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 themselves. These rinks could only be used after the regular public skating was over, from ten p.m. onwards. This meant long hours of boring rides to and fro and the rigours of “climbing in” over the college walls in the small hours of the morning afterwards, because of course the bus was very late in returning and the college grounds were locked at midnight.
My roommate, Donald Schultz (who was to become Professor of Engineering at Oxford and later an OBE, and who died in 1988 while hiking in New Zealand), rigged up a system for me. He tied a cord to a boot that he placed on his desk and ran the cord out the window to a height of about two and a half metres above the pavement below. I could just reach it with a jump and, by pulling hard, drag the boot off the table to make it clatter into his metal wastebasket and wake him up. He would then get dressed, go down to the quadrangle, through the arch at the other side into the centre quad, and climb up on top of the four-metre wall looking down into Oriel Street by means of a ladder we had left concealed behind the shrubbery. Once on top, carefully straddling the rotating spikes set there to discourage just such exploits as these, he would heave the ladder up and over to the spot where I was waiting. With all my hockey gear in a duffle bag, I would climb up and both of us would balance precariously as we then reversed the procedure. I still have a small scar on one hand where the spikes took their toll.
After several months of this routine, including a disastrous match with Cambridge for which I won a Half Blue, I realized the futility of this exercise and took up rowing instead.
“Come on, Jesus!”
This bizarre shout was followed by three cracks of pistol shots in quick succession and then a chorus of other loud cheers. I stopped in my tracks. I thought I had inadvertently stumbled into the making of a film—a weird sacred western of some kind. Otherwise, it must be cloud-cuckoo-land. A knot of rowdy undergraduates was surging directly towards me, yelling and firing. But the location was a towpath alongside the River Thames (or the Isis as it is called when it curves around Oxford). The occasion was Eights Week, the annual five-day rowing event to determine which college is “head of the river.”
The cheers were for the eight-man crew and coxswain of the Jesus College boat. The blank shots were to signal that they were overlapping the boat ahead of them and could sweep across for a “bump.” Since you row with your back to the direction in which you’re headed, it’s impossible for an oarsman to get an accurate assessment of the right moment to strain to strike. It’s even hard for the coxswain, steering with eight large, toiling bodies in his line of sight. Hence all the shooting.
Rowing has long been a hugely competitive tradition between Oxford and Cambridge in the annual boat race that takes place every spring around Easter. The Captain of Boats at Oriel, as previously mentioned, lived in rooms on the ground floor of number one staircase. Since mine were on the same staircase, I had to pass his door several times daily. It wasn’t long before he invited me to sign up. I soon discovered there was a great deal more to oarsmanship than simple brute strength and determination. To begin with, every initiate had to toil for many autumn afternoons at what was dubbed a “bank tub.”
Near the boathouse on the Isis, just off the towpath, was a stubby, squarish-looking “boat” permanently bolted on one side to a dock. It was really a mock version of a section of a racing eight, complete with a sliding seat, foot stirrups and an oarlock. The chief difference from the real thing was that the oar one was given had two wide gaps in it that ran close to the full length of the blade. Once the art of squaring the blade to cut the water at a firm right angle was mastered, the stroke could be carried through with a firm sense of pressure but without the full weight of water caught and carried forward by a normal blade.
It took time, under the critical eye of a member of the crew of the college’s first eight, but after a few weeks I was deemed fit to go out on the river in a regular boat. What a mess we made of it! The coach shouted instructions from his bicycle on the towpath, but he was close to losing not just his voice but his temper before the outing was over. It was one thing to pseudo-row in a bank tub, it was quite another to try to coordinate one’s oar with those of other beginners just as shaky as oneself. Nobody had warned us that balance was just as important as timing your stroke. The boat rolled easily, so that the surface of the water could be at quite a different place or plane between the time one stroke was ended and another was begun. If once the boat was actually under way your oar “caught a crab” (was too deep in the water), it almost brought the boat to a total halt as the handle was forcibly wrenched from your hands to end up striking your solar plexus while the blade was pulled uncontrollably downwards. The offending oarsman immediately became the focus of a number of intensely cross glares and much shouting from the riverbank.
Once
