The redhead's trailer, nearly empty of furniture, with only a beat-up table and chair that I randomly placed in a back bedroom and a camping air bed that I laid on the living room floor, suited me just fine. It was cavernous compared with the dorm rooms I had lived in for the past six years at Cambridge and Penn and I wandered through its rooms thinking of Henry Miller skating in his home when one of his wives had cleaned him out of everything. My dissertation proposal had been accepted by my supervisor and the administration at the research institute in Paris. I had the outline, six years of experience with the subject and the methodologies, my notebooks from Cambridge and Penn, several clean legal tablets and a few good pens. But I had to think for awhile before I began, not to plan what I was going to write, because I knew that well, but to let the memories of my past six years in other rooms sift down a bit in my mind like the sand in an hour glass.
When I had first been accepted to Cambridge, I had received a letter from my prospective college asking which level room I wanted, level 1, 2 or 3. The only categorical differences between the levels, the letter stated, were the relative sizes of the rooms with accompanying prices. The letter, however, gave no indication exactly what dimensions of room the levels represented. So I waited until it would be morning in England and with great organization phoned the St. Edmund's college office. A sweet English lady's voice answered. I asked what the dimensions of the rooms at each level were. "Wha?" she replied. I repeated, "What are the dimensions of the rooms in the different levels? I need to know so I can decide which level to choose." "Well, we've never actually measured the rooms," she replied. I thought about how Cambridge was going on 800 years, though St. Edmund's College was only around a hundred or so. "You've never measured the rooms when the only difference between them for the price differences is the size?" "Noooo," she said thoughtfully. I paused, considering. "Well, can you describe how big the level 1 room is, then?" "Well," she replied, "It's quite snug." I told this to my mother who said I'd better pick level 2 because when she was in college her dorm room was so small she had to stand on the bed to close the door. However, when I got to England, to my level 2 room, it was lovely, one large room but with an arch separating it gently into two, the smaller part with a small sink and a make-shift closet, the larger part with a single bed and desk and a non-working fireplace painted white. The entire length of the room had windows in small panes all along one wall. Every morning the maids came down the hall. I always had the same maid. She was an older woman who always wore the thinest gold cross around her neck. She would rap softly, I would say to enter. She would come in, take out my trash, clean my sink and on Fridays bring me new sheets and pillow cases and change my bed for me if I preferred or leave the starched folded sheets for me to exchange for the week's old ones at my leisure. She was very very very polite and as I was invariably reading, she would tip-toe around the room tidying it up and might ask me how I was in a tiny whispering voice. I would say fine and ask how she was. She every single time I did that would look shocked, say that she was fine very nervously and then thank me several times for asking her. If I were leaving the room, which I often did so she wouldn't feel uncomfortable with me there, I would say goodbye and then she would again thank me and say goodbye and if I then said goodbye again, she would thank me again and say goodbye again. She absolutely always had to have the last polite word to be happy. She would not stop thanking me until I shut up and left. There were points, being an American, that I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, straighten her up and yell, "You are a human being! You don't have to be obsequious!" But of course I never did say that to her.
The college library was just down the hall from my room so I often went there to read when the maids were at work. Only once did I hear them criticize a student and I heard them talking together often. They never commented negatively if a student were messy or unclean, which did happen on occasion like the day the student next door to me moved out and when the maids went into his room they discovered that he had never changed his sheets but piled them in the closet in a year-high stack. The sheets on his bed were so filthy that they had the outline of his body but I didn't hear them say a word about it except in surprise. But that one day that I did hear them criticise a student, what they said was that a certain male student down the hall was lazy and didn't study all the time like he should. That was our job as students at Cambridge and our only job, to study. Three miles was the farthest we were allowed to live outside of college or be expelled. We couldn't work even the smallest part time job or be expelled. We didn't even have to know what time it was. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and two teas were announced by a bell. When the bell rang, we had only to walk away from our work, which would not be disturbed while we were gone, dine and then go back up to continue studying. Once I complained at the University Library that it should not close at 6 p.m. nor be closed on Sunday. The librarian replied that if they did not do that, many of the students would live in the library. I, myself, like many others, walked from place to place with a book in my hands, reading as I walked. I memorized Sanskrit roots even while riding my bike from college to lecture block. We were only not allowed to read in the dining hall. There we dined exclusively. On Tuesdays and Fridays we dined formally, receiving a note in our post box informing our place at which table and the attire required (black tie, white tie, evening gown, cocktail dress) and the time, which was invariably 6:30 for 7 in the Common Room. Over the formal evening wear we were to wear our academic gowns, or as we call them in the U.S., our black graduation gowns. At six-thirty we would gather, students, tutors, dons, faculty and the Master, in the Common Room to have port or sherry and chit chat. At precisely 7 p.m., the butler would come in, bang the gong sitting in the far corner of the room and announce in a pleasant British accent, "Would you please follow the Master into the hall." We would all then set down our ports and sherries and follow the Master of the College into the dining hall, taking our seats at our assigned places. Dinner was always served with several wines at candlelight. There was the requisite etiquette, how to use the knife, forks and large spoon properly, how to lean without interrupting one's conversation when the waiters came with the platters of extraordinarily dull-flavored dinner. One leaned to the right to be served on the left and leaned to the left to have one's dish removed on the right. One never spoke or made eye-contact with the waiter and vice versa. When one was finished, one simply placed the knife and fork on the plate at a 45 degree angle to the right, the signal for the waiter to come up and take the plate without speaking. It was so lovely a way to dine that it irritates me to this day when a waiter or waitress comes bobbing up in an American restaurant saying, "Hi, I'm Dave. I'm going to bombastically interrupt you several times during your meal to ask if you want more coffee and then forget to give you the check so you have to wait far too long, trying ridiculously to flag me down." Instead, at dinners at Cambridge one would hope to eat as swiftly or as slowly as the Master because when the Master was done, you were done. The butler would come into the hall, bang the gong that sat in the corner of the room there and say, "Would you please follow the Master into the Common Room for coffee." All silverware was set down, everyone stood up and all followed the Master back into the Common Room to have dishraggy scented coffee in demi-tasse cups and chit chat again. Once I asked one of my faculty who was the master of one of the other colleges why we had to have so many formal dinners. He said that America is a heterogenous society so we eat any way we want depending on where we're from and even in formal occasions this is considered fine. But England is a homogenous society and those that graduate from Cambridge and Oxford are expected to fill the top spots in every sector of government and business and it wouldn't do to go to a dinner and not have perfect table manners; one represents Cambridge for the rest of one's life, after all.
My second year I was assigned to live in an old mansion my college owned next door. The room assigned me had been the butler's pantry so huge drawers and glass-fronted cabinets wrapped around two walls with a large window on the 3rd and the door on the fourth. The room was squarish and I suppose rather small but so comfortable in its old-world style that I loved living there. I could wander the house to the shared kitchen, to the room with window seats that we used as the Common Room, use the pay phone at the bottom of the staircase and the weightroom on the ground floor, if I so chose. The lawn was expansive and being next to the college, one could easily walk to the tennis court or through the apple orchard behind the college. My room was so bright due to the large windows and with my framed photos of my ancestors to keep me company and a bit of personal decoration, it was, as the secretary had said, quite snug.
My college, St. Edmund's, was too small to guarantee rooms the third and fourth years and they assumed by then a student would have learned enough about the town and the colleges to find their own. My third year I took a room in a house across town that was owned by my college but housed one other student and two working people from the town. It was a plain row house, two stories. My room was on the second story at the back next to a cherry tree. It had gold wallpaper and an odd sundry of antique furniture and several beat-up Oriental rugs on the floor making me consistently feel like I must be sharing it with W.B. Yeats. One morning sitting at the desk by the window just as the cherries were ripening, thousands of bitty little birds suddenly landed on the tree. They were so small they could cling to the leaves, hanging upside down to reach the cherries. They ate all the cherries from the entire tree in just a few hours. That was the year my cousin Tiny died suddenly of a heart attack. His brother Herb phoned me and told me. That afternoon a dove landed on the window sill just next to my arm on the other side of the glass by my desk, stayed there three days and then lit off, never to return. I can only assume it was Tiny paying me a last visit. One of my roommates, one of the working people, was called Colin. He was stout and proudly from Scotland with that thick brogue he used to continually scoff at Cambridge University. The first day I ever saw him he strode into the house and stopped suddenly at the open kitchen door. I was squatting in front the cabinet door under the sink. I said, "When do we take out the trash?" "On FRRRRRRRRRRRiiiiideeeeees," he replied. "You must be my roommate from Germany," I said. He looked at me with an astonished glare.
My fourth year I found a room in a house owned by an Egyptian who ran a restaurant in town. One other person lived there, an extremely home-sick motorcyclist from Buenos Aires. They were pleasant enough but the house was nearly outside the three-mile limit and too far for me to ride in the rain every single day. A member of the Linguistics Faculty, Dr. Vivien Law, who had become a friend, found me a house on an estate in a nearby town. The woman who owned the house had just lost her husband who had been a professor at the Scott Polar Research Institute. She was disabled and although she had servants, they went home at night. Consequently, she wanted someone to simply live on the estate and I was the lucky choice. I was given a cottage next to her mansion, which had the name of Laundry Cottage. The house was enormous with two huge staircases that criss-crossed each other in the entry hall. The estate was magnificent, with a formal rose garden complete with a sun dial, ivy-covered brick arches, a good sized vegetable garden right outside my kitchen's dutch doors, a hedge maze at least nine feet high and so enormous that at its center was a tennis court. It had been the family home of the great English writer, Graham Greene, of which the lady of the house was extremely proud. She lent me right away a novella Greene had written which mentioned the house. It was about a pond on the premises. When I had finished reading it, I asked her where the pond was. She said unfortunately she didn't know but suspected that it had been out in one of the long-ago sold-off fields just beyond the dry stone wall. I wrote a novel a few years later called just that, Beyond the Dry Stone Wall. It's a murder mystery set in East Anglia, not exactly a new idea but I put my spin on it. The characters are one might claim fictitious but the places are very real indeed. I've put it in the right column of this blog if you'd like to read it. I can't really give it away but I will sell the .pdf of it for $5 for anyone who'd like to have it.
The sad problem with this perfect setting was that the busses didn't run on time or didn't show up at all so after a couple of months, I had to again move. By then I had gotten a tip from a friend, who told me that Trinity College owns so much property you could walk on Trinity land from Cambridge to Oxford and once they've placed all their own students in rooms, there are plenty of rooms to be had and they can only go to other students, for tax reasons. I went straight to the accomodations office at Trinity and was assigned a very interesting room in one of their houses very near a private library that I often spent whole days in, the Ancient India and Iran Trust Library. It was started by a professor from the Orientals Faculty at Cambridge, Sir Harold Bailey, who didn't want his enormous personal collection of books, all on ancient India and Iran, particularly lingusitically, to be stored in one of the deep lost sections of the University Library, or so I was told. So he began with a few other trustees a private library. They bought a lovely manor, built shelves, catalogued the books and kept the garden up. I would ride my bike there from my rooms at the Trinity house and read all day. The reading rooms downstairs were usually empty except for me, an ancient black cat named Walter and the Curator James Cormick's two small terriers, Tilly and Daisy, who guarded the library aggressively with their mighty yaps dashing from window to window, room to room if anyone rode up on their bicycle. Every day at tea time, James Cormick would come out into the hall and ring a small bell, calling everyone to tea. The first day I sat there reading, I heard the bell but ignored it. After a moment, Cormick stepped into the doorway and looked at me meaningfully. "Tea time," he said merrily, indicating that I must in fact come to tea. It was like that every day. No matter who was there, what we were working on, we all stopped and had tea together, either in the main front room on the beautiful long cherry-hued table or in the lovely garden. One day when he rang the bell, I put my books down and came out. Cormick was standing gazing out the front door. "I think we'll have tea in the garden today," he said wistfully. I looked out the door past him. "But it's raining!" I exclaimed. After a contemplative moment, he replied, "Oh no, it's just drizzling." All the tea things and all the library patrons and trustees who happened to be there strolled out to the furniture on the lawn a bit distant from the mansion where we had a very nice tea and conversation under the rain on that fine cool day.
The room in the Trinity house where I lived that fourth year was in a 16th century Tudor in a room they called "a priest's hide". A priest's hide or hole was a tiny hiding place built by Catholic sympathizers for priests in fear of their lives from Cromwell. The room I was in was clearly not the actual hide as it was at the back on the ground floor by the garden and had large leaded glass-paned windows and French doors leading out to slabs of paving rock set into the lawn long ago. There was a huge fireplace with a magnificent mantle, though I was of course not allowed to light it and I suspect if the priest's hide had been anywhere it had been somehow in part of the structure of that fireplace. It was the door to my room that was particularly interesting or should I say doors. From the hall by one of the downstairs kitchens, there was a plain door that looked very much like a door to a broom closet. When opened, the tiny room inside looked also just like an empty broom closet. Until one took one step in, then suddenly and strangely enough, one could see to the right a very slim hall that disappeared in an optical illusion when one took that one step back into the hall. Shimmying down the thin hall, one came to a tiny, hand-made, rustic door and it was through that door that lay my room. Needless-to-say, the room was so quiet and peaceful, with only the sounds of birds out my lovely old windows and open French doors. I could read from dawn to late at night without a single interruption. One morning, for a reason I can't remember now, I attempted to leap over my single bed to efficiently reach my desk. As I landed on the other side, my little toe on my left foot hit the wingback chair and broke. I staggerered into the hall by the kitchen, starting to go into shock. There was a young, very pale man standing in the kitchen. I told him I had broken my toe and was going into shock and needed to be taken to the hospital. He blushed crimson, looked extremely unnerved and replied, stuttering, "Well, first how about I make you a cup of tea?" I slid down the wall to sit on the floor trembling as he made the tea. Surprisingly enough, that cup of tea helped very much. I felt my fear calm, my nerves cool and in much better spirits rode with him to the hospital.
My dorm room in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania the next two years was a bit plainer but just as cozy. I lived on the top floor of a sixteen-floor graduate building directly behind the Penn bookstore. The building itself was on a hill so I could see all the way across Philadelphia to the airport. I was there on September 11, 2001. One of the actions the city took to handle the disaster was to close the airport. Instead, the U.S. flew jets over the top of our building. It was so strange to see no more planes at the airport but hear jets rush right overhead that I dreamed several times our building was being hit by bombs. My room was very skinny, almost like a hallway so I pushed the bed directly under the windows which ran the width of the room at the end, the door at the far other end. I pushed the desk up to the bed so if I were lying down or sitting at the desk I could see out my windows and particularly at night, the lights of Philadelphia and the stars together with it were marvelous. I was lucky to be able to keep the room for both years that I lived there doing my master's degree.
So the next year, suddenly and unexpectedly in Elk Falls, Kansas, the redhead's trailer was something very unusual indeed. It had several bedrooms, a long hall, a large open kitchen combined living room, all in train-car boxy pre-fab and radically more spacious albeit tacky than my single rooms of the past six years. Someone gave me a pile of National Geographic maps of the Mediterranean and Middle East and having vast amounts of wall space, I covered the walls with them. I could stride from room to room to look at whichever map was useful as I began to consider writing my dissertation.
