Letter from Cambridge |
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Finality
My time is up in Cambridge, the clock’s run out, the trip to the airport is waiting beyond my flat’s door. My last month or so has been winding down the research, with time for visiting friends and family, excursions again to Norwich and Oxford, and escorting my daughter Maggie to Stirling in Scotland for her August summer course at the university there.
I had some wonderings in January whether my fairly firmly entrenched fondness for all things English would suffer any dents over an extended stay. Would local traditions continue to amuse and delight me? Would the familiarity of daily exposure to the local discourse, the habits of academical Cambridge, the continual dealings with customs ever so slightly different from America wear down the charm of this polite and civilized society? Do the English keep their unique identity with dignity up close and over time?
Worries proved to be unfounded. While certain individuals were a disappointment (belligerent bus and taxi drivers, surly retail staff) and various practices were bewildering and aggravating over the long haul (paying bills, following procedures, avoiding the landmines of unwritten and hidden regulations) the large picture remains serene and alluring. It really is a remarkable island and people, and my not-so-latent antiquarian tendencies are easily assuaged by a daily dose of 15th and 16th century architecture.
Cambridge is not necessarily a proper representative for the rest of England. It is a university town, with all the charms and distractions such a place brings. It is gorgeous. The colleges are out of a movie set, their lawns the sort one imagines in an afterlife. Greenery is everywhere, bushes carefully tended, flowers afoot for 10 months of the year. In the spring one set of trees would finish blossoming and another would take its place, so April through June was a riot of color, in whites and reds and yellows, each batch surpassing the previous one.
The academical season had its rhythm, culminating in Lent term just ended, with exams for most students, and the relief their finish finally brought. Then “ball week” with each college in friendly competition to outdo each other for the lavishness of their final party of the term, with handsome young undergraduates cavorting in town in gowns and dinner jackets, wine glasses left outside college gates. If you could ignore mobile phones and the occasional jarring techno-sight, the appalling dress of tourists, and a few other modern conveniences, it is not hard to imagine this as an eternal, or more accurately, an eight century, cycle of university life here.
Many university denizens were distant, with well developed exoskeletons. They have seen a lot of folks come and go, so some protection is natural. Erasmus came and went, and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Byron and Milton, and even Newton did not stick around all that long. I am one of a long series of those seeking to mine the university tradition and crack the da Vinci code of Cambridge, which of course is impossible.
Would I do it again? Already I plot the ways.
Leeds
June began with a trek to Leeds, in Yorkshire, to the Leeds Metropolitan University, which has a library school (included in a group of departments with the unfortunate name of “Innovation North”) and an energetic faculty, one of whom is the editor of the journal Library History. The train took over three hours to get there, with one change in Peterborough, and I must say that traveling by train is one of the great civilised luxuries of modern life. This is odd since trains have been around for a hundred and fifty years, so they aren't exactly cutting edge, feeling rather the reverse, but they allow one time to gaze out the window and ruminate, and not drive a car (and get traffic tickets or be tempted to speed or curse your other fellow humans) and arrive at one's destination, generally close to the center of town, with some composure and dignity.
I find the English countryside entirely soothing. Everything is green, and even the weeds in the somewhat dreary sections of towns that one is apt to go through on a train journey are attractive and entirely happy.
A teenaged girl on a horse in the middle of a field has riding gear on and is talking to another woman, her coach perhaps? Is she getting advice before going off on a long ride in the country? The cathedral of the island town of Ely sticks up out of the flatness, the big town in what used to be swampy fens that dominated this part of England until they were drained in the 18th century.
The farms in Cambridgeshire tend to have long stretching plots, bordered by trees or hedge rows, and despite growing up near working farms, I have never been good at identifying different crops from a distance at speed. One exception is wheat, which this time of year has a distinctive color, with almost a blue or purple tinge to the young deep green of the rapidly growing stalks, and a great many fields were filled with wheat, with blackbirds and magpies conducting reconnaissance overhead. The rape fields, which a month ago were dominant with their blinding yellow, have all merged into the background, and there appeared to be strawberries and lettuce-like crops along the route as well.
The farms themselves, often in sturdy stone buildings, might have old abandoned tractors out back, and the occasional 60's Mini or Morris Minor in the driveway still doing duty. The parish church steeples stand up out of the distant field-surrounded towns like sentinels spotted at a great distance, the impression being a series of cheerful "thumbs up" exhortations to townsfolk and travelers alike.
An hour north of Peterborough, the largest town in Cambridgeshire and hub for all train travel to the north and east, the hills become more pronounced, the valleys deeper. More and more sheep enter the landscape, and I conclude there is no stupider looking mammal than a sheep gazing at a train going by. What can possibly be going through their underbred brains? "How can something that big eat enough if it goes that fast?" or "What's the hurry? It's a nice day out here after all. Slow down and you’d get a proper bite to eat." Indeed they litter the distant rolling green hills like flocked thumbtacks.
A couple of local wenches, young and all tarted up, hop on one stop and I watch the conductor flirt with them as he comes through to check tickets.
"Tickets please" he says as he spies them sitting on the floor in front of the doors on opposite sides of the coach, gossiping and passing a cell phone and a can of Red Bull back and forth.
Taking their tickets he frowns and says "I'm sorry, you're sitting in first class seats and your tickets are only coach." I wonder how many times he has used that line.
“First class my arse” they respond, or something similar.
They chuckle and banter back in the strangely hard to follow Peterborough dialect.
An older retired couple sitting across from me hardly say a word. He is a tough looking customer, and looks like he ignored his mother's advice not to frown too much or his face would get frozen in one expression. His mouth is a perfect upside down "U" and he looks bitter and roughly treated by life. I was wondering if his expression would ever change over the course of the train ride but he whispered once to his wife, and a perceptible smile crossed his face.
Leeds is a tough, hilly city, a working class testament to gritty survival. The university of the conference, not the larger University of Leeds, is four miles out of town, and I elect to hoof it up, but it is mostly uphill and my shirt is damp and sticking to my back by the time I get to my hotel, which turns out to be built right into the Headingley cricket pitch, internationally famous amongst cricket aficionados. My room even looks out over the field, all closely cropped and ready for the next match.
The conference is one of those small "everyone gives a paper" types, and I am one of four Americans in a cast of slightly over forty. The theme, "Making Connections Between Library, Book, Reading and Information History," has attracted a large percentage of Scandinavian and Baltic participants and over the course of the conference I hear languages that never before graced my ears, at least so I could identify them: Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian. These were in addition to the more familiar Finnish, Swedish and Danish. On the attendees section of the program I am listed as being from the "National Library of Norway" but I am unsure how I merited that promotion. During the conference several people circle me warily, puzzled that my spoken English doesn’t sound “Norwegian.”
At tea in the morning I chat with a professor from the Royal School of Librarianship in Copenhagen and we compare notes on the profession. There are some very good talks over the sessions, and I trade business cards with folks around the world – New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania and the Inns of Court in London, besides the Balto-Scandinavian crowd. I have volunteered to chair a session the next day, and while the duties are simple – introduce the speakers and keep order – I grow worried with the program now in hand. How I am going to gracefully and accurately pronounce the names of people presenting on the morrow: Minna Ahokas (Finland), Indra Ranasinghe (Sri Lanka), Valdis Villerušs (Latvia)? At least I can do the one American, Robert Milevski. I am keenly aware, for the entire conference, just how limiting it is to be mono-lingual.
Racing on the River
One of the more distinctive elements of Cambridge culture drew my attention one Saturday in June – the Bumps. Rowing races seem to have fascinated university folks since the beginning, seeing as all the old towns were on rivers anyway and boat-life was unavoidable, but for Oxford and Cambridge the boats appear to be a singularly strong obsession. As you go upriver (to the North and East out of town) past Jesus Green, a great long string of college boathouses lie along the north bank of the Cam. Kings College, Trinity, St. Johns – all have their crests on the fronts of large garage-like structures which house the great long boats and gear used for racing.
One of the difficulties, naturally, with boat racing in long streamlined sculls with extended oars on what is, after all, a fairly narrow river, is the business of passing. Most of the time there just isn’t room, and you would get a tangle of oars and accusations of unfair play, so some ingenious watermen from way back came up with a sound means of determining the king of the river that would provide an indisputable means of crowning the best rowers, at the same time drawing out the competition and maximizing viewers’ enjoyment. That it has elements that the Marx brothers would find entirely suitable is a bonus.
The race is a five day affair, and the starting line is several miles out of town. The rowers do a warmup run from their boathouses, going with the current, turn around at the starting line and are arranged in order by their last year’s performance: fastest boat in front. Each college may enter one or two boats, and there is a group of open competition that allows colleges to enter more boats, with both men’s’ and women’s divisions. An individual race includes about a dozen boats. About a boat and a half length separates competitors. At the start there is furious pulling and splashing with the oars as the first flat stretch of river is strategically crucial. The river then goes through a series of narrower bends, and here the fun begins. Spectators line the curvy places, as the goal is to “bump” the boat in front of you, thereby moving up a spot and assuming their place in the order for the next race. You can move up one place per race, and once bumping has occurred, both the “bumper” and the “bumpee” immediately pull up oars and retire to the side of the river to let the rest of the pack continue. Someone explained how it was possible to move up two places, by a curious combination of events and rules, but the complexity of that unlikely occurrence exceeded my comprehension. See the the CUCBC website for more.
Obviously, several races over several days are required, with various “brackets”, to get things sorted out for the final day of competition. If you are last in your bracket you cannot “win” the race, but you are fighting to move up a place. In fact you are quite vulnerable, because if you don’t succeed in bumping the boat in front of you, you are dropped to the bracket below you next year, while the winner of that bracket takes your spot. Like, I suppose, all university activities, it looks both immensely simple and is absurdly difficult.
The competition is fierce, with spectators on the side urging on their favorites, the rowers in their college colors pulling like mad and negotiating the turns. The Saturday I watched had been windy and heavy rain squalls punctuated the event. Bystanders told me that if the day had been sunny and warm, the riverside would have been teeming with spectators, blankets spread out on the river banks with picnics while everyone made a day of it. As it was, there seemed like plenty of people, kids and dogs, and the bike path next to the river was particularly lethal since once the race began, each boat had a team of four support staff on bikes who would tear along the path next to their boat, shouting out times and strategic instructions (“Shoulders down!” “Look out for Trinity behind you!” “Composure, lads!”) . Minding where they were going appeared to be last on their list of priorities. So staying off the path seemed like a good thing to do once the race had begun.
A pub in Fen Ditton, at a perfect spot for viewing, did their banner business of the year this week, as hundreds of attendees crowded their grassy green by the river to drink and cheer. There even was a punt ferry to get folks over from the other side of the bank, at £1.50 a ride, all of 30 meters of water-width to traverse of the river. I half expected a pint-starved spectator to dive in and swim across the muddy span to get to the beloved pub and avoid the ferry charge.
I stayed for several hours and a half-dozen races, and it was great fun. The rowers take it all as a life-or-death activity, and one boat which had been bumped, and thus retired, was a mass of crying, red-faced, athletes on the riverside bank, their season come to an ignominious end. Another tradition I witnessed on the way back upriver and home was that the poor coxswain, who had navigated his or her college boat through thick and thin, once safely back at the boat house, is grabbed by his or her teammates and ritually tossed into the river. One unwilling coxswain was pleading for mercy but the rowers seemed to delight in giving her an extra far toss into the river Cam.
Honorary Graduation
I was lucky enough to score a ticket for the University’s Honorary Graduation this year, so had a taste of this ritual, Cambridge-style. The folks getting degrees were from all over the map, some already with a Cambridge degree, and one without any university degree at all. They came from art, anthropology and various technical backgrounds, and the ceremony itself was remarkable. The list included Hans Blix, the nuclear weapons inspector and Richard Leakey, son of the famous anthropologists Louis and Mary.
Tradition required all Cambridge graduates or members of a college or department to wear their robes, so there was a good chance to view these. Various clerical collars and obscure distinguishing features graced some robes. After the audience had assembled, a five piece brass section began stirring processional music, and the dignitaries, led by Prince Philip, who by ancient charter is vice chancellor of the university.
His robes were long enough they required a page to hold them off the ground, and he settled on a throne-like chair facing the audience, while the rest of the stage party made their way to their places. Some military costumes, circa 1825, were present, and two men shouldered some impressive looking but structurally dubious pikes and halberds. I am not sure their blades, however flashy, would have stood up well against a sturdy cardboard box.
The program listed speeches in Latin, with English translations, but I was not prepared for the entire ceremony (with the exceptions of the first command “Everyone rise!” when the procession began and the singing of the “God save the Queen” at the end) to be entirely in Latin. This was handled by a Latin orator, an official university position with a title and a stipend, with style, enthusiasm and wit (although the percentage of the audience who chuckled at the Latin witticisms was small, which likely would not have been the case a hundred years ago.) Later it turned out this was his last official performance, and there was some concern about a suitable successor.
I was struck by the various bowings and ceremonial routines, not all of them of identifiable significance. Afterwards there was a splendid reception next to the Senate house, adjacent to Kings College, in the area that formed the center of gravity for the university from about the 15th century. This spot had been called the “Schools” which included the original building that served as the university library, across from Great St. Mary’s church, which had functioned as the main university building for these sorts of things in the first few centuries of Cambridge University life.
Librarians were fairly well represented. The university librarian was in attendance, and I recognized the librarian from Magdalene, and the archivist from Corpus Christi, a fellow of Darwin. It was surprising how many other university people I also knew from my short time here – two associates from Emmanuel College, a fellow’s spouse from Queens, and American associates from the colleges of Wolfson, Kings, and Clare Hall.
Last Details
Second-born Maggie arrived the last week of June, while we had other American friends Lauren and Tom, progeny Austin and William, here too, and stayed a week. Then I escorted Maggie by train to Stirling in Scotland for her summer course in medieval history. This is phase one of her junior year abroad, as she will move on to Gottingen come fall for the year.
Once again the train ride was a pleasure, enlivened by a garrulous and increasingly insistent and drunken native of Berwick on Tweed, returning home for a visit with his nine month old baby. He managed to engage in conversation everyone within sight or hearing in our car, and if he had not been so generally good natured and amusing, would have been annoying indeed. He accused one couple of having a “vicious” Scottie dog, me of blocking aisle access, another pensioner of bleeding UK tax revenue dry. But he pointed out a grand sight out the window, the holy island of Lindisfarne, the location of a 7th century monastery which had a thriving scriptorium, and indeed produced the breathtakingly beautiful book known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. The settlement was later pillaged by Vikings, but the island itself remains, reachable by foot only at low tide. It passed by, ghostly in the distance out in the ocean, a siren call of medieval learning and literacy.
Scotland, when the clouds lifted enough and you could see it through the rain, was gorgeous, huge rugged mounds of stony mountains rising from the greenness below. Edinburgh had an enduring majesty, and the town of Stirling itself was appealing, small but lively. The university, while a relatively recent arrival, is based on an old noble’s estate, with his own castle as part of the campus. Part of me would not mind trading places with Maggie for the month, as it looks a splendid site for a month’s course of study.
The rest of us went to Leipzig for a last visit to Gene in early July, and he came back with us to England to dash up to see Maggie, eventually to return home with us after over a year away from the states when we return mid-July.
Epilogue
The last weekend in town, for the first time in many rain-soaked weeks, was warm and sunny, so naturally I was occupied with packing and cleaning the flat instead of wanton dalliance outdoors. I did pay my last visits around town, calculating that I had crossed one main footbridge over the Cam over four hundred times since my arrival in town in January. Said goodbye to the baker at the market, bought my last copy of the Guardian, and generally wished I had more time left.
The flight was long, with the usual adrenaline producing mini-crises getting to Heathrow and checking in, and California startled me with its dry tawny hills, aggressive driving habits, and overall Bay Area sprawl. Luckily a couple weeks still intervene before heading back to work and committees and a shabby contemporary library, and I have reams of notes and what I have written so far to sift through and revise, photos to organize, and an overarching intellectual and cultural digestion process to complete, if that is at all possible. Home feels good, a comfortable bed welcome, my neighborhood intact, but the time overseas was extraordinary, an adventure in scholarship that I hope generates some more enduring results than I can envision at the present. May Cambridge continue for another eight centuries, jewel in the center of East Anglia, a university tradition of charm, resilience and excellence.
Thanks for your audience, thanks for comments and feedback throughout. It has been fun.
Ned