My life

A week later, on April 30, the war finally came directly home to me, with a strange twist that was a metaphor for those bizarre times. I received my draft notice: I was ordered to report for duty on April 21. It’s clear the notice had been mailed on April 1, but like my absentee ballot a few months earlier, it had been sent by surface mail. I called home to make sure the draft board knew I hadn’t been a draft resister for nine days and asked what I should do. They told me the surface mailing was their mistake, and besides, under the rules, I got to finish the term I was in, so I was instructed to come home for induction when I finished.

I decided to make the most of what seemed certain to be the end of my Oxford stay, savoring every moment of the long English spring days. I went to the little village of Stoke Poges to see the beautiful churchyard where Thomas Gray is buried and read his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” then to London to a concert and a visit to Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx is buried beneath a large bust that is a powerful likeness of him. I spent as much time as I could with the other Rhodes scholars, especially Strobe Talbott and Rick Stearns, from whom I was still learning. Over breakfast at George’s, an old-fashioned café on the second floor of Oxford’s covered market, Paul Parish and I discussed his application for conscientious-objector status, which I supported with a letter to his draft board. In late May, along with Paul Parish and his lady friend, Sara Maitland, a witty, wonderful Scottish woman who later became a fine writer, I went to the Royal Albert Hall in London to hear the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. She was magnificent, with her booming voice and powerful, innocent faith. At the end of the concert, her young audience crowded around the stage, cheering and begging for an encore. They still hungered to believe in something larger than themselves. So did I. On the twenty-eighth, I gave a farewell party at Univ for my friends: fellows from the college I’d played rugby and shared meals with; Douglas and the other porters; my scout, Archie; the Warden and Mrs. Williams; George Cawkwell; and an assortment of American, Indian, Caribbean, and South African students I’d gotten to know. I just wanted to thank them for being a big part of my year. My friends gave me a number of going-away gifts: a walking stick, an English wool hat, and a paperback copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which I still have.

I spent the first part of June seeing Paris. I didn’t want to go home without having done so. I took a room in the Latin Quarter, finished reading George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and saw all the sights, including the amazing small memorial to the Holocaust just behind Notre Dame. It’s easy to miss, but worth the effort. You walk downstairs at the end of the island into a small space, turn around, and find yourself peering into a gas chamber.

My guide and companion on the trip was Alice Chamberlin, whom I had met through mutual friends in London. We walked through the Tuileries, stopping at the ponds to watch the children and their sailboats; ate interesting and cheap Vietnamese, Algerian, Ethiopian, and West Indian food; scaled Montmartre; and visited the church called Sacré Coeur—where in reverence and humor I lit a candle for my friend Dr. Victor Bennett, who had died a few days before and who, for all his genius, was irrationally anti-Catholic. I was trying to cover all his bases. It was the least I could do after all he’d done for Mother, Daddy, and me.

By the time I got back to Oxford, it was light almost around the clock. In the wee hours of one morning, my English friends took me to the rooftop of one of Univ’s buildings to watch the sun rise over the beautiful Oxford skyline. We were so pumped up we broke into the Univ kitchen, pinched some bread, sausages, tomatoes, and cheese, went back to my room for breakfast.

On June 24, I went to say good-bye to Bill Williams. He wished me well and said he expected me to become a “disgustingly enthusiastic, pompous old alumnus.” That night I had my last Oxford meal at a pub with Tom Williamson and his friends. On the twenty-fifth, I said good-bye to Oxford—

permanently, I believed. I went to London to meet Frank, Mary, and Lyda Holt. After we attended a night session of Parliament, and Judge and Mrs. Holt went home, I took Lyda to meet some friends for my last dinner in England, grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep at David Edwards’s place, then got up early and headed for the airport with six friends who came along to see me off. We didn’t know when, if ever, we’d see each other again. I hugged them and ran for the plane.

SIXTEEN