It’s almost the height of summer here, which is August, and it’s time to talk about Oxford. On a hot summer afternoon in 1975, three days before Christmas, I left the house on the Calle Juncal with my small white leather suitcase and my rosewood handmade classical guitar in its travel case, whisked by car and driver with two close friends to Ezeiza airport where I would take a 22-hour flight to England on Aerolineas Argentinas. The heightened security at Ezeiza at the time forbade more than two people seeing off each passenger, and my friends Anna and Irene accompanied me.
Before getting into the silver Ford Torino with Nuno our driver for the last time, I had to take leave of Ada and Oscar de Lenci, Raul, Juliana, Adela, Mario, The Three Marias, Maria Jose, Maria Magdalena and Maria Florencia, Maman’s husband who I addressed as Papa, as well as more family friends and relatives who had come to say good-bye, and I had to say my good-byes to Maman.
My sister was away at boarding school in the care of the nuns in La Cumbrecita in the province of Cordoba where she would be safer than at a day school, and my brother Carlos had been taken one month earlier to the Hospital Frenopático against his will and committed also against his will. He remained there with no future prognosis suffering from a purported diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia arrived at by the finest psychiatrists in the region interviewing him and observing him through a one-way mirror at the venerable psychiatric institution in the heart of the city, as was the common practice in those very psychoanalytic trainings led by wonderful doctors like Salvador Minuchin, the founder of structural family therapy. Unfortunately for my brother Minuchin was not on his team.
Listening to Maman’s husband relate with relish the situation, that Carlos was very ill and he would not be released for the foreseeable future, in fact for life was distressing on so many levels, and often in the middle of his monologue Maman would get tears in her eyes and leave the room or make herself another drink. This psychiatric emergency and involuntary hospitalization was based on fabrication on the part of Maman’s husband and was the culmination of years of fierce struggle for the trust and the trust fund of the matriarch of the family, whose decisions held the most weight. Not long after I departed my father and his new bride flew down from Texas, sorted the whole matter out, and took my brother with them back to Houston.
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By the beginning of the Trinity term in May, my entire outlook on life in Oxford had changed, and I was beginning to feel a bit more at home. Gone were the wet fall days of Hilary term, and the snowy winter days of the start of Michaelmas term, and there was the excitement of the Trinity term after Easter holidays, which promised to be spectacular, and like nothing I had ever known in Argentina. In terms of my academic performance not only had I quickly accepted that in everything except Spanish Language and Literature I was a mediocre scholar at best, but I didn’t want to think about the fact I was getting ready to take my Oxbridge entrance exams in the fall, that my entire future was riding on the outcome, and yet all I cared about was going out and having a good time with my newfound friends.
In my first term alone, there were three suicide attempts by students at my college, there were two incidents of rape so serious the students were sent home and it was rumored one had sustained irreparable mental illness and was in a state of catatonic dissociation as a result. There took place a serious fistfight between two rivals in a pub, a flooding of the Oxford illicit drug market by an independent brand of blue amphetamine pills of dubious French provenance, a preponderance of potent Moroccan green hashish, ubiquitous inebriation, a lot of men who wanted my attention, some of them way older than me, and a serial killer who picked up girls hitchhiking in Oxford was still at large. A classmate was attacked by skinheads at Victoria Station, and another stabbed herself with a kitchen knife in a telephone booth saying she had been attacked at first to get the sympathy of a Lord at Balliol she was in love with.
Nowadays and for some years now Oxford gives you a host family if you are a foreign student, as the suicide rate among foreign students is so high. I experienced severe sleeplessness and florid anorexia based on the absolute absence of appetite. The sheltered world of Buenos Aires where three generations gathered was nothing like social life in England for which I was unprepared. Anxiety interfered with my sleep and my appetite and the doctor at the NHS clinic suggested I was too young for Oxford and ought to go home. He gave me a bottle of prescription tranquilizers, Valium, and told me to come back each week to be weighed. I learned from other non-body dysmorphic anorexics who suffered from pathological homesickness to weight myself down by putting things in my blazer pockets before I went to check in at the clinic.
One evening coming back from the Bodleian Library I ran into a group of seniors from Princeton who said they were on their way to meet their classmate who had just arrived from Princeton for the year ~Antonia Gould. I asked if I could go with them as I believed Antonia Gould was my cousin. They were more than happy to have me accompany them as it wasn’t the first pub visit we had made together, and they laughed at the mention that their classmate might be my cousin and told me several times that Antonia Gould didn’t have any British cousins.
~ How do you know? I asked. Besides, I am not British. I am American.
They laughed heartily at this, these pre-law men from Princeton I tutored in basic Shakespeare so they could get a passing grade. They were astonished to find out that Antonia Gould was my cousin, and I was in fact an American.
Back in the United States her father the filmmaker Henry Gould had just won his first Oscar for a screen adaptation for a movie that won almost everything that year, and Antonia was taking her last year at Princeton to write her thesis on Gertrude Bell. She had come to Oxford on the Princeton one year away program to see Gertrude Bell’s papers under glass in England.
In June I broke my wrist and several bones in my hand climbing out of the house to attend the Magdalen College Ball. I had no permission to stay out so late because of my age and the strictness of the rules of my college, as the ball would go until the early hours of dawn, followed by breakfast at The Randolph Hotel and other local haunts about town. It was a good thing that it was my left hand only or I don’t know what I would have done! Although I had no formal exams that term, I was writing four and five essays a week for my Oxbridge entrance exam preparation. I was learning to do work at a much deeper level than I had at my school in Argentina.
Because our transgressions resulted in my broken hand the fact of our sneaking out to attend Magdalen Ball could not be kept secret from the house matron or the A Level College where I was to sit for Oxbridge exams in September during my fourth term along with preparing for Advanced Level exams in English Literature Spanish Language and Literature and History. The amount of work I needed to do was mountainous, and yet I wasn’t worried as I had set my sights on other visions by then.
The world of society called my name in a voice sweeter than Circe’s enticing me into a constant pace of pub rounds, lawn parties, afternoon tea at Browns, cricket games at The Botanical Gardens, punting on the Cherwell, myriad college balls, drives in the English countryside, birthday parties, debutante balls, house parties, receiving lines, theatre, rock concerts large and intimate performances at places like Ronnie Scott’s in London, invitations to famous people’s parties, quail shoots, picnics in the gardens at Blenheim Palace, point-to points, hunts where you rode to hounds, Eights Week, Henley Regatta, Newbury Races, racing at Ascot, Rugby at Rugby, tennis at Wimbledon , and trips to London on the weekends or to stay at people’s famous old historic country houses.
There were the Oxford College Balls and that didn’t leave time to travel to any of the Cambridge University parties, and yet I was particularly fond of and loyal to Oxford, so I didn’t miss this at all, and only two of my friends kept up with that social schedule, as we were all sure Oxford was so much more than Cambridge, and you couldn’t think of anywhere you’d rather be that term, in this beautiful city with its unusual skies at dusk , and its halcyon summer days. Nowhere else you’d want to be while occupied with attending the dances at Christchurch, Magdalen, Merton, Herford, Oriel, Queens, Balliol and New College to name the most prominent.
My head was in the clouds, and my feet had left the ground. I had more invitations than I could count on the mantelpiece in my little rooms. I had left terra firma and my future was in peril. People dropped by my rooms constantly and I had to keep the doors shut to keep them from knowing I was in when I needed to work. Men slept in the hall outside when I had the double doors shut or when they could hear me playing music. This was upsetting and I heard it happened to other women at other colleges, at least in particular to one, Alina Goldsmith, now Lady Vesey, and we both became good friends working at OUDS the dramatic society, handing out programs and making tea for the cast and crew, until she couldn’t take it anymore and left for London to work with a famous designer.
The need for more than the fifty pounds allowance Maman sent me by check every month from Argentina had also forced me to bus tables wash dishes and serve dinner two nights a week, much to my resentment at missing out on fun with my friends, at The Cherwell Boathouse, an elite restaurant patronized by the private men’s college clubs. None of this could I bring myself to tell Maman who had sent me to England to study, or so it seemed.
Essays all had to be written by hand and in ink. You could use a ballpoint pen, only my handwriting was part of what I relied on to get a high mark, as I was soon convinced, I was quite a mediocre candidate with slim chances of achieving even an interview at Oxford let alone a place based on the scholarship evident in my papers. My penmanship was skillful, and I wrote in ink with a fountain pen in large bold cursive with capital letters I had copied from calligraphy in books, on invitations, and anywhere I had seen in it. The awareness that I was not even going to try to be admitted for reading English, as I had dreamed of for years, and in fact I would attempt to gain a place to read for a degree in Philosophy and Theology weighed on me.
The first reason this adaptation made my heart heavy as lead was that I had said nothing about this to Maman. It seemed to me that the ground I was walking on so to speak had become a very fine ice over the course of the first three months in England. There was significant difficulty in communicating with her and while I reveled in my newfound freedom from any parental contact at all really, I was also profoundly homesick for Maman, and for my family and friends and everyone in the house on Juncal in Buenos Aires. Now that Maman and her husband had retreated to Cordoba, to the former tuberculosis sanitarium in the hills of Villa Allende, there was no telephone and no way to call her. Despite all the possible financial incentives offered, there was no way a telephone was going to be installed at the old villa though there may have been a five-year wait list.
The telephone situation was so serious it would take an entire essay to describe properly. Suffice it to say that when you advertised your apartment for sale you stated whether or not it had a telephone already installed, as Siemens had a seven-year waiting list in Buenos Aires. At our house in the Calle Juncal there was a phone on a table in the corner of the great room. It was an old black heavy phone with the brass hook rest for the receiver. Whenever it rang anyone within earshot ran to stand there and waited as Maman’s husband answered, and all calls in full were conducted in front of the entire gathering no matter who they were from.
It was far easier for the purpose of social events to send telegrams. If you wanted to see someone you were better off sending them a telegram.
~No venís a tomar el té el Martes STOP Nos vemos a las cuatro querida STOP
~Come to tea on Tuesday STOP See you at four Darling STOP
For making and receiving any and all phone calls, Maman would have to be driven to the house of close friends about ten kilometers away, the Alvarez Rivero family whose patriarch was an important attorney, where they did have a phone. Often if she had to call Ada in Buenos Aires or her attorney in New York City, Maman preferred to drive into Villa Allende and use the phone at the almacen, the small grocery store where the owner made a profit from charging for its use. The owner loved her to come and sit in the store while waiting for calls to come in or be put through, and while waiting for her husband to come collect her, and he plied her with special bottles of lemonade and Bariloche chocolates, as well as paté foie gras and cheese or a picada, a plate of meats and olives and cheeses, as well as caramelos, medias lunas, alfajores, and crackers with dulce de leche. She did not like to put the owner out she said, who had to go get his daughter to watch the store when he had to drive up to the house on the hill to inform her someone was waiting on the phone to talk to her. He would be excited and out of breath when he got up the steep driveway in his Fiat, if the call was long distance from the United States.
She made me promise not to call as it was a half hour drive each way to the almacen and the owner would leave the store and come to the house to get her leaving the phone off the hook until she arrived to take the call. I honored her request because I knew how angry her husband would be if I called.
I had promised Maman to write, and we had made a pact I was to write every week. The letters could sometimes take ten days or more to reach Oxford and Villa Allende. I wrote to Ada and Oscar de Lenci in Buenos Aires as well, and to Nora my tutor. That stopped after a while. I would look at their letters and put them away again. At first, in January when I came in for the Hilary Term already three months behind everyone else, two years younger and ill-prepared compared to girls who attended British public schools and had studied Latin and Greek for years, I wrote religiously to Maman and told her everything I thought she would want to hear. Most of this was sincere. After I started to get my bearings about getting into Oxford that changed.
Inevitably, I wrote less and less as my life took on an entirely different shape than what I described to her, as I was now trying to gain one of the newly appointed places for Philosophy and Theology that had been designated for women. I did not recount anything about my social education or how I needed way more money than she was sending just to eat let alone have clothes and funds for everywhere I was invited to. I did not say that I wanted to put on a party dress and go out dancing every night, that my academic focus had faltered, as had my interest in scholarship, though I would get into Oxford so as never to have to leave this city I loved immediately. I had not yet developed any real feeling for London except maybe awe.
My tutors and the dons started waylaying me just to get me to talk to them. They expressed concern about my academic load and wondered whether they should write to Maman to ask if she wouldn’t be agreeable to my taking Oxbridge after my A-Levels instead of in November? I had broached the subject of reading for the degree in Philosophy and Theology or a subject other than English with Maman in our correspondence, and she had answered vehemently ~ I sent you there to study English, Mignon!
~Impossible! I would say. There is no second chance for me, my Mother will never agree to more time. She is paying a lot of money for me to be here.
~Well then. You had better see to it then.
Almost every night my friends and I would decide on what evening dress we would wear to this party and that , and as I owned only one dress of my own handmade by Ada from Vogue patterns, the fabric chosen from the stacks of beautiful bolts in the Once district, the Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires., my well-off fashionista friends would lend me their beautiful designer gowns generously almost every evening. This time I had a burgundy silk layered Alberta Ferretti slip dress which I rolled carefully and put into my leather satchel along with the desired shoes and got ready to exit the premises. This was a complicated exercise, which included appearing downstairs for the house matron at curfew time as if we were just coming in, saying good evening, commenting conspicuously to each other on how very tired we were or how much we really needed to study, and going upstairs where there was an adjoining hallway.
We then grabbed our bags of evening clothes, crossed the connecting hall on the upper floor to the other house and usually walked out that door into the street. On this evening the door to Number Eleven was already locked so we used a makeshift ladder made of sheets and let ourselves out the window of the third floor instead with a drop at the end. I fell and broke the fall with my hand, only I didn’t know it was fractured or didn’t accept that it was for many hours. We rode our bikes down the Banbury Road into the center of Oxford to Magdalen, where we changed outside the college walls. We then marked the spot by throwing our belongings over the Magdalen College wall so as not to walk in carrying them ruining our vibe, and we presented our invites to the Porter and made our entrance. We then retrieved our stash and partied hearty with our friends old and new until breakfast had been served and enjoyed, and the tall candelabra on the long tables draped with white tablecloths set up in the quad had outlasted the fireflies, and were still burning when full daylight came.
By dawn I would be fading somewhat, as we sat in little iron garden chairs at the long tables on the grass in our bare feet, in our long gowns with cloaks draped over our shoulders, or wearing the men’s jackets now that it was cooler once the height of the night had passed. We chatted recited rude poetry and sang silly songs as we came down to earth, and by the time Phoebus drove his chariot across the sky smoking his Benson and Hedges, we had gathered up our gowns into our bags, thrown them back over the wall, put on our jeans and tucked them into sparkly cowboy ankle boots, fastened our billowy antique poet shirts under secondhand waist coats from Little Clarendon Street, and were riding our bikes, pedaling furiously up the High Street, the vivid patterns of our open kimonos worn as overcoats flapping in the wind like some fabulous wild flamingos in flight.
“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
~Evelyn Waugh