When I hear grown-up people discussing the University Boat Race I smile sadly and hold my peace.  They may say what they like about the latest Oxford trial, or the average weight per man of the Cambridge crew, but deep in my heart there stays the conviction that they are making a ludicrous mistake in speaking about the Boat Race at all.  Once I knew all about it, and even now I think I could put them right if I wished.  But what is the use of arguing with persons who, under the absurd pretext of fairness, pretend to find praiseworthy features in both crews?  Even the smallest boy knew better than that in the days when the Boat Race was really important.  I will not say that there did not exist weaklings even then, who wobbled between Oxford and Cambridge in an endeavour to propitiate p. 93both factions.  But they usually suffered the fate of wobblers by having to join one side or the other, while still incurring the scorn of both.

The Boat Race dawned upon us each year as a strange and bewildering element in our social relationships.  We would part one night on normal terms, and the morrow would find us wearing strange favours, and regarding our friends of yesterday with open and passionate dislike.  For the sake of a morsel of coloured ribbon old friendships would be shattered and brother would meet brother with ingenious expressions of contempt.  There was no moderate course in the matter.  A boy was either vehemently Cambridge or intolerably Oxford, and it would have been easier to account for the colour of his hair than to explain how he arrived at his choice of a university.  Some blind instinct, some subtle influence felt, perhaps, in the dim, far-off nursery days may have determined this weighty choice; but the whole problem was touched with the mystery that inspired the great classical and modern snowball fights, when little boys would pound p. 94each other almost into a state of unconsciousness for the sake of a theory of education.  Our interest in the Boat Race as a boat race was small, and quite untroubled by any knowledge of the respective merits of the crews.  But we wore their colours in our buttonholes, and the effect of these badges on our lives was anarchic.  We saw blue.

It was my fate to drift, fatally and immutably Cambridge, into a school that had a crushing Oxford majority.  In these circumstances, the light-blue ribbon became, for the small and devoted band that upheld the Cambridge tradition of valour, the cause of endless but never conclusive defeats, the symbol of a splendid martyrdom.  Try as we might, we found ourselves always in a minority, and, to add to our bitterness, these years of luckless warfare coincided with a series of Cambridge defeats, and we knew ourselves the supporters of a forlorn and discredited cause.  And yet, Fate having decreed that we should be Cambridge, we did not falter before our hopeless task of convincing the majority that it was made of baser stuff than we.  We would arrive p. 95in the morning with our colours stitched to our coats, and when, overwhelmed by numbers, we lost our dear favours we would retire to a place apart, repair the loss from a secret store of ribbon, and dash once more into the fray.  The others might be Oxford when they had a mind to, but we were Cambridge—Cambrid............