There was even a silly rhyme that made the rounds of Christ Church in those days - I am the Dean, and this is Mrs. While at home he could scarcely make himself heard he was entirely eclipsed by Mamma, and entirely happy to be so. Instructors would bow to him, scholars would pale in his presence, princes deferred to him entire halls full of young men would rise upon his entrance, as well as his departure. Even when I was so young that the only place I could look was up, for I was all too well acquainted with the ground, I knew that he was quite important. Papa was merely the Dean of Christ Church, responsible for the education and religious upbringing of hundreds of gentlemen, including the sons of that same queen. At times she even graciously made room for other queens Victoria herself once stayed with us, although not even her plump, imperious personage intimidated Mamma.

No one dared give a party or a bazaar or a dance without her approval. Remarkable for a woman who bore ten children - one would have assumed she was perpetually in a state of bearing a child, or waiting for a child, or getting over a child - Mamma made certain that the Deanery was the social center of Christ Church, which was of course the social center of Oxford. Naturally, it follows that if Oxford was its own kingdom, then I was its princess - one of three, to be precise - because my mother was, as everyone knew, its queen. It was different from, and superior to, the rest of the globe (which of course meant Britain, for those were the years when the sun never set on Victoria's empire), complete with its own rules, language, and even time all the clocks in Oxford were set five minutes ahead of Greenwich mean time.

I knew, of course, that children possessed legs yet the legs seemed to disappear as their owners grew up, and if I never questioned the logic of this it must be because, even then, I understood that Oxford was a kingdom unto itself. The men in their long academic robes, the women in their voluminous skirts everyone skimming, floating, like puffs of cotton in the air - that is the first, and most vivid, memory of my childhood. That certain people - queens, generally - lost their heads was understood to be a historical fact.īut in my world, legs were missing with alarming regularity as well. that was the curious notion I had as a child.

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin