Harold Mather

Harold Mather is a clever, talkative history student whose friendship with Edward Mayhew is altered after Edward violently retaliates against a man who strikes him in the street. Mather is not merely the vulnerable figure in that encounter: at university he has flourished as a writer, editor, debater, mimic, and leading student in their history group. His response to Edward’s intervention—quiet disapproval rather than gratitude—forces Edward to reconsider both the friendship and his own idea of toughness.

Identity and Background

At university, Mather is short, wears thick glasses, and has features Edward remembers as comically squashed. Edward later reflects that at his grammar school Mather might have seemed an easy target, someone he would once have avoided. University has changed that impression: Mather has become a high-status student, and Edward counts their friendship as evidence of his own developing maturity. He values a connection with someone he might previously have dismissed on appearance.

Mather’s standing rests on specific accomplishments. He has an important jazz record collection and edits a literary magazine. A short story of his has been accepted by Encounter, though it has not yet been published. In formal Union debates he is hilarious, and his imitations range from Macmillan, Gaitskell, Kennedy, and Khrushchev in fake Russian to African leaders and comedians Al Read and Tony Hancock. He can reproduce the voices and sketches from Beyond the Fringe. Among the history students, he is reckoned the best by a considerable margin. These details establish a social and intellectual authority that the street assault’s focus on his height and studious appearance fails to capture.

The Assault on Old Compton Street

The incident takes place in January 1961, during the second term of Edward’s final year. On a weekday winter evening, Mather and Edward are walking along Old Compton Street toward the French Pub in Dean Street. They have come directly from the library in Malet Street and are on their way to meet friends. Soho’s pubs are full, but the clubs have not yet opened and the pavements remain uncrowded.

A couple dressed as rockers approaches. The man is a large figure in his mid-twenties, wearing a studded leather jacket, tight jeans, boots, and long sideburns; his plump girlfriend is dressed similarly and holds his arm. As the pair passes without stopping, the man swings out and smacks the back of Mather’s head. Mather staggers, and his Buddy Holly glasses skid across the road. The narration presents the attack as an act of casual contempt, perhaps directed at Mather’s short stature and studious appearance, or at the fact that he looks and is Jewish; it also allows that the man may be trying to impress or amuse his girlfriend.

Edward immediately pursues the couple. Mather calls after him with an entreaty to stop, but Edward, caught in the familiar tunnel vision of a fight, does not heed him. Edward grips the attacker’s shoulder, turns him around, pins him against a wall by the throat, and hits him once, hard, in the face. He then returns to help Mather find his glasses, one lens cracked. The two friends leave the attacker sitting on the pavement, covering his face, while his girlfriend fusses over him. The intervention answers the physical insult, but it does not produce the grateful response Edward expects.

Friendship and Withdrawal

Mather’s reaction becomes clear to Edward only gradually. During the evening, Edward notices that Mather is not grateful; he takes longer to understand that Mather disapproves and, more painfully, is embarrassed by what happened. Neither man tells their friends the story in the pub. Mather never discusses the incident with Edward afterward, so Edward receives no direct rebuke or explanation. The absence of confrontation leaves him to interpret a change in the friendship on his own.

Mather withdraws without making a public display of it. The two still see each other in company, and Mather is not openly distant, but the friendship is never again the same. He takes care that they are not left alone together. Edward is distressed by the possibility that his behaviour repelled his friend, yet does not find the courage to raise the subject. Mather’s silence therefore has a lasting practical effect: it preserves outward civility while closing off the private closeness that had made the friendship important to Edward.

Significance for Edward

At first, Edward thinks he may have compounded Mather’s humiliation by witnessing the attack and then acting as his champion, making Mather appear weak beside his own show of strength. Later he reaches a harsher understanding: what he did was not cool. He sees street fighting as incompatible with the poetry, irony, bebop, and history that shaped the values by which he now wants to be judged. In his retrospective account, the fight is not a simple act of loyalty but a lapse of taste and a discrediting discovery about himself.

Mather does not explain this lesson to Edward; his silence and retreat supply its force. Edward comes to regard the fight as evidence that the rough virtue he had imagined in himself was actually vulgarity, and that he had mistaken physical recklessness for something admirable. After the incident, he stays out of fights. When the novel later returns to his fear of losing control on his wedding night, the memory of the episode with Mather helps explain why he distrusts his own capacity for sudden violence. Mather’s importance to Edward’s story lies in this consequence: a friendship that had marked Edward’s movement beyond old schoolyard judgments becomes the setting in which he discovers that good intentions do not determine how an act is received.