My father greeted me at the door simply beaming and nearly bursting with pride. “Where’s Mum?” I asked. He said, “She’s up in our bedroom on her knees praying that God will show you that you ought not to go unless it really is His will.” I had a problem with the logic and the theology of that kind of response, but I knew she loved me and, in spite of her anxious disposition, would at some point admit she too was pleased with this unprecedented event in our family’s history. In the end, it was a very happy evening in our humble Lawlor Avenue home.
My parents drove me to Montreal some months later to catch the Cunard liner that would take me to Liverpool and a brief visit in Northern Ireland with our many relatives there before I journeyed on to Oxford. Standing in the crowd at the ship’s rail as the engines began to thrum and the small gap of water between oneself and loved ones on the dock began to widen ever more rapidly brought a rush of conflicting emotions. There was all the excitement of a great unknown adventure begun, mixed with premature homesickness as Canada and home would now be gone from my life for two years, perhaps three.
The last time I had made this same voyage down the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic was as a boy of nine. I was now twenty-two, this was the first of five crossings by ship I would make as an adult, not to mention many more later by aircraft as a journalist for the Toronto Star and for pleasure trips. An economy-class berth on a Cunarder was to my mind a luxury beyond compare. It was September and as we sailed downriver the maples along the north shore of the St. Lawrence were already tinged with scarlet. Bright steeples gleamed above every village clustering at the water’s edge. There was all the time in the world to read, to walk briskly around the decks, to chat with other travellers and to delight in a succession of simply glorious dining experiences. When we reached the open Atlantic, I found that gazing steadily off at the distant horizon for a fixed period of from twenty minutes to half an hour morning and evening was an effective form of meditation—unless of course one was susceptible to seasickness, as some passengers quickly found they were. However, no mode of travel this observer has ever since employed comes even close to the sheer joy of an ocean crossing in a modern liner. Few things are better for one’s spiritual or physical health.
Arriving in Oxford on a late September afternoon was quite an anticlimax. Trains entering the city from the north catch a quick glimpse of spires and towers across a river flanked by a wide expanse of meadow (Port Meadow) before being swallowed up by numerous other engines, dark sheds, stark mechanical devices of various kinds, vistas of cluttered back gardens, and then the looming shadows of what used to be known as the gasworks. Having been primed by all the lofty praise dedicated in poetry and prose to chanting the aesthetic charms, the “towers in the mist,” of this ancient city, I felt let down. But by the time the taxicab was out of the station area and whizzing down the High Street, things were looking a great deal better. Even though it is much more invaded by and surrounded with all that makes up a very busy English city than Cambridge is (Oxford has been described as a city that has a university while Cambridge is a university that also happens to be a city), it more than measures up in the end to all the advance notices. It is just more tucked away, more subtly woven into its background, more reluctant to give up all its treasures all at once than “the other place,” as Cambridge was known to all Oxonians.
I must have seemed like a very keen “colonial” (as some of the English students liked to dub those of us from overseas) because when the taxi dropped me together with my luggage at the gate to Oriel College, I was promptly told by an elderly gentleman at the porter’s lodge that I was more than a week early. “Room’s not ready yet, sir,” he said. “You’re a bit ahead of yourself, you are.” He consented to my leaving most of my stuff at the college in spite of this and recommended a small hotel near Magdalen Bridge, farther down the High Street (popularly referred to as “the High”). I took a very modest room at the Eastgate Hotel, where, as I would learn later, the already renowned author and lecturer C.S. Lewis was regularly to be seen enjoying a pint or two with a friend at the cozy bar below. He was an English tutor at Magdalen (pronounced Maw-da-lin) at that time.
Later that night, while having supper at a second-floor restaurant overlooking the High, it was brought forcibly home to me just how much the British were still feeling the effects of World War II. There was no meat to speak of on the menu and not a great deal of choice of other dishes either. I was soon to discover, once properly moved into residence, that several staple foods were still being rationed, eggs, butter, margarine, tea and sugar among them. My scout, as the college servant who looked after the “young gentlemen” on each staircase was called, presented me with a tiny piece of butter, a small block of margarine and a small bag of sugar every Monday morning once I took up residence. You were supposed to use these for tea in your room and bring them along to the refectory at mealtimes.
My scout’s name was Cuddiford (I never learned his first name as he seemed more than content to be called by his surname) and he had served as batman to a senior officer in the British army during World War II. He brought each of us hot water for shaving when he came in and flung open the curtains every morning, and then cleaned up the dishes after teatime each afternoon. In hall, as the refectory was known, Cuddiford and the other scouts served the meals—wearing formal wear for dinner. The dons or tutors (officially known as Fellows of Oriel College) took their meals with the provost (principal or president of the college) on a raised dais or platform at the head of the hall. They had much better fare than was served to the students, together with wines from a well-stocked cellar.
In his will, Cecil Rhodes—who was once upset while dining at Oriel to find there were holes in his table napkin—had left a princely sum to uphold the dignity and honour of the college’s head table. Dinner each evening began with the provost or one of the dons standing up and bowing to a student whose scholarship or bursary entailed his saying the lengthy Latin Oriel grace or blessing of the food. He would commence with an answering bow and then launch into it. I found that after a couple of weeks I had unconsciously memorized this sonorous-sounding invocation, and even today it resonates in its entirety the moment I recall the scene to mind. The grace was reportedly first recorded by St. John Chrysostom, an early patriarch of Constantinople who played a not insignificant role in this writer’s life, as we shall see. It can now be found in full, with a translation, under the Wikipedia entry for Oriel College on the Internet.
While it has changed and grown over the centuries, Oriel College is one of the oldest in the university, having been founded by Edward II in 1326. It will thus celebrate its seven hundredth anniversary in 2026, a short time from now. Because it was a royal foundation, Her Majesty The Queen is the official college Visitor and must pay a formal visit whenever her duties bring her to Oxford. There is a large portrait of the founder at the north end of the hall, over the head table, and one of Queen Elizabeth II at the south end. The hall itself is a stunning, light-filled, oak-panelled edifice with a soaring hammerbeam roof. When the tables are laid with the historic college silver, some of it dating back to the medieval period, and the place is packed with students—today both male and female, since women were finally admitted in 1985—it simply glows with warmth and vibrant energy. It wasn’t long before I felt very much at home.
At the same time, I must admit up front that being a student at Oxford and a member of Oriel was a truly humbling experience. People much wiser and cleverer than I have expressed the same feelings about this. You see yourself from a different perspective when you walk amidst the ghosts of all the great names from the past. Just to take Oriel alone: The key founders of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England—John Henry Cardinal Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble—were at one time Fellows of Oriel. Sir Walter Raleigh was a student (c.1585), as was Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1710–1713), the patron and friend of George Washington. Winston Churchill’s grandfather John Spencer-Churchill, seventh Duke of Marlborough, attended Oriel, as did Cecil Rhodes (1876–78), the poet Matthew Arnold (1845), two Nobel Prize laureates and numerous bishops, including two Archbishops of Canterbury. In short, the full list of notables who walked those cloistered halls is beyond impressive. But, thankfully, as well as being sometimes intimidating, the illustrious history of Oriel, and of Oxford itself, was a source of inspiration.