Memoirs

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By the end of my second term in the Classical Under Sixth it became clear to me that I was never going to make a classical scholar, even of the humblest kind. Nevertheless, there had to be a battle if I was to change my specialization. The classical side of Brooke Hall, which is the masters’ common room at Charterhouse, would not easily give up. Arrowsmith advised strongly against a change; Russell, as was his nature, was less dogmatic; Irvine opposed it though with decreasing confidence. My housemaster, Jasper Holmes, was a scientist, but was well aware of the strength of the classical side in Brooke Hall, from which he had sometimes suffered his own reverses in Charterhouse politics.

I wanted to switch to the History Under Sixth, which would lead naturally to Robert Birley’s History Sixth. That in its turn would lead to reading history at Oxford. I was increasingly strongly convinced that that was what I ought to do. However bad I was at the classics, I was good at writing essays, and had always read history.

During the period of this minor, but, to me, crucial, struggle, an incident occurred which nearly led to my changing my house as well as my form. There was a Jewish boy in Verites whose family background was unhappy, and whose conduct was erratic. He was so unhappy that at one time he tried to set fire to the school pillar box. He was nonetheless intelligent, and he was a friend of mine. I remember once going to a meal with his mother. Perhaps she had pressed him to bring a friend home. I knew therefore that his home was not happy, and that he resented about equally the authority of Charterhouse and that of his non-Jewish stepfather who, even to me, lacked charm.

In Verites he was unpopular. No doubt there was anti-Semitism in it. He was accused of being dirty, of not having taken a bath for a long time. This was not all that unusual; hot water was rationed and we only got one bath a week, so we must all have been pretty grubby. A group of sixteen-year-olds dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him and put him in the bath.

I was present, protesting and horrified at what was happening. I was not able to prevent it, though my protests may have helped to shorten the ordeal. I went to Holmes, as the house-master, who took less action against the bullies than I thought appropriate. I wrote to my mother, saying that I could not tolerate staying in a house where this sort of thing could happen. In this there was no doubt some desire to take advantage of the situation for my own ends, as well as a genuine horror and shock at the Jewish boy’s humiliation. I suggested that I should be transferred to Birley’s house, Saunderites.

Strangely, it did not occur to any of us that there was a parallel between the ritual humiliation of my friend, who had come to hate Charterhouse, and Nazi anti-Semitism. The event happened, after all, in 1943. I did raise the issue of bullying and the issue of anti-Semitism. I did not myself raise the parallel of Nazi anti-Semitism. Neither Holmes, Birley, nor, indeed, the bullies saw it in that way. The bullies themselves were not particularly thuggish boys, as I remember. They seemed to be acting out some very primitive role, like chimpanzees setting on a weakened companion in the rainforest.

I am not sure how closely my bid to move house, which failed, and my bid to move from Classics to History, which succeeded, were linked. I do not regret having stayed in Verites; it was not my spiritual home, and Holmes was not a particularly sympathetic housemaster, but we had a mutual respect, and I was certainly more trouble to him than he was to me. Later, when Birley made me Head of the School, Holmes refused to make me Head of Verites, a disjunction of office which had last happened when William Beveridge, later the author of the Beveridge Report, was Head of the School. That, too, suited me perfectly well. I liked the prestige of being Head of the School, but was happy to forgo the chore of running Verites.

The move to studying history was a joy and a turning point, one of the crucial decisions of my life, all the better for having been achieved after a struggle. Robert Birley, later to become the head of education in the British Zone of Germany and Headmaster of Eton, was an inspired teacher of history for a sixth-form student. Even then, I took a Tory view of the world, more so than I do now, and was always willing to argue the Tory case. Disraeli was right; Gladstone was wrong, even about Ireland. Birley found that amusing; he was himself a man of liberal views, later to distinguish himself in the struggle against apartheid in South African education. Some of his liberalism was bound to rub off on me, as it did on James Prior, who was in the same History Sixth, and as it had on Edward Boyle, an earlier Eton pupil of Birley’s, who, as a rising Conservative Minister, resigned over Suez.

The summer of 1944, when I had my sixteenth birthday, was a happier one. The depression was still lurking, but was seldom too unpleasant when the sun was shining and there was good cricket to be watched on the Green. My closest friend at Charterhouse, one of the closest friends I have ever had, was Clive Wigram. Clive was the son of a distinguished Jewish doctor, who had cared for Asquith in his last illness. Because he was Jewish, Clive had been sent to the United States early in the war, but his father fell ill and he came back in 1942, earlier than most of the refugee children. He was more mature than the rest of us, and was a year older than I was; he found it difficult to take schoolboy life seriously, and even Robert Birley misread his character as a result. Birley mistook Clive’s maturity for cynicism.

Clive and I would go for gentle walks in the Charterhouse grounds. On one such walk we were discussing the fact that we had not been invited to join the Literary and Political Society, an ancient Charterhouse society. The reason for our exclusion was that the Lit and Pol was run by Harry Iredale, a senior French master with snowy white hair, who disliked us; he had never been made a housemaster because of his progressive views, which were largely derived from George Bernard Shaw. He saw Clive and myself as sinister and reactionary; we saw him as pretentious and superficial. The poor man had suffered a tragedy, some time in the later 1920s, when he had taken a boy out punting on the River Way. The boy had fallen overboard and been drowned.

As we walked beside Under Green, the idea came to us of setting up our own literary society. I am not sure who had the idea first; it came into our heads together. We thought it should cover much the same subjects as the Lit and Pol, but from a more conservative point of view. We decided that it should be set up so as to capture the high ground of Carthusian prestige. We would match Iredale by two patrons from Brooke Hall; one was to be Russell, always a willing co-conspirator in school politics, the other Mr Thomson, the senior science master. He introduced me to Sung Dynasty Chinese pottery, of which he had a fine collection.

Clive and I discussed an appropriate name, and decided to call it the Thackeray Society. William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist, was one of the most eminent of the Carthusian authors; there is a long-standing Thackeray Prize for an English essay, which I was later to win, narrowly beating Simon Raven into second place. We thought that the school would soon accept the Thackeray Society as an established institution.

I remember some of the early meetings the society had, usually in Russell’s drawing room at Hodgsonites. Clive and I had selected the best of the next year’s group of boys, most of them scholars. One of them was Dick Taverne, the brightest of the scholars of the year below mine. We took entrants a year younger than the Lit and Pol, during their summer in the fifth form, so that we could catch the best candidates before the Lit and Pol could get hold of them.

My own contributions were marked by my interest in a classical and even stoical human culture. I persuaded the society to have a play-reading session in which we read Addison’s Cato, on the grounds that Addison had been an Old Carthusian. Cato is a play which justifies suicide in a noble cause, and that may have influenced my choice; I think it was more the stoicism which attracted me.

’Tis not in mortals to command success,

But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.

I still feel an attachment to the play, which has many connections for me. It is a link to the Thackeray Society, to Russell and Clive Wigram. It is a link to my youth, and what it was like to be sixteen. It is a link to George Berkeley, my favourite Christian philosopher, and to Alexander Pope. Both Berkeley and Pope were present on the first night the play was performed in April 1713.

On that first night, the part of Marcia, Cato’s daughter, was played by Anne Oldfield, the leading actress of the period from 1710 to 1730. I think Pope fell in love with her and was rebuffed, since he attacked her more than once in barbed verse. She had an illegitimate son, Charles Churchill, who married Maria Walpole, Robert Walpole’s daughter by Mary Skerritt, also born out of wedlock. My son-in-law, David Craigie, is a descendant of that romantic match between an illegitimate Churchill and an illegitimate Walpole. For me, Addison’s Cato is ringed about with the happy coincidences of life. Four of our grandchildren are descendants of Anne Oldfield.

In the early autumn of 1944, I discussed with Robert Birley the prospect of going to university. I knew that I wanted to go to Oxford. I was drawn by its romantic and political character and slightly repelled by the intellectual puritanism of Cambridge. I had no strong family connection with any particular Oxford college; my father had gone to University College, but his uncles had gone to various other colleges, and my ancestor John Rees had gone to Jesus. Birley recommended that I should try for a scholarship at Balliol, his own old college; he had himself won the Brackenbury Scholarship, which had been held by various other well-known figures, such as Cyril Connolly and Hilaire Belloc. In terms of prestige, the Brackenbury was then the best known history scholarship at Oxford.

I was only just over sixteen and had been a history specialist for no more than a term and a half. Birley warned me that I was too young and did not really know enough history to get a scholarship, but suggested I should enter for Balliol, to see what the examination was like. I was delighted with the challenge.

The examination was taken over a couple of days, and the candidates stayed in college. I remember how cold it was, with an early December snow covering the paving stones outside the Sheldonian. I took with me a copy of Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie, a first edition which I had bought from George McLeish of Little Russell Street. I imagine that I found an opportunity to work in some quotation from Hooker, intended to show the breadth of my reading. The set essay was a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, in which Cardinal Wolsey says to Cromwell: ‘Fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels’. At the age of sixteen, I was not at all willing to fling away ambition, which was my ruling passion at the time. I wrote an essay defending ambition; how I got over the problem of the fall of Lucifer I do not now remember.

There was an oral interview, in which my confident assertions were gently probed. Two young Balliol dons, still serving in the army, took part in it: Richard Southern, a serious-minded medieval historian, who later became the President of St John’s, and Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian of the seventeenth century, who later became Master of Balliol. Southern was too ascetic, too serious, too medieval for me, and I was too frivolous, too partisan, too eighteenth-century for him. I was never to find it easy to learn from him, which was my fault; he never found much pleasure in trying to teach me, which was also my fault, since he was both a good historian and a good man.

Christopher Hill was much more my type of historian. As a good Marxist he looked for broad explanations of historic events. He saw, and taught, history as a series of challenges and responses, which could be explained by identifying underlying social and economic forces. He had an ebullient Celtic temperament. Although we were on different sides of the ideological fence, and disapproved of each other quite strongly, we were also quite fond of each other in an adversarial way. I have always been grateful for his Marxist teaching; Marxism is only one of the ways of looking at history, and is only partly true, but it is a form of analysis all historians need to have experienced at some point.

The history dons sat round the fire in the Dean’s room, and made me feel welcome; I knew I had done quite well. I was back in Somerset on my Christmas holiday with my parents when the telegram arrived, telling me that I had won the Brackenbury. I had won it, as I now think, because I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist. I had trenchant opinions; I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject; I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound. I showed promise. Indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise.

When I received the telegram I was filled with delight; I felt like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Was it not passing brave to have won the Brackenbury Scholarship at the age of sixteen? I have never felt such an uprush of pleasure at any subsequent success, at becoming President of the Oxford Union or Editor of The Times, agreeable though success always is. It is the moment of success which gives the greatest satisfaction; the life of a Prime Minister must be anxious and exhausting, but the hour of appointment, or of winning a General Election, must feel very good. The hour I got that telegram from Balliol was good in that way. Of course, if one is going to have a success, sixteen is an enjoyable time to have it.

I paid for it, in a way I have not had to pay for any subsequent success. I went back to Charterhouse in the January, having achieved a Balliol scholarship and having at least a couple of terms of relaxation ahead of me. The old depression came back, more severely than it was ever to come again. I sat in my study at Verites, unable to concentrate, unable to take pleasure in anything, wholly lacking in energy, let alone zest. I had not expected to react so badly to something which had given me so much delight. The black mood passed as spring came, but for a couple of months I felt lower than I had felt high on receiving the telegram.

That year I edited The Carthusian, which was a senior position in the school. I spent a good deal of my leisure time with Clive Wigram, on whose judgement I greatly relied. I remember a walk with him when we discussed the relative evils of the Hitler and Stalin regimes. I said that Stalin’s was the more totalitarian of the two, and that a private individual had a better chance of preserving some normality in Germany rather than Russia. Clive agreed, but pointed out that such an option would not be open to him, because he was a Jew, and Hitler would kill him. At that time, early in 1945, we still had no real knowledge of the Holocaust, but Jews knew that Hitler was a Jew killer. It was only when British troops liberated Belsen in May of 1945, and the first photographs of the starving or the dead appeared, that we began in Britain to realize that the evil that had happened was even worse than the war itself.

In the summer, the war in Europe came to an end. Rather to my surprise, Birley asked me to stay on for an extra term and be Head of School. I had not been considered a likely candidate for the job, and, in any case, everyone assumed I was leaving. I was conspicuously unathletic. I was a thorn in the side of my house-master, who was opposed to the whole idea. I was seen in the school as a weedy intellectual, and there were doubts as to whether I could maintain discipline. Few headmasters other than Birley would have considered it. I think that part of his motivation was the desire to show that an intellectual could be Head of School.

I do not think that I made a particularly good one. I compensated for my apparent lack of authority by being too decisive in some cases. The benefit of my being Head of School was not to Charterhouse but to me. I would previously have thought of myself as the sort of person who edits the school magazine but does not become the Head of School. My self-image came to include the idea of exercising authority. I have never subsequently found it worrying to handle the political relationships in such positions of authority as I have held. As Editor of The Times or as Chairman of the Arts Council, I have found the simple leadership skills which I first learned at Charterhouse were useful, and if I made some of the mistakes of the learning process while I was still at school, that is as it should be.

Chapter Six

Everyone Wants to Be Attorney General

I went up to Balliol in January 1946, just after the war. Balliol, a left-wing college, was then full of Labour triumphalism, following the General Election in the summer of 1945. The mood lasted about a year to the summer of 1946. It was quite unlike the political mood at any other time in my life. The Labour majority was a large one, people believed that this was a revolutionary event; they believed that the old ways of doing things had been thrown out. It was widely felt that the conservatism of the pre-war era had been not only morally repugnant, but also intellectually contemptible; it was a more complete ideological rejection than that of 1997. It was further held that figures like William Beveridge and J. Maynard Keynes had shown how it was possible to run society in a much more scientific and effective way. Conservatism was dead, and disreputable; the future lay with Attlee socialism, Keynesianism and the Beveridge Report. I did not agree.

Ideologically I was swimming against the tide in post-war Balliol. I took the view, best set out in Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom, that universal state controls, including substantial state ownership and very high taxation, involved a serious loss of liberty. I held the connected belief that liberty was the key to economic and social development and that, by restricting liberty, Britain was putting shackles on its future performance. Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford contemporary and acquaintance, was taking the same view at the same time and in the same environment, but in 1946 we were a small minority, either among students or in Britain as a whole.

Balliol itself possessed a set of values which was distinct from the other Oxford colleges. It was a strange mixture. There is an extremely attractive feeling that Balliol is a special place, that there is a friendship throughout Balliol which crosses the boundaries of opinion. On the other hand, there was a self-congratulatory side to some Balliol men, which must have seemed rather ridiculous to the outside world. Balliol was, indeed, attracting and producing the best undergraduates. It was regarded as the academic college and merited this reputation. The Norrington Table had not yet been brought into existence, but Balliol was getting, fairly effortlessly, a high quota of Firsts. The many brilliant undergraduates included George Steiner, the literary critic, Bernard Williams, the philosopher and future Provost of King’s, and, among distinguished lawyers, George Carman, Lord Hutton and Lord Mayhew.

Among my first actions after I arrived at Oxford was to join the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). The Union was the key institution in my life at Oxford. When I arrived it was dominated by people who had come back from the war. Being only seventeen, I was a schoolboy among people who were ex-officers and had been in battle. It was quite difficult to get myself into, and succeed, in a society which was dominated by people with much greater experience. I countered this by being very active indeed, not only managing to get myself elected, after only my first term, to the Committee of the Conservative Association, but also, at the end of my second term, to the Library Committee at the Union. I was an eager beaver, running round, working on university politics and getting to know people.

Ever since I had been at Charterhouse, where I founded a Conservative Society, I had sought out senior politicians as part of a learning process; they were almost a continuation of my school teachers, and were often generous with their time. I wrote to Leslie Hore-Belisha after the Conservative defeat in 1945, when he had lost his seat. Before the war, he had been, briefly, the great modernizer of British politics. In the National Governments of the later 1930s he modernized the transport system, introducing driving tests, the Highway Code and pedestrian crossings, marked by lights which were known for many years as Belisha beacons. Next, he was appointed to, and modernized, the War Office. He retired some twenty of the senior officers of the army, appointed Lord Gort as a new broom, and prepared the British Army for war in 1939. Without Belisha’s reforms the army could scarcely have formed the British Expeditionary Force in 1939, or, indeed, had the resilience to escape from Dunkirk.

These reforms were a material achievement, for which he was not much thanked. The old guard almost always wins in the end. Anti-Jewish prejudice was used to destroy Hore-Belisha. Early in 1940, he went as Minister for War to review the defences in France. He observed, and reported to the Cabinet, that there was a gap at the end of the Maginot Line. The French complained. Neville Chamberlain, with relief, took the opportunity to dismiss Belisha. Those who called him ‘Horeb-Elisha’ and ‘the Jew Boy’ had won.

I think Leslie Hore-Belisha saw himself as a second Disraeli. He was a brilliant speaker, a very modern publicist and a Minister capable of radical reorganization of his department. I cannot remember just how I first met him, but when I was at Oxford I attached myself with enthusiasm to his unfortunately waning star. I canvassed for him in Coventry South, a seat he failed to win back for the Conservatives in 1950. I exchanged lunches with him, going to his Lutyens house behind Buckingham Palace; we corresponded when I was in the RAF. He, too, had been President of the Oxford Union when he was at Oxford. By the 1950s he had very few disciples, and I think he was pleased to have a supporter. I learned a good deal from him.

I must have started the correspondence about the same time as I won the Brackenbury Scholarship, and presumably made some expression of my own political ambitions. At any rate, I remember one striking sentence in his reply which reflected both his own adolescent ambitions and what he saw as mine. ‘At the age of sixteen,’ he wrote, ‘everyone wants to be Attorney General.’ I remember a few other of his remarks. He told me that the perfect length for a speech in the House of Commons was no more than eight minutes; after that one would lose the attention of the House. His old seat had been Devonport, which in 1945 was won by Labour. He decided to move to the marginal seat of Coventry South, and commented of Devonport, ‘if they don’t want me, they shan’t have me’.

My political ambitions were already well formed. I believed I would become a political lawyer. I planned to read for the bar (I actually joined Gray’s Inn in 1948 or 1949), and to stand for Parliament. My imagination was fixed on a career as a Member of Parliament. I have always enjoyed politics, political company, debate, argument, even committee meetings. To me it is a stimulating and natural environment.

Shirley Williams once described me, in a flattering phrase, as ‘a young sage’ at Oxford, someone whom people would seek out for advice on matters relating to their own careers. Robin Day was the guru of younger Oxford politicians, advising them when to stand and for what office, but I studied the game of Oxford careerism with almost as much fascination as he did. I used to lunch with Robin Day at the Committee table in the Oxford Union. Later in life we lunched together at the Garrick Club. When Robin died I made a calculation that I had lunched with him more often than with anyone else outside my family. We always talked politics.

I got off to an early start in seeking political office at Oxford, as did our son Jacob in the late 1980s. He became President of OUCA and Librarian, though not President, at the Oxford Union. At the end of my first term I was elected to the Committee of OUCA. One of the senior members of the Committee was Margaret Thatcher and in the summer term she stood for the office of President. There were eleven members of the Committee with the right to elect the President. I voted for Margaret Roberts, as she then was, and she was elected by – as I remember it – seven votes to four.

She invited me to be the Meetings Secretary for the following term and I accepted with some glee. It would have meant greeting the outside speakers, who ranged between retired Cabinet Ministers and the rising young stars of the party, such as Reggie Maudling. I also looked forward to working for Margaret, who seemed in the immediate future to be the leading figure in Oxford Conservative politics and whom I liked.

This agreeable prospect was taken away from me when Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who was made a Labour peer in 1947, decided to give my place in the college to a demo-bilized ex-serviceman. This meant that I only had two terms at Balliol in 1946, and I had to do my own National Service in the middle of my time at Oxford, which I resented. It was indeed contrary to the commitment the college had made when I came up. I was not able to take up my post as Meetings Secretary and had to go round to Somerville College to apologize to Margaret for my inability to accept her offer. In retrospect, I naturally regret not having worked more closely with her. When I returned to Oxford, two years later, she was in the hierarchy of ex-Presidents. By the time I became President of OUCA myself she had gone down from the university. Nevertheless, we retained a friendly acquaintance, which always gave me access after she became Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. I was not a member of the inner team of friends and advisers, but I think I was regarded, if rather remotely, as ‘one of us’. We never imagined at that time that Margaret was to become the first woman Prime Minister, though we knew how disciplined she was and how determined to achieve her objectives.

In 1946–8, I served two years in the RAF. The first winter was that of the 1947 fuel crisis. For most of those who lived through it, 1947 was one of the most unpleasant years of their lives. It started with an exceptionally cold winter in which supplies of coal ran out. These were fuelless days, electric fires burned only a dull red, and crowds suddenly discovered the fascination of tropical plants at Kew Gardens and tropical birds at various zoos around the country.

The fuel crisis broke the reputation of the Attlee Government for administrative competence. For years afterwards the Conservative Party speaker’s handbook carried a much-loved quotation from Emmanuel Shinwell: ‘There will be no fuel crisis, I am the Minister for Fuel and Power and I ought to know.’

I spent that winter as a National Service clerk in a Nissen hut at Flying Training Command Headquarters in Reading, Berkshire. We burned anything we could lay our hands on, except the snooker table, in an effort to keep the hut warm; we failed.

In the spring of 1948, I was sent on a course to Wellesbourne Mountford in Warwickshire to be turned into an acting sergeant in the RAF Education Corps. That I enjoyed.

Wellesbourne Mountford is situated close to Stratford-upon-Avon where I went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; and I managed to stay with my cousins who then lived in the beautiful village of Clifford Chambers. Their house was said to have a rather sad association with Shakespeare. In 1616 he went there for a drinking party, returned home flushed with mulled wine, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died. I do not know whether the story is true.

We had a splendidly crazy wing commander who was in charge of the course. He was concerned that we should have brightly polished boots, something I was still no good at. He told us a long and rambling story about a Canadian Mountie who was sent into the wilderness to capture an outlaw. It took him three years to find his man and three years to bring him back. Nevertheless, when he returned with his prisoner, he walked into his station with his Mountie uniform impeccably pressed and his boots shining like the sun.

As the education sergeant when I returned to the Reading headquarters I was not exactly fully employed. Consequently, I arranged to have tutorials on seventeenth-century history at Reading University, for which my tutor was paid three guineas a time.

I tried, and failed, to teach an illiterate WAAF recruit to read. I taught young officers general knowledge for their officer’s promotion exam. I remember telling them, with all the authority of a nineteen-year-old, that they would acquire an excellent grasp of current affairs if they read The Times every morning over breakfast.

I drafted a general knowledge quiz to find out what, if anything, they did know. That project had to be dropped when I put the quiz in front of my education officer, who was a squadron leader. One of my multiple-part questions required the candidate to sort biblical characters into the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, the squadron leader had not read his Bible. He thought Moses was a figure in the New Testament, and scolded me for setting a quiz which he regarded as unreasonably difficult.

In the sergeants’ mess we drank our beer and the occasional whisky and soda. I was the only teenager in a group of middle-aged men. They saw my life as quite divorced from their concerns, but we wished each other well.

The following year, I left the RAF and returned to Oxford University. As a sergeant I fear that I had failed to impress my Commanding Officer. He wrote a reference in my leaving book: ‘Sergeant Rees-Mogg is capable of performing routine tasks under close supervision.’ I only wish that were true.

It was the autumn of 1948 when I returned to Oxford. I was now twenty. I had had the advantage of two years in the RAF, which had transformed me from a callow recruit to a sergeant in Education. I had kept in touch with Oxford life through my friendship with Clive Wigram, who was himself elected as President of the Union. In the spring of 1948, I came up to Oxford for the last time wearing my RAF uniform with its largely unpolished boots. Clive and I went to watch some college races on the river. We met two delightful girls, both of whom were acquaintances of Clive. The dark-haired one was Val Mitchison, daughter of Naomi Mitchison, the novelist, later to become Val Arnold-Foster; the blonde was Shirley Williams, the daughter of another novelist, Vera Brittain. I remember thinking what a delightful place Oxford was, if one could stroll the towpath and meet such delightful young women. I did not realize that Val and Shirley had already become stars of Oxford society.