My Semi-European Childhood, Part II

When I was young, I lived for a time in half of a double house in a small village near Oxford, England.  

My dad was an intelligence officer in the US Air Force.  We were used to him disappearing without explanation for days at a time, and then returning with oh, say, a cuckoo clock.  Code for Germany.  Belgian chocolates—you get the picture.

One Christmas Eve, Dad came home from work—or from having beers at the Officer's Club—and told us that on the radar at the base there'd been a UFO spotted.  


The really weird thing is, that was not an unusual occurrence.  But that night, the air traffic controllers said it looked suspiciously like a sleigh and reindeer.  Dad went into specific detail about the route of the man in red, and his ETA  for our town. 

I'll always wonder if every soldier from Upper Heyford Air Force Base went home that night and told his children the same tale, or if it was just my father who shared that story with three children who didn't see their dad nearly enough.

My Semi-European  Childhood, Part I

In 1968, the president of France (rather rudely, it seemed to me) decided to drop out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  What that meant to a small American girl living in the French countryside was that we had to get out of town  - fast.

Within weeks, our young family of five moved from a small, rural chateau with fireplaces in every bedroom in Champagne, to a trailer at Croughton Air Force Base, England.  The transition was occurring so rapidly that the armed forces didn't have time to finagle sufficient housing for all of its personnel.

Fortunately, our stay in the mobile home was very brief.  Soon my father found us two tiny rooms in an eleventh century inn called The Marlborough Arms, in Woodstock.  (It still exists, and I heartily recommend it.)   

There we stayed for a couple of months–time is different to a child so I'm not quite sure—rising in the dark to board our navy blue military bus to the Department of Defense school.  The bus took my sister and me, half asleep, across mist-filled greens over narrow roads and Roman stone-arch bridges to our corrugated metal classrooms, warm as aircraft hangers.  

Every fifteen minutes of the school day, for the next three years, our teachers would be interrupted by the mindsplitting noise of B-52 bombers taking off, a mere football field away. No one thought about ear protection in those days.

Returning to the inn after school, once again, in the dark— England has shorter winter days than we do—we grew to anticipate tea and little pink and yellow checkerboard slices of cake served to us by the hotel staff.   I think we were as much a novelty to them, as the lovely olde Inn was to us.

Long back in the US, I've since discovered that among my father's ancestors were a retinue who accompanied William the Conqueror from Normandy, France, to England, at about the same time The Marlborough Arms was founded.  Turns out that while living overseas, I unwittingly walked the same ground as those forebearers.

Even though Dad's people were later some of the first to migrate to America in the 1600's, we're still a young country, compared with England.  After all, we've only been here three hundred years or so.  Not even as long as The Marlborough Arms has been standing.

Bad Manners

When I began my teaching career, one of the first things I learned as a teacher was that I'd have to lower my initial standards for behavior expectations.

For example, my pet peeve quickly became the use of the phrase, "that sucks."  

Why? Because I remembered the origin of the phrase.  Back when I was a teenager, the saying was not "that sucks," but a slightly longer version that indicated exactly what part of the male anatomy was sucked.  Does anyone else remember that?  It was crude, it was rude:  it was what the cool guys said when they wanted to impress the bad girls and shock the good ones. 

So one day when "Jason," a 13-year old middle schooler, responded to my pronouncement of a homework assignment with the hated phrase,  I decided to make an example of him by doling out after school detention.

At 3:30PM, I dutifully called Jason's mom to deliver the bad news.

Me:  "Mrs. Jones, this is Jason's teacher calling.  I wanted to let you know that Jason will be staying after school tomorrow."

Mrs. Jones:  "That sucks.  How come?"