing cream; the furniture was heavy and uncomfortable and carpets thin and violently patterned, the better to stand the strains and stains of undergraduate occupation.

Billeted in rooms that resembled a cheap boarding house in Hull, few of my contemporaries felt impelled to brighten up their surroundings or even mitigate their discomfort. It wasn't only indifference, though, that left the walls bare, so much as a shortage of anything with which to adorn them. The glimpse of light, colour and good design that was the Festival of Britain had been snuffed out and drabness was back. Even posters were in short supply and there were no shops selling cheap reproductions. Long-playing records were just coming in, however, and their covers were often colourful and well designed, sometimes with good photographs; these at least were readily accessible and several rooms that I remember had record sleeves artfully arranged around the walls.

I myself was far from indifferent to questions of decoration, and having a room that I could do up and arrange as I wanted was what made me look forward to Oxford. University to me had less to do with broadening the mind than finding a place I could call my own. I had never had a room to myself; at home I had shared with my brother, and during my two years' National Service had been in various barrack rooms. Some of this time,
though, was spent in Cambridge, which, perhaps because it boasted a School of Architecture, wasn't the design desert most provincial cities were.

At Joshua Taylor's there were pots by Lucie Rie which foolishly (and with only my army pay) I did not buy; Robert Sayle's had Isokon chairs and I didn't buy those either. The same shop did stock some hand-blocked wallpaper and though it was expensive, too, thinking of the room I was going to have I invested in a length. Few freshman undergraduates arrive at college, I imagine, with a single roll of wallpaper under their arm, but I did.

It was all to no purpose. Finding I was going to have to share meant that my precious wallpaper would have to wait. In an ideal world, I suppose we might have come to some arrangement about doing the place up together. But interior decoration was not high on my room-mate's list of priorities and so, since it was plain we were never going to be Colefax and Fowler, the wallpaper went back into the drawer.

At the time I had even less idea than Charles Ryder what it was I liked, though I didn't bother as much as he did about the impression I created, as none of my friends cared one way or the other. Exeter happened to have been the college of William Morris, and at the bottom of my staircase was a room enshrined to his memory, papered in green willow-patterned paper with his portrait over the mantelpiece along with various drawings by Burne-Jones. Together they had designed and furnished the college chapel, modelled on the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. I didn't care for it or Morris either, nor did the thick-necked women of Pre-Raphaelite portraiture much appeal. I would have liked Kelmscott had I seen it, but there was no hope of that. Too far to cycle, it was lost in the depths of the car-free countryside.

While not quite a sleepy provincial town, Oxford in 1954 was both quieter and dustier than it is today. Few college or university buildings had been restored or cleaned: the old emperors' heads around the Sheldonian were still shapeless and decayed, the stucco everywhere peeling and scrofulous. It smelled older too, some of it the smell of ancient meals in hall
and buttery, and it's this smell rather than more obvious fragrances (wallflowers, old books, cold stone) that calls the place back.

It was not until my second year that I achieved the sole occupancy of a set of rooms, under the eaves of the front quad and looking out at the back over Exeter garden and walls of the Divinity School. I could also see the towers of All Souls and the spire of St Mary's. Still, it was less the view than the interior I was interested in. I put my wallpaper up on the chimney breast and at the windows I hung long grey curtains of some shiny material which were purely for decoration because, since I was on the top floor, nobody could see in anyway. To the left of the fireplace I hung a plain gilded nineteenth-century mirror, which was falling to pieces then and is falling to pieces now where it still hangs at the top of my kitchen stairs. Below it in the photograph is a small black-and-white portrait of myself in profile. Though I am no artist, I was immensely pleased with it and mortified when it was later lost, the linen on which it was painted recycled, I've always thought, by a young painter for one of his own less distinctive efforts. I had painted a coloured portrait at the same time and this has survived. However, since I was the only subject I seemed able to tackle, I thought it was best, or at any rate healthiest, to cease production.

Also in the photograph is a red lacquer tea caddy, spotted in a junk-shop window as I was coming into Lancaster on the bus when I was about fifteen. I got off, ran back and bought it for five shillings and this, too, I still have, some dusty leaves of fifty-year-old tea a relic of that time. Next to it is a grey-and-blue mocha mug, also extant, and a Staffordshire dog which got the elbow (or the Charles Ryder treatment) sometime in the sixties. I note, too, that even I had succumbed to the lure of record sleeves – one of them, I believe, with a photograph of Prague, at that time an unvisitable place.

As a boy I felt myself a bit of an oddity for being drawn to such objects as those I now displayed on my college mantelpiece, as it was an interest unshared with any of my school friends. However, I'd been encouraged while I was in the army by reading (partly as an antidote to army life) the
Denton Welch Journals
. The standard taste of the time was for insipid Georgian, but Denton Welch was more passionate and idiosyncratic than that and had an unashamed fascination with what he could turn up in wartime junkshops about which he wrote vividly in his diaries.

Oxford was still full of such shops then, and though I never ventured into the better class of antique shop on the High Street, there were plenty of others. Down Little Clarendon Street was Kyril Bonfiglioli, a colourful character, now I think revealed as possibly a spy and certainly an accomplished detective story writer. He sold me for a few pounds a little oil sketch of an Oriental market that he thought might be by W. J. Mueller (of whom I had never heard). Years later I took it into the Fine Art Society in Bond Street, where a young man glanced briefly at it before saying kindly, ‘Ye-es. Well, Mueller painted some bad pictures, but I am afraid this is not one of them.' I've had other such humiliations down Bond Street which, in many different ways, I've come to regard as a street of shame.

I bought the supposed Mueller because it was a dark little painting with something of a glow about it and this reminded me of the glass paintings I liked at the time. Impossibly expensive today, the historical subjects,
The Death of Nelson
, for instance, or
The Trial of Queen Caroline
, were not cheap then but religious subjects could be picked up for a few pounds. Some were more votive than others – sickly depictions of the Virgin, say, or mawkish representations of the saints – but in others the strength of the colours and the primitive crudities of the style offset the, to me, slightly distasteful fact that these were in effect Stations of the Cross.

I stayed on at Oxford after I took my degree and in due course got larger rooms for which I could even buy furniture. Over Magdalen Bridge and just up the London road on the left, I bought a Victorian marble-topped chiffonier (
£
6) which is still in my kitchen today. In 1958 it had to be taken up the High Street on a handcart. The rooms I then had were at the end of Exeter's Broad Street building, my bedroom looking over the emperors to the Sheldonian and the Clarendon Building.

Where taste was concerned I never went through the Damascus-road
experience like that occasioned in Charles Ryder by Sebastian Flyte, undergraduates who already knew what they liked being quite rare. One such, though, was Brian Brindley, with whom I overlapped at Exeter and whose much-reported death occurred last year in typically spectacular fashion when he collapsed in the middle of his seventieth birthday dinner at the Athenaeum. Brian's taste was for Soane and the Gothick, and his rooms were crowded with religious images and (though I did not know the word then)
bondieuserie
.

He was an outrageous figure, kinder than he would have liked you to think, but witty, camp and a bit of a bully. He once called on me at the top of Staircase 5, the call a mark of significant social favour and like a visit from Lady Bracknell. What I had done to my rooms can't have been to his taste at all but among my sparse possessions he spotted two blue Bristol-glass dishes, liners from some long-vanished salt cellars. He begged one from me in order to use it as an incense burner, and so overawed was I by this arbiter of taste that (though it had not been cheap and they were, after all, a pair) I gave it to him. I still have its fellow, and somewhere among the exquisite clutter of his Brighton flat (for his taste had not altered a jot since he was an undergraduate) languishes, I imagine, its twin.

No other personality that I came across was as colourful as Brindley or with such pronounced tastes, though mention of Brighton recalls John Morley, who was Director of the Royal Pavilion and Museums there. He, too, was an undergraduate at Exeter, though slightly younger than me and every bit as precocious and dogmatic in his tastes as Brindley. They both drew witty and elaborate Gothick extravaganzas in the college Suggestions Book rather like ecclesiastical versions of the
Punch
cartoons of Emmett. These days I feel there would not be time for such silliness, and talents so notable would already be being turned to profit or self-promotion. Then it simply seemed fun. Half a morning could be spent elaborating some confection in the Suggestions Book that only a few undergraduates would see and smile at. It was a community as enclosed and unworldly as a medieval monastery.

After I took my degree I stayed on at Oxford to do research in medieval
history, and also taught a little. I now had rooms in Merton Street, the back looking over to the Botanic Gardens. Some of my pupils were already collectors and possessed of a good deal more expertise than I ever had. David Bindman, later Professor of Art History at University College, London, was a pupil and would show me old master drawings he had picked up for a song, and another pupil, Bevis Hillier, later the biographer of John Betjeman and writer on the arts generally, would fetch along ceramics; I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put forward. But they taught me a more useful lesson than I ever taught them, namely that my own taste was for surfaces.

I was no collector. I cared more for the look of an object than for what it was. My aim was to make a room look interesting or cosy. I didn't see paintings as art objects so much as objects in a setting, and had the unashamedly English notion of pictures as furniture. I preferred them above tables, behind flowers, say, dimly lit by lamps or even half hidden by books. I would never want a room in which a painting was spotlit; it smacks too much of a museum, or a certain sort of gallery.

It is for these reasons that almost my favourite museum is the Fitzwilliam at Cambridge. It has too much on the walls and there is furniture besides, but it adds up to just the kind of inspired clutter that has always appealed to me. When I was stationed in Cambridge in the fifties I used to go there on Saturday afternoons out of term when the museum (and the town) was virtually empty.

The first room I would head for was on the right at the head of the stairs. There were some grand pictures but they were mostly English paintings then – a portrait of Hardy by Augustus John, some Constable sketches and Camden Town paintings and, presiding over them all, another Augustus John, a portrait of Sir William Nicholson. He's in a long thin black overcoat, hand outstretched resting on his stick, urbane, disdainful and looking not unlike the actor in the films of the time who played Professor Moriarty to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. I didn't even know then that William Nicholson was himself a painter; what it was I admired was his detachment and his urbanity to the extent that the first chance I
got I bought a thin second-hand black overcoat which made me look as spidery as he did.