Football in the Park

In the school year of 2002-03, I pursued (and finished) my MA while living in Stratford-upon-Avon in England.  My degree is officially from the University of Birmingham (and that’s the U.K. Birmingham, not the one in Alabama), but I only went to Birmingham once per week, by coach, with the rest of my class.  The rest of the time we spent in the Stratford Annex, called the Shakespeare Institute.  It was housed in an old (Victorian?  or much older?) home called Mason Croft, formerly the home of an eccentric romance novelist named Marie Corelli, a woman with melodramatic tastes in both writing and decorating.  We heard lectures in her Music Room, had classes in her bedrooms, studied at small tables set up in her Winter Garden (a sort of conservatory), and held plays on the green lawn of her hedged in backyard.  The elders of the University of Birmingham decided upon acquisition of Mason Croft to furnish the home tastefully, and so all of Marie’s tiger striped chairs and exotic print sofas were foregone for more soberly upholstered furniture (and I personally think the house is the worse for it.)  The Institute has only a few dozen students at any one time, so Ms. Corelli’s former abode is the perfect size, and with dark wood paneling, uneven creaking stairwells, low door frames, and narrow crooked halls, it was a wonderfully evocative place to study the history of Shakespeare.

 

Mason Croft is located just across the street and a few yards down from the Guild Hall where Shakespeare’s father certainly attended town meetings, and the primary school where Shakespeare may have attended lessons.  I myself attended lessons in both.  It was damn cool to sit in the low-ceilinged room where students had studied for centuries upon centuries – to look out the same small high windows, onto the same bit of sky over the same street (now paved, of course, but otherwise not much changed.)  The history hung so heavy in the air, you could almost feel it in your lungs – breathing in centuries of dust and eau de small boy.  During a short tour, we were shown an old wooden table that had messages and names scratched on it by students who attended in the 1700s.  It had been discovered in an old room that had been boarded up and painted over at some point in the building’s history – boarded up and painted over, mind,  with crates and crates of old documents just sitting in it, almost as if there’d been a mixup and an active office had been sealed off while its inhabiting professor was mid-project.  Pity that there were no old absent–minded professor bones found in there with them.

 

Back behind Mason Croft, just through a tall hedge, was a large "football pitch."  That’s British for a "soccer field," of course, and we all played together in the afternoons once a week.  "All" included most of the students and all of the male professors, including one of the leading Shakespearean researchers of the day – a man who co-edited the Oxford Shakespeare (italics are meant to indicate that that is a big deal.)  (you know, to Shakespeare geeks.)  (I was, like, so totally afraid I was going to accidentally kick him and break his foot or something, and then I would’ve singlehandedly stalled the completion of the latest edition of the Oxford Shakespeare while Dr. Jowett was healing up, and OMG how embarrassing.)  My American roommate Sally and I played with them, poorly but enthusiastically.  As it always rains in England, the pitch was perpetually muddy, and we rarely concluded a game in anything other than an utterly filthy state.  This stopped no one from striding across the street post-game and drinking a cold pint or two at the Windmill, an old timber-frame pub that was a favorite of Institute students.  Any man much taller than 6 feet would have to walk through the dark main room with his head bowed, so we usually sat in the back courtyard with our frosty mugs and packets of salt and vinegar crisps.  One of my fellow students, an American man pursuing his PhD, would often bring his young children, who drank half-pints of coke and ate crisps and politely entertained themselves until it was time to go, and I thought that was just wonderful.  You bring a kid to a bar in America and half the room gives you the hairy eyeball while the other half jockeys for seats as far away from you as possible.  And rightly so, as American kids tend to be rude pains.  British kids (or American kids attending British public schools for a few years) tend to be much more well-behaved in public, I noticed during my time abroad.  (But don’t get me started on Australian kids – oh. my. god.)

 

After a few months, when it became clear that I would have to up my hours as a barmaid in order to keep the bill collectors from turning off my electricity, I quit playing.  I wish I hadn’t, for that lousy wage of four pounds an hour, but I did.  I think of it sometimes, though – the Institute, my friends there, the football games, the Windmill.  Sometimes I want so badly to be a student again that I have to sit down in a corner of a quiet room and recite "Academics drive you crazy, academics drive you crazy*" over and over again until I remember why I declined to pursue a PhD.  And then I google "get PhD abroad" and search through programs in Italy . . . Scotland . . . Egypt . . . Scandinavia . . . and pretend that I am still very young and unfettered and deciding my educational fate, instead of only somewhat young and definitely tied to some very important and beloved things here in America.

 

*excluding my darling husband, of course