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MY FATHER KNEW all about the Rhodes Scholarships many years before I was eligible to apply. Candidates had to be male (a restriction that thankfully has long since been removed), be in their final year at a Canadian university, and have a thorough track record of academic and athletic achievement together with some signs of leadership potential and of concern for the welfare of others. Cecil Rhodes, born in 1853, an imperialist who had made a fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa, created the scholarship fund in his will in 1902. It was to be the world’s first international study program. Ideally, Rhodes wanted the impossible: fully rounded individuals who would take back to their countries of origin the gifts offered by an Oxford education (something he didn’t complete all in one session because of poor health). When my father started to campaign and exhort me to apply, I wasn’t optimistic.

Several well-meaning but misinformed key people, some of whom I had hoped to put down as my necessary references, told me fairly directly that these scholarships always went to the sons of the educated “well-to-do” in Canadian life. The not-so-subtle subtext was that an east-ender whose parents were working-class immigrants from a family where nobody, at least in recent generations, had ever gone to university didn’t have a hope in Hades of getting the award. Recent studies of successful Rhodes Scholarship applicants over the years show this perception to have been quite erroneous. Fortunately, my father convinced me to move ahead with an application. I had the high marks, and while I wasn’t extremely proficient in any one particular sport, I had played intramural basketball and hockey for Wycliffe College. I was also a member of the university history club as well as the leader of a growing young people’s Bible class at a downtown church. And I had spent the three summers at Big Trout Lake teaching Cree children.

All of this was noted in my application, which was sent in early October 1950. Some weeks went by and then a letter came inviting me to a reception for the candidates from all over the province. It was held one evening near the end of November at the large Rosedale home of Roland Michener, himself a former Rhodes Scholar, who was eventually chosen by the Queen to be the Governor General of Canada. Although the Micheners were warm and hospitable, I felt self-conscious because all the guests knew that only two of us would be chosen to be Ontario’s scholars when we went for our formal interview on the coming Saturday. Quite naturally, we were all busy assessing our competitors while being ultrapolite. Because I didn’t drink at that point in my life, I was one of the very few people who didn’t have a glass of sherry or white wine to hold on to. I was seized with a kind of stage fright and felt certain I would be perceived as altogether too shy and awkward. It was a great relief when the evening ended and we said our goodbyes.

On the Saturday, however, as the hour for my interview drew closer, I felt increasingly calm and ready for anything. It seemed to me that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going in and doing my best. Perhaps my lack of optimism somehow lent me a certain poise, I don’t know. The interview was held in a lovely, familiar reading room on the second floor of Hart House. When I went in, I was shown to a chair facing a panel of five or six men, all of them former Rhodes Scholars, all of them distinguished in some branch of Canadian life. There were a couple of professors, a noted medical authority and a judge. They took turns asking probing yet friendly questions about my plans should I be selected and go on to Oxford, about my views on the future of religion, and in some detail about what I thought of the federal government’s policies regarding our Native peoples. It was in fact a truly relaxed and stimulating experience. As the chairman thanked me and showed me out, he whispered, “Well done.”

I went for a long walk around Queen’s Park to try to settle down and then went back to my room at Wycliffe to work on a piece of Greek prose composition that was due on the coming Monday morning. It was by then around five-thirty. Because it was a Saturday, the college was nearly empty; almost all of the boarders had gone home or were out for the evening. The theological students had left for the parishes where they assisted on weekends. It had grown dark outside, and the place was almost unnaturally silent.

At about six-thirty, the third-floor buzzer rang out with my particular signal code. I went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the student who was tending the front hall desk, “Who is it?” He yelled back, “It’s somebody for you, Harpur.” I tore down the three flights to the phone booth below. A deep male voice asked, “Is that Tom Harpur?” I said it was and he announced, “Congratulations, Tom. You’ve been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and will be going to the college of your choice at Oxford next fall.” I managed somehow to thank him and hung up. For a moment I braced myself against the back of the booth and said a brief but profoundly heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving to God who had made this miracle possible. I was momentarily overwhelmed. Then I telephoned my parents to share the news and to tell them I was coming home by streetcar as soon as possible.

My father greeted me at the door simply beaming and nearly bursting with pride. “Where’s Mum?” I asked. He said, “She’s up in our bedroom on her knees praying that God will show you that you ought not to go unless it really is His will.” I had a problem with the logic and the theology of that kind of response, but I knew she loved me and, in spite of her anxious disposition, would at some point admit she too was pleased with this unprecedented event in our family’s history. In the end, it was a very happy evening in our humble Lawlor Avenue home.

My parents drove me to Montreal some months later to catch the Cunard liner that would take me to Liverpool and a brief visit in Northern Ireland with our many relatives there before I journeyed on to Oxford. Standing in the crowd at the ship’s rail as the engines began to thrum and the small gap of water between oneself and loved ones on the dock began to widen ever more rapidly brought a rush of conflicting emotions. There was all the excitement of a great unknown adventure begun, mixed with premature homesickness as Canada and home would now be gone from my life for two years, perhaps three.

The last time I had made this same voyage down the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic was as a boy of nine. I was now twenty-two, this was the first of five crossings by ship I would make as an adult, not to mention many more later by aircraft as a journalist for the Toronto Star and for pleasure trips. An economy-class berth on a Cunarder was to my mind a luxury beyond compare. It was September and as we sailed downriver the maples along the north shore of the St. Lawrence were already tinged with scarlet. Bright steeples gleamed above every village clustering at the water’s edge. There was all the time in the world to read, to walk briskly around the decks, to chat with other travellers and to delight in a succession of simply glorious dining experiences. When we reached the open Atlantic, I found that gazing steadily off at the distant horizon for a fixed period of from twenty minutes to half an hour morning and evening was an effective form of meditation—unless of course one was susceptible to seasickness, as some passengers quickly found they were. However, no mode of travel this observer has ever since employed comes even close to the sheer joy of an ocean crossing in a modern liner. Few things are better for one’s spiritual or physical health.

Arriving in Oxford on a late September afternoon was quite an anticlimax. Trains entering the city from the north catch a quick glimpse of spires and towers across a river flanked by a wide expanse of meadow (Port Meadow) before being swallowed up by numerous other engines, dark sheds, stark mechanical devices of various kinds, vistas of cluttered back gardens, and then the looming shadows of what used to be known as the gasworks. Having been primed by all the lofty praise dedicated in poetry and prose to chanting the aesthetic charms, the “towers in the mist,” of this ancient city, I felt let down. But by the time the taxicab was out of the station area and whizzing down the High Street, things were looking a great deal better. Even though it is much more invaded by and surrounded with all that makes up a very busy English city than Cambridge is (Oxford has been described as a city that has a university while Cambridge is a university that also happens to be a city), it more than measures up in the end to all the advance notices. It is just more tucked away, more subtly woven into its background, more reluctant to give up all its treasures all at once than “the other place,” as Cambridge was known to all Oxonians.

I must have seemed like a very keen “colonial” (as some of the English students liked to dub those of us from overseas) because when the taxi dropped me together with my luggage at the gate to Oriel College, I was promptly told by an elderly gentleman at the porter’s lodge that I was more than a week early. “Room’s not ready yet, sir,” he said. “You’re a bit ahead of yourself, you are.” He consented to my leaving most of my stuff at the college in spite of this and recommended a small hotel near Magdalen Bridge, farther down the High Street (popularly referred to as “the High”). I took a very modest room at the Eastgate Hotel, where, as I would learn later, the already renowned author and lecturer C.S. Lewis was regularly to be seen enjoying a pint or two with a friend at the cozy bar below. He was an English tutor at Magdalen (pronounced Maw-da-lin) at that time.

Later that night, while having supper at a second-floor restaurant overlooking the High, it was brought forcibly home to me just how much the British were still feeling the effects of World War II. There was no meat to speak of on the menu and not a great deal of choice of other dishes either. I was soon to discover, once properly moved into residence, that several staple foods were still being rationed, eggs, butter, margarine, tea and sugar among them. My scout, as the college servant who looked after the “young gentlemen” on each staircase was called, presented me with a tiny piece of butter, a small block of margarine and a small bag of sugar every Monday morning once I took up residence. You were supposed to use these for tea in your room and bring them along to the refectory at mealtimes.

My scout’s name was Cuddiford (I never learned his first name as he seemed more than content to be called by his surname) and he had served as batman to a senior officer in the British army during World War II. He brought each of us hot water for shaving when he came in and flung open the curtains every morning, and then cleaned up the dishes after teatime each afternoon. In hall, as the refectory was known, Cuddiford and the other scouts served the meals—wearing formal wear for dinner. The dons or tutors (officially known as Fellows of Oriel College) took their meals with the provost (principal or president of the college) on a raised dais or platform at the head of the hall. They had much better fare than was served to the students, together with wines from a well-stocked cellar.

In his will, Cecil Rhodes—who was once upset while dining at Oriel to find there were holes in his table napkin—had left a princely sum to uphold the dignity and honour of the college’s head table. Dinner each evening began with the provost or one of the dons standing up and bowing to a student whose scholarship or bursary entailed his saying the lengthy Latin Oriel grace or blessing of the food. He would commence with an answering bow and then launch into it. I found that after a couple of weeks I had unconsciously memorized this sonorous-sounding invocation, and even today it resonates in its entirety the moment I recall the scene to mind. The grace was reportedly first recorded by St. John Chrysostom, an early patriarch of Constantinople who played a not insignificant role in this writer’s life, as we shall see. It can now be found in full, with a translation, under the Wikipedia entry for Oriel College on the Internet.

While it has changed and grown over the centuries, Oriel College is one of the oldest in the university, having been founded by Edward II in 1326. It will thus celebrate its seven hundredth anniversary in 2026, a short time from now. Because it was a royal foundation, Her Majesty The Queen is the official college Visitor and must pay a formal visit whenever her duties bring her to Oxford. There is a large portrait of the founder at the north end of the hall, over the head table, and one of Queen Elizabeth II at the south end. The hall itself is a stunning, light-filled, oak-panelled edifice with a soaring hammerbeam roof. When the tables are laid with the historic college silver, some of it dating back to the medieval period, and the place is packed with students—today both male and female, since women were finally admitted in 1985—it simply glows with warmth and vibrant energy. It wasn’t long before I felt very much at home.

At the same time, I must admit up front that being a student at Oxford and a member of Oriel was a truly humbling experience. People much wiser and cleverer than I have expressed the same feelings about this. You see yourself from a different perspective when you walk amidst the ghosts of all the great names from the past. Just to take Oriel alone: The key founders of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England—John Henry Cardinal Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble—were at one time Fellows of Oriel. Sir Walter Raleigh was a student (c.1585), as was Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1710–1713), the patron and friend of George Washington. Winston Churchill’s grandfather John Spencer-Churchill, seventh Duke of Marlborough, attended Oriel, as did Cecil Rhodes (1876–78), the poet Matthew Arnold (1845), two Nobel Prize laureates and numerous bishops, including two Archbishops of Canterbury. In short, the full list of notables who walked those cloistered halls is beyond impressive. But, thankfully, as well as being sometimes intimidating, the illustrious history of Oriel, and of Oxford itself, was a source of inspiration. It made you want to do your very best.

Readers who have enjoyed the British television crime series Inspector Morse will be interested to learn that the buildings and quadrangles of Oriel College were used as the location for “Ghost in the Machine,” under the name of Courtenay College, as well as the following episodes: “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn,” “The Infernal Serpent,” “Deadly Slumber,” “Twilight of the Gods” and “Death is Now My Neighbour.” The college was also used as the location for the actor Hugh Grant’s first major film in 1982, Privileged, as well as for Oxford Blues (1984), True Blue (1991) and The Dinosaur Hunter (2000). Other television series, a documentary (on Gilbert White) and the book Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes were also shot or set either in part or wholly at Oriel. When I first walked around Oxford in my early days there, I felt very much as though it were all one big movie set because of the rich and at times nostalgic aura surrounding everything, especially when the mist rose up from the Cherwell and Isis rivers in the evenings. Since then, the city has in fact become the movie set I thought it was in 1951.

At Oxford they talk not of studying a particular subject but of “reading” political science or economics or physics. I read Classics, or “Greats” as it was called, and so was not actually exposed to an English seminary. However, every college had its Anglican chapel and a learned chaplain. Oriel, one of the smallest and oldest of the colleges, was no exception. The circumstances of my meeting our chaplain, Dr. Roy Porter, for the first time were somewhat unusual. I had just arrived to take up residence the day before. My room was on the second floor, off staircase number one, in the main quadrangle. Immediately below me was the large, though similarly bare, suite of the Captain of Boats—head of the Oriel College Rowing Club. On this particular evening there was a club party in his rooms to celebrate the beginning of a new term. The din of the revellers was worsened when, as they drained each glass of beer, they tossed the glass through an open window to crash on the concrete pavement around the quadrangle of grass below. Coming from a conservative background, and being Canadian, I was surprised at both the obvious drunkenness and the wanton waste.

Then I heard a crash of tangled metal. I looked downstairs and saw a student with his dinner jacket askew, bow tie hanging by a thread, climbing the stairs carrying a bicycle over his shoulders. I watched open-mouthed as he staggered past me up to the third floor, paused for a moment before an open window, and then threw the bicycle out and down to the quad below. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, and he said with an inebriated grin: “My tutor told me that after the party he wanted to see the whole quad filled with bicycles!”

I decided to lodge a formal complaint and went in search of the Captain of Boats. Looking into the crowded room, my eyes focused on a small black-suited figure with a clerical collar: the college chaplain, a man renowned for his knowledge of the ancient Biblical languages and one of the most noted of the translators of the New English Bible. Porter was being held firmly in the grip of two very large oarsmen while a third wound bathroom tissue around him in wreaths from head to foot. A fourth student then mounted a chair holding a pitcher of beer and, reciting some kind of Latin mumbo-jumbo, poured the beer over the chaplain’s head in a mockery of baptism. The helpless cleric spotted me and cried out for rescue. Call it discretion or cowardice, but there were twenty “enthusiastic” young men in the room who were looking for trouble. I decided that anyone clever enough to decipher Hebrew ought to have known better than to be there in the first place, so I retreated and left him to their mercies. The next day I saw him enjoying himself at the head table with the other dons, so it seemed his little encounter had caused him no permanent damage.

With these antics and many more, I suffered a certain loss of innocence during those first few days in the city of mist and “dreaming spires.”

My footsteps reverberated through the deserted quad and the clock tower began to tremble as its inner workings prepared to sound the hour. Peter Brunt, my tutor in Greek and Roman history, had sent a terse note earlier in the day saying he was down with a cold, wouldn’t be able to meet with me for the usual full hour, but would I come along at eight p.m. for a brief chat about my studies? I adjusted my ridiculously short commoner’s gown as I reached the door of his apartment. As yet we hadn’t been introduced, although his rooms were on the front quad not far from my own. As I knocked, the eight strokes of the bell had begun their doleful litany.

The chiming ended before I could make out the distant, exceptionally nasal voice saying: “Come in, come in—the bloody door is open!” I entered timidly into what proved to be his study-cum-sitting-room. The air was rank with stale cigarette smoke. Books, papers and files were stacked on all sides. Apart from two tired, deep easy chairs in front of the standard electric fireplace, the only piece of furniture visible was a large oak table. There was so much clutter around and upon it, however, that it was very well disguised. The best thing about the room, as I subsequently discovered, was its splendid view of the college’s main quadrangle, with the entrance or clock tower on the west and the ancient hall or refectory on the east.

The door in one corner of the study was open and Professor Brunt, my don or tutor, could be seen propped up in bed, surrounded by more stacks of books. He was sneezing loudly, and apparently very moistly, into a dubious-looking handkerchief. His eyes and nose were red and his hair was tousled. When the immediate paroxysms were over, he waved me in with an impatient gesture of his free hand, holding the hanky ready with the other. Since there was no place to sit—the only chair was already carrying its own literary burden—I stood respectfully at the foot of the narrow, astonishingly short bed and tried my best not to stare.

To be honest, I was both scared and intrigued at the same time. I knew this germ-laden, wheezing gentleman was one of the greatest living authorities on the classical period of Greece and Rome. He was later to become the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, from 1970 to 1982. Brunt, the son of a Methodist minister, was born in 1918 and was eighty-eight when he died. He had scored a rare double first in his own time as an undergraduate and was then, at about thirty-six, still a comparatively young man. I figured he had already forgotten more that I might ever know. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was destined to spend at least an hour a week on my own with Brunt for three eight-week terms every year for the next three, a total of over seventy-two hours one-on-one. It was a schooling in the history of the period before and surrounding the birth of Christianity that few people have been privileged to receive. Above all, it taught me in depth about this crucial question: What constitutes genuine historical evidence, or in other words, what do we truly mean by “historical” and “historicity”? That question was to play an important role in the later controversy over The Pagan Christ.

“You’re Harpur, are you?” he coughed. I assured him I was. “You’re my eleventh student. The others will come in pairs for tutorials, but you’ll have to come by yourself.”

At the time, this had no significance for me. What I didn’t know was that when there were two students, one would read his weekly essay aloud; the other would be assumed to have written one if he made a useful contribution to the discussion. Thus, you could get away with just making notes on your research every other week. Being alone for each session, however, meant I had no option but to write an essay for Brunt every time. He explained that these essays should be about two thousand words long, which would be roughly twenty minutes of reading aloud. With a snuffle close to a snort, he said: “And I don’t want you just to regurgitate what you’ve read in the books I assign for each topic. I’ve read them; I know what’s in them already. What we want to know is what you think about what they think—backed by plenty of evidence.”

He was, as I later learned, a very gentle person, but he sniffled and dabbed his streaming eyes and fixed me with what I thought was an angry grimace, then shot out: “You do read Greek, don’t you?” When I nodded that I did, he fished around among the books on the chair and, coming up with a worn copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, stabbed a stubby finger down on a page and ordered: “Start translating from there.”

I was barely under way when he asked the same question about Latin, and hauled out a copy of Tacitus’s Annals. I exchanged Thucy-dides for it with a sense of relief. I could handle Tacitus’s Latin more easily than Thucydides’ elegant yet knotty Greek any day of the week.

He seemed to be quickly satisfied, and I began to feel a lot more confident. This sense was shaken, however, when he asked if I read French. “A little,” I said. “Do you read German?” “No,” I replied weakly. “Mmm, what a pity,” he sighed. He arranged the blankets under his chin and added: “Oh, by the way, your first tutorial will be on Wednesday at four p.m. Write an essay on the Athenian lawgiver Solon’s reforms.” He outlined a number of books to read in addition to the Greek sources. A sharp pang of alarm stabbed at my stomach: at least two of the books on the list were in German! My three years of study with Professor Brunt had commenced.

The next time I saw him, he was over his cold and ushered me through his door with a flourish of his lighted cigarette. Standing a scant five foot six or so, he peered up at my height with concern. Once he got me seated in the deeper of the easy chairs, he stood on the raised fender of the fireplace, his elbows crooked against the mantel. Staring down at me now, he seemed to feel more at ease. “You’re rather huge, aren’t you?” he observed. “The boat club will be glad to see you coming—the rugger club too.” In what I was soon to recognize was his habitual way, he sucked vehemently on his cigarette with his mouth open on either side of it. I was later told by other smokers that by hyper-aspirating thus one can maintain a kind of mild high because of an excess of oxygen being inhaled along with the smoke.

There was an awkward period of silence after he expressed his thoughts about the putative benefits that my size might confer on Oriel College’s athletic hopes. Then he abruptly said: “Start reading.” I pulled the product of my late-night labours (the technical term is my “lucubrations”) from my jacket pocket and, feeling a little self-conscious at being one grown man reading aloud to another who was perfectly capable of reading himself, began along the labyrinthine, even tortured paths of my reconstruction of Greek history. Occasionally he would mumble to himself, causing me to lose my place. Once or twice he challenged a statement and watched me try to defend myself. At the end he sat smoking for a few minutes and saying nothing. Finally he said: “That’s not too bad. Like a glass of sherry?”

I read him an essay every week during terms. It was an enriching encounter. We were ploughing a narrow furrow, but we ploughed it very deeply indeed.

Since Greats was a two-stream discipline composed of both ancient history (Greek and Roman) and philosophy, I had a philosophy tutor in addition to Peter Brunt. His name was Richard Robinson, a tall, slightly stooped, gaunt-looking man with sad eyes and a trace of an American accent though he had spent most of his life in England. He was in his early forties when I first met him and he died not all that long ago at just short of ninety-five years of age. He seemed a very solemn person and never spoke without giving his words considerable forethought. Robinson’s task was to instruct me not just in the philosophy of the ancient masters, Plato and Aristotle—in much greater depth than I had ever gone before and of course in their original Greek—but also in the writings and ideas of philosophers ever since, down to the modern empiricists. Robinson was a long-time atheist (he had written a book on atheist ideals as well as one on Plato’s theory of definition) and we often had lengthy discussions that edged at times into disputes over matters of faith and religion in general. We met once a week in term over three years and I knew him very well by the end. He would sit at the far end of a long oak table in his rather bare study and as I began to read my weekly offering he routinely propped his elbows on the table, let his head sink into his hands on either side and closed his eyes. Just when I felt certain that my essay had put him to sleep, he would snap his eyes open and critique or question something I’d said. Often he’d challenge my grammar. “There you go again. You keep splitting the infinitive,” he would splutter. I would apologize and soldier on.

It was a painful process at times, but he taught me to think more sharply than I ever had before. I learned a tremendous amount from him and learned also to respect the atheist position while in fundamental disagreement with it—as I remain today. I grew to like the man, but he did seem haunted by an unforgiving melancholy. Whenever I think of him I recall one day when my tutorial was scheduled for eleven a.m. Robinson had just been walking down the High before coming to our meeting. He told me that a few minutes ago he had been looking at the students crowded into a couple of coffee shops nearby. He fixed me with his sorrowful gaze and said: “You know, Harpur, happy people depress me so.”

The full richness of studying for three years at Oxford would take a book of its own to attempt to describe. There was the first long summer vacation when four of us bought an ancient London taxi and toured the Continent in it for over a month. There were other vacations where I worked cutting firewood and carrying out many other outdoor chores on a gorgeous Christian-run holiday estate on the edge of Exmoor National Park overlooking the Bristol Channel. There was always a mountain of assigned reading, but it could be done wherever one went. Several times I stayed with my uncle and aunt in Tullyhogue, Ireland, where one could always break the brain work by grabbing a fishing rod and going down to the river. The two terriers used to watch through the window, waiting for the slightest movement towards the cupboard where the guns and fishing rods were kept. They would then almost turn cartwheels in a frenzy to get going.

In spiritual matters, I found myself broadening out steadily. I became good friends with a fellow Orielensis, Andrew Bull, who happened to be Roman Catholic. Andrew rowed next to me in one of the “eights” in many practices and stirring races on the Isis (the upper Thames), and we had many vigorous discussions. (By a curious synchronicity, my annual copy of the Oriel Record arrived in the mail the same day I wrote this last passage. It contained updates on the activities of the widely flung, vast family of alumni, and also the obit for Andrew. He was later in life awarded an OBE by the Queen for his work on behalf of education in Portugal.) When I happened to mention this ongoing friendship and our debates in a letter home, I got a swift and tersely worded note from my father telling me to be very careful about my friends, and warning me of the possible risk of being recruited to Rome!

My parents, it should be noted, had picked out the church I should attend while at Oxford (on the advice of their evangelical friends from the “old country”). It was St. Ebbe’s, a keenly evangelical, Low Church congregation headed by Rev. Maurice Wood, later named as a bishop by the Queen. The church fairly bulged with students, but after my first year I began foraging elsewhere because there was a certain everything-down-patness, an overly either-or mentality of a fundamentalist flavour that I was beginning to find intellectually and spiritually cramping and confining. Even so, looking back over the more than one hundred airmail letters I wrote home during those years—my father kept them all and pasted them into a very thick scrapbook, which I still have—I realize now with some shock how extremely pious I was in the earliest days at Oriel. It embarrasses me today to read what I wrote then. Like the folk at St. Ebbe’s, I spoke about “real Christians,” that is, those who had been “properly (sic) saved” and who were quite different from the larger crowd of merely “nominal Christians.” Everything had to be seen as “the Lord’s will.” If evangelicals were the only real Christians and non-Christian religions were wholly out of the loop of salvation, obviously only a very small part of humanity stood a ghost of a chance of reaching “heaven.” Even then, however, this sad and mistaken division of the human race into the saved and the unsaved was holding less and less appeal. The seeds were already being sown as I gradually saw the need for nothing less than a spirituality that could embrace not only all of humanity but also the natural world, and the whole of the cosmos as well. Nothing less would be worthy of a God in whom one could believe. It was a long time coming, but the shaking of the foundations of former beliefs was already well under way.

There is a tradition of every Canadian who goes up to Oxford spending part of his time playing ice hockey for the university. I was not particularly good at hockey, although I had played for Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto during my undergraduate days. As a boy I had played in goal once but quit when they started calling me “the human sieve.” I loved to skate, however, and my size, which interfered with my ever being really talented at the sport, was considered a plus for a defenceman when truly capable hockey players were few and far between. I might not be able to score goals, but I could bounce the opposition a little and slow them down, or so the coaches hoped.

At Oxford, however, there were problems surrounding this particular sport, mainly the lack of a proper ice rink. We had to travel by chartered bus to London’s Harringay, Wembley or Streatham arenas both for practices and for the games themselves. These rinks could only be used after the regular public skating was over, from ten p.m. onwards. This meant long hours of boring rides to and fro and the rigours of “climbing in” over the college walls in the small hours of the morning afterwards, because of course the bus was very late in returning and the college grounds were locked at midnight.

My roommate, Donald Schultz (who was to become Professor of Engineering at Oxford and later an OBE, and who died in 1988 while hiking in New Zealand), rigged up a system for me. He tied a cord to a boot that he placed on his desk and ran the cord out the window to a height of about two and a half metres above the pavement below. I could just reach it with a jump and, by pulling hard, drag the boot off the table to make it clatter into his metal wastebasket and wake him up. He would then get dressed, go down to the quadrangle, through the arch at the other side into the centre quad, and climb up on top of the four-metre wall looking down into Oriel Street by means of a ladder we had left concealed behind the shrubbery. Once on top, carefully straddling the rotating spikes set there to discourage just such exploits as these, he would heave the ladder up and over to the spot where I was waiting. With all my hockey gear in a duffle bag, I would climb up and both of us would balance precariously as we then reversed the procedure. I still have a small scar on one hand where the spikes took their toll.

After several months of this routine, including a disastrous match with Cambridge for which I won a Half Blue, I realized the futility of this exercise and took up rowing instead.

“Come on, Jesus!”

This bizarre shout was followed by three cracks of pistol shots in quick succession and then a chorus of other loud cheers. I stopped in my tracks. I thought I had inadvertently stumbled into the making of a film—a weird sacred western of some kind. Otherwise, it must be cloud-cuckoo-land. A knot of rowdy undergraduates was surging directly towards me, yelling and firing. But the location was a towpath alongside the River Thames (or the Isis as it is called when it curves around Oxford). The occasion was Eights Week, the annual five-day rowing event to determine which college is “head of the river.”

The cheers were for the eight-man crew and coxswain of the Jesus College boat. The blank shots were to signal that they were overlapping the boat ahead of them and could sweep across for a “bump.” Since you row with your back to the direction in which you’re headed, it’s impossible for an oarsman to get an accurate assessment of the right moment to strain to strike. It’s even hard for the coxswain, steering with eight large, toiling bodies in his line of sight. Hence all the shooting.

Rowing has long been a hugely competitive tradition between Oxford and Cambridge in the annual boat race that takes place every spring around Easter. The Captain of Boats at Oriel, as previously mentioned, lived in rooms on the ground floor of number one staircase. Since mine were on the same staircase, I had to pass his door several times daily. It wasn’t long before he invited me to sign up. I soon discovered there was a great deal more to oarsmanship than simple brute strength and determination. To begin with, every initiate had to toil for many autumn afternoons at what was dubbed a “bank tub.”

Near the boathouse on the Isis, just off the towpath, was a stubby, squarish-looking “boat” permanently bolted on one side to a dock. It was really a mock version of a section of a racing eight, complete with a sliding seat, foot stirrups and an oarlock. The chief difference from the real thing was that the oar one was given had two wide gaps in it that ran close to the full length of the blade. Once the art of squaring the blade to cut the water at a firm right angle was mastered, the stroke could be carried through with a firm sense of pressure but without the full weight of water caught and carried forward by a normal blade.

It took time, under the critical eye of a member of the crew of the college’s first eight, but after a few weeks I was deemed fit to go out on the river in a regular boat. What a mess we made of it! The coach shouted instructions from his bicycle on the towpath, but he was close to losing not just his voice but his temper before the outing was over. It was one thing to pseudo-row in a bank tub, it was quite another to try to coordinate one’s oar with those of other beginners just as shaky as oneself. Nobody had warned us that balance was just as important as timing your stroke. The boat rolled easily, so that the surface of the water could be at quite a different place or plane between the time one stroke was ended and another was begun. If once the boat was actually under way your oar “caught a crab” (was too deep in the water), it almost brought the boat to a total halt as the handle was forcibly wrenched from your hands to end up striking your solar plexus while the blade was pulled uncontrollably downwards. The offending oarsman immediately became the focus of a number of intensely cross glares and much shouting from the riverbank.

Once we finally settled in and became the crew our coach was doggedly determined we should be, it was sheer joy to be out on a crisp fall day with a crew on the river. You never forget the crack of eight long oars simultaneously biting into the water as the racing shell beneath you leaps suddenly forward. As you drive your legs, back and arms into the full stroke and then slide ahead, coiling to release the next, the boat becomes a living thing, gliding with barely a susurrating curl of wave at the bow. Eight muscled bodies move as one. Everything melts into a rhythmic single-mindedness. If you close your eyes, as we sometimes were told to do in practice drill, it feels as though you are flying. The wind is on your face and the rest of the world is forgotten. It’s a glorious feeling.

In the distance, the towers and Gothic pinnacles of the colleges kept silent watch; in nearby meadows, geese and cattle grazed; close by, the majestic swans sailed on in sublime indifference. It was an almost mystical experience—until a passing barge would occasionally send a swell that would slap over the side of the shell and douse your sweaty back with cold spray. However, after a warm shower later and sitting down to tea in your study—toast and honey or a bit of cheese—before hitting the books, you felt truly alive, glowing and at peace. Our crew managed to win our oars twice and went on to wear with pride the distinctive tortoise ties—a dark blue tie with a white tortoise image sewn into it just below the knot—that marked our membership in the Tortoise Club. It is composed of those who manage to row in the long-distance races held annually on the River Thames at Reading. The college mascot was a big tortoise that could sometimes be seen sunning itself in a corner of one of the college’s three quads.

One of our crew members, Ronald Watts, the son of a Canadian Anglican bishop, later went on to become provost of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Ron and I went to the coronation of Elizabeth II in June 1953 by paddling down the Thames from Oxford to London. At night we slept under the canoe, which I had had my father ship over to me during my first term, and we dined off a very large Dutch cheese and a couple of loaves of bread. We spent two full days on the trip, paddling past Eton College, Windsor Castle and Runnymede Island, where Magna Carta was signed, and later brought the craft back to Oxford on the train.

Many years later, in 1983, at the Oxford eightieth reunion of Rhodes Scholars, which we were both attending with our wives, the Queen spoke to us and I was able to tell her of our perhaps eccentric mode of getting to her ceremony all those years ago. Her eyes twinkled as she laughed and said: “How clever of you to have paddled downstream!” A Reuters cameraman caught the happy exchange and it was featured not just in the Toronto Star but also in the New York Times and several other international newspapers the next day.

This photo op didn’t just happen by chance, although luck lent a hand. The Toronto Star foreign editor had asked me to cover the reunion since I was planning on being there in any case. So I had arranged for a freelance photographer from Reuters in London to be in the gardens at Rhodes House for the Queen’s visit. The former Governor General of Canada, Roland Michener, the oldest Rhodes Scholar on the list of those attending, was supposed to be there to greet Her Majesty. My instructions to the photographer were to capture a shot of the two of them meeting to accompany my story, to be filed later that night by phone to Toronto. Just as the rope line had been set up in the gardens and the crowd of scholars and their partners was buzzing in anticipation, the Australian freelancer whom Reuters had sent came up to me to say that Michener had reportedly been taken ill and would not be available for a picture. I told him: “Do you see that attractive lady with the coral dress and white hat?” I pointed to Susan, who was standing nearby talking to the Wattses. “If you see the Queen come anywhere close to her, get that shot if you possibly can.” I went back over to stand with Susan.

Just as the Queen, by a remarkable synchronicity, crossed to where we, together with Ron and Donna Watts, were grouped, I saw the photographer emerge above the heads of the people on the other side of the huge crowd and begin to shoot some film. He was obviously standing on a chair or box of some sort. As the Queen ended her brief stop and chat with us, I looked across at him and saw the palace police pulling him down, but not before he gave me a thumbs-up signal and a huge grin. He had got the shot, and it made the subsequent feature glow.

The following evening there was a special dinner in the gardens of the main quadrangle of Balliol College. It was a formal occasion and large tents had been set up to cover the affair in case of rain. The guest of honour and speaker for the event was the aging but vigorous former prime minister Sir Harold Macmillan. Everyone was given a glass of champagne at the entrance to the quad and with the former scholars and their partners all in tuxedos and black tie or lovely gowns, it was a highly colourful scene. Macmillan was at the top of his form—witty, provocative and wise. The wines were excellent and the fellowship over and after dinner were not soon to be forgotten.

When we finally arrived back at Oriel, where we were staying for three or four days until the reunion program ended, it was about ten-thirty, but we were still too “up” from the evening’s events to think of going to bed. Susan said she would love a cup of tea, so I changed into jeans and a sweater and took off up Oriel Lane and the High past historic St. Mary’s Church in search of a tea wagon.

The curving chief thoroughfare, graced on each side by some of the loveliest spires and towers of any avenue in the world, with its ancient colleges and famous churches, was strangely devoid of traffic. But in the distance, beyond All Souls, there sat a lone tea van. A couple of customers huddled under the lamplight. As I came up to them, it was clear that they too had been at the Balliol banquet— they were still in formal evening dress—and also that the man had lost something, because he was patting himself down like a pipe smoker in a frantic search for his matches. He and his wife appeared to be in their late thirties. He said to me, “I believe I saw you at the dinner tonight. This is a bit embarrassing, but I forgot to bring my wallet when we came out and we were hoping to get something to drink here.” I hastened to pay the small amount involved, and as I did so he said: “By the way, my name is Bill Clinton. I’m the governor of Arkansas, and this is my wife, Hillary.” I introduced myself and we had a friendly conversation for a few minutes before parting to our respective colleges.

As in the incident with the Queen, there was a postscript. A few years later, shortly after Clinton became president of the United States, I wrote to him at the White House as religion editor of the Toronto Star to register my protest at his firing of twenty-three Tomahawk missiles at intelligence facilities in Baghdad on June 26, 1993. The missiles, fired from American warships in the Red Sea, were a reprisal and “wake-up call” to Saddam Hussein for a thwarted plot to assassinate President George Bush Sr. during his “victory visit” to Kuwait in April of that year. Clinton had called the alleged plot “a particularly loathsome and cowardly” attempt. I began the brief missive on a friendly note, recalling the occasion, which I admitted he had probably long forgotten, when our paths had crossed in the High Street in Oxford in 1983. Then I put the letter totally out of my mind.

One day about four weeks later, a very official-looking parcel came by special delivery to my home. It bore the seal of the White House on the envelope and contained a personal letter, which addressed my comments. While I continued to disagree with his actions at that time, I respected his intentions and courtesy in replying to a critical response from somebody he didn’t really know and had met so briefly.