Very Old Cambridge Tales 3: ‘Reflected images’

It was the Saturday of the fourth week of the Michaelmas Term.

Half Term.

As he stepped purposefully from the steakhouse on Trinity Street, where he had feasted on the 10/6d gammon menu, Roger Johns suddenly realised that he had no pressing work to do. He turned up the street and, for want of anything else, wandered into Rose Crescent.

The November air was slightly gauzy – but somehow this made the lamps of the short pedestrian thoroughfare all the more luminously revealing. A couple tumbled towards him from a little restaurant to his left and he caught the ripe vermeil of the girl’s lips and the hard white of her teeth as she threw her head back; while the silk of the boy’s neckerchief and the ringlets of his long black hair seemed to whisk across Johns’ throat with a tickle.

A completely different figure approached him on his right. It was a student of about his own height wearing jeans, an unbuttoned bright red guardsman’s tunic complete with gold braid, over a lumberjack’s shirt, and a grubby green headband. The beard and moustache were blonde and straggly. Behind his circular, gold-rimmed glasses, their owner seemed to be lost in thought. But suddenly, as he drew level with Johns, his head lifted, his eyes focussed on him, and he smiled thinly.

Roger looked sharply away. No, he could scarcely believe it: there was that ‘Cambridge smile’ again!

Time after time in the past four weeks he had chanced to fix his eyes on some university figure coming towards him apparently lost in thought, when this person had suddenly looked him in the eyes – or was it through the eyes? – and smiled knowingly. And he was totally confused by it. Were they actually smiling inside their own little world, at some suddenly seized perception, at some solution achieved in precisely that second to a particularly knotty metaphysical or mathematical problem, at some brilliant aphorism recently heard at high table or a party and casually recalled? The irony that played round the lips as their gaze met his seemed to say as much. Yet Roger’s initial reaction had been that they were smiling mockingly, with a super-subtle, razor-fine Cambridge irony, at him… For although the gaze was indisputably through you, it was certainly directed at you in the first place. Were they smiling at his face? What did his face look like, then? He thought his expression was relaxed, normal, non-committal; but perhaps it was serious, intense, or ridiculous to them? Or was it something to do with his hair? His shirt? His clothes generally?

As he had found himself doing increasingly over the last few weeks, he glanced at himself in the nearest shop window. He veered closer. People passed behind him. He stopped.

In the viscous black pool of the optician’s shop he saw a solid, pinkish, but not jowly head, with tufty reddish hair and eyebrows. It seemed much the same as ever. The eyes were a trifle larger, perhaps, and more owlish, but there was nothing peculiar about that. His blue Terylene shirt collar was plain, but not dull. The same could be said of his woollen tie and close-fitting tweed jacket; even though, he acknowledged, the grey flannel trousers were a bit conventional, unmistakably schoolish. But surely it was the appearance of the others, of the vast majority, that was conspicuous, that made you stare?

As figures passed in the window, he remembered the incredible ‘type’ (there was no other word for him) whom he had passed in the street last week. He was obviously just an undergraduate, but he was wearing a tailored black frock coat, detachable starched collar with bow-tie, a Homburg hat and pince-nez, was carrying an ebony cane, and had a waxed red moustache and a Louis Philippe beard! For a moment, it was like having an hallucination. The type seemed utterly oblivious of his dress and those around him, however, so Roger stared and stared.

And the black bushy beards and military berets, sometimes even accompanied by cigars? The rashes of goatee beards? The occasional ‘imperial’ beards, with swept back hair and gold-rimmed glasses irresistibly reminiscent of Trotsky? Here was a Palestinian head-shawl, carelessly draped round a dirty-green battle jacket. There was a big fluffy Russian hat surmounting a World War I gas cape. He saw once more the undergraduate in Boots who had scrutinised a bottle of shaving lotion through a monocle on a black cord. There, too, was the one who came out of W.H. Smith’s wearing a deerstalker and kalabash pipe…the pink paisley waistcoat and the mustard one…the chap with the stalactitic shelalagh…the formless, long black émancipée dresses…that guardsman’s tunic again…

Among all this rich and weird variety, how could he possibly stand out so much as to warrant that subtly quizzical regard? Surely ‘Louis Philippe’, or Gawain Bumpus-Pearson, say, who had displayed a tendency to affectation while still at school and could now be seen striding about the College in full Regency rig, claimed that as their object and their right?

A very thick magnifying glass, some advertising cut-outs, and tiers of spectacle frames slowly materialised before him. He remembered where he was. He took a last, steady look at his form in the dark mirror, walked on up the precinct, and disappeared into the thickening mist on the market square.

Back in his college room, Roger Johns unhurriedly made himself a cup of cocoa, flipped through History Today, then re-read the essay he had written for next Wednesday’s supervision. His recent ruminations returned to nag him. It was still three months, however, before he grew those bushy ginger sideburns of his and acquired from an Oxfam shop the battered pith helmet in which he delivered his notorious speeches at the Union and hosted the sumptuous weekly dinners in his rooms. By then he was known to all by his second name, Morton, and to the hoi polloi of the University as ‘Raffles’.

© Patrick Miles, 1978

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.