by Bruce Feiler
LOOKING FOR CLASS
Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge
Bruce Feiler
For
Aleen Wolf Feiler,
who taught me when to bunt
and when to swing away,
and who gave me the gift of travel
Tut-tut, it looks like rain.
—A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926
CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
Coming Up
MICHAELMAS TERM
I Matriculating
II Rowing
III Touring
IV Loving
V Drinking
VI Learning
VII Sharking
VIII Racing
LENT TERM
IX Dating
X Sparring
XI Talking
XII Partying
XIII Ragging
XIV Flirting
XV Praying
EASTER TERM
XVI Reading
XVII Searching
XVIII Debating
XIX Climbing
XX Waltzing
XXI Graduating
EPILOGUE
Going Down
AFTER CLASS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
BOOKS BY BRUCE FEILER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PROLOGUE
COMING UP
Rivers and Roads
It was a dreary morning when the wheels
Rolled over a wide plain o’erhung with clouds,
And nothing cheered our way till first we saw
The long-roofed chapel of King’s College lift
Turrets and pinnacles in answering files,
Extended high above a dusky grove.
—William Wordsworth
The Prelude, 1850
A young man stepped forward into the bleached morning light and drew a sword from a sheath at his waist. His mouth, like the sky, was dry. All around him, from the shops, the sheds, and the terra-cotta fields of the arid Indian town, whispers streamed through the dusty streets and settled before the shrine. Up above, the sun stood still, as if bowing to a moment in the passage of youth. While far below, faces peered toward the boy in front of the altar and blushed the shade of baked red earth as they first inhaled the divine perfume of a lamb about to die.
Moving cautiously, the boy gripped the sword around its gilded handle and lifted it slowly to a peak above his head, using both his hands, both his eyes, and the amalgamated strength of the town’s congregation. The boy, barely a month past twenty, was royally dressed in a white cotton gown, a scarlet cap, and black canvas slippers. His stringy hair was matted to his brow by a delicate lace of perspiration. Feeling the drip of his anxiety, he steadied his stance, redoubled his grip, and awaited the signal from God.
As far as anyone in town could remember, the sword had never failed to attract the needed signal. A generation earlier, after World War Two, the boy’s father had used the blade to consecrate his country’s independence; later his older brother had used it to gain good fortune for his marriage; now he was required to use the sword to guarantee safe passage on a voyage—one that many others would take that day, but few would observe in its ritual glory. For this son, the second son, was leaving home for a journey that would take him to a higher world, to the world of poets and kings, to the world of England. Rana Patel was going to Cambridge.
For a quarter of an hour he awaited the signal—his arms outstretched, his breath held tight, his face as still as stone. But the message didn’t come. The lamb continued to wander about, and Rana began to squirm. Years earlier, his older brother had successfully decapitated the lamb with one blow from the sword and anything less on his part would augur misfortune for the rest of his life.
Then suddenly, when Rana thought he could remain poised no longer, the lamb drooped its head and began to drift, first forward, then back, with the subtle sway of an empty cradle. Beginning with its cloven feet and stretching through its sinewy legs to the hunch of its infant back, the lamb began to shiver, to quake with the force of a tender shrub seized by monsoon winds. Rana knew this was the beacon he sought. Closing his eyes and arching his back like the callow lamb he was destined to slaughter, he pointed the sword toward the heart of the sun, summoned a resolve from the depths of his person, and sliced the blade toward the woolen flesh he would transform into parchment.
When Rana finally opened his eyes, he could see a prayer on the lips of the town and hear the blood that began with a drip, eased into a stream, and flowed inexorably down toward the sea. From this river he had built a bridge. And at that moment, when the whispers began to bask in the glory and Rana began to shine, somewhere on the other side of the sun it began to rain….
A young woman stepped up to the antique sink and turned on the water to hide her distress. Her climb—so thorough—seemed about to collapse. True, Peter’s father, all through the evening, seemed not to notice the remains of her northern accent. His mother, who surely noticed her roots, acted as if she didn’t care. But Susanna still knew that they didn’t approve. Even though she and Peter would be returning to Cambridge the following day, no degree of education—no change of accent, no bleaching her hair—could completely bury her lowly background. And then, after dinner, she made her misstep, excusing herself for a trip to the toilet with the line “I’ll just go and wash my hands.” Peter’s mother—was it on purpose?—had given her directions to the washroom, which, as customary, was removed from the toilet. Eager not to admit her faux pas, Susanna opted for the only solution. Moving as silently as possible, she slid off her shoes and climbed onto the basin. She hiked up her skirt, slid down her stockings, and was just about to relieve herself when the sink, overwhelmed, relieved itself first: crashing to the ground, smashing the pipes, and spoiling Susanna Greely’s return to Cambridge by spilling her onto the washroom floor and spewing tap water, in a mock fountain of youth, all across the polished tile and all over her borrowed dress….
I stepped to the curb, dilated my umbrella, and stared as far as my eye could see. The road was a river, reined by the sky. The river was crowded, dammed to the bridge. From Long Island to Manhattan, all along the arteries, cars were clogged in an endless stream. Bobbing, I stood at river’s edge on Broadway, waving at occupied yellow cabs and drawing behind me like a pontoon bridge a suitcase, a camera case, a backpack, a duffel bag, a laptop computer, and a masticated paper sack containing two weeks of unread New York Timeses. From all accounts the president seemed tense: the Crisis was growing darker, he said, and men and women were being shipped to the East in the middle of the night. History, it seemed, was moving west to east, while I, fresh from Japan, was moving east to west.
“Where you going?” said a driver as he splashed to my side.
“Camelot.”
“Is that in Brooklyn?”
“It’s in England. I’m going to JFK.”
“Uy,” he said in a Queens English accent. “That’s a long ride. ’Fraid I’m gonna have to stop along the way. I gotta go. Know what I mean?”
“Sorry,” I said as I slid through the door. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to wait.”
He humphed, squeezed his legs, and took off with a start, while I checked my watch time and sank back in the seat. It was a little over an hour before my plane would take off and with it my quest for the perfect English grail—the driest wit, the densest fog, the ultimate degree. For most of the next half hour, however, every time my driver would round a corner and draw me closer to the start of my pursuit, a small orange light would cry out from his dash, CHECK EXPECTATIONS, at which point he would slam on his brakes and I would slink down in despair.
A little under an hour later we finally arrived. I handed the driver my last remaining dollars and hurried off with my hundred pounds of luggage to try and catch my flight. Dripping, I made it down the vertical escalator and along the underachieving horizontal one as well, before being stopped at the security gates, where I was asked to open my suitcase, take a picture with my camera, and, for counterterrorist-typist purposes, write a simple sentence on my laptop computer: “I gotta go. Know what I mean?”
With the engines already humming and the British papers long since distributed, I stumbled down the gangway at the appointed departure hour. I offered the attendant my luggage with an apologetic bow and lugged my three carry-ons down the aisle. Once they were stuffed overhead and underfoot, I leaned back on my flotation device, shielded my eyes from the last NO SMOKING sign I would see for a year, and released myself to the soothing voice of “my captain,” who said that the rain had caused such a river that our road to London would be delayed, happily ever after.
“Mummy, mummy, look, the wings are falling to bits.”
Phillida McClosky, aged seven-and-a-half, was pounding on the double window at the end of my row as our plane approached Heathrow International Airport a little over ten hours later, following a three-hour weather delay in New York and a seven-hour flight to London.
“They are not,” comforted her mother.
“No, no!” Phillida insisted, now turning to me for support. “I’m telling you, the wings are falling to pieces. They’re all mucked up.”
“Mucked up?” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “They look like this.” She held her arms askew like an awkward bird. “We’ll never land with wings like that.”
Phillida and her family were just returning from a holiday in America.
“Granny fell down and hurt her leg, so we had to go visit her,” she explained. “Then she got all dressed up to meet us at the airport and fell down again. Poor Granny.”
“Did you eat well in America?” I asked her.
“Well, once we went to a restaurant and I had a hamburger. It was pretty good.”
“So what do you want to eat first when you get home?”
She thought for a second, then clasped her hands together and stuck out her moistened tongue. “I want a huge plate of sausage and beans.”
“Phillida, dear, look,” called her mother. “You can see the M-4.”
“You will be pleased to note,” said the captain over the loudspeaker, “that we will be experiencing no unforeseen delays this morning during our final descent into London. Down below you will find a pleasant view of the River Thames and the M-25 motorway.”
“Everyone seems to know all the roads,” I observed.
“We have to learn them in school,” Phillida explained, still looking at London below. “I can tell you how to get from Brighton to Edinburgh without a map…. Hey look!” she cried. “I can see Waterloo Bridge. That’s my favourite.”
“Do you know all the bridges, as well?”
“Of course,” she said, turning back toward me. “This is Britain. You can’t go anywhere in this country without crossing a lot of bridges.”
Inside the terminal, where everything strikes the new arrival as a metaphor, various illuminated signs stood out on the chrome-and-plaster walls as I carried my luggage toward the “Disembarkation Lounge.” One, a red sign with white lettering, seemed like a declaration of independence from a unifying Europe: 100 FLIGHTS A WEEK TO PARIS AND AMSTERDAM (AND 100 BACK AGAIN). Another, a wry slogan over a close-up of club soda on the rocks, seemed a national anthem of sorts: THIS MAY APPEAR STRAIGHT, it said, BUT THE DISCRIMINATING EYE WILL NOTICE A TWIST.
After disembarking through the well-named lounge, I approached a lone policeman wearing an ice bucket-shaped helmet and asked if he could direct me to the bus station.
“Buses depart from across the street,” he said, pointing his machine gun at a sign above his head that showed, indeed, a pictogram of a bus with an arrow pointing across the street. “Be sure and look both ways,” he said.
Thanking him, I stepped into the street and glanced to my left, where I immediately noticed a message painted on the pavement that said, politely, PLEASE LOOK RIGHT. Chastened, I looked to the right, then to the left, and even to the right again before pulling my bags across the street and through the station door.
“I would like to take a bus to Cambridge,” I said to the woman behind the counter.
“Sorry,” she said, “there are no buses to Cambridge.”
“Are there trains?”
“Sorry, no trains.”
“Surely there must be some way to go.”
“Perhaps you should try the coach station.”
“What’s a coach station?”
“It’s where the coaches depart.”
I looked at her. “I realize that, but what’s a coach?”
“It’s a bus.”
“But I thought this was the bus station.”
“It is, but buses travel only short distances and coaches travel further.”
“I see. And where, may I ask, is the coach station?”
“See that bobby across the street?”
“The policeman.”
“The copper. Go past him, down the hall, up the lift, and out to the right.”
I took a deep breath and began gathering my luggage.
“By the way,” I said. “How much does it cost?”
“About ten quid,” she said.
“Thank you very much.”
“Thank you, sir. And don’t forget to look both ways.”
For the next fifteen minutes, as I redragged my gear past the bobby-copper, down the hall, up the lift, and out to the right, I tried to determine precisely what a “quid” was and whether I had ten of them or not. I had exchanged money before departing—at two dollars a pound—but could not remember receiving any quids. Frankly, I could not remember even hearing of a quid. At this point, suffering from physical exhaustion, not to mention linguistic deprivation, I briefly considered dropping my hundred pounds and catching one of Heathrow’s hundred flights to Paris: at least there I could speak the language.
Regaining my composure inside the elevator, I opened my Pocket Guide to London: “The unit of currency in Britain is the pound sterling,” it said, “which is divided into 100 pence (p). There are coins for 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, and £1.” All very courteous, I thought, but not very helpful. Next I looked in my pocket dictionary: “Quid, n, from Middle English quide, a cut or wad of something chewable.” This sounded more like tobacco than money, and I knew I was out of luck.
“Luton, Stansted, Cambridge,” said the loudspeaker as the elevator opened its doors and I stepped cautiously to the right. “Last call…”
I sprinted the last few steps to the coach.
“Hurry along,” the coach driver said. “Bring your bags inside. I’ll get your fare after I start.”
Using three trips and three sets of seats, I eventually loaded my luggage into the cabin of the National Express Luxury Coach oft-stop service to Cambridge and went to pay my fare.
“That’ll be twelve quid,” the driver announced.
I leaned down nonchalantly so as not to appear out of place and pretended to be occupied with my wallet.
“By the way,” I said, “how much is a quid these days?”
“Are you American?” he said.
“Yes,” I mumbled.
“Well, son, a quid equals one pound sterling, always has, always will. It’s the one with Her Majesty, the Queen of England, on the front.”
“I see. And why doesn’t it say that on the note?”
He took his eyes off the road and for the first time looked at me. “It doesn’t have to, my boy. We have a long memory in this country. We English don’t easily forget.”
I had rediscovered England in Columbus. About a month before departing for Britain I attended the wedding of some college friends in the capital of Ohio. Late Sunday evenin
g, following three days of prenuptial and postnuptial festivities and three nights of little sleep, I found myself in a conversation with two other guests, one of whom—like myself—had just returned from living in Tokyo, the other from living in Cambridge.
“So I hear you just finished a book on Japan,” said Jennifer. “I can’t wait to read it. Don’t you just love the way the Japanese go to sing-along bars and get drunk every night.”
“The British do that, too,” added Daniel. “Except the pubs all close at eleven.”
“Then what does everybody do?” she asked.
“The nobs catch a taxi,” he said. “The yobs catch the bus, and the lager louts just go outside and sing themselves silly in the streets.”
And so it went, back and forth until four in the morning, first a story from Japan, then a tale from Britain. In the course of that evening I learned the English terms nobs (snobs), yobs (toughs), fags (cigs), and getting pissed (the process of putting stout, ale, lager, or some other liquid into someone to make them drunk or taking it out of them to make them disgraced. As Daniel explained, a typical pub-sentence goes something like this: “Last night I went to the pub and got pissed, then I met this bloke who pissed me off, so I took the piss out of him.”) More important, as the night progressed and the conversation flowed east and west across the oceans, forward and backward in time, I began to see in this triangle the odd constellation of my own odyssey.
When I first went to Japan five years previously, while a student at Yale, I was wholly ignorant of Asia. In two decades of a supposedly great American education, I had managed to learn only about Europe. When I graduated from high school, I could have named all six wives of Henry VIII but not one Japanese emperor. As a history major at college, I could have listed causes for the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, but would not even have known which century spawned the Meiji Restoration. In over three years of living, working, and traveling in Asia—one as a student, one as a teacher, and one as a reporter—I aggressively and often naïvely tried to throw off the yoke of my European bias. I studied Japanese, read only local writers, and trekked around the rising world of the Pacific Rim. On one typical evening near the beginning of my Asian awakening, I argued with my brother, then a graduate student at Oxford, that Europe was passé, beyond the mend, and no longer worth our attention. The frontline of history had moved to Asia, I said, and Europe was in decline.
