Remembrance of St Andrews Past

Through our fresher's magazine, you’ll hopefully gain a panoramic view of what it’s like to live and attend university in St Andrews. We can’t predict how your future here will unfold (and who would want that?), but as returning students we can offer reflections on our own experiences and hope they provide some sense of the cobblestone path before you. But why restrict ourselves to recent memory? In the pursuit of conveying the elusive essence that is The St Andrews Experience, might it be helpful to travel back in time? Of course, much has changed over the years and for the better, but by discovering what still remains intact, we may learn something of that core essence. With that in mind, I’ve taken the liberty of dusting off a little time machine: a book to send us back exactly one hundred years to see the St Andrews experience of 1926.

Our DeLorean can be found among the oft-neglected shelves of the University’s Walter Bower House Library, a modest 50-page volume simply titled: St Andrews: Two Poems. Published by the university following the end of Rudyard Kipling’s term as university rector, the book contains (you’ll never guess) two short poems followed by sixteen works by the Scottish artist Malcolm Patterson of views around town. Kipling and the English writer Walter de la Mare (who received an honorary doctorate from the university in 1923) each contributed a lyrical ode recounting their memories of the town, and despite the fact that neither attended university here, they offer a nostalgic vision of St Andrews as it was in the early twentieth century.

So what do Kipling and De la Mare recall in their fond lyrics? Of course, they remember the weather. In Kipling’s “A Rector’s Memory”, a third-person narrator tells of a Rector’s arrival to a “far, guarded City” flanked by a “grey warlock ocean” from which “the roar of the wind shall refashion” one’s soul. It’s an autobiographical tale of his arrival in 1923, when he found himself unexpectedly restored from the callous and embittered state he’d assumed since his son’s death seven years prior. The magical qualities invested in the North Sea wind clearly had a resounding effect. Meanwhile, in De la Mare’s “A Memory”, his speaker declares he will always hold onto “those bleached grey streets, / Grey skies, a glinting sun, a wind” (he must have lived by T-Squared). Unsurprisingly, dismal Scottish weather is a consistent element of our experience. But you didn’t need poetry to tell you that.

De La Mare moves from the weather to the second defining feature of the town: its history. Specifically, its capital-H History: the mythic struggles on museum placards, our medieval fairy tales of conquerors and conquered. “Ghosts in that sunlight come and go,” his speaker writes, and while he goes on to cite names that blur the lines between St Andrews history and Scottish history writ large, he does capture the supernatural sensation of walking through town surrounded by generations that refuse to surrender their presence, who “of their long wild centuries / Left but these stones their bones beside”. Kipling offers a similar impression too through his protagonist’s realisation of “[t]he lives that caught fire ‘neath Her hand — / The fires that were tamed to Her mood”. Anyone who’s ever avoided the stone letters outside St Salvator’s cathedral knows exactly what he’s talking about. We still take our ghosts seriously in this town.

There is a second meaning to this fire, though. When Kipling arrived in St Andrews, he was greeted by a mass of eager students who pulled his carriage around town, demanding impromptu speeches. While he’s biased by the effects of celebrity, he still identifies the quintessential element of every great university experience: what his poem’s speaker declares as “the passion / Of Youth over all”. With that, “the lives that caught fire” imply not just the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart, but also every St Andrews student past, present, and future inflamed by the town’s “magic unspoken”. Their passion is the key ingredient to this magic, both fuelling it and fuelled by it, a self-sustaining spell which — along with the grey climate and the ghosts of History — leaves each generation of guests as it left Kipling in his poem’s final line: “Changed and renewed in that hour.”

Reading this magazine, with all its advice and predictions of what your university experience will be like, it’s easy to gain the familiar sensation that there’s no such thing as a unique experience. At a school as old and bowed to tradition as this one, where you’ll shuffle behind a thousand others in the same red robe and arrive at your academic wedding only to find two other ceremonies have already commenced on Castle Sands, the experience can feel formulaic or, at worst, pre-determined. If, like me, you feel this way occasionally, it’s useful to remember that singularity was never the goal. In fact, it’s the opposite of the goal. That these two poems convey something of my own university experience — an overcast, blustery communion of haunted ashes and eager new flames — doesn’t lessen but enhances that experience. The remarkable thing about this town is how much of that you share across how many centuries, how the memories that Kipling left with won’t be dissimilar from mine or yours, how each class carries that shared memory forward. This isn’t to say you’ve got the weight of St Andrews history on your shoulders so you better sit up straight and enunciate, but it’s easy to forget everything you share in these four years and everyone you share it with. Sometimes it’s helpful to listen to a couple of ghosts to remember that.