Weekly Dispatch #12In Which We Welcome Our Final Guests, Cross the English Channel, Meet the Archbishop of Canterbury & Walk Along The White Cliffs
Winter in England is a different season from winter in the Midwest. Rather than freezing temperatures and inches of snow, the weather here today is a comfortable 50+, but a steady, heavy rain is being driven sideways by a gusty wind and sounds as if someone is throwing handfuls of pebbles at our windows. Add to that the fact that it starts getting dark between 3:30 and 4 p.m., and you’ve got a good picture of Canterbury in December. We aren’t likely to go out anywhere today, but having just received a stack of student essays—and with both of us in the middle of good books—staying inside where it’s warm and dry seems like a pretty good idea.

This past week, we hosted our last group of visitors. Jan Grainger, Lisa March and Shawn Skiver arrived by bus—in the rain, of course—a few hours after we put our kids on the plane home and settled in for a few days of sightseeing. Usually, people who fly to Europe leave the U.S. around 5 or 6 p.m. and land about 8 a.m. in the new time zone, but these savvy travelers left around 9 p.m. Chicago time—which meant, theoretically, that sleeping would be more natural and easier (if you can get comfortable)—and only lost a couple of hours on this end. Next time we take a trip abroad, I think we’ll do the same thing.

Our big outing with these guys was a ferry ride across the English Channel to Calais, France, for the day. We all studied the time tables for the trains to Dover and for the ferry and left Canterbury, we were sure, with enough time to make the required 45-minutes-before-departure deadline. And, we are all convinced, we would have done that had the train/bus/ferry companies made any attempt to coordinate their services. Instead, there is a large sign absolving them of any such responsibility. So, when we de-trained at Dover Priory Station, we discovered that the bus to the ferry port had left a couple of minutes earlier. Instead of waiting, we hired a couple of taxis—Shawn and I in the second one, and I got to say to the driver, “Follow that cab”—and hurried to the ticket counter, only to be told that we had missed the deadline for the 9:25 a.m. crossing by two minutes and would have to wait for the 10:10. We were not the only people who were inconvenienced, and more than one Brit said that the company had never been that bound by the 45-minute rule before. Needless to say, there were a group of grumpy people shooting dirty looks at the ticket clerk and watching the clock. Finally, they called us to board the bus that would take us to the boat, and we were off.

Sort of.

From the terminal, the bus took us along a winding route through chain link fences and warehouses and then into a barn-like building where we stopped and were told to get off for passport control. We followed the rest of the passengers into a large, bare room where two Frenchmen behind tall desks greeted everyone with a cheery “Bon jour,” looked at and stamped passports and then handed them back with a friendly “Merci.” We filed out of that room and got back on the bus which arced out of one gate, through another and into a barn-like building just like the one we had left. According to an announcement piped into the bus, our vehicle had been specially selected for additional screening, but we were all beginning to feel like refugees rounded up and about to be sent to a prison camp somewhere far, far away. Again, we shuffled off the bus and into another big, cold room where we had to pass through a typical security check (bags on the conveyor belt, walk-through metal detector, full body cavity search), collect our things and then re-board the bus again.

Until this trip, the only ferry ride I’d taken was out to Mackinac Island in Michigan, so I was surprised by the size and accoutrements of this massive craft. In addition to a duty-free shop that sold cosmetics and liquor and the biggest boxes of cigarettes I’ve ever seen in my life, there were a couple of bar/lounge areas, restaurants, a video arcade, and a casino. We took advantage of none of the options and, instead, went up on deck for awhile to see the White Cliffs of Dover as we pulled away and then settled into a quiet corner and watched people. A man who had mistakenly identified us as Canadians (can you imagine!) sat and talked with us for a bit as we were about to dock in Calais. He had been a disposable “nappie” specialist for Kimberly-Clark and had spent time in Racine helping folks in that plant get their production lines up to speed. He was traveling to Calais with his neighbor to do what everyone does when they come to Calais for the day: have a nice lunch, then go buy French wine, cheese and bread.

Once we were on French soil, we needed to get from the port to the city center, but, again, we had missed the bus. So Beth, who has studied French for the past five years and did a summer of language immersion in Dijon, went up to a taxi and flashing five fingers, asked “Quatre?” which, to those who don’t know French (like me), means, essentially, do you have room for four. There was actually room for all five, and Beth made the driver laugh by declaring “Je suis un idiot!” (I am an idiot.) The driver also recommended restaurants for lunch, and, taking his advice, we settled in at a table in La Mer, one of a dozen or more seafood restaurants in this part of the city.

Because there are so many Brits who come across the channel, the menu had English translations of all the dishes, but the specials of the day, which were printed on a chalkboard, were only in French. Lisa was interested in finding out what one of them was, but none of us could figure out what “sabaste” was. Our best guess was “sea bass.” When the waiter came to the table, Lisa asked him, “Is this sea bass?” To which he replied, “Oui, sabaste.”

“But is it sea bass?” she asked again.

“Oui, is sabaste.”

“I know, but what is sabaste?”

“Is sabaste.”

This went on for a few more volleys until Lisa managed to find out that it was a kind of whitefish, which both she and Shawn ordered. Jan and I had mussels, and Beth, inexplicably given that it was a seafood restaurant, asked for beef stew. Guess which one of us wasn’t happy with her meal? My mussels, for the record, were incredible. They arrived—probably close to 100 of the little black-shelled beauties—in a silver pot, having been steamed in a white wine/thyme/rosemary/bay leaf/onion concoction. I ate and ate and ate until Jan, a former biology teacher, wondered about the effects of all of these mollusks on American Midwestern gastrointestinal systems. Fortunately, there were no ill effects, and I wish now that I’d have finished the bucket; I’m not likely to get a delicacy like that again for quite some time.

Dragging ourselves away from the table—there was discussion of ordering a second bottle of wine and staying put until it was time to go back to Dover—we set out on the second part of our mission: bread and wine and cheese. Since arriving in Canterbury, neighbors and colleagues had been telling us we needed to get to France to pick up that trio because the French varieties are better than the British (I won’t concede that the French have the corner on cheese, however) and because the currency exchange rate favors the British pound, meaning your money goes farther. We figured that there must be shops nearby that specialized in one or all of the items we were looking for, but we wandered for a bit and found nothing but more restaurants and lots of souvenir shops. While we were looking, we caught glimpses of an impressive clock tower between buildings and, almost by accident, found ourselves in front of the place.

The clock tower—which we learned is a World Heritage site, like Canterbury Cathedral—is part of Calais’ Hotel de Ville (city hall). The clerk at the information desk in the vast, marble-floored lobby told us we could explore the first two floors, so we did, discovering along the way the “marriage chamber” where Charles de Gaulle got hitched, and letting ourselves into a plush meeting room where, I’m sure, we weren’t supposed to be. The architecture, which is Flemish Renaissance, features ornate and intricate ornamentation and more color than is found in some other, more sedate styles. In front of the building is a Rodin sculpture, “The Burghers of Calais,” which honors six local citizens who, in 1347, after an eight-month siege by the British, surrendered themselves and the keys to the city, hoping that their sacrifice would save the rest of the population. Edward III, the English king, was so moved by their bravery that he spared them and the city.

Our quest to find wine/bread/cheese led us, at last, to a rather uninteresting mid-town mall, where American Christmas carols sung by Perry Como and Bing Crosby and others played over the heads of the shoppers, and into a large supermarket. We made the purchases we wanted, but the quantity and prices that we had been told to expect weren’t there. Only later, after we were at home and re-consulted the guide, did we learn that a huge shopping mall located near the channel tunnel entrance in Coquelles, about 3 miles outside of Calais, was the place we should have gone to get bargains. So, lugging heavy bags, we trooped back to the spot where we had been dropped off five hours earlier and waited for the bus that would take us back to our ferry. As we waited, I struck up a conversation with a couple of Brits who were also heading back. The older of the two men told me that he had worked the ferries for years before retirement and came over once a month or so, but usually by car and not as a foot passenger. In fact, he said he was unlikely to come again without his car because it was more expensive and more difficult getting to places he wanted to visit.

On the bus to the port, someone wondered if we would have to do anything like the double security check we’d passed through on our way to France. Jan said she didn’t think so. “All the weirdness was on the other side,” she mused, not knowing there was, indeed, a little weirdness awaiting us in Dover.

It was probably my fault. When I presented my passport to the British agent in Calais, he asked what I was doing in Canterbury, and I told him that I was working at the university. He quickly flipped through my passport and said, “You don’t have a work visa here.” Remembering the conversation we had had three months ago at Heathrow when we tried to explain our reason for being in England and the difficulty that ensued there, I tried to backtrack without seeming guilty of anything, but I was feeling a little like the American spy in an old black-and-white movie who gets tripped up because he held his fork in his right hand rather than his left. Finally, I said that we were chaperoning a group of American students, and he let me pass. Shawn and Lisa and Jan were ushered through quickly, but the officer wanted to chat a little with Beth as well. She told him essentially the same thing that I had—without all of the hemming and hawing—and joined the rest of us. She recalled, as we were boarding the ferry, that we had been told to bring our appointment letters explaining the arrangement with Christ Church anytime we left the country. It didn’t seem to be a big deal, though, so we found comfortable couches and headed back to England.

We had pretty much forgotten the incident—in part because we were all drowsy from the trip—until we started through the Dover terminal and were met by four immigration/customs/security officers who were spaced the width of the hallway and seemed ready for action should we say or do the wrong thing.

“Do you have British passports?” one of them asked.

We said no, we have American passports, and suddenly the tension was gone, and they let us pass by. The ferryman we had met in Calais was right behind us, and I asked him what that was all about.

“They took your picture on the other side and sent it over here. They knew what you look like, and they were waiting for you.”

“Why?”

He just shrugged.

The only thing we could figure out was the exchange I had had with the agent prior to our boarding, but even that didn’t seem to warrant any kind of alert. It wasn’t a big deal, as I said before, but it was just weird and unsettling enough to be memorable.

On Wednesdays in London, matinee ticket prices for most of the theatres are half-price, so while Beth and I had a workday ahead of us, our guests were going off to the city. We broke out some of the French bread for breakfast, and Lisa ate a whole loaf by herself (she didn’t really, but she was so afraid that I’d say she did that I had to put it in here). We haven’t seen any productions yet, but we plan to go up this Friday to see a show and were happy that the intrepid trio came back from their adventure with good advice for us. They did a musical double feature: The Lord of the Rings in the afternoon at half-price (which all three said was stunning to watch) and We Will Rock You, a musical featuring the music of Queen, for full price in the evening. They didn’t have much time to eat, so when they got back to Canterbury after midnight, food was a high priority. About the only place open at that time is Efe’s Kabobs, where Shawn ordered a chicken sandwich with a “to-may-to,” which caused the rest of the customers and the entire staff to shout back at him in unison, “It’s to-mah-to!”

We really enjoyed having the three friends visit—just as we’ve enjoyed the rest of our visitors (we are envied by the other Americans)—and were sad to see them go on Saturday morning. Because the bags were heavier than when they arrived—we convinced them to take some of our stuff home with them—we called for a taxi. Shawn and I were going to ride with the bags, but Jan and Lisa and Beth decided to walk. A couple of minutes after they left—and just before the taxi arrived—we realized that they were going to the wrong station. So, with almost as much cinematic resonance as my “Follow that taxi” line from Dover, our driver said he would get us to the correct station on time and went wheeling through Canterbury’s narrow streets until we caught up with the three walkers. They jumped in, and we raced to the right destination with just three minutes to spare before the train left. Shawn and Lisa got tickets, while Jan and Beth and I hustled the bags down and under the rails to the correct platform and then convinced the conductor to please, please wait because our friends would miss their flight. He grumbled a bit about people missing their train connections, but he did hold the train until Sean and Lisa came flying up the steps and, literally, jumped into the train just as he was closing the doors.

The tone of the day changed after the train pulled away. I think it was because we had just said goodbye to our last group of guests and that the next time somebody was leaving Canterbury it would be us. We went home, got out the suitcases and put them in one of the extra bedrooms, and then started to consolidate things we were going to bring home in that same room. It was the same routine we had followed at home two weeks before we flew over here, and there was a real sense of déjà vu to our actions.

At the cathedral on Saturday night, there was a special World AIDS Day service with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, presiding. It was a moving service, held in the cathedral crypt, attended by 80 or so people. When the service ended, because the crowd was so small, we had a chance to chat for a few minutes with the Archbishop—a charming man with white hair and beard and fierce black eyebrows—and found out that Chicago is his favorite city in the U.S.. Now that we’ve met the leader of the Church of England and have seen the Queen, who else is left?

I’ll end this dispatch with a quick report about an outing we took yesterday to Deal, a delightful seaside town with three castles—one of them the home of the late Queen Mum—and a beautiful view of the sea that stretches from Ramsgate to the north, Dover and its cliffs to the south, and the coast of France to the east. We were guests of Mandy Cooper, who teaches in the American Studies Department and has lived in Deal for the past twenty years. After a tour of the town, we headed to St. Margaret’s Bay, an even more picturesque place nestled between two white cliffs, for the best fish pie I’ve had since we got here. Mandy told us that a good number of celebrities—including Roger Moore of James Bond fame—have or used to have homes nearby. After the meal, we drove to the top of the cliffs and took a walk. The light and the clouds, the gulls hanging over the waves, the wind blowing the long grass along the path: I wished I was a painter struggling to get the scene down on canvas exactly right. Instead, I snapped a couple of pictures and hoped I captured a bit of the place.

These last two weeks are going to be very busy with us trying to get as many last-minute trips and activities completed before we have to leave, so the next dispatch—which will be the final account of our time here—will be a little different. As I noted before, I’ve been putting together a Top Ten list, and that’s what I’ll send along.

Thanks for reading…