obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that
one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless
conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially
this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the
Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase
that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword,
namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if
they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I
disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak,
and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a
companion I never cared for in the slightest degree. . . .

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped,
our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and
three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was
Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was
Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken
the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three
years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days
it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.



2


It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream
of undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our