and woke up in a pool of vomit. Next morning, my bedder, an elderly veteran named Rose, took in the situation with a wordless glance and went to work. Within two hours, I was clean, dressed, and in my armchair, coffee to hand and sputtering with embarrassment. Rose, in cool command, returned my bed and its surroundings to their usual pristine condition while chatting nonchalantly away about her daughter-in-law’s travails at the supermarket. She never spoke of the incident to me, nor I to her, and our relationship suffered no detriment.
I think I gave Rose an unusually large box of chocolates that Christmas. I would certainly not have known what else to do: she was poor and might have appreciated hard cash, but the college frowned upon money tips and in any case I was no better off than she was. The difference between us, elective cultural affinities aside, lay in our future prospects, not our contemporary condition. We both understood this, though she doubtless better than I.
A decade later, I was now in authority: Rose’s employer, so to speak. A fellow of King’s and, briefly, associate dean, it was my job on occasion to reprimand undergraduates for excessively inappropriate behavior. In this capacity I once mediated between a bunch of late-Seventies students (boys and girls alike, King’s having gone “mixed” in 1972) who had been seen cavorting naked on the college lawns early one morning and a bedder who had taken umbrage at their immodesty. The students were utterly mystified: in those post-authoritarian times it was incomprehensible to them that anyone would find such behavior untoward, much less “inappropriate.” It was not, as one of them pointed out to me, as though they had been “doing it in the road”—a Paul McCartney reference that they could reasonably expect a Sixties-era Fellow to recognize.
The bedder, however, was inconsolable. Nudity was not unfamiliar to her. She had witnessed generations of young rugby players, cavorting drunkenly in their underpants before collapsing into an alcoholic stupor. But this was different. For a start there were girls involved and this upset her. In the second place, no one had made any effort to pretend or dissimulate or cover up. And thirdly, they had laughed at her discomfort. In short, they had broken the rules of engagement and she felt humiliated.
The undergraduates in question, as it turned out, were mostly from state schools: upwardly mobile, first- generation students of modest background. This, too, upset the bedder. It was one thing to be patronized by young gentlemen of the old sort—who would characteristically have apologized the following morning and expressed their regret in the form of a gift or even an affectionate, remorseful embrace. But the newer sort of student treated her as an equal—and it was this as much as anything else which hurt her feelings. The bedder was not the undergraduates’ equal; never would be. But at least she had a traditional claim, even if only during their student years, upon their forbearance and respect. What was the point of being an underpaid servant if this was no longer forthcoming? At that point the relationship was reduced to one of mere employment, in which case she would be better off at the local canning factory.
The nuances of this encounter would have escaped me altogether had I not myself been educated into this late-era application of noblesse oblige. I tried to explain to the students—just ten years my junior—exactly why this middle-aged lady was so offended and upset. But all they could hear was a justification for indentured servitude in an age of rhetorical egalitarianism. They were certainly not against the institution of bedders, of which they were the beneficiaries. They simply thought that the women should be better paid: as though this would inure them to the injuries of class and the wounded vanity of status loss—absolving the boys and girls whose beds they made from the
I think I gave Rose an unusually large box of chocolates that Christmas. I would certainly not have known what else to do: she was poor and might have appreciated hard cash, but the college frowned upon money tips and in any case I was no better off than she was. The difference between us, elective cultural affinities aside, lay in our future prospects, not our contemporary condition. We both understood this, though she doubtless better than I.
A decade later, I was now in authority: Rose’s employer, so to speak. A fellow of King’s and, briefly, associate dean, it was my job on occasion to reprimand undergraduates for excessively inappropriate behavior. In this capacity I once mediated between a bunch of late-Seventies students (boys and girls alike, King’s having gone “mixed” in 1972) who had been seen cavorting naked on the college lawns early one morning and a bedder who had taken umbrage at their immodesty. The students were utterly mystified: in those post-authoritarian times it was incomprehensible to them that anyone would find such behavior untoward, much less “inappropriate.” It was not, as one of them pointed out to me, as though they had been “doing it in the road”—a Paul McCartney reference that they could reasonably expect a Sixties-era Fellow to recognize.
The bedder, however, was inconsolable. Nudity was not unfamiliar to her. She had witnessed generations of young rugby players, cavorting drunkenly in their underpants before collapsing into an alcoholic stupor. But this was different. For a start there were girls involved and this upset her. In the second place, no one had made any effort to pretend or dissimulate or cover up. And thirdly, they had laughed at her discomfort. In short, they had broken the rules of engagement and she felt humiliated.
The undergraduates in question, as it turned out, were mostly from state schools: upwardly mobile, first- generation students of modest background. This, too, upset the bedder. It was one thing to be patronized by young gentlemen of the old sort—who would characteristically have apologized the following morning and expressed their regret in the form of a gift or even an affectionate, remorseful embrace. But the newer sort of student treated her as an equal—and it was this as much as anything else which hurt her feelings. The bedder was not the undergraduates’ equal; never would be. But at least she had a traditional claim, even if only during their student years, upon their forbearance and respect. What was the point of being an underpaid servant if this was no longer forthcoming? At that point the relationship was reduced to one of mere employment, in which case she would be better off at the local canning factory.
The nuances of this encounter would have escaped me altogether had I not myself been educated into this late-era application of noblesse oblige. I tried to explain to the students—just ten years my junior—exactly why this middle-aged lady was so offended and upset. But all they could hear was a justification for indentured servitude in an age of rhetorical egalitarianism. They were certainly not against the institution of bedders, of which they were the beneficiaries. They simply thought that the women should be better paid: as though this would inure them to the injuries of class and the wounded vanity of status loss—absolving the boys and girls whose beds they made from the
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