Last week I had happened to watch Shadowlands–the story of C.S. Lewis and his wife Joy Gresham with the backdrop of Oxford in the 1940’s.
The movie was released in 1993, and so it predated my arrival at Oxford by merely six years. The views were, of course, strikingly familiar to that of memory. Lewis was a don at Magdalen College; I had the privilege of visiting it a couple of times due to my friendship with Ernest Lee.
The Magdalen Tower was perhaps a permanent fixture of my years at Oxford; I had to cross the Magdalen Bridge a couple of times a day on the way to college and back to my abode on Cowley Road and Dawson Street. I’d remember waking up in the wee hours of the first day of May in 1997, walked to the bridge, joined my friends (and thousands of others) to hear the choristers singing from the Tower at six in the morning. Ending which, the madness began where the mayday revelers would go delirious with some jumping off the bridge into the Isis. I remembered a young man (Scottish, presumably) who flipped his kilt, mooned everyone and took off into the muddy river.
I would have forgotten that if it wasn’t for the movie–which depicted similar shenanigans as witnessed by C.S. Lewis. It was one of the things that made Oxford Oxford, I suppose. Maybe I’d get to relive this experience again, watching the sun rise on Isis serenaded by the Magdalen College School choirboys, marking the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere.
Addendum: Found out in the Wikipedia entry for May Morning that someone ended up paralyzed in 1997 from jumping into the river. I wonder if it was that Scottish fellow.