Sometimes Snowy Oxford
The last week of Michaelmas term is pure joy. It kicks off with the Advent Carol Service and Christmas dinner in Hall. Scholarly activities are wrapped up; nothing new is started. The undergraduates at college had to pack their things and put them in the void so that their rooms could be rented out between terms.
The outdoor market at Gloucester Green is transformed into a Christmas market, and the streets are crowded and lively. I went Christmas shopping to pick up a few small presents to take back to my family in America (key rings for my brothers and sister). My social engagements were intense because I wanted to spend time with all my friends before leaving. And every social event seemed to include small mince pies and mulled wine.
Christmas Carols
The English Christmas carols were for the most part the same as their American versions. But one carol threw me off entirely: “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem.” The words are identical, but the melody is completely different. Years later, I remember walking to the little village of Church Enstone for a late Christmas Eve service. My children were young and afraid of the footpath that ran through darkened fields and woods. I alternated singing the American and English versions of “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” which no doubt scared away the hedgehogs, or perhaps woke them up.
This is what the English version of “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem” sounds like.
The highlight of eighth week at Keble is the Advent Carol Service on the last Sunday of term. It is followed by a Christmas dinner in Hall . . . and so the Christmas season begins.
This is a long video, so I suggest that you save it to listen to on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. It starts with the carol “Once in Royal David’s City.”
Decline and Fall
During the last week of term, “I read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which was a delightful experience. It’s a very funny book. It starts out at Scone College, Oxford, on the night of the Bollinger dinner” (quoting from my journal). Two dons in a darkened room overlook the college quad, where members of the Bollinger Society have spilled out, and pray that they will attack the chapel so the college can raise money by fining them. An unsuspecting theology student named Paul Pennyfeather, whose old school tie differs from the Bollinger’s tie by only a quarter-inch narrower stripe, has his clothes ripped off by the mob when he tries to return to his room. As a result, Paul is sent down for indecent behavior because of running across the quad without trousers.
Paul takes a job at an obscure private school at Wales, where he meets a wealthy widow Mrs. Margot Best-Chetwynde who hires him as a tutor for her son. Unbeknown to Paul, Margot has made her fortune based on white slave trade. After a dinner where Margot speaks of matters of daily interest— some jewels she was having reset, how the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings was demanding a guarantee that she not demolish her castle in Ireland, and how her cook seemed to be going off his head—Paul proposes and she accepts. He gets caught up in Margot’s trafficking and takes the fall for her.
“They ask him when he goes to jail, ‘have you ever spent any time in a mental institution or something similar?’ And he says yes, Scone College, Oxford. And it turned out, he was completely happy in solitary confinement. In other words, when he was just left in his cell and given a few books a week, he was quite happy . . . much to their frustration, since they were trying to punish him. Paul makes the observation that anyone who has been to a public school is quite comfortable with that kind of a world, where they bring the food to you and you have a little room that you exist in.”
Margot marries an MP and devises a plan to get Paul out of jail, after which he is given a new identity. He returns to Scone College and the book ends with him safe in his room listening to the doings of the Bollinger Society some three years later.
“I read it in about two sittings. It was very gratifying in a sense to be sitting in an Oxford college room and read a book that starts in an Oxford college and brings you back to college when it is finished. That is what was so gratifying about it. Not so much the content of the book, although it was funny, but that it began and ended in the same place where I started and finished reading it.”
Snowy Oxford
It rarely snows at Christmas in Oxford. I do have some photos of snowy Oxford, courtesy of Lynn Felhofer. She wrote, “In April 2007, I spent a week at St. Catherine's College for a work event. I stayed in a dorm room similar to the one you described. I woke one morning to a surprise spring snow shower. My favorite memory is wandering through Holywell Cemetery early that day. The bushes had pink blooms, and the mid-19th century headstones were draped with snow. It was magical.”
This is the last newsletter for Michaelmas term. The newsletters will resume in January at the start of Hilary term. In the meantime, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Every Christmas in the UK, we eat turkey and mince pies, then they disappear for another year as no one really likes them that much. We were wondering what unique food items only make an appearance at Christmas in the US?
I, too, had the good fortune to spend several years in England - London 1983 - 1993. They were defining years in my life.