ABSTRACT
Through all his tergiversations, his adventures in mind and body, Auden had wisely kept his relations with his old college at Oxford in good repair. At a Christ Church Gaudy in i960 he proposed a toast in verse: Ah! those Twenties before I was twenty … In Peck [Peckwater Quad] there were marvellous parties With bubbly and brandy and grouse, And the aesthetes fought with the Hearties It was fun, then, to beat the House … One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg, or Rowse: May there always to lend their variety Be some rather odd fish at the House.
