Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography by Margaret Thatcher Page A

greatdeal from the fact that Oxford at the end of the war was a place of such mixed views and experience.
    I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment. I continued to take long walks on my own, around Christ Church Meadow, through the university parks and along the Cherwell or the Thames, enjoying my own company and thoughts. But I soon started to appreciate Oxford life. I was a member of a Methodist Study Group which gave and attended tea parties. My mother would send me cakes through the post and on a Saturday morning I would join the queue outside the ‘cake factory’ in north Oxford for an hour or so to buy the sustenance for tea that Sunday. I joined the Bach Choir, conducted by Sir Thomas Armstrong (by a nice coincidence Robert Armstrong’s father), whose repertoire was wider than its name suggested. I especially remember our performance of the
St Matthew Passion
in the Sheldonian Theatre, which Wren might have designed for the purpose. We also sang
Prince Igor
, Constant Lambert’s
Rio Grande
, and Holst’s
Hymn of Jesus.
Sometimes I went to listen rather than to sing: I heard Kathleen Ferrier in Elgar’s
Dream of Gerontius.
    With the end of the war and the return of the servicemen, the pace of entertainment quickened. Eights Week was revived and I went down to the river to watch the races. It was at this time that I first went out to dances and even on occasion drank a little wine (I had previously only tasted sherry and did not like it; nor do I now). I smoked my first cigarettes. I did not like them much either, though I knew I would get the taste if I persisted. I decided not to, to save the money and buy
The Times
every day instead. I now went to my first commem ball, and, like the girl in the song, danced all night. I saw Chekhov and Shakespeare at the Playhouse and the New Theatre. (Christopher Fry’s first plays were being performed at that time.) And I saw a wonderful OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) production performed in a college garden and featuring Kenneth Tynan, Oxford’s latest dandy. I cannot remember the play, partly because it was always difficult to distinguish Ken Tynan on stage from Ken Tynan in everyday life.
    I might have had a more glittering Oxford career, but I had little money to spare and would have been hard put to make ends meet if it had not been for a number of modest grants secured for me from the college at the instance of my ever-helpful tutor, the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. I was also assisted by some educational trusts. I might have been able to supplement my income further from such sources if I had been preparedto give an undertaking to go into teaching. But I knew I had no such calling; and I did and do believe that good teachers need a vocation. In fact, I did teach science for one vacation at a school in Grantham in the summer of 1944: this earned the money for that luxury in Grantham but near-necessity in Oxford – a bicycle. It was while I was teaching there that Paris was liberated. The headmaster called the school together, announced that Paris was free again and told us how the brave Resistance fighters had helped the Allies by rising up against the German occupiers.
    It was a thrilling moment. The war was evidently being won; I felt somehow less guilty for not being able to play a larger part; and I shared the joy of the British people that the French Resistance had restored French honour and pride. We may have had an exaggerated view in those days of the universality of resistance – we told each other stories of how the customers of a café would tap out ‘V for Victory’ in morse code on their glasses when a German soldier entered the café – but we had no doubt that every true Frenchman wanted to be free.
    I threw myself into intensely hard work. In Dorothy Hodgkin the college was fortunate to have a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher, working in the comparatively new field of X-ray