24 SOMERVILLE MAGAZINE
Looking Back
SUSAN COOPER
Susan Cooper (1956, English Literature) is the author of The Dark Is Rising series, not to mention many other works of fiction and non-fiction, TV screenplays, and the Broadway play Foxfire.
P
erhaps you have to reach old age before you find yourself wondering if, and how, Oxford managed to shape your life. Up to that point there’s no time; you’re too busy doing the living. But now that it’s 65 years since I went down from Somerville, I find myself starting to wonder. I’m a writer, a Jack-of-all-trades – fiction, non-fiction, TV screenplays, a Broadway play, and in particular, books published for children. As a word-besotted young person, naturally at Oxford I read English – and worked on Cherwell and joined the Press Club, since I assumed the only way to earn a living as a writer was to become a journalist. The Press Club turned out to have been the most practical choice, since it gave me contacts in Fleet Street that helped me to become a reporter on The Sunday Times.
As a friend of mine put it: “They simply taught us to believe in dragons.”
But the English School had a quiet, long-lasting influence of its own. Wildly different from its counterpart at Cambridge, its syllabus - created by J.R.R. Tolkien with the support of C.S. Lewis - had us studying hardly anything written after 1832. The stress was all on early and medieval literature. As a friend of mine put it: “They simply taught us to believe in dragons.” I loved it all, having been a child reared largely on fairytale and myth; Britain had been busy with World War Two until I was ten years old, and few children’s books were published. And life in wartime is like a sort of active myth; it’s easy to develop a Manichaean sense of good and evil when you spend your nights in the air-raid
Hard at work with Cherwell co-editor Patrick Nobes
shelter because enemies are dropping bombs to kill you. So off I went from Oxford, from the world of Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature, into the London world of a newspaper reporter, working for the news pages and for a column written by one Ian Fleming, the tall, elegant chain-smoker who had just begun publishing his Bond books. It was a fascinating and exceedingly fact-based life. I interviewed Duke Ellington while he was eating a steak, the Archbishop of Canterbury while he was mowing his lawn; I interviewed Newcastle dock-workers whose English my Southern ear could hardly understand, and farmers in the Outer Hebrides whose Gaelic I couldn’t understand at all. Over the years I graduated from reporter to feature-writer, which gave me two pages of space but involved vast amounts of research. Once I spent months writing a scathing three-part feature series about the appalling state of most
