Notes Along the Way Durham 2 -- Settling into St. Johns

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8. St. John's was a delightful place, the kind of place where you want to stay forever. There were three of us Residential Tutors. Neil Evans, who was the Welsh chaplain I mentioned earlier, and Helen Fox of the Isle of Wight, who had just finished her undergraduate work. Her flat was up the Bailey a smidge.

The John's property was really a delightful Frankenstein. There was the principal property. Then there was this random slice of flats a little further down. You had to go out on the Bailey and up to get to them.

Helen only stayed a year, maybe because she was working on a one year master's. Then I believe Neil moved into her flat for the next two years. More on Helen later. She was the one who really set me on to Wittgenstein.

9. These were residences first built in the early 1700s in the Baroque style. The University of Durham itself wasn't founded until 1832 -- a bit of a late comer when you think that Cambridge goes back to the 1200s and Oxford even to the 1000s. Still, Durham is the third oldest university in England. Then again, when you consider that St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Dublin were all founded in the 1400s and 1500s, Durham was quite a bit down the line.

As a sidenote, I didn't really go in understanding all the distinctions of territory. England is the heart of Great Britain, but Great Britain also includes Scotland and Wales -- both of which were forced to join the merry band somewhat against their wills. And you have to add in Northern Ireland to get the United Kingdom. Ireland proper to the south gained its independence in the 20s. 

These distinctions are bloody obvious to anyone who lives there. But they weren't to me as an American. And I expect James Petticrew to have an Angus for saying England is the heart of Great Britain.

10. Because the innards of John's were repurposed residences, they seemed to be constantly trying to figure out how to maximize the space. There was a lovely set of stairs that ended in a wall. Sometimes it felt a bit like a maze.

We three Residential Tutors were also Fire Marshalls of a sort. If the fire alarm went off, we would spring to action, running to the front office to see where the alarm had gone off. Then we would run to the appropriate location to see if it was a real fire or not.

It almost never was. I can only remember one time in my three years there when it was a real fire. Third year. Someone cooking on the top floor of Cruddas. At least one fire truck always had to come and double check, but if we could ascertain that it wasn't a real fire, we would call and tell them that they didn't have to send multiple trucks.

11. My sense is that most alarms had to do with alcohol. The drinking age is 18 in England, so pretty much all students drank. In fact, John's has a very quaint bar in its basement -- not for the claustrophobic. You went down a very narrow set of winding stairs to get down to it. A student was chosen each year to be head barman.

I was impressed with how many things like this were student led. They really entrusted the students with significant leadership. In fact, as students they didn't think of themselves as pre-engineers or pre-geographers. They called themselves what they were going to become. "I'm an engineer."

A note on drinking. I of course had grown up with a sense that you might become an alcoholic if you had one drink. Certainly, there was plenty of drunkenness among the student body, as is the case among American colleges. I used to marvel at a rugby lad named Hamish who had juvenile diabetes. Yet he would take a shot of insulin and then go on a pub crawl in which he would down a "yard" in one.

But the staff at John's modeled responsible drinking. Every Sunday involved a high meal, a little like you see in the Harry Potter movies. The leaders would sit at the "high table" -- with everyone in a simple black academic gown -- and the students filling the rest of the room. 

The leaders were part of what was called the "Senior Common Room" (SCR). It referred both literally to a room upstairs and figuratively to those who made it up. We would meet before these special meals and those who wished would have a class of sherry. Then after the meal there would be glasses of port available.

Yet I never saw any of those leaders drunk. It really made some of the rhetoric I grew up with seem rather foolish. This august group was far from some collection of out of control Bacchanalian figures, spilling all their secrets and giving into their hidden desires. Nothing of the sort!

It would seem to me that it would be more mature for us to teach young people to drink responsibly than to set up an all-or-nothing proposition where many would fail and then be out of control.

12. The entrance to John's, as I mentioned, had been constructed in the early 1700s and had been Baroque. A few anecdotes. Principal David Day enjoyed telling of how he had recently visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Apparently, on the tour, the guide had boasted that the stairs there dated from the 1700s. His remark? "The stairs outside my office are older."

This expanding sense of time was a key feature of my travels. In America, I had been impressed with something from the 1800s being old. The 1700s seemed a very long time ago. I didn't know any buildings in Florida or Indiana that went back to the 1700s.

Now in England, we had Durham Cathedral that dated to the 1000s and 1100s. Absolutely blowing my mind, Hadrian's Wall was about an hour away from me, and it dated to 122 and Roman times. (They said you could tell a road that was built on a Roman road by its straightness for miles and miles.) 

Then you go to Jerusalem and Greece and you're looking at things that are 2000 to 3000 years old -- maybe older. I've never been to Egypt or Iraq, but the scale just gets higher and higher.

I also remember Principal Day saying how overwhelmed they were by choices on their trip to America. In England you ask for an English breakfast and it's going to be much the same anywhere. But in America you have to decide how you want your eggs cooked and whether you want bacon or sausage. My daughters have to text me their Starbucks orders because of how complicated (and counter-intuitive) some of them are.

A fun memory is the brief moment when Principal Day had the opening hall repainted in its original Baroque colors (puke green). It was so awful that he immediately had it repainted back. At least that's how I remember it.

I've already mentioned the chapel -- St. Mary the Less. There was also a magnificent library. These were small buildings with lots of character. St. Mary the Less dated to the 1100s.

13. The oldest colleges of Durham were on the peninsula where the castle and cathedral were. The Bishop of Durham had previously been a Prince Bishop -- half bishop, half soldier, cathedral on one side, castle on the other. That all ended during the time of Van Mildert in the early 1800s, whose support helped to found the university. University or "Castle College" is the most posh of the colleges -- students live in the castle and graduation ceremonies happen there. 

A fun anecdote about the Castle kitchen. When it was constructed around 1499, word has it that Prince Bishop Richard Fox got tired of having to bless all the food coming out of the kitchen. So he put a sign over the pass through with the words "est deo gratia" ("thanks are to God"). That way, the food was automatically blessed when it arrived to those serving it.

The Palace Green is the area between the Cathedral and Castle. The Department of Theology is right there on the Green as well. Dunn's office was the first on the right as you went in the door. It was like a library in itself. 

[I'll put a placeholder here for the second floor window.]

The Cathedral itself was quite inspiring. I much preferred it to the ostentatious Westminster Cathedral in London with all its gold. Durham Cathedral lost most of its gold in the 1500s during the time when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It was quite disheartening to see the ruins of former monasteries or abbeys out in the countryside. And you could see stones from them in nearby houses

As you went down the Bailey, you saw Hatfield College, Chad's, John's, and St. Cuthbert's. At the end of the Bailey, the bridge that crosses the river is called Prebends. It has a famous quote by Sir Walter Scott engraved on it: "Grey towers of Durham, yet well I love thy mixed and massive pyles, half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scots, and long to roam your venerable isles with memories stored of tales long since forgot." C. S. Lewis is said to have taken the idea of the lamp in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from here.

I guess Oliver Cromwell kept some 3000 Scottish soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar in the cathedral in 1650. The idiot Puritan had closed all the cathedrals and so used the empty building to keep those who survived the march down to Durham. Hundreds would die in there. They would burn anything wooden they could find for heat. 

The Chapel of Nine Altars commemorates them today. They were buried nearby, as was discovered during work on the Palace Green Library in 2013. Then they were reburied at a cemetery nearby.

16. The first trips to Durham involved lugging my books in huge boxes -- the biggest allowance possible. I had two huge suitcases and two huge boxes each trip. It was a lot. The first trip it was my desktop and books, books, books. 

I think I may have tried Heathrow once but quickly Gatwick became the way. Gatwick Express to Victoria. Victoria to Kings Cross on the Tube. Then a three hour train ride to Durham.

By the time the train was past York, I would be fighting sleep with all my might. I wasn't able to sleep on the plane. I was inevitably sucked into one or two movies. Darlington. Stay awake Ken. You have to stay awake. Durham. Then a taxi to John's.

I always would say, "Never call a nerd a weakling. We have to have muscles to carry all those books!"

17. I was on the bottom level of Cruddas. Cruddas was a four story building of student housing on the back of the John's property, situated on the incline leading down toward the river. Indeed, it was very easy to slip down to the river from where I was.

I think I mentioned that I did a little rowing that first year. Christoph Lorentz was a German exchange student that year, very tall. Juan was from Spain. Jonathan was English. Helen Fox served as the cox. We weren't very good (they called us the "crowd pleasers"), but we had a lot of fun.

Just about as soon as I was in my flat. Rachel Leonard and David Fox appeared at my door. Rachel's room was right next to mine. David was the Junior Common Room (JCR) president. Both of them sharp as a whip. Brilliant. Rachel was Psychology. David was Literature. I always felt like my brain was moving in slow motion when I was around them.

I came to consider them some of my closest friends. I still have a gord somewhere that David and I used to hide back and forth for some reason. I have failed to send it back to him now for about 25 years.

Although I was exhausted, they insisted I walk with them and some others to a pub that evening. I couldn't tell you where it was. I had my first Ribena, a non-alcoholic blackcurrent drink.

My impression of the night was that I was in a foreign country. I knew all the English words they were saying. I just didn't know what they meant.