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On Saturday, I had lunch at a riverside restaurant called the Cherwell Boat- house with an American who came to Oxford in the 1960s and never left. I’d met a few of these hybrids, and they unsettled me. They no longer sounded American but they didn’t sound Eng- lish, either. The word “been” was the giveaway. They pronounced it “bean.” Bill Heine grew up in Batavia, Ill.
After getting his degree from George- town in the 1960s and working in the U.S. Senate, he studied law at Balliol, one of Oxford’s most prestigious colleges. He interrupted his studies to enter the Peace Corps, then moved back to Oxford for good. Said Heine: “I remember when I first came over here, I sent my parents
a letter saying, ‘This is my address: Ho- lywell Manor, St. Cross Road, Oxford.’ They wrote back: ‘Well, none of us like the idea that you don’t have a proper ad- dress. What number is it?’ ” As we watched punts in the Cherwell
River drift lazily into one another like slow-motion bumper cars, Heine said: “I realized very early on once I got to Oxford that people here, in an almost un- knowing way, were giving me a gift. They didn’t classify me every time I opened my mouth to speak. They would classify each other, put each other in boxes, but I could weave my way through every different group that I wanted to.” Heine hosts a radio program on BBC
Oxford, but he’s probably best known for his shark. In 1986, on the 41st anni-
28 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | september 12, 2010
versary of the bombing of Nagasaki and as an artistic response to the U.S. bomb- ing of Tripoli, he unveiled an artwork he’d commissioned from artist John Buckley: a life-size sculpture of a great white shark sticking out of the roof of his house. It is known as the Heading- ton shark, after the neighborhood in east Oxford where Heine lives. “Good Lord, the reaction was just phenomenal,” said Heine of the shark, which looks as if it had fallen head- first from the sky and plunged straight through the shingles up to its pectoral fins. “The postman dropped his bag and ran home to get his camera. And while I was there, mingling with the crowd, I saw this American, and he says, ‘Come on, Mabel. I want to show you just how crazy
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