I love this song! Say what you will about his sibilant s’s, this is a great song by Al Stewart. This song got me into the rest of his work and I discovered he had a great historical sensibility. Who else has written songs about: the Night of the Long Knives (‘Last Day of June 1934”), about Hitler’s purge of Ernst Roem and the SA brownshirts; “Warren Harding”; Germany’s retreat from Russia (“Road to Moscow “); or a 10 minute song about “Nostradamus”?
It’s one of those songs that settles my mind and takes me to a specific day in June 1978…..
In 1977, upon graduation from Blackburn College, I had been offered a position as a grad assistant at Western Illinois University. At the end of that school year, in 1978, I was looking at coming back in the Fall for one more semester to finish my coursework, and WIU had extended my assistantship for that one semester, something they did not normally do.
So during the Spring of 1978 I saw an ad for a Summer school in England that was in Late Medieval/Early Renaissance History. I was interested in Medieval history, but did not have the foreign language background necessary to do original research at the graduate level. This was a six-week course in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My grandma fronted me the money for the course, about $500, and I paid for the flight to London, another $500.
I got on the TWA flight about 7:30 PM at O’Hare, sat down and belted up. I was a little scared, I’ll admit. I had never flown before. My family took few vacations and those we did tended to be in Wisconsin, within an 8 hour’s drive, or so. I purchased the state–of-the-art tubing called headphones, put the ends in my ears, and the first thing I heard was the 35 second piano solo that opens “Year of the Cat.” It settled me down right away and every time I hear it, it reminds me of that flight and that summer.
The flight took about 6 hours and got in to London around 2AM, Chicago time, 8AM London time. I then had to drag my two bags through customs, and the airport, to the tube (Underground) to Victoria Station to a train that took me to Canterbury. It was about 1PM or thereabouts, and I dragged the suitcases (I could find no bus, and didn’t have enough cash for a cab) about 2 miles to the campus, which was on a hill overlooking Canterbury and it’s beautiful cathedral.
I arrived at my college (there were four colleges that made up the University of Kent at Canterbury: Darwin, Keynes, Rutherford, and Eliot), which was Darwin and I was shown to my room, where I laid down for a while, my mind still racing (I had been up about 24 hours by then). I was still up several hours later when we (all the other US students) were feted at the Mayor of Canterbury’s digs.
About 2 hours into the shindig, after eating for the first time since the flight, 12 hours before, I was babbling to some Englishman about my master’s Thesis on the Civil War. It wasn’t until the next day that I remembered England had a Civil War as well and maybe I wasn’t making the sense I thought I was at the time.
What a great summer that was! The whole college was housed in one grouping of buildings, the dorm (single rooms), classrooms, dining hall, and (surprise!) a pub. You didn’t have to go into town (though we did do a couple of pub crawls in the six weeks I was there), just stroll in and get a pint. Of course, in 1978 the pubs in England closed at 10PM, but still, you couldn’t beat the convenience.
And the lectures! We had guest lecturers like Eugene Vinaver, who had done the translation of my copy of “Le Mort D’Arthur” and spoke off the top of his head brilliantly about the various versions of the legends of King Arthur (it turned out he was almost blind so notes wouldn’t have helped him much).
We had a lecture about an altar painting by Jan Van Eyck that is in a church in Ghent, Belgium. He’s considered a primitive, because he came before Michelangelo, but the detail in his paintings is incredible. As the lecturer told us, scholars have identified 30+ different kinds of flora in this painting.
The Summer School was broken into two, three-week sessions and on the weekend between the two; a group of us went to Bruges, Belgium. We took a train to Dover, then a ferry across the Channel to Ostend, Belgium, about four and a half hours away. Then we got on another train for Bruges. We got in around 2AM to our hotel and the Canadian student I was sharing a room with said, “Let’s find a bar!” I said, “Sounds like a plan!” and off we went. We found a bar that was still open and we ordered Trappist, brewed in a Trappist monastery.
The bartender placed a glass before me that was black and cold! In England, the beer was never cold, since their ales were meant to be drunk at room temperature. In fact, in 1978, it was hard to find any drink that was served cold, even a pop.
I took a sip and it was glorious, maybe because it was 3 AM and we were a little loopy from the travel, but it was a strong, sweet taste, with a hint of chocolate or coffee, unlike any beer I have experienced since. There are a lot of micro brews in the US that claim to use the Trappist recipe, but none has come close to that brew from Bruges. The closest thing I have found in the US is an English import called Mackson Triple Stout (which I have not been able to find lately).
The next day, Saturday, we spent looking around Bruges, going into the Church of Our Lady, which has one of the few Michelangelo sculptures in Northern Europe; Old St. John’s Hospital, now an art gallery with several Hans Memling works, another “primitive”: and the Groeningemuseum, which had a couple of Van Eyck’s as well, a Hieronymous Bosch, and one particular painting I have never forgotten (though I forget the artist) of a man being flayed alive. I also remember on the backside of the Church of Our Lady was a urinal; fully exposed to the street I seem to recall.
(Holy Crap! You can find just about anything on Wikipedia. I found out who did the flaying painting, it’s Gerard David’s “Judgment of Cambyses, part 2”)
I also climbed the 270-foot belfry, which had a wonderful view of the market square below. I am afraid of heights and when I leaned out to take a photo of the square I felt as if someone was going to push me the whole time.
That night, we went to a restaurant where the menu was in French/Dutch. I had had several years of French, but I wasn’t sure what I was ordering. It was crayfish grilled in butter and it was pretty good.
On Sunday morning we got up early to catch a train to Ghent to see the Van Eyck altar piece we had had the lecture on, and we were able to go into St. Bavo’s church and go right up to it, looking for the various flora and fauna. Then they opened it up and we got to inspect the altar of the lamb up close.
Then we hopped back on the train to Bruges, then on to Ostend, then by boat back to Dover, where we stood in line for over an hour and an half at customs, then back to Canterbury by late Sunday night.
While at Darwin College, we received three separate tours of Canterbury Cathedral. The first was on the night we arrived, and was a quick walk around; the second was during the day and included a climb onto the roof and down into the crypt under the nave; and the last, and best, was at night when they turned off the lights inside the church and the floodlights were turned on outside so we could see the stained glass in all it’s glory.
After six weeks of classes I went back to London and got the train to Scotland. I had a Brit Rail pass for unlimited travel for 7 days and I was going to see Edinburgh, Dundee, and Elgin. The first night I stayed in a bed and breakfast in Edinburgh that cost 5 pounds, around $10, and I had a room to myself. For dinner I bought a pastie (a meat pie) and brought it back to my room.
The next morning at breakfast I met a man who was from Edinburgh, but had emigrated to Australia. He had returned to spread his wife’s ashes on Arthur’s Seat, a volcanic mountain that overlooks Edinburgh. We started talking and he gave me several ideas for sight seeing. I had several other sights to visit based on a letter I received in Canterbury from my Blackburn College History professor, Dr. M.G.R. Kelley, who had recommended me to Western Illinois for the Graduate Assistant program and had received his PhD. from the University of Edinburgh.
Consequently, I visited Edinburgh Castle, the Scott Monument, Holyrood House (where the British royals stayed when they visited Scotland), the unfinished National Monument (“Scotland’s disgrace”), and Arthur’s Seat.
I returned to my B&B that night and got into a conversation with Alex McWilliams, the Aussie expatriate, and I found out that he was an artist and had had a show in Australia. He had invented what he called stereoscopic painting, where he would paint thickly onto a hard, non-porous surface, then place a piece of paper on it, apply pressure, then pull it off, achieving a painting with an almost 3D depth to it.
He showed me a newspaper article from his show in Australia and it mentioned that the first of his stereo paintings was valued at $10,000. He reached into his bag and pulled it out to show me. He then signed and gave me three other stereoscopic paintings along with some of the commercial art he had done (travel brochures, sketches, etc)
We talked into the night, until the proprietor of the B&B asked us to quiet down, as other guests had complained.
The next morning, after a very filling breakfast, I was off to the northern coast of Scotland, to Elgin, the town after which my birthplace was named (though the Brits pronounce it with a hard “G”). I got into town, took some photos, bought some postcards of the ruins of Elgin Cathedral, and then got on the southbound train to Dundee, where I found another B&B for 3 ½ pounds.
When they showed me to my room, I saw there were two single beds. I thought nothing of it until the middle of the night when another man was shown to the room and, in the dark, he began to smoke. I have never been a smoker, except for a brief period in Grad school when I tried smoking a pipe. I had always enjoyed the smell of a pipe, my grandpa smoked one, but when it’s in your mouth the smell is not the same, and the taste is worse.
Then I saw myself in a mirror with a pipe and quit the next day.
After breakfast the next morning (and all the breakfasts in Scotland had been very substantial, enough to get me through the day until I bought a pastie to eat for dinner, I honestly can’t remember any other dinner I ever ate during that week. I know I didn’t go to any restaurants, maybe I had nothing?) I spent one day and night in York, England, visiting their beautiful cathedral, and then headed back down to London, where I stayed at a youth hostel (again for a very reasonable 3.5 pounds). The breakfast, however, was only a continental, fruit and cereal, nothing like the eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, and kippers, of the Scottish ones.
While in London, I spent one full day at the British Museum, one day at the London Tower, and one-day trip outside London to Hampton Court.
My favorite memory of that whole seven weeks was one night I spent in the pub on campus, reading the National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper parody, which I had brought to read (along with my copy of Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison).
There was a married couple form Tennessee, still undergrads, who sat with me that night and I have rarely laughed so hard and so long at anything, especially the “Swill Mart” flyer/insert by the great Bruce McCall. The English folk could not understand what was so funny. I almost peed my pants.
While in England I went to several book stores to stock up on books I could not find, or were out of print, in the US, by authors Philip K Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ivan Turgenev. I ended up bringing over 30 paperback books back with me (adding a box to the two suitcases I was already dragging around. I also bought 2 bottles of mead (grape and apple juice fermented with honey) and several comedy albums of BBC radio shows (with Monty Python alumni John Cleese), including one album I have never played. It’s an album by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, “Derek and Clive”, which I’d heard was a truly scatological group of comedy bits.
After those last 3 days in London, I made my way back to the airport and flew home. “Year of the Cat” was still on TWA’s playlist as it remains on mine.
