Oxford & Cambridge [antikvár]

Introduction HEN I was small, I remember, the world was divided into two kinds of pcople, Dark Blues and Light Blues. Oxford or Cambridge; you had to be one or the other. (Not 'for' one or the other; you never said 'Are you for Oxford?' but always 'Are you Oxford?' - or Cambridge). Even now, one day in the year, England remembers that division and on Boát Race Day everyone is either Dark Blue or Light Blue. But I am both, and always must be both. For I was born in Cambridge and lived there, a Light Blue, till I was twelve; but I went to Oxford as my university. So I cannot choose between them; both are my almae matres. The Cambridge which I saw first, and which I still see hidden behind - not much hidden, either - the present Cambridge was an older town than the Oxford. It was the Cambridge of horsedrawn trams, of muffin men ringing their bells at nightfall, of Coe Fen still wild, with no great road running across it. The water ran sluggishly through it; water beetles danced endlessly in the sun on the river's surface; a child could lose himself quietly there a whole day through. The horse trams ran from the railwav station to the markét place - 'ran'? Hardly the word; the one horse walked scarcely faster than a man would, but assuredly faster than the old ladies who mostly used the service. Even for them the speed was so sedate that one standing on the kerb could still íinish her conversation with one on the departing tram's platform. My mother once heard the most sinister of these last sentences: 'But it was the buttonhook that opened his eyes', squealed the old lady. But, in the tempó of those times, the traffic was already dangerous; on my bicycle I was run down, and might have been killed, by a hansom cab. Oxford was more like it is today, except that it was quieter; the motor buses were there, but the motor car was rare and the motor lorry rarer. But the two cities showed then, as these pictures show still, their essential difference, as well as their essential similarities. Summarised in a few words, the truth is this: Oxford is more beautiful piece by piece. Cambridge is more beautiful as a whole. Oxford you can see from afar - from Boar's Hill - spread out with a forest of spires; Cambridge you must cnter to appreciate; from a distance it is a confusion of spilt roofs. Alsó, and by the way, Oxford is Tory, Cambridge is Whig. There are more similarities than differences, of course, as there must be with two ancient university cities, both packed with old buildings, both on a river, both built on what is nearly a marsh, and both with a large population of dons and students. But their variadon one from another is more interesting to the foreign observer. Cambridge is in essence still a markét town; it has a unity which Oxford doesn't have. The grand buildings are integrated with it; the narrow medievally-planned streets assimilate them as part of their own pattern. The town of Cambridge is interesting in itself; it is not just an appendage of the University. Markét Hill - which is a flat square into which narrow streets run at each corner - has a life of its own every markét day; it is a county-town markét in its own right. Cambridge streets are overcrowded, true, as almost all county-town streets are, but they are overcrowded by the natural exuberances of a university-plus-county town - too many dons, students, motor bicycles and bicycles and too many farmers, lorries and traders bringing in or taking out their goods. But Oxford, which has no centre of old county-town life like Markét Hill, is overcrowded and ovcrnoised (if that is a word) by an external and alicn plague. It is oppressed and elbowed by a monster, a Beast crouching next to it. Follow the unending, noisy, sluggishly-choked traffic down High Street to Magdalén bridge, cross it, and then you will see three roads spreading out like a fan. They lead to the great new, tedious modern suburb of Cowley, which has been swelling ever since Mr Morris started making his cars there, and whose inhabitants, vehicles and trucks pour into Oxford, destroying its quiet, shaking its buildings and making its streets impassable.