12 December 1926.
In the morning Jeremy and I went to consult a lawyer. He says the woman will probably bring damages against us in the Civil Court as well as the case coming before the Proctors. Most unfortunately for us it turns out that she is one of the secretaries in the office of the Mayor of Oxford, and the Mayor is quite annoyed about the whole business and threatens to make a fuss.
This morning when I opened the London newspaper there was a leading article about our case which said that a group of undergraduates of “the idle rich class” had been amusing themselves by sitting at a window of their rooms in an “exclusive” college taking pot-shots at the honest citizenry of Oxford and had stricken down an innocent girl as she walked by her sweetheart’s side. The article extended sympathy to her sorrowing family and expressed horror at the deed which reminded the writer of the excesses of Rome in its decadence. He hoped that the perpetrators of the crime would be condignly punished and made an example of. How did they get hold of the story? Perhaps the Mayor of Oxford put them up to it as there was another quite disagreeable article on the same lines in the Oxford Times.
Of course it is all part of the current press campaign about the wickedness and degeneracy of the young, and how we have no moral standards.
In the evening we went in a group – Jeremy, Anstruther-Gray, Jim Patterson, and I – to apologize to the girl at her family’s house. When we got there they were all posed as though for a group photograph. The girl sitting in a chair with her leg up on a footstool. Her father and mother and brother ranged behind her and the young man who had been with her when it happened standing beside her looking very sheepish. They stood about her chair as if to protect her from further assault. Jeremy put out all his charm and I was tremendously sympathetic. Anstruther-Gray was as tactless as usual. However, it did not make much difference, as I could see that they are determined to press the matter just as hard as they can and get every last cent out of us.
The girl is not bad-looking, but has a stubborn little receding chin which bodes no good for her young man. Her brother I believe is the real inspirer of her case, spouting a whole lot of legal terms he has got from their lawyer. So we retired no better off than when we came in. The doctor says the injury to her leg has already quite healed up; still I suppose it was a shock to her at the moment and promises profit in the future.
13 December 1926.
I have not seen Margot since the shooting affray, and when I went there last night she seemed unusually depressed and said she was sick of Oxford and of her life here and longed to get away for a change, and then she suddenly said, “Charles, why don’t we go to Paris together when university vacation begins? I have always craved to see Paris, and it would be so divine to be there together. I can just picture the two of us sitting in one of those cafés in the Champs-Elysées. The only thing is that poor you would have to pay for most of it. I might just have enough for my return fare, but nothing over. My bloody husband has reduced my allowance again.”
We went on talking about Paris, getting very excited at the prospect. All the time I knew it was impossible. I am overdrawn already at the bank, apart from my debts, and in cash I have less than eighteen pounds to last me for the entire vacation, but I pretended to believe in our going to Paris. Perhaps she was only pretending too. I do not know. But we seemed closer together than ever before.
As I was getting up to leave, I saw on the table by the bed a tortoise-shell cigarette case which is the one that I gave Jeremy to show my gratitude for his staking my losses at vingt-et-un. He must have left it there one time when he was leaving.
As I walked home I thought that Margot’s sadness and discontent tonight, and her wanting to go to Paris with me, have made me feel that I could love her, but I know that that would be a big mistake. The term is nearly over and we shall all be going down in a few days.
14 December 1926.
Today I had a final tutorial. My tutor says that my essays are lucidly and interestingly written, but do not represent “any cataclysmic energy on my part” and seem to skate over the surface rather than plumb the depths. “Cataclysmic energy” indeed! “Plumbing the depths”! Well I devoted this morning to “plumbing the depths” of my finances. Apart from the impending Battels bill, I owe Jeremy £47 for unpaid gambling debts, and Shepherd the tailor £32 for those two lousy ill-fitting suits, not to mention other smaller debts.
I was rather consoled by Jim Patterson coming in and laughing at my debts as a joke compared with his. Now, not content with the ill-fated Amilcar, he is proposing to buy a horse and compete in the University Steeple Chase, despite the fact that the one time I rode with him in Folly Meadow I could see that William, at home, would not have allowed him to take out one of the livery-stable horses.
I wonder where the notion of “carefree undergraduates,” as described for instance by E. F. Benson in his novels, ever came from. Most of my friends are hag-ridden by debts; dreading exams; and sexually frustrated in one way or another. Yet who would want to be anywhere but at Oxford? Certainly not I.
15 December 1926.
Sunday afternoon in Oxford on a damp, dark day in December. Oh the charnel gloom of it. The feeling that nothing will ever happen again. The ivy climbing on an iron gate outside a red-brick North Oxford villa makes you turn your eyes away.
I went into the musty, empty Union to write a letter to Mother, and could think of nothing to say to her that would not be a lie. She has an idea of my Oxford life that I used to have before I came up here – that I am taking advantage of a wonderful opportunity for which she is making sacrifices, and how can I explain to her what is really happening to me, especially as I don’t understand it myself. Perhaps it is a sort of education, but not what we planned.
After writing a very dull letter I had some tea and cinnamon toast and wandered into the library, picking one book after another out of the shelves, but I could not settle to any one. It is said that T. E. Lawrence, when he was at Oxford, read every book in the Oxford Library. I began to calculate how many hours this would have taken him and it works out as a mathematical impossibility, unless he had done nothing but read, never sleeping or eating and reading three books an hour. Then I thought, why don’t I drop in and see Margot. I know she does not like me to come in on Sundays, but I thought I would chance it, so I did.
When I got there I found her and Vi lying on the bed upstairs smoking cigarettes with their shoes off. They had just been at a luncheon party and were talking about the men there, comparing notes about their admirers and giggling together. I sat on a chair at the foot of the bed and they paid no attention to me. Vi said that Anstruther-Gray thought he was a great lover, but that that was a “big joke,” although he was “rather sweet.” Considering that Anstruther-Gray thinks that Vi dotes on him, this surprised me considerably. I felt that I was listening to the secrets of the Seraglio and I wondered when it would be my turn to be discussed as though I was not there.
Then they got into a discussion about a hat of Margot’s that she was going to sell to Vi. “Well then, fifteen shillings it is,” said Margot. “But you said twelve and six before,” said Vi. “No, my dear, you must have misunderstood me. It was always fifteen shillings.” “Yesterday you did say twelve and six.” They went on and on like this till I went downstairs to the sitting-room and read the Sunday papers.
Later on Margot came down and said, “I have been trying to get rid of Vi but she simply won’t go.” So I took the hint and left myself.
It has been a very unsuccessful Sunday.
16 December 1926.
The last day of term. Our case is now out of the Proctor’s hands and will come up in Court at the beginning of next term. The college has been surprisingly indulgent about it, and we have been let off with a warning. I shall be on my way to London tomorrow to spend Christmas with my cousins, the Adlingtons. They say the elder daughter, Mary, is a great beauty and I am anxious to meet her.
15 January 1927.
I g
ave up writing this diary during the vacation. I decided that it is unhealthy because it encourages me to see my life as a looker-on; also it is a waste of time when I should be working. I did do quite a lot of work, among other things, during the vacation, but now I find it impossible to resist returning to the diary. I know it is a bad habit, like smoking or drinking, but I cannot give it up any longer.
Today was a blustery, dusty day. I woke up full of new resolutions. This term is going to be very different from last term. One difference will be that I am going to work five hours a day regularly. McCallum says that if I do this I might even get a First, but I doubt it. Secondly, I am going to take regular exercise. I have been seeing more of Wynne Paton, and he has convinced me that half my depressions and bad moods are due to lack of exercise. I am going to continue boxing with Paton three times a week and we are also going out with the Christ Church Beagles. My third, and most important, resolution is that Anstruther-Gray shall never darken my door again.
In fact, the “little set” is breaking up. We saw too much of each other under the strain of the shooting affray, and boredom has set in. I have not seen Margot yet. She has been on a visit to her husband in London. Jeremy tells me that during the vacation she was seeing a lot of that fellow Frankie Turner, the man I saw her with the first time I met her in the George bar. He is an Oxford townee who has a job at the Morris Cowley Works. Apparently Margot has known him since they were children and at one time was engaged to him.
16 January 1927.
Today I went with Paton to the Meet of the Christ Church Beagles at a village near Cowley. We met at Canterbury Gate and went out by bus. It was a still day with a pale blue sky, very cold if you stood still, but we were off ploughing through oceans of mud and scrambling through hedges. It is a peculiar sport as the hare runs in circles, and, when following, one is always coming back to the place one started from. It is like Alice in Wonderland when Alice had to keep running to be where she was at the beginning. At intervals the hounds swerve round and the whole field reverses and instead of being at the rear one finds oneself leading the hunt.
When it was over we all came back to a farm-house for an enormous tea with muffins and cherry jam before a roaring fire. It was great fun but exorbitantly expensive at three shillings each for tea.
17 January 1927.
I took Matza to lunch at the George today to pay him back for some of his lavish hospitality. At the end of lunch he said, “You know, you should always fold the bill over the tip.” I suppose it is good for me to learn these things, but all the same I thought it was rather patronizing.
18 January 1927.
I tried to apply myself this morning to Hobbes’ Leviathan, then I went out to do some shopping and spent about three hours and only bought one pair of shoelaces. On the way back I stepped on an imitation bird which was hopping on the pavement, and broke it, and had to pay the hawker for it, “if I was a gentleman,” he said. I don’t feel at all like a gentleman today. Then I paid my college Battels bills, which were a third more than I had counted on. I am sure this college must have a crooked accountant.
In the afternoon I went to see Margot, who was back from London. She was friendly but different. She would not let me touch her, and put me off with a kind of steely indifference.
In the evening I came back to write my essay on “The Formation of Parties under Charles 11,” but I couldn’t get on with it and paced about my room in a bad temper, knocked over the lamp by my bed and broke it.
19 January 1927.
Went to a very funny comedy, Louise Fazenda was in it, and then went to tea with Jackson and got into an argument about religion. He said, “Surely as an intellectual you can’t say that.” I said, “But I am not an intellectual.” He said, “If you are not an intellectual, what are you?” It’s a good question and I don’t know the answer.
20 January 1927.
Margot had a party today. She has been talking about this project for some time, saying that she should do something to cheer up Vi’s mother, who has been very depressed and has been complaining that after all she has done for Vi, she is now cast aside like an old shoe. I was quite curious to see Vi’s mother. I had almost begun to doubt her existence, as Margot makes her the excuse for every last-minute postponement of our meetings. Well, she does exist, although quite different from the ill-used, pathetic old lady I had pictured.
She arrived at the party before the others and turned out to be a bosomy Thames Valley ex-blonde in her forties who downed a couple of gins – she said it was to cheer her up as she had been “feeling worse than death with worry over Vi.” (I wondered if Margot has picked up her phoney Mayfair way of talking from this old girl.) Vi’s mother backed me into a corner and, although I was meeting her for the first time, began a long tarradiddle about how sad it was that Vi lacked appeal for men. “Of course she has Cedric hanging about, but if you ask me I don’t think he is serious. I mean, she is twenty-seven and has never had what I call a real proposal yet. It is so hard for me to understand as I was married to her father out of the schoolroom when I was sixteen and I have had men after me all my life. Of course Vi has the brains. But that is not the same thing, is it?” (I am certainly surprised to hear about Vi’s brains, as she has always struck me as being very nearly half-witted.)
While she was going on like this, that man Frankie Turner came in. He has a disgustingly curly mouth and curly black hair. Margot greeted this individual as a long-lost friend. “Darling, would you see to the drinks.” So, he went over to the side table and began by helping himself to a mahogany-coloured whisky, saying to Margot, “Where the hell are the big glasses?” as if he was entirely at home in the house. Then the room began to fill up. No more women, but Jeremy with a hangover, and Jim Patterson and some assorted undergraduates, including that man Branksome from Magdalen. Then Anstruther-Gray appeared with a stout, squat, bearded man wearing an Arab head-dress, introduced as the Emir of Zkwat, and an unshaven Scotsman with pink eyelashes who, according to Anstruther-Gray, is “the greatest philosopher Balliol has ever produced.” He also said the Emir “owned half Arabia.” Vi’s mother attached herself to him and I heard her say, “I have always longed to visit the desert. It must be so divinely empty.” The Emir gave something between a grunt and a belch. He drank only water, but McAvity the philosopher got into the whisky at once. When I asked him what brand of philosophy he professed, he replied, in a rancid Glasgow accent, “Let me clarrify your thinking, philosophy has no brrands.”
By this time someone had turned on the gramophone. Frankie Turner and Margot had gone into the pantry together and were giggling. As the gramophone was playing a tango, Vi’s mother swept into the middle of the floor and catching Branksome by both hands said, “Come on, I know you have rhythm. I can always feel these things.” He was too feeble to resist, and she began swaying him backwards and forwards to the tune as if he was a rag doll, saying, “No, no – slower, darling – that’s better – now you’ve got it.” But he hadn’t, and she had to give up.
The party went on for hours and everybody, including myself, had a great deal to drink. I don’t remember much about the last stages except that Vi’s mother, looking very dishevelled, hissed in my ear, “Darling, would you come into the loo with me and help me fish my comb out of the w.c. It has fallen in and I can’t get at it.” But Vi overheard her and grabbed her by the arm and bundled her off to a taxi.
I stayed on and on hoping to spend the evening with Margot, but Frankie Turner stayed too, and finally Margot said she was going out to dinner with him, so I departed.
21 January 1927.
Peter came over for a day and night from Cambridge. We had been planning this reunion for a long time and I am to go to Cambridge to visit him later. He arrived in high spirits and his tales of life at Cambridge make it sound much more exciting than mine at Oxford. He has become passionately interested in the theatre, acts in the Dramatic Society, and wants to have a theatrical career.
We had lun
ch together and walked in Christ Church Meadows. It seemed as though nothing had changed and we might have been walking together in the park at home. I wanted to take him to Margot’s for a drink, but that bloody Frankie Turner was there. I invited Leslie Mahon to join us at the George for dinner, as I thought he would amuse Peter, and they share an interest in the theatre, but it was not a great success, and their talk was rather competitive. After dinner I walked back to the Clarendon Hotel with Peter, where he was staying, and he was very appreciative and nice, so perhaps his visit was not a failure after all.
22 January 1927.
I went to a party at St. John’s. About forty men were there, all very drunk. I knew no-one except my host and one dreary man who stuck to me like glue. Two chaps did an exhibition of dancing the Charleston in their dressing-gowns, then two Hungarian barons – famous international homosexuals who were visiting Oxford – joined the party and began dancing with the undergraduates. I had a lot of mixed drinks and they began playing Hawaiian music on the gramophone. For some reason Hawaiian music makes me want to throw up, and the combination with the drinks made me feel quite sick, so I went home and read Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, a new novel about lesbians and homosexuals at Cambridge, which Jackson has lent me.
My cousins the Ponsonbys are coming to live in Oxford. This is great news for me as I started to fall in love with the beautiful daughter Doris when she was visiting Halifax, although she did not give me much encouragement at the time.
23 January 1927.
Today finally our shooting case came up before the magistrate. Only those who had fired the pistol were charged, and as I was not called as a witness I just sat there in the courtroom watching the proceedings, which were soon over. The magistrate gave a lecture and a warning and exacted a pretty heavy fine, so we shall all have to chip in to find the money.
Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) Page 16
