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I had been looking forward to reading this book ever since its
warm, wise author appeared on Joan Bakewell’s television
series "Memento" and its imminent publication was given
a discreet plug. It was worth waiting for.
Written with a stripping-the-willows honesty, it joins the apostolic
succession of the best Oxford memoirs: Gibbon on the dons of Magdalen
("Their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance
of youth"); Cardinal Newman and his blessed snap-dragon;
Victorians such as W. H. Mallock and the Rev. W Tuckwell; Sir
Lawrence Jones (L. E. Jones) in An Edwardian Youth; Anthony
Powell in Infants of the Spring; Larkin on Arnis; Amis
on Larkin; John Wain on the flagellant E. H. W. Meyerstein and
his ‘notable collection of whips’ in Sprightly Running.
I would add to the list Sir Maurice Bowra’s Memories,
even though the book was sent up rotten in Private Eye,
9 December 1966 ("Lord Mary Webble [I shall call him P] was
slim and dark with bright green eyes and an engaging lisp.")
And you’d have to include Sir John Betjeman in Summoned
by Bells (‘My walls were painted Bursar’s apple-green’).
Martin Amis in the symposium My Oxford (edited by Ann Thwaite,
1977) took an unrosy view of the dreaming spires, though his Oxford
was not quite as grisly as the one he had imagined was in store
for him:
Three years of waking up every morning dangling naked from
the chapel rafters, my head shaved, my balls blackened with
shoe polish, and a sign reading "Yaroo—College Squit!"
suspended from my neck.
I say ‘apostolic succession’ because Oxford dons outlast
their undergraduates, as the Sir Humphreys of the civil service
outlast their Government ministers. One of the pleasures for the
connoisseur of Oxford memoirs is to track a particular don through
successive books. So ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, who was to
Oxford what Oscar Browning was to Cambridge, appears as an affable
saloniste in L. B. Jones’ book, still conducting vacation
reading-parties like the one described in A. H. Clough’s
grotesque poem "The Bothie of Toperna-Vuolich"; and
as "mild, monkish, white-haired, withdrawn, elusive in manner"
in the memoirs of Anthony Powell, who records how Evelyn Waugh
and his friends sang under Sligger’s window, to the tune
of "Here we go gathering nuts in May", ‘The Dean
of Balliol lies with men.’
Ved Mehta is fascinated by the Oxford continuity. He had Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ room in his first year at Balliol, Harold
Macmillan’s in his second. One of his friends, he writes,
had learned ‘his particular shout’ from Sir Isaiah Berlin,
‘who, in turn, had learned it from Sir Maurice Bowra, another
great Oxford figure’. In fact, Mehta is almost obsessionally
interested in people’s backgrounds. Blind since about the
age of four, he has an urge to know not only exactly what people
are like, but how in heaven they got that way.
This taste for antecedents leads to some mighty digressions.
In describing his Balliol friend Jasper Griffin (later a don),
Mehta treats us to 15 pages on Griffin’s schooldays at Christ’s
Hospital, five bonus pages on Lamb’s and Coleridge’s
experiences there, and four pages on Griffin’s life before
that school, including a long extract from a specimen 11-plus
exam paper. But it would be unfair to suggest that Mehta cannot
find a tangent without racing off on it. The digressions are reservoirs
that feed the river of narrative. Griffin was one of Mehta’s
best friends, and we understand him better for knowing his social
background, his schooling and even his school’s background.
Griffin told Mehta that wearing that ‘extraordinary kit’
at school had made him not care so much what people thought of
him. ‘Everyone stared at you. Well, you got used to that.’
We know a lot about Mehta’s own background from his many
autobiographical works. The first, Face to Face, appeared
when he was still an Oxford undergraduate in 1958. He was the
son of a comfortably off Indian doctor. When the child went blind,
he was sent to a school for the blind in Arkansas and went on
to Pomona College, California. So at Oxford he was doubly an exile—trebly,
if one counts his being an exile from the light. That made for
marvellous objectivity. Blind he might be, but he was the acutest
kind of observer: the outsider who wants to be an insider.
If you are given a translation of a French play, you can tell
fairly quickly whether it is a good play. Only by reading the
original can you know if it is a good translation. Similarly,
a portrait in oils can be a good painting without necessarily
being a good likeness. Like Ved Mehta, I went up to Oxford in
the late 1950s. I arrived there in 1959, the year he went down—knew
some of the same people and read the same subject, modern history.
So I saw the original, and this book gave me, what not every reader
can get from it, the ‘delighted shock of recognition’.
Everyone, I suspect, likes to think that his Oxford is the last
guttering (Indian summer?) of an ancien regime . Ours was the
Oxford before ‘student unrest’ erupted in the 1960s,
an Oxford of short-back-and sides haircuts—as Mehta puts
it, ‘a period of decorum ... Both dons and undergraduates
wore ties and tweed jackets’. The Mitre Hotel and the Cadena
Cafe were still standing. So was that wonderful Victorian Gothic
shop with a Victorian Gothic name, Grimbly Hughes. The ratio of
women to men was one to eight.
The golden-age Oxford of Waugh’s and Betjeman’s days,
which had been divided into ‘aesthetes’ and ‘hearties’,
had given place to a university divided between the public school
boys and the grammar school boys. By the time Mehta went up in
1956 the grammar schools had theoretically won the battle: 70
per cent of Oxford undergraduates were from state schools. But
that did not end the antagonism. To the public school people,
the grammar school boys were oiks with Brylcreemed ‘quiffs’
of hair, uncouth accents, blazers sewn with college badges and
a battery of Parker pens in the front top pocket to assert status.
Worse, they wore the collars of open-necked shirts outside their
jacket collars and rode bicycles with low handlebars.
What the grammarschool boys (of whom I was one) thought of their
public school contemporaries, was never better expressed than
by a grammarschool undergraduate quoted by the future Lord Vaizey
in The Establishment (1959), edited by the future Lord Thomas:
Physically they seem to be bigger than the rest of us, with
especially long legs. Their faces tend to be long and lean,
or fleshy; in every case they seem to be permanently twenty-five
years of age . . . Their lips are slightly bulging; their voices
loud and confident . . . Their clothes do not include zip-fronted
knitted garments, gaberdine raincoats or leopard-skin bathing-trunks.
He credited them with ‘an abundance of rather ragged and
slightly grey underwear’, and noted that their clothes were
covered in Cash’s labels, ‘especially on the parts of
socks you can see’. They went for runs in very long shorts,
with towels round their necks:
As I walk through Oxford . . . I see figures that would be
greeted in Lewisham or Birkenhead with shrieks of derision.
He thought that
Public-school boys are bloody rude unless they make a decision
to be charming…They tend to eat like pigs; it is those
poised on social brinks who worry about table manners.
And finally he charged:
They are very confident and emotionally quite uninvolved in
what they say: they must never be in a position where it is
possible to be snubbed, ridiculed or ruffled.
To this I would add: they wore their hair in lank ‘bangs’,
brushed down to one eye; they left their mouths gaping open when
not talking, as if they had just run a race; they tended to barge
their way to the front of the dinner queue, bellowing ‘Sorry’;
and when they couldn’t hear you they shouted ‘What?’
(pronounced ‘Wart?’), as much as to say, ‘Why can’t
you speak up, you snivelling wretch?, as opposed to the lower
middleclass ‘Pardon?’—which derided expression
at least politely implies, ‘I’m at fault.’ As for
accent, they pronounced toast ‘taste’—a foible
Stephen Fry notes in The Liar.
Gilbert Harding once asked a man on a radio programme what he
did. ‘I’m a gentleman farmer,’ he unwisely replied.
‘I suppose that means you’re neither,’ Harding
shot back. Ved Mehta with his Indian and American background,
was neither public school nor grammar school. He wistfully observed
that as a foreigner he simply had no place in what he saw as the
ruthless hierarchy of Oxford society. The accuracy with which
he anatomises the groupings on that distant battlefield is uncanny.
Here is his portrait of a public school friend (friend , mark
you!):
Like many public school men, he moved around with a gang so
close-knit that its members could almost have passed for a mythical
animal. They had a sort of group personality, as if each were
always in need of an audience . . . They were known for strutting
about—for constantly getting in and out of taxis, for hard
drinking, for exchanging jokes and witticisms in loud voices.
Indeed, they conducted themselves as if they belonged to the
governing class, and the place were part of their inheritance—as
if the majority of undergraduates, who were non public school
men ... were interlopers.
Every word of that rings true to me after more than 30 years.
Oxford was renowned for ‘knocking off the rough corners’,
but the Polyfilla has not been invented that could fill in the
chips excavated in some shoulders in those years. Mehta’s
book will be valuable to social historians. I am rather ashamed
that I did not take his sympathetic interest in the college scouts:
he even knows what their wages were (£10 a week). He writes
of the famous without malice but with his usual honesty. There
is a good pen-portrait of the bibulous poet Dom Moraes (‘Vedkins,
what about a tiny drinkkins?’). It is a diverting exercise
to look up what Moraes had to say about Mehta in his 1968 memoirs,
My Son’s Father: ‘suits of excellent cut’
. . . ‘sleepy air . . . misled’ . . . ‘a rather
waspish line in wit’. . . ‘attended club dinners frequently,
resplendent in evening dress’… ‘intensely disliked
people who tried to help him’ . . . ‘he would ascend
the drainpipe like Sir Edmund Hillary and swing himself from it
through the windows like Tarzan of the Apes’…
….Mehta quotes John Sparrow’s quip that young fellows
of his college in getting married were ‘giving up All Souls
for one body’. Sparrow indeed said that, and was praised
for so doing in an otherwise punishing article by David Caute
in Encounter in 1966. But Ved Mehta, with his passion for
antecedents, may like to know that the joke was first made in
the Gentleman’s Magazine of May 1748 in this poem:
On a College Life
By a Fellow of All Souls
So fond am I of a sweet college-life,
I would not change for that sweet thing, a wife.
Prevailing nature his weak mind controuls.
Who for one single body quits All Souls.
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