Read Online Cherry by Sara Wheeler - Free Book Online

belonged. He thrived in the enforced companionship of a small team, and since he had few outlets for his enthusiasms, rowing took on a great importance in his life. By the autumn of 1905 he was in the 1st IV. As a man in a college boat, he was one of the lucky ones who posed for crew photographs in the Palladian grandeur of Peckwater, standing nervously, jacket buttoned and hands in pockets, by the stone doorway emblazoned with rowing victories. The crews trained in the early morning, running from Meadow gate down the wide avenue to the shrouded river, where they carried their boat from the boathouse in the clammy mist. Torpids dominated the spring term, and summers revolved around the pistol shots of the Eights’ Week races and parental visits to the boathouses for salmon mayonnaise, trembling jellies and a glass of hock.
    The tyranny of games, so vice-like at Winchester, was broken at Oxford, and in an atmosphere of greater choice, Apsley, always anxious, found it easier to participate. Social rituals notwithstanding, Oxford was a release from the robotically prescribed routine of school. Stephen McKenna, a future journalist and Liberal politician and a near contemporary of Apsley’s at the House, commented that ‘many who had been despised and rejected at school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights’. Apsley was never a social light, but at university he could at least glow.
    One who shone very brightly was George Mair, a modern history scholar who had a room near Old Library 6. Mair was an influential figure in college. He went on to become a modestly successful literary journalist, and when
The Worst Journey in the World
made Apsley famous fourteen years after he left Oxford, Mair remembered him as ‘a dark, lean, rather silent man who was short-sighted and always wore spectacles. He used to row in the college boat, and used sometimes to afflict his friends by his anxiety as to whether he was pulling as well as he should.’ Mair went on to deliver a convincing verdict on his friend’s personality: ‘Otherwise he was remarkable only for a certain taste in natural history, an extreme shyness, and a nervousness which was not what we commonly call nervousness, but rather a sensitive imagination which made him see further round things than other people, and, like a tightly stretched wire, made him react more quickly than other and duller men.’ In later years Apsley was not just liable to react more quickly, but also to respond more profoundly than other men, sometimes with appalling consequences. A tightly stretched wire indeed.
    Women were not admitted as full members of the university, and they scarcely featured in the lives of most male undergraduates. Twenty years later the art historian and Old Wykehamist Kenneth Clark wrote that ‘it was practically impossible to meet a girl at Oxford’, and he turned out to be quite good at meeting girls. A shy boy from Hertfordshire had no chance, even one with five sisters. One of Apsley’s peers called it ‘a life of familiarity without intimacy’. Of course, there were sentimental attachments in college; but if Apsley enjoyed any, their story has slipped away. Little is known of his emotional life during this period. Leonard Woolf, born in 1880, offers a clue to general attitudes towards sex at that time. ‘How dense the barbaric darkness was,’ wrote Woolf, in which the Victorian middle-class boy and youth was left to drift sexually is shown by the fact that no relation or teacher, indeed no adult, ever mentioned the subject of sex to me. No information or advice on this devastating fever in one’s blood and brain was ever given to me. Love and lust, like the functions of the bowels and bladder, were subjects which could not be discussed or even mentioned.
    Stuart Mais (pronounced ‘Mays’) was among Apsley’s friends at Christ Church. In later years, after being sacked as Professor of English from the new Cadet College at Cranwell, S. P. B. Mais