Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said James, after pouring himself a second cup, ‘I’ll get back to my book.’

  The pipe felt so awkward between his teeth, it seemed to rattle against them. He held onto the bowl, steadied it, and sucked in deeply. You needed to persist, the man in the shop had said, sometimes it could take weeks. Why had he not asked his name?

  It was not until half past six that he felt in the clear. Where would they have gone? Would they be interested in the same things? Yet Joe had known him even though he was a stranger. He’d been so friendly, and in a way that had touched Joe so directly. He felt he had somehow let himself down. He would have to go to a different barber’s shop in future.

  ‘Let me buy you a pint of bitter,’ James suggested, and snapped the novel shut. ‘I don’t want to finish this until later. Sometimes spinning it out like that can be …’ - he was going to say ‘exquisite’ -’… quite exciting, you make your own cliffhanger.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Joe went up the spiral of stone steps to meet his tutor feeling like a boy summoned from the lower deck to the captain’s bridge. Matthew Turney’s reputation was already vivid. It was claimed that he had written his first book while commanding a submarine in the North Atlantic; his second had been a hand grenade tossed into the cautious and patient scholarship of early Tudor history; his later books broke into local records of the gentry and with fresh evidence dashingly tilted at received opinions, delighted in fierce disputes over details, made history a war game.

  When, later, Joe would reach the period of history in which Turney had pitched camp, he would find the weekly reading list of four or five books and an equal number of articles often quivering with debates provoked by the man who would listen to him every week at 5 p.m. on Monday reading aloud an essay, for about half an hour, and then fill out the hour with his own observations on the essay and on the subject. And the princely early seventeenth-century room bagged by Turney impressed itself on Joe almost as much as the man himself. When the ten 1958 intake of historians at Wadham had met Turney for sherry in their first week, the tutor had listed some of the scientists, historians, classicists, scholars of quiet fame and enduring importance in the chain of knowledge who had themselves over the centuries ascended those spiral stone steps and brooded on learning.

  Many of the more artistically informed undergraduates had observed that Matthew Turney would have been a perfect subject for El Greco. He sat black-gowned in his high armchair facing Joe, similarly black-gowned, in an almost matching chair. Turney would settle himself deep in the chair, throw out long legs which managed to look bony even under his heavy cloth three-piece suits, the thin face, thinning black hair, somehow cowled by the top of the gown as he hunched up to listen - or, not to listen, who could tell? - to yet another essay on the same question asked by him of a similar band of novice historians during the past eight years.

  For Joe so far this was the best bit. He felt secure, he knew how privileged he was, this was what he was here for. He delivered the essay at a steady pace.

  Accepted to read Modern History, Joe had been a little surprised that it started in the fifth century, but now he revelled in that Dark Age richness. He knew so little about it. It was inhabited by Celtic Christians and northern warriors. Much of it was located in places he had visited - Iona, Lindisfarne, along the broken Roman Wall. He felt proprietorial about it and Matthew smiled at fulsome descriptions, amazement, panegyric.

  ‘Well done!’ he said when Joe finished. ‘You put a hell of a lot into it, well done. You don’t have to murder yourself over these chaps, you know. There’s much more interesting stuff to come and frankly this will figure very small in Finals. I doubt whether you’ll even bother with it. But well done, old chap!’

  Joe flinched away from the compliment. He sought out the glass fronted bookcase, almost floor to ceiling, glistening with handsomely bound books, volumes of authority, and again he thought this was the best room he had ever been in. But though his eyes were reluctant to meet the enthusiasm of such an idolised tutor, inside himself Joe sang and for a while the song dispelled his homesickness. The work on the essay had numbed it but this was a lifting of a siege.

  ‘You may,’ said Turney, tactfully, burying himself even more deeply into the armchair, his face now all but shrouded in the gown and the large collar of the loose jacket, you may like to take a slightly different look at one or two aspects of this. Yes, those kings were fighting - when it suited them - for God and the cross, but they were the most terrible thugs. Think of Al Capone in Chicago, that’s more like it.’

  Al Capone? Thugs? Kings of Northumbria, Kings of Wessex and Mercia? Chicago?

  ‘They’re basically illiterate war lords - think of the Chinese war lords. The Roman Empire’s collapsed, the Romans push off to defend their heartland and this place is up for grabs. There are the locals, there are mercenaries who’ve been in and out for donkey’s years, the Germanic hordes see a chance to push across and snatch up the freehold, it’s a good old-fashioned land grab. Nor is it so very unfamiliar to us today.’

  Joe nodded but he was reeling.

  ‘You’re very generous about those Celtic monks - you are a Christian, aren’t you? - and some of them were remarkable chaps. They came out of Ireland where the Romans had scarcely set foot -important point, uncolonised - then up to Iona - you wrote well about that, been there? I guessed so - down to Lindisfarne, then they’d go on to York over into Europe, sit at the centre of Charlemagne’s attempt to make a Holy Roman Empire - some remarkable individuals. But are we to believe everything they said about themselves? The miracles, the prophecies, the healing of the sick? They’re aping the Apostles, you see, they want to beat the Apostles at their own game and all the mumbo-jumbo that went with it. We have to be a bit careful about the sources here, even Bede. There is a sense in which he’s writing propaganda - for the Church and for the Northumbrian royal family. Serving two masters, you might say.’ He smiled warmly. Joe needed it.

  Propaganda? The Venerable Bede? The Founder of English History? St. Bede?

  ‘And those Celtic saints, Richardson, they were far more worldly than you gave them credit for. Look at how they worked their way into positions of power by getting the women on their side. They arrive at the courts of these pagan kings. Nothing about the poor, here: they know their Bismarck, their real-politik, these chaps. They single out the Queen and her daughters and sisters. We don’t know how they do it and imagination could run riot - but they convert them. The Queen stumps up for a church. More conversions. Their husbands win a battle or two after they nag them into planting the Christian cross on the battlefield. They’re convinced the cross brings them victory and then mass conversions. Monotheism is in business. But these canny Celts saw that it was the women who could drive it. And when they built abbeys - like Hilda at Whitby - the women were staking claims to power because they ran these places and these Saxon women had independent inheritances. They could afford to be empire builders.’ Joe concentrated hard. You did not take notes.

  ‘At their abbeys the women trained the younger sons of the upper crust and probably one or two scholarship boys - not unlike this place today - and herded in a few earnest and privileged young women -ditto - and for a while Christianity gave these women a real power base. So who was using whom? We have Celtic cunning and feminine opportunism - a marriage made in Heaven!’

  Turney had enjoyed that: not least seeing that the mind of the young man in front of him was being turned on a spit. It was Joe’s turn.

  ‘Whether you’re a Christian or not,’ said Joe, ‘they were, and that’s what matters, isn’t it? Whatever you say about mumbo-jumbo and trying to beat the Apostles and roping in the women or being used by them, the fact is they did it, didn’t they? They made these places Christian. They set up monasteries. They brought workmen from all over Europe to build and carve stuff. Bede wrote that first history and all his other books. There were the Lindisfarne Gospels - they’re great w
orks of art, aren’t they? As well as being the Gospels. They used the Roman script to start writing in English. They wouldn’t have been able to do that if they hadn’t believed in God and if God hadn’t helped them.’

  ‘Other, and greater, civilisations, Richardson, take Greece, had managed well enough without a Christian god.’

  ‘But they crumbled, they lost.’

  ‘Not exactly. Not at all actually. The Greeks are still with us, thank God, despite Christianity’s attempt to go it alone without them. It was the Arabs who took the Greeks over … seriously. The Arabs were coming on as the real boys at about this time.’

  ‘But do you think that Northumbria would have been civilised without the Celts and Christianity?’

  ‘Civilised? O.K. - the Lindisfarne Gospels, Bede, Hilda, yes, civilised. I confess to being rather worried when you say God was on their side. Lots of these saints of yours were martyred and once it had become the powerful court religion I suspect an awful lot of chaps just jumped onto the bandwagon and went into the Church. And they became every bit as greedy and often as bloodthirsty as their heathen warrior brothers.’

  ‘But the monks still did it.’

  As Joe tried to keep the argument alive, tried, in truth, to find some way of standing up to what he felt was an unfair and untrue reduction of the whole Celtic enterprise, he had to keep hypocrisy at bay. Despite the experience of Paris, his faith had dimmed to the point where he could even question the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the facts of Heaven and Hell. Viscerally, especially at extreme moments, it could still be convincing but a growing and stronger voice was steering him towards the secular scepticism of Matthew Turney.

  ‘But jolly good,’ said the tutor as he stood up at the end of the tutorial. ‘Well done.’

  As he always did, he ushered his undergraduate to the door.

  ‘I see you come from Wigton, in Cumberland.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I get my suits copied there. The John Peel Tailor. Redmayne’s?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Joe felt a little surge of ridiculous pride. ‘They do an excellent job. First rate. And jolly cheap.’

  ‘My mother worked at Redmayne’s.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘She made buttonholes.’

  As soon as that came out, Joe wished very hard that he had not said it.

  ‘Before the war,’ he added.

  Matthew Turney, Wykehamist Scholar, Officer, Gentleman, pressed his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder.

  ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Don’t work too hard on this stuff, Richardson, will you? Take time to have a good nose around.’

  Joe had an hour and a half before dinner. He came down the stone steps exuberant, embarrassed, comforted and still intoxicated by the achievements of the Celtic monks. It was dark in the architecturally faultless front quad, dimly lit by yellow lights, shadowy men coming in and out of the black entrances to staircases, a misty sense of Sherlock Holmes about the place. Joe took out his pipe.

  He would go back to his rooms and make notes on what Mr. Turney had said. After dinner he would start on the fortnightly essay which he had to write for his other tutor. He got his pipe going with just two matches.

  James was at the desk and the two young men acknowledged each other in one of what was becoming a deeply companionable range of responses. Joe settled in the window seat. After a few minutes, James leaned back his chair and said,

  ‘You don’t have any Greek at all, do you?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘I pity. Damn!’

  He stood up.

  ‘I think I’ll go to the bar.’

  ‘I want to do a bit of work. I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind.’ Part of him wanted to go, just to please James.

  James nodded, as it were blessing Joe’s diligence. He took his gown and then spotted that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was still exactly where he had left it.

  ‘Not read it yet?’

  ‘I haven’t had time,’ said Joe. ‘But I will.’

  ‘Do. I’d greatly value your opinion on it.’

  Joe was, guiltily, a little relieved to see him go. He could now be alone and luxuriantly burrow into himself completely and sift through Matthew Turney’s comments. He had taken it for granted that Christianity was flawed, occasionally even something to be ashamed of, but still fundamentally the peak of human achievement in morality and in ideals of freedom and justice. However shaky his own faith was becoming, it was too early for Joe totally to abandon his belief that, for instance, the great Celtic preachers, Aidan, Columba, Cuthbert, had brought light to a dark world, hope to a miserable world, possibilities of truth and equality to a corrupt world. But Matthew Turney was the cleverest man he had met. Joe was excited to think he had the chance to take him on. He tried to relight his pipe with just one match.

  ‘Fancy a bit of Society Hunting?’

  Roderick, who was also reading History, accompanied Joe, sometimes with a few others, on a grand tour of Oxford’s beckoning societies.

  The History Society was an obvious early stop. Joe was caught. Two dons whose books he had seen on the shelves debated and then led a discussion on the Jesuits in the Counter Reformation. Joe joined.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Roderick, rather enjoying, Joe thought, the fact that Joe so clearly liked and imitated his clipped way of talking - so he made it even more clipped - his brisk way of walking - more brisk -his quick-chop decision making. ‘Too much like home. Next!’

  The Literary Society. A critic from the Observer whose writing Joe revered was pitched against a woman novelist who chain-smoked through a cigarette holder. The subject was ‘The Relevance of the Critic’. The room was packed. The speakers were only mildly funny. Joe thought they might be boozy. No sparks flew. Joe was puzzled. These were Titans.

  ‘Alcos both,’ said Roderick. ‘And bloody egomaniacs.’

  Neither joined although Joe took the programme and reserved himself the right to attend particular meetings. The Music Society. In the college itself. A recital of Schubert’s songs by one of the new undergraduates, accompanied by a man in the third year. ‘Bliss,’ said Roderick. I’m on.’

  Joe demurred. It would be easier, he calculated, and take less time to continue to listen to concerts on the wireless. He had brought his maroon plastic box and spare batteries.

  Roderick marched off with school chums to two or three other societies: Joe went with James to the Philosophical Society where the discussion was so dazzling - and from men of about his own age - that he staggered out thinking the best thing to do would be to catch the next train home. James joined. There was a new society being formed to campaign against racial intolerance. All of them joined that.

  The Politicals.

  ‘We can always say we tried,’ said Roderick.

  The Conservative Club. ‘Oh Gawd!’ said Roderick. Labour. ‘Gawd!’ Liberal. ‘Some very pretty girls there,’ said Roderick, ‘worth a sub.’ Joe signed on for Labour but he was not sure he would stick it out. There was rugby, there was the Chapel, he wanted to summon up the nerve to audition for the college Drama Society. There were the societies he’d already joined and should he join the Jazz Society? There was the theatre, there were cinemas, there were rumours of an opera.

  ‘All good men and true must go to the Union,’ said Roderick. ‘No getting out of that. Let’s get it over with.’

  Through the early winter streets of Oxford, in the yellow-lit dusk which always seemed touched with a river mist and curled around university buildings still too fine for Joe to take for granted, along the Broad and the High, up Turi Street and Merton Street, past the Martyrs’ Memorial and across Carfax, like phantoms out of the mist, they came, the serious men, and serious women too, some cycling in from their more distant colleges, men in strong made-for-a-lifetime sports jackets, women in sensible warm coats, heavy and obliterating of all shape, puffing out the cold air like pipe smoke, college scarves slung around the neck in that precisely casual unif
orm style, streaming towards the Oxford Union. It was the place in which Prime Ministers had taken their first steps in public life, the place which had and would again breed Chancellors and Foreign Secretaries, leaders of newly liberated countries on several continents, statesmen, moulders of opinion in print, on air, masters of society or so it was thought and so it had often enough proved to be the case. Eagerly they came through the streets as a congregation to their temple of destiny.

  ‘James said that he expected at least two or three of those we saw tonight would be in the cabinet, or running the civil service, maybe an ambassadorship, an important one, he said, America, Russia, France, India.’

  This was from the last letter Rachel received before setting out for Oxford and everything in it fuelled her growing fear of inadequacy.

  ‘It was great to see them,’ Joe wrote. ‘Most of them just two or three years older than me. Some of the main speakers in dinner jackets with black dicky bow ties. Others wearing white bow ties. And such speeches!’

  What he really meant was such assurance, such aplomb, and a confidence beyond his understanding. He would have loved to stand up in the Oxford Union, as he had in the debates at school, and tell the world to be more just, argue that peoples of all races and religions show more tolerance to each other, demonstrate the need to work for a single world order and demand the end of all poverty. The schoolboy Joe had seen public and political speech as the essential platform from which to launch ideas which would sweep the world and change it for ever.

  The Union tongue-tied him. He knew in the first few minutes that he could not dress like that or speak or perform like that to an audience which he believed to be almost mythically intelligent and critical and itself packed full of the potentially great. The speakers in their evening dress, the speeches full of knowing, anecdotal embroidery, classical tags, the place so clearly a forum for those who would rule over us unnerved and paralysed him.

  ‘That’s my lot,’ he said in a clipped, Roderick tone. ‘Not for me.’ He hoped his rejection was convincing.