Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [10]
'...You're reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English literature and the next worst is Modern Greats. You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between. Time spent on a good second is time thrown away. You should go to the best lectures Arkwright on Demosthenes for instance—irrespective of whether they are in your school or not... Clothes. Dress as you do in a country house. Never wear a tweed coat and flannel trousers—always a suit. And go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit... Clubs. Join the Carlton now and the Grid at the beginning of your second year. If you want to run for the Union—and it's not a bad thing to do—make your reputation outside first, at the Canning or the Chatham, and begin by speaking on the paper... Keep clear of Boar's Hill...'
The sky over the opposing gables glowed and then darkened; I put more coal on the fire and turned on the light, revealing in their respectability his London-made plus-fours and his Leander tie... 'Don't treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at home... You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm...'
Finally, just as he was going, he said, 'One last point. Change your rooms'—They were large, with deeply recessed windows and painted, eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky as a freshman to get them. 'I've seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,' said my cousin with deep gravity. 'People start dropping in. They leave their, gowns here and come and collect them before hall; you start giving them a sherry. Before you know where you are, you've opened a free bar for all the undesirables of the college.'
I do not know that I ever, consciously, followed any of this advice. I certainly never changed my rooms—there were gillyflowers growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door. I should like to think—indeed I sometimes do think—that I decorated those rooms with Morris stuffs and Arundel prints and that my shelves we're filled with seventeenthcentury folios and French novels of the second empire in Russia-leather and watered silk. But this was not the truth. On my first afternoon I proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers over the fire and set up a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape, which I had bought inexpensively when the Omega workshops were sold up. I displayed also a poster by McKnight Kauffer and Rhyme Sheets from the Poetry Bookshop, and, most painful to recall, a porcelain figure of Polly Peachum which stood between black tapers on the chimney-piece. My books were meagre and commonplace—Roger Fry's Vision and Design, the Medici Press edition of A Shropshire Lad, Eminent Victorians, some volumes of Georgian Poetry, Sinister Street, and South Wind—and my earliest friends fitted well into this background; they were Collins, a Wykehamist, an embryo don, a man of solid reading and childlike humour, and a small circle of college intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant 'aesthetes' and the roletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely for facts in the lodging houses of the Iffley Road and Wellington Square. It was by this circle that I found myself