Hilary Ward Schnadt
In 1977, I spent the first semester of my junior year studying in London with about two dozen classmates plus a history professor from our college. We lived with families, or, in my case, with an elderly couple who rented rooms in their house to foreign students and to internationals pursuing banking credentials. I shared one large bedroom with two friends/classmates.
After seeing ads that Barclays Bank was recruiting new customers by offering a bank at a nominal cost with a chit that could be redeemed for £2 when opening an account, I stopped into Barclays the next time I needed to cash traveler’s checks. Completing my transaction, I told the teller, “I’d like to buy a bank.” She gave me a worried look that suggested I had become delusional. Mystified, I referred to the ads I’d seen. “Oh, you mean a savings bank,” she said, suddenly realizing that I did not hope to take possession of the branch where she worked. She fetched one and it became my treasured memento of those months.
I learned a lot about “British Life & Thought,” the common course we took that semester, as well as about playwright Tom Stoppard, the topic of my independent research project. But I learned more about the change in perspective from one country to another. Yes, we spoke a common language, but I learned there were distinct differences.
A cook in a small diner taught me that I probably wanted a “beefburger” not a “hamburger.” More significant to a cradle Catholic then entering her fifteenth year of Catholic education, was the comment by our landlady when one of my roommates declined to see a doctor for her mild cold. “Oh, that’s right, you Catholics don’t see doctors.” I learned then that I had never experienced life as a member of a religious minority. That semester, I came to see that what I had understood as “how the world worked,” was really how suburban life in the American Midwest worked.
But language could also unite us. I took a modern drama extension course taught in a library in Golders Green. The other students were all retirees and welcomed the earnest American student the age of their grandchildren.
We studied Arnold Wesker’s play, Chicken Soup with Barley, set in the East End of London. Its three acts follow a Jewish family from 1936 to 1946 to 1956. To them, this was not an exemplar of kitchen sink drama by one of Britain’s “angry young men.” This was a play about life as they had lived it. They discussed in fascinating detail what Wesker had correctly captured about socialism, communism and the war years in London’s East End, and what did not seem true to their experience. And when one proclaimed “A whistling girl. . .” and I chorused with her “and a crowing hen, both will come to a bad end,” they were delighted. The decades and distance that separated our experiences melted away.