IX
The Opening World

Balkan Sobranies in a wooden box,

The college arms upon the lid; Tokay

And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves

The University Statutes bound in blue,

Crome Yellow, Prancing Nigger, Blunden, Keats.

My walls were painted Bursar’s apple-green;

My wide-sashed windows looked across the grass

To tower and hall and lines of pinnacles.

The wind among the elms, the echoing stairs,

The quarters, chimed across the quiet quad

From Magdalen tower and neighbouring turret-clocks,

Gave eighteenth-century splendour to my state.

Privacy after years of public school;

Dignity after years of none at all—

First college rooms, a kingdom of my own:

What words of mine can tell my gratitude?

    No wonder, looking back, I never worked.

Too pleased with life, swept in the social round,

I soon left Old Marlburians behind.

(As one more solemn of our number said:

“Spiritually I was at Eton, John.”)

I cut tutorials with wild excuse,

For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way—

And evenings dining with the Georgeoisie.

Open, swing doors, upon the lighted ‘George’

And whiff of vol-au-vent! Behold the band

Sawing away at gems from Chu Chin Chow,

As Harold Acton and the punkahs wave:

“My dears, I want to rush into the fields

And slap raw meat with lilies.”

But as the laughs grew long and loud I heard

The more insistent inner voice of guilt:

“Stop!” cried my mother from her bed of pain.

I heard my father in his factory say:

“Fourth generation, John, they look to you.”

    “Harry Strathspey is coming if he can

After he’s dined at Blenheim. Hamish says

That Ben has got twelve dozen Bollinger.”

“And Sandy’s going as a matelot.”

“I will not have that Mr. Mackworth Price;

Graham will be so furious if he’s asked—

We do not want another ghastly brawl” …

“Well, don’t ask Graham, then.” “I simply must.”

“The hearties say they’re going to break it up.”

“Oh no, they’re not. I’ve settled them all right,

I’ve bribed the Boat Club with a cask of beer.”

Moon after parties: moon on Magdalen Tower,

And shadow on the place for climbing in …

Noise, then the great, deep silences again.

    Silk-dressing-gowned, to Sunday-morning bells,

Long after breakfast had been cleared in Hall,

I wandered to my lavender-scented bath;

Then, with a loosely knotted shantung tie

And hair well soaked in Delhez’ Genêt d’Or,

Strolled to the Eastgate. Oxford marmalade

And a thin volume by Lowes Dickinson

But half-engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm

Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes,

Past college chapels with their organ-groan

And churches stacked with bicycles outside,

To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.

    Those were the days when that divine baroque

Transformed our English altars and our ways.

Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink

Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike:

“Why do you try to ape the Holy See?”

“Why do you sojourn in a halfway house?”

And if these doubts had ever troubled me

(Praise God, they don’t) I would have made the move.

What seemed to me a greater question then

Tugged and still tugs: Is Christ the Son of God?

Despite my frequent lapses into lust,

Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,

I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.

Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,

By worldly standards you have not ‘got on’

Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed

On some colonial bishop’s broidered cope.

Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,

Some start upon that arduous love affair

In clouds of doubt and argument; and some

(My closest friends) seem not to want His love—

And why this is I wish to God I knew.

As at the Dragon School, so still for me

The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone,

Stained glass and vestments, holy-water stoups,

Incense and crossings of myself—the things

That hearty middle-stumpers most despise

As ‘all the inessentials of the Faith’.

    What cranking-up of round-nosed Morrises

Among the bicycles of broad St. Giles’!

What mist of buds about the guardian elms

Before St. John’s! What sense of joys to come

As opposite the Randolph’s Gothic pile

We bought the Sunday newspapers and rush’d

Down Beaumont Street to Number 38

And Colonel Kolkhorst’s Sunday-morning rout!

              D’ye ken Kolkhorst in his artful parlour,

              Handing out the drink at his Sunday morning gala?

              Some get sherry and some Marsala—

                  With his arts and his crafts in the morning!

The over-crowded room was lit by gas

And smelt of mice and chicken soup and dogs.

Among the knick-knacks stood a photograph

Of that most precious Oxford essayist,

Upon whose margin Osbert Lancaster

Wrote ‘Alma Pater’ in his sloping hand.

George Alfred Kolkhorst, you whom nothing shocked,

Who never once betrayed a confidence,

No one believed you really were a don

Till Gerard Irvine (now a parish priest)

Went to your lecture on Le Cid and clapped.

You swept towards him, gowned, and turned him out.

I see the lines of laughter in your face,

I see you pouring sherry—round your neck

A lump of sugar hanging on a thread

‘To sweeten conversation’: to your ear

A trumpet held ‘for catching good remarks’.

An earlier generation called you ‘G’ug’:

We called you ‘Colonel’ just because you were,

Though tall, so little like one. Round your room

The rhyming folklore grew luxuriant:

             G’uggery G’uggery Nunc,

             Your room is all cluttered with junk:

             Candles, bamboonery,

             Plush and saloonery—

             Please pack it up in a trunk.1

You loved the laughter at your own expense:

             That’s the wise G’ug, he says each thing twice over,

             Lest you should think he never could recapture

             That first fine careful rapture:2

How trivial and silly now they look

Set up in type, acknowledgments and all,

Those rhymes that rocked the room in Beaumont Street,

Preposterous as th’ apostrophe in Gug,

Dear private giggles of a private world!

Alan Pryce-Jones came in a bathing-dress

And, seated at your low harmonium,

Struck up the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning hymn:

“There’s a home for Colonel Kolkhorst”—final verse

ff with all the stops out:—

             There Bignose plays the organ

                 And the pansies all sing flat,

             But G’ug’s no ear for music,

                 He never notices that.

             The stairs are never smelly,

                 The dogs are well-behaved

             And the Colonel makes his bons mots

                 To an audience of the saved.3

Perhaps you do. Perhaps you stand up there,

Waiting with sherry among other friends

Already come, till we rush up the stairs.

    Oxford May mornings! When the prunus bloomed

We’d drive to Sunday lunch at Sezincote:

First steps in learning how to be a guest,

First wood-smoke-scented luxury of life

In the large ambience of a country house.

Heavy with hawthorn scent were Cotswold lanes,

Golden the church towers standing in the sun,

And Gordon Russell with his arts and crafts,

Somewhere beyond in Broadway. Down the drive,

Under the early yellow leaves of oaks;

One lodge is Tudor, one in Indian style.

The bridge, the waterfall, the Temple Pool—

And there they burst on us, the onion domes,

Chajjahs and chattris made of amber stone:

‘Home of the Oaks’, exotic Sezincote!

Stately and strange it stood, the Nabob’s house,

Indian without and coolest Greek within,

Looking from Gloucestershire to Oxfordshire;

And, by supremest landscape-gardener’s art,

The lake below the eastward slope of grass

Was made to seem a mighty river-reach

Curving along to Chipping Norton’s hills.

    Crackle of gravel! in the entrance-hall

Boot-jacks and mattocks, hunting mackintosh,

And whips and sticks and barometric clock

Were Colonel Dugdale’s; but a sheaf of bast

And gardening-basket told us of his wife.

“Camilla Russell—Bridget King-Tenison—

And Major Attlee—Patsy Rivington—

Shall we go in? I think it’s rather late.”

    Dear Mrs. Dugdale, mother of us all,

In trailing and Edwardian-looking dress,

A Sargent portrait in your elegance,

Sweet confidante in every tale of woe!

She and her son and we were on the Left,

But Colonel Dugdale was Conservative.

From one end of the butler-tended board

The Colonel’s eyes looked out towards the hills,

While at the other end our hostess heard

Political and undergraduate chat.

“Oh, Ethel,” loudly Colonel Dugdale’s voice

Boomed sudden down the table, “that manure—

I’ve had it shifted to the strawberry-beds.”

“Yes, Arthur … Major Attlee, as you said,

Seventeen million of the poor Chinese

Eat less than half a calory a week?”

              How proud beneath the swelling dome

                 I sang Lord Ullin’s daughter

              At Mrs. Dugdale’s grand At Home

                 To Lady Horsbrugh-Porter.

So Sezincote became a second home.

    The love between those seeming opposites,

Colonel and Mrs. Dugdale, warmed their guests.

The paddock where the Colonel’s favourite mare,

His tried companion of the ’14 war,

Grazed in retirement—what is in it now?

New owners wander to the Temple Pool

Where Mrs. Dugdale snipped exotic shrubs

With secateurs as on and on I talked.

The onion dome which listened all the time

To water filling after-tennis baths,

To water splashing over limestone rock

Under the primulas and thin bamboo,

The cottages and lanes and woods and paths

Are all so full of voices from the past

I do not dare return.

    At six o’clock from Bourton-on-the-Hill

The bells rang out above the clumps of oak;

A lighter peal from Longborough lingered on;

Moreton-in-Marsh came echoing from the vale …

So gently broke the triple waves of sound

On a still evening of enormous light

That, when they ceased, I almost seemed to hear

From open church-doors village voluntaries

A mile and more away.

                                        It’s time to go.

Dinner with Maurice Bowra sharp at eight—

High up in Wadham’s hospitable quad:

The Gilbert Spencers and the Campbell Gray

Bright in the inner room; the brown and green

Of rows and rows of Greek and Latin texts;

The learning lightly worn; the grand contempt

For pedants, traitors and pretentiousness.

A dozen oysters and a dryish hock;

Claret and tournedos; a bombe surprise …

The fusillade of phrases (“I’m a man

More dined against than dining”) rattled out

In that incisive voice and chucked away

To be re-used in envious common-rooms

By imitation Maurices. I learned,

If learn I could, how not to be a bore,

And merciless was his remark that touched

The tender spot if one were showing off.

Within those rooms I met my friends for life.

True values there were handed on a plate

As easily as sprouts and aubergines:

“A very able man.” “But what’s he like?”

“I’ve told you. He’s a very able man.”

Administrators, professorial chairs

In subjects such as Civics, and the cad

Out for himself, pretending to be kind—

He summed them up in scathing epigram,

Occasionally shouting out the truth

In forceful nineteen-fourteen army slang;

And as the evening mellowed into port,

He read us poems. There I learned to love

That lord of landscape, Alfred Tennyson;

There first heard Thomas Hardy’s poetry,

Master of metre, local as his lanes,

The one expressive village fatalist.

Yeats he would chant in deep sonórous voice;

Bring Rudyard Kipling—then so out-of-date—

To his full stature; show that wisdom was

Not memory-tests (as I had long supposed),

Not ‘first-class brains’ and swotting for exams,

But humble love for what we sought and knew.

King of a kingdom underneath the stars,

I wandered back to Magdalen, certain then,

As now, that Maurice Bowra’s company

Taught me far more than all my tutors did.

      Come, Michael Arthur Stratford Dugdale, rise,

          And Lionel Geoffrey Perry. It is ten.

      Binsey to Cowley, Oxford open lies.

          They breakfasted at eight, the college men

      In college blazers clad and college ties

          Who will be pouring out of lectures when

                  Eleven strikes,

      For morning coffee at ‘The Super’ bound,

          And stack their bikes

      St. Mary Mag’s Tractarian walls around.

          Rise! we ourselves are pledged to drink with Ben.

                  John Edward Bowle

                  Will bring his soul

      And even Mr. Bryson may be coming.

      Rise from your beds! The hawthorn trees are humming

      With insects down the length of Banbury Road,

          The water splashes over Medley Weir.

          The freckled undergraduettes appear,

      Handle-bar baskets heavy with the load

          Of books on Middle English. Up! Away!

      We’re lunching at the Liberal Club today

          Where, though the credit’s good, the food is poor.

                  And should a single Liberal dare

                  To show his hunted features there

                  We’ll freeze him with a stony stare

          That drives him to the door.

      New College calls us with her Wykehamists,

      Old home of essays, gowns and lecture lists,

          Where Sparrow, with his cowlick lock of hair

                  And schoolboy looks,

          Stands a young contrast to his antique books

      On walls, floor, table, window-seats and chair.

      What time magnolia’s bursting into bloom

          By Balliol’s brain-grey wall,

          See clever satyr sprawl

                  And well-bred faun

      Round ‘Sligger’ in his deck-chair on the lawn.

          Deep in their books they are, yet notice whom

      They will, with cheerful shout across the grass

      For peer and Isis Idol as they pass,

      While Sandy Lindsay from his lodge looks down

         Dreaming of Adult Education where

                  The pottery chimneys flare

      On lost potential firsts in some less favoured town.

      We’ll thread the hurrying Corn and George Street crowds

          To the unlovely entrance of the OUDS

                  And hear

      How Harman Grisewood, in the tones which thrill

                  His audience in Lear,

          Orders a postcard and a penny stamp;

      While Emlyn Williams, palm to either ear,

          Struggles to learn a part,

      And in the next-door room is heard the tramp

          And ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ as the crowd rehearse

          A one-act play in verse,

      Written by someone who is wedded still

          To Gordon Bottomley and Celtic Art.

          And does an unimportant don

          In Pembroke College linger on,

              With sported oak, alone?

          Do nearby bells of low St. Ebbe’s

              Ring all unnoticed there?

          Can only climbing ivy see

          That he for weeks has ceased to be,

          While hungry spiders spin their webs

              Between his desk and chair,

          Where he is sitting very still

          With all Eternity to kill?

          How empty, creeper-grown and odd

      Seems lonely Pembroke’s second quad!

          Still, when I see it, do I wonder why

          That college so polite and shy

      Should have more character than Queen’s

          Or Univ. splendid in The High.

      Friends, we will let our final visit be

          Oxford’s epitome:

          The place they call The House

          That shelters A. L. Rowse,

      Where the unnoticed canons and their wives

          Live safe North Oxford lives

      While peer and peasant tread the sculptured stair

          The festal light to share

          Of Christ Church hall.

      Let the obscure cathedral’s organ note

      Out, out into the starry darkness float

      O’er my friend Auden and the clever men,

      Running like mad to miss the upper ten

      Who burst from ‘Peck’ in Bullingdonian brawl,

          Jostling some pale-faced victim, you or me.

              I tell you, Brian Howard,

              ’Fore God, I am no coward—

          But the triumphant Philistines I see,

      And hear a helpless body splash in muddy Mercury.

      With sports Bugattis roaring in my ears,

          With ‘Blackbirds’ bursting from my gramophone,

      Lunching with poets, dining late with peers,

          I felt that I had come into my own.

      What was my own? Large parts of it were jest.

          Recall the music room in Holywell,

      The nice North Oxford audience, velvet-dress’d,

          Waiting a treat whose title promised well:

      HOMAGE TO BEETHOVEN the posters show.

          ‘Words: Thomas Driberg. Music: Archie Browne’.

      Good wives of Heads of Houses, do you know

          For what it is you’ve given your half-crown?

      What was ‘my own’? I partly liked to shock—

          But strawberry-coloured trousers soon made way

      For shirts by Hawes and Curtis, hats by Lock,

          And suits for which my father had to pay.

      What was my own? Week after sunny week

          I climbed, still keeping in, I thought, with God,

      Until I reached what seemed to me the peak—

          The leisured set in Canterbury Quad.

      The sun that shines on Edward James

          Shines also down on me:

      It’s strange that two such simple names

          Should spell such mystery.

      The air he breathes, I breathe it too—

      But where’s he now? What does he do?

      On tapestries from Brussels looms

          The low late-’20s sunlight falls

      In those black-ceilinged Oxford rooms

          And on their silver-panelled walls;

      ARS LONGA VITA BREVIS EST

      Was painted round them—not in jest.

      And who in those days thought it odd

          To liven breakfast with champagne

      And watch, in Canterbury Quad,

          Pale undergraduates in the rain?

      For, while we ate Virginia hams,

      Contemporaries passed exams.

      Tutorials and dons there were,

          And tests and teams and toughs and games—

      But these were neither here nor there

          To such as me and Edward James:

      We swung the incense-smoke about

      To drive the smells of breakfast out,

      And talked of Eliot and Wilde

          And Sachie’s Southern Baroque Art,

      While all the time our darling child,

          The poem we had learned by heart

      (And wrote last night) must be recited,

      Whether or not it were invited.

      At William Morris how we laughed,

          And hairy tweeds and knitted ties:

      Pub poets who from tankards quaff’d

          Glared up at us with angry eyes—

      For, Regency before our time,

      We first found Cheltenham sublime.

      Ah, how the trivial would enchant!

          On our Botanic Gardens walk

      We touched the tender Sensitive Plant

          And saw the fronds enfold the stalk

      At each light blow our fingers dealt—

      So very like ourselves, we felt.

      But in the end they sent me down

          From that sweet hothouse world of bells

      And crumbling walls of golden-brown

          And dotty peers and incense-smells

      And dinners at the George and hock

      And Wytham Woods and Godstow Lock.

Failed in Divinity! Oh count the hours

Spent on my knees in Cowley, Pusey House,

St. Barnabas’, St. Mary Mag’s, St. Paul’s,

Revering chasubles and copes and albs!

Consider what I knew of ‘High’ and ‘Low’…

Failed in Divinity! O, towers and spires!

Could no one help? Was nothing to be done?

No. No one. Nothing. Mercilessly calm,

The Cherwell carried under Magdalen Bridge

Its leisured puntfuls of the fortunate

Who next term and the next would still come back.

Could no one help? I’d seen myself a don,

Reading old poets in the library,

Attending chapel in an M.A. gown

And sipping vintage port by candlelight.

I sought my tutor in his arid room,

Who told me, “You’d have only got a Third.”

I wandered into Blackwell’s, where my bill

Was so enormous that it wasn’t paid

Till ten years later, from the small estate

My father left. Not even dusty shelves

Of folios of architectural plates

Could comfort me. Outside, the sunny Broad,

The mouldering busts round the Sheldonian,

The hard Victorian front of Exeter,

The little colleges that front the Turl,

The lean acacia tree in Trinity,

Stood strong and confident, outlasting me.

I called on Ava. He was packing up

For Ireland, for the scintillating lake,

His gate-lodge, woods and winding avenue

Around the limestone walls of Clandeboye.

“Cheer up! You’re looking like a soul in hell.

Here’s some Amontillado.” As I drank,

Already I could hear my father’s voice.

“My boy, henceforward your allowance stops:

You’ll copy me, who with my strong right arm

Alone have got myself the victory.”

“Your father’s right, John; you must earn your keep.”

Pentonville Road! How could I go by tram

In suit from Savile Row and Charvet tie?

How could I, after Canterbury Quad,

My peers and country houses and my jokes,

Talk about samples, invoices and stock?

Ah, welcome door, Gabbitas Thring & Co.’s

Scholastic agency in Sackville Street!

“The Principal will see you.” “No degree?

There is, perhaps, a temporary post

As cricket master for the coming term

At Gerrard’s Cross. Fill in this form and give

Qualifications—testimonials

Will help—and if you are accepted, please

Pay our commission promptly. Well, good day!”

              The sun that shone on Edward James

                  Shone also down on me—

              A prep-school master teaching Games,

                  Maths, French, Divinity.

              Harsh hand-bells harried me from sleep

              For thirty pounds a term and keep.

              And he continued friendly still,

                  And wrote his verses out with care

              On vellum with a coloured quill,

                  And published them in volumes rare

              Of hand-made paper bound up fine …

              And then, by Jove, he published mine!

              They tell me he’s in Mexico,

                  They will not give me his address;

              But if he sees this book he’ll know

                  I do not value him the less.

              For Art is long and Life must end,

              My earlier publisher and friend.