Goodbye to All That

In October 1919, Graves begins taking classes at Oxford. He finds the campus overcrowded though "remarkably quiet" (291). Graves and Nancy find a cottage to rent in the garden of the poet John Masefield, on Boar's Hill. Other poets, including Edmund Blunden, Robert Bridges, and Robert Nichols, also live on Boar's Hill. Graves finds himself having frequent "day-dreams" (293) of traumatic scenes of combat during his classes. He says these visions don't leave him completely until 1928. Many of Graves’s fellow students had served in the military and they all share an "anti-French feeling" (293), which reveals itself in their study of 18th-century literature.

That winter, Graves’s old friend, George Mallory, invites Graves and Nancy to go mountain climbing with he and his wife, Ruth. The Graves decline, though, as Nancy is pregnant with their second child. Nancy hopes to have four children, close in ages, and alternating boy and girl. Graves feels that Nancy, as an ardent feminist, has begun to "regret her marriage, as a breach of faith with herself" (296). She wishes she could be with Graves without any "legal or religious obligation to do so" (296).