The next time I saw him, he was over his cold and ushered me through his door with a flourish of his lighted cigarette. Standing a scant five foot six or so, he peered up at my height with concern. Once he got me seated in the deeper of the easy chairs, he stood on the raised fender of the fireplace, his elbows crooked against the mantel. Staring down at me now, he seemed to feel more at ease. “You’re rather huge, aren’t you?” he observed. “The boat club will be glad to see you coming—the rugger club too.” In what I was soon to recognize was his habitual way, he sucked vehemently on his cigarette with his mouth open on either side of it. I was later told by other smokers that by hyper-aspirating thus one can maintain a kind of mild high because of an excess of oxygen being inhaled along with the smoke.
There was an awkward period of silence after he expressed his thoughts about the putative benefits that my size might confer on Oriel College’s athletic hopes. Then he abruptly said: “Start reading.” I pulled the product of my late-night labours (the technical term is my “lucubrations”) from my jacket pocket and, feeling a little self-conscious at being one grown man reading aloud to another who was perfectly capable of reading himself, began along the labyrinthine, even tortured paths of my reconstruction of Greek history. Occasionally he would mumble to himself, causing me to lose my place. Once or twice he challenged a statement and watched me try to defend myself. At the end he sat smoking for a few minutes and saying nothing. Finally he said: “That’s not too bad. Like a glass of sherry?”
I read him an essay every week during terms. It was an enriching encounter. We were ploughing a narrow furrow, but we ploughed it very deeply indeed.
Since Greats was a two-stream discipline composed of both ancient history (Greek and Roman) and philosophy, I had a philosophy tutor in addition to Peter Brunt. His name was Richard Robinson, a tall, slightly stooped, gaunt-looking man with sad eyes and a trace of an American accent though he had spent most of his life in England. He was in his early forties when I first met him and he died not all that long ago at just short of ninety-five years of age. He seemed a very solemn person and never spoke without giving his words considerable forethought. Robinson’s task was to instruct me not just in the philosophy of the ancient masters, Plato and Aristotle—in much greater depth than I had ever gone before and of course in their original Greek—but also in the writings and ideas of philosophers ever since, down to the modern empiricists. Robinson was a long-time atheist (he had written a book on atheist ideals as well as one on Plato’s theory of definition) and we often had lengthy discussions that edged at times into disputes over matters of faith and religion in general. We met once a week in term over three years and I knew him very well by the end. He would sit at the far end of a long oak table in his rather bare study and as I began to read my weekly offering he routinely propped his elbows on the table, let his head sink into his hands on either side and closed his eyes. Just when I felt certain that my essay had put him to sleep, he would snap his eyes open and critique or question something I’d said. Often he’d challenge my grammar. “There you go again. You keep splitting the infinitive,” he would splutter. I would apologize and soldier on.
It was a painful process at times, but he taught me to think more sharply than I ever had before. I learned a tremendous amount from him and learned also to respect the atheist position while in fundamental disagreement with it—as I remain today. I grew to like the man, but he did seem haunted by an unforgiving melancholy. Whenever I think of him I recall one day when my tutorial was scheduled for eleven a.m. Robinson had just been walking down the High before coming to our meeting. He told me that a few minutes ago he had been looking at the students crowded into a couple of coffee shops nearby. He fixed me with his sorrowful gaze and said: “You know, Harpur, happy people depress me so.”
The full richness of studying for three years at Oxford would take a book of its own to attempt to describe. There was the first long summer vacation when four of us bought an ancient London taxi and toured the Continent in it for over a month. There were other vacations where I worked cutting firewood and carrying out many other outdoor chores on a gorgeous Christian-run holiday estate on the edge of Exmoor National Park overlooking the Bristol Channel. There was always a mountain of assigned reading, but it could be done wherever one went. Several times I stayed with my uncle and aunt in Tullyhogue, Ireland, where one could always break the brain work by grabbing a fishing rod and going down to the river. The two terriers used to watch through the window, waiting for the slightest movement towards the cupboard where the guns and fishing rods were kept. They would then almost turn cartwheels in a frenzy to get going.
In spiritual matters, I found myself broadening out steadily. I became good friends with a fellow Orielensis, Andrew Bull, who happened to be Roman Catholic. Andrew rowed next to me in one of the “eights” in many practices and stirring races on the Isis (the upper Thames), and we had many vigorous discussions. (By a curious synchronicity, my annual copy of the Oriel Record arrived in the mail the same day I wrote this last passage. It contained updates on the activities of the widely flung, vast family of alumni, and also the obit for Andrew. He was later in life awarded an OBE by the Queen for his work on behalf of education in Portugal.) When I happened to mention this ongoing friendship and our debates in a letter home, I got a swift and tersely worded note from my father telling me to be very careful about my friends, and warning me of the possible risk of being recruited to Rome!
My parents, it should be noted, had picked out the church I should attend while at Oxford (on the advice of their evangelical friends from the “old country”). It was St. Ebbe’s, a keenly evangelical, Low Church congregation headed by Rev. Maurice Wood, later named as a bishop by the Queen. The church fairly bulged with students, but after my first year I began foraging elsewhere because there was a certain everything-down-patness, an overly either-or mentality of a fundamentalist flavour that I was beginning to find intellectually and spiritually cramping and confining. Even so, looking back over the more than one hundred airmail letters I wrote home during those years—my father kept them all and pasted them into a very thick scrapbook, which I still have—I realize now with some shock how extremely pious I was in the earliest days at Oriel. It embarrasses me today to read what I wrote then. Like the folk at St. Ebbe’s, I spoke about “real Christians,” that is, those who had been “properly (sic) saved” and who were quite different from the larger crowd of merely “nominal Christians.” Everything had to be seen as “the Lord’s will.” If evangelicals were the only real Christians and non-Christian religions were wholly out of the loop of salvation, obviously only a very small part of humanity stood a ghost of a chance of reaching “heaven.” Even then, however, this sad and mistaken division of the human race into the saved and the unsaved was holding less and less appeal. The seeds were already being sown as I gradually saw the need for nothing less than a spirituality that could embrace not only all of humanity but also the natural world, and the whole of the cosmos as well. Nothing less would be worthy of a God in whom one could believe. It was a long time coming, but the shaking of the foundations of former beliefs was already well under way.
There is a tradition of every Canadian who goes up to Oxford spending part of his time playing ice hockey for the university. I was not particularly good at hockey, although I had played for Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto during my undergraduate days. As a boy I had played in goal once but quit when they started calling me “the human sieve.” I loved to skate, however, and my size, which interfered with my ever being really talented at the sport, was considered a plus for a defenceman when truly capable hockey players were few and far between. I might not be able to score goals, but I could bounce the opposition a little and slow them down, or so the coaches hoped.
At Oxford, however, there were problems surrounding this particular sport, mainly the lack of a proper ice rink. We had to travel by chartered bus to London’s Harringay, Wembley or Streatham arenas both for practices and for the games