#treacle sponge

How could I resist a glorious Victorian confection like that? Built by Thomas Holloway, a self-made millionaire who rose to prominence by selling patent medicines of dubious efficacy, it was inspired by the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley. Queen Victoria herself gave him a charter for the school, hence the name Royal Holloway (a huge sculpture of VR herself graces the northern quadrangle). This was years before Harry Potter but of course having read scads of English literature growing up I’d had my fantasies of quaint English boarding schools for years (minus the beatings and the buggery). Once I saw this I signed right up. 

Though there were some more modern satellite buildings for specialized subjects (e.g. labs), I spent almost all of my time in the main Founder’s Building, which comprised lecture halls and classrooms, student residential rooms, a chapel, a well-regarded picture gallery, a library, and the main cafeteria (located in half of the long centre section), which everyone called the Boog Tube. It was in the Boog Tube that I was first introduced to English cultural delights such as Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding and gravy, and – a dessert I still dream about even today – treacle sponge with custard. 

My room was located on an upper floor of the western wing, facing out – probably just about where that last white van is parked in the picture above. It was super “quaint” and incredibly English, replete with a sink in the room and my own little gas-heater fireplace. In my head I felt like I lived in something like this, but of course it was a trifle more modern than that (though the door transom and the mantelpiece were still there).

Although there was a basic common kitchen down the hall, the tiny British fridges didn’t have much room for everyone’s stuff (though to be fair, American fridges are monstrously oversized). So my new floormates taught me to keep a block of butter on my windowsill to keep it chilled (this was the autumn/winter term). Which worked like a charm, though I soon noticed that birds had started pecking away at one corner. But since the block was so large and I wouldn’t possibly get through it in three months, I let them have their corner and simply cut off bits from the opposite one. My floormates also taught me how to bend a wire hanger to clamp bread into so I could hang it from the fireplace grate and make toast. With a loaf of bread and my windowsill butter, a can of baked beans, and the tea kettle in the kitchen, I whiled away many a night merrily pretending I was a no-nonsense Englishwoman sitting down to my very sensible snack of tea and beans on toast. 

On other nights, I’d hang out in the campus bar – yes, mind blown: with a drinking age of 18 of course they could have bars on campus. For even more atmosphere, though, we'd walk a few minutes down the road into the village of Englefield Green (a/k/a “Engie Green”) to The Happy Man, an English pub so perfectly archetypal that you expected to see a picture of it in the dictionary next to the definition of “public house”. The bartender was a charismatic, bearded northerner with an impenetrable yet sexy Geordie accent who reeked of hand-rolled cigarettes. I first got my taste for drinking hard cider at The Happy Man. I also had to put up with idiotic pick-up lines from drunken college boys (no, of course my father’s not a thief), but what I soon found worked in my favour was that they were so unaccustomed to having women come on to them that I didn’t have to put in much more effort than “Fancy a snog?” to pick up a guy myself. 

But there wasn’t really much nightlife to distract me (besides the kebab van parked outside the main gate all night at weekends), so I had plenty of extra time on my hands and decided to try a new sport. They didn’t have (ice) hockey at Royal Holloway, so I tried out for the women’s rugby union team. (I have yet to find my uniform top in storage but I think it was in a different box than the scarf.) I made it onto the First XV (i.e., the A team), though there wasn’t actually a Second XV. (Sssh. Let me have this.) Since I didn’t know a thing about rugby other than you were either running with the ball or tackling someone else who was running with the ball, they had me play #12, the Inside Centre – that was the position closest to the captain (who played Fly-Half). I learned the basics in practice but still didn’t really have the strategy down by the time of our first game, so she’d shout instructions to me as we played. (“OK, run up! Stop there! Jump on the ball!” etc) I may not have known the rules but boy, did I love the tackling – you don’t go in heads first like they do (dangerously) in US football, but wrap your arms around the opponent’s upper thighs and basically wrestle her to the ground. We did all right in our games at home, but then the team took a trip to the Netherlands to play two games, including one in Leiden. We didn’t find out until half-time that some of our opponents were members of the Dutch National Women’s Rugby Team, which certainly explained why they were absolutely slaughtering us – I don’t think we scored a single try against them. Even better, it started raining just before first whistle, so we ended up playing absolutely soaking wet, freezing cold and trying to run through a pitch cratered with huge puddles of mud. By the end of the game I had mud and dirt in every nook and cranny of my body, including ones I didn’t even know I had until I washed them clean in a blessedly hot shower afterwards. I was absolutely miserable that entire game – I kept thinking to myself, “Why the fuck am I here?” – but I have to admit, I felt pretty badass (badarse?) in the pub afterwards, checking out my new bruises and thinking about the few tackles I’d been able to make. (Now you see why I got into roller derby years later.)