The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

Author:John Carey [John Carey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571310944
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Davidge, and many others in Oxford, would have concurred.

But there were those in Keble who didn’t, and who supported what I was doing. Austin Farrer was one. Another was Malcolm Parkes – later internationally known as an expert on early manuscripts, but then just a young lecturer looking for a job whom I signed on to teach Anglo-Saxon and who helped me reform English at Keble. Actually what he helped me with at our first meeting was our flat’s electrical system. He turned up to see me on the off chance one morning when I was trying to sort out the bewildering main fusebox and the wires perilously dangling from it. Rapidly taking charge, he displayed electrical skills far in advance of anything I had expected in an Anglo-Saxonist. It seemed to me that on both counts he was too good to lose, and that was the start of Malcolm’s distinguished Keble career which lasted till his retirement some forty years later.

The other fellows I thought of as being on my side were really, of course, simply the ones with a serious interest in their subjects and in Keble’s academic future who were prepared, from that point of view, to indulge my intemperate outbursts. There was Denys Potts the French don, an opera fanatic and authority on Saint-Évremond, and the archaeologist Christopher Hawkes, and Hans von Engel, an urbane, witty physicist who had fought on the German side in the First World War, and the young historian Eric Stone, and the philosopher Basil Mitchell, who had been Farrer’s advocate in the wardenship election, and Spencer Barrett, who was working on what was to be a landmark edition of Euripides’ Hippolytus (published in 1964) and who, as a devout atheist, had refused to become a fellow of Keble – though he was treated as one – until 1952 when the college statutes ceased to require fellows to declare themselves members of the Church of England.

Our favourite fellow was Douglas Price, a rotund, jolly, pipe-smoking historian who, before Gill bought the Mini, used to take us out for night-time drives to prehistoric sites around Oxford. We stood in pitch dark among the Rollright Stones and, encouraged by Douglas, imagined that we could hear them walking. We looked out from Wayland’s Smithy at the lights of Swindon twinkling far below, while Douglas told us how, if you left your horse to be shod there, and put a silver sixpence on the entrance stone, the job would be done in the morning and the sixpence gone. He never claimed to have seen the phantom smith himself, but he did see ghosts, or one ghost anyway, in the kitchen at Chastleton House, a Jacobean manor near Oxford, and seemed keen to see more. One night he drove us out to the escarpment of Edgehill where, on 23 October 1642, the first battle of the English Civil War was fought. Though the conflict was inconclusive, the idea of Englishmen fighting and killing Englishmen left a terrible mark.

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