Jane Gardam - Old Filth

The winter gathered. Once or twice he grew desperate to telephone the Ingoldbys but dared not because of Pat’s bombshell: It’s family stuff .

The air-raids in the North-West had for the moment stopped but the dogfights went on in the South-East and Eddie wondered whether Pat had his pilot’s wings yet. “They’re sending them up after twelve hours’ instruction,” said an old soldier at the golf club. “They’re running out. Slaughter of the innocents.” “I heard after six hours,” said someone else. “Six hours’ flying instruction and they’re in their own Spitfire.”

According to the six o’clock news on the wireless each evening huge numbers of the Boche were being shot down, twice as many casualties as our own. But the bulletin always ended with “a number of our own aircraft are missing.”

At last he set off for the Oxford entrance exam in a blizzard and a series of unheated trains, each one packed down every corridor with troops, all smoking, drinking, sleeping, hawking, balanced against each other or jack-knifed on their knees on the floor. Coughs, oaths, laughter, glum silence, sudden waves of idiotic singing ( Roll out the Barrel, Tipperary ) from the War before. The final train groaned out of a station to stop as if for ever outside Stratford-on-Avon in the dark. Planes droned above. (“Dorniers?” “No, Messerschmitts.”) More soldiers sank upon their haunches, heads into their spread knees, asleep. The crumpling sound of bombs, the W.C.s surrounded by the desperate, jigging up and down. When you did get inside, heel holding the door to behind you, the lock broken, the floor awash, the smell was rank, no water in the taps. No lavatory paper. “ Roll me over in the clover ,” sang the soldiers who mostly had never seen clover. “ Roll me over, lay me down and do it again .”

Eddie burst from the train at Oxford station and looked for someone on the gate to take his ticket and tell him how far his college was. There was no one and no taxi. No one at all. It was bitter midnight and in his head he could still hear the horrible singing.

Then, stepping out down a dark road something changed. Out from clouds sprang a great white moon and showed pavements and roads of snow, sleeping buildings, spires and domes all stroked by dappling snow. There was not a soul, not a light and not a cry.

Over some bridge he went in such dazzling moonlight he wondered there were not crowds turned out everywhere to see it. He walked exalted, his feet light and the moon came and went, and then soft flakes began to fall. He looked back and saw his footprints already softened by the snow, the snow ahead of him waiting to be imprinted. He had strayed into medieval Oxford like a ghost.

And nobody to direct him and he was growing cold. A great silent street widened. A church stood in the middle of it, its windows boarded, its glass taken into safety. He wondered whether its door might be open and then saw opposite a large building that might be a hotel where he might try to get them to answer a bell and tell him where to go. Then, behind him, he heard a sound from the black church and all at once there was a figure beside him, a muffled-up giant who was graciously inclining his head towards him, the head bound about by some sort of scarf. The man was wearing a flowing macintosh like the robe of someone in the absent stained-glass.

“May I help you? Did I frighten you? I was in the church.” The young man swung a key. He was very young indeed to be a clergyman. He, too, must be a ghost.

“I’m looking for a college called Christ Church.”

“You are going in absolutely the wrong direction. Follow me,” and the soft and boneless giant went padding away with Eddie following.

“There,” he said, in time. “Straight ahead.”

“My train was late.”

“Bang hard for the night-porter. Are you all right now?”

The snow had stopped and the moonshine gleamed out again.

“Excuse me, are you — someone in the church?”

“No. I do fire-watching there. And praying. I’m a student.”

Eddie felt his kindliness and confidence and cheerfulness.

“Goodnight,” said the young huge fledgling. “Good luck. I suppose you’re up for the entrance exam?”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m joining up.”

Eddie felt ridiculous regret. And then confusion. Somehow, he knew this man.

“Thanks,” he said. “It was a mercy I met you.”

They went their different ways, but when Eddie stopped and looked back, he found that the muffled giant was doing the same thing, looking back at him.

“Feel sure I know you,” Eddie called. “Very odd.”

Then the man waved and padded out of sight down a side street and Eddie was trying to rouse his college.

As he fell asleep in a monkish bed in a mullioned room he thought: How can I possibly leave all this for Malaya?

A few days later, “I suggest,” said the man who might in time become his tutor after the War, if that time ever came, “I suggest that you come up as soon as possible.”

“Does that mean I’m accepted, sir?”

“Of course. Goes without saying. You wrote excellent papers yesterday. Well taught. Were you at Sir’s? I thought so. And your public school is very clever with closed scholarships, though I hear you are rich enough not to need one.”

(Am I? thought Eddie. I’ve ten shillings a week.)

“Now, I suggest you volunteer for the Navy. It takes them a year to process you, so you can get your Prelims done with here, before you go, and you’ll have a toe in the door for when you’re demobilised. You’ll be reading history?”

“I’m not quite sure, sir, what. .”

“Your father was here. How is he? Still about, I hope?”

“He lives in Malaya. Well, I think he may be in Singapore now. I hardly know him.”

“I’m sorry. I heard shell-shock? Poor chap. But he’ll be proud of you now.”

Eddie swam with guilt. Ought he to say? His father had ordered him out of the country. His father had no notion or memory of Oxford. His father had — shell-shocked or not — organised a passport and visa and made his sisters get Eddie his jabs. He was to be “an evacuee.” Well, he would not do it. No. He would come to Oxford where he was welcome and admired and befriended and a familiar ghost had directed him to a safe haven after midnight. He would say nothing.

“May I come up next term, sir?”

“Ah, not quite so fast. But leave it to me. We’ll find you a room in Meadow Buildings, where your father was.”

As he fell asleep in the beautiful ice-cold room with his coat and the hearth-rug over the blankets, and watched the moon light the snowy rooftops, he briefly wondered about money. Will my father pay my fees if I refuse to go out to him? Will my scholarship be enough? I might be poor. I’ve never been really poor. Well, hell, so what? And he watched the moon bowling along, lighting the sky for the bombers.

I could live and die here, he thought. They’ll never destroy this. I’ll stay and fight for it.

And with these noble thoughts he slept.

By morning the snow had gone as if it had been dreams and it was raining hard and the pavements soiled and splashy. From the mullioned window could be seen people hurrying, bent forward, miserable and mean along the streets, and it was not the fairy city any more. The bedroom door opened and a lugubrious man called a Scout came carrying hot water in a jug across to a washbowl and asked if he would be taking breakfast early so that his room might be cleaned? For some panic- stricken reason Eddie said, No, he would be leaving before breakfast. “Very good, sir,” said the Scout, eyebrows raised, and Eddie wondered whether to leave him a tip and, if he didn’t, whether it would be remembered next term and held against him. In the end he left a shilling on the dressing-table, took his bag and went head forward into the slushy street. As he butted along against the wet and the umbrellas, bicycles wetting his trousers as they passed him, melancholy struck. Was this place after all a delusion? It was criminally cold. Nobody had said goodbye to him. Hot water in a jug and the W.C. three flights down. Not a word about the date of his return. And he was bloody hungry. He turned into a tea-shop because the steam on its windows promised warmth, but once inside it was cold and crowded and dark, with people sitting in buttoned-up clothes. A long and silent queue stood by the counter, each one holding a ration book in a gloved hand and hoping for an extra cake.