The dreaming spires of Oxford
[You can find Parts I and II here and here.]
T.E. Lawrence, along with his four brothers, had been brought up in Oxford and all five boys had attended its colleges. I searched for the Lawrence house at No. 2 Polstead Road but found it not at all approachable, owing to the British penchant for privacy. High walls or hedges often hide front gardens and walkways. Thwarted in that mission, I made my way to the Ashmolean Museum, where T.E. had spent a great deal of time. A young man, also wandering around the exhibits, stopped to speak to me. I could tell he was a student because over his ordinary jeans and sweater he was wearing a hip-length gown, which meant he was a commoner. (Scholars wear knee-length gowns.) Or, at least, it had been a gown: now there was a circlet of black material around his neck, from which hung hip-length rags of black fabric.
After greeting me politely he asked where I was from. I told him I was American.
“You can’t be American,” he said, “they travel in herds. And where’s your camera?”
I crisply informed him that I had a notebook, a pen, and an excellent memory, and therefore did not need a camera. (In actual fact, then and now, I am clueless regarding mechanical objects. Even if I’d had a camera I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.)
After that we fell into conversation and left the museum. He showed me round some of the colleges: T.E., because of his Welsh connections, had been a student at Jesus College; my new friend John was at Brasenose. He showed me the door of his college, from which a small brass nose protruded.
Because of the loss of my diary I can’t remember what we did the rest of the day but I think we must have gone to a film in the evening, after which he invited me to have coffee with him in his rooms at college. It fascinated me that he had two rooms all to himself and a “scout” (a male servant) to come in each day to clean and tidy them. John brewed some instant coffee and we chatted some more. Then, to my great discomfiture, midnight struck. We heard the sounds of the college gates closing, which meant I couldn’t leave.
No problem—my new friend was not only six feet four inches tall, he was also a rower, with long, powerful arms. Quickly we found a patch of wall in the darkness and he lifted me up. I scrambled over as best I could—the damned wall must have been 12 feet high—and dropped to the ground. I’d already promised to get in touch with him the next day.
However, all I did was send him a nice note, thanking him for the day we’d spent together, and telling him I was leaving town. From Oxford I took a train to York, arriving so late at night I had to stay at the station hotel.
Once in York I was supposed to stay with Mr. and Mr. S., more old Singapore friends, who had a daughter my age. However, the British telephone system defeated me. One had to put in a penny, dial the number, and press button A. Then, on hearing the voice of the other person, one had to press button B. It took me two days and several tries to get it right, after which Mr. S. swooped by in his car to pick me up and take me home. I was embarrassed to admit when I’d actually arrived.
Mr. and Mrs. S., who lived in a modern bungalow in York, were extremely kind. Years ago in Singapore their Sarah and I had played together frequently, so they remembered me and my family well. They put me in Sarah’s old room, she having married and left home some time ago. Over breakfasts and dinners they regaled me with the story of her growing-up years, especially her courtship. It appeared she’d gone out to do Scottish dancing once a week and after every occasion reported to her parents: “My shadow was there.” She eventually married the owner of the shadow, a nice up-and-coming young accountant, and had just become the mother of a little girl.
In the daytime I wandered the wonderful streets of York, soaking up the history of the place. Many of the street names ended in “-gate” from the days of the Danish invasion in the ninth century A.D. The “-gate” comes from “gata,” meaning “street.”
One can walk along the top of the city walls enclosing York, and I did so, noticing to my surprise that daffodils were blooming although it was May. “Ah, yes, dear,” said a lady who was also walking the walls that morning. “They bloom later up here in the North.”
I explored Clifford’s Tower to the extent that I could (parts were blocked off to tourists because of the danger of rickety floors), and gazed long at Micklegate Bar. There the head of Richard, Duke of York, was displayed in 1461 as a warning to those who would attempt to seize the throne of England.
York Minster impressed me even more than had Canterbury Cathedral a month earlier. I spent hours there one day, looking at the stained glass windows, the statues, the soaring Gothic architecture. In the Minster’s lower regions I saw a fallen Doric column, recently unearthed during some repairs, that dated back to the days when York was known as Eboracum, home to the Ninth Hispana Legion of Rome. Emerging blinking into the afternoon sunlight, I felt as if I’d traveled through time.
York was enjoying a rather nice spring that year, so office workers, old people, and families sat on blankets or benches and ate lunch beside the River Ouse as it oozed through the town. One evening Mr. S. took his wife and me to a pub at the junction of the Helmsley-Harome Roads. As we left the car to enter the pub, I smelled an unfamiliar but intoxicating scent. “What is that smell?” I asked Mr. S.
“Oh, that’s the may,” he said.
Instantly my mind flashed to Alfred Noyes’ poem, “A Song of Sherwood,” about Robin Hood and his merry band of outlaws:
Doublets of the Lincoln green, glancing through the may
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day—
So that sun-dappled green forest had been filled with white hawthorn and its wonderful aroma. I envied Robin and his men.
In the pub itself a a cheerful fire was burning in the fireplace as we entered. A woman sat at a table near the fire with her dog’s head resting on her knee. This was one of the many things I loved about England—the fact that dogs were allowed in so many places. And the people I saw never seemed to have just one Jack Russell, one beagle, one whippet—they always had two or three on leashes, which they called “leads.”
There was one pilgrimage I had to make before I left York, a most important one. From York I took a train to Leeds, then another train from Leeds to Keighley (pronounced “Keithley”), and a bus from Keighley to Haworth. When I alighted and began to walk to Haworth Parsonage, I had to flatten myself against a wall as a car made its way up the narrow, hilly street.
I’ve never forgotten my visit to the Parsonage. From the ground level windows one could see the green moss-hung tombstones sloping against each other in the churchyard next door. I looked at the infamous fireplace mentioned in Mrs. Gaskill’s Life of Charlotte Bronte. It seems that one wet winter afternoon, after the four children—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell—had returned from a walk on the moors, they put their little boots in front of the fire to dry. The Reverend Bronte, returning home later, grew enraged at the sight of such “indulgence of the flesh” and threw all the boots into the fire. Then and now I despised the hatefulness of those men who cloak their viciousness in the guise of devotion to a stern, joyless deity.
One display case in the house showed a dress that Charlotte had worn. I was transfixed; I was pretty small myself, 99 pounds and 5’3” in those days, but I’d never have been able to squash myself into this tiny dress. She had clearly been very short and very thin, probably from malnourishment.
It depressed me to think of the hardships the Bronte children had endured, so I didn’t linger in Haworth. I returned to York to spend one last night with Mr. and Mrs. S., then set out the next morning by train to my beloved London.
London in the summer was a revelation. No one had bothered to tell me about the long, long summer daylight in northern climes. Once I realized it wasn’t going to get dark until 11 p.m., I was never in my tiny room at the top of the stairs. After I returned I settled into a bed-and-breakfast house in Coram Street, Bloomsbury, not far from the Russell Square Tube Station. The other guests and I had long, hilarious breakfasts in the dining room. We called each other by our city of origin: I was “Washington” (by this time my family had moved to Washington, DC), and the others at my table were friendly young men my age named Montreal, Lucerne, and Bern. Many a spirited discussion took place between me and Montreal, with Bern and Lucerne chiming in occasionally. We didn’t socialize at any other time, although once Bern did take me out for a drink at the pub round the corner.
The breakfasts fascinated me: the inevitable cornflakes, the boiled eggs, the unbelievable cold, leathery toast they made the night before and served in little toast racks the next morning, the weak tea. Once I refused to eat a boiled egg, informing the startled host that it was the reincarnation of a dear, departed friend and I simply could not perform an act of cannibalism.
One of the most delightful aspects of my new lodgings was that it was quite close to the dental college attended by Justin, on whom, as I mentioned before, I had a mad crush. Occasionally he and a couple of his fellow students would call on me in the evening and we’d all go out for a drink at the pub. (I, of course, was floating on a cloud of bliss on these occasions.)
During the days I haunted the British Museum and took in as many other sights as I could, occasionally wincing at the behavior of my fellow American tourists. Once I saw an American girl with a camera approach a young Englishman sitting on the steps of the Museum. It was two years before the Summer of Love and the concept of hippies, but “hippie” comes closest to describing his appearance.
“Kin Ah take a picture of yew?” she asked. Resignedly, he nodded.
That wasn’t as embarrassing as the time I was having my hair done in the salon next the Russell Square Tube. One morning an American girl about my age burst into the shop and asked the stylist who was doing my hair, “Do you speak English?”
Pam, my blonde, blue-eyed stylist, replied crisply, “Yes.”
My God, I thought, she must be on one of those ‘If it’s Tuesday, it’s Belgium’ tours and forgotten what day this is.
But mostly it was fascinating just walking around London. I loved the cheerful scarlet that ran through London like a connecting thread: even on a misty grey day the red double-decker buses, red and gold Royal Mail vans, and iconic domed red telephone booths lifted my spirits. Once, strolling down the Strand, I saw a building with a plaque that announced this had been Dr. Johnson’s house, so I went in. There I upset the docent by noting there was no bathroom and asking where Dr. Johnson had bathed. “There was a bath house nearby,” she said huffily. Thinking of Dr. Johnson’s habit of drinking twenty-four cups of tea a day, I also wondered where the toilet was, but feared to upset the docent further by inquiring.
One day I discovered that by going to the Old Vic box office in the morning I could buy a three-shilling (42 cents) gallery slip that would enable me to attend the play that evening. Oh, what a time that was! I saw a young Maggie Smith in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” a young Robert Stephens in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” and other Old Vic actors in “Mother Courage and Her Children.”
One evening I attended a Monteverde opera, “Il Ballo delle Ingrate,” in the garden of a historic house in Hampstead. Glancing round the audience, I saw a man on my left zipping himself up to the neck in a sleeping bag before he sat down in one of the folding chairs, and I wondered why. As night fell I jolly well realized why: whereas in the American Southwest a summer night is apt to be only slightly less warm than a summer day, in England a June night is downright chilly. Walking back to the Tube station after the performance I fell into a conversation with a young woman who had also attended the opera. It turned out we both liked lute music, so, happily humming “Two Almaines,” we made our way to our respective stops and exchanged addresses.
After that I made sure to dress warmly when I attended a couple of Shakespeare plays in Regent’s Park. I loved watching the plays in the lingering daylight and felt quite sophisticated when I drank mulled wine during the intermissions. I know “As You Like It” was one of the plays I saw but alas, I can’t remember the other one.
In late June I took a Cook’s Tour, a ten-day visit to the Continent. It was really a holiday designed to allow sun-starved English people to soak up some rays on the Ligurian coast of Italy, so there wasn’t a great deal of sightseeing. As the lone American on the bus I came in for some rather sarcastic ribbing from one of the men about my alleged Yankee superiority complex. It was quite surprising because, as the youngest passenger and the only one traveling alone, I barely said a word the whole time. All the other passengers were middle-aged except for one youngish woman who was the object of Sarky Guy’s attempts at flirtation. The other people on the tour, aware that I did not deserve the ribbing I was getting, were extra kind to me, which made me feel better.
By the time we passengers arrived back in England, thankful to be able to get a decent cup of tea at long last, I had only one more week in London before it was time to go home. At that point I was glad my odyssey was coming to an end: even an introvert like me, who’d rather read a book than eat, eventually wearies of being alone. Sometimes I would deliberately prolong transactions at shops, just to have someone to talk to. Also, I had the sense that my days were passing fruitlessly and it was time for me to get serious about my life, just as Justin and his fellow students were doing.
As on the day I had arrived four months earlier, it was a beautiful morning when I left England. After the plane lifted into the air and began to climb I could see the sand-colored Windsor Castle, looking like a child’s toy, far below and then the neat green patchwork quilt of the English countryside as the plane wheeled and turned westward.
On a sunny July afternoon the passenger jet from Heathrow descended gently at Washington Dulles International Airport. I followed the other passengers into the customs and immigration hall and lined up with them for processing. When my turn came the immigration officer looked at me, stamped my passport, and smiled. “Welcome home, Diana,” he said.
Home, I thought. This is my home and now I’ve come back to it. In that moment I realized that although I loved England passionately and always would, I was American, indisputably and forever, and glad of it.
And half a century later I’m still glad.
Diana in NoVa at 22 (1966)