Jill Read Free Page A

outcry disciplinary action would produce; some colleges, indeed, have begun to take women students, in consequence of the lack of places for them in women’s colleges. One wonders, in fact, how long the collegiate system will last: legislation of a succession of socialist or quasi-socialist governments has severely diminished college incomes from investment or property, while the rise in labour and other costs in running these academic hotels has been equally damaging. Furthermore, nobody really wants to live in them: dons and students alike prefer domesticity, houses and wives on the one hand and flats and mistresses on the other. Finally, left-wing agitation is striving to unite all Oxford students into a single political force that would be hostile to the collegiate system and the spirit it engenders. Recently a fellow of my own college said he gave it ten years.
    My original purpose in writing an introduction of this kind was to make clear that my own Oxford life was rather different from that of my hero; nevertheless, over the years I can see that I have been to some extent identified with him. A later Oxford generation, according to one writer, liked my poems because they ‘found a voice for those in the painful process of transforming themselves from petits bourgeois or hauts bourgeois .’ Though this implication of enterprise is flattering, I think the time has come to disclaim it; thanks to my father’s generosity, my education was at no time a charge on public or other funds, and all in all my manner of life is much the same today as it was in 1940— bourgeois , certainly, but neither haut nor petit . Perhaps in consequence I may receive a few more degrees of imaginative credit for my hero’s creation.
    Lastly, since the book’s original publisher is now dead, I can explain that it was probably his imprint that won Jill a place in that Coventry Street shop. Reginald Ashley Caton, mysterious and elusive proprietor of the Fortune Press throughout the Thirties and Forties, divided his publishing activity between poetry and what then passed for pornography, often of a homosexual tinge. My dustjacket advertised titles such as Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy, A Diary of the Teens by A Boy , and so on; the previous year he had published a collection of my poems (Dylan Thomas and Roy Fuller were also on his list), and I had rather despairingly bunged the novel at him, as no one else seemed interested. He must have accepted it unread, since the printer’s objections appeared to take him by surprise; our only meeting was in a teashop near Victoria Station to discuss this, when he assured me that to find yourself in the dock on a charge of obscenity was ‘no joke’. (That cup of tea was my sole payment for both books.) All the same, as a publisher of poetry at a time when such an activity was even less remunerative than usual, he deserves a footnote in the literary history of the time. An interesting study might be written of the crusading activities of the Fortune Press in the Forties, and of the Fantasy and Marvell Presses in the Fifties, and their effect on English verse. It occurs to me that I am probably the only writer to have been published by all three. 1975                                                                         P.L.

 
     
     
The main location of this story in time and place—the Michaelmas Term at Oxford University in 1940—is more or less real, but the characters are imaginary.
As, despite its length, it remains in essence an unambitious short story, chapter-divisions have been dropped, leaving it merely as a narrative with breathing-spaces.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    J ohn Kemp sat in the corner of an empty compartment in a train travelling over the last stretch of line before Oxford. It was nearly four o’clock on a Thursday in the middle of October, and the air had begun to thicken as it always does before a