Poems, Letters and Memories of Philip Sidney Nairn. E. Eddison R.
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discoveries, enthusiasms, friendships, that bear with them into the soberer years of after-life a flavour and a fragrance not elsewhere to be gathered. Nairn had, as not many men have, I think, this happiness, this power of high-spirited enjoyment of every side of life, guarded by the saving principle of μηδὲν ἄγαν.
After all, the purpose of Oxford is education: to it belongs the last step in that process before the tables are set for the serious game of life, where no false move can be recalled. And lectures and texts form but a small, and not perhaps the most important, part of the fountain of learning which an Oxford life affords. To the official side of the curriculum Nairn paid so much attention as to obtain a Third Class in Honour Mods, and a Second in History – a degree which would be in itself a credit to a man of moderate parts. To this it may be added that he played Rugby football for his college, and on one occasion played for the ’Varsity, though he did not obtain his blue. But the main part of his life at Trinity, and that to which I know he looked back with pleasure and affection, was represented by those social and intellectual activities which lie outside the rut of what is, after all, schoolboy work and play. I include under this head river excursions, motor drives, walks in the parks or the surrounding country, midnight symposiums, philosophic and unphilosophic, andante piacevole and presto con fuoco, wherein he took part not perhaps always wisely yet seldom too well; activities, let me add (if any over-serious reader haply of the fairer sex should scent herein matter of offence), entailing no incident of which he or any sensible person need feel ashamed. Dulce est desipere in loco. It is to be set down to his wisdom and the soundness of his character in these merry opening years of manhood that these adventurous or Anacreontic interludes never reached the point of embroiling him seriously with the College authorities and imperilling his continued residence at that seat of learning. So far as I remember, the gravest charge he was called upon to answer was when he and certain jolly companions were haled before the Proctors and fined £2 apiece for paying their respects at a late hour to some attractive young ladies, not unconnected with the musical comedy stage, who happened to be staying a few days in Paradise Square.
Trinity at this time was in danger of becoming a somewhat ‘cliquey’ college. It had, three or four years earlier, been rescued from a threatened anarchy of rowdyism by its new Dean, Mr Michael Furse, now Bishop of Pretoria; and a tendency had become apparent among a certain section of the undergraduates to look upon themselves as the peculiar guardians of the corporate welfare. Among the freshmen of the year 1901 there grew up a group of friends, including many of the scholars and one or two of the best rowing men and football players of the year, between whom and the just persons of the senior years there arose a degree of estrangement based, no doubt, on mutual misunderstanding. This lack of good fellowship was doubtless very silly, very unjust, very unnecessary on both sides, as plenty out of each camp have since discovered. It was pronounced, however, when Nairn came up in 1902.
It was in 1901, and among what I may call the Caesarean as opposed to the Pompeian party, that the exclusive and august body known as the A.C. was founded. There were, I think, five original members, and the membership never went far beyond this. The initials stood for ‘Alpine Club’, the object of the society being primarily climbing in and out of Trinity and other colleges in the small hours. To the jaundiced eye, however, of second-year virtue the letters signified ‘Alcoholic Club’. That the principles of the body were anti-alcoholic I am certainly not so hardy as to allege. Its memory is enshrined in the famous Mitre Cup, the existence of which is due to Mr Raper: a name that few Trinity men – not I, at least – can pronounce without a feeling of the warmest admiration and affection. The cup commemorates the unexplained appearance one morning in the Garden Quad at Trinity of a stone mitre, an architectural feature of St John’s College, and its equally unexplained disappearance and return to its age-long abode during the following night. Nairn was elected to the A.C. soon after becoming a member of the college, and took no mean share in some of its most successful enterprises. I think he was there when the President missed his hold in the dark on a certain fall-pipe high aloft on the ‘overland route’, and had to be extricated from Balliol with a sprained ankle by means of sheets let down from a first-floor window looking on to Trinity quad. Other incidents are mentioned in his letters. In 1904 he writes:
‘The Alpine Dinner was a vast success, and also the flash-light photo thereof, but — and —, with their accustomed celerity, have not yet sent it me. To solemnise the occasion we lit an enormous bonfire in the middle of the Parks, which created intense scandalismos, and an unfortunate rencontre with a copper, suspicious of our numbers and presence at 4 a.m.’
In 1906 he writes:
‘I suppose you saw all about l’affaire Maurice. It may interest you to hear that I wasn’t in it (though I damned nearly was). Most of Trinity and no small part of the ’Varsity still think I was, however. So that spurious notoriety is descending upon me in my reprobate old age.’ fn1
Whether the Club survived into later years or ended its existence with the going down of those who constituted it in its prime, history relates not, nor is it relevant to this narrative.
Though his particular friends were identified with what has been referred to as the Caesarean camp, Nairn was persona grata with all sections of the College. His membership of the Rugby fifteen and of several of the college literary and debating societies, such as the Griffin (the official debating society of Trinity) and the Gondoliers (founded originally for the study of Gilbertian opera, but extending its patronage to a much wider range of dramatic literature), kept him in touch with the more orthodox elements. But the chief reason lay in his sunny and sociable disposition, the power of which no one who came into contact with him could long resist. Even the inner camp of irreconcilables unbent towards Nairn. In later years chance brought him into close relationship and good fellowship with some of those from whom college cliquishness had divided him at Oxford.
If the fascination of pleasant memories has trapped me into dwelling on the more ‘unbuttoned’ side of the Oxford days, it must not be thought that he neglected their quieter gifts. He was a great reader, and no term or vacation passed without adding a number – sometimes a dozen, sometimes a score – of entries to the list he kept of books read: a long and catholic list, dating back to his preparatory school-days when he was only ten years of age. The short stories of Guy de Maupassant, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, Meredith’s Shaving of Shagpat, and various plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists were among his favourite books first read during his ’varsity days. Many of these we discovered jointly, and read aloud together: some at Trinity on lazy afternoons, others at Mrs Honey’s among the Borrowdale mountains. He possessed the accomplishment, very rare because never taught, of reading aloud well, without monotony or affectation; and it was equally delightful to listen to his rendering of the musical cadences of lyric poetry, or to his declamation, in a swashbucklering style that was peculiarly his own, of the thunder-charged dialogue of Edward II or The Duchess of Malfi.
His literary tastes and accomplishments are matter for a later chapter. The name of Borrowdale brings me to two vacations spent at the Lakes, in the springs of 1905 and 1906. Our headquarters were at Green Bank, a house standing back on the hillside behind the farm of High Lodore, half a mile or so from the head of Derwentwater and the same distance from the little hamlet of Grange and the Gates of Borrowdale. Here, fortified by the hospitality and good cheer of Mrs Honey, we put in four hours’ reading at our text-books each morning, supplemented by a less defined period in the evenings, and spent the rest of the day in exploring the high fells between Skiddaw and Scafell. The charm of the Lake mountains cast its spell on Nairn. He writes in 1909 from Kota Bharu:
‘I’ve been thinking of you in the tail-end of this year, up at Mrs Honey’s, when the vile tourists have left only their traces behind on the fells and visitors’ books, and one can roam unoffended in the solitudes. Jucundum fuerit! Even in a glorious country like this, with the mountains all round, and the distant forests blue on the hillsides, or sailing on the sea in an open boat by night, with the stars reflected in the waters, and a cool breeze swelling the big sail – no, there is no moment like that on the high fells when the mists swirl and lift, and the dales appear in the sunlight below.’
One expedition stands out clearly in my recollection.