My Thrilling First Sabbatical Leave Abroad (1) (Part 20)
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In August of 1972, my family (my wife and I and two little girls, 4 and 5 years old) took off on our first transatlantic flight, bound for England to spend a year in academic research and travel. We were still young and adventurous enough to launch out into a new world with only the barest of ideas about how to manage it. We had been put in touch with a faculty member at King’s College in London, Prof. Ronald Waldron, a published scholar in Middle English language and literature. Having reserved a room in a small bed and breakfast hotel in London next to Paddington Station (the Ty-Mellon it was called), we stayed there a week while we searched in the classified newspaper ads for a place to live. However, having been cautioned not to go to bed immediately on arrival, we took some time to orient ourselves to the city through a tourist bus ride that pointed out all the major sites of interest. Having been up for 18 hours or so, we went to bed around 8 p.m. London time and slept well. Very soon after we arrived, we phoned Professor Waldron (with whom we were quickly on a first name basis), and he invited us for tea at his house (a light supper, not just something to drink). He gave us instructions on how to get to a train station near his home in Essex, where he met us with his car and drove us to his home. It was a delightful experience with Ron and his wife Mary and their three children. We became good friends, and whenever we went back to England for subsequent sabbaticals or just visits, we always tried to spend some time with them. Mary died several years ago, but we are still in touch with Ron.
We finally settled on a house for rent in a “bedroom suburb” of London called Upminster, about a 45-minute train trip from central London, or, as it was often identified, the last stop on the District Line of the London Underground system. I’m sure God engineered that place for us, since it set us up to find a church in that community and to make some long-lasting friendships that have enriched our lives even to this day. At that point, Laquita and I still wanted to maintain our relationship to the Churches of Christ, but the only one at all accessible to us (we had no car that year) was a small church in central London. We tried going there several Sundays, but public transportation was unreliable on Sundays, which were often used by the railway system to make repairs. Consequently, we started searching in the Upminster community for a church we could walk to. We tried attending a nearby Baptist church, thinking it would be closer to our traditional ties, but that didn’t click for us, so we visited the local Anglican church, and we were warmly welcomed there and decided to continue with them. The church was called St. Luke’s in Cranham, which was the name of the old village that been incorporated into the larger town of Upminister. On our first or second visit we were invited home to Sunday lunch with a young couple named Terry and Val Thorpe, and that was the beginning of one of those rich friendships that have lasted to this day.
We soon realized that this congregation was not in the mainstream of the Church of England, but was part of a minority of conservative evangelicals within the C. of E. The Vicar at the time was John Simon, who had been converted by evangelical preaching in the business area of London and had dropped his banking career to become a clergyman. He brought to St. Luke’s an informal style of worship, often leading the singing with his accordion rather than the organ, reflecting the evangelical move away from adherence exclusively to the formal (and often lifeless) Anglican liturgy. How interesting that God brought us into fellowship with a conservative congregation that was to enrich us for many years to come
Our neighbors on Helford Way were warm and welcoming. The Stiff family next door were agents for our landlord, a sea captain working out of Beirut, Lebanon. Roy and Elsie had us for tea on the day we looked at the house and for meals several times after that. The neighbors on the other side of us were also hospitable, an older couple, John and Martha Morris and their teen-age son, Peter, who was deaf. Martha was a Scotswoman who had met and married John when they were in their 30s. They were both great talkers and regaled us with stories of their WW II experiences. The Stiffs also had teen-age children, two daughters, who did some baby-sitting for us. They were greatly amused by our girls’ pronunciation of “bear,” with the American “r,” in contrast to the English “bayah.” Helford Way was a cul-de-sac, so it didn’t have a lot of traffic, and it was a safe place for Liann and Cynthia to play. We were within easy walking distance of the primary school (or “infant school,” as the English called it) that they attended. Liann was a first grader, and Cynthia was in kindergarten. They enjoyed attending there, and they soon picked up perfect English accents, of which we became aware one day when Liann asked us for a drink of “wotah.”
Soon after moving into our house, we launched out to take a road trip to Scotland, since September is usually still good weather for touring. We were rather bold in deciding to drive and stay at bed and breakfast (B&B) places rather than taking a guided tour of some sort. Learning to drive on the “wrong” side of the road took some major adjustment, but apart from a fender-bender accident on one of their roundabouts (traffic circles) at the beginning, we did all right, and when we went back in subsequent years, we thought nothing about driving ourselves around on English roads. Doing so gave us a great deal more flexibility, and before the year was out, we were able to drive even in downtown London. Laquita arranged in advance the B&Bs we stayed at, often in the country. These enabled us to meet British people as we ate breakfast together and sometimes sat together in the parlor in the evenings.
Some of the roads, especially in the mountains, were quite narrow and a bit scary. I did most of the driving, and Laquita was rather white-knuckled as she looked over the edge down into the valley. Moreover, not all of these roads had railings! However, driving on these country roads supplied some spectacular views. At one point in the highlands of Scotland we pulled off to the side and looked out over a mist-covered lake (or “loch”) and heard a bagpiper playing on the other side. It was beautiful, but a bit eerie, too, as the sound at that distance had a kind of ghostly echo. We also visited cities in Scotland, most memorably Edinburgh and Stirling, both of which had famous Castles. One evening we questioned an old man at a B&B where we were staying as to the location of Loch Ness, which we knew to be nearby. He took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed, saying, “The Loch-ch-ch (the ch sound seemed drawn out forever) is doon that wey.” We did make it to Loch Ness, but no monster sightings.
When we got back to Upminster, we settled into a routine of taking the kids to school, attending to household and business chores, and getting me settled in as a “visiting scholar” at the University of London, King’s College, where Ron Waldron was a professor. Those credentials formed the basis for me to be registered at the British Museum, where I wanted to do some research in medieval studies, and more specifically, I wanted to be able to work in the famous British Library. Ron helped me get registered in and oriented to all of the places where a scholar in Middle English might want to spend some time, including the Senate House Library, which served all of the colleges of the University of London, and especially the manuscript reading room of the British Library. In addition, he introduced me to several of his colleagues in the King’s College English Department, including the Head of Department. Again, they were all very warm and welcoming.
I felt quite privileged to be allowed into the manuscript room at the British Library, which housed many original and unique ancient manuscripts. People could use only pencils to take notes, and I had to order any specific manuscript by its catalogue number. That meant that I had to know exactly what I wanted to see—no browsing on the shelves! I was given a numbered place at a table, and the manuscripts I had ordered were delivered to me at that spot. I had two kinds of research I was doing that year. First, I wanted to see unpublished manuscripts relating to the literary figure Piers the Plowman, from which one of the dream-works I analyzed in my doctoral dissertation took its name. Secondly, Ron Waldron arranged for me to be assigned the examination and description of a section of documents in the British Library to be included in the Index of Middle English Prose, a major project to catalogue all of the M.E. prose manuscripts as yet unpublished. I needed to get some instruction in paleography (reading documents hand-written in early styles), so I audited some of the classes offered to users of University of London libraries, aided by textbooks in paleography.
I met often with Ron for lunch, sometimes in his office, sometimes in a pub, for chats about our work and about English life in academe and the nature of English society and culture. We formed a close personal friendship that year, and I owed him much for getting me established in my research.
More next time about our travel and excursion experiences during that year.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.
