My Thrilling First Sabbatical Leave Abroad (2) (Part 21)
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Our trip into Scotland was a good launch to the year for us. It paved the way for us to take subsequent family trips and for touring around with guests from the U.S. We hosted our friends Wendell and Joyce Bean and their daughter, Melanie, who was about Liann’s age, and with them, we rented a van and visited the Cotswolds, Wales, and northwest England. It was in Chester that we discovered one morning that in the confusion of our departure we had left behind our little Cynthia at the B&B. We quickly corrected our mistake, and Cynthia was quite calm when we arrived, having been plied with cookies by the proprietress while she waited. Crossing the English Channel by ferry, we hit the high spots in Paris and Amsterdam, as well as visiting Cologne and its magnificent cathedral. Unfortunately, our most vivid memory of the visit to Cologne was an incident where Joyce got locked into a toilet booth because she didn’t have the correct coin for paying the attendant. The woman was quite insistent that Joyce would not be released until she paid properly! Finally, someone came in and resolved the matter, and Joyce was released.
We also had the pleasure of being visited by Sel and Helen Sutterfield, who were “uncle” and “aunt” to our children, who were quite comfortable with them and readily engaged in conversation with them. One morning Helen came down for breakfast in one of her usual tasteful ensembles, and Liann told her,”Aunt Helen, you look very “smaht” this morning,” using both an English term of description and its British pronunciation. With the Sutterfields we concentrated on points of interest in London and the south of England, including notable sites in Essex, such as the great house of Audley End and the ancient log church in Greensted.
One of the Essex sites that touched our hearts was the old church of St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, at Bradwell-on-Sea. It was out in a lonely field on the North Sea and had been restored and re-consecrated, after being used many years as a barn. Built in 654 by St. Cedd, early evangelist to the East Saxons, it was impressive, even in its austerity. Praying there, we felt the power of the centuries of prayers that had been offered there. It was constructed of materials remaining from a Roman fort on that site. In contrast nearby was a WWII concrete bunker, one of many that had been built for coastal defense. At the other end of the spectrum was the famous Canterbury Cathedral, ecclesiastical home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the clerical head of the Church of England. The beauty and glory of the ancient cathedrals never ceased to amaze us. It is also the destination of the group of pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval poem, The Canterbury Tales, making it especially meaningful to me as a teacher of literature. The town walls still stand, forming part of the walls around the Cathedral Close, the private grounds belonging to the Cathedral.
Back in Upminster, we settled into our routine. The girls were quickly oriented to their school. It was only a short distance away from our house, and they went back and forth on their own, even coming home for lunch. They did well academically, and Cynthia, being only four when she started, got a head start from where she would have been in the U. S. The headmistress, Mrs. Pullam, was a traditional British school administrator and believed in developing character in her students, as well as intellectual skills. The boys wore short pants all the year around, whatever the weather. When one of the mothers asked Mrs. Pullam about their abbreviated garments in very cold weather, she replied, “It toughens them up!” One of our early memories of Cynthia’s marching to the beat of her own drum arose from her being late coming home from school one day. We went looking for her, and we found her poring over a trail of ants on the sidewalk. She was always interested in bugs, and she saw no reason that she should not just follow where her curiosity led.
Laquita spent a lot of time that year reading books, including a good deal of the local history of Upminster and the Borough of Havering, which was the political and geographical area of which Upminster was a part. We went on walks to see sights she identified through her reading, such as the old Cranham parish church associated with James Oglethorpe, principal founder of the State of Georgia. Right in the center of Upminister was the old parish church of St. Lawrence’s, known for its “high church” liturgy. Because of its use of incense and the ringing of a bell with the Eucharist, Evangelicals laughingly referred to them as “smells and bells.” We visited both the grounds and the inside of the church and found the usual reflections of distinguished parishioners of the past who were buried there. The most prosperous of the members were able to set brass images of themselves and their families into the floor of the church to mark where they were buried. One of Laquita’s interests during the year was doing brass rubbings that were made by stretching a strong sheet of black or white paper over a brass gravestone and rubbing a special wax, called a “heel ball,” across the paper to create an image of it. We have a number of these framed on our house walls, and she gave several of them to people as special gifts. It was fairly easy to gain access to the brasses back then, but it has become increasingly difficult to get permission for this activity, and most churches now charge for it. Laquita and I took several excursions by bus to visit small, very old parish churches that had brasses she wanted to rub.
The customs of daily living in those days still reflected “old England,” since it took the country many years to recover from the privations of World War II. Shopping for food was a challenge, since refrigerators were small and it was necessary to go down to the row of shops serving the community every day or two. One would go to the butcher for meat, to the greengrocer for fresh fruits and vegetables, to the chemist (pharmacist, drug store) for medicines and sundry items, and to the small grocer for other food items. There was also a hardware store, a shoe shop, and a laundromat, which we visited regularly. The shopper was to bring her own shopping cart or bags to hold all the items. One had to go into the town of Upminster to find a grocery of any size, and nothing like our modern supermarkets. By the time we returned there to live again in 1980, refrigerators were bigger and supermarkets had begun to spring up. Milk was delivered to most homes every morning, so that was a help. One day early in our stay, Laquita heard a horse-drawn cart coming down the street with a man ringing his bell and shouting something, so she went out to meet him with 50 pence in hand and asked for a cabbage, thinking he was selling vegetables. He replied, “Oh, no luv, Oi’m the rag and bone man,” meaning he collected junk to sell. No doubt he had a chuckle about that strange American woman.
Across from the shops was the local bank, Nat West, or National Westminster. Tellers generally knew their customers, nearly all of whom lived in the neighborhood. We opened an account, and before long we were visited by the bank manager, Mr. Chambers, a man of 60 or so who was part of the country club set and later in the year treated me to lunch in the exclusive country club dining room. I was of course a complete neophyte in the financial customs and had to learn to write checks and deposit slips in the British manner. The tellers were amused at my accent and my lack of common knowledge about British customs. We have maintained our Nat West account all these years, but, alas, the Cranham Branch closed a number of years ago, and our relationship with the downtown Upminster Branch was never as personal as the one in Cranham.
Every so often we would catch bus number 248 in Cranham and go to downtown Upminister to shop for groceries and other items. The “anchor store” for Upminster was Roomes’ Department Store, which was very large and occupied two buildings across the street from each other. Among the other shops we liked was a little bookstore called Swan’s. It was delightfully cluttered and had a wide variety of books, new and used. One of the most lasting of our purchases there were children’s story tapes that we listened to with our children for two generations. Rachel still has some of them. We also bought travel books there and maps. Number 248 could also take us to Romford, the old Essex market town. Market day there brought hundreds of farmers, clothes merchants, craft and jewelry sellers, fast food stalls, and other people hawking all sorts of wares. It was a marvelous sight and we usually brought home something useful or interesting.
When we could arrange for after-school care for the children, Laquita and I spent days in London, especially in the traditional financial district called the City, or the “Square Mile,” with its ancient Roman walls and beautiful churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The best-known structures in the City, of course, are the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral, the crown of Wren churches. It was delightful to be there in the winter time, since there were few tourists and one could walk even in the British Museum without crowds. We were not much into shopping, but we did go to the famous Harrod’s Department Store, with its amazing artistic display of fish and confections. Toward the end of our stay, we went to a big china shop in London called Lawley’s and bought a set of Royal Doulton china in the Valley Green pattern. It has been our special set of dishes for guests and family festive occasions. We had it shipped, and it was an exciting final touch to our trip when the china arrived at our house a few weeks after we got home. What a year it was!
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.
