St. Martin-in-the-Fields
If taking long walks through the English countryside, coming back with good English mud caked thickly on your boots, and sitting in a comfy armchair by a warm fire reading philosophy and sipping mulled wine bore you, then this shall too. I, however, couldn’t imagine a pleasanter way to relax over Christmas, so I will risk boring you. I am also in danger of devoting this entire entry to describing English Christmas food and drink, because that was the other extremely pleasant component of my holiday. I will do my best to overcome those dangers.
I spent two weeks in England for my Christmas holiday, staying with the family of my elder brother’s good friend from his Oxford days. I flew into Heathrow a few days after completing my term papers, then made my way to Paddington where my brother’s friend Matt lives. We weren’t going to drive down to his mum’s house until late in the evening the next day, so given a whole day in London I did two things: I went downtown to enjoy the free lunchtime concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the church on Trafalgar Square from which the BBC broadcasts the carol service annually which my family listens to on the radio on Christmas morning. The acoustics were unsurprisingly excellent. The other thing I did was to wander through Trafalgar Square towards Big Ben, then along the Thames, turning north to arrive at Harrod’s Department Store to complete my mission of consuming a Krispy Kreme donut. Impressive sounding, I know. But I miss American donuts and they don’t have them in Dublin, only London. Plus I got a Krispy Kreme hat.
That night we drove down to Arundel, an old, picturesque town nestled into the valleys just south of the West Sussex downs, but perched on a hill so that when you rise in the morning you see the fog settled below you glowing gold in the morning light. Arundel is too good to believe. A one-thousand year old castle stands in the middle of the town which has been the home of the Dukes of Norfolk for 900 years. The current duke still lives there with his family. The Duke of Norfolk is one of the last Catholic dukes in England, one of the previous dukes having been martyred by Queen Elizabeth I and later canonized. There is a stained glass window of him in the town’s cathedral. The castle and the cathedral are the tallest structures in the town and stand on the top of the hill, creating a stunning panorama when viewed at a distance, say 6 miles down the River Arun where you’ve wandered along the water from the Black Rabbit Pub into the cows’ pastures. I don’t understand what qualifies Arundel as a town rather than a village: it has only a dozen streets (though still manages to support 15 pubs) and you can easily walk from one end of it to the other in fifteen minutes, but perhaps it’s on account of the post office. The butcher’s, baker’s and sweets maker are also delightful.
I spent a very peaceful week getting up late, strolling through the town, rambling through the countryside, exploring the river, fields, and woods, and curling up by the fire in the back parlor to read and hang out with Matt and his mum (suitably, the house has a front parlor, a back parlor, a larder, and a back garden. Could it get any better? Yes. It’s next door to the Eagle Pub.). They introduced me to all sorts of delights and were rather amused that I’d only ever read about them in books: mince pies, mulled wine, hp sauce for breakfast sausage, eggs, and bacon (they eat it like Americans eat ketchup, but it’s much better than ketchup). One afternoon we walked down to Clive’s candy store, where Matt worked as a kid along with his friends Mark and Luke, to get some sweets for Christmas. I’ve never seen such sweets: rum raisin fudge, Turkish Delight, and amazing hand-made truffles in all sorts of flavors- violet, rose, champagne, bailey’s. As I said, it all sounds too good to be true. Throughout the holiday I had the surreal feeling of living in all of my favorite childhood books at once- there was the Turkish Delight and the grounds of the old professor’s house from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the candy shop from Charlie and the Chocolate Family, the Mildenhall Treasure in The British Museum in Roald Dahl’s epynonymous short story, the Christmas feast and charades of the The Christmas Carol, seeing the statue of Peter Pan in Hyde Park, the English fondness for mushrooms and long walks from The Lord of the Rings, all of the animals from The Wind in the Willows, and George MacDonald, author of The Princess and the Goblin once lived on the street I was staying on!
I was surprised by other English traditions, however, such as everyone spending Christmas Eve in the pubs. I’ve never been in such a crowded pub as when we stepped into the Eagle for a couple of pints before midnight Mass at the Poor Clare convent. I thought it was a bit odd, but the English were equally shocked to find out that the pub is not where most Americans are on the night of Christmas Eve. Midnight Mass was beautiful; the sisters sang all of those good English carols like “The Sussex Carol,” “Once in Royal David’s City” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” that Americans don’t usually get to sing in church.
On Christmas morning we woke up late and leisurely ate salmon sandwiches and sipped champagne while unwrapping Christmas presents around the tree. Then we walked a couple of blocks up the hill to a friend’s house for a proper English Christmas dinner. It was a large dinner party, with a beautifully set table, which we gleefully plunged into with as much decorum as we could muster. First there were Christmas crackers. You cross your arms to hold onto the end of your cracker and the end of one of your neighbor’s crackers, then pull until a plastic toy, a riddle, and a paper crown pop out. Then there was the salad, and after salad we blew up really long, noisy balloons and let them off, trying to see whose would make it all the way through the kitchen door. The main course was hearty: turkey, bread sauce (a bit like saucy stuffing), bread stuffing, potatoes, red cabbage, redcurrant sauce, and a lot of other tasty dishes which I enjoyed but couldn’t identify. And then it was time for the glorious, flaming Christmas pudding to be topped with brandy butter (you may have noticed by this point, like I did, that the English like to flavor everything with alcohol). I in my ignorance thought that dessert signals the end of a meal. Quite the contrary. After dessert comes fine cheese and wine, and several rounds of charades and pictionary, which I thought were children’s amusements, but which were far more entertaining on Christmas with the grown-ups after dinner than any games I played as a child.
Boxing Day, better known in the States as St. Stephen’s Day for the feast of the first Christian martyr, was a cold replay of Christmas. We went to the home of family friends to lunch on cold cuts, gherkins, relishes, more redcurrant sauce, and bubble and squeak (a kind of casserole baked using mashed potatoes and all the leftover vegetables from the Christmas feast). There were more Christmas crackers, and trifle for dessert, followed by cheese and port (I was catching on). There was also more unwrapping of Christmas presents, before we went on to a birthday party in the evening, with more eating, drinking, and this time piano playing. England still has a remnant of a culture of singing and musical entertainment at parties which has been wholly overtaken by the recording industry in the States and survives only in the vestige of karaoke back home. But well into the drinking, a middle aged man sat down and began playing very quaint and comical songs which I’d never heard, and everyone joined in the singing. I only remember the refrain of one of them: half a dozen young men merrily belting out “Mud! Mud! Glorious Mud!”
As predicted, I am afraid I have failed to rise above describing food and drink. Nevertheless, my time in Arundel was drawing to an end as Matt and I returned to London to celebrate the New Year. I spent the last days of 2007 in the National Gallery, gazing at the Arnolfini Portrait, at a handful of El Grecco’s, my old friend, including one painting with a fantastic portrayal of the jaws of Hell, and at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which of course can’t be done justice by a glossy picture in a high school art history textbook on account of its rich texture and vibrant yellows. I also wandered down Portobello Row and Nottinghill, which looked just like the movie. I even found the Travel Book Shop and peered through the windows (it was closed for the holidays, so it can’t really be doing too badly). Again, the inside looked just like the movie, and there were some very tempting books inside, so it was good it was closed. I strolled down Bayswater Road to enjoy the original artwork for sale on Sundays along the fence of Hyde Park, just like on Merrion Square in Dublin, though of course these were scenes around London rather than Dublin.
I frittered away a Sunday afternoon hanging out in Speaker’s Corner, which is vastly entertaining. I was rather shocked by the provocative things which Christians were saying to Muslims and which Muslims were saying to Christians. Religion is the favourite topic on Speaker’s Corner, but unfortunately none of the speakers seem to be able to separate theology from politics or transient cultures. Once while I was standing listening to a Briton harangue America for the war in Iraq and for pulling the U.K. into it, a man standing next to me turned to me to ask where I was from, and after I admitted to being American, from the state of Indiana, he spent half and hour telling me how wrong the speaker was, and how fantastic America is because we kept the Communists at bay, and because we believe in freedom. Then he told me he wanted me to communicate his best wishes to the state of Indiana for the New Year. So Happy New Year, Hoosiers, from one friendly and slightly kooky Brit.
Matt and I rung in 2008 at a party in a flat in the Docklands with about a dozen friends of Matt’s and my brother’s. I learned how to play poker and we watched the fireworks explode over the Thames at midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
Finally, before leaving London, I couldn’t miss The British Museum, or more appropriately entitled “The Museum of Everything British by Conquest.” Their collection is all-encompassing, giving a tactile and visual history of all the globe’s cultures for the past ten thousand years. I saw Egyptian mummies, the Mildenhall Treasure (stunning Roman silver unearthed in England during WWII), Irish gold jewelry, enormous fantastical stone monsters which once guarded throne rooms in Assyria, the wall carvings of the palace of Ninevah, Inuit sleds, African masks, Korean books, Arabian calligraphy, Indian jade, the pestles used to grind flour by the first farmers, Celtic burial treasure troves, intricate clocks, astrolabes and other tools which fascinated Enlightenment scholars. While looking for the Greek rooms, I had to laugh in incredulity when I encountered a paper notice on a door which read: “To find the Parthenon Sculptures, take a left at the Rosetta Stone.” The museum is a testament to the aesthetic heights which men have mounted, and it is intriguing to explore the various roles art has played in different cultures, but it also left me thinking of Ozymandius, the broken statue in the middle of a desert who proclaims “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” I would like to see the bafflement of scholars and archaeologists millennia in the future when they unearth the remains of The British Museum, and begin once again the task of trying to discover the origins of each item and its significance within its culture, to glean information about all the generations upon generations which preceded them, but also to puzzle over the men who collected all this paraphernalia and cherished it so.
But at last, after a heavenly fortnight, I had to return to Dublin, where I am starting Hilary Term this week. It’s hard to believe that I’m only 1/3 of the way through my year studying abroad, since after Hilary Term I’ll still have Trinity Term and exams to go. But it’s just as odd to think that as much as I enjoyed England, I missed Dublin while I was there, and I’m happy to be back. It’s surprisingly homey. Obviously I miss my family and I miss Notre Dame, but I’ve realized that I’ll miss Dublin when I finally go back. Peter Pan never missed any place.
I haven’t done any traveling since getting back from Christmas, so I thought I’d talk about Tallaght, and area of Dublin I visit every week.
Tallaght is a large town in the southwest of Dublin, about 45 minutes to an hour away from Dublin’s city centre. Tallaght existed as a medieval village and did fairly well for itself until the Dublin City Council decided in the 1960s and ‘70s to turn it into the poor suburb of Dublin. Whereas other major cities have inner-city areas of poverty and crime, Dublin pushed its problems outside of the main city creating an “outer-city” environment of poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, bad facilities, poor education, murder, and suicide. It is conveniently out of sight and out of mind for the businessmen and politicians who inhabit Dublin proper. Yet it also does not have the status of an autonomous city and therefore lacks the power to be proactive about its own development. The Tallaght accent is the Irish Cockney.
Quite naturally, then, you may wonder why I visit Tallaght every week. Tallaght is also home to a unique educational initiative called Youth Horizons. Youth Horizons is an alternative high school which serves 14-20 year old secondary students in Tallaght. Ireland has a public school system, but ever since it abolished tuition and fees for university education, an expensive network of private schools has grown up, which in turn diminishes the quality of the public school system and the ability of its graduates to pursue a college education. Youth Horizons is neither a typical public school nor an expensive private institution. Rather, it is an initiative founded by a woman named Sr. Mairead about a decade ago to educate some of the young people whom Ireland’s school system has failed. Each student has a different story: many of the young women are also young mothers, most had deplorable attendance records, many have learning disabilities, many come from difficult family situations, and one had gone to an Irish-language only school all her life which didn’t work out well for her. All of them need to pass the Leaving Certificate, which is a bit like the SAT but much more comprehensive and advanced, if they want to go to college or be qualified for many jobs.
Youth Horizons takes a radically personal approach to education. There are only about 20 students at the school, which is run out of an old house in Tallaght, complete with a kitchen and a back yard. It also includes a creche (the European term for daycare) for the students’ children, who are adorable. Besides the creche supervisors, there are a handful of teachers and Brenda, the cook. Youth Horizon’s holistic approach to education and the human person entails food! Brenda makes a hot breakfast and lunch for all of the students and teachers every day. She is a real Dublin woman, and I love chatting with her, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter while she scrambles eggs or mashes potatoes and chops up chicken. Many of the students live below the poverty line, and just as in the US, poor nutrition accompanies it. But there’s always plenty of fruit, toast, eggs, milk, juice, chicken curry, and potatoes at Youth Horizons, which, as a college student cooking for herself for the first time, I enjoy as well.
I spend one morning a week volunteering as a tutor and teacher at Youth Horizons. I hop on the LUAS, Dublin’s light rail commuter train, and ride it almost to the end, a 45 minute ride, and then John, a graduate of the Notre Dame ACE teaching program who currently runs Youth Horizons, picks me up and drives me ten minutes to the school. Usually I work with students one-on-one in literacy and reading comprehension, and I also teach the Junior Cert history class once a week (Junior Cert: Leaving Cert :: PSAT : SAT). But one of the fun things about Youth Horizons is that you never know what to expect. I’ve taken the Leaving Cert business class twice, which is a pretty comical notion if you know me at all, and I was even the cook once when Brenda was out sick! I love going out there and I really look forward to it every week; it’s a family environment, where the teachers really know the students and know what’s going on in their lives.
More than anything I love the students. They're fun-loving, intense, forthright people. They are unafraid to say just exactly what they think about everything- about what kind of day they’re having and about what we’re studying in school. They don't pretend to like something that they don't like, but on the other hand, if you hit upon a subject they do like, you can see their eyes light up and hear their passion for it. I would have a very impoverished and two-dimensional understanding of contemporary Ireland were it not for the conversations I’ve had with some of the students over the past few months. They tell me why they love Dublin or why they hate it. They talk about their families and the Tallaght community. They tell me what they think of the Church, the Irish school system, and the government (all equally negative). And I hope that as much as the things they say surprise and enlighten me, my responses might make them stop and think a little bit. They are naturally very curious about what it’s like to live in America; they wonder why I would choose to go to a Catholic university; they have never heard of philosophy and wonder why I would study such a thing, and they have no conception of theology as a discipline distinguished from the dry religion classes through which they’ve had to sit. I never try to argue with their opinions, because that’s not my place, but I would like to think that the way in which I speak of my own life might suggest to them that there is another way to view the world, and they might even find some of it attractive.
It can be quite challenging. There are minor bumps, such as Irish colloquialisms both in the texts and in their speech which I don’t understand, or the Irish tax system in the case of the business class. But the more significant obstacles include frequent absences, shockingly poor reading levels, and general misbehavior. The last is the typical stuff that teachers deal with all the world over: they make fun of my American accent, or goof off with each other and won’t settle down, or ask awkward personal questions. It was strange for me at the beginning because I’m only a few years older than the students themselves, who are around the age of my little brother and sister. But that turned out not to be an issue at all, because they all immediately assumed that I was a paid teacher and treated me like all of their other teachers. I’ve explained several times that I’m just a volunteer and I’m still in university myself, but the concept seems a bit foreign to them. Some days it feels like the whole day was about discipline, not learning, which is disappointing. But then other days I come in and find out that they remembered what we discussed about the crusades or the Renaissance in the last class, or I get to listen to the way in which they understand and relate to characters in the books we are reading, and then I’m so happy for them. They’re really intelligent; this is just the first time they’ve been an environment that really encourages them to fulfill their potential.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to be involved with Youth Horizons, and I’m proud that Notre Dame, through its ACE graduates and through Trinity College study abroad undergraduates over the years, can play a role in building up such a wholesome endeavor to educate students who have been otherwise forgotten, and to relieve burdens in an economically disadvantaged area of Dublin. I feel that Notre Dame has a huge debt that we owe to the Irish, and it’s an honor to be part of the group of the Fighting Irish who get to return to Ireland to start paying some of it back.
