13 August 1966

     The last day and a half at the Abbey has been in many ways remarkable, in some respects unbelievable, in its juxtaposings of contentment and melancholy, delights and shocks, order and Chaplinesque chaos.
     The whole business began early yesterday morning. Before breakfast I was hauled by Dean Haberly out to the freshly excavated sewer trench that has been giving clues to some of the Abbey's past. The shovels and scoops have unearthed skeletons, roof and floor tiles, mullions, bits of stained glass, great silver headed nails, and broken sections of intricately carved columns, capitals, and bosses. Many of the fragments are brightened by splashes of gold, red, or blue paint. I felt slightly eerie seeing the colors shining in the sun four, many hundreds of years after it was applied, perhaps, by the Augustinian monks who built their church and priory here long before the place was to know the Raynesfords, the Popes, and the Norths who were later to own it successively.
     The Dean, who was at the very point of departing when he led me out to the trench, had two objectives for our pre breakfast trip. He wanted to scratch at the trench sides for more of the red floor tiles he had been finding daily, and he wanted to alert me to watch for the back hoe's uncovering of more of the church walls, first broken into a day or so before. His interest in the precise location of the latter had become so keen that, wearied as he was by his long and tiring duties with the summer graduate program, he was about to postpone his departure so that he could stay with the digging.
     Before we had so much as a sip of juice or coffee, therefore, we were sloshing around in a ditch nine feet deep and mucky from yesterday's heavy rains. His passion and my compliance—though it became more than that, for his wonderful enthusiasm, like his fluting laughter, is contagious—were quickly rewarded. Both of us uncovered a tile. His was broken, but large, with a fine deep gold pattern on its glazed terra cotta background—a cross, a fleur de lis, and a pine tree. It was striking. Mine was intact, but small, about two and a half inches square. It was a bold Lombardic Z, with a line drawn horizontally through its center. The Dean was hot on the scent and wanted to go on, but the rain, which began suddenly, and the reverberating Wroxton breakfast gong hurried us into the dining room.
     Our meal was soon over, for the Haberlys had to rush out to a taxi at 8:10. Like all those we had together, however, it was a pleasant one. I have never met a man with such lively and unfailing good humor. Reminiscence after reminiscence tumbles out of him, each one a joy. Over hasty swallows of breakfast coffee, he can somehow be reminded of, and able to recapture in sprightly terms, the delightful oddities he has encountered in his uncommonly unconven¬tional experience.
     One of them is about his having awakened years ago to find a large bat in the shirt of his pajamas. A second deals with his once having attended a recital by a flautist whose plastic artificial eye exploded from its socket in the middle of his rendition of a 16th century composition. A third concerns his having visited a children's school run by a Miss Maypother, who made her students live the stages of civilization (dressing, for instance, at first in hides and finally in contemporary clothes) and had all doorways three feet high so that adults had to crawl through them. A fourth recalls his having been commissioned to bind, illustrate, and print, for a wealthy eccentric woman (a Schwab heiress) a book written in a language of her own invention. She wanted the text in gold on lavender vellum, and she ordered him, for as long as he worked, to stay in one room of her home so that he would not shock her recently bereaved male cockatoo, mortally vulnerable, since the death of his mate, to the sudden appearance of any man.
     He can also draw upon his vast reading and study—and a memory that must be photographic—to respond with lectures in miniature to questions about stained glass, Roman Britain, the structure and regimen of monasteries, literary figures with whom he has had close associations, and an almost awe inspiring range of other subjects. All that he says he says well and with a modesty that seems altogether unnecessary.
     I have frequently asked him to allow me to tape at least a few of the memories he shares with listeners, but he steadfastly refuses. "No, no, no, Savage," he tells me with dismissive shakings of his raised hands. "Never." When I protest and ask him why, he says, "Because I improve each of them with every telling."
     As they are, the stories need no refining. They are so good, in fact, that several of the lecturers who visit Wroxton's classes regularly have told me that one of the principal attractions of the place is the opportunity to hear the Dean recall some of the events of his past. Stanley Wells, for one, has more than once told me that he would probably give his lectures here without an honorarium if, on each of his visits, he could be sure that he could enjoy some of Haberly's anecdotes.
     We said goodbye to the Dean and Mrs. Haberly with honest sadness. We knew that we would miss them both. We knew, also, that we would now be almost totally alone in the vast and creaky building, for no students were expected until September 5.
     I was especially loath to give up not only the Dean's conversation but also his infectious curiosity and capacity for observation which had made my every walk with him about the Abbey grounds, every poking into garrets and little used rooms an adventure and a discovery.
     As an example, he noticed that two windows in the Great Hall, facing the Minstrels' Gallery, are so mullioned and leaded that they must once have been outside windows. The observation led him to the conclusion that the center of the building, assumed for a hundred years to be the oldest part of the Abbey, must postdate the rest of the structure. The discovery was made apparently, simply as he strolled along. I learned later that his speculation was probably wrong. In this instance as in every other one I knew of, however, he was, in his ceaselessly zestful spirit of exploration, always in the right.
     After the Haberlys departed, our day was, surprisingly, pleasant and easy until 2:00 p.m. We bustled about with letters and memos and semester planning and walked through the charming village just outside the College gates. We watched a workman thatching a roof, stopped in at Mrs. Friend's small gift shop, and introduced ourselves to Mrs. Scott (who runs the tiny grocery store) and to Mrs. Jessie Cook, "licensed to sell beer to be consumed off the premises" and Wroxton's singularly friendly postmistress, perhaps the only postmistress or postmaster who licks and applies for you whatever stamps you purchase from her in the little cubicle just off the hallway of her and her family's living quarters.
     At 2:00 p.m., however, I got a call from Dr. Stanley Wells, who invited us to a dinner conference at the Black Swan, or "Dirty Duck," in Stratford at 6:30. I accepted hastily, for the atmosphere of the deserted Abbey closes in on one quickly and, be¬sides, Wells and I had to shape up the first four weeks of the Shakespeare course. Right then, Patty's and my troubles began, although I did not know so at the time.
     My inquiry to the Midland Red Bus Company offered no cause for alarm. The woman who took my call quickly told me that a bus left for Stratford from Banbury, at the Cross, at 6:03 and arrived in Stratford at 7:00. I had, of course, to call Dr. Wells and ask for a half hour's grace, but there was no real problem about that or about getting by taxi to Banbury, which we reached at 5:30. Our driver began our difficulty. He told us that the bus left from the depot, not from the Cross, and therefore took us to that place, about 9 blocks from the Cross. After idling for two or three minutes, I grew uneasy and began to ask around about the exact point of departure. Five different bus drivers gave me five conflicting sets of instructions. They agreed on only one point: the bus information booth was closed.
     Sifting the varying directions, Patty and I decided that the Cross was the safest waiting place after all, and at about 5:40 we started out briskly in a beginning shower. After only a block Patty became a virtual cripple. The rain, the damp pavements, and her high heels did something excruciating to a toe she broke years before. We would walk twenty steps and stop, she leaning on me heavily and making pained whimpers. We wobbled on, looking at clocks—for time was getting short—looking for a phone to call a cab, looking and feeling miserable and anxious, which we genuinely were.
     Somehow, we reached the vicinity of the Cross with seven or eight minutes to spare, and once again I ventured a few nervous questions of passersby. The first man I approached was a retarded alcoholic who cast dumb, frosty eyes on me for a moment and then hawked a wad of phlegm at my feet. The second was "a stranger here myself, you know." The third, obviously well moistened by a few pints of red or bitter, told me we were a block off target, that we wanted the Stratford Blue, which stopped only at the Cock Horse Tavern. We checked his instructions against those of three others who passed. Two of them, like the proprietor of a dairy shop into which I desperately dashed, knew nothing at all about buses.
     Three legged fashion, we hurried down to the Cock Horse. Nobody in the parking lot there, in the tavern, or in the sweet shop next door could give us assurance that we were where we should be. It was now 6:05, and I surrendered and decided to get a taxi all the way to Stratford, even though the fare and the tip run to 48s., or $6.72. The decision was not simple to act upon, for I could find no nearby phone, and I had to go hunting once more, leaving Patty standing out of the rain under an awning and look¬ing forlornly after me as she balanced on one leg, like a stork.
     I bolted into the Cromwell Arms Hotel and asked the desk clerk, an elderly woman, if there was a phone handy. "A phone, sir? Hm. Let me see. Did you try the Horse Fair: There's one there, I'm sure."
     I did not reply to her as I raced out. I thought that de¬parting quietly would be to my benefit and hers. I flew back to the Cross and found a phone booth, but I found also that the jingling freight of English coins that had been tearing at my pocket stitches with every one of the frantic strides I had so long been making did not include a "thruppence," the only coin the slot would accept. Getting one required four more inquiries, but finally I had one, was able to get through to Trinder's taxi, and, at last, to get under way to Stratford with Patty, who had limped up after me to the cab rank.
     Once in the cab, I saw a small placard identifying the vehicle as "Trinder's Easy"—rather than another of its kind, "Trinder's Baker" or "Trinder's Charley," I understood, but right then I saw the ironist's mockery behind the terms.
     The ride out to Stratford in the sheeting rain was close to perilous. The driver responded with manic zest to my request for a rapid trip. Schussing down the curves of Sunrising Hill was, consequently, a chancy few minutes that kept our eyelids from blinking even once until the descent was over. Our meeting with Wells and our late supper with him and Dr. Anne Righter of Cambridge were, nevertheless, thoroughly enjoyable.
     Before going to the Swan for Leek soup, prawns, gammon, chips, and a carafe of vin rose, we worked and chatted and had gin and tonics in the Shakespeare Institute, in a book littered room which looked out on beautiful gardens stretching immaculately and colorfully to New Place. In the middle of the vista was an in¬triguing gazebo sort of thing once used by Marie Corelli when she owned the big house now used by the Institute. Her less than epic books were all about, and Dr. Wells told us that large numbers of people of a certain kind still come to Stratford because Mme. Corelli lived there, not because Shakespeare did. He is often embarrassed by their questions about her work, about which he pretends to a blissful and carefully preserved ignorance. He told us also that one dowager once consoled him, when he told her that he couldn't read much Corelli, by noting, "Yes, her books are deep."
     Our return to the Abbey was a sharp contrast to our outbound journey, for Dr. Wells drove us back in his car. The ride, though thick fog had rolled over the narrow road, was a happily uneventful one.
     And so was most of today. Patty and I got a good bit of work done in the Minstrel's Gallery office, posted a pack of letters, and ordered the files. Late in the afternoon we walked through the village again, primarily because Patty was hit by homesickness and wanted some change of scene to put a stop to some of the moping she found herself unable to avoid. Coming back we were caught in a downpour, but we ran under a giant old beech and by that time Patty was able to joke about the "tree adders" an ancient Wroxton visitor had told us she always prepared against by raising a parasol whenever she was near overhanging branches.
     We watched the tapering off of the rain for ten minutes or so, hurried through the last mist of it into the Abbey, and had an authoritative scotch with water before a good dinner all alone in the big dining hall. As a waiter, a waitress, and the chef himself fussed about our table, we felt regal but awkward and lonely. The royal head, I remembered in the midst of the baronial accoutrements all about me, is heavy with isolation.
     After dinner, we dropped in at the North Arms, the pub just outside the college gates. We had sherry and a long talk with a young girl from the Madison campus who attended Wroxton last spring and stayed on as an assistant in the pub's saloon bar. (She is going back home shortly, she told us.) The appealing old pub—the building, a villager told me, is about 500 years old—pleased us greatly with its blackened beams and old brasses gleaming after centuries of polishing, and we walked back up the Abbey road, at about 9:15, almost light hearted in the heavy darkness not brightened at all by a rust colored moon barely visible through the sluggish racks of the fog.
     We were making ironic jokes about the hearty cheerfulness of the Abbey. (It was illuminated only by the lamps in the servants' two fourth floor rooms and two sixty watt bulbs in the Great Hall as we climbed the front door staircase—with exaggerated caution, for the past four days' rain and the night's dank mist had given the antique and foot hollowed slate a slickness like that of fish scale.) Our pleasantries died abruptly when we found the outside door firmly bolted. We had known that our key was good only for the second door inside the vestibule, but, knowing also that the night porter's duties ran till 11:00, we had felt no worry and had seen no need to take along a key to the lower courtyard door. We should have reckoned upon the porter's apparent absent mindedness and his present anxiety about his cancer stricken wife, which led him to plan to shut up two hours early and not give us warning as we left. Our situation was wonderful.
     There we were in the dripping blackness, rattling great Jacobean doors, feeling our way up terrace steps, poking tentatively about Stygian sunken courts, and raising helpless cries for assistance from four domestics who understand only Spanish and whose privacy was protected from our noise by their sealed leaded windows, small amber squares sixty feet above us in the dark. For 15 minutes we whistled, hooped, and sang out in unison, primarily to rouse the two Joses, Isobel, or Manuel, but partly also simply to reassure ourselves.
     After a week at the Abbey we had come to terms with the resident ghosts—an elderly lady and a monk, we had been told—about which we had heard the day that we arrived, but just a few minutes before we found ourselves locked out, we had learned at the pub of two more. One of them, one of the Lord Norths, we could welcome into our spectral family matter of factly. The Earl is said merely to wander over the lawns looking straight ahead through squinting eyes and recognizing no one, not even foreign usurpers of his grounds. The other one seemed less easy to accept. A murderer hanged in a nearby marsh for the killing of a young girl, he is, our sensationalist informants told us, well known to emit moans and scramble about the very paths and courts in which we were seeking rescuers. Our clatter kept him safely off, and it eventually brought Jose #2, mumbling and shuffling like Macbeth's porter, to our aid.
     We trudged up the sighing stairs to our bedroom, past the suits of armor in the corners of three landings—they still make us a little edgy when we come upon them in the dimness late at night—and let ourselves into our large and lofty quarters by screwing a weighty four inch key into a stub¬born 18th century lock. As we did so, we heard the piercing screams of a murderer's victim in a Sherlock Holmes film that the Spaniards were following on their telly two floors up, under the pointed gables in the attic. Patty had, she found, discovered a most effective remedy for homesickness, and I had met with a few additional reminders of the special quality of our days and nights at Wroxton Abbey.