Everyman's England Page 13
To wander about the quiet streets, and the wide squares and crescents of Bath is to be taken out of this century and carried away to the days of stage coaches and sedan chairs. In Royal Crescent there still lingers the spirit of that period of pomp and dignity when patches and powder were fashionable and men wore rich clothes and were only reluctantly giving up the wearing of their swords.
If there are any finer examples of eighteenth-century domestic architecture than the Royal Crescent and the Circus in England I have yet to see them, and if there are any worse slums than some I have seen in Bath, then I do not want to see them.
Bath, however, is progressing; it is aware of its imperfections and eager to remedy them. It refuses to live in the past or rest upon its reputation. It is alive, modern and not content with old methods.
‘Some people’s idea of Bath,’ said a shopkeeper to me, ‘is that it is a glorified museum. They come here with their heads full of Beau Nash, Mr Pickwick, and the gay doings that were carried on at the Pump Room, and thinking that the streets are full of decrepit old ladies and gouty gentlemen. We’re proud of our springs and our history, but we’re just as proud of our industries. Perhaps you didn’t know we had any? Let me tell you, this is a modern town. Our shops are modern and we’ve got one of the biggest cabinet-making factories in England here, and plasticine works, biscuit factory and quarries… and then there’s the Pump Room. They’ve got treatment apparatus in there, so I’m told, that is the last word in modern things—’
‘Have you ever tasted the waters?’ I interrupted him to ask.
‘If some of the old Romans could come back and see all those gadgets it would give ’em a shock,’ he went on and forgot my question about tasting the waters. Somehow it was never answered, and he was not the only one to evade it. I found that there were more than a few people in Bath who had never tasted the waters of the spa, though there is a constantly running fountain in the street outside the Pump Rooms where it may be had free.
CHAPTER 14
THE OTHER OXFORD
The Oxford air is enervating and the long, willow-hung stretches of the Cher and the Thames on hot days makes energy seem out of place. But there is nothing to stop a man dreaming, and there have been more dreams composed to the idle song of the river at Oxford than perhaps in any other town in the world. And in later years those dreams are remembered. If you were a student, and are now an unimportant official, you are grateful for the importance which once was yours in Oxford, though it was only an importance that came to you from your landlady and the townsfolk. And if you were not a student and lived in the town you are grateful because you, at least, have had the distinction of living closely to a cultured, refined world, sharing in some way the life of the intellectual, living in a city which cherished first the mind, and next the body.
Between them the undergraduates and the townsfolk of Oxford present a most amusing study in picturesque and pathetic snobbery. From the colleges pour young men who, although they may be members of the October Club, and sing the ‘Red Flag’ outside the town hall on the night of election results, cannot repress within themselves a feeling of their superiority over the unfortunate tradesmen and workers of the town. From the University point of view there is only one attitude to be taken towards the town; it exists that the University may be fed, clothed, housed and occasionally entertained, and this attitude may be coloured by kindness, condescension or faint disgust. A great many of the townsmen seem to hold one of two views. Either they secretly wish they were members of the University, so that they might enjoy their sports and, less often, their studies, or they scorn the University and say they are very glad they are not part of it. The first form is common amongst the young men and older schoolboys of the town, and to heighten their desire they sedulously copy the University graduates in clothes, so far as they can, and cultivate an accent which surprises their mothers and fathers. It must be said to their credit, however, that they are very often taken to be undergraduates. The people who scorn the University are the rougher types who could never hope to be mistaken for undergraduates while their speech remains as it is, and a good many honest tradesmen who, making their livings from the trade they do with the University, object to the patrician manner adopted towards them by so many University people.
There is a considerable body, fortunately for the sanity of Oxford, to be found amongst the townsfolk and the University residents who realise that Oxford is not solely a university. Oxford is Oxford, a vast conglomerate, neither university nor county town. It is more perplexing than Petticoat Lane and sometimes a deal more interesting. Few people realise this. Those who visit the town are mostly interested in the University buildings or the boating, and those who live in the town are often handicapped by their own prejudices.
It is this other Oxford which has always interested me. It is a tantalising, undefinable, mocking thing, and the best way to come near to any understanding of it is to throw away your guidebook and wander without reference to town or University wherever your fancy takes you. Forget the city of dreaming spires and grey colleges set about green quadrangles on which starlings chitter at the rising of the sun and where students and tourists take up their chittering when the sun is well established in the sky; forget the weathering gargoyles and the brooding dons and professors who walk the streets, happy in the supposition that the sanctity of their abstractions is a shield against the vagaries of traffic, and concentrate for a while on the other side of Oxford where actions mean more than accents, and which may well be alive long after the Bodleian has crumbled into ruins.
Oxford is changing. If you find Gloucester Green you will see a wide square where motor coaches enter and depart upon journeys up and down England, and where long ranks of private cars are parked while their owners do business in the town. Once Gloucester Green had a greater glory than being a car park. It was a cattle market. Every Wednesday from the surrounding villages and towns droves of cattle come clumping through the streets, by the shadow of Worcester College wall and into their red-
painted pens. Stallholders set up their wares around the market and there was an interminable confusion of cries; the bellowing of frightened bullocks, the bleating of stupefied sheep and the ballyhoo of blustering salesmen. Black men selling corn cures, apathetic men selling religious tracts, big farmers selling broken-winded horses… the market attracted rogue and honest man, and was a delight to schoolboys from the town. There was always a lot of laughter, and the squat building of the morgue which stood in the centre of the marketplace was never given a thought. Though once, on a hot afternoon, I saw the crowd part, and two men carried a stretcher into the place. A few minutes later a man stood upon a cart and swung a great bell to attract the crowd and then shouted across the silence:
‘I would like to speak to Mrs James, please. We understand she is shopping somewhere in the market.’
I never saw Mrs James. I rather hoped that Mrs James had left the marketplace. It would have been a frightening blow to have been called out of the happy turmoil of the market into the morgue to look at the wet face of her boy who had slipped into the canal nearby…
The Oxford–Coventry canal comes very quietly into Oxford, hidden by the railway for a while and then gliding to rest past the lovely gardens of Worcester College, to be overlooked on one side by the rough plug of Oxford Castle and on the other by the austere eighteenth-century building which houses the offices of the canal company. Attached to this house, for it is more a house than an office building, is a tiny garden which rivals anything the colleges can show and yet hides its beauty behind grey walls and stacks of coal and gravel.
Life on the canal has not altered a great deal from those early days in the eighteenth century when the canal was first constructed. The bargees are more domesticated and less unruly, and there is now no need for the private police force which each canal company once maintained. These policemen were very necessary, not only to maintain order among the barge families who took feuds seriously,
but also to keep an eye upon trespassers, who were inclined to experiment with the canals. These liberties took many forms, the chief being the persistent habit (of farmers close to the canal) of tapping the convenient supply to water their cattle and fill their duck ponds; and there were times when young boys, perhaps spurred by the tale of the little boy who once saved Holland from destruction by putting his hand into a gap in the dyke-wall, made holes in the canal embankment and then shirked the responsibility of stopping the flow of water.
It must have been a great day for Oxford when the first barge from Coventry came floating along the new canal behind its beribboned horse, carrying a load of coal, a strange black stone to many of the townsfolk. The barge was greeted in state by the mayor and corporation and heralded to the wharfside by the town band. When I visited the wharf there were no boats in.
‘You didn’t arrive early enough,’ said the man who had come down from the canal office with me. ‘They were here last night but they loaded up early and got away before nine almost.’
‘Is that usual?’
He laughed and shook his head. ‘No. Only there happens to be a fair at Banbury the day after tomorrow and, if there’s one thing a canal family love, it’s a fair. They’ll do anything to make their visit to a town coincide with a fair. Today for instance, they’ll be travelling hard to get there. If they were coming to Oxford from the other side of Banbury they would be quite capable of hanging about and wasting time not to pass and miss it. If there’s a fair anywhere along the canal, you can be sure that there will always be half a dozen boats hitched up for the night there.’
‘What happens to the canal-men when they get too old to manage the barges?’
‘They don’t usually. They just go on working all their lives. Some of them save up enough to help out their old-age pension, and then they look out for a little cottage somewhere near the canal. Quite a lot have done that and most of the cottages along the canal and by the locks are owned by canal people who either live in them now or are going to do so when they retire.’
‘And what about the children – do they go to school?’
He smiled. ‘They are supposed to go to school whenever they are stopping in a place where there is a school. You know what that means?’
‘I can guess,’ I said. What boy or girl would want to go to school after days of freedom on a barge, and as most of them become bargees or marry bargees, the formal education of a school is probably never missed. All they need to learn comes to them in their everyday life.
Oxford has given its name to more than the Oxford Movement or the University Press, as you may know every time you sit down to breakfast. Even if you do not know about Oxford marmalade you cannot walk about Oxford, especially by the railway station, and not be reminded of it. In the marmalade season, which lasts only a few months in each year when the Seville oranges arrive in England, the factory near the station is surrounded by a sweet, tanging odour of oranges. It fills the streets with its bitter-sweetness and is sometimes carried on the breeze far into the countryside, to surprise the cottagers.
Most of the work in the factory is done by girls. Most of the work in most factories these days seems to be done by girls and women. In this factory, however, there is an added reason for the employment of girls. The making of Oxford marmalade was first started by a woman in a tiny shop in the town, and it seems only right that its manufacture should be carried on by the same sex. The marmalade was supplied originally to the colleges, where it earned the onomatopoetic name of ‘squish’, and its popularity probably came from the unconscious sales efforts of students spreading its fame as they left the University. Today it goes all over the world.
As I walked around the storage-rooms I could not help noticing that the pots used for home markets were white with black lettering, but most of those sent abroad, and especially the ones for America, were coloured and decorated with sprays of flowers and other designs. Why should the colonies and America insist, as I am told they do, on these decorated pots when we at home are content with plain white ones? Here is another thing I learned about the marmalade. When you buy a pound pot of this marmalade, you don’t buy a pound pot. The pots are referred to as ‘ones’ and, because they are all made by hand, no two are exactly alike or hold the same amount. In one you may get fourteen ounces to your pound and in another eighteen ounces. So the manufacturers carefully designate them as ‘ones’, not one-pound pots, and what you lose on the swings you often gain on the roundabouts.
Oxford delights in queer names. The Clarendon Press is in Jericho. That is the name given, just why I cannot imagine, to the district surrounding it. The walls of this Jericho are not falling down, nor likely to. It is a modest, working-class quarter which bears its oriental name with a red-brick complacency.
Then there is Mesopotamia. Part of the River Cherwell flows through Mesopotamia. This is no arid, desert stretch, but a delightful tract of trees and green walks where daffodils and primroses stud the grass in spring and courtly swans sail the waters. There is some reason for this name. Mesopotamia is the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Oxford Mesopotamia is a narrow strip of land between two arms of the Cherwell.
And not far from Mesopotamia is Parson’s Pleasure. Oxford has shown a happy genius in the naming of her bathing places; Tumbling Bay, Long Bridges and Parson’s Pleasure. The first two suggest what they are. Parson’s Pleasure might be a tobacco or the name of a risque periodical. Actually it is the pleasantest of the three bathing places. The two others are on the Thames. Parson’s Pleasure is on the Cherwell, and is frequented more by University people than any others, though it is open to anyone on the payment of a small fee. Parson’s Pleasure is for men only. Mixed bathing is not allowed for the very good reason, if one were needed, that there is a tradition that no bathing costumes are worn. The tradition is a University one and characteristically takes no account of the fact that all punts and boats coming up the Cher must go through the bathing place. This means that any punt manned solely by women must stop at the rollers outside the bathing place. Here it is taken in charge by an attendant who punts it through the bathing place and delivers it to the owners on the other side of the bathing place, whence they have walked by a footpath that skirts the outside of the bathing enclosure. This is inconvenient but necessary. The trouble starts when the boats are returning, for then there is no attendant waiting to take the boat. The ladies are relied upon to remember the bathing place and to hitch their boat up and walk around and tell the attendant of the rollers to fetch it. Boating parties usually remember. Occasionally, however, there are times when, into the midst of the male paradise of Parson’s Pleasure, where respected dons and fellows walk the green clad only in spectacles and a copy of Plato’s Socratic Discourses and youths lie about in the sun with no cover but handkerchiefs over their faces, there comes a lone punt manned by some forgetful female.
If anyone still contends that man has not a good deal of the anthropoid in him he should witness such a scene. The dominant desire at such moments is to return to the trees for safety. The bathing boxes are few, and only the lucky ones find room in them during the mad scramble which follows the intrusion. Naked figures spring frantically into the rough cover of pollarded willows, others flatten themselves desperately behind tall tufts of grass, some imitate the armadillo and curl into inadequate balls, while a few with great presence of mind dive into the river and grant only their heads to the intruder. Some few lofty souls continue to read their books with grand imperturbability and mildly wonder, as they turn the pages, what all the fuss is about. Meanwhile, the unfortunate lady in the punt attempts to do the impossible, namely, to cover her eyes with her hands and negotiate her punt through the bathing place. The punt zigzags from side to side, ramming indignant bathers, shouts affront the summer air and a fine blush mantles all that is visible of the lady’s face. The fiasco ends usually in the appearance of the attendant. There have been times when to restore peace to this Eden, the good la
dy has had to be expelled by a couple of swimmers getting behind her punt and pushing it before them. And still I do not know why it is called Parson’s Pleasure.
Oxford has changed within the last fifty years. The town is acquiring a greater prominence and the University is now far from constituting its whole life. The colleges are being surrounded by a ring of ferro-concrete cinemas, office blocks and palatial garages. To the East industries are spreading, motor car works, press-steel factories and housing estates. Even the river is changing. Medley Weir is no more, and I expect the cannibal trout that once hung about the whirlpools below the weir have now gone to find other hunting grounds. Instead of swirling turbulently by the lock the river now flows quietly along, past the tall poplars and under the arched iron bridge which holds an oddity few other bridges can boast. The bridge at Medley was erected by public subscriptions, and to commemorate this fact there is placed, in the centre of its span, a plaque giving the date of its erection and an indication of the carelessness of the persons responsible for the casting of the plaque. The inscription states that the bridge was erected from ‘public subsriptions.’ I wonder how that ‘c’ came to be left out?
It was on Port Meadow, that wide stretch of river meadow that runs from Medley up the Thames as far as Godstow, with the Wytham heights to guard it on one side and the railway on the other, that I met the Professor. I called him the Professor to myself, for he did not offer his name, and there was something aloof and academical in his manner which forbade the urbanity of a formal enquiry.
He was standing on a raised part of the meadow watching the movements of a small herd of Shetland ponies. From under the brim of his felt hat a fringe of white hair escaped, and his face was folded and creased with loose skin that spoke of age. His eyes were young enough and he held himself very erect within his dark pepper-and-salt mixture suit.