Formerly British, at home in the states

5/8/07

By Norman Johnson
Special to the Critic

"You get in about 6 a.m. unless you sleep well on a plane, things are a bit bleary," said Bill Barber about the 6½ hour plane ride from Boston to Heathrow in London.

Barber, fiftyish, well over six feet tall, has a basketball center's build, Celtic-Graying loose-curled hair and blue eyes. By today's airline seating standards, a flight of that length is pure misery for anyone of Barber's size.

On trips to England, Barber and his family now rent a car to make sure they visit all the relatives. "You don't want to offend people," he says about making sure everyone gets a visit. "With the way the dollar is, it'd be a lot cheaper for them to see us." Barber interjects, however, "one of the things about going back is seeing how much your relatives have aged." He talks about seeing his mother age and a young girl he saw on his last visit who is now old enough to go to a pub.

Barber is from Harwich, England, a town with a history going back to the Roman occupation. "You still see Roman walls around town still being used." Barber said. "There's an old crane down on the docks dating back to the 1600s that looks like a big hamster cage—" and he details how people walking in a big round cage power the gears that operate the still functional dock crane.

"When I graduated from high school, I worked for the customs and excise department on the docks," Barber said. "I realized I didn't want to end up like those guys, and I quit. My father went ballistic." For Barber's father, it was like throwing away a perfectly good job to go to school.

At the time, College was free in England. Barber went to night school, worked off expenses picking grapes or construction work on the continent. Later, he spent what he calls "a four year stint," traveling through Canada, the U.S., Central and South America, India, and Russia. He's also seen far western China.

He worked his way into polar studies at Cambridge, a masters program for people with school and work experience. Since then, Barber has worked, as he says, "on the ice," at both ends of the globe, also in Greenland and Alaska, contracting services to polar study groups.

Barber, his wife Victoria, and son Max live in St. Johnsbury, Vt. He built a super-insulated house, what he calls "Greenland style," off the electrical grid near Marshfield on 150 acres, is remodeling a house in St. J. and has projects in Kentucky. He thinks of going back to work on the ice, but doesn't know when.

Harwich, with its old Roman walls and Napoleonic War era tower, is on the coast northeast of London, with the Netherlands to the east across the North Sea. "They say you can go anywhere in England, and never be more than 80 miles from the sea," said Barber. "There's something about growing up on the sea, it's very calming. Every day after school we'd go down to the shore when the tide was out. Sometimes the fog came in while you were out there and you couldn't see the land."

Barber, a U.S. citizen now, is thoroughly adapted to life in the states but his speech still retains that distinctive British elegance. After a moment he says, "I miss the attitudes, the gentleness of the culture. When I was working on a boat in Antarctica, we stopped in the Falklands. They were so gracious, so English," and he recounts the way Falklanders entertained them with English tea and biscuits, a bit of England in spite of thousands of miles of cold Atlantic between them.