THE
READING PARTY
Fenella Gentleman
To my father, David, with love
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Michaelmas
Christmas
Hilary
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Easter
Trinity
Summer
Epilogue
Glossary of Oxford terminology
Historical note
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Prologue
The other day I looked something up in a book and out fell that sheet of paper.
Whoooooosh! A rush of memories, as if a sluice gate had opened; my insides suddenly in free fall.
Which is odd. I mean, it was only the list of names. It’s not as if it had been a photo or a flower – something evocative. It wasn’t even handwritten; just one of those cyclostyled sheets we sent round in those days. And yet it conjured the Reading Party as if it had been the group photo, offering a glimpse of his face; or a pressed daffodil, with a vestige of the colours he talked about.
I must have been using the list as a marker when I was sitting in that room with him – the little library with the view through the pines to those Cornish cliffs. I’d have been trying not to look his way, trying to get on with my work. At Carreck Loose, you spent as much time reading the people and the situations as you did reading your books. Well, I certainly did.
To recover from the emotional jolt, I tried thinking about that year – my first as an academic – with the dispassion of a social historian. But every time the exercise made me cross. Of course it had been hard to read the signs correctly and behave appropriately; no need to have given myself such grief. Many of my difficulties were just a symptom of the times: the balance of power was inherently unequal and what was at stake for men and women was simply not the same.
There were huge pressures on us – which naturally meant the women – to set an example; to show that ‘going mixed’ was ‘a good thing’. The junior tutors were often very young: one minute strutting our stuff in the belief we were making history; another fearing the boot for failing to make the grade or for breaching one of those diktats that the men never bothered to mention. And a few of us hadn’t even been there as undergraduates – we weren’t Oxbridge types at all.
The first female Fellow in what had been a male college – in my mid-twenties and an outsider to boot! That says it all, really. How could it not be challenging?
I did my best. Did very well, in the circumstances. I’m proud of what they called my ‘feistiness’, even though it got me into trouble. Besides, if I hadn’t been feisty, they wouldn’t have offered me the job in the first place. But some of the men said it was precisely the feistiness that they found so very attractive, which rather proves my point: as a woman, you really couldn’t win …
The Reading Party
12th–19th March 1977
Carreck Loose, Cornwall
Tutors
Dr Dennis Loxton: Senior Fellow and Tutor (Philosophy)
Dr Sarah Addleshaw: Junior Fellow and Tutor (Modern History)
First Years
Mei Chow: Law – Hong Kong Scholar –
(King George V School, Hong Kong)
Eddie Oakeshott: English (Westminster School, London)
Second Years
Jim Evans: History (Cathays High School, Cardiff)
Finalists
Hugh Chauncey: Classics – Exhibitioner (Ampleforth College)
Gloria Durrant: Modern Languages
(Roedean & Colegio Peruano Britanico, Lima)
Chloe Firth: Psychology, Philosophy & Physiology
(Camden School for Girls, London)
Rupert Ingram-Hall: Oriental Studies
(The Manchester Grammar School)
Lyndsey Milburn: English – Exhibitioner
(Walbottle Campus, Newcastle upon Tyne)
Priyam Patel: Law (City of London School for Girls)
Barnaby Quick: History (Gresham’s School, Holt)
Martin Trewin: Geography (Truro School)
Tyler Winston: Philosophy, Politics & Economics –
Rhodes Scholar (Harvard University, Boston)
Glossary of Oxford terminology page 335
Michaelmas
‘There’s just one other thing, Dr Addleshaw,’ he said, as I was readying to get back to the sunshine.
Here we go, I thought: not reprieved yet.
It was early October 1976, just before the start of Oxford’s Michaelmas Term. I was in the Warden’s Lodgings, having a meeting with the head of the College about matters on which, it seemed, he needed to put his stamp. From next door came the low throb of an IBM ‘golf ball’ and the occasional burst of electric typing. Through the windows was a view of the front quadrangle, the odd student or don passing by. On my knees flopped some paperwork, none of it referred to.
The Warden began explaining how it would be ‘most helpful’ if I accompanied one of the Senior Fellows and some undergraduates on that year’s trip to Cornwall. A week at the end of the Hilary term, so they could revise for Finals during the Easter break – nothing onerous: a matter merely of deciding who should attend and then, once the group was at the house, taking a few walks and checking people read for seven hours a day.
It sounded straightforward enough, if archaic.
‘The thing is,’ he continued, the huge head turning back to its view of the Gatehouse, ‘our Reading Party has yet to go mixed. For the first two years of female students, I could defend an all-male event, but I can’t any longer, now they are Finalists. As our first woman on Governing Body, you will see that.’
‘Of course.’
He looked at me – I had a habit of clicking the lid of my pen – before carrying on. ‘Dr Loxton has been leading the Reading Party for two decades. He accepts it must keep pace with the times. He assures me he expected to include women this year, knows I’d like you to accompany him and says he’s delighted for you to do so. So all the signs are in our favour.’
Not so straightforward.
There was a pause while he adjusted the green reading lamp on the vast mahogany desk: even on a bright day his study was gloomy, the sunshine blocked by the stone mullions or absorbed by the deep recesses of the window seat.
I realised my t-shirt was too low, too many freckles revealed. Mum would have told me the trousers were wrong too, but I liked my bell-bottoms. Only my patchwork handbag looked the part – real suede and no tassels.
The Warden affected not to notice me fiddling. ‘We are a progressive college. We’ve done well so far with the admission of women, but …’
It was all so circuitous. ‘Let me guess. We have a reputation to uphold …?’
‘Quite.’ He gestured towards the window and the life beyond. ‘We have a duty of care for all our students, male as well as female, postgraduate as well as undergraduate, wherever they are. And we must keep Dennis on side: the Reading Party would not be the Reading Party without Dennis at the helm.’
He completed his circuit and stood by the chair again, arms still clasped behind his back, watching me over the glass lamp, twirling his thumbs.
My papers were slipping off my lap, soon to meet the floor.
‘Whoops,’ I said, rescuing our brief agenda and putting it back on top. Stupid to look so unprofessional; Dad would smile if he knew.
‘It is a corollary of being one of one, Dr Addleshaw,’ he continued, regardless. ‘I appreciate – we all appreci
ate – that it may be trying, having to set the standard. But the Reading Party offers an exceptional experience for our students. Hard work matched with fresh air, even some larking about, and companionship – the benefits are incommensurable. This year will be crucial. You’ll understand the importance of getting it right.’
My Parker clicked again. There were stories about such traditions; historians like me were always arguing about why some survived and others did not.
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Anything in particular you have in mind?’
Perhaps he felt the need to convince. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the pastoral side, important though that is: the Dean will fill you in. You have an advantage, as a woman – it will come naturally. But there are other rewards: you will be able to get some work done – an article for one of the journals, or polishing your lectures. That’s what we care about here: our Fellows should lead the field.’
Already I was exhausted by the endless tests. At least this one was blatant: no mistaking being volunteered – or put on notice to produce.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, stuffing the pen in my bag. ‘Why shouldn’t a mixed party be a success?’
The Warden put his hands on the back of his chair and pushed it under the kneehole. The craggy face softened.
‘Why shouldn’t it, indeed! That’s the spirit we need. I’m sure you will set an excellent example. And you’ll soon get the measure of Dennis. Some of my colleagues bark a little harder than they bite. There’s always a reason. He is not quite what he seems.’
Business done, he ushered me into the hall, dispensing pleasantries, even calling me ‘Sarah’, and then stood by the front door, his arm outstretched to indicate the exit.
I imagined his days punctuated by meetings like this, geeing people up or giving them a dressing-down. As a newcomer, I’d be in the first category for the moment. How little did it take, during that long probation, to move into the second? What kind of role model, or misbehaviour, did they have in mind? No one had ever accused me of being tame …
‘It will be another historic moment,’ he concluded, which was clever of him. ‘I knew you would appreciate that.’
He opened the heavy door and waited while I stepped down onto the flagstones and into the warmth of the afternoon.
There was a minor collision with someone on the path: an explosion of apologies, a helping hand. My papers were suddenly everywhere, my red hair flying, my cleavage again too visible. The man – film-star looks, all the trappings of the Ivy League – dropped nothing. He crouched down to help me gather my things, his knees touching mine. I noticed the sheen on the loafers, the very soft socks, the patch of honey shin, the miniature curls.
‘Sun …!’ the Warden observed, as if nothing had happened. Then, while we each claimed the mishap as our own, he rounded off: ‘… nearly eclipsed by our scholar here! Isn’t it glorious at this time of day?’
The American handed back the last of my sheets and the three of us stood for a moment, surveying the contrast of creamy stone, green grass and blue sky. From that angle the composition was almost a perfect trapezoid, the sides of the quad tapering away from the shadow. It was indeed lovely.
‘The best light in which to see them,’ the Warden pronounced, indicating the statues of the founders, a formidable husband-and-wife team about whom I’d heard tales.
He bent down as the American moved off, hand raised by way of goodbye. ‘He’s the sort we need,’ he said conspiratorially, as if it was obvious what sort of promising the man was – older student or young academic, my peer or not.
Then he reverted to the booming voice: ‘It was all down to our foundress, you know: her vision and tenacity after her husband died. So there is a very good precedent for women here, as my own wife likes to remind me – even if it has taken a few centuries.’
He gave me an indulgent smile. ‘Come to see us if anything troubles you. We are always here.’ And he leant forward, hand on the doorjamb, his massive body threatening to topple onto my much smaller one.
‘That’s very kind,’ I replied, and watched as he pulled his weight back, swivelled and went inside.
Was he, in effect, my new boss? No one told you how it worked.
As for the Ryan O’Neal lookalike, how much had he heard?
The early days were so exhausting that thoughts of the Reading Party were easily pushed aside. I loved exploring the College, the Faculty and the University, and was constantly amazed at the beauty of the buildings and the grounds, the intelligence of the people I talked to. The challenge was working out how to behave.
The first hurdle was the ordeal by dining.
I come from a modest background: my family doesn’t use a phalanx of silver cutlery and no one serves you from behind; as for talking over a meal, you can’t hold erudite conversations when my brothers are around. So the formality of High Table in Hall, processing past the students to reach the dais, where you sat surrounded by similarly gowned but solely male figures, was intimidating. No one explained the rules – when to start eating, how to pass the various decanters; I was constantly worried about getting it wrong in front of everyone. And the dons were all so learned, so fascinating on their subjects! When they turned to my own, it felt like one of their viva voce examinations. Even the social chat assumed you knew about the arts and required you to have views.
It was worse when we withdrew, again passing the students, for coffee, port and cigars in the Senior Common Room. With its careful arrangement of burnished leather seating, its polished tables of journals and newspapers, the SCR was how I imagined a gentlemen’s club. And I sensed that the dons hadn’t quite got the measure of ‘the situation’, as the Warden had called it in relation to the students: I – the sole woman – was being treated as a visitor rather than a new member. There was too much of the careful courtesy they might extend to a colleague’s wife before resuming a more important discussion with somebody else. Either way, I was being assessed. It was utterly different from the slapdash banter in the staffroom I’d just abandoned.
Interestingly, there was no sign of the American amongst the tutors. I began to think he might be a student, in which case there would be less scope for joking about the English and their arcane customs, which would be a shame.
Then there was the business of ‘tutes’.
I’d never had a tutorial, let alone given one – it wasn’t the way you were taught at York – yet suddenly I was expected to carry them off with aplomb. There was no guidance about what to cover or how, in that hour in your rooms; you were left to work it out for yourself.
My first went without a hitch. It was with a Finalist who handed in an essay he should have delivered the previous term. I suppose I could have put it aside, but I liked him – he, too, was from Norfolk – and the topic intrigued me: it was about the impact of a group of nineteenth-century reformers and who deserved the credit; those who campaigned for change or those who enacted the legislation. So I asked him to read it out. We had a sparky discussion about his argument that there was courage on both sides, and that historians were prone to glamorise a few highly visible protestors at the expense of the many people struggling to improve things from within. It was nice to see him looking so relieved when I reassured him that it had been worth the wait.
So far, so good – and Barnaby Quick went on my mental list of candidates for the Reading Party.
My second tutorial was more testing. It was with a pair of Second Years: one was a cocky guy who made endless lazy comments – about the topic I suggested they study, the books I recommended, my plan for the rest of the term; the other was a taciturn Welshman with eyes that noticed everything. I wanted him to contribute more. Perhaps Mr Smug felt the need to retaliate. As he went to the door he tossed off something else. He said it was ‘groovy’ being taught by a woman, especially a pretty one, but you could make too much noise about it: a female Fellow might be a novelty – it was certainly an amusing misnomer – but there’d been endless changes over
the centuries; it wasn’t such a big deal.
I was taken aback, having planned no less than transforming the character of an institution. I certainly hadn’t expected a student to put me in my place – let alone with complacent flirting.
That was no fun at all, though a glance from the other student helped: he understood my quick retort; he was on my side. I made another Reading Party note: Jim Evans.
Worse, almost, than the fact of these difficulties, there was no one to discuss them with or to explain the many things that were hard to handle, like the intricacies of the collegiate system or the bizarre niceties of academic dress. Of course there were the two other historians on Governing Body: the diehard from the panel at my final interview, who taught Ancient History and had decades on me; and a nice man approaching forty, who focused on the period up to 1500 and seemed a real supporter. But the older man wasn’t the sort of person in whom you would confide, even though we were meant to be colleagues, and the Mediaevalist had a young family, which meant he wasn’t around much.
As for my own generation, if it turned out that the American was not on the staff, then the youngest of the Tutorial Fellows would be two men a few years older than me: a scientist and a mathematician; perhaps unlikely to become confidants. That left the Dean, a free-market economist in his early thirties who seemed to relish the opportunity to keep, as he put it, a quasi-parental eye on the students and had endless extravagant stories about what they got up to. He wasn’t really my type – the first thing he did was declare himself unashamedly right wing, banging on about Friedrich Hayek and that awful Thatcher woman – and he had a way of prancing around like a pop star, flaunting his tight jeans and ruffling his layered hair as if he were Rod Stewart, which made even a handsome man look slightly ridiculous. But the energy, the wit and the inside knowledge were very compelling, and he made you laugh. Besides, no one else had offered to get me up to speed.
The Reading Party Page 1
