My Mom was coming to Portugal for a visit and wanted us all to hop across the channel to England. My Mom was English. At least that’s where she was born in a pleasant little town called Grimsby. When we were kids my sister got to visit England one summer while I was forced to tour the US from the back of my grandparent’s car. I’m not bitter. So, my Mum (as they like to say) was English. About as English as an English muffin. But she wanted to pay for our tickets. So, jolly good! I started thinking, “Why not see if there’s anything linguisticky happening at the SIL Centre in Horsleys Green?” I might be able to attend something vaguely linguistic and position myself for a stellar ascendancy into the pantheon of the linguistic gods. “No,” the directore (I assume there’s an extra “e” in there somewhere) said, “but would you be willing to teach at our school this summer since we’re desperately short on staff.” A chance to escape Lisbon! A chance to see the land of Cadbury Flakes and the Spice Girls! What classes would I teach? “We need phonetics assistants.” Um, that’s a problem. I hate phonetics. I’m dumb at phonetics. But my wife aced phonetics. Could she teach that and I do something like “Language Acquisition Made Pleasant?” Sure, they’d take me if my wife would teach phonetics. So instead of a week visit we went to England for the “Summer.”

The incessant rain was my salvation (although it killed our vegetable garden) since shortly before leaving Portugal for England, during one of my daughter’s panic attacks in the middle of the night, I had lost a hearing aid. Or maybe a lion ate it. But the result was that my brain stupidly tried and tried to get more sound to come out of the left side of my head without success and so tinnitus tormented me with ringing and hissing until I was almost desperate. The training centre where we were staying had a nature trail around the perimeter and when it rained I would walk slowly under the trees and the hiss and drip of the rain among the leaves would mask the ringing in my ears and give me relief for a brief while.

But even with the hearing aid replaced I still couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying. From the moment we arrived at Heathrow, friendly Brits kept greeting us and giving us important pieces of information that we should follow. But we couldn’t understand anything. This was our first exposure to English. Not the English of Dan Rather. Instead, the English of a mouth full of licorice allsorts. In fact, there were more englishes than I had ever imagined. Just when we got our ears attuned to the Pakistani taxi driver, the next taxi driver spoke London cockney. Or maybe this was just a big joke. The English were certainly cheerier than the Portuguese, even though we were dismayed to discover that we could understand Lisboetas better than Londoners. Perhaps it was just a countrywide scam, a Monty Python skit grown large for the sake of having one over on the tourists. The Country of Funny Talks.

Despite all the friendly natives’ best efforts we eventually reached our destination. It was a great day for me. Back in 1992 I had actually written to this school and requested information on enrollment. I had heard that the school was located in Bucks. So I asked for any information on Bucks. Was Bucks far from London? What kinds of things could you do in Bucks? A very English letter arrived at the Taj Mahal in Saltillo, Mexico (a story for another time) informing me that it might be better for me to attend a school in my home country. And (by the way) Bucks. is an abbreviation for Buckinghamshire (you twit). Well, the letter didn’t actually call me a twit. But I felt like a twit. Americans always feel like twits around the British. Why is that? Is it because we don’t have a queen? Or because we think digestive biscuits taste gross? That funny way of talking that the English have is such a sign of culture and refinement. It’s so classy. We Americans just speak English without sounding all hoity-toity. Well, some folks from other parts of the US speak English like hicks, but most of us, especially on the West coast, except for California, Washington and eastern Oregon speak clear cool English. So, whoever this Brit was made me feel like a dope even though he probably wasn’t trying. I bet he laughed his head off when he got my letter. Bucks! Hey Love, pass me the digestive biscuits and read this letter. Haw haw.

When Hilary heard what they were expecting of her for the phonetics class (two hours of classes and four hours of office hours—per day!) she refused. Well not in an adamant “take this job and shove it” sort of way. But she did hide in our flat and refuse to come out. I got asked to teach phonetics again. Thankfully I also refused. And amazingly they didn’t kick us off the campus but let me teach language acquisition, although one crotchety old veteran when he heard that I only spoke Spanish and Portuguese said, “Well, they shouldn’t let someone teach who hasn’t learned a real language.”

Language acquisition methodology is like teaching a dog to sit and roll over. Only you’re the dog and you’re trying to get someone else to tell you to sit up and beg. When you say, “Muka!” I’ll stand up. And when you say, “Khala pantsi.” I’ll sit down. The method is called Total Physical Response or TPR and it’s actually a really fun way to learn a language if you can convince your language assistant that it’s a method worth trying. The head instructor for our course was the infamous Carol O, and she was a master at giving future linguists the skills to stand and sit on command.

I don’t remember much else about England. We toured a lot of castles. I attended the Proms. I suffered agonies walking through London in a pair of English shoes. On the 4th of July I took the kids out of the house so Hilary could have an afternoon of peace and quiet. In High Wycombe we found ourselves in the middle of a 4th of July celebration. A group was square dancing in elaborate western costumes and the caller was singing “You can’t hide those lying eyes” and making a very English attempt to sound American. My kids started dancing so vigorously to the music that they stumbled into the middle of a group of square dancers and almost brought the whole group down in a heap. We Americans love to interrupt a British party. I think the only 4th of July I enjoyed more was in Nelspruit, South Africa where a group of Americans broke spontaneously into “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and one of our British colleagues sniffed, “They kyped our song.”

At the school that summer I got to meet real Africans for the first time. Growing up in rural Oregon I had never met even an African-American until i went off to college. Even when I had got up off my knees at an altar call after devoting my life to missionary service in Africa I didn’t have a very clear idea of what Africans were except for black. Sure we were racist in my hometown but it was a half-hearted racism based on bad jokes and a gaping ignorance of any of the eccentricities of race and culture that are really worth joking about. I do remember having a dark foreboding of doom when I saw a photo of a white missionary standing next to some of his African colleagues. They were all wearing suits. And ties. Despite this they looked happy. Surely this must be a sign of something basically wrong with Africans and possibly the missionaries who worked among them. The only suit I had ever owned was my birthday suit and I seldom wore that in public. The thought of being trussed up in a blue suit, white shirt and tie gave me just the right feeling of righteous martyrdom that a person needs before heading off to the dark Continent. Yes, Lord. Even this would I do for you. But the Kenyans that I met that summer in England weren’t wearing suits. Instead, they had raided the giveaway closet at the school and swathed themselves in layer upon layer of shirts, sweaters (what the English call jumpers for some reason) and heavy jackets for protection against the hostile elements of an English summer. One of them had found an oversized lady’s coat complete with fur-lined hood. I became good friends with one of the Kenyans. He was my student but I soon had him tutoring me in Swahili. Kipnyango was less flamboyant in his dress than the other Kenyans but his skills were crazy. He was a Greek Orthodox priest whose special ministry was icon painting. My co-teacher in the course, also named Dave, took us out to the Proms together with a German friend and we all slept through the first movement of Brahms’ Symphony 1. Kipnyango had a blast.

Kipnyango did something I didn’t like on the day we left. He asked me for my t-shirt. What a bizarre request. How undignified! I’m sorry to say that I refused to give him the shirt off my back (It was a fundraising shirt from the church that purchased our Land Rover and had an outline of the continent of Africa on it). I was very sensitive to not being patronizing to Africans. Why would this dignified priest act like a beggar. I only learned later, much too late, that his act was a gesture of friendship. If I could only find him now, probably in some monastic cell painting icons of saints in the highlands of Kenya, I’d give him my shirt and ask for one of his icons.