inviting me to a reception for the candidates from all over the province. It was held one evening near the end of November at the large Rosedale home of Roland Michener, himself a former Rhodes Scholar, who was eventually chosen by the Queen to be the Governor General of Canada. Although the Micheners were warm and hospitable, I felt self-conscious because all the guests knew that only two of us would be chosen to be Ontario’s scholars when we went for our formal interview on the coming Saturday. Quite naturally, we were all busy assessing our competitors while being ultrapolite. Because I didn’t drink at that point in my life, I was one of the very few people who didn’t have a glass of sherry or white wine to hold on to. I was seized with a kind of stage fright and felt certain I would be perceived as altogether too shy and awkward. It was a great relief when the evening ended and we said our goodbyes.
On the Saturday, however, as the hour for my interview drew closer, I felt increasingly calm and ready for anything. It seemed to me that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going in and doing my best. Perhaps my lack of optimism somehow lent me a certain poise, I don’t know. The interview was held in a lovely, familiar reading room on the second floor of Hart House. When I went in, I was shown to a chair facing a panel of five or six men, all of them former Rhodes Scholars, all of them distinguished in some branch of Canadian life. There were a couple of professors, a noted medical authority and a judge. They took turns asking probing yet friendly questions about my plans should I be selected and go on to Oxford, about my views on the future of religion, and in some detail about what I thought of the federal government’s policies regarding our Native peoples. It was in fact a truly relaxed and stimulating experience. As the chairman thanked me and showed me out, he whispered, “Well done.”
I went for a long walk around Queen’s Park to try to settle down and then went back to my room at Wycliffe to work on a piece of Greek prose composition that was due on the coming Monday morning. It was by then around five-thirty. Because it was a Saturday, the college was nearly empty; almost all of the boarders had gone home or were out for the evening. The theological students had left for the parishes where they assisted on weekends. It had grown dark outside, and the place was almost unnaturally silent.
At about six-thirty, the third-floor buzzer rang out with my particular signal code. I went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the student who was tending the front hall desk, “Who is it?” He yelled back, “It’s somebody for you, Harpur.” I tore down the three flights to the phone booth below. A deep male voice asked, “Is that Tom Harpur?” I said it was and he announced, “Congratulations, Tom. You’ve been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and will be going to the college of your choice at Oxford next fall.” I managed somehow to thank him and hung up. For a moment I braced myself against the back of the booth and said a brief but profoundly heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving to God who had made this miracle possible. I was momentarily overwhelmed. Then I telephoned my parents to share the news and to tell them I was coming home by streetcar as soon as possible.
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
