Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [66]
Love, Alice
The first field trip scheduled for the class was to the Cotswold village of Burford. For me it came just in time, this jaunt out of the lecture hall and into the actual countryside that gave rise to cottage life in England. I had already cut class one morning to travel on my own to the nearby village of Woodstock, and was really looking forward to visiting Burford.
It was a sunny, cool morning when we left Oxford for the hourlong drive to the Cotswolds. Through the windows of the bus I watched a gentle wind move the sun slantwise, like the beams from a lighthouse, across the sea of Oxfordshire meadows. Sheep grazed, streams gurgled, dales quietly rose into hills, tall grass bent before the wind. We had arrived in quintessential English countryside.
I got out my book on the Cotswolds and read the names on the map: Shipton-under-Wychwood, Bourton-on-the-Water, Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold. How I loved these quaint names. In my head I had a picture, formed long ago by seeing photographs in one of Grandmother’s books, of what life was like in English villages such as these. The corner pub, the medieval church towers, the flocks of sheep driven to market through the village, the thatched-roof cottages and wild, blooming gardens, the square where everyone gathered: this was English country life as it existed in my head.
The drive from Oxford to Burford took us first through Witney. It was a village that seemed less idyllic and picture-perfect than many of the better-known Cotswold tourist attractions.
In Witney, the quick eye caught glimpses of real people living real lives. Housewives with hunched shoulders and weary expressions carried their string-tied packages from the butcher shops. Elderly men sat in the sun, canes by their sides, caps pushed back to reveal faces sculpted by hard work. Bored-looking teenagers gathered in front of a drugstore, flirting and puffing on cigarettes, their schoolbooks lying in piles on the ground. At Angelina’s Beauty Shop a young shampoo girl with butter-colored streaks in her long, dark hair stood daydreaming at the half-open door, a wet towel slung over her shoulder.
I tried to imagine what it was like to be young in a place such as Witney. Does growing up in a small town make for a smaller life? I wondered. Or does it offer a more secure, less complicated one?
I knew from my conversations with the owner of an Oxford bookshop—a smart, observant man who grew up in Oxfordshire—that many young people from nearby villages, restless for adventure, emigrated at an early age. “I’m too old for that,” he said. “Oxfordshire is where I’ll make my stand.”
After talking to him, I thought of Grandmother, who moved to America in her late fifties. Unlike so many younger people, she moved out of necessity, not the desire for adventure. From her I learned that the older emigrant feels something the young do not: the deep sadness of leaving home. The “Old Country,” she used to call it, when telling me bedtime stories about her life in Scotland. Occasionally, she would pull out from under the bed a cardboard box. Inside, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was a kilt woven in the tartan of her clan. “It’s from the Old Country,” she would tell me with pride and, I later realized, sadness, too.
For a long time I thought the Old Country was the name of an ancient land, one that, like Atlantis, no longer existed. I pictured it as a place of rolling green hills and deep glens, of cottages with smoke puffing through chimneys; a place populated with kind When we arrived in Burford I set out to explore the town on my own. Positioned on a hillside, its main street rising dramatically from a small stone bridge spanning the poetically named Windrush River, Burford retains the unspoiled charm of the seventeenth-century wool town it once was. With its steep main street—the