Free Mad World by Paula Byrne Page A

reads:
Once, my dear – but the world was young then –
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes –
Lissom the blades and the backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times –
Careless we, and the chorus flung then
Under St Mary’s chimes!
    Though Evelyn was not the lissom type that might take to the river in a rowing eight, he shared Q’s rosy-tinted vision. Oxford was ‘mayonnaise and punts and cider cup all day long’. Charles Ryder’s voice is his own: ‘Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint … her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days … when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning.’ Late in life, revising Brideshead for the last time, Waugh changed that last phrase to ‘exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth’. Oxford ultimately stood for youth more than learning.
    What would he have looked like to his fellow undergraduates? He was an attractive young man, short and slim with reddish, wavy hair, a sensuous mouth and a penetrating gaze. He had large hands, which he called craftsman hands. A wonderful hearty laugh, nearly an octave lower than his speaking voice. Those who knew him at this time testified to his peculiar charm, something that had not been nearly so apparent at Lancing. For some he was ‘faun-like’ – more an allusion to his light-footed energy than his diminutive stature. Despite the fierceness of his blue eyes and his slight swagger, there was an engaging air of vulnerability about him. Nevertheless, he could be impatient and cruel, especially to those less clever. He was not a kind young man, but he was generous and quick to see kindness in others.
    For his first two terms he led a quiet and uneventful life. He claimed that he was content: ‘I have enough friends to keep me from being lonely and not enough to bother me,’ he wrote in a letter, adding that he did little work and dreamed a lot. But in other letters he lamented the lack of congenial friends. He complained of the ones he had met so far, ‘agloomy scholar from some Grammar school who talked nothing, some aristocratic men who talked winter sports and motor cars’. The highlight of his first term was to buy finely bound editions of Rupert Brooke and A. E. Housman’s haunting homoerotic poetry collection A Shropshire Lad , volumes that he could ill afford. He reported the purchases with relish in letters to his school friend, Tom Driberg.
    In his memoir of his early years, self-deprecatingly entitled A Little Learning , Waugh described the first part of his Oxford education as typical of a scholarship freshman from a minor public school. Subdued but happy, he purchased a cigarette box carved with the college arms, learned to smoke a pipe, got drunk for the first time, made a speech at the Union and did just enough work to scrape through his first year exams. ‘But all the time it seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that there was a quintessential Oxford which I knew and loved from afar and intended to find.’
    He knew that he was in search of something, but he was not quite sure what it was.
    In A Little Learning he quoted Q’s line about Oxford’s ‘ secret none can utter ’ once again. ‘It is not given to all her sons either to seek or find this secret,’ he commented, ‘but it was very near the surface in 1922.’ The clear implication is that he was on the brink of being let into the secret of the quintessential Oxford. At this point in his memoir he named one of his contemporaries: ‘Pembroke [College] harboured Hugh Lygon and certain other aristocratic refugees from the examination system.’ Pembroke was a college that had a reputation for welcoming the ‘cream’ of Oxford (rich and thick). Hugh was not the most intellectual of men, but after a period of study in Germany he had duly come up to Oxford. He would hardly have been turned away,