Jill Read Free

walking-stick, he stalked aloofly to and fro in a severe triangle formed by the College lodge (for letters), the Randolph bar and his lodgings in Wellington Square. In his first year he had been partnered at tutorials with Alan Ross; having observed that their tutor’s first action was to wind up a small clock on his desk, they took advantage of his lateness one morning to wind it up for him. The tutor was an energetic man and I always understood that the result was disastrous. But now Alan had long since gone into the Navy and Bruce, like myself, was something of a survivor. This did not make me less shy of him. Like “Mr. Austen”, he had a grand piano; he had written a book called Romanticism and the World Crisis , painted a picture that was hanging on the wall of his sitting-room, and was a skilled pianist, organist and even composer. During the vacation that Easter he had spent ten days writing, with his J $$$-16 nib and silver pen-holder, a detective story called The Case of the Gilded Fly . This was published the following year under the name of Edmund Crispin, launching him on one of his several successful careers.
    Beneath this formidable exterior, however, Bruce had unsuspected depths of frivolity, and we were soon spending mostof our time together swaying about with laughter on bar-stools. True, I could make little of Wyndham Lewis, at that time Bruce’s favourite writer, and my admiration for Belshazzar’s Feast was always qualified, but I was more than ready for John Dickson Carr, Mencken and Pitié Pour les Femmes . In return I played him Billie Holiday records and persuaded him to widen his circle of drinking-places. One night the Proctor entered one of these and I was caught by the bullers at a side door: Bruce, on the other hand, simply stepped into a kind of kitchen, apologized to someone he found ironing there, and waited until the coast was clear. “When will you learn,” he reproved me afterwards, “not to act on your own initiative?”
    I sometimes wonder if Bruce did not constitute for me a curious creative stimulus. For the next three years we were in fairly constant contact, and I wrote continuously as never before or since. Even in that last term, with Finals a matter of weeks away, I began an unclassifiable story called Trouble at Willow Gables , which Bruce and Diana Gollancz would come back to read after an evening at The Lord Napier. Possibly his brisk intellectual epicureanism was just the catalyst I needed.
    III
    Jill was in fact begun that autumn, when I was twenty-one, and took about a year to write. When it was published in 1946 it aroused no public comment. Kingsley, who by that time was back at Oxford, wrote to say he had enjoyed it very much, adding that its binding reminded him of Signal Training: Telegraphy and Telephony , or possibly Ciceronis Orationes . Later he reported that he had seen a copy in a shop in Coventry Street between Naked and Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne .
    On looking through it again in 1963 I have made a number of minor deletions but have added nothing and rewritten nothing, with the exception of a word here and there, and the reinstatement of a few mild obscenities to which the original printer objected. It will, I hope, still qualify for the indulgence traditionally extended to juvenilia.
    IV
    Looking, after twelve years, at this introduction and the story it introduces, I am struck by the latter’s growing claims as a historical document—not only on obvious points such as John’s thinking that a pound would be sufficient pocket-money for two weeks, but as recording a vanished mode of Oxford life itself. Christopher and his friends would not now have to bother about wearing gowns, or fear molestation by the Proctors when on licensed premises, nor would Elizabeth’s visits be limited to between two and seven o’clock in the afternoon. College authorities today have been known to turn a blind eye to girls actually living in college, aware of the