My Vicarage Lessons With A Four-year-old Theresa May

In 1961, Detlev J. Piltz, a German teenager, was thrilled to stay with a vicar’s family in the Cotswolds. He learnt about English tea rituals,cricket and class with their little daughter.

I first visited England in summer 1961 at the age of sixteen, during the school holidays. It was quite common at the time for English families, ideally with children, to take in youngsters from Germany and other foreign countries for a few weeks, as paying guests.

My host family comprised a vicar and his wife, with their young daughter who was coming up for five years old. They lived in an idyllic Cotswolds village, Church Enstone, in Oxfordshire.

The four weeks I spent there enriched my life. Not only did I improve my schoolboy English and become more fluent, but the family took me with them on their shopping trips in their plush Morris Minor, usually to Chipping Norton.

On Sundays, the family and I attended the village church together. We all went to watch the motor racing at Silver stone, picnicked in the country, and the vicar showed me Oxford University and explained about its colleges.

What impressed me most were the many conversations that the Reverend Hubert, to call him by his first name, then in his mid-forties, carried on with a rather wet-behind-the-ears teenager.

The vicar, as folk in the village referred to him, was a good-hearted soul: clever, educated, helpful and gentle, yet quite clear about his moral and ethical principles. Perhaps this was also partly due to his slight stoop which, as he himself put it, had focused his concentration more on the spiritual than on the physical.

The parishioners – who visited us, or whom we visited – and the congregation in church always displayed an aura of love and devotion, but also respect, for their vicar.

I still admire him today for how he and his wife managed the not-so-easy duties of an English country clergyman. During my stay, I also learned something about Englishness and even about the English class system, although this knowledge was more sensed and intuited than consciously understood.