IN October 1919, I went to Oxford at last, and Nicholson gave us the Harlech furniture to take along. Oxford was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead, and charged accordingly. Keble College built a row of huts for its surplus students. Not an unfurnished house could be rented anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty by pleading ill-health and getting permission from St John’s College to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill – where John Masefield, who thought well of my poetry, had offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.
We found the University remarkably quiet. The returned soliders did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and races with the Proctors’ ‘bulldogs’, as in the old days. The boys straight from the public schools kept quiet too, having had war preached at them continually for four years, with orders to carry on loyally at home while their brothers served in the trenches, and make themselves worthy of such sacrifices. Since the boys went off to cadet-battalions at the age of seventeen, the masters kept firm control of the schools; trouble there nearly always came from the eighteen-year-olds. G. N. Clark, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree at Oxford just before the war and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: ‘I can’t make out my pupils at all. They are all “Yes, sir” and “No, sir”. They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can’t remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-war days.’
The ex-service men, who included scores of captains, majors, colonels, and even a one-armed twenty-five year old brigadier, insisted on their rights. At St John’s, they formed a ‘College Soviet’, successfully demanded an entire revision of the scandalous catering system, and chose an undergraduate representative to sit on the kitchen-committee. The elder dons, whom I had often seen during the war trembling in fear of an invasion, with the sacking and firing of the Oxford colleges and the rape of their families in the Woodstock and Banbury Roads, and who then regarded all soldiers, myself included, as their noble saviours, now recovered their pre-war self-possession and haughtiness. The change in their manner amused me. My moral tutor, however, though he no longer saluted me when we met, remained a friend; he persuaded the College to let me change my course from Classics to English Language and Literature, and take up my £60 Classical Exhibition notwithstanding. I felt glad now that it was only an exhibition, not a scholarship, though in 1913 this had disappointed me: College regulations permitted exhibitioners to be married, scholars must remain single.
I found the English Literature course tedious, especially the insistence on eighteenth-century poets. My tutor, Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson’s plays, sympathized, telling me that he had suffered once, as a boy, for preferring the Romantic Revivalists. When his schoolmaster beat him for reading Shelley, he had protested between the blows: ‘Shelley is beautiful! Shelley is beautiful!’ Yet he warned me not on any account to disparage the eighteenth century when I sat for my finals. I also found it difficult to concentrate on cases, genders, and irregular verbs in Anglo-Saxon grammar. The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject: it was, he said, a language of purely linguistic interest, and hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry extant possessed the slightest literary merit. I disagreed. I thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff-tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting – all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Edmund Blunden, who also had leave to live on Boar’s Hill because of gassed lungs, was taking the same course. The war still continued for both of us, and we translated everything into trench-warfare terms. In the middle of a lecture I would have a sudden very clear experience of men on the march up the Béthune–La Bassée road; the men would be singing, while French children ran along beside us, calling out: ‘Tommee, Tommee, give me bullee beef!’ and I would smell the stench of the knacker’s yard just outside the town. Or it would be in Laventie High Street, passing a company billet; an N.C.O. would roar: ‘Party, ‘shun!’ and the Second Battalion men in shorts, with brown knees, and brown, expressionless faces, would spring to their feet from the broken steps where they were sitting. Or I would be in a barn with my first platoon of the Welsh Regiment, watching them play nap by the light of dirty candle stumps. Or in a deep dug-out at Cambrin, talking to a signaller; I would look up the shaft and see somebody’s muddy legs coming down the steps; then there would be a sudden crash and the tobacco smoke in the dug-out would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books. These day-dreams persisted like an alternate life and did not leave me until well in 1928. The scenes were nearly always recollections of my first four months in France; the emotion-recording apparatus seemed to have failed after Loos.
The eighteenth century owed its unpopularity largely to its Frenchness. Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund, shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: ‘No more wars for me at any price! Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them, I’ll go like a shot’ Pro-German feeling had been increasing. With the war over and the German armies beaten, we could give the German soldier credit for being the most efficient fighting-man in Europe. I often heard it said that only the blockade had beaten the Fritzes; that in Haig’s last push they never really broke, and that their machine-gun sections held us up long enough to cover the withdrawal of the main forces. Some undergraduates even insisted that we had been fighting on the wrong side: our natural enemies were the French.
At the end of my first term’s work, I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed, and said a little stiffly: ‘I understand, Mr Graves, that the essays which you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others.’
A number of poets were living on Boar’s Hill; too many, Edmund and I agreed. It was now almost a tourist centre, dominated by Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, with his bright eye, abrupt challenging manner, and a flower in his buttonhole – one of the first men of letters to sign the Oxford recantation of war-time hatred against the Germans. Dr Gilbert Murray lived there, too, gentle-voiced and with the spiritual look of the strict vegetarian, doing preliminary propaganda work for the League of Nations. Once, as I sat talking to him in his study about Aristotle’s Poetics, while he walked up and down, I suddenly asked: ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you trying to avoid the flowers on the rug, or are you trying to keep to the squares?’ My own compulsion-neuroses made it easy for me to notice them in others. He wheeled around sharply: ‘You’re the first person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go another seven steps, then I turn around. I consulted Browne, the Professor of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it isn’t a dangerous habit. He said: “When you find yourself getting into multiples of seven, come to me again.”’
I saw most of John Masefield, a nervous, generous, correct man, very sensitive to criticism, who seemed to have suffered greatly in the war, as an orderly in a Red Cross unit; he was now working on Reynard the Fox. He wrote in a hut in his garden, surrounded by tall gorse-bushes, and only appeared at meal-times. In the evening he used to read his day’s work over to Mrs Masefield, and they corrected it together. Masefield being at the height of his reputation at the time, a constant stream of American visitors washed against his door. Mrs Masefield protected ‘Jan’. She came from the North of Ireland, and put a necessary brake on Jan’s generosity and sociability. We admired her careful housekeeping, and the way she stood up for her rights where less resolute people would have shrunk. As an example: some neighbours of ours had a particularly stupid Airedale; they were taking it for a walk when a wild rabbit ran across the road from the Masefield’s gorse plantation. The Airedale dashed at the rabbit, and missed as usual. The rabbit, not giving it sufficient credit for stupidity and slowness, doubled back; but found the dog not yet recovered from its mistake and ran right into its open jaws. The dog’s owners, delighted at the brilliant performance of their pet, retrieved the rabbit, which was a small and inexperienced one, and took it home for the pot. Mrs Masefield had been watching through the plantation fence. This not being, strictly, a public road, the rabbit was legally hers. That evening they heard a knock at the door. ‘Come in, oh, do come in, Mrs Masefield!’ She had called to demand the skin of her rabbit. Mrs Masefield’s one extravagance was bridge; she used to play at a halfpenny a hundred, to steady her play. But she was a considerate landlord to us, and advised Nancy to keep up with me intellectually, if she wished to hold my affections.
Another poet on Boar’s Hill was Robert Nichols, one more neurasthenic ex-soldier, with his flame-opal ring, his wide-brimmed hat, his flapping arms, and a ‘mournful grandeur in repose’ (the phrase comes from a review by Sir Edmund Gosse). Nichols served only three weeks in France, with the gunners, and got involved in no show; but, being highly strung, he got invalided out of the army and went to lecture on British war-poets in America for the Ministry of Information. He read Siegfried’s poetry and mine, and started a legend of Siegfried, himself, and me as the new Three Musketeers, though the three of us had never once been together in the same room.
That winter, George and Ruth Mallory invited Nancy and myself to go climbing with them. But Nancy could not stand heights and was having another baby; and I realized that my climbing days were over. I could never again now deliberately take chances with my life. In March, the baby arrived and we called him David. My mother was overjoyed to have secured the first Graves grandson. My elder brothers had only girls; here, at last, was an heir for the family silver and documents. At Jenny’s birth she had condoled with Nancy: ‘Perhaps it is as well to have a girl first, to practise on.’ Nancy was determined to have four children; they were to resemble the children in her drawings, and be girl, boy, girl, boy, in that order. She intended to get it all over with quickly; she believed in young parents with families of three or four children fairly close together in age. She had her way exactly, but began to regret her marriage, as a breach of faith with herself – a concession to patriarchy. She wanted somehow to be dis-married – not by divorce, which was as bad as marriage – so that she and I could live together without any legal or religious obligation to do so.
I now met Dick again, for the last time, and found him disagreeably pleasant. He was up at Oxford, about to enter the diplomatic service, and so greatly changed that it seemed absurd to have ever suffered on his account. Yet the caricature likeness to the boy I had loved persisted.