Playing Fields in Winter

Sarah Livingstone and Ravi Kaul meet at Oxford. She is English, sensing a chance to evade the pattern of conventional middle-class life to which her experience has so far conformed. The more sophisticated Indian, Ravi, also wishes to sample another way of life – if only temporarily. Against a quintessential Oxford background of gloomy winters and hesitant summers, of tea and ginger-nuts eaten beside electric bar fires, of other people’s lovemaking overheard through thin walls, of sherry parties and suicide attempts, of girls in long cotton skirts and evening punting expeditions, their affair blossoms for two academic years. Until the inevitable time when Ravi must depart for Lucknow, Sarah for job-hunting in London – and their expectations clash head on.

‘So well does Miss Harris handle this story, so convincingly and passionately does she write, that we get to know the hero and heroine, fear for them, feel for them… an accomplished first novel’

Susan Hill,
Good Housekeeping

‘The relationship between Sarah and Ravi is very nicely, perceptively and credibly handled. Miss Harris has got a real subject, she can tell a story and create character’

Allan Massie,
The Scotsman

‘Helen Harris has drawn a painfully accurate picture of the difficulty of holding on to a love in the face of society’s prejudice’

Over 21

‘An unbridgeable gap is the theme movingly explored in talented Helen Harris’s first novel’

Daily Express

‘Rich in suggestion and imagination’

Punch

‘A reassuringly solid descriptive sense, and the confidence to handle a delicate theme of racial integration with forthright and readable flair’

Books and Bookmen

‘
IS THERE
any history?’ Two doctors stand in the corridor of a dilapidated hospital and an immense Indian sun spills through the windows on to their white coats. A row of large rooms opens on to the inside of the corridor and out of some of them come sobs and sighs. But the doctors are discussing – a trifle dismissively – the occupant of a completely silent room. In it, between listless routine cases, there is an English girl, cast up in their overworked hospital with an initially undiagnosable disease. Their patient is not presenting any of the usual hippy traveller’s symptoms; she has not got
hepatitis
or dysentery or malaria. Yet she is clearly ill. She lies repugnantly white and bony on their much-laundered sheets and tries to roll her eyeballs inwards away from their probing examination. They know it all so well, the doctors: the
European
female patient’s panic at being taken ill here, the hysteria and recoil, the unspoken conviction that their hands, because they are brown, cannot adequately work the miracle of
treatment
and cure. But this one had said something funny during the examination; she had asked for visitors. As if she could possibly expect acquaintances to visit her here, when they were surely all sitting cosily at home in England, wondering what had become of their adventurous young friend who had gone gallivanting off alone to that fearsome place, India. And they had waggled their heads in amusement and gone on examining her. At which point she had shown that she was simply utterly sick of the sub-continent and, not surprisingly, this had insulted them.

At the beginning, there was temptation, temptation to reject the grey with which she had grown up and exchange it for something very bright and shimmering, like a bauble. Oxford in winter was only half alive. There were no leaves on the
trees and, in the libraries, immobile figures sat hunched over their books as if they might at closing time shockingly be found to be dead. The college quadrangles, remember, had been painstakingly preserved in the shape of past centuries and from long preservation had imperceptibly lost life, so that every hour on the bell tower was an upheaval and evening chapel a commotion which might shake down the spires. When she rode her bicycle at night through the city, nothing else moved in the streets but cats and she could look into the houses where there were lights on and see motionless tableaux of family scenes.

Sometimes, it seemed, from sheer self-control, the English must erupt. But they never did; break open their dignity, rip off their reserve. They enacted Oxford with elaborate care. The students wore their characters like costumes – they were scholars or aesthetes or drunks. Ultimately they became purely their black gowns or their anachronistic, bicycle-
clip-bound
trousers. They defined themselves in the security of time and place, as if being in Oxford in their youth supplanted the need to be anything else.

The city lent itself to posturing. It would have seemed an insult to the marvellous scenery of spires against a backdrop of northern European grey not to act out its traditions. But to some of the students arriving in Oxford that autumn, the traditions lacked a vital quality.

England was wrapped in an all-enveloping cloud. When his plane landed at Heathrow on that grey October morning, he found a muffled country hunched in self-pity over a
handkerchief.
It was not gracious or grand, as he had sometimes liked to imagine it as a child in India. The people were all shrouded in a cocoon of selfish privacy, their words and movements muted. He was there for a fortnight before he felt, through the layers of propriety and pretence, that he had really got through to someone.

At the beginning, there was the hope of finding that vitality she sought. There was the thrilling feeling that all her life
until then had been lived according to a pattern, but that here finally was a chance to evade the pattern and embark on something which no one could have predicted: no romantic maiden aunt inventing a prince for her favourite niece, no part-time clairvoyant at a charity fête. Oxford was so
overwhelmingly
safe, cushioned in the protective hollow of the Thames Valley. It was gratifyingly ironic that there, in such cloistered safety, she should have managed to find danger nevertheless.

Danger was so tremendous on a morning with ground frost, speeding in from the Victorian suburbs on a bicycle. The road stretched between tall red houses and orange trees. The fallen leaves flared up around her bicycle wheels and the wind scoured her face with a delicious pain. But all there was at the end of that exhilarating ride was a lecture – Middle English or Linguistics – and coffee in a book-lined mediaeval turret and lunch in a monastic hall. She slipped off her bicycle clips, unwound her long striped woollen scarf – sodden with the breath which five minutes before had been exercise and excitement – and sat down in the lecture theatre to listen to an old man talking (with what had presumably replaced passion in him) about vowel formation. In Oxford there were many clock hands which moved in grudging jerks, as if their mechanism resented the need to advance. The clock in the lecture theatre was one of those; it showed a glorious autumn morning as a series of tiny, unwilling concessions to the 1970s. Sitting at the back of the theatre after the soaring bicycle ride, lacking fresh air and space as well as that less definable vitality, she used to have a terrible feeling that she was not entirely alive here either. Somewhere else the world was moving forward, but here in the beautiful archaic city she might get left behind.

There was excitement at the beginning, there was mischief. There was a little girl running in from the garden, clutching a wet frog and crying, ‘Mummy, Mummy, look what I’ve found!’ already savouring in advance the delight of her mother’s horrified shriek. For she knew from the moment she caught sight of the frog in the grass that he would cause consternation and she could barely wait to carry him into the coffee morning and hear the ladies’ upset squeals. Even
before she realised that she was in fact
going
to carry the frog into the house, the thought of the squeals alone was satisfying.

There was actually a garden beyond the small confines of her college desk – although it was by no means a miracle like the gardens which came later on – which seemed a triumph over surroundings capable of eradicating the will to create gardens. In Oxford, creating gardens was an obvious thing to do, like decorating your speech with sprigs of Latin or wearing a long skirt to parties. There was the rain and the soft soil of the Thames Valley. The university called out for gardens to surround its libraries with soothing green, to protect its peace. The big trees beyond her window were supposed to harbour prowlers and perverts. They were black firs and cypress. Unable to find ideas for her essays, she would stare out into the winter afternoons and search between the trees for human shapes. But the cold weather and the college’s remoteness from the centre of the city kept them away and, although tales did circulate about girls being horribly attacked by rapists who forced their way in through the barred windows on the ground floor, most of the time such danger seemed imaginary.

A long, tidy lawn spread across to the trees, on which girls lay and studied in summer and held decorative tea-parties. A stone sundial at the junction of four gravel paths reported every suspect night-time footstep. On the other side of the trees were the university playing fields where, on winter afternoons, players in bright shirts lumbered up and down, churning up the mud, and from that side of the college, the girls could hear the harsh cries of the men they were supposed to marry.

Behind her, when she sat at her desk looking for ideas in the garden, lay the cold bulk of the college like the shell of some extinct mammoth. Approached from the front gates, it presented a high red wall behind which a hint of turrets and dormer windows gave an impression of possible grace. Coming up from the garden, you saw its angular brick shape devoid of mystery: a great red facade looming above the lawns, which no amount of creeper could romanticise. Its corridors were phenomenal, renowned within the city. A
story existed of a new student who had wandered lost in them for days, unable to find her way back to her room and too embarrassed to ask anyone for directions. That and a more light-hearted tale of a visiting male student trying to find his way back from the bathroom to his girl-friend’s room in the middle of the night and horrifyingly,
improbably,
finding himself instead in bed with the junior dean, conveyed the only kind of danger the students imagined. The corridors smelt of disinfectant and left-over years of unappetising dinners.

It seemed an unlikely beginning. But in fact, it turned out to be provocative to give so excessively the impression of a fortress to be penetrated and overthrown.

At his beginning, there was curiosity: what were these stiff inhibited young people, yet who clearly thought the world of themselves, like? Could anyone really be as inhuman as they made themselves out to be? The impression of his first weeks gave way to amusement at their naïvety. For all their pretensions, he saw they actually had no idea at all of how the world worked. They put on their acts and mannerisms to hide their gullibility. Good God, he had understood more of life at twelve than these gawky schoolboys did now.

There was a challenge, for never before had anyone implied to him that he might be their inferior. (Except once; he had been about seven at the time, but small for his age. On his way home from school one day, he had got caught up in a gaggle of street children who were pestering a party of
tourists
outside the grounds of the Residency in Lucknow. As he tried to push his way through the crowd, he heard an English voice exclaim, ‘Oh, isn’t he sweet?’ and, for an instant, he had been filled with a violent rage. Couldn’t they see that he had nothing to do with the dirty, squealing urchins? Couldn’t they see his satchel and his smart school clothes? Couldn’t they
see
?)

Now, he was filled with an urge to pierce that English primness and giving way to his worst feelings, he saw that the girl was one way in. The disdain which he knew he would earn from his compatriot students was a challenge
too; he had grown up to think that only run-of-the-mill mediocrities were conventional. And there was too, although scarcely admitted, the fascination of the legend about English girls – that if you wanted to, you could. He felt that he would regret the missed opportunity all his life if he spent these three unique years shut away studying. He owed it to himself to experiment in England; while he was here, he wanted to do everything.

Other chaps who had come home after Oxford had told him about other adventures. Pratap Singh had been to endless parties and got hilariously drunk and smashed things. Joti Verma had tried out all kinds of drugs. But where, he could not understand … and when and
how
? He saw no openings in those early days for any sort of adventure and in any case could imagine nothing more wicked in that schoolboys’ city than pillow-fights in the quadrangle or a mischievous dousing in the river Thames.

He set his sights on a real adventure, something which would involve risk and compromise to his principles and danger. He turned up his nose at experiments with whisky and piffling little coloured pills; he wanted to try out another life; he knew his years in Oxford would only come to him once and, afterwards, he already knew how defined his life would be.

‘What will you be when you’re grown up?’

‘A minister in the government.’

‘A minister? Why do you want to be a minister? Not a big-shot general or a pilot or a spaceman?’

‘Because I want a big desk – so big – and a nice car with curtains to ride around in and everyone pointing and going “Ah, ah” as I go by because I’m so important.’

‘Ha, ha, Kaul Sahib, you have the boy well-trained, it seems.’

‘First, let’s see if he’s clever enough to study and pass his exams. Run along, Ravi.’

‘What will you be when you’re grown up?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, of course you must know. A teacher? An air hostess? A nurse?’

‘I’ll be a … I’ll be Mary Poppins, so I can fly up into the sky with my magic bag.’

‘Oh Sarah, stop being silly. You know perfectly well you can’t be someone else.’

‘I won’t grow up. I won’t grow up!’

The telegram announcing that Sarah Livingstone had been admitted to Oxford arrived at breakfast time. A family
argument
was in progress over who was responsible for the
soft-boiled
eggs being as hard as old rubber; and it had grown so acrimonious before the postman rang the front-door bell that bad temper remained in the air even after Sarah had opened the envelope and it slightly affected the celebration. The words on the telegram form did not immediately make sense – little strips pasted together, almost as if in code. But the very arrival of the telegram told the family what it was about and the words only served to define certain secondary details.

‘Well, there we are,’ her father said, as if it were a family achievement. ‘You run along to Oxford, my dear. I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time.’ And the news had moved him so little that he concentrated on buttering his toast to total smoothness.

‘Great! When do we get rid of you?’ her younger brother asked.

Only Sarah’s mother, flushed by the cooker, had trembled with excitement at the thought of the freedom ahead of her daughter, which her generation had not thought it necessary for her to experience.

They passed the telegram around, joking about the use of Sarah’s middle name, about the time at which the telegram had been sent. (‘Gosh, so late, you must have been an
afterthought!’
) and even the eggs were accepted under cover of their contentment.

When she looked back on it, Sarah saw that she had received the news rather like instructions; she had duly finished her schooldays and now she was to go to university.
There seemed no comfortable alternatives. At her school, there was one sixth-form pregnancy and three gruesome sufferers from anorexia nervosa. One of these was in the same small class as Sarah, preparing for the Oxbridge exams. At the weeks went by and the prospect grew more and more daunting, so the thin girl dwindled, coming to the class frailer and frailer each day until, only two weeks before the exams, she vanished and they were told that she was being treated in hospital. That girl stayed in Sarah’s mind like a thwarted ghost and when she received the telegram, she felt a pang of guilt for this future should really have been given to the thin girl who wanted it so much. Sarah could not make up her mind if
she
did, but something about her family’s bland acceptance of the news as the natural course of events irritated her unexpectedly. Looking around at the jolly satisfaction which had replaced the acrimony over the eggs, she felt acutely left out. All this represented was a pattern of which she suspected that she herself was the least part. She said, ‘Give me back my telegram,’ and taking it, folded it up very small and put it back into the envelope.