25 April 1985

I start these jottings by recording an item that I saw just a few minutes ago in a recent issue of The Times:

"A man who brought terror to women in his home town was revealed yesterday as Keith Everitt, a security guard. Over eight months he carried out a number of attacks near his former home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Everitt would creep behind unsuspecting women and teenage girls, hold them and then shampoo their hair. Watford magistrates were told he admitted deriving sexual pleasure from what he had done."

     If any woman ever happens to see these lines, they may provoke for her an odd set of musings the next time she uses her Prell. I hope, however, that she—and anyone else who chances upon them—will give some little thought, at least, to the way they symbolize rather well a conspicuous feature of life in the Abbey. The item's strange blend of reflective pastoral serenity and sudden arresting surprise—girls and women abruptly set upon by a jack-in-the-box assailant springing out of a thicket or a copse—seems to typify much of what is the singular Wroxton experience: a combination of tranquil sanctuary and confrontation with the shock of discovery. I say this as I look back at some of the items on my calendar for the last few days.
     On Friday, I rode to Oxford with our art tutor, Philip Inwood. In addition to enjoying a good walk around the colleges on one of the best mornings of the year, I browsed in Blackwell's and visited the Ashmolean, where I took in the Greek and Japanese exhibits and saw two special shows, one an assembly of British drawings from 1945 to the present, the other a collection of Turner watercolors.
     Detouring on our way back to Wroxton, Philip gave me a short guided tour of some of the most attractive and less well known small villages like Wooton and Great Tew, the latter owned almost entirely by one landlord and boasting a marvelous pub, "The Falkland Arms." It is managed by a husband and wife who make five or six different fruit wines on the premises. (Strawberry and apple, were listed for the day we stopped by.) Every building that I saw in Great Tew was constructed of Hornton stone that had the warm look of lightly browned toast, and many of the houses were splashed with the bright color of espaliered forsythia or japonica.
     The roads leading to little places like Wooton and Great Tew are single track lanes squeezed on either edge by the sides of very old, thatched, stone cottages and the mortarless rocks of the garden walls that mark the boundary of virtually every property. In one or two places, hedges of privet and blackthorn and holly made leafy tunnels of the lanes.
     At one point Philip and I got out of his VW Golf and climbed up on a low wall to get a better view of the rolling countryside of irregular patches of woodland, farms, and meadows with meandering streams and cows and ewes nursing this spring's lambs and calves. The stillness was broken only occasionally by the bleat of a lamb, the distant and pleasantly melancholy crooning of a wood pigeon, and small, indeterminate sounds of domestic doings in some far-off cottage. Neither Philip nor I spoke for several minutes. We just let our eyes slowly rove over the "peaceable kingdom" or Constable scene. When we finally looked back at one another, each of us knew, without saying so, that both of us would long remember what we had seen, standing there on the wall at the edge of the lane.
     On Sunday Eithne Henson, who teaches two novel courses here, took Patty and me to Canon's Ashby, a recently restored medieval house once owned by relatives of John Dryden. Two or three of the walls in its rooms are, in effect, marvelous old murals, although they were probably not seen as such by the original owners. The "Spenser Room," so called because, reportedly, Edmund Spenser frequently stayed in it as a guest, was discovered to have, under the crumbling walls later removed by the restorers, mistily faded paintings of Faery Queene scenes and large plaster rectangles decorated with abstract symbols in once bold reds now softened to terra cotta.
     Monday, all of us went to Stratford for our second visit in two weeks to the R.S.C. theater, where we had earlier seen The Merry Wives of Windsor and where, this time, As You Like It was the offering. As quirky as Wives in some people's view—both productions are staged in modern, or at least, 20th century dress—its action, and theme as well, depended heavily upon a vast white drapery that billowed over the set as a Forest of Arden snowfall and rose to become all sorts of things like bridal canopies and great snow covered trees. The forestage was given over to a real running brook in which young lovers danced (like Tommy Tune and Twiggy) and into which country bumpkins clumsily tumbled.
     Yesterday, I went with Nicholas Baldwin's British Politics class to Parliament. We left Wroxton at 7.30, got to Westminster Palace at l0.20, having been stalled in Lincoln-Tunnel-like gridlock, and spent 2 hours being guided around both Lords and Commons. We also heard a talk by Lord Tordoff, chief Liberal whip of the House of Lords, who had generously granted Nicholas's request that he meet with the Wroxtonians. During the rest of the day (which ran straight through till our 7.30 bus boarding at Trafalgar Square with only twenty-five minutes for lunch,) we sat in on debates in both houses, listened to a talk by Lord Elwyn Jones, a Labor life peer and former Lord Chancellor as well as former Attorney General; watched the Speaker's Procession; and heard talks (in Parliament-building conference rooms) by six different MPs and one secretary to an MP.
     The MPs, by the way, were an accurately representative group. Two of them were Liberal, two Conservative, one Labour, and one SDP. They came from districts as widely separated as Truro in Cornwall and Great Grimsby in the northeast.
     Tonight I drive a minibus load of modern drama students to Banbury for a performance of Look Back in Anger, and tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. I start out with the students for a weekend trip to North Wales. We are to visit Caernarvon Castle, climb Mt. Snowdon, and go on a guided tour of a slate quarry. We will start the return trip to the Abbey about noon on Sunday.
     We have also had some little excitement and a few busy times on the Abbey's grounds over the past week or so. On Saturday, one of the six swans assigned to us by the "Swan Rescue Association" died. I saw it—it was the cob, the oldest and largest of the parents of four one year old cygnets—thrashing about spasmodically on the water at about 6:00 p.m. By the time I had run up to the village and returned with Robert Denton, the Abbey gardener, the bird was dead, floating with its wings spread on the lake surface and its head and neck hanging like a thick feathery length of rope under the water. Robert and I pulled the bird's body to shore with a grappling hook, fighting off the female, who spread her wings protectively over her dead mate, trumpeted loudly, and tried to frighten us away with thrusts of her bill and noisy, threatening flappings. I thought, sadly, of the old folklore about the pairing of young swans, their gliding together to some thicket-ringed edge of water, touching their heads together—their curved necks forming the shape of a heart, and thus mating for life.
     When we carried the sodden weight of the dead male away, the pen began a series of mournful cries that lasted through the night. I closed my bedroom window early, but the sadness drifted in, nevertheless, incongruously mixed, after eleven or so, with the thump and wail of a disco party in honor of newlyweds in the village.
     Twice, Robert has had the police in to try to catch a Drayton village teenager who comes into our woods with a fowling piece and begins blasting away at squirrels, rabbits, ducks and swans. At first Robert and I therefore thought that the swan had been shot. A postmortem proved us wrong. He had died of old age or disease, perhaps lead poisoning from dredging in the muddy lake bottom for roots and ingesting discarded fish-line weights or bird-shot pellets. Both are common causes of waterfowl death in England now.
     Almost nothing else worthy of comment here, at the moment, is in any way troublesome, but even the grounds can remind you of Wroxton's thought-provoking mix of rustic calm and that which can abruptly astonish. The lawn is greening luxuriantly as spring advances, buds are swelling on tree branches and rose canes, and numbers of the flowers are in bloom. Aconites, primroses, daffodils and jonquils are everywhere in the wooded areas, especially near the ice house on the rise by Lime Walk. Anemone, chinodoxia, and half a dozen other flowers that I know only by sight are brightening the knot garden and the herbaceous borders.
     Close to the Folly in the East Garden, however, several shafts of stinkhorn thrust almost lewdly out of the low weeds like ithyphallic totems left over from some Bacchic festival procession. Birds on the Great Pond seem to be responding to this fungus's gamic dehiscence. At least two pairs of mallards are nesting on its banks, and a tufted grebe that everyone concluded last year had been widowed for life has found a mate this spring and is elaborately busy following the rules of a highly stylized and compulsively ardent courtship ritual.
     Beyond that, the students are becoming a much more cohesive and thoroughly likable group. I've begun to feel very good about having been able to get to know them. The FDU contingent has been a real pleasure to work with, though their almost aggressive informality seems to perplex one or two of the more traditional English members of the staff.
     C. S., for one, calls the tutors "Doll" and gets the attention of her roommate Ellen by whistling through her teeth, piercingly. The other night, she also irritated the chef here by sneaking behind the cafeteria service counter, stealing a second after dinner cream puff, and running out of the dining room. Slim, athletic, and tom-boyish, she easily outdistanced both the chef's cries of protest and the pursuit of a waiter, ordered by the chef to retrieve the cream puff, set aside as dessert for a late-dining staff member. I asked her, an hour or two afterward, to try to set things right by talking to the chef about the incident. She quickly and amiably agreed: "Ok., Babe. No problem. What's the big deal about a cream puff? To tell you the truth, it wasn't worth stealing, anyway."
     Her own and her FDU classmates' work compares most favorably with that of representatives of the 12 other colleges from which this term's students have come. And the best grade in the course for which I administered the final, a one point offering called "Britain in the 20th Century," a course that ends several weeks before the others, was earned by a Madison woman, Jill Vacula.
     The bells in All Saints tower, not far from my bedroom window, are now tolling, the shouts of the frisbee players on the front lawn are dying down, and someone is pounding on the dinner gong in the Great Hall. It's time to end this entry.