Those spires
Benny Green
A, n Oxford Childhood Carola Oman (Hodder and Stoughton £5.25)
People who have been fortunate enough to grow up in the cloisters of Oxford and still einerge with their literary sensibilities intact, !Pc a problem. For the rest of their lives lacY find themselves struggling to reconcile th.eir wistful contemplation of a lost garden with the traditional restraints of literary c,2MPosition. After wrestling with this aernon for a few chapters, Carola Oman stOPs trying. She finds herself describing `the wisteria on the face of Worcester, mist ch_reePing from the river to make Magdalen ucli tower arise like a phantasy, the fanvaulting of Christ Church great staircase by candlelight . . .' But then she stops as she etatches herselfout. 'Even when collecting ihLese memories I found I had to cross out in "ie first chapters no less than twenty appear4nces of the word "beautiful".' Her pretscribed antidote to soppiness appears to be ehe deployment of shortish and often disnnected sentences, in a style I have ineptly 4,t,telliPted to ape in this paragraph and will "andon with immeasurable relief from this
Point on.
h The first thing to be said is that Miss Oman failed miserably, for there is a sense in 170101 her reminiscence of an Oxford child9d is very beautiful indeed. In fact, I think d is the very breeziness with which she ends herself from the onset of sentimenr'itY which conjures a curious kind of r°seate glow over the narrative. At first I rileared that I, a miserable pleb with not so b 'ICI) as a single letter after my name, would e lost in the swirling tides of familial
statistics :
As they were making preparations for Packing up their Simla house in view of retirement in 1878, the Robert Maclaglans ,heard that Willie, who had risen steadily In his late-chosen profession as an eDiscopalian clergyman, had accepted n1 Lord Salisbury an offer of the see of Lichfield. Lord Lytton had now arrived in Simla, and at a dinner party at Govern°lent House, spoke with great affability to Robert about the marriage of the Bishop °f. Lichfield to Lady Lytton's cousin, Youngest of the five brilliant daughters of LOrd Barrington, who had died last year.
wall°vvever, something told me that all this bet! n° more than a scanning of the cast-list ki„°re the curtain rises, and so it proved. All th'e'ds of abstruse information drift across ree ,k, ind1V cloudscapes of Miss Oman's nlaZilection, and the cumulative effect is to 4n Oxford Childhood, in its modest, "ected way, just as valuable a document
of English history as the same writer's books about Nelson, Sir John Moore and Sir Walter Scott.
Miss Oman gets off to a flying Wodehousean start, being born in 1897 and baptised in All Souls chapel. Because of its celibate history the said chapel had no font, and so 'I was christened in the largest punch-bowl the college could muster.' Subsequently raised by a mother who in earlier days had been devoted to the MABEYS, Miss Oman casually encounters the assorted fictions of English social and literary history. The Reverend Spooner comes to tea with the reputation of a man who has said, 'We all know what it is to find a half-warmed fish within one's breast'; one relation becomes Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and is so deaf that when the national anthem is played 'his wife had to poke him to rise, and to disregard "Hearts of Oak," "Cherry Ripe" and other sudden orchestral noises' ; Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling drop in on the same day; Miss Oman's father takes great pleasure in one of the amenities at the Athenaeum, which supplied its members with 'mourning paper for every stage of bereavement.'
Whether the naïveté of this sort of world is the innocence of the past or merely the innocence of childhood, the reader will have to decide for himself, but I have included in my gallery of Edwardian types Miss Oman's young relation Willie, who must have been, Miss Oman says, 'what nowadays would be called rather highly sexed.' I take leave to doubt it; Willie's crime against decorum consisted of ogling illustrated magazines with pictures of stage favourites lying in hammocks and smiling over muffs. There was one of a very bedizened buxom young person leaning on a parasol. He asked, triumphantly, 'What do you think of her ?' But I told him in two composite words. 'Over-dressed and under-bred.'
The world which takes shape under the civilised and friendly tutelage of Miss Oman's recollection is a world of walking tours and hymn-singing, of winter rollerskating and no fishing on Sundays, a world in which young ladies faint while being fitted at the dressmaker, where suitors arrive from India and Africa, and dashing young naval officers drive up in hansoms for family balls where the buffet includes oyster patties, fish creams in aspic, chicken croquettes, sandwiches, jellies, fruit salad, meringues, éclairs, Chantilly baskets, chocolate mushrooms, coconut pastry, Parmesan creams and curried eggs; a world where a good blast through a speaking tube can send the receiver at the other end flying into the icebucket, where the imperfections of the plumbing are balanced by the pleasure of hip-baths before a blazing fire; a world where you could open The Times on New Year's morning to find that 'Uncle Ed had been given a CSI.' A world, in fact, so substantial that it would have required a giant earthquake to destroy it. And a giant earth
quake duly did; the narrative ends in September 1914. Two tiny grumbles: the index does not always list those named in the text, particularly the Surrey batsman D. J. Knight. And I had hoped against hope for a passing reference to the Reverend Dodgson. MABEYS, by the way, stands for the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.
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