Whether the archery contest between Oxford and Cambridge would have
excited more passionate interest if it had taken place at Oxford than it did at Cambridge is a matter of speculation. It could hardly, at any rate, have had a more ideal setting. Trinity Backs on Sunday afternoon when the sun came out after rain were almost unbelievably green—the grass, the willows weeping into the river where the punts and canoes went up and down, the young limes growing their hardest to replace that " long line " which Tennyson celebrated, and which in the interests of public safety the college was under tragic compulsion to fell a couple of years ago. The targets, four of them, were set up in a row on the tennis-courts, the arrows flew (quite indiscriminately as it seemed) to hit some part of them with a satisfying thud or gradually build up a sort of cheval de frise on the grass all round, young women from Girton or Newnham wrote things down on paper, and every now and then the archers themselves came up in a bunch to examine the impaled targets for themselves. In the end, it was assumed, one side won. The Times said Cambridge. Quite possibly.
Previous page
