How Oxford saved the Lloyds

Mom and Dad met at Reed College in Portland, Oregon when they were both still teenagers. They were married and my sister, Anamaria, was born before Mom turned 18. This was less shocking back in the 1950s but still not a very auspicious start to the Lloyd family life.

Mom obediently dropped out of school – her dad wouldn’t pay expensive tuition if she was just going to sleep with boys. And of course, Dad couldn’t afford that tuition either once he was married and raising his daughter and supporting his wife.  My parents moved back to his parent’s home in Colfax, Washington and into the hotel that they ran.

During Anamaria’s first of year of life however, both her grandfathers died and her Dad’s family hotel burnt down. Not an auspicious start to Anamaria’s young life either.

And yet, both my parents were smart, strong (perhaps spoiled) only children and both their mothers kept right on helping the young family thrive. So, we kids started with three moms and one dad. I understand that my father’s mother gave them a monthly stipend for years after they were wed – well after their fourth child was born – and my mother’s mom came when I – their third child – was born to help as needed.

But as a teenager, my dad continued taking courses at Washington State University while my mom had a second child in Pullman, Washington; Clifford became my older brother. She had a very difficult delivery – breach birth – so they gave her blood transfusions because of her heavy loss of blood. She was convinced for the rest of her life that this blood had been tainted. Remember, 1958 was well before they were testing donated blood for hepatitis after all – My mom was convinced she caught Hepatitis from her transfusions. She was too sick to get out of bed for months after my brother was born. Meanwhile, my dad was doing well at school. As an undergraduate he met a distinguished professor, Bob Clawer, (who later went on to become the editor of the American Economic Review) who had been a Rhode’s Scholar and was very impressed by this local boy. My dad had a spark of something special: a great sense of humor, mathematical genius, a fabulous singing voice and great people skills. Not only was he very good at math but he was also good at translating math to life, so he saw that it worked very well to explain Economics. Meanwhile my mom remained sick.

Dad graduated in Washington State and Prof. Clawer sent him up to Northwestern University in Chicago to get a Master’s Degree. But my mom stayed sick, and the kids kept growing. My parents did a short stint as a moving company for one summer – one truck and two adults to carry stuff made them some much needed money. Both Grandmas had stayed out west and though my dad did well at school, the family wasn’t quite thriving.

Prof. Clawer must have really taken my dad under his wing by this time because he thought of Dad when the professor heard of an academic position is Africa. His clever plan was that my parents could take the kids with them to teach in Khartoum – Dad would teach math at the University in Khartoum and Mom would teach English at a girl’s high school. Everyone figured that the warm weather and the house help would really help the little ones and my mother would be able to rest enough herself to get over her mysterious illness.

Well not everyone was thrilled: my dad’s mom was not happy to lose her son to the tropics – and so far away ‘just to be a teacher’, but my mom’s mother thought it was a good idea….generally she thought following the paying job was a very good idea.

The young family took their first mid-term holiday with a safari: my adventuresome young parents (who still believed they could do whatever they wanted in their lives – the bravery of naive youth) took a boat from Khartoum to Kampala and learned a lot about ‘deepest darkest Africa’ – for example my toddler brother walked off the boat into the Nile and local swimmers had to fish him out before the crocodiles did – though he did get dysentery from the adventure. Luckily, an older German woman explained to my mother to give him yogurt, which was something she had known nothing about in the USA at that time. The old adage that ‘It takes a village to raise our children’ comes to mind – especially if you have a couple of foolhardy teenaged cowboys as parents.

They met lots of local people along the Nile and their stories colored my childhood: Mom told me the story of being begged for antibiotics as they passed though, by the chief of a village because a young man had been mauled by a hyena the night before. My parents said no because they were still traveling with two young children and wanted to be able to treat them if something went wrong. I think this was hard for the well-meaning young couple. They had less trouble turning down the offer to purchase a leopard skin – because it was for sale for a whole pound sterling and that was a ridiculously expensive price.

My mother also told me story when I was about ten years old: “We were traveling down the Nile, and we had a translator to help me interview the local tribes. I talked to one man from a small group of people and asked him if it was true that his people were cannibal like the rumors said. He got the translator to earnestly explain that they weren’t cannibals at all ‘but if somebody dies, we don’t waste him’.  She had told me that story as a lesson in not wasting, but I believed it literally enough to share it with a university class in cross cultural understanding years later. Before she died Mom told me that this was only a joke. Whoops – Professor Fulton passed on fake news in the early 21^st century, I guess.

But back to the colonial outpost of Khartoum – my folks thrived on the adventure – aside from the baby mom miscarried at 4 months along. There was another uncomfortable social dynamic in Khartoum: that they were treated as slightly lower-class citizens by the posh brits. For example, Mom was a wee bit insulted by the boxing day tradition of giving the Lloyds their already half eaten ham. She fussed years later “It tasted good but really, we didn’t need their handouts”.

Anamaria distinctly remembers not wanting to learn Arabic in Khartoum, because as a toddler herself – she was treated as a mere female by the solely Arabic speaking servants. Meanwhile her kid brother could do no wrong in their eyes. She knew at the age of 5 years old that this was only because of his possession of a penis, and she felt cheated by the language and the culture it promoted.

Well, it turns out that my dad was a very good math teacher.  He is supposed to have ushered through some of the best math scores in the world from his central African university. In fact, looking at the exam results out of Khartoum, Oxford was suspicious that cheating was involved. So they sent some Fellows down to Khartoum to check out what was going on.

My parents were not your regular sports club expats, and the Oxford Dons were impressed. They found no cheating from my Professor Lloyd’s class; so they asked him to come teach ‘Maths’ at Oxford. He was less impressed: “I’m fine here – why should I go to that cold stuffy place?” So they sweetened the pot with an offer for him to do a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics. This was exciting. My Dad had thought of himself as potentially the next Woody Guthry, but being an Oxford Don also sounded good. So, after four years in the colonies my parents were taken under the Oxford bubble by and for the world’s lucky few.

After her miscarriage in Khartoum mom got pregnant with me upon arriving in Britain. The doctor said I would never be born and that she would never carry another living baby. He also prescribed thalidomide which may could well have fulfilled his prophesy, if she had taken it, But she didn’t.

She did what any crazy 24 year old mother of 2 – with an added foster child – would do, she persuaded the Oxford faculty to let her do a Master’s Degree even though she had never finished college in the USA. Life experience worked for something back then, I guess. She studied under the famous anthropologist E. Evans Pritchard, because she had first hand knowledge of South Sudanese ethnic groups. Once one of her dons asked her why she was never properly intimidated by their authority (I believe he said “why aren’t you scared of me”). Clearly students were supposed to be cowed. Mom responded “I guess it’s the Rodeos I used to do”. My mother knew no fear of consequences. I can’t remember my father’s relationship to fear – but I know he had a healthy respect for hard work (which may have been fueled by fear).

Obviously, my parents looked like Nobel Savages to the Oxford Elite. To top up the ‘upstart colonist’ image – We lived for some time in the same house as Monmohan Singh – who later became Prime Minister of India – We passed children’s close back and forth between all the kids in the house. I remember with pride my rabbit skin coat that Monmohan’s daughter passed onto me. Interestingly Mr. Singh never wanted to be in Politics – all he ever wanted was to be an Economics professor, like my dad became.

It turned out that I was born in July after all: healthy except for recuring bronchitis. Mom still had to do her exams when I was a less than a year old though. So she called her own mother to come and help out. My Meme never really left. She became the stable parent I knew for my whole childhood.

I have been told that during my first year of life Dad fell in love with a woman in London – I don’t have the details on that but he supposedly told Mom and us kids that he was leaving us all in the capable hands of my Meme.

But the Oxford University of those days wouldn’t allow a professor/graduate student to abandon his wife and three children and still get his stipend. So dad dutifully returned to Oxford and my parents stayed married.

I guess Meme worked as their marriage counselor too. I also know that Mom took me (as a babe in arms) and Anamaria to Paris and then to St. Malo to find her cousins, since her grandfather had emigrated from Alsace. To this day, this family relationship is still a source of great value on both sides.

When I was two (and my dad was 28 years old) we moved back to the USA, where my parents both taught at Purdue University and had another child together before splitting up for good.

As they say the rest is history. Though in this case it is ‘my story’ – or “herstory”- and I will continue soon. It is certainly much richer for our Oxford jaunt and I am incredibly grateful that my accidental British passport got me residency in France (before Brexit).