Short Story: Dreaming Of Spires

Short Story: Dreaming Of Spires

Oxford. Not where I went to university, or came visiting armed with a guidebook, but where I grew up. My home town.

In the course of a peripatetic childhood involving many different and progressively depressing lodgings and rented houses, Oxford itself was the one constant. It was my home, not the places I lived in. And I think that even as a young child I knew instinctively that it was special, but was only able to rationalise this many years later, after I had left.

My own map of the town was not like the conventional maps. Mine was crisscrossed with short cuts, bike paths, back routes, many of which skirted round or avoided altogether the four-star buildings, the most famous colleges. How to get to the market, the swimming baths, the library, school. And wherever we happened to be living, the most important route was the fastest way by bike to Port Meadow.

The Meadow was – and still is, in its cosmeticised state in the tidy 21st century – more than a hundred hectares of common land on the north and west of Oxford, bordered on one side by the river Thames and the other by the railway. Its main attraction for me was that it was home to a great many horses, turned loose, often uncared for by their owners, but living well enough on the grass that flourished on the wet land. In winter often too wet – many of the horses suffered from laminitis, a painful condition induced by standing constantly in boggy ground – but how we all longed for it to flood: an area of frozen water never so deep as to be dangerous but large enough to provide skating for all of Oxford, town and gown.

I won't bore you with the facts about Port Meadow, or about any of the sights and sites of Oxford – they are available to any Googler who is interested. I want to try to convey what they were for me then, a child growing up in the 1950s with all the freedom to explore and make my own this unique and exciting city.

For then there were no mobile phones (thank God for no mobile phones in my childhood!), children were allowed to go around alone from perhaps the age of seven or eight, bicycles were never chained but just propped up wherever one stopped, and traffic was considered heavy when there were more than a dozen cars on the road. Oxford was my oyster.

So back to Port Meadow. If I felt unfettered in Oxford I felt liberated on the Meadow, whether it was plodding through the wet marshland, the water always just higher than the top of one's boots, or trying to catch one of the horses as a dare, or lying in the buttercups choking over illicit cigarettes stolen from her mother by my best friend, Philippa, or spying with her on the old lady who lived in a shack of cardboard boxes on the edge of the meadow. She, once tall but now stooped, dishevelled and smelly but proud, was more than a lady – she was allegedly a Dame. Whether or not she had once been a highly regarded tutor at one of the women's colleges, it was well known that every two weeks she would trundle her old pram up to the base of the steps of the grandest hotel in Oxford, the Randolph, where she would wait be helped inside by a flunkey, take a long bath, have a meal, and then go back to her shack on the Meadow.

Talking of dames reminds me of another favourite occupation of Philippa and myself. On Oxford's other river, the Cherwell, was a bathing place called Dames' Delight, hollowed out of and fenced off from the river and provided with changing rooms where families went to bathe. I say 'families' because there was another bathing place where only men were allowed. Nude men. To get a view of Parsons' Pleasure took a lot of cunning and determination, but oh was it worth it. Scratched by brambles, stung by nettles, knees scarred, clothes torn, terrified but triumphant, Philippa and I would lie in our hiding place and laugh until we cried at the sight of pinched white bottoms, drooping paunches, nobbly knees – but above all, willies! Big and small, brazenly lolling or half hidden themselves in undergrowth, docile or occasionally and memorably rampant, these were entertainment that no money could buy. I don't remember seeing any desirable young bodies, let alone willies, but maybe desirable men didn't go to Parsons' Pleasure – or maybe we were then too childish to do anything but laugh at them.

But there came a day when we were not. By this time Philippa and I had drifted apart, she off to a smart boarding school, I caught up in a religious phase – even if one induced by the number of undergraduates who attended St Aldate's, the swinging church, evangelical with a small 'e', that was only five minutes' walk away from where my family was then lodging.

'Lodging' seems an old-fashioned word now, but we were in fact living in what was called The President's Lodgings. Not that my father was president of anything, state, society or college, but because there was an empty flat above the house in which lived the President of Corpus Christi College. And this was where my real love affair with my home town began. Aged 16, a fresh flower ready for plucking, I found myself in the heart of the city and the university, surrounded by history, ancient buildings, academia – and men. For in the mid-1950s undergraduates were predominantly male, and since most of them had done national service after leaving school and before university, they were men, not boys.

My bedroom at the Lodgings, oak panelled and painted pale blue, featured in my first Shortbread story, "Up There". From its window I leaned, and gazed, and feasted on the dark figures strolling under the giant copper beech in the garden below, listening to the buzz of their talk, longing to join them. One hot summer's night I decided to take my pillow and a blanket out on to the roof – a maze of ridges and angled slopes connected by gulleys in which a convenient 'bed' could be made without too much danger of falling off. Later I was discovered climbing out in my sleep and the window was locked. But this night I fell asleep to the sound of men's chatter against a backdrop of the dreaming spires in moonlight, the rose window of the cathedral softly defined by a light within.

Though my religious fervour was waning – superseded by other, more earthy ones – I still walked to the local church, largely because the route took me through the back of Christ Church across Peckwater Quad, and here on a Sunday morning undergraduates could be seen emerging groggily from their rooms in skimpy dressing gowns to cross the quad for a shower, towels draped over their shoulders. In Tom Quad, the huge open quadrangle with its unbuilt cloisters that distinguishes Christ Church as well as housing the university's cathedral, another figure was often to be seen emerging from his room. An ancient diminutive cleric called Canon Jenkins, he would stand in his doorway, strike his staff on the ground and proclaim, 'Ha, you haven't got me yet!' – his daily defiance of the Grim Reaper. (His rooms were said to be so full of books that whenever he could no longer get inside he would hurl a load out on to the quad.)

University life, to a teenage girl whose only preoccupation was not to fail her O levels, was very seductive. Not only the sheer numbers of intelligent, relatively mature and to my eyes gorgeous young men, but the life itself. There was always something on. Meetings, societies and clubs at which outsiders were often welcomed, parties both formal amd improptu, tea and crumpets toasted in front of the gas fire. In winter, beagling with the Christ Church pack, skating on Port Meadow if it was both flooded and frozen – neither a given – or just strolling around another meadow, this near the centre of town and enclosed within the curves of both rivers, the Thames and the Cherwell. In spring these flood-meadows are dizzying: foaming with cow-parsley and thickly spread with buttercups, the piebald cows squelching lazily, up to their bellies in more food than they can ever eat. One spring I walked the meadow path in early morning for a month, trying to memorise Cleopatra's lines for a school play in which I had been seriously miscast as the great seductress, still far too shy and virginal to do anything but just look.

And in summer, the thrill of the commem balls. Unburdened as I was by the threat of exams – I was then 17 and in the comfortable lull between O and A levels – my first invitation was a coup in several ways. Commemoration balls are an Oxford tradition, formal affairs held at the end of the summer term, with the men in white ties and girls in long gowns. (Surprisingly they appear to have survived the current vogue for informality, though what happens under the surface has probably changed little over the centuries.) What kudos I gained, as well as envy – even spite – from being the only girl from my school to be going! But being invited – invitations were essential, though occasional gatecrashers did get through – was only the first hurdle, to be followed by the almost insurmountable one of parental permission, aided by my brother whose friend was to be my partner, and then the real anxiety-maker, what to wear.

Since buying a new dress was out of the question, the only possibility was a rehash of a bridesmaid's dress worn the year before for my brother's wedding. This had a very long zip down the back, and as I had grown in that year doing up the zip was a struggle, even if it looked quite sexy when achieved. On the evening of the ball I got dressed at the house of a schoolfriend, who duly zipped me up – and the inevitable happened. Laughing hysterically, half-crying, I stood as still as I could while she slowly sewed me into my white dress. ('Please, please don't get blood on it,' I prayed.) A good friend, and I felt guilty at leaving her, Cinderella-like, as I departed for the ball.

I don't remember more than a haze of dancing, looking, talking, flirting, feeling by turns grown-up and pathetically childish, the edges softening as the night wore on and yet another glass of champagne went down. I do remember being grateful at one point that I was sewn into my dress, and the shame of bumping into my partner and his group of friends making their way to the river for breakfast – and more champagne – as I cycled off to school the next morning, cut out of my dress and back in school uniform.

But if all this was heady stuff, what affected me more deeply and lastingly about growing up in Oxford was the buildings. They don't need describing for they are well enough known; they can stand on their own foundations, as they have for the last eight centuries. But I would like to get across what they meant to me.

The more important colleges, many with large gardens, were then open to anyone to wander into at most hours of the day, though all had strict hours of curfew. The lesser known ones were sometimes more fiercely guarded, but either befriending or dodging the gatekeepers was relatively easy. Nonchalance and confidence, however skin-deep, were the best ways to gain entry, I discovered. So on some flimsy pretext I would wander through the quadrangles, into small courtyards, up narrow stairways, once memorably out on to the stone parapet of Brasenose College, accompanied by a mad climbing enthusiast (who later became my husband). The buildings were so old, so constant, so unshakeable, that they underpinned my own shaky existence. They gave me the same tactile comfort that I later gained, out in the world, from trees. Though I often touched their stones, ran my fingers across the pockmarks in a column, wondered at how many footsteps over how many years it had taken to wear down the centre of a stone staircase, it never occurred to me then to find out about architectural styles or terms – lovely words such as corbels and quoins and squinches – that I later came to learn. I simply absorbed the buildings into my consciousness as a spider digests a fly.

They fed me, and I dream about them still. They were the rocks that supported my childhood, gave me perhaps my instinct for survival. The buildings formed me, just as they formed my home town.