So Kate settled down to read Whitmore’s letters, sitting in one of the bays of the Somerville library looking out over the lawn-tennis courts and the great beech trees beyond. Kate was particularly intrigued with Whitmore’s letters to her family from France, where she had served in the women’s army corps. She had written stories at night by candlelight, and talked to the men for the fun of it. Of course, she had come back from the war thinking she could save the world. The League of Nations, and all that. She had been wrong; no one could save the world. But how wonderful, even for a short time, to have supposed that possible.
Kate, reading these letters and gazing out at the quadrangle, would picture it at an earlier time when Whitmore had come up in Michaelmas term, 1919. The following year, Whitmore’s last, the statute giving women degrees came into force, and the first degree-giving ceremony in which women took part must have transformed the Sheldonian, Kate thought, into the sort of ceremony with which movie directors in the innocent days of Hollywood films used to end their pictures. In the words of Vera Brittain: “Inside the Sheldonian Theatre, its atmosphere tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled, younger and older spectators looked down . . . upon the complicated ceremony in the arena below. Then the great south doors opened and the five women principals, arrayed for the first time in caps and gowns, entered. . . . After a second’s silence the theatre rang with unrehearsed applause, and the Vice-Chancellor rose to receive the first women Masters of Arts ever to appear in that historic place.”
In the world outside. Parliament had granted votes to women, thus freeing Oxford from the threat of appearing eccentric. In 1920, Kate thought, the new sight of women in scholars’ and commoners’ gowns whirling about the town on bicycles and running, as they are now, to the clamor of bells must have encouraged hope of progress. It must indeed have been a time of hope. And war, of course, was finished and would never return.
In the mornings, before Kate left the hotel for Somerville, her own letters would arrive. In this, too, England had clung, however precariously, to standards. They no longer had several deliveries a day; few even spoke now of the time when one could order from the grocer by postcard, and he would deliver your order the same day. But at least the mail arrived before nine o’clock in the morning, so that one started the day knowing where one was.
On the morning of the sixth day, Kate had three letters. She opened Reed’s first. He assured her in his penultimate paragraph that the mess at St. Anthony’s was progressing rather as expected. The faculty had been stunned by the news, not least of all, Reed suggested, because it had reached them through students. Their response had been varied and, as Reed had suspected, Leo and the other students had withstood a certain amount of sharp remarks. This, Reed thought, would pass. She wasn’t to worry. He was asking Leo to write.
Leo’s letter, which Kate opened next, was remarkably reassuring, particularly since he did not mention the matter of the College Boards at all. He had apparently grasped that the purpose of his note was to reassure her that life was unchanged. “Dear Kate,” he had written. “Everything fine here. Nothing special happening, though Reed said he would tell you what there is. I’ve been reading all the books I’m supposed to have read already for finals at the end of May. As you know, I took only bull shit courses my last term [by which, as he knew Kate knew, Leo meant literature courses]. In the midst of all your highbrow activities, why don’t you go to see a professional soccer game. It’s the great game all over Europe and South America, and you ought to see one, even if it isn’t upper class. It’s great to watch. Sit next to some man who’ll explain the moves, if you can manage it. I’m sure you can. Love, Leo.” Kate admired Leo’s way of administering assurance, and the way he had moved onto the safe ground of athletics, even from afar.
Her third letter, a much fatter one, was from Crackthorne.
Dear Kate [he wrote]. The end of the basketball season has left me with time for literary researches on your behalf; I reread a bit of Graves, and of course he was not only at Oxford with your crew, but at Somerville! Not that Whitmore, Hutchins, or any other female students are mentioned, but one certainly gets another view on the same life, if that’s what you’re looking for. Needless to add, Somerville was a hospital when Graves was sent there before he was demobilized. They posted him for a time at Wadham to train officers, but the damp and hard work got the better of him, and he ended back at Somerville, where the men used to lounge around the grounds in their pajamas and dressing gowns, and even walk down St. Giles thus arrayed. What can Oxford have been coming to? But, as Graves points out, the social system had been dislocated. The don who was to be his moral tutor when he came up (the same time as your chaps, I think) was now a corporal and saluted Graves, who was a captain, every time they met. Aldous Huxley, of whom we were speaking at St. Anthony’s great basketball victory, was there also, one of the few undergraduates in residence at the time. Graves used to visit Garsington, where everyone, but everyone, my dear, went, and where Clive Bell was passing the war looking after cows on the Garsington farm. All the CO’s congregated there, apparently, because the Morrells were pacifists. But I must not get carried away with Graves’s tales.
When Graves finally resigned his commission and came up to Oxford he was at St. John’s college, but lived on Boar’s Hill with all those other poets—I bet your trio visited there, if truth were told. What’s more, Graves married a feminist who sounds rather amazingly up-to-date, actually, but must have seen pretty much eye-to-eye with Whitmore et al., shouldn’t you think? Graves’s wife kept her own name, was against religion (“God is a man, so it must be all rot” was her unforgettable comment), and nearly refused to marry when she read the marriage service for the first time on their wedding day, just like the lady in Shaw’s play. I wish Graves had actually mentioned your people, but he didn’t apparently go back to Somerville after he came up, being too busy meeting T. E. Lawrence at All Souls, an anti-feminist place if ever one there was. I suppose all this is more worthy of conversation at a basketball game than as correspondence between two scholars, not to mention between a dissertation writer and his sponsor, but as you have no doubt gathered by now, frivolity is my long suit. Speaking of All Souls, Graves and Lawrence (T. E. again, D. H. being always committed to sterner and more important things) once planned to steal the Magdalen College deer and drive them into the small inner quadrangle of All Souls. The plan fell through, more’s the pity, or the deer might have made it even if the women never did. Keep well, dear Kate, and send a postcard to your devoted friend and admirer, John Crackthorne.
Kate chuckled. Either Crackthorne had not heard of Leo’s imbroglio, or he had decided to ignore it. Perhaps he did not think Kate knew about it yet; an overseas letter was scarcely the best medium for approaching so delicate a topic. Kate left the hotel and walked round to the back to fetch her bicycle, a form of transportation not usually employed by residents of Oxford’s most expensive hotel, and looked upon by the employees thereof with a certain disdain, which was replaced by confusion at the size of her tips. It seemed to her pleasant to bicycle from her letters to Whitmore’s, and she looked forward to tea that afternoon with Phyllis and Hugh.
“We can actually have tea, if you insist, as Hugh usually does,” Phyllis had said, “but I’ll have something with a bit more firmament on hand, should Hugh not appear.” But Hugh did appear; this was the first time Kate had seen him in Oxford. He had not been there when they returned that night from Binsey. He greeted Kate with what for Hugh probably counted as effusion. (Kate thought instantly of Watson’s description of his reunion with Holmes: “His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me.”)
“You must forgive me, Kate,” Hugh said, “and prove your forgiveness by letting me do something for you. Take you and Phyllis punting, to a cricket match, a boat race—what will it be?”
“Since you are so kind, sir,” Kate answered, remembering Leo’s letter, “I would like to see a professional soccer game.”
“A what?” Phyllis asked.
“Oh, good heavens, Phyllis,” Hugh said, “where have you been? It’s all anybody talks about in a general way, but I didn’t know people actually went to them. I thought they were dangerous and ended in riots and people beating each other over the head with the goal posts.”
“Good,” said Phyllis. “It sounds noisy and frightfully un-English. Let’s go.”
“Phyllis, my dear,” Hugh said, helping himself to a muffin, “I don’t know what’s come over you this year. You never used to want to do something for the wholly insufficient reason that I would rather you didn’t.”
“I know, poor Hugh, I know. I will abandon the soccer game,” Phyllis said, sinking so far back upon the collapsible couch that her shoulders were on a level with her knees. “It’s the hideously masculine quality of life here that’s undoing me. Perhaps if a man lived at Oxford, unconnected with the university in any way, and married to a woman don, he, too, would suffer, and yet I doubt it, even if such a situation could be imagined. He’d be a writer, or a potterer in laboratories, or a bus driver, or something. You can’t imagine how content the woman in England are to be slaves if they aren’t actually professionals themselves.”
Hugh chuckled, and as he spoke Kate realized with a great surge of affection why this marriage had so triumphantly lasted for twenty-five years. “I hate to grant a principle for the other side,” he said, “but you know I do find it amazing, helpful and affectionate American husband as I am, who married a woman because, among other attractions, she had brains and a mind of her own. I’ve been to tea—my dear, you’ve no idea how often I’ve been to tea; the poor chaps feel they should ask me home at least once, and no doubt dinner is an expense and horror—and, Kate, it is just as though these men have a perfectly behaved servant. We arrive, are greeted charmingly, the wife acting as if she were a geisha girl who’d outgrown the fascination originally required for the job, and then we are served tea. I mean actually served it, all sorts of cakes and sandwiches and whatnot she’s spent hours concocting, and after we’ve stuffed ourselves and told her what a good tea it was, we simply leave, I saying thank you politely, and her husband, my colleague, giving her a peck and saying, in effect, expect me when you see me. I don’t deny that when the women’s movement was getting under way in the States, I used to dream about a docile little wife the center of whose life I was, but you know, I’ve discovered it’s not only embarrassing, it’s bad for the character. There’s a woman who works in our laboratory, and I asked her about it; she’s a very important and competent woman. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, as though I’d asked her why some Oxford men don’t get involved with boats during Eights Week, ‘most English women aren’t interested in liberation.’ She made it sound like backgammon, or higher thought—some new fad. And yet she’s far more liberated herself, to use that frightful word, than any American woman I’ve met professionally. Does her job, glad to have it, and no nonsense.”
“Hugh,” Phyllis said, staring at him, “that’s the longest speech you have ever made in my presence since the first fine, careless rapture; what’s more, its the greatest tribute to the women’s movement in America yet enunciated. I apologize for even considering the soccer game.”
“I couldn’t have helped you at a soccer game anyway, my dear. I’m not much at watching the lower classes cavort. My offer included only elegant Oxford events. I had in mind something like a pleasant afternoon on the Balliol cricket grounds. That offer is still open. Farewell, my dear ladies. I am glad, Kate, to have seen you at last.”
“He always vanishes like that,” Phyllis said when Hugh was gone.
“Well, this is how he described tea. Maybe every woman should spend one year as the little wife at home. Be thankful you’re lucky enough to have done it when it isn’t a lifetime commitment. But I have to admit”—Kate laughed—“he did slip back into that sleek masculine world with indecent haste. Still, it has made him a feminist, let us not forget.”
“Let us not. Tell me about Whitmore—the best soap opera ever.”
“I hope her life wasn’t that,” Kate said.
“I only meant soap opera in the sense of being presented in daily installments. But I don’t know why all this prejudice against soap opera anyway. It’s only the feminine version of melodrama, and frequently much better. Anyway, the sense I’ve been getting from your Whitmore and friend Cecily and Frederica Tupe—fabulous name—is that, in the beginning anyway, before Tupe became Reston and Cecily became Ricardo, life was clearer for them than it would be now. Is that only an illusion of time?”
“I don’t think it was so different then from now,” Kate said. “I’m sure when Whitmore and Hutchins and Tupe went to live in London and support themselves on freelancing and a little help from their families, there were as many raised eyebrows then as now. It seems clearer because they were unusual in knowing what they wanted. People who know what they want are always unusual, particularly if what they want isn’t to be found along one of the well-worn paths furnished by society for the use of the young. Whitmore’s school was bombarded during the war—shot at, I mean, by guns from ships. She not only discovered the excitement of all that, of being one of those left behind when fearful parents had removed their, in Whitmore’s opinion, less fortunate daughters from the school on the coast; she learned that courage is not an exclusively male virtue. I mean courage under fire. Some young man from the nearby town, when the bombardment started, grabbed a horse and nearly ran over a lot of children getting away from the place, while the women at the school were calmly helping everyone. Later she had a brother killed in the war and knew that she had to meet his courage with hers, offer her life, really, to prove that his hadn’t been offered in vain. That’s why she joined the army, of course.”
“What did Whitmore actually do in the war? Nursing?”
“No, she was really in the army—Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps was its proper name. It was all very daring and new at that time, and she was a sergeant. Used to march the girls around, snapping out orders. ‘Left march, eyes right;—great fun, I should think, for someone who’d never cared for being lady-like and who was built like a Valkyrie and looked like Athena.”
“She didn’t have a commission, and her from Somerville?”
“No. I don’t think many women had commissions, except the nurses, who were terribly isolated, poor things; they weren’t allowed to hobnob with the enlisted men and were forbidden to associate with the officers. When Whitmore finally ended up in France and in a signal unit, there was only one woman officer. They were telegraphists, repaired telephone lines, did clerking—that sort of thing. There was a male signal unit there with them. It was a heavily bombed area, so the two signal units—maybe they were really one; I’m very weak on military matters—were hidden in the countryside and Whitmore used to ride about on horseback with some of the soldiers. Her letters are remarkable. Frankly, if I could imagine a male army corps of Americans, I’d assume they’d be raping any women they could get hold of, the way they always do in plays and movies, but there seems to have been an innocence about all this. The French, with their usual opinion of the English, suspected the worst, but, at least from Whitmore’s accounts, they were wrong, everyone was just WAAC’s and Tommies together. It was the end of a world, of course.”
“And then she came back to Somerville?”
“Michaelmas term, 1919. And shared a railway coach with Tupe or Hutchins or maybe both. Anyway, they met. The next year they lived together in lodgings, not far from where you are now, I expect. Then they went down to London together and started to write and meet interesting people and enjoy the optimistic twenties. Tupe dwindled into wife, but the other two kept at it for a number of years. Then Hutchins married her Ricardo and came to America; she found the secret of solitude and art, but Whitmore? Whitmore just kept struggling with the two ideas that wouldn’t let hold of her: women must cease thinking they were ordained by God to be servants, and she must increase her sense of her opportunity to live life. All her novels and poems were attempts to catch life, behind the everyday reality. The critics haven’t noticed them, except the last, and that they ignored because it was popular. She made herself live to finish North Country Wind, there’s lots of evidence of that. Well,” Kate finished up lamely, “they’re all dead now.”
“But you know,” Phyllis said, “the same class thing goes on. Hugh wasn’t just trying to be funny with his new Oxford manner when he talked about the lower classes at soccer. He told me he asked in the SCR about one of the younger dons, and was told that his antecedents weren’t especially refined.”
“It’s only just occurred to me,” Kate said, “but I dare say most of the professional athletes in America don’t exactly come from the upper reaches of society, but nobody bothers to mention it. Is England still as madly class conscious as ever, or is it just crustier dons Hugh meets in his line of work?”
“Not a bit. Some quiet young man in Hugh’s laboratory came up to Oxford originally on a scholarship from a state school, and soon after he came up he attended a meeting of a socialist club; the first question someone standing about asked him was what public school he’d been at. He hasn’t let off being angry yet, Hugh says, and he’s had one academic success after another ever since.”