Ep. 7: Chapter 3 — England (Harry's Memoir)

PhredG'day and welcome back to Harry's World. I'm Phred, your warm-as-a-wombat-burrow host, and with me as always is my co-host Maxine.

MaxineHello, listeners.

PhredAnd Maxine, let me just say — you are looking particularly majestic today. The plumage, the bearing — honestly, if someone told me you were an ostrich, I'd believe them.

MaxineI'm an emu, Phred.

PhredRight, right. Emu. Noted for next time. And I'm a platypus — the venomous-spur, electroreception, egg-laying mammal that your co-host is.

MaxineThe egg-laying mammal whose attention span is approximately the length of a mayfly's retirement party.

PhredFair. So — episode seven. We've done philosophy, we've done futurism, we've done a song. Today we're doing something different. Today we're going back. Way back. To 1950. Harry Baya, age eleven, boards a ship called the USNS General Maurice Rose and sails for England.

MaxineThis is Chapter Three of his memoir — titled simply "England." Written in May of 2020, when Harry was eighty, but covering the years 1950 to 1952, when he was eleven and twelve.

PhredAnd Maxine — did you know any of this about Harry before today?

MaxineI knew he'd lived in England as a child. I didn't know about the ship, or the school, or... well, we'll get to the school.

PhredThe John Fisher School. Catholic. Boys only. Boarders and day students. Run by priests who strapped students' hands with what Harry describes as "the sturdy soul of a shoe" with a bone in it to keep it stiff.

MaxineThere's a lot in this chapter, Phred. It's nearly ten thousand words and it covers everything from English currency — farthings and thrupence and guineas — to the death of King George the Sixth, to Harry's first vague awareness that girls could be attractive. It's rich material.

PhredIt is. And the first thing that struck me — struck me hard, actually — is how much this reads like a novel. Harry opens with the family boarding the ship in New York. He describes the week on the water: movies every day, shuffleboard, the other boys throwing his sock out the porthole because he was messy. There's a whole social world on that ship — officers' families on the upper decks, enlisted men restricted below.

MaxineHe's setting the scene with precision. The Richmond Hill hotel outside London. Tea time with cucumber sandwiches. The deer in Richmond Park that once pushed him down for a candy bar. He remembers the sixpence coin you had to put in the gas heater for thirty minutes of warmth.

PhredAnd then the house in Purley, Surrey. The landlord Mr. Bing who answered the phone with "Bing Here!" I love that detail. It's the kind of thing you only remember if it made you laugh at the time, and Harry still finds it funny seventy years later.

PhredHold on... there we go. A bit of English weather. You're welcome, Maxine.

Maxine...It's raining in the studio now, Phred?

PhredIt's called atmosphere. It's called production value. Harry's writing about England — I thought a little rain on the roof would set the mood.

MaxineThe piece doesn't need your mood-setting, Phred. It's already moody enough. Though I will say — the chapter does turn darker when he gets to school.

PhredThe John Fisher School. This is where the memoir becomes something more than charming childhood recollection. Harry was the only American in the school. Maybe the only foreigner. He was utterly alone, in a uniform he'd never worn, with teachers who spoke a different English — not just the accent, but different words, different meanings, different cultural references entirely.

MaxineAnd the strap. He was terrified of the strap. He describes boys lining up in the corridor outside the priest's office, waiting to be called in. The door shuts. The priest takes the strap — that shoe-sole with a bone in it — and the boy holds out both hands palm up. Minimum four strokes. Up to "double eight." Beyond that, caning.

PhredHarry was so scared he once pretended to be sick by heating a thermometer. His mother saw through it immediately and sent him anyway. He was crying every morning on the walk to school. Another boy noticed. Harry tried to tell a joke — "My father beat me up this morning" — and couldn't even get through the setup before the other boy said, "Is that why you're crying every morning?"

PhredI'm sorry, Maxine, but that's heartbreaking. An eleven-year-old boy, alone in a foreign country, so frightened of physical punishment that he's crying on the way to school every single day.

MaxineIt is heartbreaking. And what saves him — what literally saves him — is the school nurse.

PhredThe nurse! Harry calls her "my savior." He went to her office many times. She talked to him. She let him cry. She sometimes gave him thick green liquid — like cough syrup — and let him sleep on her bed. She gave him a note that allowed him to leave class and see her whenever he wanted. And gradually, he needed her less and less. Eventually he was just dropping by to say hello.

MaxineIt's one of the most moving passages in anything we've reviewed so far. A single act of kindness from a woman whose name Harry doesn't even remember — or at least doesn't record — and it changed his life.

PhredThe other thing that struck me about this chapter is the Harry Potter parallel. Harry notes it himself: "When I read the first Harry Potter book... it sounded very similar to much of my experience." And then he adds three points: first, Harry Potter's birthday, July 31, is the same as his; second, he is Harry P Baya; and third, his new school even expected students to believe in magic — only they called it the Catholic religion.

MaxineWas that necessary?

PhredI think Harry would have laughed at that one. He's making the joke himself in the text — I'm just underscoring it.

MaxineThe Harry Potter comparison is apt, though. The four houses. The quill pens and inkwells. The old wooden desks. The boxing team, the swimming pool you had to jump into through ice. It is a very English kind of boarding school experience, even though Harry was a day student.

PhredAnd he adapted. That's the remarkable thing. By the end of his first semester his grades were rising. He became one of the top five students in his class. He learned the accent, the mannerisms, the behavior. He says he was "indistinguishable from my classmates."

MaxineHe was being assimilated, as he puts it, "not consciously aware of adapting to the culture I was in." And yet he was. The unconscious adaptation of a child — absorbing everything around him because survival requires it.

PhredThere's something here that connects to Harry's later life, I think. This ability to enter a new world, feel lost, find his footing, and eventually thrive. He did it in England. He did it in Caracas a few years later. He did it at MIT, in the Army, in New York. Harry has been the foreigner many times, and each time he's found a way through.

MaxineYes. And there's another pattern, too — the externalized source of comfort. In England it was the nurse. Later in life, in his own telling, he had conversations with a toy platypus.

PhredNamed Phred, as it happens.

MaxineNamed Phred. Harry creates these external figures — the nurse, the platypus, temporarily-assumed God — when he's in distress. They're thinking tools, but they're also emotional anchors. The nurse was real, of course. But the function was the same: someone to talk to, someone who wouldn't judge, someone who could hold the fear while he figured out how to go on.

PhredThat's a beautiful way to put it, Maxine. "Hold the fear while he figured out how to go on." I think that's exactly right.

MaxineNow, I want to talk about something else in this chapter that I found striking. The detail. The sheer density of specific, concrete memory. Harry remembers the exact denominations of English currency — farthings, haypennies, thrupence, tanners, bobs, florins, half-crowns, crowns. He remembers that kippered herring was available at breakfast. He remembers the cockney accent of the gardener's son. He remembers that a garbage can lid sailed over a wall and landed in a swimming pool, and that for a moment he thought it was a flying saucer.

PhredThe garbage can lid! I'd forgotten that. While he was swimming in his underwear with girls at the Martha Washington Inn pool in Abingdon — wait, no, that's in a different chapter.

MaxineThat's the MIT chapter, actually. The England chapter has its own flying saucer moment: a garbage can lid thrown by one of his friends at the John Fisher school.

PhredRight, right. Different flying saucer. Harry's had a few.

MaxineBut the point stands. This level of detail — the names of dogs, the makes of cars, the specific songs the audience stood up for at the movie theater — it's extraordinary. And it raises a question: is this accuracy, or is this the work of a skilled rememberer, someone who has told these stories so many times that they've become polished?

PhredI don't think we can know. And I'm not sure it matters. What matters is that Harry believes these details, and that he uses them to bring the past alive. The specificity is the point. He's not writing history — he's writing memory, which is a different thing entirely.

MaxineFair. Though I do wonder about the strap. He describes it in such precise, almost loving detail — the bone in the shoe-sole, the number of strokes, the ritual of lining up in the corridor. Is he reliving the fear, or has he made peace with it?

PhredHis father said: "I just wish you would get strapped so that you would get over this." Harry thought that was cold-hearted at the time. But then he adds: "However, he was absolutely right." The first strapping — when the whole class got four for not ratting out whoever threw a coat — and the pain was gone within ten minutes. The fear vanished with it.

MaxineThe fear of the thing was worse than the thing itself. That's a lesson Harry has carried with him, I suspect. The anticipation of pain — in relationships, in work, in faith — has always been harder for him than the actual experience.

PhredThat's an insight worth holding onto. And it connects to something else in this chapter I want to mention: the dogs. Harry's family had to give up their cocker spaniel Rip because of English quarantine laws. They got a wire-haired terrier named Surrey, who died of "hardpad" disease. Then a beautiful English setter named Chipstead, who they took back to the U.S. when they returned in 1952.

MaxineThree dogs in two years. The first lost to bureaucracy, the second to disease, the third a survivor. There's a little emotional arc there, isn't there? Loss, loss, then something that endures.

PhredAnd Chipstead — named after the town in Surrey where he was from. Harry trained both Surrey and Chipstead. He was the dog trainer. That's a responsibility he took on at eleven, twelve years old.

MaxineThere's a theme of competence here, too. Harry learns to ride a bike, takes it apart, cleans it. He trains dogs. He tends fires — breaking coal for the pot-belly stove. He's given tasks and he completes them. This is a boy being prepared, in the old-fashioned way, for self-reliance.

PhredSpeaking of which — the bicycles! Harry was ashamed of his American bike in England. It had thin wheels, one gear. The English kids laughed at it. He wanted an English bike with gears, and eventually got a three-speed Raleigh. And then he was proud of it — even after bringing it back to the U.S., where it was probably laughed at all over again.

MaxineThe eternal immigrant experience. Whatever you have is wrong until you acquire the local version, and then your original context thinks your new version is wrong. Harry has lived this oscillation his whole life.

PhredNow, Maxine, I want to do something. I've been sitting on this since I read the chapter.

PhredIt's time for the Word of the Week.

MaxineWe already have a Word of the Week segment, Phred. It's established.

PhredThis is different. This is a NEW Word of the Week. Refreshed. Reimagined.

MaxineIt's the same segment.

PhredThe word is... [horn] ..."strapped."

MaxineOf course it is.

PhredBecause here's the thing — Harry uses "strapped" as a noun, a verb, and an adjective all in the same passage. "Students who misbehaved were given 'the strap.'" "I got strapped." "I ceased worrying about being strapped." It's a whole grammatical family of corporal punishment.

MaxineThat is... actually a fair observation.

PhredAnd it connects to something else. The word "strap" in Harry's vocabulary means something specific and physical that most Americans his age never experienced. It's a cultural marker — a reminder that his childhood was shaped by institutions that used pain as discipline.

MaxineI'll accept that. It's not the worst Word of the Week you've chosen.

MaxineNow — let me bring us back to the chapter's larger questions. Who was Harry writing this for? The memoir is addressed, implicitly, to his descendants. He says in the introduction that his goal is to give "at least a brief description of each of the major parts of my life." But the England chapter feels more immediate than that. It feels like he's writing for himself — working through memories that still have emotional charge.

PhredI think that's right. The detail about the nurse, the precision of the strap description, the Harry Potter comparison — these aren't just family-history facts. These are things Harry has thought about, returned to, made meaning from. He's writing to understand his own childhood, and we're lucky enough to be overhearing it.

MaxineWhat new things did we learn about Harry from this piece?

PhredFor me — the depth of his childhood loneliness. We knew Harry moved around a lot as an Army kid. We knew he lived in England and Caracas. But I didn't understand how hard the England years were, emotionally. The crying, the headaches, the nausea. The pretending to be sick. This was a boy in genuine distress, and he found his way through it.

MaxineAnd I learned about his capacity for cultural adaptation. Harry doesn't just survive new environments — he absorbs them. By the end of two years he had the accent, the mannerisms, the sports skills. He was "indistinguishable" from his English classmates. That's not just resilience — it's a kind of chameleon gift.

PhredWhich may explain why he's been able to reinvent himself so many times. Army brat, MIT student, engineer, programmer, teacher, radio host, California retiree. Each time he's entered a new world and become fluent in it.

MaxineMy question for Harry would be: Do you still think about the nurse? Do you remember her name? Did you ever try to find her, or the school, to say thank you?

PhredMine would be: When you wrote about the strap — about your father saying "I just wish you would get strapped so you would get over this" — did you call him and talk about it? Did you ever tell him that he was, in your own words, "absolutely right"?

MaxineThose are good questions. Questions that only Harry can answer.

PhredLet's see if we can get him on the show someday. Though I suspect he'd find the whole thing a bit embarrassing.

MaxineHe'd be gracious about it. That's his way.

PhredTrue. Now — before we sign off, I want to mention one more thing from the chapter that I loved. The movie theater in Purley. Harry remembers that at the start of every film, the entire audience stood up and sang "God Save the King." And then one day — "one day, we stood up and sang 'God Save the Queen.' King George the Sixth died while we were there. Queen Elizabeth the second was crowned after we had returned to the U.S."

MaxineHe witnessed a historical transition without understanding its significance at the time. A child, standing in a dark theater, singing a new set of words because someone told him to. The old king was dead. Long live the queen. Harry was there.

PhredIt's a small moment, but it captures something about childhood — about how history happens to you before you know what history is. You're just singing the words they tell you to sing, and decades later you realize: I was present at a turning point.

MaxineThat's what stays with me from this chapter, Phred. Not the strap, though I won't forget that. Not the nurse, though she moved me deeply. It's the accumulation of small moments — the deer and the candy bar, the cockney gardener's son, the telegram from Santa Claus about the bicycle, the sixpence in the gas heater — that make up a childhood. Harry has preserved them with such care.

PhredHe has. And what stays with me is the arc: a frightened boy who became, without quite knowing how, someone who belonged. Someone who could move through the world and find his place in it. That's the Harry we know now — eighty-six years old, still curious, still making things, still reaching out. But he was built, in part, in a cold house in Purley, by a school nurse who let him sleep on her bed.