The British are coming - Peace near Bunker Hill

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We’re here in Charlestown, in Tom and Nancy’s wonderful 1820 house overlooking the John Harvard Mall. Charlestown is less than 30 minutes' walk to the centre of Boston, across the Charles River, which also separates the city centre from Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT.

Can’t quite believe how lucky we are to be exchanging homes with Tom and Nancy. Nor can we believe the things we have in common. Both our lives have been in education, both our houses are stacked with books, we both live in places with stacks of connections with our respective national heritage and we both live with the honour of sporting a resident’s parking permit on our car. Before long, we’ll both have a memory of forgetting where it was parked the night before.

If our house is one room wide, four rooms deep and on two floors, N & T’s is two rooms on each of four floors. Cardio-vascular exercise as we puff up three flights to retrieve glasses left in the bedroom. Nancy plays the piano. A real one, which puts our tinny keyboard to shame. To watch TV, like at home, there’s a secret sequence of button pressing to learn. We’re getting better. It’s all so comfortable and well organised.

Most windows look on to the John Harvard Mall. Yes, that Harvard, who lived in Charlestown before his name was donated to ... well, you know. He donated his book collection in 1636 and the rest is history. On so many criteria, top dog university in Cambridge and of of the universe. Back in Charlestown the Mall has no shops. It’s a small paved park, for dog walkers, yummy mummys and their kids, surrounded by brick walls, with trees and gas-lamps. One of the walls backs on to N & T’s patio garden. John Winthrop, leading Puritan, was elected first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Charlestown (Charlestown = Charles I - geddit?) yards from where I sit. Was he distracted from his good works by the burgers on N & T’s barbeque? OK, guys, take five. One burger per burgher then it’s straight back to planning the merger of Charlestown and Boston, OK? The Puritans (not the Pilgrim Fathers - they landed further down the coast at Plimouth. Sailed from Plymouth, landed at Plimouth. What a co-incidence!) - the Puritans left England to escape persecution and to persecute their own kind in the New World. They were instrumental in not burning many witches at all during the Salem Witch trials, testament to their tolerant attitude. Maybe I’m being unfair by connecting loosely Winthrop to the death of innocent people. He helped formulate the rules of law in these parts, but it’s not true that he founded the famous Puritan consumer magazine, Witch?

Charlestown was a Navy place. The Naval Yard built hundreds of warships from the time of the American Revolution until its closure after the Vietnam War. Two ships (the wooden USS Constitution and the USS Cassin Young, a WW2 destroyer) are tourist attractions in the vast space which in 1944 employed over 50 000 people. Similarities with Portsmouth and the HMS Victory. One heavyweight match that was never engineered by Don King or even George Washington - HMS Victory vs USS Constitution.

The obelisk on the horizon just up the hill from ‘our’ house in Charlestown is the Bunker Hill Monument. The eponymous battle between the British army and colonialist militias was a ‘victory’ for Team GB, but losses were so great that it was hardly an easy win for the away team. The home team realised that the great British army (or at least those deployed here) was not invincible. A year later, independence had been fought for and was being won. Not much further than 200 yards away from this desk is the Warren Tavern, the oldest pub in Massachusetts. Reputed to have served victuals to George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere. What a quiz team they were!


Right then, quiet please!! Question 1: Who was the First President of the United States? (no conferring, George!)
Q2: Which inventor of the Franklin stove helped draft the Declaration of Independence? (Ben, no idea?)
Q3 Which Bostonian silversmith organised intelligence gathering on the movements of the British army, perhaps in this very tavern and one April night in 1775 secretly and illegally rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown, from where he rode like hell to Lexington to warn the Colonialists of the approach of the British? Yes, Paul?
-Sorry, Jim, could you repeat the question? George and Ben were talking.

Answer to Q3: Paul Revere. He’s all over this part of town. Not only in the pub (the Warren Tavern does a Revere Burger - beef, not horse) but also on plaques and statues in Charlestown and in Boston, particularly in the North End, where he lived. His house is now a museum, aptly named the Paul Revere House which draws people from across America and drags in gaggles and straggles of schoolkids, complete with worksheets to complete before they get back on the bus for Ipswich, Worcester, Gloucester or Manchester-by-the-Sea. (Real places, honest). No, Rachel, you can’t buy one of those pencils. They’re dangerously large! Buy one of those muskets.

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