The sculpture in Bill heine’s roof is known as the headington shark, after his neighborhood in oxford.
shark on his roof. Now, it’s a cherished landmark. Both Oxford and Washington, Heine
said, have a closed society that opens up only to the initiated: politics in Washing- ton, academe in Oxford. If you were on the inside of Capitol Hill, “all the doors were open. If you weren’t inside, all the doors were closed. It’s the same here. If you’re part of the university, you’re invit- ed every place to do whatever you want. It’s New College and Magdalen College for evensong. It’s dinner at any of the col- leges. … The entree is wide open. And then you go out and open the doors and you start walking the streets and you find out what’s happening there. Instead of having barriers, it’s just a series of open- ings. That’s how I experience Oxford.”
■
Before returning home, I visited Duck- er & Son, a 112-year-old shoe store on a short street called the Turl. Ducker and his son are long gone, and the shop is run now by Bob Avery and his wife, Iso- bel. Leather-bound order books contain the names of such former customers as Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh and T.E. Lawrence. A pair of handmade shoes at Ducker
the English can be.’ ” Crazy not-quite- Englishman! I asked Heine whether he could have done such a thing back in Bat- avia. Stuck a shark on his roof, I meant. Sure, he said, “but I think you would
have then had to deal with the ‘so what?’ factor.” England, he said, is such a small
place that every corner is significant, every patch fretted and obsessed over. “People know the different alley-
ways and cobbled streets and care about them, have to care about them, because that’s all they’ve got. They don’t have these vast open spaces. … I just wonder if I had done it in America, what would it have meant?” In Oxford, Heine fought the city council for six years to let him keep the
costs about $2,000. Bob also sells less expensive shoes made to his specifica- tions in a Northampton factory. Three years ago, I splurged on a pair of brown leather Oxford brogues, what we call wingtips. They were $500, and after that, all I could really afford from Ducker were socks. But, oh, what socks: stripes of lav- ender and gray, harlequins of green and blue, pink with gumballs of color. Bright splashes under a sober suit, they were the antithesis of Washington, which seemed reason enough to buy them. As I pawed through a basket of
socks, Bob and Isobel busy with other customers, a tall, bearded American student asked if I needed any help. This turned out to be Lev Sviridov, a Rhodes scholar from New York finishing his doctorate — or DPhil, as the English call it — in organic chemistry and work- ing at Ducker on the weekends. Having a Rhodes scholar help you pick out socks is like having a Nobel laureate take in your dry cleaning. It was almost closing time, and as
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1) a croquet teacher at the University of oxford’s Christ Church College; 2) a member of oxford’s Cathedral singers of Christ Church; 3) anthony Church, the oxford town crier; 4) John goddard, lord mayor of oxford; 5) an english gentleman on high street; 6) a cricket player from Banbury Cricket Club; 7) susan Carrington, a member of the Christ Church housekeeping staff; 8) Christopher Lewis, the dean of Christ Church; 9) Bob avery of Ducker & son, maker of custom shoes; 10) Mick Bowman, a custodian at Christ Church.
Sviridov grabbed his squash racquet — he’d taken up the sport since moving to Oxford, he explained — he offered to show me his college. I walked down Holywell Street with
him as he pushed his bicycle toward New College. We entered the gates of the an- cient college (founded 1379) and walked into one quadrangle and then another. Billiard-table lawns were bordered by gravel paths. We strolled through a clois- ters and into the college garden. We went into the medieval dining hall, where twin rows of narrow polished tables gleamed under a wood-beamed vaulted ceiling and sober-faced former college dignitar- ies gazed down from their portraits on the walls. Most of them had been dead a pretty long time, I figured, especially the ones wearing wigs. I knew my own portrait would never
hang among them, but as I studied their faces — some pale, some ruddy, each face suffused with an artist’s idea of erudition, the eyes betraying a curiosity about the world they once looked at — I couldn’t help feeling that I belonged.
John Kelly is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at kellyj@
washpost.com.
september 12, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 29 10
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