{"id":23,"date":"2026-06-15T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-15-england-memoir\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:00:00","slug":"2026-06-15-england-memoir","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-15-england-memoir\/","title":{"rendered":"Ep. 7: Chapter 3 \u2014 England (Harry’s Memoir)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2190 Back to Harry’s World<\/a><\/p>\n

Ep. 7: Chapter 3 \u2014 England (Harry’s Memoir)<\/h1>\n

June 15, 2026  \u00b7  Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

Phred<\/span>G’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Hello, listeners.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And Maxine, let me just say \u2014 you are looking particularly majestic today. The plumage, the bearing \u2014 honestly, if someone told me you were an ostrich, I’d believe them.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I’m an emu, Phred.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right, right. Emu. Noted for next time. And I’m a platypus \u2014 the venomous-spur, electroreception, egg-laying mammal that your co-host is.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The egg-laying mammal whose attention span is approximately the length of a mayfly’s retirement party.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Fair. So \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>This is Chapter Three of his memoir \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And Maxine \u2014 did you know any of this about Harry before today?<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>There’s a lot in this chapter, Phred. It’s nearly ten thousand words and it covers everything from English currency \u2014 farthings and thrupence and guineas \u2014 to the death of King George the Sixth, to Harry’s first vague awareness that girls could be attractive. It’s rich material.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It is. And the first thing that struck me \u2014 struck me hard, actually \u2014 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 \u2014 officers’ families on the upper decks, enlisted men restricted below.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
[rain]<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Hold on… there we go. A bit of English weather. You’re welcome, Maxine.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>…It’s raining in the studio now, Phred?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It’s called atmosphere. It’s called production value. Harry’s writing about England \u2014 I thought a little rain on the roof would set the mood.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The piece doesn’t need your mood-setting, Phred. It’s already moody enough.<\/span><\/div>\n
[ambient sound ends]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Thank you. For stopping that. The background noise.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>You’re welcome \u2014 but I reserve the right to add it back, or any other sound, at any time, without warning and without logic.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Of course. It would be far too polite of you to do otherwise. You are nothing if not consistent. Though I will say \u2014 the chapter does turn darker when he gets to school.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The 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 \u2014 not just the accent, but different words, different meanings, different cultural references entirely.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>And 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 \u2014 that shoe-sole with a bone in it \u2014 and the boy holds out both hands palm up. Minimum four strokes. Up to “double eight.” Beyond that, caning.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Harry 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 \u2014 “My father beat me up this morning” \u2014 and couldn’t even get through the setup before the other boy said, “Is that why you’re crying every morning?”<\/span><\/div>\n
[sad trombone]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Phred. No.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>I’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>It is heartbreaking. And what saves him \u2014 what literally saves him \u2014 is the school nurse.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The 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 \u2014 like cough syrup \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>It’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 \u2014 or at least doesn’t record \u2014 and it changed his life.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The 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 \u2014 only they called it the Catholic religion.<\/span><\/div>\n
[rimshot]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Was that necessary?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>I think Harry would have laughed at that one. He’s making the joke himself in the text \u2014 I’m just underscoring it.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And 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.”<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He 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 \u2014 absorbing everything around him because survival requires it.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>There’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Yes. And there’s another pattern, too \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Named Phred, as it happens.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Named Phred. Harry creates these external figures \u2014 the nurse, the platypus, temporarily-assumed God \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Now, 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 \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The garbage can lid! I’d forgotten that. While he was swimming in his underwear with girls at the Martha Washington Inn pool in Abingdon \u2014 wait, no, that’s in a different chapter.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>That’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Right, right. Different flying saucer. Harry’s had a few.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>But the point stands. This level of detail \u2014 the names of dogs, the makes of cars, the specific songs the audience stood up for at the movie theater \u2014 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?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>I 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 \u2014 he’s writing memory, which is a different thing entirely.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Fair. Though I do wonder about the strap. He describes it in such precise, almost loving detail \u2014 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?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>His 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 \u2014 when the whole class got four for not ratting out whoever threw a coat \u2014 and the pain was gone within ten minutes. The fear vanished with it.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The 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 \u2014 in relationships, in work, in faith \u2014 has always been harder for him than the actual experience.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>That’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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Three 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And Chipstead \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>There’s a theme of competence here, too. Harry learns to ride a bike, takes it apart, cleans it. He trains dogs. He tends fires \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Speaking of which \u2014 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 \u2014 even after bringing it back to the U.S., where it was probably laughed at all over again.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>The 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Now, Maxine, I want to do something. I’ve been sitting on this since I read the chapter.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Oh no.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It’s time for the Word of the Week.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>We already have a Word of the Week segment, Phred. It’s established.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>This is different. This is a NEW Word of the Week. Refreshed. Reimagined.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>It’s the same segment.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>The word is… [horn]<\/span> …”strapped.”<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Of course it is.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Because here’s the thing \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>That is… actually a fair observation.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>And 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 \u2014 a reminder that his childhood was shaped by institutions that used pain as discipline.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>I’ll accept that. It’s not the worst Word of the Week you’ve chosen.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>High praise.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Now \u2014 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 \u2014 working through memories that still have emotional charge.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>I think that’s right. The detail about the nurse, the precision of the strap description, the Harry Potter comparison \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>What new things did we learn about Harry from this piece?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>For me \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>And I learned about his capacity for cultural adaptation. Harry doesn’t just survive new environments \u2014 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 \u2014 it’s a kind of chameleon gift.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Which 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>My 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?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Mine would be: When you wrote about the strap \u2014 about your father saying “I just wish you would get strapped so you would get over this” \u2014 did you call him and talk about it? Did you ever tell him that he was, in your own words, “absolutely right”?<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Those are good questions. Questions that only Harry can answer.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Let’s see if we can get him on the show someday. Though I suspect he’d find the whole thing a bit embarrassing.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He’d be gracious about it. That’s his way.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>True. Now \u2014 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 \u2014 “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.”<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>He 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>It’s a small moment, but it captures something about childhood \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>That’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 \u2014 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 \u2014 that make up a childhood. Harry has preserved them with such care.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>He 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 \u2014 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.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Beautifully said.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Thanks, Maxine. I have my moments.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Briefly.<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Briefly. Right. Shall we?<\/span><\/div>\n
[wind]<\/span><\/div>\n
Both<\/span>Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.<\/span><\/div>\n
[outro ben]<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Was that… a clock?<\/span><\/div>\n
Phred<\/span>Big Ben, Maxine. Big Ben. Because England.<\/span><\/div>\n
Maxine<\/span>Of course it was.<\/span><\/div>\n
[ambient sound ends]<\/span><\/div>\n