The Last Enemy

OXFORD has been called many names, from 'the city of beautiful nonsense'
to 'an organized waste of time,' and it is characteristic of the place
that the harsher names have usually been the inventions of the
University's own undergraduates. I had been there two years and was not
yet twenty-one when the war broke out. No one could say that we were, in
my years, strictly 'politically minded.' At the same time it would be
false to suggest that the University was blissfully unaware of impending
disaster. True, one could enter anybody's rooms and within two minutes be
engaged in a heated discussion over orthodox versus Fairbairn rowing, or
whether Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot was the daddy of contemporary poetry,
while an impassioned harangue on liberty would be received in embarrassed
silence. Nevertheless, politics filled a large space. That humorous
tradition of Oxford verbosity, the Union, held a political debate every
week; Conservative, Labour, and even Liberal clubs flourished; and the
British Union of Fascists had managed to raise a back room and
twenty-four members.

But it was not to the political societies and meetings that one could
look for a representative view of the pre-war undergraduate. Perhaps as
good a cross-section of opinion and sentiment as any at Oxford was to be
found in Trinity, the college where I spent those two years rowing a
great deal, flying a little--I was a member of the University Air
Squadron--and reading somewhat. We were a small college of less than two
hundred, but a successful one. We had the president of the Rugby Club,
the secretary of the Boat Club, numerous golf, hockey, and running Blues
and the best cricketer in the University. We also numbered among us the
president of the Dramatic Society, the editor of the Isis (the University
magazine), and a small but select band of scholars. The sentiment of the
college was undoubtedly governed by the more athletic undergraduates, and
we radiated an atmosphere of alert Philistinism. Apart from the scholars,
we had come up from the so-called better public schools, from Eton,
Shrewsbury, Wellington, and Winchester, and while not the richest
representatives of the University, we were most of us comfortably enough
off. Trinity was, in fact, a typical incubator of the English ruling
classes before the war. Most of those with Blues were intelligent enough
to get second-class honours in whatever subject they were 'reading,' and
could thus ensure themselves entry into some branch of the Civil or
Colonial Service, unless they happened to be reading Law, in which case
they were sure to have sufficient private means to go through the lean
years of a beginner's career at the Bar or in politics. We were held
together by a common taste in friends, sport, literature, and idle
amusement, by a deep-rooted distrust of all organized emotion and
standardized patriotism, and by a somewhat self-conscious satisfaction in
our ability to succeed without apparent effort. I went up for my first
term, determined, without over-exertion, to row myself into the
Government of the Sudan, that country of blacks ruled by Blues in which
my father had spent so many years. To our scholars (except the Etonians)
we scarcely spoke; not, I think, from plain snobbishness, but because we
found we did not speak the same language. Through force of circumstance
they had to work hard; they had neither the time nor the money to
cultivate the dilettante browsing which we affected. As a result they
tended to be martial in their enthusiasms, whether pacifistic or
patriotic. They were earnest, technically knowing, and conversationally
uninteresting.

Not that conversationally Trinity had any great claim to distinction. To
speak brilliantly was not to be accepted at once as indispensable; indeed
it might prove a handicap, giving rise to suspicions of artiness. It
would be tolerated as an idiosyncrasy because of one's prowess at golf,
cricket, or some other college sport that proved one's all-rightness. For
while one might be clever, on no account must one be unconventional or
disturbing--above all disturbing. The scholars' conversation might well
have been disturbing. Their very presence gave one the uneasy suspicion
that in even so small a community as this while one half thought the
world was their oyster, the other half knew it was not and never could
be. Our attitude will doubtless strike the reader as reprehensible and
snobbish, but I believe it to have been basically a suspicion of anything
radical--any change, and not a matter of class distinction.

The Last Enemy