The neat green patchwork quilt of English fields
If it is possible to pinpoint the happiest day in one’s life, I definitely know mine: it was Friday, March 12, 1965, my twenty-first birthday. That was the day I achieved the dream of half a lifetime, that of setting foot on English soil.
In previous diaries (here and here) I recounted my memories of attending a British school in the colonial Singapore of the 1950s. Along with lessons in English history, mathematics, and geography, I somehow absorbed the idea that the British were God’s chosen people, and as I grew older I saw no particular reason to alter this point of view.
As I wrote in a diary about my father several years ago, he revered English literature and the English language and brought me up to love them too. From a childhood spent reading books by Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, I progressed to the works of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson.
It was a combination of factors that drove me to save my money for more than a year to travel to England: my obsession with T. E. Lawrence, the publication of Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, and the utter boredom and futility of my existence in Tulsa, recounted here.
So it was that I packed my bag, kissed my family goodbye, and flew from Tulsa to New York to catch an Icelandic Airlines flight to Keflavik. From there I would travel to Reykjavik and board a plane for Heathrow a day later.
That Friday morning in March was a shimmery day of pale blue skies and pale sun: as our Icelandair plane flew over Scotland, my seat-mate and I craned our heads to look out the window at the lochs glittering thousands of feet below. For both of us it was our first visit to England, although he had lived in Paris for many years, he told me, and spoke “very good French.” The young man's name was Louis Begley and he was one day to write the best-selling book, Wartime Lies.
As the airplane began its descent to London Heathrow I looked out the window and thought, “Paul McCartney and Jane Asher are in London at this very moment.” For as much as I loved Shakespeare, Keats, Lawrence of Arabia, and the music of John Dowland, I was also completely enraptured by the Beatles. They seemed fresh, daring, and irreverent, the antithesis of the bland, conformist 1950s.
At Heathrow friends of my parents from Singapore days, Wing Commander and Mrs. B., were waiting to take me to Purley, Surrey, to spend the weekend. In their charming semidetached house perched on a hill, I settled into their daughter’s bedroom. She worked for NATO in Paris but was traveling back to England that very weekend for a conference. In fact Eleanor (not her real name) and her brother Justin (not his real name either) arrived in time for Sunday dinner. And what a dinner it was! I’d never had roast lamb with currant jelly and mint sauce before, nor Jerusalem artichokes with bread sauce. That weekend I learned about the British custom of heating dinner plates before hot food was put on them and putting the hot plates on lace table mats with cork mats beneath them.
Eleanor seemed very sophisticated to me, speaking fluent French and working in Paris. She was to be married in three months’ time. As for Justin, I have already described my reaction to meeting him again after ten years here.
Mr. B. drove me to the station on Monday morning, helped me board the correct train, and off I went to London, city of my dreams. I needed to take a bus to Marylebone to find the bed-and-breakfast place I’d picked from Frommer’s book. Peering about for the destination sign, I heard a voice ask, “Do you need help, miss?” Turning, I saw a man with a round face, pink with cold, and a bright red handlebar mustache, politely lifting his black bowler hat. Enchanted, I admitted that I did, so he told me the correct bus to catch. I climbed aboard the red double-decker bus whose sign read “Baker Street, Waterloo,” excited to be on my way.
In Marylebone I experienced the first of what became the pattern of my bed-and-breakfast stays in England. “Here comes an elf,” the proprietor would think. “She can have that tiny room at the top of the house.” Luckily for me I was young and spry and didn’t mind climbing three flights of stairs. Nor did I mind not having a private bathroom, as I had at the hotel in Reykjavik. (In my room at the Hotel Saga I noticed to my discomfiture that the carpet had a pattern of tiny swastikas* and that the bathroom had only two of the customary three fittings. Then I realized that the “bathroom” was one enormous shower stall.)
For the rest of March I walked around London in delight, visiting Half Moon Street, a name that had intrigued me for years, stopping by the American Express office in Haymarket to get letters from home, and practically haunting the National Portrait Gallery. Once, coming out of the Gallery to Trafalgar Square, I stopped a young man and asked him for directions to the next place I wanted to visit. He politely gave them and said, “You’re American, aren’t you?” Crestfallen—in my Burberry I had so hoped to be taken for a Londoner—I asked, “How did you know?”
“You’re wearing a mac,” he explained kindly, “and it isn’t raining.”
This is the time to mention that after a few days in London my British accent, acquired in Singapore, started coming back—or so I thought. The English people I met were puzzled; they knew I wasn’t one of them, but on the other hand I didn’t sound like a Yank, either. They finally decided I was South African. I also learned that any day—or any time of day—that rain wasn’t actually bucketing down was considered “fine.”
Before leaving London for the country, I went to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. There I fell in love with a leg carved in high relief (“Lapith triumphing over a wounded Centaur,” metope XXVII, c. 447-442 BC). So exquisitely carved was that leg, so utterly lifelike, that I couldn’t help wondering about the man who carved it. Had he worked in an open-air studio in Athens, under a blue sky in the clear Attic sunlight? Did someone bring him a lunch of wine, olives, figs, and bread and did he eat it while raptly contemplating his carving? I pictured his going home that evening and getting drunk from sheer exhilaration at having created something so extraordinary.
After I learned my way around the Underground I could find my way anywhere in the city, so I took the Tube to Hampstead to visit the home of my beloved John Keats. In the sitting room of his house I saw the two chairs arranged just as they’d been when he lived there. He’d sit in one and rest his arm on the back of the other one while he thought about what to write next. Walking out again, I received some whistles and cheers from a carload of newly minted constables from the Police College nearby. Smiling back at them, I went on my way. In those days such attention was considered a compliment.
Visiting the Haymarket one last time to pick up my letters, I overheard part of a conversation between two middle-aged American women. “Oh, I come from a little place you’ve never heard of,” one of them said. “It’s called Falls Church, Virginia.”
The name “Falls Church” stuck in my memory because I thought it was a nice name for a town. Little did I dream that in a few years I’d be living there myself.
After sending my suitcase ahead to Weymouth, where I would be staying with Mr. and Mrs. C., also old friends of my parents from Singapore, I took a train to Rye. From reading English history, especially the Wars of the Roses, I knew Rye had been one of the Cinque Ports. Frommer’s guidebook recommended the Peacock Inn, a charming little establishment on top of a hill. The proprietress greeted me politely, showed me to a room, and left me to my own devices. The next morning she kindly placed her own electric heater in my room. “I thought, being American, you might feel the cold,” she explained.
A few minutes later I went downstairs to enjoy a solitary breakfast at a table in the corner. When I was halfway through the classic Full English Breakfast, she came up to me again. “Er, dear,” she said, “do you mind telling me how old you are?”
Surprised, I looked up. “Not at all,” I said. “I’m twenty-one.”
She looked relieved. “Oh, good. We thought you were about sixteen—far too young to be wandering about the country alone!”
(That was owing to my genes. My father always looked at least ten years younger than his actual age, as do I.)
The journal I kept of my travels disappeared long ago, so it’s difficult to remember the exact sequence of my journeyings. I do remember doing everything the hard way, as I was young and trying to be careful with my money. I recall tramping through bracken for what seemed like ages to reach the Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede and thinking about the great confrontation there in 1215. That morning I was the only person around.
Next came Winchester and here I had the first of the many great pieces of luck that came my way during my stay in England. It happened one morning that I was enjoying breakfast in a pleasant b-and-b when I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged married couple who were breakfasting as well. As sunlight poured into the dining room through the French windows, we exchanged information about ourselves. During this exchange the couple told me they were caretakers at Winchester College, one of the top public schools in England. They asked if I’d like to see it.
Enthusiastically, I assured them I would.
“The boys are on holiday at the moment, so we’d be happy to show you round,” they said.
It was the only time I’ve ever seen the inside of one of the great public schools that educate the elite of England. When we reached the large, dark-paneled dining hall, I stepped up onto the dais containing the high table, where the masters sat to keep an eye on the students. To my amusement, the paneling behind the table showed where generations of boys had carved their initials. One such carving read, “R. Biggs, 1665.” And there I stood on an April morning three hundred years later, wondering about that young man. Charles II would have been on his throne five years by then; did young R. Biggs go on to Oxford or Cambridge after he left Winchester? And did he then go home to the country to mind his estates? Or was he a younger son who had to choose among the Army, the Navy, or the Church for a profession? Whichever path he’d chosen, I hoped his life had been a happy one.
*Some time later I learned that the swastika was an ancient Nordic symbol of the sun, but seeing it in such an unexpected place unnerved me considerably.
(End of Part I. Part II will appear tomorrow.)