Et in Arcadia ego


Well, you be very pleased to learn that I have decided to give the London Water Closet a rest for the time being. But maybe you are wondering what happened after I left LWC. Well, you are about to find out. 


It is imprinted on my mind, that amazing sight of the fat envelope, lying on the doormat of our house in Alma Road. Even before I opened that fateful piece of stationery, I knew that I must have been given a place at Oxford. Yes, why would they send a fat envelope if it just contained a brief rejection letter?



I have almost no photos at all for most of my four years at university, but in the summer term of my second year Tim Hinton contacted me. He was doing a degree in Photography, so could he come up to Oxford and take some photos? Could I put him up for a day or two? I am deeply indebted to Tim for these photographs, as they are almost the only records I have of my time at Oxford.


Who is this young man, smoking the clay pipe and carefully pouring port into the decanter? Where is he now? I suppose I am about 20 in these photos and I had switched from Classics (Literae Humaniores) to Theology. The stress and failure of Mods were over and I was enjoying my new academic subject. I really had no plans for my life and I simply felt relieved not to have been thrown out, so I could finish my university days and maybe even get a degree.


My “rooms” were in a tower in the back quadrangle, the Margary quad, next to the college chapel. It was a bit weird, living in a modern block that rubbed shoulders with Gilbert Scott’s flamboyant Victorian pastiche of La Sainte-Chappelle in Paris. Sitting at my desk, studying Abraham’s wanderings in Genesis and listening to the organ playing in the chapel, I could look up and see across the Margary quad to what was called “the dustbin quad”.

The Fellows' Garden at Exeter College 

    

 


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