Sunday, August 30, 2020

Summer in Britain

In the summer of 1982, for the first time in our lives, J and I traveled overseas to spend a couple of months in England. This came about because the college where I was teaching was part of a consortium of southern colleges and universities that sponsored summer study in Britain. Each year British Studies at Oxford offered a program in some period of English history and culture, including philosophy, literature, theater, art and architecture.  While students attending the colleges or universities in the consortium were given preference, enrollment was open to just about anyone who could afford the costs for travel, tuition, and room and board. In addition to classes (called tutorials) taught by professors from the consortium, the program included regular morning and afternoon lectures by well known English academics, plus field trips and site visits related to the era being studied. In 1982 our topic was early and medieval Britain. My role was to teach a tutorial on Chaucer's "Parlement of Foules" and "Troilus and Criseyde” which would meet two mornings a week for about six weeks. And for this service I would be paid a stipend and given room and board at St. John’s, Oxford.


Never having gone abroad, or anywhere really, for such an extended period of time, J and I began by obsessing over logistics: leaving our house in Shreveport unoccupied, abandoning our cats with J's mother in San Antonio, storing our car with my brother in Austin. Then, of course, there was packing for a nearly two months stay in a climate that might require anything from short sleeves to lightweight coats. In addition, we were advised to bring along something reasonably dressy for evenings dining in Hall at high table. J would need a choice of casual as well as something suitable for dinners, and I would require at least a blazer and a selection of dress shirts and ties for teaching. And somewhere we would have to find space in our luggage for my textbooks. As a result we ended up having several fairly large checked bags in addition to the maximum allowed for carry ons. 


When the time for departure drew near, we locked up the house, loaded our cats and bags in the car and drove down to San Antonio to spend a few days with our families. Then on June 29th, we drove back to Austin to drop off the car and pick up the rental car we would be driving to Dallas to catch our flight from DFW to London Gatwick on British Caledonian Airways. I seem to remember we drove because it was cheaper than the cost of a short flight between Austin and DFW, although I suspect J thought we were doing it just to make life a little more complicated. But we did have plenty of time. We arrived early enough to have supper at Denny's, get lost on the way to the airport, and still ended up waiting to board our evening departure for London. One pleasant surprise awaiting us was discovering that although we'd chosen British Caledonian because they offered the cheapest fares, the service, and especially the food, was excellent. 


But even on an excellent airline, a trans-Atlantic flight in coach is exhausting. We tried to sleep, but I don’t think either of us succeeded. When we arrived at Gatwick the next morning after flying all night, I’m not sure we fully appreciated how weary and jet-lagged we actually were. After collecting our luggage we caught a train to Victoria Station, eager and excited to begin our British adventures. Our anticipation grew as our train approached the city and we watched the suburbs changing to denser rows of houses and shops. When we reached the station, our first objective was to locate the British Tourist Authority and get reservations at a nearby bed and breakfast for that first night in London. We were determined to cram as much as we could into our few weeks in Britain, so during the week and a half before the British Studies Program was to begin in Oxford, we planned a train trip to Scotland. After all, we had already purchased BritRail Passes and we might as well take advantage of them. 


With amazing efficiency, the helpful folks at the Tourist Authority got us reservations at The Corbigoe Hotel on nearby Belgrave Road. Our next step should have been looking for a taxi, but we'd been assured that the hotel was not very far, so we decided we would walk.  Did I mention that by then it was also beginning to rain? What a sight we must have been as we trekked our way, both of us loaded down with baggage and fumbling with umbrellas. Fortunately, we did have one of those collapsable luggage trollies, which were fairly common before the days of ubiquitous wheeled luggage, but it was definitely our first fiasco. The things J has had to put up with traveling with me!


Eventually, we arrived, exhausted, at a small London B&B on a long street of nearly identical establishments, all painted in gleaming white, with stairs leading up to a tiny reception area. We were relieved to discover that the Tourist Authority had indeed made reservations, and we were soon checked in to our double room, which amazingly had an in-room shower and sink (but no toilet). Of course, the room was not yet available at that hour of the morning, so we would have to wait, which we did, as I recall, with our bags piled around us in a small front room that had a single sofa and one or possibly two chairs and a telly (as the Brits call them). We sat there and rested for a while watching TV and dozing off before the hotel staff took pity on us and told us our room was ready. I actually don't recall what we did the rest of that first day. Our notes say we walked around Victoria and then ate dinner at Grumbles, a very nice and somewhat pricey London restaurant that served "French" cuisine. I think we had salads, broiled fish and cauliflower with a good bottle of wine. We must have slept well that night.


The next morning we were up early eating our first of many full English breakfasts: cereal (cornflakes), eggs, bacon, baked beans, toast and jam, pretty good orange juice, and very weak coffee. Then we returned to our room, packed, checked out, and went off to store our bags for the day at an establishment that turned out to have gone out of business. Change of plans: we went instead directly to Kings Cross Station and checked some of our luggage for the evening train, keeping the carry-ons with us. It was still raining, or raining again, so we spent the rest of the morning at the British Museum, where we also ate a late lunch of soup and bread and wine. Later that afternoon we went to see our first London play, Hedda Gabler, starring Susanna York and Tom Baker. It was a matinee and there couldn't have been more than few dozen people in the audience, mostly OAPs by the look of them, plus J and me, but the performance was amazing. As we soon discovered, there is nothing to compare with London theatre. Even an afternoon performance in a half empty theater was spectacular. After the play we returned to Kings Cross Station to await our departure for Edinburgh on the overnight train. I'm not sure whether or not we had another meal before leaving, and I don't recall that they served us anything on the train until the next morning, when they brought us some tea and scones in our compartment, but I do remember that when we reached Edinburgh, we had a large breakfast in the station's restaurant. 


Once we were in Edinburgh, we experienced the same ease in locating the local Tourist Authority, finding accommodations at a B&B, The Abileen Guest House on Minto Street, and then getting on a bus that took us almost directly there. We were delighted to find that we had a view of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, but even had J not been suffering from the onset of a nasty cold, I doubt we would have ventured to climb it. What seems amazing to me now, as I think back on this trip,  is that we went off to a foreign country having made no advance plans for local travel or lodging beyond purchasing a BritRail pass. We intended to be spontaneous, as we probably would have done when we were students, and fortunately, everything seemed to work out very efficiently. That is, until the British Railway workers decided to go out on strike. We had known that was a possibility, and the strike had already been averted once. Fortunately, we managed to get in a few good days in Edinburgh, seeing the historic sights and enjoying the Scottish ambience. 


The other problem was that cold J was coming down with would linger nearly the entire trip. Nor was it helped by the sometimes rainy and chilly weather we were experiencing. Of course, it was summer, at least on the calendar, and the locals seemed to think they were having a heat wave, but we were still wearing our sweaters and jackets most of the time. We have an amusing photo of me standing in my trench coat outside a bakery with a sign in the window apologizing for having removed many items from display on account of the heat. Before the rail strike we also managed to take a day trip to St. Andrews, where we walked around the university, visited the Scottish Woolen Mills (and bought some nice woolen souvenirs), and saw the famous Old Course, supposedly the home of golf. My memory is that St. Andrews was not a particularly large town, or at least those central tourist sites were all conveniently grouped together. In any case, we had a good time under the circumstances, and I was getting to ride on some British trains, both intercity and local service. Then the strike came. 


There we were stuck, like many others, in Edinburgh, when in a matter of a few days I was supposed to be showing up at St. John's to teach my class for British Studies at Oxford. As I recall, I don't think we actually panicked, at least not right away. We stayed on another day, walked around the Old Town, saw Robert Burns's house, and other sites, ate some good fish and chips, watched some of the Wimbledon matches on the telly in our room while J doctored her cold. But the next day we decided to fly back to London. We packed up and went to the airport and bought standby tickets on a commuter flight. I think British Airways may have been putting on some extra flights to accommodate those who like us were stranded in one place and wanted to be somewhere else. Anyway, it seemed a close call. We were the last two on the plane and had to sit in the very last row. In those days that's where the smokers were, at the back of the plane, so not the most pleasant flight, but mercifully rather brief. When we got to Heathrow, we booked another B&B on Belgrave Road, this time The Simone Hotel, and found our way to an express bus that took us into central London.


We spent the next five days in London, seeing more sites than I would have thought possible. First we went to the Tower of London, then St. Paul's and Lincoln's Inn because they were associated with John Donne, one of my enduring research interests. But the following days we also visited the Tate Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Southwark Cathedral, as well as Kensington Gardens, the Courtauld Institute, and Greenwich. In the evenings we saw more plays, No Sex Please, We're British and Season's Greetings, and sampled more of London's restaurants, more fish and chips, Mimmo and Pasquale's, and the Izmir Kebab. But soon it was time to pack up again and, with BritRail still out on strike, catch an express coach for Oxford. The coaches were crowded, but they ran frequently, and they were fast, about ninety minutes. Once we made it to the coach station in Oxford, we caught a cab (having learned our lesson about walking places loaded down with luggage) and were soon delivered to the front gate of St. John’s College on St. Giles. 


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We arrived in Oxford around noon on July 10th. Everything actually went pretty smoothly. The British Studies staff were ready for us, and after checking us in, giving us some basic information about the college, and feeding us an impromptu lunch, they showed us our rooms so we could begin to get settled. We were given a two room suite on the second floor in the Rawlinson Building on the North Quad. We had a fairly roomy front sitting room furnished with a sofa, comfortable arm chairs, a large desk and chair and what may once have been a working fireplace but was now fitted with a coin operated electric fire. The second room was a smaller but certainly adequate bedroom with twin beds and a built-in cabinet or wardrobe where we could stow our bags and hang some of our clothes. The front room had a nice view of the North Quadrangle and the bedroom windows looked out onto a small parking lot and passageway at the back of the college that led to shops and the Valiant Trooper public house on St. Giles. 


After we unpacked a bit and rearranged a few items of furniture in our rooms, we checked out our bathroom, conveniently located on our landing of the stairwell. It was about then, as I recall, that we met our "scout," who introduced himself to us as Bill, and told us we could call on him if we needed anything. He also offered to "knock us up" in the mornings so we'd be up in time for breakfast and explained the intricacies of Oxford's plumbing, warning us to go easy on the toilet paper, which seemed to us to be more akin to some variety of light weight waxed paper than the stuff we were accustomed to.  J and I were, of course, amused to encounter this additional bit of the authentic Oxford experience. Although I don't remember that we ended up interacting with Bill more than a couple of times, one of those occurred a few weeks later when we commiserated with him as he mopped up the flood brought on when our upstairs neighbors who shared the bathroom used a bit too much of their own non-standard toilet tissue. I'm sure that they too had been warned, but American bottoms are very sensitive.


Following all the excitement we'd had during our first week and a half in Britain, we were more than ready to settle down for a spell and see what it was like living in Oxford. Yes, we knew it wasn't quite the real thing. We were there in the summertime, the "long vac" between the Trinity and Michaelmas terms for all the regular students and dons, but it was as close as a bunch of American pretenders were likely to get. We were also hopeful that J would begin to recover from her London flu. So later that afternoon, when we set out to explore our new neighborhood, one of the first places we stopped was Boots, the local pharmacy, to see what cold remedies the English might have on offer. Then we found our way to Blackwell's Book Store where we almost immediately began using the charge account that I had opened with them years earlier when I was still in graduate school. We were beginning to feel very much at home.


Our first few days at St. John's were spent learning about life in an Oxford college. We arrived on a Saturday, and the following day the students began showing up and getting checked in. While they were being oriented and shown to their rooms, J and I went about our business, picking up some personal items from local shops and using the college laundromat to wash and dry some of the clothes we'd been wearing during our first couple of weeks in England. Of course, we had each brought a fairly substantial and varied wardrobe, but we had been saving our dressier things for dining in Hall in the evenings. J also tried to get some rest and I began thinking about my Chaucer tutorial. Very soon we discovered that the British Studies at Oxford program was very programed indeed. On Monday we were officially and ceremoniously introduced to St. John’s and Oxford: first with a talk about the city and the university, followed by guided walking tours in both the morning and afternoon. Then we had an opening convocation in St. John’s historic Chapel, after which we were treated to an outdoor sherry party in the college gardens, and finally a festive dinner in Hall. 


One of the most interesting parts of the British Studies at Oxford program was eating in the college’s 16th-century Hall. Meals were ample and sometimes delicious, as well as occasions for social interactions of various kinds, but menu choices were often predictable. Breakfast, for example, which came early, was usually the typical English fare of eggs, cereal, toast, jam, coffee, and juice, but they did have oatmeal as a choice. Lunches offered greater variety but featured many meat pies. I even had occasion to sample steak and kidney pie, something I will not likely try again, but at least now I know. There was also something the Americans referred to as English pizza. But the high point of the day was usually the evening meal, when everyone dined together, more or less formally, in Hall. Select members of the program's faculty and any distinguished visitors would be seated in assigned places at high table, while students dined below, seated at long rows of tables. Everyone else, including spouses, staff, and less distinguished visitors, sat at something we referred to as the auxiliary high table, on the same level as the student tables and just below and to the right of high table. In fact, many of us preferred the auxiliary high table to the actual high table, because it was less conspicuous and conversation was more relaxed, but we nevertheless had the same slightly superior menu as well as access to St John's famous wine cellar.


These multi-course dinners always began with prayers and announcements, followed by the very efficient serving of a multi-course meal, which seemed always to include potatoes prepared in one way or another, but most frequently boiled. The college cuisine was rather predictable, but well prepared. Vegetables, often some version of zucchini or cauliflower, tended to be served well done, as was the meat, although the lamb was always delicious. We had fruit or something to start, but generally not a green salad, and after the main course, there was always something sweet for dessert. Perhaps the main attraction of high table was the excellent and invariably appropriate selection of wine, always ending with the passing of a decanter of port. The high table ritual also included a good amount of lively dinner conversation among the faculty, faculty wives, and guests, sometimes growing in volume as the dining and drinking progressed. But as the summer went along I ate at high table less often. Since seating was limited and wives were not always included, I preferred to surrender my place to someone else and sit with J at the auxiliary high table. 


As entertaining as evening meals at high table (or the auxiliary high table) might have been, however, almost more interesting was the regular drinks hour that preceded dinner. J and I soon learned to dress early and wander over to the Davis Room where the staff of the British Studies program would have laid out a spread of appetizers and cheeses and set up an open bar of spirits, wines, and beers. Anyone familiar with academics will know that such an invitation is unlikely to be turned down. And nothing serves as a better lubricant for social interaction than free booze. Everyone would gather sometime after six o'clock and almost immediately begin social drinking and mixing. These were also occasions to get to know some of the distinguished English academics who had been invited to lecture and otherwise entertain us. I was pleasantly surprised to discover how sociable many of these men (as nearly all were that year) could be. They were frequently scholars whose books I had read and sometimes even used in my teaching, and it was amusing having an opportunity to engage them in casual conversation.


The Davis Room was also the setting for a more exclusive, invitation only, gathering for drinks and cigars after dinner. I was only invited a few times for those. With a smaller group present the conversations were more relaxed and sometimes more profitable. I had the opportunity to discuss my budding interest in Renaissance English gardens with one of the established experts in the field, although in that case he was someone I had been slightly acquainted with during graduate school, when he had been a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins. I'm not sure he remembered me, but it gave us something in common to talk about, and he showed considerable interest in my questions about gardens. Another English academic I met at a Davis Room reception was a man whose texts and scholarly books and articles I'd been using for many years. I was delighted to find that he was also one of the most personable people I've ever known. A few years later he would come for a visit to my college and spend several days teaching and entertaining my students in medieval and Renaissance drama. 


When we were not among the select few invited back to the Davis Room, J and I usually went for long walks in the lingering English summer evenings, sometimes enjoying a stroll through the University Parks or Christ Church Meadow, where we walked off some of the effects of our potato based diet. As darkness began to fall, we might hurry back to meet some of the other faculty or students for a last beer in one of the pubs before the landlord called time. If it sounds like there was a lot of drinking going on, that is probably because there was. Anyone who has ever been to Oxford, or just watched an episode or two of Inspector Morse on PBS, will know that pubs and beer are a central part of the Oxford ambience. There were two pubs convenient to St. John's, the famous Eagle and Child, referred to by locals as the Bird and Baby, where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other Inklings held court in earlier times, and the Lamb and Flag, which was literally next door just outside the back gates.


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I held my first tutorial, on Tuesday, July 13th. My class of about a dozen students was to study two of Chaucer’s poems, “Troilus and Criseyde” and the less well known, to most undergraduates anyway, and much shorter “Parlement of Foules.” We met twice a week, sometimes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings or, after that first week, on Mondays and Wednesdays from 9 to 10:30 AM. It had been my experience teaching undergraduates that with a little instruction in spelling and pronunciation, students could pick up Chaucer’s English relatively quickly, so I began with “Parlement of Foules” to get everyone comfortable reading Chaucer in middle English, then spent the majority of the course reading and discussing “Troilus and Criseyde.” The classes were very enjoyable, and the students were bright and, for the most part, well motivated. We discussed Chaucer in his cultural and literary contexts, primarily as these were revealed by our texts, but for the most part we concentrated on close reading of the two works. Each poem represented popular medieval types or genres, one a dream vision, the other a medieval retelling of the siege of Troy with elements of courtly romance. 


On mornings when I taught classes, I was intent on rising early and getting breakfast in the college Hall, sometimes bringing back tea and muffins or something for J who, especially on mornings when I was teaching, liked to take breakfast in our rooms. After tutorials everyone would make their way across St. Giles to the Taylor Institute for the morning lecture at 11 AM. Lectures were held there because, other than the Chapel or Hall, St. John’s had no appropriately sized classroom that would seat everyone. After the morning lecture, we had our lunch break, once again back in Hall, followed by the afternoon lecture at 2 PM. On a few occasions, especially if I was the one introducing the speaker, when the morning lecture was concluded, the visiting scholar and I would walk down the street for a quiet lunch of sandwiches and beer at the Eagle and Child. 


The morning and afternoon lectures were really the core of the Oxford program. They provided the academic substance for the topics being studied during that summer, and attendance was required of students, particularly if they wanted to earn college credit. British Studies at Oxford was not inexpensive, and the lecturers were one reason for the program’s relatively high tuition. The list of speakers that year included many famous scholars, or at least they were well known in their fields: A.L. Rowse, Rupert Bruce-Mitford, Derek Pearsall, A.C. Spearing, John Burrow, Peter Bayley, Sir Richard Southern, Glynne Wickham, Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper), Christopher Ricks, John Dixon Hunt, among others. Not surprisingly, given such a distinguished group of speakers, the lectures were not only instructive, but sufficiently entertaining that J and others among the staff and faculty spouses frequently attended.


Also in keeping with another British Studies tradition, each lecturer was paired with one of the members of the faculty who greeted them, welcomed them to the program, and introduced their lecture to the assembled group. These pairings also sometimes linked visiting lecturers with faculty who had similar interests. For example, I introduced Peter Bayley’s lecture on “Troilus and Criseyde,” an obvious choice, but also Glynne Wickham’s two lectures on medieval drama, a field I had specialized in during my earlier NEH Fellowship year at the University of Chicago, and Derek Pearsall’s lectures on art and literature and Langland’s “Piers Plowman,” perhaps because I knew his work and had met him earlier during our field trip to York.


Meeting well known scholars, and spending a little time with them, was a nice added benefit, as was the field trip we took that summer to spend a long weekend in York, a beautiful medieval city and home of York Minster. On Friday morning, July 30th, everyone boarded several luxury coaches for the long drive to Yorkshire. Despite some traffic along the way, we made pretty good time and arrived by early afternoon. We were greeted by Derek Pearsall, who welcomed us to the city and the University, which was our host during the visit. Like all things associated with the Oxford Studies program, there was a lot of activity packed into our three days. We heard lectures on the city, Roman Britain, the Vikings, the architecture of York Minster and its medieval glass, and we were treated to side trips to Rievaulx Abbey and Castle Howard. The latter was a sort of spontaneous substitute for other sites that were unexpectedly closed to visitors at that time, thus providing a convenient excuse to visit a site that was more a reflection of some of the staff’s interest in the PBS/BBC Television series “Brideshead Revisited” than medieval Britain.


Although our schedule was typically full, J and I did have time to walk around medieval York and the Shambles, see what remained of the old city wall, and make some souvenir brass rubbings to take back home. We also enjoyed a very good meal at one of the the better restaurants in Old Town. I remember looking out the restaurant window and seeing two of the students from my college sitting on the curb, or kerb, across the street eating pizza. Everyone was having a good time. Then on Sunday morning, before departing for our visit to Rievaulx Abbey, I woke with an ominous tickle in my throat. By the time we got to Castle Howard, all I really wanted to do was have some hot tea in their little cafe and then sleep on the coach all the way back to Oxford. 


Once we arrived at St. John’s I was feeling only slightly better. However, I somehow managed to get through the next week of classes and lectures, doing my duty for my students and introducing Derek Pearsall’s lecture, but by the weekend, J and I were starting to doubt we’d have the stamina for a scheduled coach trip to Cambridge on Friday, or the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday. By then J had either caught my cold or was having a relapse of her own. So we rested for a couple of days and then somehow found sufficient energy to join the Sunday tour to Eton College, Windsor Castle, and Milton’s Cottage at Chalfont St. Giles. When we returned to Oxford that evening we were both exhausted but feeling somewhat better since we’d salvaged some portion of the weekend’s excursions.


Despite J’s lingering or recurrent cold, we did manage to make a few other weekend outings during our time in Oxford. One weekend we saw two plays in London, Balthazar and Amadeus, and visited the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. We also had opportunities to explore Oxford and the surrounding area and even played hosts for one of my colleagues who came and spent a few days with us at St. John’s while we were there. We attended a memorable performance on an antique pianoforte at the Holywell Music Room and an impromptu lecture on C.S. Lewis by one of his biographers who entertained us with personal anecdotes and a slide show. 


There were other notable unscheduled activities as well. One afternoon A. L. Rowse, a well known historian and literary scholar who had famously claimed to have identified the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, invited a small group to accompany him on an informal tour of All Souls College, where he was a fellow. This was a notable treat, since we were able to see parts of the college not usually open to visitors. After showing us around, including the Hall and Chapel and his own rooms, and telling us about All Souls’ unusual history as a research institution with no undergraduates, Rowse guided us out to the street where he had parked his car. Then he opened up the trunk, or the boot as he would have said. It was filled with copies of his various books, which he offered to sign for us should we wish to purchase some of them. I quietly slipped away without buying one, but sometimes I wish I had, just for the uniqueness of such a souvenir of our time in Oxford.


As the British Studies program was drawing to a close in mid August, we were both beginning to grow a little weary and feeling we were ready to return home. By then we were entering the home stretch of what seemed a much longer stay than we had anticipated. But perhaps that was because we were both hampered by colds, what we were referring to as the Yorkshire plague. As my tutorial was winding down, I prepared the obligatory final exam, which was easy for anyone who had read the poems and paid at least minimal attention to our discussions. As I recall everyone did well and seemed happy with the outcome. All that remained was a concluding festive dinner in Hall to celebrate the completion of the program and to say thank you to our hosts at St. John’s. The faculty were presented with mementos, mine was a set of St. John’s College cuff links, and, perhaps appropriately, everyone also got a half pint mug with the British Studies at Oxford logo and the year, 1982, embossed in red.


Our original flight back to Texas had been scheduled to depart on August 20th, but after the program ended on the 16th, we rebooked and took the train back to London the next morning and thence to Gatwick for an earlier flight home. Yes, the rail strike had ended, so we had one last train ride on British Rail before leaving England. Our luggage was stuffed with clothes and souvenirs; we shipped the books and some of our other purchases home by mail to lighten the load. The flight back on British Caledonian Airways was just as pleasant as the one over had been. And in what seemed a cruel irony, once we returned to the heat of the Texas summer, our English colds seemed to dry up immediately, with no further treatment being required. It was hard to believe that only a day earlier we had been so weary and eager to return home.


© 2020 by Michael L. Hall