The Weekly Dispatch No. 14:  In Which I Return To This Wonderful City, Settle In, and Begin A New Adventure.

Though Beth and I have been in England a few times since our 2007 Canterbury stay, landing at Heathrow last Sunday was different because I knew that it would be months before I got back on the plane to come home and that I would be not a tourist but a resident, albeit an alien one.  When we landed for our first extended stay, that realization was a bit daunting; this time I felt ready and confident.  The only major drawback to that confidence is that I’m alone—Beth’s school suspended sabbaticals this year—so any mistakes or wrong turns or missed connections will fall entirely on me.  More importantly, I will miss sharing the experience with Beth, but she will be coming over three times during my stay, so we’ll have plenty of opportunities to board the wrong train together.

 At Heathrow, I met up with the ICISP students who will be my “charges” during this study abroad semester.  All six are female and all six strike me as capable young adults, eager and excited about this new chapter in their lives.  After we found each other in the terminal, we were brought to Canterbury and driven to the places where we will live for the next three months.  I was the first one dropped off—so that the students know where to find me—and then the rest were taken to the homes where their host families welcomed them.  One of the students had to wait until evening to be delivered because her family was in London, so she was stuck hanging around with me until the taxi picked her up.

 My residence until mid-December is a new three-bedroom flat in a brand new building the university built as student housing.  No students have or will live in the apartment I’m in unless they are older and/or have families because the neighbors on the street did not take to the idea of having 18- or 19-year-old students carousing next door.  Like most English homes, this one is small but has everything I need.  On the ground floor, there is a combination living/kitchen space, a half-bath and a bedroom.  I have both a large refrigerator and a combination washer-dryer.  Upstairs, there are two more bedrooms and a full bath.  I also have a large TV set on the ground floor hooked up to cable, so this time I won’t be limited in my viewing to British game shows, though it was good to watch Eggheads again.

 While I was unpacking, Jayne Anne Kilvington from the university's international program came to the door and told me that my Missouri counterpart, Rich Pernaud, had arrived, so I went next door to say hello.  Last time around, the faculty person from Missouri was, to say the least, a challenge and not someone we cared to spend much time with.  This time, I am lucky to have a great neighbor and colleague.  Rich teaches English at St. Louis Community College, and he and I will be guest lecturing in an American literature class taught by a young, enthusiastic lecturer, Zalfa Feghali, who is just starting her first full-time teaching position.  When both Rich and I had unpacked enough to feel a break was needed, we walked into the city centre, where I tried to be both tour guide and silent companion, knowing that I could diminish the wonder of discovering this beautiful city by talking too much.  It was interesting to note that Rich’s impression of Canterbury was exactly the same one that Beth and I had when we first walked on High Street: “This doesn’t seem real. It’s like a movie set.”

I did impose my will a little bit, though, and suggested that we have dinner that night at The Weavers, which is a traditional English restaurant housed in a building built in the late 1500s—“oldy-woldy,” as they say here—that serves a variety of pastry-topped pies both filling and delicious.  After walking some more and staying awake late enough to beat jet lag, I came home and got ready for what I hoped would be a restful sleep that would leave me charged and ready for Monday’s obligations at the university.  Teeth brushed, lights turned out, I pulled back the duvet on my bed and lay down.  As I did, I remembered that Steve Alvin, the faculty person here last spring, had commented on the firmness of the mattress.  I think he said “hard” rather than “firm,” but I passed that off as hyperbole.  Surely, Steve just wasn’t used to an English mattress.  As I stretched out and pulled up the covers, I realized Steve was not exaggerating. The mattress was hard in the same way that a paved road is hard, ungiving and unforgiving.  Despite my being fatigued and desperate for sleep, I spent the whole night trying to find a position that approximated comfort, but, alas, I could not find one.  Every time I woke from a brief bit of fitful sleep, all I could think about was doing this every night until December. I tried to convince myself that if medieval monks could sleep on bare boards in tiny, dank rooms, then I had no room to complain.  By morning—by which I mean 4 a.m.—I decided that medieval monks must have been idiots or had grown up in an environment where a wooden slab was preferable to whatever they had known prior to their joining an orders (what could that be?) and was determined not to emulate those brown-cowled knuckleheads another night, so I dragged the mattress off the bed in the adjoining room and put it on top of mine: it worked! I managed to get an hour of real sleep before I had to hop up and head off to campus.

 Even though I was groggy and a bit unfocused the next day, I was very impressed by the changes that had taken place in the study abroad program at Canterbury Christ Church University since we were here in 2007.  This time, the students were given everything they needed to get off to a good start.  Representatives from every important office or department spoke with them, welcomed them, reassured them that they were there for them.  All in all, there was a greater cohesion and completeness to the orientation process missing six years ago, and I think the students had any lingering fears allayed before the day was out.

There is also a more concerted effort to get the students out and about, so on Wednesday night, we were treated to a Canterbury Ghost Walk.  Granted, it wasn’t dark, and we didn’t see anything even remotely resembling a spectre, but the woman who conducted the tour was very theatrical (she had some BBC acting credits) and kept us amused for an hour.  At one point, she even hid behind a guy who was leaning in a doorway drinking a beer, a move that he seemingly took in stride, but one that made all of us spectators a bit uncomfortable. 

 On Saturday, we went on our first field trip, this one to the Roman fort at Richborough, followed by an afternoon of roaming around the seaside town of Broadstairs.  The tour was conducted by Doug MacMillan, who had been a student in the American Literature class I taught six years ago, and it was a real delight to see how much he has matured and how well he does his job.  (For those who read the blog in 2007, Doug—or Dougie, as he was known then—was the instigator of the “how old is Pat Parks contest,” a claim to fame that had him a bit chagrined when I reminded him of it, though I reassured him that it made me feel accepted.)  Doug, who has a Hugh Grant-ish charm about him, had been one of the first students to get involved with the American students, so it seems only fitting that he is now helping this group get acclimated.

 The Roman fort was a place that we had discovered in 2007 but could not explore because it was closed for the season. This time we were able to do more than take pictures of a lone stony wall and could actually get in and look around.  Past that wall, which is all one can see from the parking lot, is a two-acre complex of crumbled stone ruins and deep trenches. The footprint of St. Augustine’s first chapel on British soil is there, too.  Built in roughly 45 AD, the site marked the first place the Romans came ashore in Britain.  They picked that spot because it was low—unlike the cliffs at Dover and other spots on the southeast coast—which made it easy for them to off-load supplies and troops.  Though this was a beachhead then, the sea has silted in considerably, and it’s now a mile-and-a-half to the coast rather than the five or six hundred yards that it had been.   

 After an hour or so of wandering, we piled back into the coaches and headed off to Broadstairs, a smallish city that had been a popular seaside resort in the Victorian period for Londoners who wanted to get out of the smoggy metropolis and enjoy clean air and sandy beaches.  White chalk cliffs rise up from the beach—not as high as those at Dover—so the hotels and restaurants command a wonderful view of the English Channel and, when the sky is clear enough, the coast of France, 22 miles away.  Doug took the group down High Street (there’s a High Street in almost every community; it’s their equivalent of our Main Street) to the beach and let the students go exploring for a bit until reuniting for a trek up the coast to the North Foreland Lighthouse, the last manned (though no longer) lighthouse in England. The walk took about an hour and gave the students not only a chance to see the historic building but also to go down to Joss Bay and wade barefoot in the very chilly Channel.  Behind the lighthouse, a hill drops away to a riding stable.  In a field near where we were standing, horses and sheep mingled and grazed.  I was talking with two students who were interested in finding a place to go horseback riding and perhaps take lessons when I noticed a tiny girl in Wellington boots, blond braids and a purple riding helmet making her way up the long hill toward us.  When she got to the fence—which was a good 20 yards or so away from where we were—she said, “Excuse me.  Please don’t try to touch the horses or feed them.  It will make them fight.”  I said that we wouldn’t, that I had a horse at home and that we were just looking.  Satisfied that she had done her job and had likely prevented an equine free-for-all, she turned and marched back down the hill.

 One of the great things that Doug did on this trip was to make the students responsible for getting themselves back to Canterbury.  His thinking, which strikes me as very sound, was that if they could safely manage to return on their own, then they would be more comfortable with a longer trip away.  He had purchased train tickets for everyone and made sure that they were in groups of three or four so that no one was left alone.  These were distributed prior to our arriving in Broadstairs with the understanding that once the lighthouse walk was over, students could either stay for a while longer or make their way back to Canterbury.  Some students had plans for the evening—one group was heading up to Edinburgh and had to catch a train north—leaving about a dozen students behind.  Some of them accompanied Rich and Doug and me to a sailors’ pub where my formidable skills as a pool player on an American table proved to be woefully inadequate on the much smaller, narrow-pocketed British table.  Rich and I lost three in a row and decided a second pint would make lessen the embarrassment.

 Part of the reason we had decided to linger in Broadstairs was a pageant scheduled for 7 o’clock, to be followed by fireworks at 8.  Now, I am a great fan of local pageants—in fact, I even wrote one when we lived in Muscatine, Iowa—and the more awkwardly sincere it is, the better.  Keep in mind, I don’t attend these to mock their clumsiness but, rather, to appreciate the honesty and guilelessness of that clumsiness.  Granted, I am amused and find myself laughing when perhaps I shouldn’t, but it’s never mean-spirited.  I love that people throw themselves with such abandon into their roles, and I love that people who attend do the same. There’s a shared joy that’s undeniable and enviable, a respite from cynicism.

 From where we stood on the beach, next to the place where the acts gathered for their turn on stage, it was a bit difficult to follow the action, but the deep-voiced and impassioned narrator told us that the over-arching theme of the evening was tolerance.  He noted that the performers possessed many abilities and disabilities and that they had all practiced diligently for this night.  That said, he introduced the first performers, a dozen males of various ages dressed as Roman soldiers and Brits, who re-enacted for a very long time the invasion of Britain by Rome.  While those costumed characters swung wooden swords against wooden shields, four men also in Roman garb galloped back and forth behind the action on white horses.  One of the four, the leader of the group, rode with both arms extended, clearly pleased that he could ride with no hands.  After the big battle, the action took a decidedly genteel turn, and group after group of dancers made their way from where we stood to a wooden dance floor.  Rich, who was closest to the performers, said to one young woman who was nervously waiting her turn, “I’ll be you guys are going to be the best ones out there.” To which she replied with typical British modesty or resignation, “I don’t think so.  We’re not very good at all.”  We were too far away to see if she was right in her assessment, but the whole event, with lights swirling off the white cliffs and New Age-ish instrumental music (think pan flute and a hammered dulcimer) reverberating over the sea was a memorable way to end our first week in England.

 This coming week will include a trip to London on Monday—a kind of primer for Rich so that he can navigate the city on his own next time around, a field trip to Rochester on Friday and Beth’s arrival that same day.  We also have a tour of the cathedral on Tuesday, so there should be plenty for me to pass along in the next installment—which may be a day late because Beth and I will be in London on Sunday, my writing day.  I’ll try my best to meet my own deadline, though.

Thanks for reading.

 p.s. A word of advice for travelers to England: don’t buy an umbrella for a pound ($1.72) unless you want to tell people not to buy an umbrella for a pound.

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