My Year Abroad in England

“Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport."
— Unknown

​“Europe somehow.”

During my junior year, my parents encouraged me to apply for an English-Speaking Union Scholarship to go to school in England. Although I won the scholarship, I was never sure why I was selected by the English-Speaking Union as one of the 22 students from American private schools to attend an English public school (in England what they call public schools are actually private schools). I had good grades but was not at the top of my class. I played varsity sports but was anything but outstanding. All I can figure is that they were looking for a typical American student; I guess I was typical.

There was good news and bad news about the scholarship. The year was free including transportation, meals, etc., however, exchange students received no academic credit, therefore, extending our high school education by a year. No matter.

In September of 1947, I found myself aboard the Queen Mary with 21 other ESU scholarship students headed for England. At that time, the Queen Mary was a three-class ship and we, of course, were assigned to the lowest part of the ship: the tourist class. Fortunately, there were only limited physical barriers separating the classes, and we quickly learned how to explore the whole ship. First class was a little snooty, so we spent a lot of time in cabin​ ​class​,​ which had great food and a very comfortable movie theater.

We landed at Southampton, and I was dazzled by how intensely green the countryside looked. A stark difference from the Kansas prairies. At that time Haileybury was called "Haileybury and Imperial Service College." It was a combination of two schools and was known as a place where officers and diplomats serving in India and the Far East sent their sons back to study. Lawrence of Arabia was a former student.

You wouldn't know World War II was over from the way things were in England. Everything was still rationed—food, fuel, clothing. English Public School was anything but luxurious.

The main entrance to the school was opposite Lawrence House where I was assigned.[1] I was in a dorm with 43 other boys as young as 10. The younger kids were called “fags,” and part of their school life was to do errands (like make tea and shine shoes) for the older boys, called prefects.

We slept in one large room with a partition about three feet high between each cubicle. The cubicles had only a bed and dresser.

A communal bathroom held two big tubs and what they called foot baths around the edge. Foot baths were a three-foot square and about six inches deep; you squatted in them and sort of splashed yourself to get clean—no showers. Fuel was rationed so hot water was short. Younger kids were restricted to the foot baths, while the older kids would use the tub, which was filled almost to overflowing. A boy would get in each end, soap up, and rinse off. They didn’t change the water between baths; instead, they “cleaned it” by using a paddle to remove the soap scum and then dumped it on the floor.

Anyone who says it doesn't get cold in England in the wintertime hasn't spent a winter there. While it seldom snows, it can get really cold, especially since there wasn’t any heat, and the dorm windows were always open. There was a little heat in the studies and common room where the older kids gathered in the evening and debated things like whether it made more sense to drive on the left as the Brits did or the right as Americans did.

My first days of class were really tough. The British were miles ahead of us in education. There were twelve-year-olds studying Latin and Greek and even putting on plays in those languages. Fortunately, they put me with the slower kids who were destined for one of the state universities rather than Oxford or Cambridge.

The amazing thing was the language barrier. There's English, and then there's American. I can honestly say that for the first couple of days I was not sure if I was in the right class—I couldn't understand a word. The classes were small and the instruction intense, and there was plenty of homework. I adapted fairly well and in a few days was in the swing of things.

Each house had its own rugby, track, and cricket teams; the competition between houses was intense. I made the rugby team and loved the sport, but I had to unlearn one of the fundamentals of American football. When you’re tackled in rugby you must immediately release the ball, or you are subject to a penalty. In football, you hang on to the ball for dear life so as to avoid a fumble. The idea in rugby is to roll between the ball and the opposing team, so that when the two scrums (think: the line of men in football) attack, your scrum can move the ball back to the running backs whereas the other team would have to kick through you to get it to their running backs! No helmets, no pads, no substitutions, no time-outs, and, interestingly enough, very few injuries. Once I got the hang of it, I loved rugby and got to be pretty good at it.

I also tried to learn cricket. Although rugby bears a great deal of similarity to U.S. football, cricket bears almost no similarity to baseball, and I found I couldn't master it. So instead, I joined the track team during the spring and did some competitive sailing on the rivers that weren't far from the school.

We took our meals at long tables in one huge dining room. Food was still rationed in England, so we only got one pat of butter per day and lots of potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Overall, there was plenty of food and no one went hungry.

My first holiday was a brief trip to Ireland with a group of other ESU students. Rationing had ended there, and my main memory is of gorging myself on things I had been missing at Haileybury.

 One food item I had the pleasure of introducing to my classmates was popcorn. My parents sent me a bag of kernels and, very importantly, a can of popping oil, as oil was strictly rationed. I got a big pan and started the process on the burner outside our study. We take popcorn for granted. Imagine if you had never experienced the bursting of the kernels. It was quite a sight, and I was a hero for introducing the dish.

The English have a much better system for organizing their school year than we have in the U.S. They have a one-month vacation for Christmas and another month for spring vacation then just over a month for summer. The long summer break students have in the U.S. goes back to the days when most people were farmers and kids would help work on the farm during the summer.

Once I learned the “language,” school went quickly and before long it was time for Christmas break. On the ship over, a group of us ESU students had decided we would get together for a skiing vacation over Christmas. We went as a group to the Swiss resort of Lauterbrunnen, which had been picked because of budget restraints. The food was plentiful and wonderful, especially compared to England, and the family we stayed with was extremely hospitable. They issued us skis and we trekked up the hill, doing the herringbone[2] and then skiing down. It was hard work.

On the third day, one of our group had twisted his ankle and decided to stay home. When we returned from skiing that afternoon, he greeted us with exciting news. He'd wandered down to the train station where he'd seen people getting on a train with skis, so he decided to follow. Just up the mountain from Lauterbrunnen, which basically was a summer resort and therefore empty in the winter, was Wengen, one of the great Swiss ski resorts. He told us that there were lots of people up there, ski lifts and ski trains, and best of all: girls!

The next day, we said goodbye to our Swiss hosts and headed up the hill to Wengen in search of the perfect ski technique and female companionship. While there, I met a Swiss girl with whom I tried hard to develop a holiday romance. Even though she seemed willing, her parents kept a very, very close eye on their daughter and "the American." No luck.

Later on that vacation, I met my father at the famous Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. That was living! My father was a good sport and he agreed to go skiing with me so I could show him what I'd learned. Showing off, I went too fast, hit some soft snow, and broke both my wooden skis. I was lucky I didn't break both legs.

From St. Moritz, Dad and I went to Nice, France, where I had been envisioning sunshine, sandy beaches, and girls in bikinis. Alas, it can be cold in Nice in January. We found empty, rocky beaches and cold, cloudy weather. The only picture I have of that trip is the two of us riding bicycles wearing our overcoats.

The best part of this trip was when my father discovered the French-built, motorized bicycle called a VéloSoleX. It was a typical bicycle you could propel by pedaling, and it had a small gasoline engine that you could lower, and it would engage the front tire and propel you forward. On a flat surface, it would go about 15 miles an hour and, on a hill, it would aid you in peddling. My father got the right to import them to the U.S. and they would have been a huge success except the police consider them a motorized vehicle and you had to have a driver’s license to operate one. That restriction killed the market.

For spring vacation, I somehow ended up in Madrid in the company of Sue Newcomer, a girl from Kansas City. This wasn't a romantic liaison; she was a bit older and just a friend who happened to be going to Madrid at the same time. I'd been reading books on bullfighting and was very interested to see some good ones, which we did.

Easter was approaching and we heard that Seville was the place to be. We talked to a travel agent who told us there were no accommodations in Seville and even he, being Spanish, wouldn't try to go there over the Easter holiday. We ignored him and decided to go anyway.

We somehow got on a small, twin-engine plane and arrived in Seville without hotel reservations. We managed to find two rather dingy rooms. It didn't matter because we were hardly ever in them, there was so much going on.

Processions started from almost every church. There were 50 brotherhoods called "cofradias" that organized the processions, some with over 2,000 men. The highlight of each was a single float or "paso," or a series of them. These were huge, heavy affairs depicting Jesus or the Virgin Mary, carried on the shoulders of up to 60 men. Each procession started at a church and took a different route, with some processions lasting more than ten hours.

Sue and I saw our first two bullfights in the Maestranza, one of the most beautiful bullrings in Spain. I thought I knew what to expect at a bullfight, but I could not have imagined the thrill of hearing the majestic bugle fanfare and the ebullience of energy and passion from the cheering crowd. Of course, a bullfight is not a fight at all as the bull is not going to leave the arena alive. It is a beautiful spectacle and an emotional life and death drama that demonstrates the courage of both the matador and the bull. The Seville audience was very knowledgeable and demanding, adding to the excellence of the whole performance.

Later that same Spring break, I met a buddy from Peddie, Ace Barkley, for a week in Paris. Ace was studying at a different English school. It was the end of our vacation, and we were both poor as church mice. We paid 50 cents a night for a tiny room with a double bed and a bath down the hall. We skipped breakfast and at about eleven in the morning we'd buy a napoleon which served as breakfast and lunch. For dinner, we went to eateries where you could get a small steak, fries, and dessert for a dollar or two. We took the Metro and saw the sights of Paris the way broke and hungry kids our age ought to see them.

July came and all my friends in America were sailing and having fun while I was looking at another three weeks of school. On the 4th of July, I decided to do something to celebrate; I took a pillow slip; some felt tip pens​;​ and made an American flag and raised it on the flagpole at the entrance to the school. There it was. Bright and early on the 4th of July. Of course, no one could guess who did it (I was the only American in the school).

I knew I was in trouble and was not surprised when I was summoned to the headmaster's office. He was not as upset about the flag as he was about the fact that I had broken curfew and made a dangerous crawl across rooftops to get to the flagpole. The normal punishment would have been six of the best with a cane on my backside, which I was prepared for, except my punishment was even worse: he made me write a 1,000-word essay on the futility of the American Revolution. The headmaster was even good enough to send the flag to my mother, who later had it framed. I still have it.

When school was finally out, our group returned home on the Queen Elizabeth. Gone for almost a year, I had acquired a fairly strong English accent. All my friends thought I was being phony. The accent quickly disappeared once I was back among my American friends.

Although England was a great experience, I received no scholastic credit for it, and I returned to Peddie for my junior year. My junior year was a good year, with lots of studying, sports, and a limited social life. About six of us lived on the edge of campus in a house called Wycoff, where Don Rich was the housemaster. He was a good guy, a fun teacher, and we students had a certain amount of freedom.

[1] http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsorhistory/isc.html

[2] A method of going up a slope in which a skier sets the skis in a form resembling a V, and, placing weight on the inside edges, advances the skis by turns using the poles from behind for push and support.:​