Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [49]
Twice a year I protested to my father that I'd be better off in Greenwich; but he wouldn't have it so. Roughly speaking, our wrangling went around and around, like moles in their devious underground wanderings; but, after the fashion of mole-holes, they seemed to arrive nowhere.
The sum of all my contentions was that an Oxford education, so called because of the strange professors, dons, fellows and tutors to whom we were exposed, was a waste of time, if not downright dangerous.
My father, however, insisted that no matter how much of a drunken sot a don or a tutor might be, education somehow worthy was bound to be achieved by my mere presence within the stone walls of my college, which was Christ Church, by my daily exposure to the portraits in Christ Church Hall, and to the conversations of those drunken dons, those barnacle-like fellows, all waiting for someone to die and provide them with a Livingand I
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often wondered what idiot first applied the word "Living" to a bare existence in a miserable parsonage at the end of a muddy lane.
"Look here, Miles," my father would say, "you defeat your own arguments against Oxford without realizing what you're doing. You want to study the writing of plays, and you complain that you're not allowed to do it, so Oxford is a bore and a waste of time. But you do do it! You belong to that Buskin Club of yours! You know Colley Cibber made a better play out of Richard III than Shakespeare did! 'Off with his head!' 'Richard is himself again.' That's Cibber: not Shakespeare!
"You say your tutors are morose, profligate, insipid assesand you've learned it by yourself! That's a whole lot better than believing some old fool of a professor who tells you that a knowledge of chemistry is an elegant and desirable accomplishment because it was revealed to Adam by Heaven! To Adam, for God's sake! And by Heaven! Pish! Nobody's educated by that sort of teaching! All anybody does in collegeif he's fortunateis to learn how to make a start at educating himself: to change his mind if his mind needs changing."
He was right, of course. If I'd never numbed my feet and fingers and nose in the cubicles of the Bodleian, reading the nice nastiness of Mrs. Aphra Behn and the humorless comedies of a score of imitation Shakespeares, I'd never have struck up a friendship with Neal Butler. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I can't say, because it's possible that something worse than Boon Island might have happened to me.
That's what I hope those who read this book will bear
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in mind: no matter what dreadful thing a man may encounter, he might, but for the grace of God, be overwhelmed by something even more awful. I can't endure people who complain about this or that little thing; but I only reached that state of mind by sad experience.
In the beginning, I had small use for Oxford, and its dreary dullness and monotony. I copied Dr. Atterbury's sermons until I was physically ill; I pored over grammar and rhetoric until my eyelids seemed glued togetherand I looked forward to nothing but returning to Greenwich at the end of Trinity Termto its life and its bustle, its palaces and taverns and parks, its endless traffic on the Thames.
One of my reasons for disliking Oxfordand how I laughed, in later years, at such unreasoning follywas the fact that Trinity Term made it impossible for me to see the great fair held in Greenwich at Whitsuntide. I never reached home until weeks after Whitsuntide, and to me a three-day fair was of more importance than anythingexcept, naturally, my father and my dinghy.
So at the end of Trinity Term, in that memorable summer of 1710, my father had my dinghy waiting for me at the yard of the Naval Hospital, and within an hour after he had welcomed me home, I had pushed her out on the river and was being foully cursed by a hundred rivermen.
A failing wind and the incoming tide carried me to Deptford Steps, where