10 March 1978

Today I left the Abbey very early with a coachload of the students on a weekend trip to Haworth and York. We rode noisily, the rock music on the tapes the students supplied for the coach's player blasting and thumping, often with jarring incongruity as we traveled through rural stretches in Oxfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire.
     The cows and sheep that raised their heads as we passed peered at us with that look of mingled alarm and disapproval at which ungulates seem to me to be so good at registering. Overinterpreting their expressions, I almost felt obligated to apologize to them for our—and The Grateful Dead's and Mick Jagger's—intrusion upon the quiet of their pastures. At noon we reached Haworth, de-bussed, and walked around the grim little town.
     Somewhere in the sky during the morning, the sun had looked like a gibbous blister, the color of pale phlegm, on gray flesh, but when we arrived in Haworth there was no sign of it at all. Appropriately, I suppose for anyone seeking to go back through time to the world and places of the three sister novelists, rain was falling lightly, dully glazing the cobbled street and stones of the buildings. Appropriately, too, a few sodden-looking crows were cawing hoarsely in leafless and wind-wracked trees nearby as our little party got to the Bronte house itself.
     After going through the house, we split up, but most of us had lunch at the White Lion Inn. Sitting on a rough bench as I ate, I remembered that it was in just such circumstances that Branwell Bronte allegedly spent so many hours riding away on the fumes of alcohol from the damp and the dreariness of his family's stark square house above the bitter lonely beauty of the moors.
     The wet and the darkness of the day and the thoughts of Branwell's short, miserable life threatening to depress me, I began paying elaborate attention to the plowman's lunch set before me by a buxom woman who called me—and everybody else she served—“Luv”: two wedges of Wensleydale, a large roll, half of a hot pork pie, two wedges of tomato, a large slice of onion, a bowl of pickled onions, one slice of pork loaf, and a half pint of Webster's bitters. God! I wondered, where would I find the plot to plow I had to find to measure up to this meal. (I paid 90 p. for it.)
     We got to York, at 4:30. I began a long and, since my sprained ankle was acting up rambunctiously, painful, crutch-assisted hunt for the room I had reserved in "Mrs. Leach's," as it was identified in the Abbey’s "Recommended Rooms" list prepared by students of past semesters. Her house, at 15 Moorgarth Avenue off Mt. Vale Drive, was much farther from the center of the city than the two or three York residents who gave me directions led me to expect. Consequently, my walk to it was not only prolonged—maybe as much as two miles or more—but wearing. I "knocked her up" at just about 5.30—17:30, that is, and was effusively welcomed. She confirmed the price, 3 pounds per night—“And that's with breakfast, as well," she said, almost immediately giving the lie to the conditions she stated by sitting me down to "a mash of tea" and some scones. She chatted with me while I ate and then showed me up to the second-floor front room I was to have.
     It was large, with the bay window so ubiquitous in English bedrooms. I was surprised to see that it lacked the equally ubiquitous kidney-shaped dressing table with triple mirrors strategically placed to face the windows, covered, almost always I had concluded, with ruffled sheer nylon curtains. With two beds, a clothes press, two chests, and a small radio, it was actually much more than I had anticipated. She told me, with some obvious embarrassment when I complimented her on it, that it was, in fact, the room that she and her husband used when they had no overnight guest. When they did, as on this day, they moved into the room formerly used by their son, now married and off with his wife and children, I think she said.
     As soon as I had settled up with Mrs. Leach, unpacked my bag, and staked out my claim to a drawer or two, I washed up in the bathroom I shared with the family and tried to shave, unsuccessfully because I had forgotten to bring my adaptor with me. I asked Mrs. Leach where in York I might buy one. "No need, Luv," she said. "We have one somewhere here," and after a few minutes of bustling about opening drawers and cabinets in various rooms downstairs, she triumphantly handed one to me.
     Somewhere around 6:30, I took a bus into the city for a short look around and to have dinner. The abbreviated sightseeing was a real pleasure, but the dinner was bad. I picked the restaurant, The Girondin, from the same student list that contained Mrs. Leach's name. The recommender was either self-destructively charitable or equipped with the palate of a carrion crow. My selection—mushroom soup, roast chicken, peas, potatoes, a glass of wine, coffee and ice cream—deserved approving comment for only one reason: since everything tasted almost exactly the same, you could eat or drink any one of its items before or after the other without having it disturb the bouquet of its predecessor or successor. ("Well," I tried to console myself, "what can you expect for L2.25? Very nearly a night's lodging at Mrs. Leach's," I unhappily reminded myself.)
     When I came back later in the evening, at 9:30, I met Mr. Leach, a telephone worker with the postal service, who called to my mind the face of a Welsh actor I couldn't identify. He was sitting in the "best chair" puffing on his pipe, looking for all the world as contented as Parson Adams near the hearth. He and Mrs. Leach invited me to join them in a cup of tea, with biscuits, and as we sat in front of an electric heater with the telly turned down, he and I had a friendly old vets' talk about our days in the British 8th Army, to which my First American Ranger Battalion was attached during the Italian campaign.
     He spoke in passing of some relatives in Derbyshire, and I at once thought for the first time in years of Clar Wilde of Glossop. One of two British 8th Army communications men who had been with my unit for several days at Chiunzi, he—as well as at least 15 or 16 others, I was later told—was wounded by the same mortar shell that sprayed four or five pieces of shrapnel in my shoulder, back, and rear end.
     Clar's mate on the two-man vehicle was a very young Irishman, named Paddy, I think, whose mother had virtually disowned him because he had signed on as a British soldier. (He told me that he had had to take off his uniform and leave it in Britain whenever he had gotten leave to visit his family.) As a kind of ritualistic observance to which tradition obligated them, Clar and he expressed a deep-seated dislike for each other to me and anyone else to whom they talked separately. But they soldiered together well, and when Clar got hit—in the head and much more severely than I—Paddy was full of concern for him and knelt by him on the litter giving him reassurances about taking care of details and getting in touch with his parents.
     I told Mr. Leach about Clar, about how, after he and I had been transported to a makeshift station hospital in a small church, Clar got up suddenly even though he was dangerously unsteady on his feet. "Damn!" he whispered to me. "I've left the flipping code book in the half-track. There'll be hell to pay if the Germans get hold of it." With that he sneaked out of the hospital, heading back to the lines. Mr. Leach said that he had never heard of a family with that name but that he would write to some of his kinfolk and see if they had. He seemed not at all surprised—as I had been and still am—that the seriously wounded Clar left the hospital as he did for the reason he did in the shape he was in.
     Shortly after ten, I went up to bed, took another distalgesic tablet to calm my throbbing ankle, and got into bed with P.D. James, her novel Unnatural Causes acting as the procurer. One of the last images in my mind's eye just before I went to sleep was of the look of York's bending river, its darkness spangled with the reflected gold of the sodium-vapor lights atop the Ouse Bridge and Station Road Lendal Bridge as I looked up the Ouse from Skeldergate Bridge, rising over St. George's Gardens to Baile Hill. I felt comfortable, happy, at home, particularly when I remembered having read, a few days before making the trip to this city the Romans called Eboracum and made the capital of Lower Britain, that a sixteenth-century Bishop of York—the 55th, I believe—was named Thomas Savage, just as my grandfather was.