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PARTISAN REVIEW
When the tourist thinks of Ox£ord he thinks of the colleges.
Living in the colleges ourselves we found it more amusing to
explore the poor streets which smell of fried fish or the residential
district of North Oxford with its neo-Gothic architecture and its
population of cranks. Anyone driving into Oxford from the north
could know where he was from the spectacle of fanatical and fan–
tastic old maids upon bicycles, in mushroom hats and shapeless
timeless clothes. Ecclesiastical porches, baronial turrets, bad
stained glass in the lavatory window; the Englishman's honie is his
ragbag. I visited three homes in North Oxford during my first
term. One belonged to an aggressive hypochondriac old lady who,
as soon as she met me, said: 'I hear you're a clever young man.
Are you interested in Peter Piperisms?' In another house Graham
Shepard and I were entertained by a don and-more entertainingly
-by his wife who made her whole conversation out of sexual
doubles entendres; she had a dog and a canary to help her out.
The third house I visited by mistake, having found in my rqom
in college a note of invitation intended for an undergraduate who
was a Plymouth Brother. Arriving at the unknown house I found
myself in the midst of Plymouth Brethren-young men in dark Sun–
day suits and stiff collars and dowdy girl undergraduates mainly
in spectacles and with clumsy embarrassed hands. The room was
full of cake-stands and suspense and suddenly everyone stood up
and Mr. Moore, our host, a genial, cunning old man, began pray–
ing in an over-familiar way which implied that we and God were
all one jolly family. Then we ate. Mr. Moore was puzzled by my
presence but he took me into a corner and said I was welcome all
the same and would I come again, they did this every Sunday;
there was a young man from the Colonies, he said, a very fine
athlete, who had told him just before he went down that there had
been moments during his university career when he felt like going
wrong but, whenever these temptations arose, he used to say to
himself 'I'll just go up and have a cup of coffee with old Moore'
and the situation was saved.
At this time one of the popular songs was
Red, Red Robin,
which like many jazz songs combined the nostalgia of the thwarted
with the philosophy of 'Whistle owre the lave o' 't.' When the red
red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin' along. There'll be no more
sobbin' etc. The choice for many undergraduates was between this
