Family History

My Father’s Pipe

Sun, 6 Jan 2008 17:16:32 -0700

It is the second World War, the South Pacific, and a Liberty ship is rocking at anchor off Ulithe or Enawetoh or Okinawa. A man who will later become my father is relaxing on deck, smoking. A pipe between his teeth, he hangs over the ship’s rail, thirty feet above the water. All at once he sees something, shouts at somebody. The pipe falls out of his mouth.

Sixty years later, another century, another hemisphere. I have been born (for a long time already). Dad hasn’t smoked in five years. He, Janet, and I are motoring up through October’s russet valleys, through Delaware and Pennsylvania, on our way to the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford. We’re curious to find out if any new Andrew Wyeth paintings are on display. My father, too weak to walk the galleries, sits on a bench in the sun against a white wall. When Janet and I come back, I am struck by his appearance: vital, younger than his eighty years, a little dangerous. He wears a white shirt and his hair is white. A three-day beard covers his face like hoarfrost. The skin is coffee-colored, the big nose bent at the tip, the mouth firm, the line of the lips a little crooked. A long, lean, confident face, but with a cast of sadness. Sunlight, wall, and shirt frame the dark skin in a stark almost theatrical way--the chiaroscuro of a Wyeth portrait. The old man has the look of an Arab pirate, weathered and refined.

He is blessed with abundance of character, but where is the artist to portray him? I think, let him sit here perfectly still the rest of his life, like a Duane Hansen installation. At that moment I realize I want to write about him. Yet I am hesitant. He is not just a character. He is my dad. Difficult (maybe treacherous) cross currents of emotion lie in wait. There is too much life between us. There is the feeling, when I am near him, when I enter his powerful aura, that I am a little boy. How can I write truly about my living father, my dying father? I make a decision. I won’t write about him. I’ll write about his pipe instead, a link between us. I will write about his love of tobacco.

It’s a strange time to be writing about the love of tobacco. I began writing in September, in the very month that my city banned smoking in bars, restaurants and public places. Oh Puritanism of the enlightened middle class! I favor the new law, but I myself am seriously out of step with the times. Several months ago I took up smoking pipe again after an interval of ten years.

I first knew his pipes as things that were really interesting to sniff. For a kid old pipes and tobacco tins have more magic than toys. My mother, when she was ten years old, played for hours with her father’s pipe. I remember breathing in the rich honey cindery smell of dad’s old pipes. I sucked the stems. I stuck my face into empty tins, Prince Albert and Sir Walter Raleigh, and marveled at the aroma, at the blend of tinniness and deep sweet dried leaf. It was nose ecstasy. The pictures of those English noblemen, and later the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Tolkien, made me think of pipe smoking as peculiarly British. Last summer in Cornwall I was happy to see a number of old men smoking pipes, confirming my youthful hunch. The dry fragrance of tobacco smoke seems perfect in that moist climate, less so here in arid Colorado where you rarely see a man with a pipe.

I doubt I ever would have smoked pipes if Dad had not. Here I must say that I always found the expression, “to smoke a pipe” perplexing. I was unsettled even more when I discovered an etymology of the word “tobacco” that traced it back to a Caribbean term meaning “pipe.” I have always thought that what you smoke is tobacco, not the pipe itself (albeit the pipe is made of wood). The phrase “to smoke a pipe” is what experts call a metonymy: the naming of something indirectly by using a related idea or object instead--as if the original were too scandalous or sacred to be mentioned. To talk about your father by pretending to talk about his pipe is a kind of metonymy.

The fact is, I never saw dad smoke his pipes. But I knew he once smoked them: he told me so, and there they were. I have one of them now, sitting in the rack. I smoke it still--a pipe he used in the early 1940’s, before I was born, which was in the year 1946. I never fail to think of my father in the South Seas when I light up this pipe. As I hold the bowl, I imagine how he held it, how he lit the tamped weed bringing it to a glow, and how he drew in the thick urgent smoke. I think of him putting the pipe in his pocket and walking down the deck of the ship. Now, the old briar is dark brown, the top of the bowl black from the years of being scorched by match flames, the edge worn and dented from long use. Yet it is still a great smoking pipe. It is handsome, balanced, and sweet tasting. The round bowl tapers, and after making a ninety degree bend, it turns into a four-sided shank. This diamond shank allows you to put the pipe down on a table so that the bowl, resting at a forty-five degree angle, doesn’t spill its contents. The shank was cracked and I had it repaired with a little collar made of thin bright silver.

So I knew my father had smoked pipes, but strangely, never actually saw him. In my time, in the ‘50’s, he smoked filtered cigarettes, and sometimes long thin cigars, never a pipe. My boyish mind magnified this discrepancy into a peculiar significance, and over time the pipe he gave me became a sort of totem object. It came to stand for the unknownness of my father, the pieces of his life I could not fully grasp. How he was as a boy in Ohio, for example, what he felt in the war, what he did with women--but above all what he was like before I was born, that is, before my coming changed him into a father and made him a different man, the one I know, or pretend to know.

The pipe he gave me is a symbol for the things about him I’ve never quite understood. His uncanniness, for example, by which I mean his self-assuredness, his mercurial intelligence, and the singular, sometimes terrifying, force of his will. And also his physicality, especially the darkness of his skin. How could he be so dark, and me so light? Did decades of smoking tan his skin? Later, after studying literature, I discovered that dad, as a young man, looked like Franz Kafka. Whenever I see pictures of Kafka, I think, there’s dad, and I sense some hidden connection. That too has to do with the the pipe, which symbolizes the mystery of his origins (and by extension mine as well). One day, he tells me that he thinks he was illegitimate, another day that our Berlin forebears were Jewish, and another that they were wealthy Italians after whom the wing of a museum was named. I ask him where he got all that. He is a little vague. He was young and he heard stories from his father and aunts. The pipe he gave me stands for these and other conjectures, all as insubstantial as the smoke that whirls out of it. Yet the pipe itself is here, present and exultant in its materiality of wood, silver, and plastica eterna.

What I know for sure about my father is that he has always been one for projects. He is forever building things, growing things. In this he reminds me of the Demiurge of ancient Gnostic myth, which is to say that he is uncontrollably creative. He is inventive, energetic, single-minded. I see him smoking a cigarette as he rests between tasks. He lights up after digging a fish pond in his backyard. Tobacco is an occasion for reflection, for kicking back to admire a job well done, for planning the next step, the next renovation. Through the last decade, his and Janet’s house has been in a continuous state of transformation. Which is to say, it has been a mess. Dad’s work is a parable of our culture, where the chaotic process of change is valued for its own sake as much as for the improvement it brings. Dad will tear out a wall on a whim. He likes laying brick, adding new rooms, putting in new staircases, redoing the cabinets and the floors. He degarages garages, turning them into rooms or offices. When he runs out of projects, he sits and smokes until some fanciful idea appears like a genie out of the magic lantern of his fertile mind. For example, a working dump truck made of scrap wood and metal and real wheels for his three-year old son. For example, a colossal toy chest on rollers in the shape of a second World War aircraft carrier, the lid serving as the flight deck. For example, a white-washed concrete sarcophagus to give the backyard patio the air of an ancient necropolis. We called it the tombstone.

He acquires five acres of woodland behind the house, bulldozes and burns the trees, and builds a stable for my sister’s horses. He orders truckloads of topsoil for the front yard and spends weeks spreading it around. He goes out and buys a whole working farm (without telling my mother beforehand) and spends weekends, nights, and vacations ploughing, harvesting, feeding pigs, moving barns. He cuts stepped terraces into the steep slope of the backyard, to make it look like the hanging gardens of Babylon. He plants apple and cherry trees, and a native forest shrub, sweet Pawpaw. He plants azaleas, euonymus, crepe myrtle, petunias, begonias, you name it. Then like a Hebrew God, he rests. He lights up, declares what he’s done to be good, and stares into a haze of smoke, to conjure up a plan for his next creation.

For me smoking is more cosmicomical than creational. I like to blow smoke rings. I launch a large lazy ring-nebula, then shoot through it a swift little whorl of smoke. Or I fall to musing on the way a strand of smoke curls out of the bowl, swirls, and disappears in the breeze like a fugitive thought.

Unlike my dad, I am more dreamer than builder. Pipe smoke is the day dreamer’s element. As I attend the pipe my thoughts are drawn away from the nervous business of life into reverie and contemplation. Waves of good feeling slowly envelop me, and soon I am sinking into a kind of vegetable satori. Not long ago, I was delighted to discover another etymology for “tobacco,” one that goes back to the Arabic word “tabaq,” meaning “euphoria-producing herb.” As I pull smoke though dad’s old pipe, I wonder if he too felt this happiness, this langorous state of muddledheadedness, so unlike the effect of a cigarette.

If dad’s enjoyment of tobacco is different from mine, I do not doubt that it is deep. The satisfaction it gives him is palpable. I am struck by his eloquence when he speaks of smoking. It is no coincidence that his father won a cash prize writing on why he liked smoking Philly cheroots. Dad has always been unashamed in his praise of smoking--as if it were not foul-smelling, not hurtful to others, not killing him. He tells me he relishes the smell of his fingers after smoking--he revels in what turns most people off. This unabashedness is part of my father’s character. How terrible that he should suffer from a fatal lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis. Yet, he tells me triumphantly, doctors say smoking is not the cause! Still, the disease has kept him away from tobacco for the last five years.

Some of his best sayings are about smoking. When I complain about the filthiness of the habit (the cancers, the soot, the stench of cigarette butts and wet pipe cleaners) he grows serious (or mock serious) and makes a pronouncement from Aristotle. The sum of a man’s bad habits is a constant. If I were to give up smoking, he says, some other vice, probably much worse, maybe even murderous (there was always this thrilling hint) will take its place--because the sum of a man’s bad habits is a constant. Search as I might, though, I’ve never found this saying in Aristotle or anywhere else.

He speaks of smoking with the wisdom of the ancients, with the passion of a romantic. He talks about his first cigarette after not smoking for two and a half years. For most people that first cigarette tastes awful. But for dad, “Oh my god, it was lovely!” The act of smoking, he tells me, is “like eating a piece of pie.” An apt expression. Dad has a sweet tooth, which is doubtless genetic: his German grandfather insisted on eating dessert before dinner. Dad is an oral person in every way, not just smoking. He likes talk and talks well. He eats and drinks with gusto, especially seafood, flounder, raw oysters, crab cakes, the Eastern Shore specialities. But also hot dogs and ice cream, both at the same time, a bite of hot dog, a spoonful of ice cream and so on. Shades of his grandfather. When my sister and I were kids he’d drive us thirty miles to an oyster bar. We’d sit there, the only kids in the place, and watch him swill beer and eat plates of oysters on the half shell. (He never got enough to eat as a boy--he also worried about my poor appetite and small size.) On one of these occasions I was spellbound by the bubbliness and goldenness of a tall glass of beer, and I asked him for a sip. He said, OK, but only if you eat an oyster first. I managed to choke down a raw oyster with crackers and hot sauce. Dad told the bartender to bring a little glass for me, into which he poured an inch of beer. I found it awfully bitter.

Sometimes, when he gets carried away talking about tobacco, words fail him and he comes out with funny noises like an infant. On smoking Camels: “you could feel them, and the top of your head just coming off, chchchchchchchchchchchchch.”

I ask him how he got to smoking. He had a friend who was an orphan, and they walked out to Four Mile Creek to camp. Dad was fourteen, in junior high. Here’s how he tells it. “Dick had a pack of cigarettes. He said, wanna cigarette? I never had one. And so I took one. Well, I don’t know whether I asked him what you do when you inhale--and I inhaled it, and God, it was just wonderful. I mean, never a cough, and then from that point on I’d borrow one from this guy and borrow one from that guy and once in a while I’d slip one out of my Dad’s Lucky Strike pack . . .”

Dad doesn’t ask me about my first cigarette. In fact, he doesn’t often ask me questions. Maybe because he knows me so well, or maybe there are things he doesn’t want to know. Just for the record then: the day before I left home for college, my friend Mike borrowed somebody’s sports car, and we sped around in the warm southern Delaware night with the top down. At a filling station I bought a pack of L&M filter cigarettes, what dad smoked. I broke one out and for the first time in my life breathed tobacco smoke into my lungs. It didn’t hurt at all. For the next eight years I smoked, sometimes two packs a day.

That wasn’t my first experience of tobacco though. When I was in high school dad and mom let me smoke a corn cob pipe at home, not in the house but in the converted garage. Why they allowed this I don’t know, unless my father thought there was nothing wrong with a kid smoking. After all he began when he was fourteen. Because of this, I first learned to smoke without inhaling. And that was good. Later, I gave up cigarettes, and I was able to fall back on pipe smoking. As a kid I loved pipe tobacco. I savored the smell. Smoking made me feel like a man, a great need for me at that time, because I wasn’t.

I still enjoy the symbolic value of smoking, but, nowadays, that has nothing to do with feeling grown up. If anything, it makes me feel less grown up, a nice feeling at my age. More important for me, now, is the idea that the pipe represents the last refuge of organic fire. The last refuge in a culture that has cut itself off from elemental things. The pipe smoker is guardian of a tiny hearth. Pyromania makes me a devotee of the pipe. Like Hephaestus or the priest of Agni, I am a celebrant of fire.

For pipe smokers, fire is skin close, blazing before the nose in the flame of a match, stinging the finger that tamps the smoldering weed. To smoke a pipe is to be forever at play with fire. That same fire about which there are so many myths of how we got it. That same fire that is one of the four elemental substances of the Ancients. Fire everchanging, and the changer. The burning pipe is the last relic of those fires of youth known to my generation, of real campfires in the wild, of fireplaces that burn wood, of the smoking leaf piles in autumn. Things that have disappeared in our crowded, cautious world. The pipe is the vestige and symbol of these fires.

I think of the pipe as a little crematory for turning leaf into ash. Sooner or later, we too burn out. Sooner or later we all succumb to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, our bodies left behind as cold ash or dust. Dad tells me he wants to be cremated. It was not always so. Married to the second of his three wives he became Baptist for a while and it was then that he told me he wanted to be embalmed and buried. No more. He who so loved to smoke will become smoke himself (but not with any undue haste).

The day before I fly out to visit him, I sit on my deck and puff on the pipe he gave me. I ponder these things, the last things. I ponder the smoke of burning bodies I saw in India. The smell of flaming cadavers on the funeral ghats of the Ganges. I am with Mona the boatman rowing up the river. We pass near the fires. Like it or not, I inhale some of the smoke of pious Hindus. It’s not unlike pipe smoke. I think uneasily of my mother who wants to be cremated, not buried with her father and mother in the family plot in Cincinnati as she had always planned. Now she wants her ashes cast upon Lake Chickamauga, near where she has lived the last thirty years.

In these latter days mortality has made serious overtures to my father. He has been in and out of the hospital. Once, they told Janet he would not make it. But he did. His latest project is to stay alive.

He goes about it with the same determination as with other projects. He writes down measurements, not of walls and doorways, but of blood counts and medicinal intake. He sends me pages of graphs and charts. No less than three fatal maladies have taken hold of him. The lung disease that has kept him from smoking the last five years. Neuropathy, the slow dying of the nerves in his body--sad for a man who always showed so much nerve. Worst of all, the myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder in which the bone marrow no longer makes enough white blood cells to fight off infection. Dad says proudly: Carl Sagan died of it, you know, and he was a lot younger than me. Researchers have found a link between myelodysplastic syndrome and exposure to organic solvents. Dad worked with them as a grad student, and later on when he was a chemist and manager for the Dupont Company.

He tells me he believes that the three diseases will kill each other off and that he will live to ninety-two. Why ninety-two? I had a dream, he says, that I would die at ninety two. If it so happens that I die, he says, I want you to pour my ashes into pepper shakers. Put a little patch on the outside of each shaker. What am I supposed to do with the shakers? Give them to your friends. Why the patch, I ask? To cover the ashes of my behind.

He tells me: when I know the end is near, I’m going to smoke again.

I am the fourth generation of pipe smokers in the paternal line of my ancestors. Only through a story did I discover that my great grandfather was also a pipe smoker. Dad’s most poignant early memories are of this man, who died when dad was six. Great grandfather Thiem grew up in Prussia. When a young man, he was recognized as a talented carver and sculptor. In his twenties, he emigrated to the States. Settling near Cincinnati, he prospered as a craftsman and designer, achieving renown for his statues and artisan work. Dad and his grandfather were close. Talking to dad on my last visit, I found out that one of the pipes I had played with as a child belonged to my great grandfather. Dad had inherited it and smoked it. Our family passes pipes down through the generations like other families do bibles and heirlooms. The pipe has a round white bowl and curved shank made of Meerschaum and tapers into a translucent stem the color of gold amber. Meerschaum, meaning foam of the sea, is a mineral, with a whiteness reminiscent of the clay pipes smoked by Dutch burghers in old paintings. It is encased in a light, wooden, silvery-satin-covered box that copies the shape of the pipe. The mirror halves of the box open on a fine hinge.

Dad’s story of his grandfather and the pipe is like a wisp of smoke from a distant time. It brings back the very taste and aroma of our ancestral past. That wisp of story gave me a direct link to my great grandfather, a man who was born in Berlin in 1859.

The story goes like this. His grandfather, after a day of carving, would sit down to rest and light up his pipe. The five year old boy would climb onto his grandpa’s lap, a great pleasure--they were real pals. On one of these occasions the boy’s grandpa struck a match to light up his pipe. The boy blew the match out. His grandpa struck a second match and the little boy did the same. And a third time. The fourth time the old man struck the boy. Dad: “he hit me only lightly but it broke my heart.” The boy fled in tears. But after an hour he came cautiously back to his grandpa, not sure whether the old man still loved him. The grandpa still loved him and took him up on his lap again and the boy felt relief and greater joy than ever. That story is how I learned we are four generations of pipe smokers.

The grandfather gave the boy a nickname, Cap or Cappie. The name stuck for a long time. The inspiration was the songline “I’m Captain Thiem of the Horse Marine.” Dad: “I never made it to Captain in the Army, only to First Lieutenant. Grandpa would be mad at me if he knew it.”

Dad tells me that in the war he enlisted in the army, and was trained as a welder. Three times his application to Officer Candidate School was rejected. Rejected because his elbow was crooked. In the first grade he’d fallen off a teeter totter at school and the elbow broke. The doctor made a mistake in setting the elbow and it became seriously deformed. It looked as if somebody had implanted a four inch cube where the elbow should have been. Dad never tried to hide the elbow and when I was a kid, I was intrigued by it and liked to rub it. But an officer was not supposed to have a crooked elbow.

Dad may have lived up to his name had it not been for the bum elbow, which delayed his entry into officer training. The last time he tried to get in, he was interviewed by a woman officer, herself a Captain. He pleaded with her. He did not, of course, tell her he wanted to be an officer because everybody called him Cap. Instead, he told her how little he wanted to be a welder. He said to her: “I received high scores on all the officer tests, the elbow works all right. Would you just give me a chance?” Three weeks later he got orders to report to Officer Candidate School. And that’s how he ended up ship’s security officer in the Army Transportation Corps in the South Seas. First Lieutenant Thiem. That’s how he got to Okinawa, Manila, Ulithe, Enawetoh, where in the evenings he would lean over the ship’s rail and like his father and grandfather before him, smoke a pipe.

I remember Dad’s Dad, my Grandpa, smoking a pipe. This fascinated me because I knew dad had once smoked a pipe. I remember being surprised when my grandfather stopped smoking. It was after he came down with Parkinson’s.

What cord of life holds the generations together? The stories that pass down? The thread of evanescent memories? The strand of nucleic acids in the DNA? Four generations of pipe smokers. And four generations of big noses. I come out of a line of big noses, my father, my mother, and their fathers. My sons too. Minor Cyranos all, or Cyranas. Those noses were made for the enjoyment and discernment of the strong sumptuous reek of pipe tobacco.

I gave up cigarettes in the early seventies and took up pipe again in the late seventies. That was when I was reading Tolkien. I would sit in front of a woodfire smoking pipeweed and read the stories of the hobbits and Gandalph, smokers of pipeweed. Then in the late eighties I betrayed my heritage. I gave up the pipe. The fifth generation would not have it. It did not like me smoking. The fifth generation is Benji, my younger son. In grade school (with the help of teachers) he embraced the anti-smoking fervor of the middle class. He would come into my study and recite the iniquities of tobacco. To set a fine moral example (and get him off my back), I decided to quit. I didn’t smoke pipe for around ten years.

But it is this same fifth generation that made me fall into the delicious old habit again. What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh. Benji, now in his twenties, comes back from LA for the holidays. He goes to a bonfire party in the mountains. I ask, what did you do at the bonfire? Oh, we smoked pipes. Pipes, I say? Pipes? I gulp a little when I say it. You mean you smoked pot? No, Dad, tobacco. Whose pipe I ask? Oh, the little Sherlock Holmes pipe, the one Nat brought back from Italy and gave me, just to irritate me, you know, when I was a kid on the rampage against tobacco. Oh, I say. Benji does not seem at all ashamed of his lapse. Quietly, I admire my younger son’s matter-of-factness. Five generations of pipe smokers. Last spring, when it got warm enough to sit on the deck, I again succumbed to the pleasures and euphorias of pipeweed. In the summer Benji and I smoked together in the backyard.

If the pipe Dad gave me signifies the mystery of his being, it also stands for the bond between us. It represents the continuity of generations of father and son. He smoked this pipe and I have smoked it, on and off, for twenty -eight years.

When I was in high school, we didn’t get along. I wouldn’t do what he asked. The usual story. At times we couldn’t stand each other. We would hardly talk. Yet there were moments of peace. Once a week, for instance, we watched together the TV serial “The Fugitive.” We followed the program with a devotion that was nearly religious. The show was about a doctor falsely accused of murdering his wife. He escapes from jail and hides his identity, and yet he invariably gives himself away when he heals the sick and injured people that he meets in the course of his wanderings. Dad and I loved the dilemma of this. We watched the program and were brought together, emotionally. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was the fugitive, unjustly accused and persecuted, and Dad knew in his heart he was the fugitive, unjustly accused, persecuted.

The other time of truce was when we smoked together out in the garage, the one Dad had turned into a room heated by a potbelly stove. We weren’t allowed to smoke in the house. Mother didn’t permit it and in this she was ahead of her time. It was just dad and me. Judy my younger sister, in spite of family tradition and genes and so forth, never smoked a pipe. Like mother, she didn’t like tobacco.

So I would puff on my corn cob pipe. Dad would draw on his cigarette like he was making love to it. There we would sit and smoke, not knowing we were ruining each other’s lungs. We would sit in front of the stove in winter, now and then adding wood, our feet on the bumpers, smoking, not talking. Content with smoking. At peace. Is it like the sense of peace that the local Nanticoke Indians knew when they smoked pipes in their camps along the river where I grew up?

On my latest visit to dad I fly into Philly in the wake of Hurricane Isabelle, and then catch the shuttle down to Delaware. During the stay, I record on tape Dad’s conversation and soliloquies about his childhood, the war, and what he remembers of my youth. In spite of his weakness, Dad is in top form. Later in the day we decide, once again, to visit the Brandywine Museum and check out the Wyeths. This time though dad does not even make it into the gallery. He sits in the car waiting for Janet and me. Afterwards, we have dinner at the Chadds Ford Inn. Dad and I eat fish and seafood and drink wine. We get back to the house after dark. I say I’m going out on the deck to smoke a pipe. Dad comes out with me. To my surprise he pulls out a long thin cigar. He lights up, draws the smoke in, says, “god, that tastes good.” “You know,” he says, “this is the first time I’ve smoked in five years.”

We sit out on the deck--not the deck of a Liberty ship, though that comes to mind. The night sky of northern Delaware swirls between the leaves of the tall trees. We smoke and talk and joke. He reminisces a little. He describes his latest garden project. He talks about science and says he has been boning up on gravity (why this sudden interest?), has been taking notes with a view to writing something. He says, “you know, when it came to gravity, Einstein had his head up his ass.” My father is unable to talk about gravity for two minutes without lapsing into levity.

The night is warm and moist. Dad lets the ash of his Garcilosa y Vega cigar grow long and knocks it off on the glass top of the garden table. He talks about quantum theory, and the wild chinquapin bushes he’d like to plant, and how he gives his doctors boxes of candy at each visit so they will keep him alive. If I die, he tells them, there’ll be no more candy. I smoke my pipe and listen.

I smoke my pipe and take in the night. The briar becomes a rose, and humid air slinks around the boles of trees and pours down the terraces. A fish breaks out of the pond, turns into a Night Heron and flaps away. The fruits of the sweet Pawpaw glow like lanterns. Smoke floats out of a flower. The great swamp maples surge in the night breeze and I hear them chant of Isabelle.

Dad draws on his cigar and talks about last things, about what still needs to be done in the yard before he goes. Everywhere he lives he moves earth, imposes on the lay of the land. He had a farm in southern Delaware. I smoke my pipe and inhale the sweetness of the past.

It is the second World War, the South Pacific, and a Liberty ship rocks at anchor off Ulithe or Enawetoh or Okinawa. A man is relaxing on deck, smoking. A pipe between his teeth, he hangs over the ship’s rail, thirty feet above the water. All at once he sees something, shouts at somebody. The pipe falls out of his mouth. He sweeps his hand down, towards the water. He catches the pipe.

It is the one he later gave me, brought back from war. He had replaced the stem four times. Where the shank has split a little, I have put a silver collar.

11/03

Rudolph Thiem, Sculptor

Sat, 5 Jan 2008 20:34:06 -0700

Look at this hall tree!
Around the bright mirror
dark wood, worked,
carved by your own hands
a hundred yearsa ago.
Great grandpa, your hall tree
was delivered to my door today.

Berliner, artist, emigrant,
you came as a young man,
first to New Orleans, then Ohio.
Your carvings and castings adorn
stoves, battlefields, cathedrals.
Your likenesses of kings
and of cotton workers
tell of a fellow-feeling
ample as Whitman’s.

A Union soldier cast in bronze,
your magnum opus,
taller than three men,
weighing two tons,
towers even now
over Hamilton, Ohio.
Few know, none see
that you gave a common soldier
the outlines of your own face.

You, an uncommon man
who ate dessert before dinner
overthrew artistic conventions
taught your son’s wife how to cook
let the King of Saxony watch you work
turned your living room into a tropical jungle
welcomed President Taft when he came to thank you
fed your grandson 20 kinds of candy when his parents were away.

Dad adored you,
slept in your bed,
babbled after you “Ach, Ach”
when you broke a tool.
He was six when you died.
Seventy years later
his memories of you
are fresh and delicate.

I have your chisels and gouges.
I have the plant stand you made of oak.
I have the child’s cane carved of strange wood.

And now the hall tree,
delivered to my door today,
with great beveled mirror,
bronze pegs that held the hats of yesteryear,
exotic foliage unknown to any tree,
the articulate leaf swelling into flame,
curling out of scrolls in bas relief,
and daintiness of frond and stipple,
flower, seashell, leaf, and snail,
petaled roundel, knob and nipple,
each figure slyly emulating others
in a happy round of theme and variation.

Of my forefathers
you are the only one
among blacksmiths, miners, grocers,
engineers, accountants, corporation men,
the only one I know who gave his life to beauty.

They delivered the hall tree to me, oldest
of your seven great grand-grandchildren,
and here it stands
work of art
ancestral gift
mirror of the world—
yes, it has come to me
and to me alone.

A Perambulation of Kent

Fri, 4 Jan 2008 20:46:28 -0700

Jon Thiem
with the assistance of Benji Thiem

This narrative relates the discovery of the places where our Pitcher ancestors lived and grew up, along with some of the important dates and circumstances of their lives. Often I have asked myself what the Pitchers of Bishopsbourne would have thought had they known that they were the subject of such intense interest on the part of their American descendants. Whatever the case, this narrative is dedicated to their memory.PRIVATE
The project arose out of a series of coincidences. In the summer of 1992, I was in England to give a paper at the University of Warwick, and I began thinking about a walking tour for June, 1993, on the old Pilgrims Way - North Downs Way from south of London to Canterbury, the route followed by Chaucer's pilgrims. In a phone conversation with Marcy Ross, who did the basic research on our great great grandfather James Pitcher the younger (d. 1863), I learned that the latter had been born in Bishopsbourne, very close to Canterbury. When I was able to confirm through transcripts of the parish records that James Pitcher had
indeed been born in Bishopsbourne, I decided to visit the village and set aside some time for archival research in Kent. Not long after, Barbara Thiem, my wife, received a Christmas card from her long lost cousin John Pinschof, who, it turns out, lives near Maidstone, seat of the Kent County Archives, and a town just a few miles off of the North Downs Way. Later, he kindly offered that I could stay with him. When my son Benji, aged 13, heard that I was planning a ramble in England he begged me to take him along and show him some castles. Thus were laid the plans for a perambulation of Kent in search of our Pitcher ancestors.
For me this project has opened up a new perspective on our pedigree and enlarged my sense of family tradition. Another bonus has been the hands-on-experience gained in the methods of biographical research. This has proved helpful to me in understanding a literary genre to which I have devoted a good deal of study: the novel of biographical quest -- that is, narratives about biographers and their personal and professional problems.
Reconstructing the Pitcher pedigree has indeed involved a number of difficulties of the sort that biographers encounter. One of the first problems confronting every Pitcherologist is the similarity between the names Pitcher and Pilcher, the latter being a much more common name in Kent. Scribes and registrars were often lazy about crossing their t's, or in their overzealousness, they would cross the l in Pilcher. Going to Kent helped me sort out some of these errors. An onsite examination of the parish records explained the puzzling marriages of George Pitcher in 1831 and Elizabeth Pitcher in 1836: it turned out that both were Pilchers, not Pitchers. Another confusion, a perennial one in the 18th and 19th centuries, goes back to the re-use, or let us say, recycling of personal names. Some favorite Pitcher names which needed to get sorted out were George (6), James (2), Mary and Maria (2 each), Elizabeth (2), and Thomas (2). How many times have I asked myself, which is which? Another problem was knowing whether a male and female of about the same age and with the same surname were unrelated, related (brother and sister?) or married. With George (d. 1828) and Elizabeth Pitcher (d. 1832), the discovery of their tombstone on the northside of St. Mary's Church, Bishopsbourne, provided the solution. They were man and wife, and our four times great grandparents.
Another problem for the biographer or genealogist arises out of the Pitcher inclination to change residence. The first Pitcher recorded in Bishopsbourne, George
(d. 1828), does not move there until 1793, a date I was able to confirm through the Land Tax Assessments held at Maidstone. Before then he lived for several years in Beakesbourne, nearby, in Fordwych and in Patrixbourne, where our thrice great grandfather James, later a carpenter, was born in 1788. At the time of his marriage in 1786, George lived in Whitstable, a parish on the coast of Kent about 5 miles north of Canterbury.
Oddly enough, the life of his son, James the carpenter, has proved more elusive than that of his father. We do know that in 1814, James married Elizabeth Wiggins from Wingham, Kent, and his brother George, also a blacksmith, was a witness. James the carpenter, like his father George, and like his son James (d. 1863), was a man who felt the need to move around. He died in1843, in Ramsgate, Kent, on the coast, and was living apart from his family. What caused him to move away from his family is not known.
A coincidence. James Pitcher the younger was born in 1819 in Bishopsbourne, about 8 miles from Dover, Kent. In 1850 he was working as a farm labourer in Dover township, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In the 1950's and 1960's his descendants Jon and Judy Thiem, grew up about 50 miles south of the Delaware state capital, Dover, Kent county.
Two more coincidences. In our B&B in Canterbury, St. John's Court, St. John's Lane, I had breakfast with Mr. Roger Weston of Middlesex, also doing genealogical research in Canterbury. Several of his ancestors in the 19th century were also named George Pitcher, unfortunately no relation to ours. Then, while working in the Cathedral Archives, I was approached by Mrs. Joyce Davis of Sittingbourne, who had heard from one of the archivists that I was doing work on Pitchers. She it turns out was working on the Pitchers of Cheriton and Folkestone, Kent, which turn out to be distant relations of ours. For Pitcherologists, southeast England is indeed a small world. Later, Joyce discovers that she herself is related to me. She kindly sends us photos of Bishopsbourne, an expanded family tree of the Pitchers, and more genealogical information that I have used in the expansion and revision of this journal. Eventually she and her friend Alyne pay us a memorable visit at our house in the Austrian alps.

Rambles and Discoveries

Preamble. After training up from Gatwick airport, Benji and I spend a day and a half walking in the castle country of western Kent. We visit Penshurst Castle, home of the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney and his niece Lady Mary Wroth, also a poet who scandalized her contemporaries by dressing up as a male blackamoor in one of Ben Jonson's masques. We ramble through lovely hills, over field and stream, to the National Trust village of Chiddingstone, near Chiddingstone Castle. We tour moated Hever Castle, home of Anne Boleyn, and Benji runs through its labyrinth twice.
Maidstone. From Otford where we relish the hospitality of Mrs. Hold and her three course breakfast, we join the North Downs Way and walk its ridge. There we encounter few
wayfarers, but do run into a fox, a pheasant, and a couple of hares. Heavy rain as we come off the ridge. Soaked, we take shelter at The Three Post Boys Pub in Wrotham. We decide to train from there to Maidstone. Here we receive a warm welcome from Barbara's cousin John Pinschof and his wife Margaret, who has prepared for us a feast fit for kings.
Next day at the Kent County Archives, I find out that our thrice great grandmother Elizabeth Pitcher died of asthma in the Bridge Union Poor house in 1836, age - mid forties. She was the mother of James Pitcher (d. 1863). Later, consulting tax records and tithe maps, I discover the exact location of her brother-in-law's cottage and forge in Bishopsbourne. He was George Pitcher, the blacksmith
(d. 1844), son of George (d. 1828), and brother of James the carpenter (b. 1788). The friendly archivists persuade Benji to come in and learn how to use the microfilm machine, where he does some useful work checking through indexes.
Holingbourne to Chilham. Rejoining the North Downs Way which here runs midway up the ridge, we walk 12 kilometers through wheat and rapeseed fields to Charing, where we enjoy the hospitality and cream teas of Mrs. Rosemary Bigwood. Next day from Charing to Chilham, the Way takes us through rolling landscapes and villages, sweeps us up on the ridge and takes us down again, whence we have a view of the stately manor house of Godmersham. Jane Austen once stayed here, and the village was home to Pitchers -- distant cousins of ours? Above Soakham, while having lunch on a huge beech tree blown down in the hurricane of 1987, Benji and I engage in a memorable cherry pit spitting contest. Weary from walking, we take the short bus trip from Chilham into magnificent Canterbury, riding high in the upstairs of the double decker, far front, rocking back and forth, glimpsing here and there the great spires of the Cathedral.
Canterbury. At the labyrinthine Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Else Churchill, the genial head librarian, gives me a short course in the use of the collections. Although my searches here yield no new information, I do get the addresses for the Kent Marriage and Burial Indexes, which will later supply the residence of George Pitcher (d. 1828) and the surname of his second wife. From the Tyler collection I get a copy of Tyler's transcriptions (names and dates) of the tombstone of George Pitcher et al, confirming what we had discovered the day before in our excursion to Bishopsbourne (more on this later).
Benji and I tour the Cathedral, whose enormous chancel is overrun with French school children. The nave is closed for restoration. We stand in awe before the tomb of the Black Prince, his sculptured effigy clad in armor and full
regalia. Of St. Thomas a Becket's shrine there is nothing left, but the maid at our guest house in St. John's Lane did assure us that if we visited his burial place, miracles would happen in our lives. I wonder if our Pitcher forebears thought so, if they came to the Saint's tomb in the hopes that some miracle might stave off the family's declining fortunes.
In the Cathedral Archives, located in a cloister adjoining the church, the atmosphere is much more reverential than in the tumultuous chancel. Here are located the original parish records and vestry minutes of Bishopsbourne. I am one of only a few researchers. The archivists are very helpful, instructing me in the intricacies of the catalogs and helping me decipher some of the early handwriting. The original documents are leather or vellum bound volumes. They get hand carried to your desk, which is reserved for you alone. Then they are carefully placed on thick pillows on the desk so that they can't be flattened out and have their spines stressed.
After lunch Benji and I go through the Canterbury Tales Museum, which he greatly enjoys. Before the trip, we had read together three of the five Chaucerian tales dramatized in the different rooms of the museum. Each room recreates a different aspect of the environment of medieval England, its smells and its sounds.
Returning to the library with Benji, I continue to read through the Bishopsbourne vestry minutes, which yield the most important information of the trip. As I transcribe entries about James Pitcher's family and its need for poor relief, Benji sits next to me drawing swords, knights and monsters, happily oblivious to the sad events that occurred 160 years earlier, events that probably prompted James the younger (d. 1863) to emigrate to America.
Tonight Benji and I split a takeout Fish and Chips. Like a couple of seasoned bachelors, we eat it with our fingers from the greasy wrapping paper, sitting on the floor of our room. Perhaps our most memorable meal.

A Pitcher Chronicle 1724-1863

1724 William Pitcher born, my five times great grandfather
1746 William marries Sarah Boughton
1757 William marries Ann Barber (1734?-1801)
1763 George Pitcher born. Elizabeth Clayson born around this time, both probably in Kent.
1786 George Pitcher, bachelor of Whitstable, Kent, marries Elizabeth Clayson, spinster of Stourmouth. Whitstable is a parish on the northern coast of Kent, about 8 miles from Stourmouth. Like Bishopsbourne, it is close to Canterbury. Fordwych, not far away is probably the ancestral home of our Pitchers.
1787 Patrixbourne, Kent. Ann, daughter and probably first child of George and Elizabeth, born.
1788 James, son of George and Elizabeth, born in Patrixbourne. He will become a carpenter.
1791 Beakesbourne, Kent. William, son of George and Elizabeth, born.
1793 George and Elizabeth Pitcher, presumably with their small children, take up residence in Bishopsbourne. George rents a property, probably a house and garden with forge, from S. Beckingham, Esq., lord of the manor, Bourne Place. Mary (d. 1847), daughter of George and Elizabeth, born.
1796 George (d. 1844), son of George and Elizabeth, born. This is George the blacksmith who lived in Forge Cottage.
1798 Thomas, son of George and Elizabeth, born.
1800 Francis Lovet (d. 1832), son of George and Elizabeth, born.
1801 Ann Pitcher (b. 1734?), wife of William and the mother of George (b. 1763), buried.
1804 Isaac, son of George and Elizabeth, born on 25 Sept. Buried 30 Sept.
1806 Maria (d. 1838), daughter of George and Elizabeth, born.
1809 Ann Pitcher (b. 1787), spinster of Bishopsbourne, marries James Cullin, bachelor of Wingham (about 4 miles from Bishopsbourne). George is witness to the marriage of his oldest child. Ann signs her own name in the register. James leaves his mark.
1811 George (b.1796) marries Sarah Blackman from Sturry, at Wingham. His children are Charlotte (b. 1813), George (b. 1815), Lewis (b. 1817), Sarah (b. 1819), Emma (b. 1821), Richard (b. 1824), and Mary (b. 1826)
1814 James Pitcher, carpenter, marries Elizabeth Wiggins at Wingham. Brother George (b. 1796) is witness.
1815 Thomas, son of James the carpenter and Elizabeth, born. This is the first record of James the elder in Bishopsbourne.
1817 George, son of James and Elizabeth, born. In this year James is witness to three marriages and signs his name in the register. Burial of William Pitcher, aged 92 (b. 1724), resident of Birchington, Kent. This is the father of George (b. 1763), and the husband of Ann (1734?-1801).
1819 James (d. 1863), son of James and Elizabeth, born. He is my great great grandfather and will emigrate to America.
1821 Maria, daughter of James and Elizabeth, born.
1821-22 James the carpenter is witness to at least 4 marriages at Bishopsbourne in this period.
1824 Mary Anne, daughter of James and Elizabeth, born.
1825 James Pitcher not recorded as having witnessed any marriages.
1827 From the vestry minutes (Oct. 24) of Bishopsbourne (1826-1850), the first entry concerning the James Pitchers, who are getting poor relief from the parish:
Ordered ... That Pitchers rent and wood bill be paid.
1828 George Pitcher, age 66, buried (July 11).
From the vestry minutes (June 24):
Agreed to give James Pitcher Oast Timber to the amount of L 8. 11 -- but should he dispose of the Timber in any manner not agreeable to the wishes of the Parishioners, they have full power to take it from him. Also that Mr. Ladd [the overseer] should pay him 8 [shillings] but should Pitcher earn more than he usually does then Mr. L shall give him what he thinks proper.
(Oast Timber was the timber from which were made the poles to support the hops vines, hops being an important ingredient in beer.)
1829 From the vestry minutes (Feb. 25):
Agreed that James Pitchers Family shall receive 15 shilling per week for their work until next vestry.
The following entry may suggest that James Pitcher, in contrast to his family, is no longer in Bishopsbourne.
From the vestry minutes (Aug. 5):
Agreed to pay Dame Claringbold for attending the wife of James Pitcher at the rate of 4 [shilling] per day.
Elizabeth Pitcher is evidently ill, perhaps with the asthma that will prove fatal to her.
1830 Marriage of Francis Lovet Pitcher (b. 1800) of the Parish of St. John the Baptist in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, and Mary Mutton, Bishopsbourne. Witnesses are his siblings, George (b. 1796) and Maria (b. 1806).
From the vestry minutes (Oct. 2):
Paid Mrs. McFarlane 30 [shilling] for Mrs. Pitcher. Paid Mr. Shoveller his bill for Mrs. Pitcher. Agreed to pay Mrs. Pitcher any Balance for week to make up 15 [shilling].
1831 From the vestry minutes (Nov. 31):
Determined to transfer Mrs. Pitcher and family to the Work House and to endeavor to put out her two sons as apprentices as soon as possible.
James Pitcher must be gone (to Ramsgate where he died in 1843?). Are the "two sons" Thomas and George? Is James (b. 1819) the one not counted because he is still too young, age 12?
1832 Elizabeth Pitcher nee Clayson and widow of George Pitcher (d. 1828) is buried, age 71. Her son Francis (b. 1800), buried.
From the vestry minutes (March 15):
Agreed that Thomas Pitcher [i.e. brother of James (d. 1863)] when he applies for Parish relief to have an order [brought] to [for] the Workhouse and there to remain until a situation can be obtained for him, which each of the Parishioners present will endeavor to do.

This is the last entry in the vestry minutes that concerns James Pitcher's immediate family. Thomas Pitcher will eventually become a master carpenter in Canterbury.
1831-37 Other entries in the vestry minutes record that George the blacksmith (1796-1844) served the Parish as constable, member of the Board of Health, Vestryman, Overseer (of the poor), and Church Warden.
1836 George Pitcher (1796-1844) bachelor of Bishopsbourne married Caroline Woodcock, spinster. age 31, of St. Mary, Dover.
Elizabeth Pitcher, wife of James the carpenter, of the Bridge Union Poor House buried, age 45 or 48. According to the Surgeon's book she died of asthma.
1838 Maria Pitcher (b. 1806), resident of London, buried.
1841 According to the 1841 Census of Bishopsbourne, the village has a population of 334 people. The only Pitchers left in the village are George (b. 1796) the blacksmith, residing at Forge Cottage, and his wife Caroline. The rest have either moved elsewhere or are dead. The Enumerator of the census for the village was George Pitcher.
According to the Census for the Bridge Union Poor House, the only Pitcher still there is Mary (b. 1824), age 15 (she is actually 16; census figures were rounded off to the nearest 5 or 10). Elizabeth, her mother, had died in 1836. Where is her sister Maria (b. 1821)? How and when did her older brothers Thomas, George and James (1819-1863) leave the Poor House? Is our ancestor James already in North America?
1843 Death of James the carpenter, in Ramsgate, Kent.
1844 Burial of George Pitcher the blacksmith, age 48, the last Pitcher of our family to live in Bishopsbourne.
1847 Burial of Mary Pitcher (b. 1793), age 54, resident of Higham, Kent. The first of George and Elizabeth's children born in Bishopsbourne, she is the last of their children to be buried there. Except for Thomas (b. 1798), whose burial place is unaccounted for, all of the other children of George the elder who were born in Bishopsbourne are buried here. The tombstone of Francis, George, Maria and Mary are aligned with that of their parents.
1850 According to the 1850 U.S. Census, James Pitcher (b. 1819) is resident in Dover Township, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Occupation is labourer.
1853 James Pitcher marries Emma J. Treleavan (aka Mary) on Oct. 25, 1853 in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
1856 Birth of George W. Pitcher (d. 1941), son of James and Emma (Mary), and my great grandfather.
1863 Death of James Pitcher, Private in the Illinois Light Artillery Volunteers, in Natchez, Mississippi.

Commentary

George Pitcher (1763-1828) and his wife Elizabeth (1761?-1832) moved several times before settling down in Bishopsbourne, presumably with their three oldest children, Ann, James—our direct ancestor—and William. After their marriage they were in Fordwych, Patrixbourne, Beakesbourne, and finally they moved to Bishopsbourne, about 3 miles away, where George and Elizabeth remained the rest of their lives. We do not know why they moved in the early years of their marriage, but it is likely that George was looking for a suitable place to work. He was a blacksmith, and his son George (d. 1844) would also take up this calling.
We have a fair amount of information about his 8 surviving children. It is interesting to note that Ann, James, and George all could write, whereas it seems that most villagers were not literate. Like their father and mother, most of the children moved away from the place they were raised. Ann, through her marriage, moved to Wingham, not far away. The others probably moved out because Bishopsbourne was too small to supply work for so many young Pitchers. William moved out. He is probably the William Pitcher, blacksmith, whose son George is baptized in Canterbury in 1814. The two daughters Mary and Maria moved, respectively, to Higham, Kent, near London, and to London. It would be interesting to know what they did. Neither seems to have married, so of the three daughters, only Ann found a husband. Of the remaining sons, Thomas moved away. He is probably the Thomas Pitcher, servant of Canterbury, whose son George John was baptized in Bishopsbourne in 1829. Francis Lovet moved to the parish of St. John the Baptist, Margate, Kent.
The children of George and Elizabeth were for the most part not very long lived. Burial data on some of them I have yet to find. Maria and Francis Lovet, the last 2 born, died relatively young, both at the age of 31. The middle children, Mary and George, lived to be 54 and 48 respectively. Thus their parents and grandparents (William died at age 92) were considerably longer lived.
Only 2 of the children seem to have stayed in Bishopsbourne, James the carpenter, our direct ancestor, and George the blacksmith, whose house, now called Forge Cottage, still exists. Their lives offer an interesting contrast. For reasons that remain obscure, James and his family had to receive poor relief from the parish. It looks as if James the carpenter may have left the family in 1829, perhaps in an effort to earn more money. George, on the other hand, was clearly one of the most prominent citizens of the village, serving in a host of responsible offices, as constable, vestryman, church warden, and Enumerator of the 1841 census. George, who married twice and had a slew of children, was a prosperous blacksmith and active community official. James, on the other hand, seems to have been so little prosperous that his family landed in the Poor House in the neighboring parish of Bridge. James also engendered a host of children, at least 5, for which we his descendants may be especially thankful, otherwise we would never have been born.
James the carpenter and his wife Elizabeth seemed to have named their children, all except James the younger, after James's brothers and sisters. Hence Thomas, George (perhaps also named after James's father), Maria and Mary. Apart from Thomas and James (d. 1863), I have not been able to find out what happened to any of them. Presumably, they went into the Poor House with their mother in 1831, but by 1841 only Mary, who was 16, remained there. Did the boys become apprentices as the parish hoped? Did James the younger run away to America or Canada to escape the grinding, health-destroying routine of the Poor House? Or did he get out and stay in England a while longer? If he still had been in the Poor House at age 17, he would have seen his mother Elizabeth die of asthma. Whatever the case, it is likely that the hard circumstances of his family were strong grounds for his emigrating.
What happened to his father, James the carpenter? After 1828-29, the latter disappeared from the Bishopsbourne records—3 years before his family is consigned to the Poor House. James died in 1843, at age 55, in Ramsgate, on the coast of Kent. Did he go there to find work, in order to rescue his wife and children from poor relief? Or did he simply abandon his family? Reading the vestry reports of Bishopsbourne about him one detects a subtle hint that he was sick, or perhaps mentally unfit, and that his condition prevented him from doing full-time work.

Out of our direct line there emerges an interesting pattern of names. George begat James who begat James who begat George. A chiasmus of names. In England we go from George to James, in America, from James to George. Though other ties may have been broken, with James the younger's emigration to America, there remained a continuity of names.

Bishopsbourne

On a fine Sunday morning in June, Benji and I take the double decker bus from Canterbury to Bishopsbourne, about 4 miles. From the bus stop we walk half a mile down a pretty country lane towards the picturesque village, which is nestled in the small vale of the Nailbourne, an intermittent stream. Bishopsbourne is situated in a green rolling landscape dotted with the wooly white figures of grazing sheep. This is rural England in its loveliest aspect.
We pass "Oswalds" the house and former parsonage of the church where Joseph Conrad spent the last years of his life. Next comes the churchyard and church, a fine Gothic building. On the south side of the Church of St. Mary many of the gravestones are overgrown with weeds or completely worn down. We go around to the north side where the grass is mown. Soon we discover the first Pitcher gravestone, of Mary (d. 1847). Next to hers we find those of George the younger blacksmith, Francis, Maria, and finally at the end of the row that of George and Elizabeth Pitcher. Their stone is completely split apart down the middle, with a gap you can see through, an indication of the rough treatment that Time bestows on our remains, on our memorial devices. Lichen and erosion make the incised script hard to read, but in the right light the names of George and Elizabeth Pitcher can easily be made out. This is a wonderful moment, to stand before the graves of our British forebears.

“The gravestone of George and Elizabeth Pitcher, Bishopsbourne, Courtesy of Joyce Davis”

After taking pictures (which do not turn out), we leave the church where James the younger was baptized and where his mother was buried, though without a tombstone. We pass down the main village street, holding before us a copy of the 19th-century tithe map. We orient ourselves and figure out which house must have been rented by George the blacksmith. I tell Benji to go ahead and see if it is called Forge Cottage. And so it is. Across from Forge Cottage is an actual blacksmith's forge, still in operation, the business of Mr. Len Sutton, whom I will meet in the evening. In front of the forge we meet Mr. Sutton's ex-wife and daughter. She kindly offers to call Mrs. Rosemary Elliot, a local historian of the village, and ask her to take us through the church. This we do and Mrs. Elliot gives us the brochure on St. Mary's Church, which she herself has written. Like everybody else in the village, she knows nothing of the Pitchers. They have disappeared from local memory.

“Forge Cottage, Bishopsbourne, Courtesy of Joyce Davis”

At The Mermaid, the local pub where our ancestors never tipped a pint because it was founded around 1860, I talk to some of the habitues, but get no information. Few if any of the old families still live in the village, which has become gentrified. The bar owner, however, suggests that I return in the evening to meet Mr. Roger Austen whose family goes back several generations.
Benji wants to stay at the B&B and read. He's had enough of all this Pitcher stuff, and he wonders how I can stand around talking to people for hours on end about subjects that have nothing to do with knightly adventures. Around 7:00 in the evening I take the double decker bus out to Bishopsbourne. I meet a couple of friendly working class fellows at The Mermaid and we drink some pints til Roger Austen arrives later in the evening. One of them razzes me for not drinking enough. Being able to down lots of beer is a sign of manhood among these fellows. They become much less friendly when I criticize some of the atrocities committed by the British army in the Falkland Islands war.
I meet Roger Austen and Len Sutton the blacksmith, who now runs the forge where George Pitcher once pounded the anvil. Len Sutton takes me back to the forge and shows me around. He does a lot of ironworking for historical renovations but also does some fine modern stuff. The business is thriving. The Forge itself is around 350 years old, he says, and I learn from him that in Ivy Cottage, next to Forge Cottage, there was also evidence of a forge.
Back at The Mermaid I chat with Roger Austen and learn that what had been the carpenter's house, near the church, was recently torn down for the building of a new house. The so-called carpenter's house near the church may well have been where James the carpenter lived. Its proximity to the church would explain why he was frequently a witness to Bishopsbourne marriages. What a pity it was razed.

Saying goodbye to the denizens of The Mermaid I set off by foot for Canterbury—a four-mile hike on a pitch black night. The last bus had left hours before and nobody else was heading back for Canterbury. When I get back to the B&B around 1 AM, Benji is sound asleep, his novel The Palladin lying by his bedside. I resist the temptation to wake him to tell him I'm back. I leave him to his dreams of castles, labyrinths, and magic swords. I let him sleep, this fine young fellow, this recent descendant of the line of George and James and James and George.

Acknowledgements

This family history would not have been possible without the valuable research done by Marcy Ross on James Pitcher the younger. She it was who discovered that Bishopsbourne was home to our Pitchers.
Betty Wickham, professional genealogist of Loveland, Colorado, shared with me unstintingly of her large knowledge of British sources. I am grateful for her kindness and continuing generosity.
I am deeply grateful to our Pitcher cousin Joyce Davis. She went to Bishopsbourne to take pictures of gravestones and Forge Cottage, and over the years she has done extensive research, not only on my line of Pitchers, but on the greater extended family. This revised version is indebted to the fruits of her zealous research.

3 August 1993
Rindbach, Austria

revised, 30 December 2007
Fort Collins, Colorado