Work Text:
SHC Oct 6th, 1914
Dear Miss B. has been badgering me to try out to join the Bach Choir. I suppose they must be awfully short of singers now, since so many of the man-students are gone to the army, but as I told her, they would have to be desperate indeed to call on my very middling sort of voice.
I think, though she was too kind to say so, that she thinks I need ‘taking out of myself’. Kind of her, but I wish she’d just leave me alone to work. That’s what I’m here for, after all.
I went and stood under the cedar tree in the gardens this evening, looking at the warm western light reflecting in the river from the clouds over Christ Church. It felt almost as if there was someone standing behind me, but when I turned, there was nobody about. I mustn’t let nerves get the better of me.
SHC Oct 8th, 1914
To silence Miss B. and prove I am not just caught up in my own self, I have joined the Anthropological Society. Miss West, who is a most interesting person and has lectured in Biblical Studies, mentioned it to me on Tuesday.
SHC Oct 10th, 1914
I have stretched my small funds to buy some muslin for a table-cloth for my room. A little extravagant perhaps, but it looks very fine with the tea-things that Aunt Jemima gave me all set out. I found myself smiling when I looked at them. It’s the sort of thing I would have done in my first year: now here I am again, less worried about impressing other students, this time I shall arrange things for my own pleasure, since I am practically an old woman now. I feel like I haven’t smiled in a thousand years, though it has only been a few months.
Still, here I am again in Oxford, with reading to do and a puzzle to solve. I refuse to be a fainting maiden who fades away from grief, pining for my lost love. Anyway, I’m not a maiden, even if not by much.
SHC Oct 11th, 1914
I was asked to chaperone K, who is one of the first-years, going to see her brother at Exeter College!
What it is to be a widow. I am now deemed quite resistant to the charms of the few remaining man-students in Oxford, it seems, by virtue of a marriage of a month’s duration.
A strange thing that comes back to mind: I was waiting for K. to join me by the cedar-tree after lunch, and I would have sworn someone put a hand on my arm. And yet there was nobody there.
The brother has not joined up because his eyesight is not up to it — he can’t see a tree at ten paces, as K. put it as we were crossing Magdalen Bridge, though he can read well enough. His eyes haven’t saved him from the attentions of the white-feather brigade, of course: rather the opposite, since he cannot see them approaching. We saw a bunch of them lingering on the High, looking out for young men to embarrass. I noticed a man duck away into Catte Street to avoid them, and remembered him.
I’m almost sure he was one of those that stole an omnibus one evening, and drove it to the Martyr’s memorial and made some rabble-rousing speech surrounded by a cheering crowd: I saw them from a window of the Ashmolean, in that other life that was the peace. Not so brave now, I see, he looked very shamefaced when we passed him by the Exeter College porter’s lodge.
I looked at that last paragraph for a while, and I almost struck it out, but I shan’t because that is what I thought. But it’s unfair. For all I know he has some perfectly good reason not to join up, and even if he doesn’t it’s no business of mine.
K. is an intelligent young woman, and refrained from asking me personal questions (Robert), but she managed to set the conversation with her brother onto George Smith’s excavations in Mesopotamia, and the Chaldaean account of the Great Flood.
Of course my resolve to keep quiet and let them have their chat flew right out of the window and we had quite a good debate. The brother, who asked me to call him Arthur almost at once, turned out to be an atheist(!) and took the position that the Bible story is a misremembering of the older pagan tale.
K.was convinced that Gilgamesh and his dear friend Enkidu must be lovers. She was somewhat dashed when I told her of the part of the tale that deals with Shamhat the Harlot, who has so far gone discreetly unmentioned in the Daily Telegraph articles from which she has gathered her information, but she was not put off for long, and really, I can’t see much against it, at least in the fragments translated so far.
On consideration, that was probably the very type of discussion that I was supposed to be preventing, as the chaperone. Still, I got no training for the role so nobody should complain if I do it badly.
SHC Oct 21th, 1914
I have completed my drawings at the Ashmolean, at least for now, and have put my puzzle away safely in its box. I still have a good number of excavations to read up on, so not having solved the puzzle yet does not distress me.
When I look at it, it could almost be Greek, a work from one of the finest sculptors of ancient Athens... but the delicate painting of the cheeks and hair make it seem so new, as if it had come from a factory in the Potteries last week. But the simplicity of it, the curving lines: surely that is nothing from the modern era.
And I trust Miss Maclagan more than any archaeologist I have ever met. If she says she found it in Livilands Broch, and that it cannot be new because the context is ancient, well then. It cannot be new. She trusted me to take on the work, and I do not intend to let her down.
SHC Oct 30th, 1914
There’s something under the cedar tree. I am sure of it, now. Something, or someone. It isn’t always there — or at least, I can’t always tell. During the day, when students, dons and servants are coming and going, and there are voices chattering and wheels crunching on the gravel, it fades quietly into the background of college life.
But when I stand quietly under the cedar tree in the evening, when the light is fading and the mist is creeping up from the dark waters of the Cherwell through the rose-bushes, it feels alive, as if someone is just about to turn to me and speak. A ghost, a river-spirit, or merely my own wild imaginings?
I don’t think it’s Robert. It feels too calm: no fear, doubt or grief, no regrets. I should hope that Robert feels that way now, wherever he may be, but I don’t. It would be the kindly way to behave but I am not kind about Robert; I am angry, and wounded, and that’s why I was sitting alone under the cedar tree after all, like some small animal that creeps away to hide. I still feel the hole where he is missing from my heart, and I can’t bring myself to wish that he is free of it, or believe that he would want to be...
No. Not Robert. A stranger. I don’t think it wishes me harm.
I daren’t mention it to anyone. They would certainly think that I have gone quite mad, that I have overtaxed my brain with research, or my heart with grief, or both, perhaps.
So I shall tell my diary, and lock it once I’ve written it. I don’t think I am mad. But then, perhaps that’s what mad people always think.
SHC Nov 8th, 1914
It has taken me a few days to decide to write this, but I said when I bought this journal that I would keep it filled with my true thoughts, and so, here is the unvarnished truth of what happened under the cedar tree three evenings ago.
I met the presence I have felt there, I saw her face and heard her voice. It was not like any voice I have heard before: at once musical and liquid, like a stream trickling from some dew-grey hillside, clear and chill and bright.
Her name is Nerdanel and she is older than anything I’ve ever read or seen. Any object I have touched in the Ashmolean, or out on a dig. She’s older than the mountains and the seas.
No, that won’t do. I would like this to make sense to someone other than myself, though heaven knows I don’t want anyone else to read it.
I went out to look at the river after dinner — what it is to be counted as an independent scholar now, rather than a student, and need no special leave for such freedom! It was raining a little, a soft small rain, not cold, misting the grass and smudging the meadows beyond the Cherwell like a watercolour painting in the damp.
I turned to go back inside, and found a woman standing next to me. I thought at first she was a don I hadn’t met for some reason. She had that air about her of study, and her clothes... now I think about her clothes, I realise I didn’t really see them at all.
I can remember no detail about their colour or their style, only a general impression of respectability, perhaps a slight frumpishness that suggested authority. She did not look old, exactly. No wrinkles around her eyes or mouth. Her hair was a dim brown, but there was no grey in it. But her eyes. How can I describe her eyes? There was a depth of knowledge in them, and as she turned to me, I noticed the reflection of the light sky in them and blinked. It was almost as if they had their own light somewhere deep inside.
“An evening of weeping,” she said, conversationally, with no introduction, and it did not seem odd, though it does now I write it down.
I replied... I forget what. Something about the rain. And then I knew she meant the War, and not the rain at all, though there aren’t many people who would speak of the War in terms of weeping, particularly to a stranger. Even a stranger who is one of the unlucky ones who has lost someone already.
“Not yet,” the woman said to me as I thought this, as if she could hear my thoughts. “Not yet. Not so early in the war, before they have seen its true face written on the bodies of their children. This war is young. Your people still believe the old lies written anew: duty, honour, revenge, punishment: the sword that will smite the evil and not the weak. But you and I know. And they will, too, in time.”
I blinked at her. “Know what? Have we met before?”
I think she said something like ‘not formally’ which didn’t clarify anything at all, but I realised then that I did know her, somehow, and that she was very old, and that I knew her name.
“Nerdanel,” I said to her, to hear the name said out loud, and although it isn’t a name in any language I have ever heard of, it felt familiar.
“Connie,” she replied, and smiled at me, and I felt as if this was the continuation of a conversation I had been having at least since that telegram came and I knew that Robert had died in his first battle, and that I, who had been newly-wed, was now a widow. But now it was a conversation I could hear and take part in, because the bitter anger that had been ringing in my ears had faded a little.
“Why are you here?” I asked, which now I think of it seems an odd thing to ask anyone. But I was very sure she did not belong here in Oxford under the cedar tree.
“But why should I not belong here? The days of my youth are long distant, and the lands of my youth are gone from the world. In this place, in the Oxen-ford that was, where now books are written and books are read, there are old forgotten things remembered, and lost things found. And I was a maker, once.” I can remember that, word for word, her voice a gentle sing-song. It was almost a poem though I’m not sure that I heard it in English.
“Not a maker any more?” I asked, and now I was trying to focus on her properly, to see her clothes and face in the grey misty twilight.
She laughed and turned away. “Now and again, I am. Even now, though the days run away down the river full of tears, and I, my people and all we did and made are utterly forgotten.”
We spoke some more after that, but the memory of what we said has curled in my hands and crumbles away like dead leaves. I can’t recall the rest of it, no matter how I try to search my mind. But I am sure that she too had lost her husband and perhaps children too, to war. I could see it was a grief to her still, and yet she was not diminished by it.
I do remember I spoke to her of Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragist. It was on my mind, because the paper that day had said she had been arrested again, for protesting against the War. No doubt she will go on hunger strike again and be force-fed, and I don’t know what to think about that. Part of me thinks that she is quite right to do it, and that I’m a coward because I would never say or do the same. And part of me thinks that getting arrested doesn’t help anything much, apart from giving smug people a talking-point.
Nerdanel thinks the talking-point might be enough to justify the embarrassment and inconvenience. But not everyone is a Pankhurst, and can expect their behaviour to be of interest to the press, rather than simply a reputation as a difficult woman to drag behind you like a chain.
SHC Dec 9th, 1914
I can’t help wondering about the news. There were the stories of the German atrocities, of course. I had thought that if Robert had to die, at least he died well, opposing those who would do such things.
But the War, which everyone thought would be coming to a close by now, seems to be getting hotter and hotter. The Turks are in it now, and what we read of the battle of Ypres from Mr Basil Clarke of the Mail seems strangely out of keeping with the official reporting in the Times.
I am trying not to fret about it. For me, the worst has already happened, and I can see the fear in other women’s eyes as they avoid the subject for their brothers, their cousins or their children when they speak to me. They don’t want to be where I am, though I am fortunate: my father is far too old to join up, and I have no brothers.
No matter. I played the chaperone at Exeter again for K. visiting her brother, this week, and we had another refreshing chat.
I am almost at the writing-up stage, and doing much tedious checking of references for my paper on the Livilands statue. Whether or not it is important in a world at war, I sometimes wonder, but I am confident it is a good solid piece of work, the best that I am capable of. And that has a value of its own. I truly believe that. If there's one thing Miss Maclagan taught me, it is that doing the work is worth it for itself, even if few people are prepared to take it seriously, even for the stupidest reasons.
As we were leaving Exeter college, I happened to encounter that tall young man from the omnibus incident again, walking together with some small emphatic old man with a very Yorkshire accent towards the porter’s lodge.
The old man said to him, something like What do you take Oxford for, lad?
And he said ‘A university, a place of learning’ which made me like him more. Clearly there’s more to this man than just a desire to hijack busses and hide from the War.
Anyway, the old man told him: ‘Nay, lad, it‘s a factory! And what’s it making? I‘ll tell you. It‘s making fees. Get that in your head, and you‘ll begin to understand what goes on.’
‘Oh nonsense!’ the tall one said, ‘I can’t believe you are such a terrible cynic, sir!’ and then they went on out of earshot, leaving me and K. to exchanged surprised expressions.
I don’t think Oxford is a factory. Oh, it might be for some of the male dons, I suppose, but it isn’t for us. St Hilda’s certainly isn’t raking in the fees, and yet somehow they found enough money for my small Exhibition, for which I am deeply grateful. It means I can do my work and I don’t have to go to Father for support. And that’s the world.
26th April 1915
Trinity term at last, and the sun is shining. Birds are singing in the trees, the flower-beds are full of tulips and ducklings are scurrying cheerfully along the river after their mothers. It’s good to be back in Oxford, even though things are so very different this year. Somerville college is a hospital now, and the women have moved into Oriel for the time being. I had never been in Oriel before I went today to visit Margot S., and it is one of the lovelier old colleges, all old golden stone, ornate windows and fine panelling.
I couldn’t help comparing it to the women’s colleges: clinging to the fringes of the town in sturdy practical buildings with few airs or graces. Still, St Hilda's has our river and our gardens, and I would rather have the river than any oak panelling.
Margot is thinking of leaving Oxford to take up nursing. I said it seemed a pity to lose the chance to study, which might not come again, but she thinks it her duty, since she cannot fight, to do what she can instead. I think she’ll make a terrible nurse, she isn’t at all practical.
There are a few male students still at the college, and so a wall has been erected between the women’s and the men’s side, which looks very stark and bare, to prevent unseemly mixing! I went to the cedar tree and told Nerdanel about it when I returned, and she laughed very much, which made me feel better about it all.
1st May 1915
May morning, and a strange one, so like and unlike the previous year. I wasn’t married, then. Robert and I met by Magdalen tower, chastely chaperoned by good old Aunty M.
This year I am a widow, and though ostensibly I went with a group of dons and students from the college, I walked with a little space around me. Most of the crowd gathering in the pre-dawn chill before Magdalen tower were women, and so were many of the choir. There were a few young men in uniform scattered among us, and here and there, men on crutches or with bandages about them who had walked down from the new hospital at the Examination Schools, and people either looking a little too long, or averting their eyes. There were no Morris-men to dance upon the bridge, and I did not see K’s brother, or my acquaintance from Exeter College. I imagine they were keeping their heads down, and avoiding the white feathers.
But the bells rang out through the birdsong and the sound of the river running, just as they ever had. As the new light filled the sky, singing came down to us from the high tower above, in the first golden sunlight of the day.
Something caught my eye, and I realised that the person who was standing next to me was not another student, but Nerdanel. In the dawn light, her face looked flushed with life, and her hair, which I had thought a dull brown had taken on a shining glossy red, like a chestnut fresh from the husk.
“There are no dancers,” she said to me. “The spring is come. There should be dancing.”
I shrugged. “The men are busy, I suppose.”
She laughed, and her laughter mingled with the singing from the tower and I couldn’t help smiling. “But we too have feet!” She took my hand and I felt light as the petals of the cherry-blossom, blowing across the road.
I’ve never danced like that before, wild, energetic dancing with no regard to who was looking or what they might think. We circled the bridge three times, and then the singing ended, and as I let go of her hand, it came to me that none of that solemn crowd listening to the music and the bells had seen our dance at all: we had been invisible as a flurry of wind.
I saw my tall acquaintance from Exeter after all, hurrying past with a bicycle in OTC uniform and looking harried, and of all that crowd upon the bridge, I think he was the only one whose eyes lingered on my companion, rather than looking through her like the morning mist.
15th May 1915
The news in The Times of the battle at Aubers is just awful. All those deaths, for nothing! And no supplies and running out of ammunition. I thought at the very least our soldiers would be well supplied. Are we not yet practiced enough at war to ensure that?
The feeling of helplessness overwhelmed me when I read the paper, and I went out and sat by the river, staring blankly at a swan paddling serenely over blue-brown water, and holding his soft white feathers in my mind as a contrast to the thought of the mud and fear of the trenches, while Nerdanel spoke softly to me of old, old wars, so very old that we have forgotten them entirely, and even for her, the horror has worn soft at the edges until all that is left is the grief. Or so she says. I felt like there was a heavy stone in my stomach.
I have volunteered to help with rolling bandages for the hospitals. It’s not much, but it’s work that I can do. I noticed, today, I no longer wonder if I am mad. It isn’t me that is mad. It’s the world.
20th May 1915
There is to be a play for the poor nerve-cases staying at the Examination Schools. We’re doing Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I shall be Oberon. This news made Nerdanel laugh a great deal, and she is now coaching me how to be a suitable magnificent King of the Elves.
K. has joined me to roll bandages and stitch stretchers, and we spend a good deal of the time while we are working talking of Gilgamesh, and of K’s brother and my paper about the statue and the Broch.
I wouldn’t dare to broach it officially to the Principal, but we seem to have given up on the idea that young women require chaperones now. We all have far too much to do to worry about inappropriate conversations! But I still go to visit K’s brother at Exeter with her sometimes. Last time we talked of whether women should have the vote — or at least, since all three of us are much in favour of women voting, of why anyone would think otherwise, and whether there is any hope of immediate change.
10th June 1915
I had a little free time today, so I took out a punt on the river this afternoon, with Nerdanel, who appeared beside me as I was packing my basket into the boat, looking, as she always does, like someone who entirely belongs here.
I asked her once where she slept, but she wouldn’t tell me. She said “Who says I do?” but I don’t believe she spends all her time lingering unseen under the cedar tree. Though who knows? Her people are strange and ancient, and the lives even of cedar trees are short enough to them.
We drank tea from a flask and shared my sandwiches, and after that, I punted gently along the river, and she sketched me while I was doing it, swift smooth strokes to summon up my image on the paper as we passed the dappled shadows of the trees around the Watermeadow, where we saw a kingfisher, a streak of liquid blue against the sunlit greens and browns of the trees. It was a good day.
When I was punting back past Magdalen Bridge, there were men in sub fusc high above us, looking over the parapet, and talking with furrowed brows of exams. I recognised my tall acquaintance from Exeter college among them, talking very earnestly with a friend.
It must be time for Finals already. I don’t know where they are taking the exams, since the Schools are full of wounded men, but there aren’t many finalists this year anyway.
14th March 1916
She told me last night that she was going away, that a kinsman had come to her, and for some reason I don’t understand, that meant that she must leave Oxford for her own land for a while, which might be a year, or a hundred years, depending on matters that she could not, or would not, explain.
She asked me if I wanted to go with her. I’m not sure if she meant it as an invitation, or simply as a question about my feelings: it can be hard to tell, with her, even now I know her so well. At least, I feel I do, though whether it is possible for a mortal to know someone so very old is something I have wondered about.
I was tempted. Of course I was! To go away from this broken and painful world to some elven land of peace, how wonderful. But I know how that story goes: I have no desire to wake on the cold hill side and find my friends and family and the world I knew all vanished and gone, and my name a half-forgotten fairytale.
But, though this probably sounds ridiculous, that isn’t my only reason. I have things to do here.
The world of Elves must change terribly slowly, if it changes at all, and this world, here and now... well, it needs to change fast and completely, and I need to do my part in that if I can. In France they are dying, and though I am grateful that I do not have to go and die with them, I will not desert my duty here. There’s far too much to do.
I hope in thirty years I shan’t look back through these entries with regret, but even if I do, my choice is made.