46
HARRY SPENT THE FOLLOWING week waiting for another bombshell to drop. When it did, he cheered out loud.
Giles received a telegram on the last day of term telling him he’d been offered a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, to read History.
‘By the skin of his teeth,’ was the expression Dr Paget used when he informed the headmaster.
Two months later, one scholar, one exhibitioner and one commoner arrived in the ancient university city, by different modes of transport, to begin their three-year undergraduate courses.
Harry signed up for the dramatic society and the officer training corps, Giles for the union and the cricket club, while Deakins settled himself down in the bowels of the Bodleian library, and, like a mole, was rarely seen above ground. But then, he had already decided that Oxford was where he was going to spend the rest of his life.
Harry couldn’t be so sure how he would be spending the rest of his life, while the Prime Minister continued to fly back and forth to Germany, finally returning to Heston airport with a smile on his face, waving a piece of paper and telling people what they wanted to hear. Harry wasn’t in any doubt that Britain was on the brink of war. When Emma asked him why he was so convinced, he replied, ‘Haven’t you noticed that Herr Hitler never bothers to visit us? We are always the importunate suitor, and in the end we will be spurned.’ Emma ignored his opinion, but then, like Mr Chamberlain, she didn’t want to believe he might be right.
Emma wrote to Harry twice a week, sometimes three times, despite the fact that she was working flat out preparing for her own entrance exams to Oxford.
When Harry returned to Bristol for the Christmas vacation, the two of them spent as much time together as possible, although Harry made sure he kept out of the way of Mr Barrington.
Emma turned down the chance to spend her holiday with the rest of the family in Tuscany, not hiding the fact from her father that she’d rather be with Harry.
As her entrance exam drew nearer, the number of hours Emma spent in the Antiquities room would have impressed even Deakins, but then Harry was coming to the conclusion that she was about to impress the examiners just as much as his reclusive friend had done the year before. Whenever he suggested this to Emma, she would remind him that there were twenty male students at Oxford for every female.
‘You could always go to Cambridge,’ Giles foolishly suggested.
‘Where they’re even more prehistoric,’ Emma responded. ‘They still don’t award degrees to women.’
Emma’s greatest fear was not that she wouldn’t be offered a place at Oxford, but that by the time she took it up, war would have been declared, and Harry would have signed up and departed for some foreign field that was not forever England. All her life she had been continually reminded of the Great War by the number of women who still wore black every day, in memory of their husbands, lovers, brothers and sons who had never returned from the Front, in what nobody was any longer calling the war to end all wars.
She had pleaded with Harry not to volunteer if war was declared, but at least to wait until he was called up. But after Hitler had marched into Czechoslovakia and annexed the Sudetenland, Harry never wavered in his belief that war with Germany was inevitable, and that the moment it was declared, he would be in uniform the following day.
When Harry invited Emma to join him for the Commem Ball at the end of his first year, she resolved not to discuss the possibility of war. She also made another decision.