Farewell to Cambridge

Classes ended this morning and we'll have our Closing Dinner tonight at 7:00.  It has been an amazing two weeks!  I've gotten a great deal out of my courses and even more from the plenary lectures including, since I last posted, a lecture on diplomacy and another on changing influences in the Islamic World.  I also learned that nasty King John, under interdict from the Pope, seriously considered making England an Islamic country rather than bow to Rome -- he could have beaten Henry VIII to it and invented the Church of England instead (but then John wasn't known for a particularly keen intellect).

Ellen, Joan, Sigrid and Pat at the Orchard

We've all had great fun discovering pubs (I particularly like the Anchor and the Eagle) and tea shops (Fitzbillie's and Harriet's) and the extraordinary Fitzwilliam Museum.  On Wednesday afternoon, we went to Grantchester, about 3 miles south of Cambridge, to have tea at The Orchard.  For fans of the BBC show of the same name, the church in the series is right there in the village.  We sat under trees laden with apples,  as the Bloomsbury Group used to do when in Cambridge.   The swoopy canvas lawn chairs are a bit uncomfortable (one sinks into rather than sits on them) but the atmosphere can't be beat.  We walked through the meadows and fields along the Cam to get home.  It was quite an adventure as we were sharing the fields with some cows who didn't always want to get out of the way.

Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion of this excursion.  Cambridge is rich in history and old buildings, but also charming eccentricities.   The names of many of the colleges are tricky -- for example, Gonville and Caius (Keys), Emmanuel ("Emma"), and Magdelene ("maudlin", which is exactly what the mood of the place must have been when, last of all the colleges, they accepted women in the late 1980s!).  In the meadow along the Cam behind King's college one often finds several big brown cows grazing (prevented from reaching the beautifully mown back lawn by a haha) and there is evidence of bee-keeping in several of the back yards of the colleges -- a rather smart move, actually, in view of the abundance of flower gardens in the University.

Since Cambridge was founded before wrist watches -- or even time zones -- there are time pieces on towers and above gates practically everywhere.  While most toll the hours of the day, some track months or seasons -- and they really are beautiful, however doubtful their accuracy may be.

Queen's College

Gonville & Caius College

 We leave for London tomorrow.  Two nights at the Landsdowne Club and then home on Monday.  I plan to visit the Tate Britain, which I haven't seen in years, and take in the revival of Gypsy starring Imelda Staunton, who has gotten rave reviews.  I'll also have time for lunch with an old high school friend who has been practicing law here in London for her entire career.  Much to catch up on as I haven't seen her since our 50th reunion 5 years ago -- and not for 50 years before that!

I'll be able to catch up with all of you in person very soon.  It's wonderful to travel, but so nice to come home too!

Emmanuel College

Lavenham

Lavenham and Bury St. Edmonds, both located in the adjoining county of Suffolk, were our destinations on Sunday.   It takes about 90 minutes to drive to Lavenham, thought to be the finest of the "wool towns".  It was certainly the richest (at one time richer even than York) and contains over 300 buildings listed as being of architectural and historical significance, most built between 1400 and 1500.  Its road to riches lay in the richly colored blue wool cloth that was made there and shipped to the Continent, what we call serge.  So, when a man dons his blue serge suit, it is made from a kind of cloth the manufacture of which began in this little village over 600 years ago.

Sculpture in Kate Denton's Gardem

We began our visit in the garden of a locally based sculptor, Kate Denton.  She and her husband have purchased a house on the outskirts of the village -- not really a manor house but a comfortable upper middle class home with considerable land, which they have converted into a stunning garden filled with her sculptures.  So, for example, one walks through the grounds and turns to find a stag poised in a glade -- only this one doesn't run off as it is made of bronze.  There is a rising swan in one of the ponds and birds tucked here and there.  On one wall sits a statue of her daughter when she was a girl with two dogs at her feet waiting for their next adventure.  In style, she is very reminiscent of Georgia Gerber on Whidbey Island.

Sculpture in Kare Denton's Garden

Across a little bridge and down a path alongside the church, one comes to the center of Lavenham.  There were not many building materials in the area in 1400 -- no great stone quarries and not much timber, so the houses were built in a half-timbered style and the space between the vertical timbers indicated the wealth of the person who built the building (the more timbers, the richer one was).  Some of the plaster between the timbers is decorated in a style called pargeting (pargeter was a plasterer back then) and adds even more interest to these remarkable houses (all still occupied).  To this day, Lavenham remains a small village; it doesn't even have a grocery store.  But it does have a hotel named The Swan, where Ellen and I had lunch, and in the bar of The Swan, one can still find the signatures of American GIs who flew out of nearby airfields.  But the very best way to show you Lavenham is to say no more and just show you the best pictures I was able to obtain.

Main Street, Lavenham

The Guildhall, Lavenham

Pargeting on Lavenham House

Crooked Little House

The little house on the right is quite crooked, the result of using somewhat green wood in the construction of the building and then letting it settle in whatever way it chose.  This house, although it  remains strong, settled bent to one side.  The nursery rhyme below is reputed to be based on this crooked little house in Lavenham, now a crooked little shop.

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

From Lavenham, we drove to Bury St. Edmonds, the site of a rich and powerful monastery that was "dissolved" by Henry VIII.  The church remains, but the ruins of the monastery itself have been turned into a large and beautiful public garden that is full of people on a nice Sunday afternoon.  It is really a pleasure to walk among the ruins and the flower beds.  And always a pleasure to stop for a late afternoon cup of tea.

Bury St. Edmond's Garden with Church in the Background

Bletchley Park

Main house, Bletchley Park

On Saturday our group made an excursion to Bletchley Park, now made popular by the film The Imitation Game but really made famous by its success breaking the German Enigma Code during World War II.   Churchill, on a rare visit, told they staff they were the "geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled."  Indeed, the current efforts to restore Bletchley Park are the result in part of the decommissioning of some of its secrets, efforts to obtain a pardon and official apology for the "gross indecency" conviction of Turing after the war, and in part by the interest of computer buffs in recreating Turing's original "Bombe", the machine that calculated the enigma code each day.  Churchill ordered all the machines destroyed after the war to preserve the secret of the work done at Bletchley Park.

The Bombe

It is interesting to note the contribution made by Poles who defected to the Allied side after Hitler invaded their country.  In the first instance, Turing's machine wound up being named after a Polish ice cream dish (a Bomba) that was reputedly being eaten by a group of Polish cypher geeks when they got the idea for how to beat the Enigma.  Not only did most of the Polish Air Force defect to Britain in 1939, but they brought with them the work of their scientists and decoders on the Enigma Machine -- work they had done during the terrible year between the Munich Pact and the invasion of their country.  That work was critical in giving the Bletchley Park group a starting point much further advanced than would otherwise have been possible.

Work Station

The old country house that the British government took over in 1939 was quite lovely, but Turing and his group worked in what had been the fruit cellar behind the house (read: cold and damp) and most of the rest of the crew were in huts built hastily and with virtually no amenities.  One hut communicated with another by telephone and so nobody knew the location or identity of the person to whom s/he was speaking.  Could be London; could be two huts over.  It meant that even people rooming together had no idea what their companions did -- or even where they worked.

Typical dormitory room

The dormitories were not much better than the work spaces and pity those who lived off site, bicycling to work on dark country lanes in rain and winter.

Bletchley Park is still very much a work in progress with more restoration and more exhibits going up all the time.  What it lacks in coherence at the moment is more than made up for by its extraordinarily powerful story, however.  It was really wonderful to experience its atmosphere first hand.

A Busy Week

An entire week has passed and it is hard to figure out exactly where it has gone.  One thing is clear:  without term papers and exams, being a college student is a hoot!  No shopping or cooking, no household to manage, no repairs and maintenance to worry about.  Just go to class, eat great food cooked by somebody else, have your room cleaned each day, enjoy your friends, and explore one of the world's best college towns.

I am sharing this experience with a wonderful group of people from the Women's University Club, but have met so many others.  When Lloyd and I were here 16 years ago, the retirees were a small group and it seemed like the rest were either teachers getting continuing education credits or groups of college kids from American schools, usually with a faculty advisor in tow.  This made for rowdy dorms, we were told, and made it more difficult for us to find others with the interests we shared.  This time, there are many more adult learners and the students who are here seem to have come on their own and are highly motivated.  I've met a retired Italian bureaucrat (self-described) who lives in Strasburg, an investment banker from Turin who loves Shakespeare, a student and a couple of teachers from Australia, a German student studying non-fiction writing -- and the list goes on.  Perhaps one of the most interesting is an Iranian woman, now living in the Emirates, who is studying the Religious Reformation of the 16th Century with me.  Go figure!

Our plenary lectures have been utterly wonderful.  Cambridge's reigning queen of the Middle Ages, Rowena Archer (a diminutive person with long gray hair), walked us through the battle of Agincourt complete with real props -- helmets, pikes and longbows (and a terrific demonstration of why yew alone and not other woods has the flexibility to bend as a bow needs to do).  Karen Ottewell gave a terrific talk on the history of English.  Condensed into one hour, it was a bit of a sprint, along the lines of this YouTube video:  The History of English in 10 Minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABi2-Qi-UXY).  And we've learned about new methods of drug discovery, the excavation of Herculaneum in Italy (near Vesuvius), how the Rothschild bronzes came to be attributed to Michelangelo... and more.

Evidence of World War II is not hard to find as the broad flat lands around Cambridge are perfect for airfields.  Ellen and I had lunch in The Eagle, a pub frequented by both British and American pilots.  The back room is still crammed with memorabilia, squadron insignia, a photo of the crew of the Memphis Belle and much more.  On Wednesday afternoon, we also visited the American Military Cemetery just outside Cambridge.  It contains the graves of over 3,500 Americans who died in service and the names of over 5,000 more whose bodies were never recovered, including members of the merchant marine and sailors who were killed during the German U-boat campaign in the Atlantic in the early years of the war.  Our visit was late in the afternoon, and several of us were able to participate in the flag lowering ceremony.  It was an honor to fold the flag.  The cemetery is in a beautiful setting on a bit of a hill with fluffy clouds in Constable skies overhead and those long rows of crosses.  

American Military Cemetery, Cambridge

I also had the opportunity to take the train up to Ely, about 25 minutes away to visit the great cathedral there, preceded by lunch in a delightful tea shop on the banks of the Ouse River.  Four of us who made the trip attended an evensong service at 5:30 and, as is usually the case in such circumstances, we sat in the Choir of the Church with the choir and clergy.  The effect of the music rising to the vault of the cathedral a couple of hundred feet overhead is simply stunning.  The foundation stone of the cathedral was laid in 1081 and it was completed in the 1300s.  The nave is 250 feet long.  We returned to dinner in a Jamie Oliver restaurant that was just delicious!

Ely Cathedral

The Fitzwilliam Museum was my destination on Friday afternoon.  It has a huge collection of art from every age -- Egyptian, through Greek, through all the major schools of art in Medieval and Modern Europe and Asia.  I was particularly interested in a special exhibit of some watercolors by Turner that were collected by John Ruskin, a critic and watercolorist in his own right.  They were tiny and not of the same quality as the gorgeous Turner paintings in the Tate Britain in London, but beautiful nonetheless.  The Fitzwilliam is so close to the little attached house/apartment that Lloyd and I rented in 1999 that I couldn't resist walking down to snap one last photo of a place where we were so very happy that wonderful July.  It looks rather blah, but backed onto the Botanical Garden and had a beautiful terrace out back.

Brooklands Court

On the way home, I came upon a shop sign that read:  Ede and Ravenscroft, Robemakers, 1689.

On Friday evening, there was a concert by students and faculty in the Early Music program at Great St. Mary's Church in the center of Cambridge.  It was terrific to see such rarely heard and beautiful music played on period instruments by people who took such joy in it.

Cambridge

Punts on the River Cam

In spite of a bike race that tied London in knots, the 13 of us staying at the Landsdowne Club managed to get our bus to Cambridge on Sunday.  We arrived just in the knick of time to get checked into our rooms before taking a walking tour of the city center.

King's College

Cambridge is no longer the little town Lloyd and I visited 16 years ago.  The river was almost as busy as the streets, clogged with tourists, many of whom are Chinese teenagers -- the result no doubt of the enormous increase in the wealth of many Chinese families (not unlike the Japanese 30 years ago).  The buildings do not change much, however, and the colleges we passed looked as stately as they did 16 years ago.

Our dorm rooms are in one of the newer colleges, Selwyn, founded toward the end of the 19th century.  It is on the far side of the River Cam from the older colleges like King's, Queen's and Trinity and much quieter as a result.  My room is spacious and comfortable with an ensuite bathroom.

We eat breakfast and dinner in Hall, a spacious dining room that is a couple of courtyards away and the classroom area is within easy walking distance.  My two classes began this morning and are just great, one on the religious reformation in the 16th century and the other on Paris during the years when Haussmann was transforming the medieval capital into a city of boulevards and light.  Of course there were some great painters around then (e.g. Monet) to chronicle the changes and the rather fraught history (war and revolution), which makes this period particularly interesting.  I'm enjoying the novel approach of looking at history through art.

Entrance to Selwyn College Garden

Every college has at least one formal quadrangle the center of which is covered in grass on which it is absolutely forbidden to walk.  Many also have lovely gardens as does Selwyn.

Selwyn College Garden

After classes today, a friend, Ellen Wallach, and I had a great lunch at a pub called the Anchor.  Pubs have changed vastly (for the better) since smoking in them was banned.  The food has improved too and with a Shandy in hand, one is bound to have a good time.  Later, we visited both King's and Queen's colleges.  King's College Chapel is so stunning -- always a treat to visit.

Ceiling of King's College Chapel

We also discovered a huge new shopping center right off the market square (at least not out in the burbs).  Even on an ordinary Monday, it was hard to navigate the main street.  But it was fun to do some window shopping and when we finally got back to Selwyn a little after 5:00 p.m. we were almost too tired to eat -- but we managed nonetheless:).  The food in Hall is really quite good and it certainly is plentiful.  The older among us choose smaller portions, but the younger participants are utterly delighted to be fed so copiously.


                                                                                                             
 
                                                           

London

The last few days have been such a whirlwind!  Miriam and I saw Othello on Thursday night.  It was, indeed, a less than perfect production but Hugh Quarshie was brilliant as Othello and playing against a black Iago quite changed the traditional interpretation of the script.  It was more brutal, the troops around Othello more obviously accustomed to casual violence -- very post 9/11.  That made me uncomfortable but it also gave the play an unusual narrative.  The less said about the costumes the better.


On Friday, I took the train to London, meeting Ellen Wallach at the Women's University Club.  We took off immediately for the a bit of lunch in Shepherd Market and then to the British Library to see the wonderful new exhibit celebrating 800 years of Magna Carta.  The surviving copies of Magna Carta are a bit of a disappointment because they are so seriously deteriorated, but the history of the ideals embodied in the document through English Common Law, the American Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights and then the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man was explained beautifully.  There were so many stunning original documents, including Thomas Jefferson's own copy of the Declaration of Independence -- the one he submitted to the Continental Congress (not the one they adopted) -- which included a ban on slavery.  Something we had never known or long since forgotten.  After a spot of tea, we walked through Bloomsbury to Russell Square.  I lived in a Friend's hostel for students near there when I first came to London in 1966 and I was able to find the address on Gordon Square where Virginia Wolfe, Vanessa Bell and their brothers first lived together in 1907 after the death of their parents -- the beginning of the Bloomsbury Set, which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M Forster, Lytton Strachey and so many more.


Saturday was equally jam packed.  Ellen and I spent the day with my cousins, Tom and Susanne Cambern.  Our first stop was the Audrey Hepburn exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.  She was such an icon of the 20th century and this collection of photos by Richard Avedon and others reminded us of what an extraordinary figure she was.  Though we tended not to think of it at the time, her gamin look in the era of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell was revolutionary.

We also stopped in at the National Gallery to see the Soundscapes exhibit.  A half dozen paintings from the collection were chosen and various musicians asked to compose music that expresses them.  We all found it a remarkable experiment.  The rest of our afternoon was spent chatting in a pub where I discovered a new drink, a Shandy -- half beer and half lemonade.  It was so refreshing, especially as the weather had turned warm (at last).

After a lovely dinner at a wine bistro with excellent food and exceptional wines, we attended a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde starring David Suchet (of Poirot fame) as Lady Bracknell.  The old chestnut survives because the dialogue still sparkles and David Suchet outshone a brilliant cast with his interpretation of the domineering grand dame who has some of the best lines -- including telling her nephew, Algernon:  "Never speak ill of Society...only people who can't get into it do that."  Yummy!

Off to Cambridge this morning!