4 September 1966

Patty and I had a wonderful visit by John Fritz, of the history department at Madison. He was here to talk with me about a special course which may be arranged for the Madison campus. Its title will be something like "British Antecedents of American Culture." It would begin with lectures here at Wroxton, to be conducted, we now are thinking, by Graham Webster of Birmingham University. In addition to the lectures, the students would get actual field work in archaeology at some place like Sulgrave Manor. Then they would go to William and Mary, perhaps, and finally to Gene Weltfish's digs at Morristown.
     I gave John the information I had received from Webster in a meeting last week and asked him to talk further with Gene, Kent Redmond, and others at Madison and to keep in touch with me regarding later developments. Our business over, he and I joined Patty for drinks in the Faculty Lounge.
     Each of us had a Dewars and water there—with ice cubes to show John how much Patty and I appreciated his stopping by—and we carried our drinks with us during a tour of the Abbey and the grounds. Although we have had rain for some part of every day for a week, yesterday's late afternoon was a fine one, and we sipped our drinks and chatted and strolled, the tinkling of our ice cubes providing a pleasant little music for us. Just before we went into dinner, we sat on the moss clumped terrace wall to the east of the Abbey—the moss has tiny spikes of red capped flowers now—and laughed about the way that I had greeted John by the Duck Pond off Main Street across from the College gate. (I had flagged him down while he was still picking his way in his rented Vauxhall and told him I had come out to greet him for several reasons: I had porter's duty on Saturdays, was shying kestrels away from our wood pigeons, was checking on the growth of fairy rings, and did not want him to lose a second's opportunity to study appreciatively the handiwork of the first English barber I had visited on Thursday.)
     We had a quiet good time at our joking, and I suppose that all of us years from now will find those contented moments coming back to us with a sweet sort of melancholy full of the lovely and yet softly sad colors of the sky above the Abbey's great gables, gray purples and pinks faintly gilded. I am sure that I will.
     The three of us and Miss Hogan, the sprightly and charming Irish housekeeper, who is, unfortunately, leaving us shortly, had a bad dinner in the big dining hall. The relief cook, to whom I had spoken earlier in the day about John's visit, interpreted my request for a good meal as meaning a big one. He gave us five kinds of meat in a Devonshire Grill (veal cutlet, bacon rolls with something mysterious in their soft coils, sausage, hamburgers, and beefsteak), all of them a drip with cooking fat. We also had two kinds of potatoes (chips and duchess), and the omnipresent Brussels sprouts. John was gallant about the meal, or perhaps he had been rendered broadly tolerant by the third whisky I had poured for him, and even said that he enjoyed it. Patty and I, however, had our usual postprandial Wroxton pains, alarums, and excursions, and I was in our spacious bath room at 3:00 a.m., belching marvelously, swallowing at gaggings, and keeping one hand on the toilet lid and the other busy tossing milk of magnesia tablets between my teeth. From the bedroom I could hear Patty laughing sympathetically, not derisively. I have concluded that the brutality of England's barbers is exceeded only by that of its cooks.*
     After dinner the three of us went to the North Arms, where we had one or two sherries and a long talk with an English family, a man, his wife, and their seventeen year old daughter. Our conversation was most cheerful and congenial. One result of it was that the gentleman whose name we still do not know, promised that he would come to the Abbey soon to bring a peculiar little memento of our enjoyable hour together: a clay pipe used by 17th century gravediggers, he told us, as a disinfectant after they had buried a victim of the plague. Something like 4,000 people died in the little village where he now lives, and many of them, apparently, were buried on the 14 acres which he once farmed. The first time that he plowed his ground, he said, he found thousands of the pipes in the furrows, testimony to the mythology so often passing as medical science. The superstitious corpse bearers believed that if they took three or four puffs of tobacco after handling each of the victims and then threw away the pipe, they would ward off infection.
     Patty and I look forward to getting this curiosity. We hope, too, that we can look forward to more heartening visits like John Fritz's. Both of us were full of regret when he drove off early this morning, headed for home as we headed for an almost wholly deserted Abbey, dreary under gray skies and a light rain.
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*My several complaints about the food service in the Abbey in its earliest years are, happily, not representative of the fare served later on, when the College employed its own kitchen staff in place of the catering group on hand in the first few years of the college’s existence.