Thursday, March 20, 2008

11 February 1985

The events of the last few days convince me that we have poltergeists, if not ghosts, with us in the Abbey. Their mischievous misconduct is a reassuring scapegoating explanation of the mishaps, small emergencies, and obstacles that have almost continuously frustrated our recent progress. Friday's five inch snowfall, accompanied by drift producing winds and frigid temperatures that turned roadways into stretches of glare ice, forced the indefinite postponement of Saturday's Oxford tour. The storm also kept some of our suppliers, much of our service staff, and, today, one of our lecturers from getting to the Abbey.
     One of our two furnaces has been operating unreliably and causing all of us and our hot water taps to run cold. The exercise room equipment that was supposed to have been delivered Friday or today is still not here. One of the three washing machines is malfunctioning. The chef's refrigerator is out of order. Three of our larger, heavier doors—to the front porch, the courtyard, and the terrace outside the faculty room—keep blowing open and inviting in arctic gusts and drifts of snow. The intercom system has been erratic. Claire Snopek, who left to visit her English relatives on Thursday night, called in this morning to report that she is bedridden with gastro enteritis. We have run out of large denomination coins with which to change the pound notes of students "desperate" to use the telephones to call home.
     My inability to get to Oxford Saturday prevented me from getting some texts needed by students who changed their programs late. Somebody—or something, my present primitive superstitiousness insists—has torn the rolled towel dispenser off the Buttery wall. Students are locking themselves out of their rooms every hour on the hour. Dr. Henson's extracurricular riding lesson session on Sunday at a stable in Steeple Aston went off, after a lengthy delay, only because Dr. Henson was able to compress five students and herself into her subcompact Citroen 2 c.v. She and the would be horsewomen macaronically entwined in a groaning, wobbling vehicle resembled circus clowns—all unattached elbows, knees, heads, and bottoms flattened against windows—in the Citroen struggling up the slight incline toward the Abbey gates. (The minibus that the party was to have used was ungettable. The key to the garage door was under lock and key in Reception. The only two people with keys to the basement room in which the garage key was secured were both snowed in in nearby villages. Seagrave also has a key, but he was away visiting his mother.)
     As I started the opening sentences of this entry, the wire holding a picture to the Minstrel Gallery wall snapped—was snapped?—and tumbled and clattered onto the mantelpiece, scattering a pile of papers and sending a matchbox car speeding end over end across the floor. The "on off" switch in the laundry room was turned off by...uh,...someone, inducing a mild attack of hysteria in Marilyn Verra and Felicity Hillmer, who had inserted 50p. to do their washing, got nothing for their money, and came complaining to me that "nothing is working here." I resignedly showed them how to turn the switch from red "off" to white "on," but I didn't have the heart to try to qualify their criticism that, normally, I would have regarded as overgeneralized.
     At the very moment that they besieged me with waving arms and shrill staccato cries of outrage, I was trying to find a replacement stylus for the record player on which the students are advised to listen, this week, to a Hamlet album supplementing their Shakespeare studies. The stylus in need of replacement began to show its age, or bad treatment, last night.
     About 7:30 I walked into the game room where the record player was surrounded by seven or eight students, all of them with New Penguin Hamlet texts in hand, and all of them mesmerized by the borborygmic growls vibrating the speaker cones: "Arh, dubroo lurb da aroogoo oorf frerm," Hamlet's bowels slowly rumbled while the students, as one, turned their inquiring stares hopefully toward me in a wordless appeal for exegesis. "According to A. C. Bradley," I stated in my best lecturer's tone, my fingertips steepled together in front of my chest, my head tilted slightly backward and my knees thoughtfully bent, "that means that we need a new needle."
     I thought that we had completed the necessary steps to get one today, but, somehow my request to Mrs. Raine, the Receptionist, got misunderstood by Mr. Winkler, our engineer, chauffeur, and all purpose maintenance man. We are, consequently, no nearer to producing understandable sound from the record player than we were last night, when Nicholas Baldwin, political science tutor, and I tried to transport the only other Abbey player from the buttery bar to the games room.
     To make the attempt, we had, first, to go to my bedroom to get the keys to the Reception Office key closet. Then we had to get from the key closet one key to the Buttery and two others for the two locks on the Buttery Bar door. (One is a very old, weapon like implement; the other is a Yale type.) Getting the last two to work agreeably in tandem was by no means simple. They needed much encouragement and flattering from me and from Baldwin, who had a go at the pair of locks after my three minutes of delicate manipulations succeeded, initially, in freeing the top bolt but not the bottom one. Baldwin, in his turn of two or three minutes, was able to coax open the bottom lock but not the top one. When I, thereupon, took painstaking charge of the key to the upper lock while he, simultaneously, soundlessly guided the guided lower one, we finally triumphed, entering the bar with the same sort of joy and wonder that Egyptologists must have felt first entering the tomb of Tutankhamen.
     Ours was, however, a fleeting triumph. The cord from the player to plug was sealed into the back of the player. The plug at the other end was at least ten times the diameter of the hole in the unlockable bar framing through which the cord had been passed by whoever installed the rig. Soon after I had to confess my record player failure to the disappointed, and quite clearly contemptuous, students, the one remaining ping pong ball in the games room disappeared. In the midst of my searching for it or another to replace it, Nanette Decea and Stephanie Donato rushed up to ask me to conduct a search of the Abbey, especially the students' bedrooms, in an effort to find out who had just stolen Nanette's Minolta camera. (Ten minutes later Nanette reported that she had found it herself.)
     Then there was that trouble with my reading lamps last night. I have two of them on the small chest beside my bed, both of them fitted with 40 watt bulbs. To amplify somewhat the pale amber flow of lumens that falls upon the pages of my late night reading, I balance both lamps on the near side of the chest and tilt their shades up at an acute angle. [1]
     About 12:15 I was nearing the final pages of an Edmund Crispin mystery, Buried For Pleasure. Like all Crispin mysteries, this one soothed and delighted me with numbers of sections like two that I had paused to smile over reflectively, the book resting comfortably on my sternum. In the first the fetchingly eccentric don/detective Gervase Fen questions Olive and Harry, a pair of rustics who may have witnessed a murder he is investigating.

"`What did you see?'
`We was mollocking,' said Harry...
`She'm a rare one for mollocking, is Olive.'
Olive appeared gratified by this tribute. `Me Grammer,` she remarked,`allus says,"When oats be cutting, maids be riggish."
`Your grandmother,' Fen tells her,`is clearly a depraved old woman.'"

     In the second, Fen, to recover from the effects of a lengthy scholarly immersion, seeks the distraction of standing for Parliament and seems, unaccountably, likely to win a seat. He delivers a deliberately insulting election-eve speech to antagonize the voters and thus, he hopes, escape sitting in Westminster, an ordeal worse than his recent work on "that malignant poet, Langland." Here is part of the speech:

"It is often asserted...that the English are unique among the nations for their good sense in political matters. In actual fact, however, the English have no more political good sense than so many polar bears. This I have proved in my own person. For some days past I have been regaling this electorate with projects and ideas so incomparably idiotic as to be, I flatter myself, something of a tour de force. Into what I have said `no gleam of reason has been allowed to intrude’ and I can think of scarcely a single error, however ancient and obscure, I have failed to propagate. Some, it is true, have cavilled at my twaddle, but their objection has been to its superficies, and not to its inane basic principles, which have included, among other laughable notions, the idea that humanity progresses, and that fatuous corruption of the Christian ethic which asserts that everyone is responsible for the well being of everyone else. Such dreary fallacies as these...have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker. And I am bound to conclude that this proven obtuseness is not unrepresentative of the British people as a whole, since their predilection for putting brainless megolomaniacs into positions of power stems, in the last analysis from an identical vacuity of intellect. What is referred to as the political good sense of the British...resolves itself upon investigation into the simple fact that until quite recently the British have been politically apathetic...It is this which accounts for the smoothness of our nation's development in comparison with the other countries of Europe; and our fabled spirit of compromise...has derived from nothing more obscure or complicated than a general indifference to the issue of whatever controversy may have been on hand; though we, of course, in our vanity have ascribed it to tolerance."

     My pleasant progress through Crispin's pages was joltingly halted when my two bed lamp bulbs blew, one shortly after the other. Rather than get out of bed, take off my pajamas and put on a shirt and slacks so that I could go on a bulb snatching foray through the Abbey, I tried to keep on reading by the light of the low wattage of the remaining lamp. (Most of the bulbs here are either 25 or 40 watts. I therefore pushed two lamps together on my side of the bed table.)
     After 10 minutes of tilting my head and book awkwardly to get from the dun colored 40 watt bulb the maximum illumination upon my pages, I gave up, doffed and donned and started my late night hunt for a replacement. Luck, or the ways of the Abbey, were against me.
     The most accessible room for my bulb raid was #1, just across the small hall outside my Room 2. As noiselessly as possible, I unlocked #2's door and crept in and removed the bulb in the lamp nearest the door. As soon as I got it in my hand, I suspected that something was wrong. When I got back to my bedroom, I found out what it was that was wrong. The base of my bulb was threaded; that on the one that I had just snatched was what is called here the "bayonet" type: instead of threads it had two projections that slip down into grooves in the socket.
     Not at all sleepy but unable to read, I turned off the faint amber glow of my lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the cries of owls and the peristaltic sighs and rumbles of the old disagreeable bowels of the Abbey.
     The grumbling in the walls was strangely like the garbled speeches of the Hamlet record, but in the Bedlam noises I thought I heard the lines "All is not well; I doubt some foul play."

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[1] The English attachment to low-lumen lamps is apparently long-standing. In Margaret Halsey’s With Malice Toward Some (New York, 1938), I found this passage: “One of the things I am used to is reading lamps, but the English idea of lighting seems to be a single shaded bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, so that people who want to do close work have to cluster like flies on a grease spot in the one small area of illumination. …” [p. 74]

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