The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Keble College: The Record 2009
euphemism of a man sexually ‘enjoying’ a woman’s body. As
I have written elsewhere: ‘Whatever strange relationship we
have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is more like
being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being’ [Geoffrey Hill,
Collected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), p. 566.].
Both my parents left school at thirteen. My father, demobilized
from the Royal Field Artillery in 1919, joined the lowest rung
of the Worcestershire Constabulary, in which his father and his
brother-in-law were already serving. A brother, also ex-army,
joined the Worcester City force at about the same time. Thirtythree
years later, when I was beginning my third undergraduate
year at Keble, Dad retired, still with the rank of constable. He
and my mother loved music; she had a good contralto voice,
sang with the Church and Women’s Institute choirs and thought
Orlando Gibbons’s ‘The Silver Swan’ the most beautiful piece
of music ever written. He was a self-taught pianist who could
make a creditable attempt at one or two of Grieg’s salon pieces
(‘Schmetterling’ — ‘The Butterfly’ — I especially remember). He
admired Britten’s ‘Frank Bridge Variations’. I recall him, on
two separate occasions, at an hour when he usually took a nap
in the easy chair in our front room, which also served as his
office and my study, picking up a book that I chanced to have
brought home for the vacation and reading it at a sitting. The
first was Max Plowman’s little book on William Blake. After
putting it down he said ‘marvellous! marvellous!’ The second
was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. He put that down and said
nothing; and who am I to say that he was wrong? I still treasure
on my shelves a now worn and shaky copy of T S Eliot’s Selected
Essays, on the fly leaf of which is written, in my father’s careful
copperplate, ‘To Geoffrey. With love from Mom and Dad.
Christmas, 1949’.
It is in their memory that I here declare myself an
unreconstructed elitist in matters to do with education and
civil polity. I will be misunderstood as that term now connotes
‘celebrity’, possessing or seeking to possess positions of superwealth
and entitlement, of the powers conferred by belonging to
some inner circle of exclusivity. My sense of the term is wholly
different and is developed from a further statement by Simone
Weil (she was contrasting her attainments with those of her
brother, a mathematician of Pascalian precocity): ‘I did not
mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was
the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to
which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides’
[Simone Weil, Waiting for God, tr. Emma Craufurd (New York:
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