Old_Love

“I must say, with some considerable disappointment,

never.”

“I am sorry to hear that; why not?”

“Because when they did invite me, I informed the President that I would prefer to wait to be elected at the same time as my wife.”

Some non-University guests sitting in high table for the first time took their verbal battles seriously; others could only be envious of such love.

One Fellow uncharitably suggested they rehearsed their lines before coming to dinner for fear it might be thought they were getting on well together.

During their early years as young dons, they became acknowledged as the leaders in their respective fields. Like magnets, they attracted the brightest undergraduates while apparently remaining poles apart themselves.

“Dr. Hatchard will be delivering half these lectures,” Philippa announced at the start of the M ichaelmas Term of their joint lecture course on Arthurian legend. “But I can assure you it will not be the better half. You would be wise always to check which Dr. Hatchard is lecturing.”

When Philippa was invited to give a series of lectures at Yale, William took a sabbatical so that he could be with her.

On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Philippa said, “Let’s at least be thankful the journey is by sea, my dear, so we can’t run out of petrol.”

“Rather let us thank God,” replied William, “that the ship has an engine because you would even take the wind out of Cunard’s sails.”

The only sadness in their lives was that Philippa could bear William no children, but if anything it drew the two closer together. Philippa lavished quasi-maternal affection on her tutorial pupils and allowed herself only the wry comment that she was spared the probability of producing a child with William’s looks and William’s brains.

At the outbreak of war William’s expertise with handling words made a move into cipher-breaking inevitable.

He was recruited by an anonymous gentleman who visited them at home with a briefcase chained to his wrist.

Philippa listened shamelessly at the keyhole while they discussed the problems they had come up against and burst into the room and demanded to be recruited as well.

“Do you realise that I can complete The Times crossword puzzle in half the time my husband can?”

The anonymous man was only thankful that he wasn’t chained to Philippa. He drafted them both to the Admiralty section to deal with enciphered wireless messages to and from German submarines.

The German signal manual was a four-letter code book and each message was reciphered, the substitution table changing daily. William taught Philippa how to evaluate letter frequencies and she applied her new knowledge to modern German texts,

coming up with a frequency analysis that was soon used by every code-breaking department in the Commonwealth.

Even so breaking the ciphers and building up the master Old Low signal book was a colossal task which took them the best part of two years.

“I never knew your if s and ends could be so informative,” she said admiringly of her own work.

When the allies invaded Europe husband and wife could together, often break ciphers with no more than half a dozen lines of encoded text to go on.

“They’re an illiterate lot,” grumbled William. “They don’t encipher their umlauts. They deserve to be misunderstood.’

“How can you give an opinion when you never dot your i’s William?”

“Because, I consider the dot is redundant and I hope to be responsible for removing it from the English language.”

“Is that to be your major contribution to the scholarship, William, if so I am bound to ask how anyone reading the work of most of our undergraduates’ essays would be able to tell the difference between and I and an i.”

“A feeble argument my dear, that if it had any conviction would demand that you put a dot on top of an n so as to be sure it wasn’t mistaken for an h.”

“Keep working away at your theories, William, because I intend to spend my energy removing more than the dot

and the I from Hitler.”

In M ay 1945 they dined privately with the Prime M inister and M rs. Churchill at Number Ten Downing Street.

“What did the Prime M inister mean when he said to me he could never understand what you were up to?” asked Philippa in the taxi to Paddington Station.

“The same as when he said to me he knew exactly what you were capable of, I suppose,” said William.

When the M erton Professor of English retired in the early nineteen-fifties the whole University waited to see which Doctor Hatchard would be appointed to the chair.

“If Council invite you to take the chair,” said William, putting his hand through his greying hair, “it will be because they are going to make me Vice-Chancellor.”

“The only way you could ever be invited to hold a position so far beyond your ability would be nepotism, which would mean I was already Vice-Chancellor.”

The General Board, after several hours’ discussion of the problem, offered two chairs and appointed William and Philippa full professors on the same day.

When the Vice-Chancellor was asked why precedent had been broken he replied: “Simple; if I hadn’t given them both a chair, one of them would have been after my job.”

That night, after a celebration dinner when they were walking home together along the banks of the Isis across Christ

Church M eadows, in the midst of a particularly heated argument about the quality of the last volume of Proust’s monumental works, a policeman, noticing the affray, ran over to them and asked:

“Is everything all right, madam?”

“No, it is not,” William interjected, “this woman has been attacking me for over thirty years and to date the police have done deplorably little to protect me.”

In the late fifties Harold M acmillan invited Philippa to join the board of the IBA.

“I suppose you’ll become what’s known as a telly don,” said William, “and as the average mental age of those who watch the box is seven you should feel quite at home.”

“Agreed,” said Philippa. “Twenty years of living with you has made me fully qualified to deal with infants.”

The chairman of the BBC wrote to William a few weeks later inviting him to join the Board of Governors.

“Are you to replace ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ or ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’?” Philippa inquired.

“I am to give a series of twelve lectures.”

“On what subject, pray?”

“Genius.”

Philippa flicked through the Radio Times. “I see that ‘Genius’ is to be viewed at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, Old

Lone which is understandable, as it’s when you are at your most brilliant.”

When William was awarded an honorary doctorate at Princeton, Philippa attended the ceremony and sat proudly in the front row.

“I tried to secure a place at the back,” she explained, “but it was filled with sleeping students who had obviously never heard of you.”

“If that’s the case, Philippa, I am only surprised you didn’t mistake them for one of your tutorial lectures.”

As the years passed many anecdotes, only some of which were apocryphal, passed into the Oxford fabric. Everyone in the English school knew the stories about the “fighting Hatchards”. How they spent their first night together. How they jointly won the Charles Oldham. How Phil would complete The Times crossword before Bill had finished shaving. How they were both appointed to professorial chairs on the same day, and worked longer hours than any of their contemporaries as if they still had something to prove, if only to each other. It seemed almost required by the laws of symmetry that they should always be judged equals. Until it was announced in the New Year’s Honours that Philippa had been made a Dame of the British Empire.

“At least our dear Queen has worked out which one of us is truly worthy of recognition,” she said over the college dessert.

“Our dear Queen,” said William, selecting the M adeira, “knows only too well how little competition there is in the women’s colleges: sometimes one must encourage weaker

candidates in the hope that it might inspire some real talent lower down.”

After that, whenever they attended a public function together, Philippa would have the M .C. announce them as Professor William and Dame Philippa Hatchard. She looked forward to many happy years of starting every official occasion one up on her husband, but her triumph lasted for only six months as William received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Philippa feigned surprise at the dear Queen’s uncharacteristic lapse of judgment and forthwith insisted on their being introduced in public as Sir William and Dame Philippa Hatchard.

“Understandable,” said William. “The Queen had to make you a Dame first in order that no one should mistake you for a lady. When I married you, Philippa, you were a young fellow, and now I find I’m living with an old Dame.”

“It’s no wonder,” said Philippa, “that your poor pupils can’t make up their minds whether you’re homosexual or you simply have a mother fixation.

Be thankful that I did not accept Girton’s invitation: then you would have been rr.arried to a mistress.”

“I always have been, you silly woman.”

As the years passed, they never let up their pretended belief in the other’s mental feebleness. Philippa’s books, “works of considerable distinction” she insisted, were published by Oxford University Press while William’s “works of monumental significance” he declared, were printed at the presses of Cambridge

University.

The tally of newly appointed professors of English they had taught as undergraduates soon reached double figures.

“If you will count polytechnics, I shall have to throw in M aguire’s readership in Kenya,” said William.

“You did not teach the Professor of English at Nairobi,” said Philippa. “I did. You taught the Head of State, which may well account for why the University is so highly thought of while the country is in such disarray.”

In the early sixties they conducted a battle of letters in the T.L.S. on the works of Philip Sidney without ever discussing the subject in each other’s presence. In the end the editor said the correspondence must stop and adjudicated a draw.

They both declared him an idiot.

If there was one act that annoyed William in old age about Old for Philippa, it was her continued determination each morning to complete The Times crossword before he arrived at the breakfast table. For a time, William ordered two copies of the paper until Philippa filled them both in while explaining to him it was a waste of money.

One particular morning in June at the end of their final academic year before retirement, William came down to breakfast to find only one space in the crossword left for him to complete. He studied the clue: “Skelton reported that this landed in the soup.” He immediately filled in the eight little boxes.

Philippa looked over his shoulder.

“There’s no such word, you arrogant man,” she said firmly. “You made it up to annoy me.” She placed in front of him a very hardboiled egg.

“Of course there is, you silly woman; look whymwham up in the dictionary.”

Philippa checked in the Oxford Shorter among the cookery books in the kitchen, and trumpeted her delight that it was nowhere to be found.

“M y dear Dame Philippa,” said William, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid pupil, “you surely cannot imagine because you are old and your hair has become very white that you are a sage. You must understand that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was cobbled together for simpletons whose command of the English language stretches to no more than one hundred thousand words.

When I go to college this morning I shall confirm the existence of the word in the O.E.D. on my desk. Need I remind you that the O.E.D. is a serious work which, with over five hundred thousand words, was designed for scholars like myself?”

“Rubbish,” said Philippa. “When I am proved right, you will repeat this story word for word, including your offensive non-word, at Somerville’s Gaudy Feast.”

“And you, my dear, will read the Collected Works of John Skelton and eat humble pie as your first course.”

“We’ll ask old Onions along to adjudicate.”

“Agreed.”

“Agreed.”

With that, Sir William picked up his paper, kissed his wife on the cheek and said with an exaggerated sigh, “It’s at times like this that I wished I’d lost the Charles Oldham.”

“You did, my dear. It was in the days when it wasn’t fashionable to admit a woman had won anything.”

“You won me.”

“Yes, you arrogant man, but I was led to believe you were one of those prizes one could return at the end of the year. And now I find I shall have to keep you, even in retirement.”

“Let us leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary, my dear, to decide the issue the Charles Oldham examiners were unable to determine,” and with that he departed for his college.

“There’s no such word,” Philippa muttered as he closed the front door.

Heart attacks are known to be rarer among women than men. When Dame Philippa suffered hers in the kitchen that morning she collapsed on the floor calling hoarsely for William, but he was already out of earshot. It was the cleaning woman who found Dame Philippa on the kitchen floor and ran to fetch someone in authority. The Bursar’s first reaction was that she was probably pretending that Sir William had hit her with a frying pan but nevertheless she hurried over to the Hatchards’ house in Little Jericho just in case. The Bursar checked Dame Philippa’s pulse and called for the college doctor and then the Principal.

Both arrived within minutes.