Peter Paul Rubens The Straw Hat

Peter Paul Rubens The Straw HatPeter Paul Rubens Duke of LermaJohn William Waterhouse My Sweet Rose
was clambering over the college roofs with Roger, the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through . Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?
In fact, of course, Lyra and her peers were engaged in deadly warfare. There were several wars running at once. The children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another. Lyra had once been captured by the children of Gabriel college, and Roger and their friends Hugh Lovat and Simon Parslow had raided the narrow streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war. Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of college affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford