11 March 1978

SATURDAY

     Up at 7:30, well rested after a good night's sleep but still feeling pain in my ankle. Downstairs to Mrs. Leach's long English breakfast: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, toast, honey, and tea. Dried cereal was also on the menu, but I succeeded in convincing Mrs. Leach that I really didn't need it.
     Mrs. Leach sat at the breakfast table with me all through the meal, talking the whole time as she closely watched my reactions to what she had prepared for me, a fact that made me feel required to exhibit a good bit more pleased astonishment over an egg or a banger than I usually do.
     An avid conversationalist who apparently seizes upon any chance source of inspiration, she called my attention to the birds feeding on the bags of nuts she had placed outside her kitchen window, identifying each type of visitor and explaining their habits and food preferences. She spoke of her husband's musical talent, and told me that her son had the same kind of aptitude, being good on both the guitar and the organ. Ability like that, she went on, was "nice," she thought, but she found musicians "trying." When I looked up at her more sharply than I probably should have at that remark, she fussed at some imaginary crumbs on the table cloth and hurriedly asked me if I was a musician—“I don't want to offend, you know." I told her that I could play nothing but the harmonica and that only about as well as I have read Adolph Hitler did. Her smile suggested that she felt greatly reassured and relieved.
     I began my day's outing with a bus ride into city center, to Exhibition Square, from where I walked past Bootham Bar to York Minster. I spent about two hours in the Cathedral, a designation, the walk-around guide pamphlet informed me, that means it is "the chief church of the northern province of the Church of England and the Diocese of York." Tourist-y as it was of me, I could not help reading the pamphlet's comments as I strolled through the overwhelming old building, saying silently to myself as I went, "Here, perhaps, is the spot where Constantine was declared `Caesar' early in the fourth century," or "This Norman glass panel is said to be the oldest stained glass in Britain."
     I found myself yielding to the same sort of impulse when, later, I passed St. Michel-le-Belfrey and the Shambles, respectively, where I pretended I could see the young Guy Fawkes walking about and Margaret Clitherow, martyred for her rumored help to Jesuits, writhing in agony under the stone-weighted door placed across her chest to crush her.
     A bus ride and another rather long walk took me to the Aardvark Restaurant for a good 50 p. plowman's lunch. After lunch, I visited the Castle Museum and its surroundings, paying particular attention to Clifford's Tower, a rebuilding of one constructed by William the Conqueror, with its marvelous view and charming chapel above the gateway. Because a passerby told me that he understood it was perhaps the work of Vanbrugh, I also stopped by at a rather grim structure called the Women's Prison.
     By this time, my humping along on crutches left me tired and with increasing discomfort in my ankle. I therefore took a bus back to the York Minster area, found a bench—near Duncombe Place and Petergate, I think, and sat down and rested and read till 4:00 o'clock, when I attended Evensong in the Cathedral. The service over, I walked down Stonegate, stone paved by the Romans, which the 40 p. "York Official Guide" I had purchased told me was "One of the finest streets in England," and where, the Guide further advised, I should keep an eye out for striking architectural details like the Stonegate Devil and the corner support at #13. From Stonegate, I went to the Shambles, called "one of the best preserved medieval streets in Europe."
     Alerted to "Shambles" by my reading about York before I made the trip, I had looked up the derivation. I found that the legs on butchers' stools and on the sort of tables on which they displayed their meats are the "ur-roots" of terms like "the place was a shambles" or "he shambled along." Dead metaphors, I thought, as are so many of our words-like metaphor, itself, for instance.
     Dinner time found me in what three or four of the students had told me was one of York's best restaurants, "Betty's." I had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, of course, and carrots, cabbage, cider—the hearty British kind that deserves respect, apple pie with Devon cream, and coffee—for £2.65.
     I got back to 15 Moorgarth Road just before 8:00. I took a bath, wrote in my journal, read, and went to bed after popping my daily fix of distalgesic. I lay awake for quite a while feeling my heart beat in my ankle and running in my mind a little film strip of some of the day's visual images: the dymo labels on the edges of the Leaches' clothes press shelves ("Shirts," "Underwear," "Pyjamas," "Sundries")—testimony to their fastidiousness; a lorry full of bawling cattle on their way to slaughter as I walked toward lunch; a verse carved on the outside wall of Debtors' Prison in 1820 by Thomas Smith, 28, hanged for stealing sheep: "This prison is a house of care,/A grave for man alive/A touchstone to try a friend/ No place for man to thrive."