OXFORD AND GERMANY
927
activities and social life of the students was fixed even more by the
income groups to which they belonged than by their colleges or by
their social class. In 1929 to have an income of three hundred pounds
a year meant that one could take part in most University activities,
joining the clubs, taking part in the games, choosing friends who
did not entertain extravagantly and going for walks with them. But
to have much less than this was to be excluded at Oxford from Ox–
ford. One of the most brilliant men I knew, the son of very poor
Scottish parents, came to Oxford with no money except that which
he gained from scholarships. During his first year, he had about two
hundred pounds. This meant that he could take part in almost no
University activities outside the college, could not entertain or be
entertained, could not join any clubs, was forced to scrape and save
even to go to the cinema. The poor scholarship student at Oxford
is rigidly confined by his poverty and leads a kind of slum life in his
college. The very rich student, on the other hand, leads an equally
segregated life at the other end of the social scale.
The social snobbery of the English Public School boys was a
revelation to me at Oxford. Once when I visited a cousin of mine who
was an Etonian at New College, I found him surrounded by six
other Etonians, .all of them purple in the face, enjoying the best joke
they had ever known in their lives. The great joke was to have found
on their arrival at New College that the senior scholar of their year
was the son of the proprietor of the confectionary shop at Eton, a
boy called Richard Goodman whom they had derided and kicked
around during all their Eton careers. Goodman, who became a close
friend of mine after this, never adjusted himself completely to being
the joke of his fellow-Etonians who were not his fellow-Etonians. He
was disconcerted and unsure of himself; and without my meaning to
do so I influenced him so that he despised the one thing which he
was most sure of: his scholarship. Subsequently he became a Com–
munist and literary editor of the
Daily Worker.
Mter what I have written, it may not surprise that many of
my friends and myself were almost obsessively preoccupied with the
question "What is real in life?" Oxford filled us not only with a
sense of our own unreality but it also made us sceptical of the reality
of attitudes and lives outside Oxford, for if we said: "Our life here
