Below Folly Bridge begins that long line of glorified house-boats, headquarters of the various college boating-clubs, known as the “University Barges,” stationary along the left bank of the river, by Christ Church meadows. The ethics of bumping or being bumped, and the sporting politics of the Torpids or the Eights are subjects by themselves, and not to be discussed here.
What, strangers ask, are Torpids? The name suggests a boa-constrictor dined to repletion, and reduced to a state of torpidity; it is, however, merely the survival of an old Oxford nickname for the less active among boating men, who, roused by it, and adopting it, took to racing among themselves, as a separate class. The extinct “sloggers” on the river Cam at Cambridge, derived similarly, from the taunt of “slow-goer.”
The racecourse of these clubs is between Folly Bridge and Iffley: scenically a dull stretch of river, however exciting it may be from the aquatic sportsmen’s point of view. And if the river between Oxford and Iffley be dull, what shall we say of the road thither?
CHAPTER VIII
IFFLEY, AND THE WAY THITHER—NUNEHAM, IN STORM AND IN SUNSHINE
The way from Oxford by road to Iffley is a terrible two miles of “residential” suburbia. So soon as the pilgrim has come out of Oxford, over Magdalen Bridge, and, taking the right-hand fork of roads, has passed St. Clements, he has entered upon the villa-lined Iffley road, in which the houses are numbered to over nine hundred. I hope I am neither a Prig nor a Superior Person, but I fully confess I should not like to live—or to “reside,” if you will have it so—in a house numbered well on into the hundreds. I do not, broadly speaking, envy our grandfathers of sixty or seventy years ago, for they are dead and we are among the living, but they had at least this advantage, among, of course, many serious disadvantages that we fortunately do not experience—that their towns (always excepting London) had no suburbs. Our ancestors of not so very long ago stepped out of their ancient streets and found themselves at once in the country. We have, commonly, at the threshold of every town, miles of undistinguished modern streets, commonplace, unhistorical, depressing. But, at any rate, there are no tramways, electric or other, along the Iffley road, and that is something to be thankful for, viewed from the æsthetic standpoint, although it may leave something to be desired on the score of convenience.
