Oxford
Undergraduate 1960-3
After
the elegance and sophistication of the Dragon years, I went in 1955
for five years to the tough northern boarding school of Sedbergh in
Yorkshire. This was enormously valuable in shaping and toughening me,
and it made it all the more wonderful to return to Oxford as an undergraduate
in October 1960, aged nearly nineteen, to read history.
This was
a period of the rapid continuation of the huge cultural and social changes
of the later 1950's, moving from Elvis to the early Beatles. In music,
art, literature, there was huge experimentation and the influence of
continental and American culture on Britain grew. In politics, the Cold
War intensified reaching a peak in the Cuban Missile Crisis which took
place over my last winter as an undergraduate. My parents experienced
the side-shocks of this confrontation when they had to flee from Assam
as a result of the brief Indo-Chinese war at the same period. Technology
continued to speed up and affluence continued to grow so that it felt
an exhilarating time to be going to study at University.
I went
to Worcester College, Oxford, a small and beautiful College which became
my home for three years. Here I learnt that Oxford's goal was to sharpen
and broaden my education through the unique system of one to one (or
two) tutorials. My friends were still mainly public school and grammar
school boys in this single sex College. Again being in a fairly peripheral
College, with dedicated teachers of the older kind, I was able to experience
a type of education which had lasted for a century but would soon be
put under strain as new universities and new models of academic life
flooded in.
I went
to Oxford as a late adolescent and changed greatly under its charms.
I had my first two serious love affairs. My relationship to my family
became more equal, particularly a growing intellectual bond with my
mother in Assam. My loss of religious faith occurred at the end of this
period but I clung on to my desire for integration and enchantment in
my reading and poetry.
My growth
in intellectual confidence and maturity was very considerable. The first
year I was roughly at the same level as my sixth form at Sedbergh, then
I rose to a higher level of critical reading and writing. I developed
the working practices – the time discipline and the filing systems
– which I would use throughout the rest of my life. My interests
shifted from hobbies towards study and scholarship, but I retained a
lively interest in social and economic problems around the world. Above
all, I revelled in the freedom, responsibility and the equal friendships
with clever students and teachers.
It is
not necessary to elaborate further on these three years since I have
described them in detail, based on contemporary materials in Oxford
Undergraduate.
Oxford
postgraduate 1963-1966
After
I graduated, I decided to stay on at the University to attempt to do
a doctorate (D.Phil) in history. This was also a very formative period,
training me to write and in the other tools of scholarship.
This was
the period of the later Beatles and Rolling Stones, with the youth revolution
building up to the 'Summer of Love' and youth rebellion in 1967. The
technologies became ever more powerful, the cars, music, television,
jet planes and the start of the computing revolution. The Cold War continued
and the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 inaugurated the
start of the Vietnam War which would overshadow our lives for the next
ten years and mix with the youth revolution. Meanwhile the glow of the
British Empire continued to wane. This affected my parents who found
that the Tea Company was in great difficulties and British managers
were leaving. My parents left a year early in late 1965, their move
also precipitated by my mother’s illness and the outbreak of the
Indo-Pakistan war.
Worcester
College became less central to my life in Oxford as a postgraduate as
I moved out into rented accommodation. My intellectual contacts also
widened beyond the College, for graduate training was the responsibility
of the University and they appointed a supervisor, Keith Thomas, to
oversee my doctorate on the history of English witchcraft in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
I spent
the first two years in Oxford or at Record Offices, but the third year
I went back to the Lake District house and, for the first time since
I was a child of five, spent a whole year with both my parents after
their retirement from India in 1965. My institutional contacts were
now fellow postgraduates and a number of older academics who advised
me on how to do research.
I was
an adult by the end of my undergraduate degree, but I was without any
formal training in any field. The doctoral three years saw me move from
the shelter of the College and become independent, with my motorbike,
a succession of girl-friends, travels to Scotland and elsewhere. I gradually
moved further from organized religion and became more interested in
a wider world, discovering anthropology and the variety of religious
and social systems around the globe.
I was
still keen to do something worthwhile (e.g. work among the poor in the
Third World) with my life, but the excitement of research at a time
when new methods and new sources were becoming available began to move
me towards an academic career. By the end of the time at Oxford I was
engaged to be married (I married in December 1966 on my 25th birthday)
and the separation from my family was nearly complete. I was now at
the end of the first phase of my education, a process which had taken
twenty-five years.
What happened
in these three years is dealt with in considerable detail in Oxford
Postgraduate.