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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, August 28, 2004

A New Academic Year:

[Being a Series of Evocations of the University]


II


GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT


In October 1919, I went to Oxford at last… Oxford was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom nearly starved during the War, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead, and charged accordingly. … I solved the difficulty by pleading ill-health and getting permission from St John’s College to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill - where John Masefield, who thought well of my poetry, had offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.


We found the University remarkably quiet. The returned soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the Proctors’ ‘bulldogs’, as in the old days. The boys straight from the public schools kept quiet too, having had war preached at them continually for four years, with orders to carry on loyally at home while their brothers served in the trenches, and make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. … G.N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree at Oxford just before the War and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir”. They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-War days.’


The elder dons, whom I had often seen during the War trembling in fear of an invasion, with the sacking and firing of the Oxford colleges and the rape of their families in the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who then regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-War self-possession and haughtiness.