11

IN ATTEMPTING to reintroduce my car to England, late on an August Sunday afternoon, I experienced a first brassy taste of British bureaucratic superiority. I’d bought the car, under the strict tax regulations then prevailing, without paying the large amount of purchase tax that a Briton would have paid. I was spared the tax on the understanding that I’d export the car forever within a year. Now the customs men at Harwich attempted to assert that I’d exported the car forever when I took it to Norway and that I could only import it now if I paid several hundred pounds of tax on the spot. As I attempted to explain myself to the increasingly livid agents in a shed in Harwich, I realized that I’d exported the car for a summer journey without sufficient inquiries, on my part, as to my freedom to bring it back. I assumed my year of grace-from-tax still had more than half a year to run.

Maybe the agents were annoyed at having to work on a Sunday—and work with a university student, at that (I was getting my first whiff of British class antagonism). But faced with their demand either for hundreds of pounds I didn’t possess or else the temporary surrender of my car, I finally asked to speak with the supervisor on duty. The request further infuriated the men who were dealing with my return; but a supervisor did indeed materialize, one with even more braid on his cap. I tried a last impassioned plea for an understanding pardon, and the man relented—not of course before he read me a lengthy and increasingly chauvinistic lecture to the approximate effect that “You Americans”—shades of Mr. Leishman!—“think you can rewrite our laws for your own benefit anytime you wish. This country suffered a world war for you, we’re suffering still; and here you’re swanking around with your dollars, flouting our troubles.”

I heard some degree of justice in his lecture; but I kept silent, then apologized for my oversight in not seeking the correct prior permissions. I made no attempt to defend my military compatriots who, even as I spoke, might well be climbing aboard willing girls in Gropecunt Lane—or an alley adjacent to the very pub nearest this customs station. No doubt, by their own lights, the customs men were correct; but since my prior experiences of the English had convinced me of an extraordinary lack of the prim self-importance and the moral superiority I’d faced for the past hour, I was briefly stunned. But the instant the supervisor waved us onward, I floored the pedal and was out of his shed before he could dream of changing his mind. I should add that the car had given us perfect service on the continental roads—needing only gas, oil, and an occasional windshield wash. In fact it would give me cheerfully reliable service for the seven years I owned it—by far the most reliable car I’ve owned, in fifty-one years of cars.

*        *        *

A supper of the famed, and first-rate, oysters from the nearby beds at Colchester set me back up; and before midnight I’d returned Michael to his mother’s flat. I stayed there with them another day or two. Michael was facing his third, and final, year at college; so once back home he betook himself to the books he might have been reading all summer. And I, who also might well have spent the past five weeks in the Bodleian, merely drove myself to Oxford and surprised the landlady who’d expected me no sooner than October 1. I asked to occupy my rooms for at least the time I’d need to shave off my beard, get my clothes truly clean again, select a few books of my own to read (mainly a few unread novels by Hardy and Forster and my increasingly annotated text of Samson), and change the oil in my car.

While I’d been on the Continent, Mother had finally undergone a surgery she’d long needed—a hysterectomy and the necessary work to repair the damage done by the delivery of two very large baby boys and a near-fatal stillbirth some twenty years earlier. My letters from the time reflect a good deal of worry for her health and the guilt I experienced for having been on a European lark while she suffered. They also show that I was beginning to think of the doctoral degree I thought I’d need after my B.Litt. In the summer before my senior year at Duke I’d spent a rewarding ten weeks at Harvard, studying with the first-rate, amusing, and friendly Howard Mumford Jones—among several others. And now I wrote home to say that “I’m pretty determined to try to get into Harvard next fall” (the fall of ’57)—yet I was still working much harder on my own fiction than on Milton’s poetry.

My mother Elizabeth and brother Will in 1956 on the porch of the Rodwell house in Macon where Mother and I were born. Between them is my cousin Marcia Drake Bennett, and another family member sits in the swing which had been such a welcoming feature of my long boyhood visits. I’ve mentioned the degree to which I missed Will and Mother during my three English years (we called him Bill then, and note his white socks). The many similar photographs which they sent me in their letters did little to assuage my longing for home, nor did my frequent spells of homesickness greatly dilute my pleasure in the British and continental years. Knowing that I’d be home, essentially for good, in the summer of 1958 kept me mostly even-keeled.

Having dispatched those concerns to North Carolina, I stashed my belongings at the Kirkbys’ and headed to Burford, after all, for my longest stay yet with Redmayne. A briefly resident friend did a good life-size drawing of me and the beard. Pamela fed me well and recounted her sometimes amusing, often plainly apocryphal, recollections. In return I mowed her lawn, trimmed the shrubs, attended Sunday church at the small but beautifully detailed Burford parish church, and rode with her to Tewkesbury to see its magnificent and cavernous Norman abbey church and the nearby field where in 1471 a crucial battle in the Wars of the Roses was fought, one in which the eventual Richard III led the Yorkist forces which killed the young Lancastrian Prince of Wales.

*        *        *

Then encumbered by grateful affection for Redmayne’s kindness and by semi-homicidal tendencies in the face of her increasingly elaborate confabulations, I struck out alone for the Gower Peninsula in the south of Wales near Swansea. In another of her bountiful good deeds, Pamela had put me onto a couple—a working stonemason named Harry Bevan and his wife—whose small ad she’d discovered in a magazine. They offered the large upper room in their rural cottage for a strikingly low weekly rent, all meals included. My family name Price (from ap Rhys, “son of Rhys”) is among the most frequently encountered Welsh names; and while my father’s family had kept no strong Welsh tradition, I’d learned—in some genealogical prowling of my own—of our Celtic roots. I was at least double Celtic; one side of Dad’s family was Welsh, another Scottish/French Huguenot. His mother was a Scot by name, a McCraw, thereby doubling my connection to that strangely imaginative and often violent brood. As I drove southwest then in early September (with $15.42 in my checking account) and slowly approached my hosts near the village of Oxwich Green, in sight of the sea, I felt slowly absorbed back into a world my genes had departed centuries ago but recognized now, in every rock and tree.

And the Bevans’ isolated cottage—no others in sight—seemed the first real home I’d inhabited in the eleven months since I left my mother’s (Michael’s mother worked outside their apartment all day, and their flat had an oddly unlived-in air). The Bevans had no children; but Mrs. Bevan was in the cottage all day, involved in the usual work of a homemaker. When I worked or read upstairs, the quiet sounds of her kitchen jobs—cleaning, polishing, and asides to the dog—were welcome accompaniments.

So in memory I seem to have stayed a long time—sleeping late, then eating Mrs. Bevan’s rich breakfast, going for long walks down to the beautiful deserted beach or the ruined castle or rides into nearby Swansea with its lively outdoor market. There I talked a good deal with the merchants at their stalls—the musical accent of that part of Wales was very near to song or chant—and I bought yards of the stout light-blue wool from which local miners’ shirts were made (I still have the fabric, folded in a closet; no shirts were ever made for me). Most redeemingly, I worked on my stories. I’d still begun nothing new but was content to teach myself how to write as I worked at my endless revisions of the four stories I considered worth owning—“Michael Egerton,” “A Chain of Love,” “The Warrior Princess Ozimba,” and “The Anniversary.”

Most vividly I recall a particular quiet tap at my door—I was napping in early afternoon. It was Mrs. Bevan and she spent a long minute begging my pardon; then said that their dog, an ancient terrier, was ill. Could she pay me please to drive her and the dog to Swansea to see the vet? She was not an old woman, maybe in her early forties, with a distinct but gentle dark beauty—chestnut hair, eyes so brown they were nearly black, perfect skin with no wrinkles yet.

I was lonely that afternoon and glad to accept her request, assuring her that no money could be involved. On our way into town, she stroked the sick dog asleep in her lap; and she talked of how she and Harry had tried and tried for a child and how “old Barrett” had taken the place of a younger human creature to love. No tears, no tug at my arm for brotherhood; yet almost no memory from that first year abroad is stronger for me now than the drive into Swansea with Mrs. Bevan and Barrett.

Yet strangely I barely recall the sequel. We brought Barrett home, alive though not healed. Oddly a very similar situation arose a year later when the Kirkbys, my also childless Oxford landlords, would ask me to be with their only dog Peter while a vet “put him down.” Old Peter, who looked like a bag of dirty feathers, had lunged for my ankles, fangs bared, a hundred times but was too blind to catch me. Now he was riddled with cancer, in moaning pain; so I went to the back room where he was all but immobile on his pillow. The vet was preparing her lethal hypodermic. Till Peter died quietly, I warily rubbed his neck (if he’d rallied he might have torn off a finger). From the two occasions, with Barrett and Peter, some dozen years later I wrote a story called “A Dog’s Death.”

And in retrospect now I more than half think that the incident in Oxwich Green—intense as it was—kept me from returning to the Bevans’ perfect quarters during later vacs, despite Mrs. Bevan’s kind letters of invitation. Maybe though more than two years had passed, I felt too near the vigil I’d kept on Dad’s awful death, and the cancer dread I’d encouraged a few months ago, to return to even a sick dog’s home. It would be almost another decade—Mother’s inescapable decline—before I felt adequate to face such trials (the completion of three related short stories was a crucial help).

*        *        *

So I wrote to my forthcoming landlady and begged the right to return. Then after ten days in Wales—and giving her no chance to say No—I turned back up on her doorstep. Despite griping steadily for the first two days, she folded me in. Her name, again, was Win Kirkby. In many ways she and her husband Jack were classic instances of the upper-working-class Briton of their time and place (I continue to specify matters of class because they were so vitally important at the time). Win and Jack owned their home in Headington—a clean and orderly Oxford middle-class neighborhood of two-story brick and occasional stucco houses. Their next-door neighbor to the right was a physician; farther down the road at number 76 lived Professor J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife (as yet his trilogy was by no means famous, in Britain or elsewhere). Win added a one-car garage while I lived there; and once I returned to the States, she paid for driving lessons, purchased her own Morris Mini; and of all things—considering her sizable tendency to battiness—she took to the roads with considerable aplomb.

The Kirkbys were dedicated members of the Labour Party and worked for the party in various minor connections—organizing and serving at spring and summer fetes, for instance. Win was also a full-time housewife (her aged mother lived alone elsewhere in Headington, and Win took loyal care of her in several daily visits on her bike). In his longtime job as a scout at New College, Jack was a man of considerable dignity—maybe also in his mid-fifties, handsome in a retired-RAF-pilot way—though he’d never been a pilot. He sported a luxuriant grizzled black mustache, a blazer with the New College emblem, and the patience of Job—which he needed.

Win was in her late forties, with an often laughing demeanor but a settled ruthlessness when crossed (I never crossed her, though I witnessed occasions when others did).

Her hair had been red, likely helped along now by a little dye; and both she and Jack spoke one of the few authentic noncollegiate Oxfordshire accents I heard in my time—an accent with none of the harshness of Cockney and none of the facial contortions required by certain other English dialects.

I mentioned Jack’s patience, and sometimes I found his tolerance in the face of Win’s headstrong impulses all but incredible. As an instance, in Oxford there was a public dance-hall near the downtown crossroads at Carfax—the Carfax Assembly Rooms. From her girlhood days, Win would often recall, she’d “evermore loved to dance.” And even in my time, maybe one or two nights a week, she’d go down on the bus and dance till midnight. If my downstairs study light was still burning, she might tap on my door and ask if I’d like a cup of cocoa. I’d always say Yes and, delivering it a few minutes later, she’d have a chance to tell me—in a stage whisper—about her evening (Jack would be twenty-five feet away, down the hall in their own sitting room).

She might regale me with a story of the “lovely young chap”—a student, a townsman, a soldier—whom she’d danced with for hours and how he might have got “all het up” when he pressed her close on the dance floor. I never saw Win in any state approaching inebriation, but some nights she’d grow so amused by her memory of the evening that she’d seem a little tipsy, laughing deeply and going on further—“He was so het up, it was rising and rising till I thought it was coming out of his blooming collar next: blimey O’Riley!”

*        *        *

And she did once tell me that, a few years earlier during the war, she’d come home unusually late one night to find Jack waiting for her in the pouring rain at the corner bus stop. She stepped off the bus to see him standing there, soaking wet. He’d brought her rain boots along to protect her through the final block-long walk to their home. Win said “He looked so silly standing there in the bus light that, like a dirty dog, I burst out laughing right in his face. He took a step back, looked me right up and down, then flung the bloody boots straight at me—cut me lip and all too. I bled for hours and was ever so angry for days, but of course I knew he was right to do what he did. Old Jack, he’s a good un, he is” (whatever their privacies from one another and the ensuing peeves, their mutual devotion was clear as clean water).

She also had endless stories about prior students who’d lived at the house. She had especially fond memories of someone she always called “The Honorable Thomas Pakenham” (likely the son of Lord and Lady Longford, and the brother of Antonia Fraser—a 1955 graduate of Magdalen who eventually succeeded his father to the title, as eighth Earl of Longford). She might laugh about somebody’s laundry habits or a girl someone had smuggled in through the window one night; but she never deplored her old gents, not once in my hearing. If they’d completed a year or more at Win’s, they were safe in her head forever after. And her head was subject to confusion—rackety schedules, odd requests, but—again—never a real lean on us. Despite her lack of a car, for instance, she never once asked me to drive her here or there, though I’d sometimes offer.

Win Kirkby, my landlady in the Headington suburb of Oxford—2 Sandfield Road. It was a neighborhood not far from the home of C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien lived just down the road from Win and Jack Kirkby’s house. Mike Jordan and I—and once Mike left for Princeton, Tony Nuttall and I—had two sets of rooms (a bedroom and sitting room for each) in the boisterously warm surroundings generated by Win and Jack with their ancient and would-be-vicious dog Peter. Here, Win sits in her own back garden in unusual sunlight, more formally dressed than was usual for her—no doubt because I’d hauled out my camera and asked her to pose. Her red hair escapes note in the picture, but her grinning eyes go a long way toward recording her undaunted taste for the Wife-of-Bath world she’d inhabit almost any Saturday night in the dance-hall palace at the center of town—the Carfax Assembly Room, a gently rowdy city dancing place (where the Beatles later made their only Oxford appearance, in 1963).

So far as we roomers were concerned, her day was generally regular. She expected us downstairs in our sitting rooms for breakfast no later than eight—Michael and I always met in my front room, though Michael had his own. Invariably Win provided the customary huge English breakfast with fried eggs, fried tomatoes, fried bread, sometimes fried mushrooms, toast and marmalade, and coffee or tea as we wished. While we were eating and getting down to the morning’s reading or writing, she’d go upstairs, lightly dust the various surfaces, and make our beds—clean sheets once a week. Also once a week she’d vacuum the carpets (“Hoovering the rug,” it was called, after the Hoover vacuum cleaner). There was never a complaint about our own house-keeping—though I’ll have to say that Michael and I—and once Michael was gone, Tony Nuttall and I—were neat, as young men go.

And all that, again, for two pounds, ten shillings per week—an extra shilling for hot water if we had a bath, though she’d frequently donate the baths or forget to charge for them. By nine she’d be done with us for the day (“I don’t do teas—you can make your own damned tea”). Then she’d head out on her bike for the morning chores in the village of Headington, ten minutes uphill on her bike; or occasionally she’d take the bus downhill to Oxford itself, a quarter-hour ride. Later in the day, or in the evening if she stayed in, she might stop for a moment’s laughter; but between Jack, her old mother, her own household chores, her Labour Party duties, and her dancing, she was too busy to donate further time to the lodgers.

When I did see her, however, she poured out such a wealth of expressions I’d never heard that I kept a list of the most striking, many of which I eventually used in short stories that transformed her into a centrally important character (“Scars” and “A Dog’s Death” chiefly). If I was looking gloomy, she might say “What’s wrong, Mr. Price? Your face is as long as a wet week.” If I mentioned that a friend’s fiancée was especially homely, Win would say “Well, you don’t look at the mantel while you’re poking the fire, now do you?” A married friend of hers named Mary was involved in a cheating love affair with a young man, and I said “She’d better be careful or her husband will know.” Win said “I told her that meself; and Mary said ‘Well, a slice off a cut loaf is never missed, is it?’” I’ve assumed that few of the sayings were original to Win (some may well have been; she had a verbal flair), but her immediate zest when she produced them in conversation was worthy of a comic actress with brilliant timing. Having few places to go during my remaining long vacations, I spent more time with the Kirkbys than most of their gents had done; and they became important parts of my English years. In retrospect, I’ve been especially grateful for the chance they gave me to participate in, at length and in depth, a genuine piece of an old working-class England that few Americans of my era ever encountered.

*        *        *

For the remainder of that first summer, I stayed on at the Kirkbys’ and finally got down to serious daily work in the Bodleian. In addition to my immersion in Milton scholarship, I was also reading widely in Italian Renaissance criticism, especially in the matter of what those early critics took to be Greek drama (there were strong indications that they thought Greek tragedy was much like early Italian opera or vice versa—and in many ways it probably was).

In the process my own knowledge of Italian grew rapidly, and I was even challenged to expand my two years of high-school Latin. I likewise read a good many of the Italian plays which Milton might have incorporated into the dense web of knowledge out of which he’d eventually weave his own Greek tragedy in English. Despite my conviction that my future work would consist—way more than half—of writing fiction and poetry, I’d begun to discover, with a certain amount of silent surprise, that such esoteric studies gave me considerable pleasure. More than once I told myself that if my fiction failed, I’d have a worthy second profession waiting; but once I got my first novel well under way, I could look back and see that those moments of contentment in the Bodleian were more nearly a form of impersonation than genuine identity. I doubt I could ever have succeeded as a full-time scholar, though I’ve admired many scholarly colleagues in later years.

Unable, as ever, to take books home from the Bodleian, I recovered some of my old self-protections as a solitary. When the building closed at sundown, I’d generally drive past the extensive Clarendon Press on Walton Street and eat a curry dinner at the Bombay Restaurant. I was already a friend of the waiters there—boys younger than I, hardly off the plane from southern India—and I almost always ate alone during the vac. Before long I began to realize that they were often silently halving my bill or simply whispering “There is no charge tonight, sir.” I’d bow gratefully and then conclude the evening with a film at the nearby Scala Cinema.

There I saw a wealth of pictures I’d never known of—Les Enfants du Paradis, La Ronde, Quai des Brumes, Salaire de la Peur among many others—German, Italian, and American included. Their complexities of form, human behavior, and exotic emotion would often occur to me years later—in images, even in flashes of dialogue—as I worked at my own plots and the relations of fictional characters. Incidentally when literary critics discuss the influences upon a given writer, they’re inclined to limit themselves to books they assume the writer has read. In the past century however more and more of us have been as profoundly influenced by the films we saw, especially in our youth, as by any particular book (childhood reading is another much-overlooked influence).

Some of those evenings I’d share with a friend who’d, like me, come back to town early—Jim Griffin remained my chief friend among the Americans; and two of my Merton friends from New Zealand, Kees Westrate and Jeremy Commons, were often in town to join me for a still-bright short drive out across Port Meadow to the Trout Inn. It was nowhere near so famous then as now, with its present busloads of harried tourists; and it was easy enough to arrive there before dusk when the place was empty and sit on the pub’s river-edge and gaze across the narrow stream to the opposite grassy bank where Alice had in fact begun to enter Wonderland.

Though I’d loved the book since my eighth-grade teacher had read it to us, I’d only recently learned of Mr. Dodgson’s powerful love for Alice Liddell, the child for whom he’d told the tale, and the poignancy of his offering this ingenious work to her as a token of his deep devotion (she was only ten when he told the story). The chance to be so near the site of this enduring invention on a series of beautiful summer evenings, and with likable friends, was yet another privilege of the past full year.

*        *        *

A number of evenings, though, were spent in contented reading of the fiction I felt so bent on acquiring to feed my own hopes as a writer. I’d read voraciously as a child and a young man; but fired by David Cecil’s enthusiasm, I read all the Tolstoy I’d not previously known and, again, almost all of Hardy. Among David’s other prime loves were Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James (David had after all been sixteen when James died; and his father-in-law had known the man, two fairly incredible discoveries for a student like me to whom James seemed as old as Fielding and a good deal harder to read). So I proceeded through Emma with pleasure and admiration; but as I tried to push on, the next two or three Austen novels failed to lure me in. More accurately, I failed to be lured by their obvious skill and their persistent concern with the early plights of young women. It was both a matter of limited taste on my part and a maybe understandable lack of interest in her subjects; in any case I managed to conceal my failure from David. And while there were acres of Henry James which mostly failed to move me (though oddly the difficult late novels did, most powerfully), Conrad has remained a lifelong favorite as well as Defoe whom David had rightly made so irresistible in his lectures.

There were one or two more visits to Redmayne in Burford. By then I’d begun to wonder about Pamela’s own personal life—her sexuality (if she had an ongoing sex life) and the apparent isolation which she worked hard to combat with the sporadic company of each year’s new crop of Rhodesters. She had a particular friend named Katherine Watson who seemed to be in her early forties. Katherine was sometimes mutely present in the house and at the table when I’d stay. A woman with prematurely white hair and obvious intelligence, when she could be lured into conversation, the nature of Katherine’s own life never clarified; and I came to wonder if she was a romantic partner of Pamela’s. I hope they had delights, that I never witnessed, in one another; but they’re both gone now and I’ll never know. It’s certain that I never felt the slightest sexual interest on Pamela’s part in any of us young men, but I’m compelled by a recent discovery to admit that I could have been wrong. I was astonished to learn from one of my Oxford friend John Bayley’s memoirs that he was at one time engaged to Katherine, not long after she’d left the convent in which she’d been living.

On otherwise unplanned evenings—weather permitting—I’d drive up to Woodstock and, as I’ve noted, lie out by the gorgeous lake, with the Churchills’ great palace looming to my left, and read till the late dark of summer forced me back to Headington. By early October, though, my cravings for solitude had waned into outright loneliness—almost a sense of abandonment, so far from home (my letters to Mother and Bill, reread now, have caught me unawares with the intensity of my longing for home). Without quite knowing it, I was slowly being inducted into the writer’s life with its unavoidable isolation and its demand for internal resources that can so easily be replaced by drink, other drugs, and the supreme narcotic of other human bodies.