O, the sweaty clothes, and O, the smashed window-panes, Ecstasy!—Wrigglesworth: Thoughts in a Parsonage.

I find it customary among the writers of reminiscences, if they have had the privilege of an Oxford or Cambridge education, to make great play with the dons who were already greybeards in their time, survivals from a yet earlier past. Thus, we shall be told of old Tommy So-and-So, who was so well seasoned that he could carry his five glasses of port after dinner and get to bed without assistance: or how What’s-his-name was reputed never to have had a bath in fifty years of residence: or how the Master of This was so absent-minded that he delivered a lecture on Homer by mistake for one on political economy, and his audience were so little attentive that none of them noticed the difference, while the President of That used to be a great sportsman in his time, and rode a motor-bicycle at full speed round Addison’s walk on Sunday afternoon for a bet. This is all very well, but it is not first-hand-reminiscence. How many of my young friends who are up at Oxford now know anything about the patriarchal figures of the place, know so much as the very names of them? You have passed them toiling up Headington Hill, that Professor of European reputation who still wears the soft flannel collars and the “plus-four” knickerbockers of the early thirties, that venerable Tutress of St. Veronica’s, whose archaic skirt barely reaches below her knees; and—confess it—you have never had the curiosity to ask who that old blighter is. Why should you expect us, then, who write reminiscences, to tell you stories of the old dons that were already skin and bone when we matriculated? We, like you, were young, and lived in a self-contained world of youth. Let nobody expect from me a description of Oxford which shall represent it as a fossil-museum of the still remoter past. There were elderly dons in my time, but I do not remember coming across them at all, except one whom I met at a tea-party, and mistook for a fresher, because at seventy or so he still looked so incorrigibly youthful!

My academic career at Oxford was destined to be successful beyond my expectations. When I first looked at the list of subjects which I should need in order to go through Pass Moderations, my heart sank within me. Latin! Greek! Logic! Did they think I had stepped straight out of the Middle Ages, that I should be prepared to face examination in such subjects as these? But a reference to Appendix XVIIIc of the Regulations reassured me. I had to take Latin “or some other foreign language”—the old days at Barstoke with my French governess were to come in useful after all. Instead of Greek I could take Mineralogy, Practical Farming, Middle Icelandic, Military Tactics, Geography, Mental Therapeutics, Book-keeping and Short-hand, Levantine Literature, or Old Testament Anthropology. I need hardly say that I selected Geography at once. There was a still longer list of substitutes for Logic, which seemed more formidable, but I was assured that it was almost impossible to fail in the Theory of Statistics—and so indeed I found it. My first two terms, in fact, made little demand on my intellectual capacities, and I was free to look about me, make friends, taste life, and enter into the multifarious activities of the place.

I found little or no jealousy of the freshers, little or no anxiety to keep them in their place, on the part of the second-year women. On the contrary, the breakfast parties at which they used to entertain us were some of the merriest functions of my life. Heavens, what huge breakfasts we ate in those days! Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, porridge, boiled eggs or even eggs and bacon, toast, butter, marmalade, sometimes jam—and yet we felt fresh and energetic after them, ready to discuss any problem of the universe! We would sit round smoking afterwards—pipe-smoking was just coming in—indulging in our interminable conversations, till at last the claim of half-past nine lecture broke up the little company. To be late for lecture was a serious thing in those days; if the lecturer were short-tempered, it meant that you missed your guinea attendance fee. “No, it’s no use!” our geography lecturer, Hoskyns of B.N.C., would shout at us, exasperated but still courteous. “I can’t have you ladies come clattering up the Hall in those great boots, making a noise like a troop of cavalry: go back, and save up your pocket-money!” He was something of a misogynist, but unrivalled at his subject, and I do not think I ever saw a man better tailored. I early decided to read geography for my final schools, so as to continue under his tuition.

It was an idle undergraduate even in those days who did not keep her four lectures every morning. If schools were not hanging over you, Quarter Day was, and there was no temptation to “cut.” Dr. Feilding, of Christ Church, had for a time a particularly successful lecture on Ukrainian antiquities, until it was discovered that he was giving his pupils a bonus of ten shillings! This practice was rightly discouraged by the University authorities, who pointed out that it practically amounted to paying people to be educated. By half-past one we were whizzing along the moving pavement in the middle of St. Giles’ (one of the first to be started, I believe, in the United Kingdom. The then Principal of Pusey House would never travel on it: “these young ladies are too fast for me,” he said waggishly, more than once) and en route for our luncheon. This, according to the old Oxford tradition, was a very simple meal—just a chop or a cutlet with vegetables, a cold sweet, and a plate of cheese and butter; I doubt if modern Oxford would stand it! Afternoon lectures had not then been instituted, and between luncheon and tea we ordinarily devoted ourselves to sport. I continued my football career with some success, but an unlucky strain prevented me ever getting my Association half-blue. Tea was our chief social meal, and I doubt if I had tea alone more than a dozen times during the whole period of my residence. The habit of “lacing” one’s tea has grown up since my time, and I do not think my young friends are any the better for it. By six o’clock we would be at our books, till at seven, the old College clock boomed out the hour for dressing.

I do not know that I have ever seen a prettier picture than was formed every night by the College dinner. The harmonious lines of the building itself—enlarged, of course, but enlarged in keeping with its original architectural design—the soft glow of the wire electrics, falling on the frilled shirt-fronts of the dons as they sat at the high table; the long rows of sable-jacketed and sable-skirted undergraduates, the kindly, weatherbeaten faces of the old “guides” who waited on us—it vied, I think, in beauty, with the brightest of our modern ball-rooms. But attendance in Hall was not compulsory, and as often as not one would be dining out at the O.U.D.S., the Asquith, or the New Bolsheviks with a party of friends from other Colleges. (Vincent’s and the Grid had not yet admitted women.) That would mean a scramble to be back before the College gates shut at ten, with the fear of meeting on your way there, all capless and gownless, the terrible figure of the Proctress, with her attendant “cowers.” A friend of mine, Ena Toogood, coming back from a fancy dress ball in the costume of King Henry VIII, had the good fortune to pass herself off on the Proctress as a man, and baffle the Proctor by giving her College as St. Lucy’s!

Nor was all always peaceful even within the confines of the College. There were nights (mostly after some athletic triumph) when the Quad rang to merry choruses and catches (sometimes) uncomplimentary to the dons. But these occasions were rare; the rowing women objected to it because, for the greater part of the year, they were in training; and the working set, who had great influence in the College at this time, were loath to be disturbed at their studies. I myself belonged to the dancing set my first two terms, but joined the working set afterwards as the result of a personal quarrel with Lady Anne Forres, the leader of the dancing set, who suspected me, I think, of rivalry. We were not much divided up into cliques at this time, though I believe that later on the admission of Astor scholars from America and the colonies tended to break up the solidarity of the College.

In summer, there were fresh conflicts and fresh delights. I did not, indeed, play tennis, because my dear mother thought it was unladylike—it would have been absurd, of course, to play College matches in skirts! But I played cricket fairly regularly; and I am not ashamed to be thought old-fashioned when I say that there was a good deal of fun to be got out of the game. It was slow, I admit (not so slow, perhaps, as when my great-grandfather used to play it in a top-hat!), but there were exciting moments when the scores were nearly equal, and sometimes plenty of exercise. But I confess that I preferred the river, although I was never a rowing woman. They were great evenings, when you would take down your dinner in a picnic basket to Timms’ boat-house, and launch your frail motor-punt just as the soft chimes of Keble struck eight o’clock; when, some half-an-hour later, you would find that you had got beyond the houses and the press of craft, and would tether “the old bus” to a willow, and bathe, and spread out your dinner on the mown grass; when, the dinner cleared and the cigars lighted, you would float home again downstream to the gentle music of a hundred distant gramophones, and think, who knows what thoughts? under the velvet skies of the June evening.

But, more important than all these busy idlenesses of Oxford life, I began to find myself at this time as a public speaker. Juliet Savage had early joined all the clubs she could hear of: I never knew a woman who had such a passion for the exchange of opinions. It was through her instigation that I joined, besides several College Clubs, the Curzon, the Dynamiters, and the x+1’s. (Of course I belonged to the Union: at the time of which I am writing, anybody of British parentage could get in without even paying an entrance fee.) The Curzon was a very select Tory club, founded a short while earlier owing to a schism in the Canning: a bare majority, who contrived, however, to keep the club funds and the Lygon Cup, refusing admission to my indignant sex. It was full of time-honoured institutions, such as taking a pinch of snuff before you began your speech (which always made me cough rather), and singing “Down among the Dead Men” in chorus before we broke up—never did we do this so lustily as one evening when the “senseless, woman-hating crew” of the original Canning were meeting on the same staircase (in Univ., I think it was), and had to be given the full benefit of our opinions.

The Dynamiters had one custom which was, I suppose, unique. At each meeting, one of the members was chosen by lot to murder the Vice-Chancellor, and had to report at the next meeting on the attempt made and the reasons for its failure. Apart from this, it was simply a home of rather dÉmodÉ revolutionary talk, with a foreign element in it so strong that I once introduced a motion to have French talked at the debates. It proved, however, that our German comrades had not enough of the international spirit to tolerate the proposal. The x+1’s were, I must admit, a more interesting Society. There was no reason whatever for their being so called. They debated literary questions mostly, not without acumen, but with a rather painful striving after originality. Thus, one member would try to resuscitate the dead laurels of Tennyson; another would condemn Masefield as a mawkish sentimentalist, another would write in disproof of the existence of Dr. Johnson. The most characteristic note of the Society was its repudiation of all the courtesies of debate. The President always opened the proceedings by saying that it was his unpleasant duty to allow Mr. So-and-so to read his paper, on the hackneyed subject of So-and-so; he could only hope that it would be as brief as possible. When the paper was ended, the Secretary would rise, and remonstrate with the honourable member for having read so uninterestingly, and would proceed to move a vote of censure on him, which was solemnly carried. In speaking, if you referred to anyone who had addressed the House before you, you were bound to mention him by reference to some physical defect, or unpleasant personal characteristic, as “the honourable member who forgot to shave this morning,” or “the honourable member whose ears are so much too large for her,” and so on. At the conclusion of the proceedings, a vote of censure was passed on all the officers. The President then rose, and proposed the dissolution of the Society; the Treasurer seconded, and the motion was carried nem. con. I do not know why we enjoyed it, but we did. Alas, one begins to discover even as an undergraduate that man’s most violent innovations turn almost at once into a sort of archaic ritual.

The Union, of course, was a more serious affair: of this Society I had the honour to be the first woman President. We had some fine speakers in those days, notably Eustace Travers, who afterwards became a very successful book-maker, and Arthur Cardman, who as Lord Bythorpe did so much to improve the breed of Hertfordshire cattle. But this was long after the days of real Union eloquence, the days of Raymond Asquith and Humphrey Paul. The most notable debate at which I was ever present was that at which the proposal for Indian Home Rule was discussed, only six months before it was carried into effect. Indians in those days used to come to Oxford in large numbers, and the front benches were parted by an absolute division of colour, “looking,” Savage said to me, “just like those advertisements of stuff to dye your white hair with, only the chap in the picture has only tried it on one side for a start.” Lord Cheadle was the guest of the evening, and I imagined, as I looked at his bowed shoulders and untidy white hair, and listened to his voice, still silvery in quality though lacking its old fire, how those tones must have thrilled the Commons at the time of the Five Years’ War. The excitement was intense throughout the evening: every sentence of Lord Cheadle was cheered to the echo, and the very dons in the gallery shook their fists when his Nationalist opponent appealed for her fellow-countrymen. The voting, as usual, went against the visitor, and we had the satisfaction of feeling that the Oxford Union had once more dictated its policy to the Government.

It must not be supposed that, because I was so multifariously occupied, I was neglecting my chances in the Schools. I had decided to take as my subject for Finals the group known as Group 65B, which consisted of Geography and Byzantine Architecture, with French as a subsidiary subject. I sat once more at the feet of the great Hoskyns, and was privileged to attend the very first lecture to which he released his considerations on “Whereness examined as such, without reference to spatial conceptions, with special allusion to the recently discovered work of Aristotle on ????t??.” He followed this up with a course (I have the notes of it still) called “Towards a reconciliation of Teleology with Geography, with some remarks on the Where as a function of the Why.” Alas, it was after my time that he startled the world with his “The Whence as an aspect of the Whither, a point Einstein overlooked.” In fact, he had not yet made his name, but he had one fervent devotee. So enthralled was I by his speculations that I made a suggestion that I should come and take private classes with him at his house: when difficulties arose, I actually consented to come without receiving the usual fee. Never shall I forget the thrill of those evenings! It was something of a pilgrimage that I had taken on myself, for he lived in one of the most fashionable streets of Boar’s Hill, and this was before the funicular railway had been electrified. At the end of our fourth class, however, he proposed marriage, a suggestion which so took me aback that I put him off with the plea (an unusual one, even then) that I must write for my parents’ consent. My mother was very busy at the time, since she was entering her dog for a show, and my father found it impossible to get away. The result was unexpected, but perhaps fortunate, a visit from old Miss Linthorpe! She interviewed Charles Hoskyns for three-quarters of an hour, and came away saying that the man ought to be in Bedlam (a melancholy prophecy of what happened later on). The engagement was broken off, but I promised that I would always be a sister to him, and when he married his typist a few months later, suggested further that I would be a sister-in-law to his wife.

My researches in Byzantine architecture were less absorbing; it was a subject more difficult to treat in a theoretical aspect. I went to Church at St. Barnabas’ one Sunday, to collect local colour, but the expedition was not a success. That Church had been one of the earliest to acclaim and to encourage rapprochement with the Greek Orthodox Communion, and I found that, during the week, an enormous screen had been erected in the middle of the Church, completely hiding the Eastern portion of it. The screen, indeed, had doors in it, which were meant (I afterwards learnt) to be thrown open at various points in the service; but unfortunately these doors jammed on this first occasion, and the congregation had to be content without seeing the officiating clergy at all.

I hope it will not be thought to argue defective piety in me that I have, so far, said nothing about the religious state of the University. I am sorry to say that I think the women who were up in my time were, on the whole, far better Churchgoers than their successors of to-day. The old idea of compulsory chapels had disappeared almost before the Five Years’ War; and there was now no worldly inducement to keep even Sunday chapels except that those who went on Sunday evening were not charged for their dinner afterwards in Hall. In spite of the purely voluntary character of these services, I think we had nearly always about a third of the College in attendance; and very heartily, I remember, did they join in the singing. Miss Garvice, our principal, used to conduct the service, and would occasionally preach us a lay sermon: she always refused, however, to pronounce the Absolution; the assumption of anything like priestly powers by women in the present state of feeling, she said, could do no good and might possibly do harm. We used the ordinary Prayer Book service, but, in virtue of a special privilege accorded to us by our visitor, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, we altered the masculine gender to the feminine wherever it occurred in any general connexion: “When the wicked woman turneth away from her wickedness,” and so on.

Our devotion to the services of the Church at St. Lucy’s was but part of a great religious movement throughout the University. In those days, the Sunday evening sermons for undergraduates which are now preached at St. Peter’s-in-the-East were still preached at St. Mary’s, and when a really popular orator such as the then Bishop of Plymouth was to occupy the pulpit, you did well to be in time for the opening prayers if you wanted to make sure of a seat. I remember an atheist meeting, which was being held opposite the moving platform in St. Giles’, where the old Martyrs’ Memorial used to stand, being almost broken up by a set of Magdalen undergraduates who were returning from the Bullingdon dinner. When the Archbishop of British Guiana was given his honorary degree (I was in the theatre myself), there was no larking among the undergraduates in the gallery, except that one young man threw down a black and only partially clothed “Golliwog” in his direction—an action which the Oxford Magazine criticized afterward as being in doubtful taste. Altogether, our young friends at Oxford might do worse than go back to the religious standard of the early thirties.

No one man can be more reasonably credited with having brought about this state of things than Canon Dives of Christ Church. It is not easy, of course, from the Catholic point of view to sympathize with his difficulties or to rest satisfied with his affirmations. But in those days he was a tower of strength to many weak hearts. I remember attending a meeting of the Oxford University Churches Reunion in the J.C.R. at Worcester, to which he read his famous “Explanation of the Existence of Good.” I felt it to be so remarkable a feat that I kept the notes of it, of which I give an abstract. Evil, he said, was an undeniable fact in our experience. The phenomenon of pain, which some short-sighted philosophers had attempted to deny, was sufficiently attested for us by the “fugitive reaction” which it set up in Man and even, apparently, in the lower animals. “If I am kicked on the shin,” he explained with his dry humour, “my instinct is to put my shin elsewhere.” A very little reflection would show us that the parallel phenomenon known as “Moral” evil had an equally real existence. “If I see a man kicking a baby on the shin, my instinct is to remonstrate with him.” He then drew a lurid picture of all the moral evil that went on in the world: even in those days, it was a damning indictment! “Now, gentlemen,” he continued, in that curious little shriek that was so characteristic of his pulpit delivery, “no Evil without Good! Evil cannot exist without implying the existence of its correlative! If you, gentlemen,” (beaming at us through his spectacles) “are to be at liberty to do wrong, you must ipso facto leave me my liberty to do right. You will tell me that, on this showing, Good has only a parasitic, and almost a negative existence. Be it so; it exists. And now, how are we to account for its existence?” He went on to show, in a really eloquent passage, that Evil can only realize itself fully if and in so far as it finds itself in a continual struggle against Good; that Good is, consequently, necessary to the constitution of the world, which demands Evil as a condition of its fulfilment. “Some day, perhaps,” he added, “wiser heads and clearer vision than yours or mine will be able to include Evil and Good under a Higher Synthesis which shall co-ordinate and subsume them both. Meanwhile, we struggle on in the half-light of our uncertainty, only confident that the Power (for so, I think we may call it) which has instilled into our natures such an irresistible craving for what is evil, will somehow, somewhere, bring that evil to fulfilment.” The roof of the J.C.R. echoed again as we testified by our grateful plaudits our gratitude to Canon Dives for his courageous utterance.

But it must not be imagined that our whole time at Oxford was spent in these serious occupations! We had our relaxations, too, and wherever innocent fun was going, you may be sure that the undergraduates of St. Lucy’s had their part. No less than five of us, I remember, were included in the caste of “Oh, blast it all” when it was performed by the O.U.D.S. in the Lent term of 1936. I came on myself in the Mixed Bathing scene, and again at the end of the Fourth Act, where the male and female choruses come out of the Noah’s Ark in pairs, in fancy dress. We had the opportunity of seeing most of the successful revues at the Theatre, some of them when they had only been running three years or so on the London stage. Occasionally (for the Proctors were very strict about the management of the theatre) we had to vary the entertainment with the old classical stage of Pinero and Brandon Thomas.

It was in the Eights Week of my last year (1938) that the St. Lucy’s boat went up into the First Division, beating Merton II. It was true that Merton I had now been head of the river five years in succession, and some thought that they sacrificed the prospects of their second boat to those of their first, but it was, nevertheless, a memorable triumph. There was bad blood between the rowing and the football sets at the time, because the football semi-final had been reported in the St. Lucy’s Chronicle in a way that we all thought odious. But it was not a time for narrow, sectarian grudges; and we all turned out in our football skirts and our blue-and-gold-edged “perspirers” to watch the race from the towing path. The habit of putting on “change” to watch the races was merely a survival, ever since the towing path had been turned into a moving platform, but it was a ritual rigorously observed. How we shouted, as the nose of the St. Lucy’s boat gradually gained upon our Herculean antagonists, and bumped them just opposite the Lady Margaret barge! There were great doings in the College that night, and we broke three of the library windows.

But meanwhile the shadow of Schools was drawing nearer, and there was little time left for such frivolities. I knew that I was sound on my texts, and my tutress warned me to take it easy toward the end. I went away for three days before the examination—to Ascot, where I made some good selections. The examination itself filled me with despair: the weather was thunderous and the heat of the room excessive. I even went so far as to write on one of my papers: “TO THE EXAMINER.—I could have done this question much better if the woman in front of me were not using such a noisy typewriter.” My “viva” was a short and purely informal one; they asked me the whereabouts of Tonkin, which I located, in the embarrassment of the moment, in Lancashire. But when the lists came out in September I found my own name among the first class, and made history once more as the first woman who had ever made good in Byzantine architecture.